They wondered why the new baby failed to cry. And why his learning process was so rapid.
Once, he had conjectured this way: what was the real moment of his origin? At what point in time had he really come into being? Floating in the womb, he had clearly been alive, sentient. To what had the first memories come? One year before birth, he had not been a unit, not even a zygote; the elements that comprised him had not come together. And by the time the fertilized egg had begun to divide, the wall had carried well beyond the moment of birth: three months into the hot, dusty, bright Colorado fall.
It was a mystery. He finally stopped thinking about it.
In his early years of childhood he had accepted his dual existence, learned to integrate the two continua. The process had not been easy. For months he had laboriously crept head-on into doors, furniture, walls. He had reached for a spoon of Pablum one year hence; he had fretfully declined a nipple long ago forgotten. Confusion had virtually starved him to death; he had been force-fed, and forcibly prevented from wandering out of existence. Naturally, it was assumed that he was feeble-minded. A baby that groped for invisible objects, that tried to put its hands through the side of its crib…
But at four months he was saying complete words.
Scenes from his childhood, reinforced by double occurrence, had never left his mind. One of them leaped up now, as he stood in the white, sanitary police cell, impatiently waiting for his release papers. When he was nine and a half, the first hydrogen bomb had arrived. Not the first hydrogen bomb dropped in the war; dozens had fallen throughout the world. This was the first to penetrate the intricate screens guarding the heartland of America, the region from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi. The bomb had detonated a hundred miles from Greeley. Radioactive ash and particles had drifted mercilessly across the countryside for weeks after, sickening the cattle and withering the crops. From the death zone, trucks and cars laboriously carted off the sick and mutilated. Repair crews made their way forward to inspect the vast damage. To seal off the titanic sore until it had given up its load of toxins…
Along the narrow dirt road past the Jones’ farm passed a seemingly endless convoy of emergency vehicles, on their way to hospitals and wards erected outside of Denver. Going the other way moved a flow of supplies for the survivors remaining in the blighted area. All this, he had watched with fascination. From morning to night there was no let-up in the streams of cars, trucks, ambulances, people on foot, people on bicycles, dogs, cattle, sheep, chickens, a motley pack of shapes and colors and sounds; distant groans that reached the boy’s ear and sent him excitedly rushing into the house.
“What is it?” he screamed, dancing wildly around his mother.
His mother, Mrs. Edna Jones, paused by the laundry tubs, her gray face wrinkled with fatigue and annoyance. She tossed back her grime-soaked hair and turned crossly to the boy. “What are you babbling about?” she demanded.
“The cars!” he shouted, dating to the window and pointing out. “See them? Who are they? What is it?”
Outside the window there was nothing. Nothing for her, at least; she couldn’t see what the boy saw.
Scampering outside, he stood gazing at the line moving along the horizon, outlined by the setting sun. On and on they moved… where were they going? What had happened to them? He ran to the edge of the farm, as far as it was permitted. Wire barred his way, a tangle of rusty barbs. Almost, he could make out individual faces; almost, he could penetrate the sight of individual pain. If only he could get closer…
This was the moment of his awakening. Because he alone saw the procession of doom. To all others, even to the doomed themselves, it was not there. He recognized a face: old Mrs. Lizzner, from Denver. She was there. Faces he knew, people he had seen in church. They were not strangers; they were neighbors, local people. They were the world, his world, the shrunken, dried-up Middle Western world.
The next day Mrs. Lizzner drove up to the farm in her dusty Oldsmobile, to spend an afternoon with his mother.
“Did you see?” he shouted at her. “Did you see it?”
She hadn’t seen it. And she had been a part of it. So there was no doubt; there was no point in pursuing the issue further.
Real understanding came in his tenth year. Now the bomb had come; Mrs. Lizzner was dead, and the area had in reality been laid waste. Such a unique cataclysm, never repeated, never seen before or since, was unmistakable. What he alone had seen had now swallowed up everyone. The relationship of the wave to what his fellow humans experienced was obvious. Of course, he told no one. As comprehension came, his attempts to communicate ceased.
He could not go back. Knowing that he was different, he could not return to the aimless activity of the farm. The monotony of farm chores was doubled for him; it was too much of a burden. At fifteen, gaunt and bony and brooding, he had collected his funds (perhaps two hundred dollars, all Westbloc inflation currency) and departed.
He found the Denver area painfully recovering from the blast. That was expected, as was everything else. One year before, at fourteen, he had previewed his journey. Once again, but this time at first hand, he examined the gaping crater the bomb had left, conjectured on the thousands of people who had been turned to ash in the wink of an eye. He boarded a bus and left Colorado. Three days later he was in the ruins of Pittsburg.
Here, basic industrial activities continued. Underground, the forges still bellowed. But Jones wasn’t interested; on foot he continued his journey, past the smoldering miles of metal that had once been the greatest concentrate of factories in the universe. Military law prevailed; as he had previewed, patrols encountered him and swept him up in the general net.
At the age of fifteen years and three months he was examined by competent authorities, questioned, fingerprinted, and disposed of. The labor battalion he joined caused him no surprise; but the anguish remained. Grimly, wrathfully, he carried handfuls of rock for months on end, trying, with a company of others, to clear the ruins by the most primitive of means. By the end of the year, machinery had been brought in, and the hand-work disbanded. He was older, stronger, and considerably wiser. Just about the time he was given a gun and moved toward the crumbling lines, the war ended.
He had foreseen that. Slipping away from his unit, he traded in his rifle for a good meal and destroyed his military uniform. A day later he was tramping the highway as he had begun: on foot, in jeans and tattered sweatshirt, a pack on his back, wandering through the rumble of debris that had survived the war, the chaotic desolation that was the new world.
For almost seventeen years his dual existence had been purposeless. It had been a burden, a great dead weight. Even the idea of utilizing it was lacking. He saw it as a cross, nothing more. Life was painful; his was twice painful. What good was it to know that the misery of the next year was unavoidable? If Mrs. Lizzner had seen her dying remains carted along the road, would she have been better off?
Somebody had to teach him to use his talent; somebody had to show him how to exploit it.
That person was a fat, perspiring salesman in a pink-stripe shirt and lemon-yellow dacron trousers, driving a battered Buick. The back seat of the car was crowded with slender brown boxes, great piles and heaps of them. Jones, hunched with fatigue, was creeping along the dusty shoulder of the road, when the Buick snarled to a steaming halt. Having boarded the car a year ago, he scarcely looked up. Yanking his pack around, he turned and stolidly climbed in beside the driver.
“You don’t seem very grateful,” Hyndshaw muttered resentfully, as he started up the car. “You want to get back out, sonny?”
Jones lay back against the tattered upholstery and rested. For him, the sequence ahead was visible; Hyndshaw was not going to throw him out. Hyndshaw was going to talk; he liked to talk. And in that talk, something of great value was coming for the boy.
“Where you going?” Hyndshaw demanded curiously. Between his lips jutted the wet stump of a cigar. His fingers daintily plucked at the power-driven wheel. His eyes, deep-set in fat, were wise with cunning of the world. Beer stains discolored the bib of his shirt. He was a sloppy, easy-going, vice-saturated creature, smelling of sweat and years of wandering travel. And he was a great, dreaming swindler.