Читать книгу Ahead of His Time - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 3

Table of Contents

He was about two years old when he first became aware that there was always a dim glow of light around him. It was nice, because it shone on the bright-colored little animals, birds and fishes which were on the inside of his white enameled crib. Even in the daytime he was sometimes aware of the glow. In the afternoons, when the summer sunlight was hot and bright, and his mother would put him into his crib when he wasn’t a bit sleepy, he would lie staring at the little figures. He could see them plainly, because the pale silver glow was on them.

“But it frightens me, Robert. Our little son—so queer—weird!” That was his mother’s murmured voice, as she stood one night with his father at the doorway of his dim bedroom.

“It mustn’t frighten you, Mary. After all, you’re a scientist too.”

Sanjan Thome, the radioactive man, seals his own doom by striving to save the world from ultimate disaster!

Then their voices faded as they went back into their own room.

Robert Thome closed their bedroom door. He was a famous experimental physicist, and his wife was his assistant. Both of them were scientists. Mary Thome knew, of course, that there were things very strange about this little son, but she was a mother as well as a scientist, and she had tried to ignore it, even while it terrorized her. Thome felt that the time had come now when they couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“But Robert, that radiance—the way his little body glows in the dark—is like radioactivity.”

“It isn’t that,” Thome said.

A queer opalescent glow kept streaming from the baby’s body. When Sanjan was asleep, it could hardly be seen, even in darkness. The glow grew stronger when he was awake. And when he was angry, it sharpened with a new intensity.

“Not some form of radioactivity?” Mary Thome said. “How do you know?”

Her husband gazed at her solemnly. “I even tried the new Watling refinement of the Geiger counter. It showed nothing of radioactivity.”

“You’ve been experimenting on him, Robert?” Mary Thome’s voice was shocked.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Why not? We can’t ignore it, Mary. But there’s no reason why it should frighten us.”

“Then if it isn’t radioactivity, what is it?”

What indeed? Some sort of power. Something inherent to him. Something which of course some day science would be able to explain, but now could only call an enigma.

And there were other things different about Sanjan Thome. Even now, in infancy, his high cheekbones, thin cheeks and pointed chin were apparent. At two years old he was talking with an abnormal fluency. Everything about him was precocious. The look of bright, dancing understanding in his eyes.

There was that time when Robert Thome had held a bright-colored rattle down into the crib. Sanjan had only been a year old then. He had reached for the rattle, but not with a normal baby’s slow, uncertain fumbling. Instead, his eyes had flashed; his tiny hand had darted out and grasped it with incredible speed and accuracy.

“All his perceptions are swifter than normal, Mary,” Thome had explained. “The messages his brain sends to his muscles are all speeded up.”

A gifted child. Why should they think of him in terms of something gruesome? This small human creature was supernormal—superior. The child was a sudden advancement in the slow normal development of the human race. It was as though he had jumped the gap of generations. A human ahead of his time.

Robert Thome no longer felt justified in hiding his secret from his scientific associates. He brought them in. Gravely they studied and tested little Sanjan, who stared at them with his dancing eyes, chattered his grown-up baby talk and was amused and excited by it all.

There was a flurry of comment now, in print and on the radio. Newscasters called little Sanjan a freak, and his mother was appalled and resentful.

“Robert, you’re going to ruin his life. You’re making him a bug on a pin.”

“But Mary, science needs to know. We’ve something wonderful here.”

But public interest died out. The world soon forgets. Science called Sanjan Thome a biological abnormality. To science he symbolized a new eugenics, a product of the New Era of Atomic fission, a mutation. Mary Thome, as a war prisoner in Japan, had been in the outskirts of Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb was dropped.

Seemingly, the radioactivity to which she had been exposed, had wrought no serious effects upon her. But the effects were there. And Robert Thome had been for years one of the key physicists working on the development of atomic fission. He had been in the Manhattan Project, from the beginning, until that first bomb was tested in New Mexico. Then, when the war was over, he had been in Operation Crossroads, meeting Mary about that time, and marrying her. He had always been careful, with Geiger counters to mark when one should no longer expose himself. Or had he sometimes been too eager? Too reckless, in his enthusiasm for this new and wonderful atomic power?

Something had changed within both the mother and father of Sanjan Thome. Science coins names for almost everything, glibly speaking of genes and hormones which are altered by radioactivity, so that they produce something new. What is so mysterious about that? Even the creation of life still is a mystery beyond human ken.

And so Sanjan Thome was a mutant....

Ten years passed, and one day Sanjan was having a quarrel with the little girl next door.

“I didn’t!” said Sanjan.

“Yes you did, too! I had only six pieces, you had seven!”

“I didn’t!”

“Yes you did, Sanjan Thome. You had seven, and this one is mine!”

But like a darting rapier, Sanjan snatched the last chocolate candy from the little girl and stuffed it into his mouth. She stood startled, it had been so quick.

“Why, you horrid little boy! That’s what you are!” She stamped her foot and burst into tears.

“And you’re just a cry baby,” he taunted. “Besides, I’m not a boy now. I’m a man. I’m ten.”

Vana Grant was the little girl next door. She was his only playmate. Her father was the mayor of the town. The Grant garden adjoined that of the Thomes, with only a small hedge between. Long ago, now, Robert Thome had withdrawn his strange child from the world. School was impractical. Sanjan had his own tutors. Peter Grant, Vana’s father, was a close friend of the Thomes.

The Grants and Thomes had built a high wall around their two houses and within it was Sanjan’s world. Already, he startled his tutors with his ability to learn. At ten, anyone would have called him well educated. Yet mixed with his maturity, there was normal childishness, so that he could play with Vana and quarrel with her.

“I hate you, Sanjan Thome! I hate you, and I’m afraid of you!”

Then as she started to run into her house, he stood stricken.

“Come back, Vana! Don’t cry!”

“No, I won’t come back! You’re a horrid little boy!”

“I’m sorry I took your candy, Vana.”

Then he was so immensely relieved when she came back.

That night he said to his father:

“Dad, I took a piece of candy from Vana today. It was hers, but I took it because she couldn’t stop me. That’s human nature, isn’t it? Being greedy. Taking what you can get, because you’re stronger?”

“Yes,” Thome said gravely. “Yes, it is.”

“And if people are that way, of course, nations are that way too,” Sanjan said. “They do what I did to Vana. Only when it’s nations, it’s called war.”

Then out of another silence, Sanjan said, “And the atomic bomb makes a nation pretty strong. I can see why every nation wants it.”

The atomic bomb—Sanjan, of course, had heard of it all his life. His toys had been built around it and the childish books with which he had learned to read, had told about it. And as he learned more of what it had done in the war that finished just before he was born, the fear of it grew in him.

He said now, “The next war will be pretty awful, won’t it, Dad?”

“We hope there won’t be any,” Thome said solemnly.

Long since, the nations had given up the idea that by some international agreement they could do away with the atomic bomb. There was no way that they could enforce any international laws, save by starting the war they were trying to avoid. So they were making bigger and better bombs, and more of them.

Each day the world hovered upon the brink of monster catastrophe.