I have a personal weakness for zany stories and demented heroes (they’re easier for me to identify with), but that’s not why I like this story so much. Most of us writers are a bit superstitious about creativity – we don’t like to examine the creative process in any detail; we shy away from trying to discover where all those funny little ideas come from. Perhaps we think of the Muse as a timid unicorn, who will flee forever if we beat the bushes for her. Or perhaps we are wary of getting locked in a Centipede’s Dilemma. Gordy wades right in, of course.

What is genius? A good question. And when it’s asked by a genius, it’s a courageous one.

Ah, forget it. Have fun.

IDIOT SOLVANT

The afternoon sun, shooting the gap of the missing slat in the venetian blind on the window of Art Willoughby’s small rented room, splashed fair in Art’s eyes, blinding him.

“Blast!” muttered Art. “Got to do something about that sun.”

He flipped one long, lean hand up as an eyeshield and leaned forward once more over the university news sheet, unaware that he had reacted with his usual gesture and litany to the sun in his eyes. His mouth watered. He spread out his sharp elbows on the experiment-scarred surface of his desk and reread the ad.

Volunteers for medical research testing. $1.60 hr., rm., board. Dr. Henry Rapp, Room 432, A Bldg., University Hospital.

“Board –” echoed Art aloud, once more unaware he had spoken. He licked his lips hungrily. Food, he thought. Plus wages. And hospital food was supposed to be good. If they would just let him have all he wanted…

Of course, it would be worth it for the dollar-sixty an hour alone.

“I’ll be sensible,” thought Art. “I’ll put it in the bank and just draw out what I need. Let’s see – one week’s work, say – seven times twenty-four times sixteen. Twosix-eight-eight – to the tenth. Two hundred sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents …”

That much would support him for – mentally, he totted up his daily expenses. Ordinary expenses, that was. Room, a dollar-fifty. One-and-a-half-pound loaf of day-old bread at half price – thirteen cents. Half a pound of peanut butter, at ninety-eight cents for the three-pound economy size jar – seventeen cents roughly. One all-purpose vitamin capsule – ten cents. Half a head of cabbage, or whatever was in season and cheap – approximately twelve cents. Total, for shelter with all utilities paid and a change of sheets on the bed once a week, plus thirty-two hundred calories a day – two dollars and two cents.

Two dollars and two cents. Art sighed. Sixty dollars and sixty cents a month for mere existence. It was heartbreaking. When sixty dollars would buy a fine double magnum of imported champagne at half a dozen of the better restaurants in town, or a 1954 used set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the parts from a mail-order house so that he could build himself a little ocean-hopper shortwave receiver so that he could tune in on foreign language broadcasts and practice understanding German, French, and Italian.

Art sighed. He had long ago come to the conclusion that since the two billion other people in the world could not very well all be out of step at the same time, it was probably he who was the odd one. Nowadays he no longer tried to fight the situation, but let himself reel uncertainly through life, sustained by the vague, persistent conviction that somewhere, somehow, in some strange fashion destiny would eventually be bound to call on him to have a profound effect on his fellowmen.

It was a good twenty-minute walk to the university. Art scrambled lankily to his feet, snatched an ancient leather jacket off the hook holding his bagpipes, put his slide rule up on top of the poetry anthologies in the bookcase so he would know where to find it again – that being the most unlikely place, Q.E.D. – turned off his miniature electric furnace in which he had been casting up a gold pawn for his chess set, left some bread and peanut butter for his pet raccoon, now asleep in the wastebasket, and hurried off, closing the door.

“There’s one more,” said Margie Hansen, Dr. Hank Rapp’s lab assistant. She hesitated. “I think you’d better see him.” Hank looked up from his desk, surprised. He was a short, cheerful, tough-faced man in his late thirties.

“Why?” he said. “Some difficulties? Don’t sign him up if you don’t want to.”

“No. No … I just think maybe you’d better talk to him. He passed the physical all right. It’s just … well, you have a look at him.”

“I don’t get it,” said Hank. “But send him in.”

She opened the door behind her and leaned out through it.

“Mr. Willoughby, will you come in now?” She stood aside and Art entered. “This is Dr. Rapp, Mr: Willoughby. Doctor, this is Art Willoughby.” She went out rather hastily, closing the door behind her.

