Short Stories by Robert A. Heinlein Vol 2 Part 53

'Huh?'

'Yeah. Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones, bless his stiff-necked, bad-tempered heart.'

'Why Waldo? You haven't suddenly acquired an interest in myasthenia gravis, have you?'

'Well, no. I don't care what's wrong with him physically.

He can have hives, dandruff, or the galloping never-get-overs, for all I care. I hope he has. What I want is to pick his brains.'

'So?'

'I can't do it alone. Waldo doesn't help people; he uses them.

You're his only normal contact with people.'

'That is not entirely true-'

'Who else?'

'You misunderstand me. He has no normal contacts. I am simply the only person who dares to be rude to him.'

'But I thought- Never mind. D'you know, this is an inconvenient setup? Waldo is the man we've got to have.

Why should it come about that a genius of his calibre should be so unapproachable, so immune to ordinary social demands? Oh, I know his disease has a lot to do with it, but why should this man have this disease? It's an improbable coincidence.'

'It's not a matter of his infirmity,' Grimes told him. 'Or, rather, not in the way you put it. His weakness is his genius, in a way-'

'Huh?'

'Well-' Grimes turned his sight inward, let his mind roam back over his long a.s.sociation, lifelong, for Waldo, with this particular patient. He remembered his subliminal misgivings when he delivered the child. The infant had been sound enough, superficially, except for a slight blueness. But then lots of babies were somewhat cyanotic in the delivery room.

Nevertheless, he had felt a slight reluctance to give it the tunk on the bottom, the slap which would shock it into taking its first lungful of air.

But he had squelched his own feelings, performed the necessary

'laying on of hands', and the freshly born human had declared its independence with a satisfactory squall. There was nothing else he could have done; he was a young GP then, who took his

Hippocratic oath seriously. He still took it seriously, he supposed, even though he sometimes referred to it as the 'hypocritical' oath.

Still, he had been right in his feelings; there had been something rotten about that child, something that was not entirely myasthenia gravis.He had felt sorry for the child at first, as well as having an irrational feeling of responsibility for its condition. Pathological muscular weakness is an almost totally crippling condition, since the patient has no unaffected limbs to retrain into subst.i.tutes.

There the victim must lie, all organs, limbs, and functions present, yet so pitifully, completely weak as to be unable to perform any normal action. He must spend his life in a condition of exhausted collapse, such as you or I might reach at the finish line of a gruelling cross-country run. No help for him, and no relief.

During Waldo's childhood he had hoped constantly that the child would die, since he was so obviously destined for tragic uselessness, while simultaneously, as a physician, doing everything within his own skill and the skills of numberless consulting specialists to keep the child alive and cure it.

Naturally, Waldo could not attend school; Grimes ferreted out sympathetic tutors. He could indulge in no normal play; Grimes invented sickbed games which would not only stimulate Waldo's imagination but encourage him to use his flabby muscles to the full, weak extent of which he was capable.

Grimes had been afraid that the handicapped child, since it was not subjected to the usual maturing stresses of growing up, would remain infantile. He knew now, had known for a long time, that he need not have worried. Young Waldo grasped at what little life was offered him, learned thirstily, tried with a sweating tenseness of will to force his undisciplined muscles to serve him.

He was clever in thinking of dodges whereby to circ.u.mvent his muscular weakness. At seven he devised a method of controlling a spoon with two hands, which permitted him, painfully, to feed himself.

His first mechanical invention was made at ten.

It was a gadget which held a book for him, at any angle, controlled lighting for the book, and turned its pages. The gadget responded to fingertip pressure on a simple control panel. Naturally, Waldo could not build it himself, but he could conceive it, and explain it; the

Farthingwaite-Joneses could well afford the services of a designing engineer to build the child's conception.

Grimes was inclined to consider this incident, in which the child Waldo acted in a role of intellectual domination over a trained mature adult neither blood relation nor servant, as a landmark in the psychological process whereby Waldo eventually came to regard the entire human race as his servants, his hands, present or potential.

'What's eating you, Doc?'

'Eh? Sorry, I was daydreaming. See here, son - you mustn't be too harsh on Waldo. I don't like him myself. But you must take him as a whole.'

'You take him.'

'Shush. You spoke of needing his genius. He wouldn't have been a genius if he had not been crippled. You didn't know his parents.

They were good stock, fine, intelligent people, but nothing spectacular.

Waldo's potentialities weren't any greater than theirs, but he had to do more with them to accomplish anything. He had to do everything the hard way. He had to be clever.

'Sure. Sure, but why should he be so utterly poisonous? Most big men aren't.'

'Use your head. To get anywhere in his condition he had to develop a will, a driving one-track mind, with a total disregard for any other considerations. What would you expect him to be but stinking selfish?'

'I'd- Well, never mind. We need him and that's that.'

'Why?'

Stevens explained.

It may plausibly be urged that the shape of a culture, its mores, evaluations, family organization, eating habits, living patterns, pedagogical methods, inst.i.tutions, forms of government, and so forth, arise from the economic necessities of its technology.

Even though the thesis be too broad and much oversimplified, it is nonetheless true that much which characterized the long peace which followed the const.i.tutional establishrnent of the United Nations grew out of the technologies which were hot-house-forced by the needs of the belligerents in the war of the forties. Up to that time broadcast and beam-cast were used only for commercial radio, with rare exceptions.

Even telephony was done almost entirely by actual metallic connexion from one instrument to another. If a man in Monterey wished to speak to his wife or partner in Boston, a physical, copper neuron stretched bodily across the continent from one to the other.

Radiant power was then a hop dream, found in Sunday supplements and comic books.

A concatenation, no, a meshwork of new developments was necessary before the web of copper covering the continent could be dispensed with.

Power could not be broadcast economically; it was necessary to wait for the co-axial beam, a direct result of the imperative military shortages of the Great War. Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until ultra micro-wave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which could be used by a nontechnical person, a ten-year-old child, let us say

,as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial wired telephone of the era then terminating.

Bell Laboratories cracked that problem; the solution led directly to the radiant power receptor, domestic type, keyed, sealed, and metered.

The way was open for commercial radio power transmission, except in one respect: efficiency. Aviation waited on the development of the