“Sit down,” said Hank, automatically. Art sat down, and Hank blinked a little at his visitor. The young man sitting opposite him resembled nothing so much as an unbearded Abe Lincoln. A thin unbearded Abe Lincoln, if it was possible to imagine our sixteenth President as being some thirty pounds lighter than he actually had been.

“Are you a student at the university here?” asked Hank, staring at the decrepit leather jacket.

“Well, yes,” said Art, hoping the other would not ask him what college he was in. He had been in six of them, from Theater Arts to Engineering. His record in each was quite honorable. There was nothing to be ashamed of – it was just always a little bit difficult to explain.

“Well –” said Hank. He saw now why Margie had hesitated. But if the man was in good enough physical shape, there was no reason to refuse him. Hank made up his mind. “Has the purpose of this test been explained to you?”

“You’re testing a new sort of stay-awake pill, aren’t you?” said Art. “Your nurse told me all about it.”

“Lab assistant,” corrected Hank automatically. “There’s no reason you can think of yourself, is there, why you shouldn’t be one of the volunteers?”

“Well, no. I … I don’t usually sleep much,” said Art, painfully.

“That’s no barrier.” Hank smiled. “We’ll just keep you awake until you get tired. How much do you sleep?” he asked, to put the younger man at his ease at least a little.

“Oh … six or seven hours.”

“That’s a little less than average. Nothing to get in our way … why, what’s wrong?” said Hank, sitting up suddenly, for Art was literally struggling with his conscience, and his Abe Lincoln face was twisted unhappily.

“A … a week,” blurted Art.

“A week! Are you –” Hank broke off, took a good look at his visitor and decided he was not kidding. Or at least, believed himself that he was not kidding. “You mean, less than an hour a night?”

“Well, I usually wait to the end of the week – Sunday morning’s a good time. Everybody else is sleeping then, anyway. I get it over all at once –” Art leaned forward and put both his long hands on Hank’s desk, pleadingly. “But can’t you test me, anyway, Doctor? I need this job. Really, I’m desperate. If you could use me as a control, or something –”

“Don’t worry,” said Hank, grimly. “You’ve got the job. In fact if what you say is true, you’ve got more of a job than the rest of the volunteers. This is something we’re all going to want to see!”

“Well,” said Hank, ten days later. “Willoughby surely wasn’t kidding.”

Hank was talking to Dr. Arlie Bohn, of the Department of Psychology. Arlie matched Hank’s short height, but outdid him otherwise to the tune of some fifty pounds and fifteen years. They were sitting in Hank’s office, smoking cigarettes over the remains of their bag lunches.

“You don’t think so?” said Arlie, lifting blond eyebrows toward his half-bare, round skull.

“Arlie! Ten days!”

“And no hallucinations?”

“None”

“Thinks his nurses are out to poison him? Doesn’t trust the door janitor?”

“No. No. No!”

Arlie blew out a fat wad of smoke. “I don’t believe it,” he announced.

“I beg your pardon!”

“Oh – not you, Hank. No insults intended. But this boy of yours is running some kind of a con. Sneaking some sort of stimulant when you aren’t looking.”

“Why would he do that? We’d be glad to give him all the stimulants he wants. He won’t take them. And even if he was sneaking something – ten days. Arlie! Ten days and he looks as if he just got up after a good eight hours in his own bed.” Hank smashed his half-smoked cigarette out in the ashtray. “He’s not cheating. He’s a freak.”

“You can’t be that much of a freak.”

“Oh, can’t you?” said Hank. “Let me tell you some more about him. Usual body temperature – about one degree above normal average.”

“Not unheard of. You know that.”

“Blood pressure a hundred and five systolic, sixty-five diastolic. Pulse, fifty-five a minute. Height, six feet four, weight when he came in here a hundred and forty-two. We’ve been feeding him upward of six thousand calories a day since he came in and I swear he still looks hungry. No history of childhood diseases. All his wisdom teeth. No cavities in any teeth. Shall I go on?”

“How is he mentally?”

“I checked up with the university testing bureau. They rate him in the genius range. He’s started in six separate colleges and dropped out of each one. No trouble with grades. He gets top marks for a while, then suddenly stops going to class, accumulates a flock of incompletes, and transfers into something else. Arlie,” said Hank, breaking off suddenly, lowering his voice and staring hard at the other, “I think we’ve got a new sort of man here. A mutation.”

“Hank,” said Arlie, crossing his legs comfortably, “when you get to be my age, you won’t be so quick to think that Gabriel’s going to sound the last trump in your own particular backyard. This boy’s got a few physical peculiarities, he’s admittedly bright, and he’s conning you. You know our recent theory about sleep and sanity.”

“Of course I –”

“Suppose,” said Arlie, “I lay it out for you once again. The human being deprived of sleep for any length of time beyond what he’s accustomed to begins to show signs of mental abnormality. He hallucinates. He exhibits paranoid behavior. He becomes confused, flies into reasonless rages, and overreacts emotionally to trifles.”

“Arthur Willoughby doesn’t.”

“That’s my point.” Arlie held up a small, square slab of a hand. “Let me go on. How do we explain these reactions? We theorize that possibly sleep has a function beyond that of resting and repairing the body. In sleep we humans, at least, dream pretty constantly. In our dreams we act out our unhappinesses, our frustrations, our terrors. Therefore sleep, we guess, may be the emotional safety valve by which we maintain our sanity against the intellectual pressures of our lives.”

“Granted,” said Hank, impatiently. “But Art –”

“Now, let’s take something else. The problem-solving mechanism –”

“Damn it, Arlie –”

“If you didn’t want my opinion, why did you ring me in on this … what was that you just said, Hank?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear it. As I was saying – the problem-solving mechanism. It has been assumed for centuries that man attacked his intellectual problems consciously, and consciously solved them. Recent attention to this assumption has caused us to consider an alternate viewpoint, of which I may say I” – Arlie folded his hands comfortably over his bulging shirtfront “was perhaps the earliest and strongest proponent. It may well be – I and some others now think – that man is inherently incapable of consciously solving any new intellectual problem.”

“The point is, Art Willoughby – what?” Hank broke off suddenly and stared across the crumpled paper bags and wax paper on his desk, at Arlie’s chubby countenance. “What?”

“Incapable. Consciously.” Arlie rolled the words around in his mouth. “By which I mean,” he went on, with a slight grin, “man has no conscious mechanism for the solution of new intellectual problems.” He cocked his head at Hank, and paused.

“All right. All right!” fumed Hank. “Tell me.”

“There seems to be a definite possibility,” said Arlie, capturing a crumb from the piece of wax paper that had enwrapped his ham sandwich, and chewing on it thoughtfully, “that there may be more truth than poetry to the words inspiration, illuminating flash, and stroke of genius. It may well turn out that the new-problem solving mechanism is not under conscious control at all. Hm-m-m, yes. Did I tell you Marta wants me to try out one of these new all-liquid reducing diets? When a wife starts that –”

“Never mind Marta!” shouted Hank. “What about nobody being consciously capable of solving a problem?”

Arlie frowned.

“What I’m trying to say,” he said, “is that when we try to solve a problem consciously, we are actually only utilizing an attention-focusing mechanism. Look, let me define a so-called ‘new problem’ for you –”

“One that you haven’t bumped into before.”

“No,” said Arlie. “No. Now you’re falling into a trap.” He waggled a thick finger at Hank; a procedure intensely irritating to Hank, who suffered a sort of adrenalin explosion the moment he suspected anybody of lecturing down to him. “Does every hitherto undiscovered intersection you approach in your car constitute a new problem in automobile navigation? Of course not. A truly new problem is not merely some variation or combination of factors from problems you have encountered before. It’s a problem that for you, at least, previously did not even exist. It is, in fact, a problem created by the solution of a problem of equal value in the past.”

“All right. Say it is,” scowled Hank. “Then what?”

“Then,” said Arlie, “a true problem must always pose the special condition that no conscious tools of education or experience yet exist for its solution. Ergo, it cannot be handled on the conscious level. The logic of conscious thought is like the limb structure of the elephant, which, though ideally adapted to allow seven tons of animal a six-and-a-half-foot stride, absolutely forbids it the necessary spring to jump across a seven-foot trench that bars its escape from the zoo. For the true problem, you’ve got to get from hyar to thar without any stepping stone to help you across the gap that separates you from the solution. So, you’re up against it, Hank. You’re in a position where you can’t fly but you got to. What do you do?”

“You tell me,” glowered Hank.

“The answer’s simple,” said Arlie, blandly. “You fly.”

“But you just said I couldn’t!” Hank snapped.

“What I said,” said Arlie, “was two things. One, you can’t fly; two, you got to fly. What you’re doing is clinging to one, which forces you to toss out two. What I’m pointing out is that you should cling to two, which tosses out one. Now, your conscious, experienced, logical mind knows you can’t fly. The whole idea’s silly. It won’t even consider the problem. But your unconscious – haa!”

“What about my unconscious?”

“Why, your unconscious isn’t tied down by any ropes of logical process like that. When it wants a solution, it just goes looking for it.”

“Just like that.”

“Well,” Arlie frowned, “not just like that. First it has to fire up a sort of little donkey-engine of its own which we might call the intuitive mechanism. And that’s where the trickiness comes in. Because the intuitive mechanism seems to be all power and no discipline. Its great usefulness comes from the fact that it operates under absolutely no restrictions – and of course this includes the restriction of control by the conscious mind. It’s a sort of idiot savant … no, idiot solvant would be a better term.” He sighed.

“So?” said Hank, after eyeing the fat man for a moment. “What’s the use of it all? If we can’t control it, what good is it?”

“What good is it?” Arlie straightened up. “Look at art. Look at science! Look at civilization. You aren’t going to deny the existence of inspirations, are you? They exist – and one day we’re going to find some better method of sparking them than the purely inductive process of operating the conscious, attention-focusing mechanism in hopes that something will catch.”

“You think that’s possible?”

“I know it’s possible.”

“I see,” said Hank. There was a moment or so of silence in the office. “Well,” said Hank, “about this little problem of my own, which I hate to bring you back to, but you did say the other day you had some ideas about this Art Willoughby. Of course, you were probably only speaking inspirationally, or perhaps I should say, without restriction by the conscious mind –”

“I was just getting to that,” interrupted Arlie. “This Art Willoughby obviously suffers from what educators like to call poor work habits. Hm-m-m, yes. Underdevelopment of the conscious, problem-focusing mechanism. He tries to get by on a purely intuitive basis. When this fails him, he is helpless. He gives upwitness his transfers from college to college. On the other hand, when it works good, it works very, very good. He has probably come up with some way of keeping himself abnormally stimulated, either externally or internally. The only trouble will be that he probably isn’t even conscious of it, and he certainly has no control over it. He’ll fall asleep any moment now. And when he wakes up you’ll want him to duplicate his feat of wakefulness but he won’t be able to do it.”

Hank snorted disbelievingly.

“All right,” said Arlie. “All right. Wait and see.”

“I will,” said Hank. He stood up. “Want to come along and see him? He said he was starting to get foggy this morning. I’m going to try him with the monster.”

“What,” wondered Arlie, ingenuously, rising, “if it puts him to sleep?”

Hank threw him a glance of pure fury.

“Monster!” commanded Hank. He, Arlie, and Margie Hansen were gathered in Art’s hospital room, which was a pleasant, bedless place already overflowing with books and maps. Art, by hospital rules deprived of such things as tools and pets, had discovered an interest in the wars of Hannibal of Carthage. At the present moment he was trying to pick the truth out of the rather confused reports following Hannibal’s escape from the Romans, after Antioehus had been defeated at Magnesia and surrendered his great general to Rome.

Right now, however, he was forced to lay his books aside and take the small white capsule which Margie, at Hank’s order, extended to him. Art took it; then hesitated.

“Do you think it’ll make me very jittery?” he asked.

“It should just wake you up,” said Hank.

“I told you how I am with things like coffee. That’s why I never drink coffee, or take any stimulants. Half a cup and my eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of my head.”

“There wouldn’t,” said Hank a trifle sourly, “be much point in our paying you to test out the monster if you refused to take it, now would there?”

“Oh … oh, no,” said Art, suddenly embarrassed. “Water?”

Margie gave him a full glass and threw an unkind glance at her superior.

“If it starts to bother you, Art, you tell us right away,” she said.

Art gulped the capsule down. He stood there waiting as if he expected an explosion from the region of his stomach. Nothing happened, and after a second or two he relaxed.

“How long does it take?” he asked.

“About fifteen minutes,” said Hank.

They waited. At the end of ten minutes, Art began to brighten up and said he was feeling much more alert. At fifteen minutes, he was sparkling-eyed and cheerful, almost, in fact, bouncy.

“Awfully sorry, Doctor,” he said to Hank. “Awfully sorry I hesitated over taking the monster that way. It was just that coffee and things –”

“That’s all right,” said Hank, preparing to leave. “Margie’ll take you down for tests now.”

“Marvelous pill. I recommend it highly,” said Art, going out the door with Margie. They could hear him headed off down the corridor outside toward the laboratory on the floor below, still talking.

“Well?” said Hank.

“Time will tell,” said Arlie.

“Speaking of time,” continued Hank, “I’ve got the plug-in coffeepot back at the office. Have you got time for a quick cup?”

“… Don’t deny it,” Hank was saying over half-empty cups in the office a short while later. “I heard you; I read you loud and clear. If a man makes his mind up to it, he can fly, you said.”

“Not at all. And besides, I was only speaking academically,” retorted Arlie, heatedly. “Just because I’m prepared to entertain fantastic notions academically doesn’t mean I’m going to let you try to shove them down my throat on a practical basis. Of course nobody can fly.”

“According to your ideas, someone like Willoughby could if he punched the right buttons in him.”

“Nonsense. Certainly be can’t fly.”

There was the wild patter of feminine feet down the hallway outside the office, the door was flung oven, and Margie tottered in. She clung to the desk and gasped, too out of wind to talk.

“What’s wrong?” cried Hank.

“Art …” Margie managed, “flew out – lab window.”

Hank jumped to his feet, and pulled his chair out for her. She fell into it gratefully.

“Nonsense!” said Arlie. “Illusion. Or” – he scowled at Margie – “collusion of some sort.”

“Got your breath back yet? What happened?” Hank was demanding. Margie nodded and drew a deep breath.

“I was testing him,” she said, still breathlessly. “He was talking a blue streak and I could hardly get him to stand still. Something about Titus Quintus Flamininius, the three-body problem, Sauce Countess Waleska, the family Syrphidae of the order Diptera – all mixed up. Oh, he was babbling! And all of a sudden he dived out an open window.”

“Dived?” barked Arlie. “I thought you said he flew?”

“Well, the laboratory’s on the third floor!” wailed Margie, almost on the verge of tears.

Further questioning elicited the information that when Margie ran to the window, expecting to see a shattered ruin on the grass three stories below, she perceived Art swinging by one area from the limb of an oak outside the window. In response to sharp queries from Arlie, she asserted vehemently that the closest grabable limb of the oak was, however, at least eight feet from the window out which Art had jumped, fallen, or dived.

“And then what?” said Hank.

Then, according to Margie, Art had uttered a couple of Tarzan-like yodels, and swung himself to the ground. When last seen he had been running off across the campus through the cool spring sunlight, under the budding trees, in his slacks and shirt unbuttoned at the throat. He had been heading in a roughly northeasterly direction – i.e., toward town – and occasionally bounding into the air as if from a sheer access of energy.

“Come on!” barked Hank, when he had heard this. He led the way at a run toward the hospital parking lot three stories below and his waiting car.

On the other side of the campus, at a taxi stand, the three of them picked up Art’s trail. A cab driver waiting there remembered someone like Art taking another cab belonging to the same company. When Hank identified the passenger as a patient under his, Hank’s, care, and further identified himself as a physician from the university hospital, the cab driver they were talking to agreed to call in for the destination of Art’s cab.

The destination was a downtown bank. Hank, Arlie, and Margie piled back into Hank’s car and went there. When they arrived, they learned that Art had already come and gone, leaving some confusion behind him. A vice-president of the bank, it appeared, had made a loan to Art of two hundred and sixty-eight dollars and eighty cents; and was now, it seemed, not quite sure as to why he had done so.

“He just talked me into it, I guess,” the vice-president was saying unhappily as Hank and the others came dashing up. It further developed that Art had had no collateral. The vice-president had been given the impression that the money was to be used to develop some confusing but highly useful discovery or discoveries concerning Hannibal, encyclopedias, the sweat fly, and physics – with something about champagne and a way of preparing trout for the gourmet appetite.

A further check with the cab company produced the information that Art’s taxi had taken him on to a liquor store. They followed. At the liquor store they discovered that Art had purchased the single jeroboam of champagne (Moët et Chadon) that the liquor store had on hand, and had mentioned that he was going on to a restaurant. What restaurant, the cab company was no longer able to tell them. Art’s driver had just announced that he would not be answering his radio for the next half hour.

They began checking the better and closer restaurants. At the fourth one, which was called the Calice d’Or, they finally ran Art to ground. They found him seated alone at a large round table, surrounded by gold-tooled leather volumes of a brand-new encyclopedia, eating and drinking what turned out to be Truite Sauce Countess Walewska and champagne from the jeroboam, now properly iced.

“Yahoo!” yelped Art, as he saw them approaching. He waved his glass on high, sloshing champagne liberally about. “Champagne for everybody! Celebrate Dr. Rapp’s pill!”

“You,” said Hank, “are coming back to the hospital.”

“Nonsense! Glasses! Champagne for m’friends!”

“Oh, Art!” cried Margie.

“He’s fried to the gills,” said Arlie.

“Not at all,” protested Art. “Illuminated. Blinding flash. Understand everything. D’you know all knowledge has a common point of impingement?”

“Call a taxi, Margie,” commanded Hank.

“Encyclopedia. Champagne bubble. Same thing.”

“Could I help you, sir?” inquired a waiter, approaching Hank.

“We want to get our friend here home –”

“All roads lead knowledge. Unnerstand ignorance, unnerstand everything –”

“I understand, sir. Yes sir, he paid the check in advance –”

“Would you like to speak three thousand, four hundred and seventy-one languages?” Art was asking Arlie.

“Of course,” Arlie was saying, soothingly.

“My assistant has gone to get a taxi, now. I’m Dr. Rapp of the university hospital, and –”

“When I was child,” announced Art, “thought as child, played child; now man – put away childish things.”

“Here’s the young lady, sir.”

“But who will take care of pet raccoon?”

“I flagged a taxi down. It’s waiting out front.”

“Hoist him up,” commanded Hank.

He and Arlie both got a firm hold on a Willoughby arm and maneuvered Art to his feet.

“This way,” said Hank, steering Art toward the door.

“The universe,” said Art. He leaned confidentially toward Hank, almost toppling the three of them over. “Only two inches across.”

“That so?” grunted Hank.

“Hang on to Arlie, Art, and you won’t fall over. There –” said Margie. Art blinked and focused upon her with some difficulty.

“Oh … there you are –” he said. “Love you. Naturally. Only real woman in universe. Other four point seven to the nine hundred seventeenth women in universe pale imitations. Marry me week Tuesday, three P.M., courthouse, wear blue.” Margie gasped.

“Open the door for us, will you?”

“Certainly, sir,” said the waiter, opening the front door to the Calice d’Or. A pink and gray taxi was drawn up at the curb.

“Sell stock in Wehauk Cannery immediately,” Art was saying to the waiter. “Mismanagement. Collapse.” The waiter blinked and stared. “News out in ten days.”

“But how did you know I had –” the waiter was beginning as they shoved Art into the back seat of the cab. Margie got in after him.

“Ah, there you are,” came Art’s voice from the cab. “First son Charles Jonas – blond hair, blue eyes. Second son, William –”

“I’ll send somebody to pick up that encyclopedia and anything else he left,” said Hank to the waiter and got into the taxi himself. The taxi pulled away from the curb.

“Well,” said the waiter, after a long pause in which he stared after the receding cab, to the doorman who had just joined him on the sidewalk, “how do you like that? Ever see anything like that before?”

“No, and I never saw anyone with over a gallon of champagne in him still walking around, either,” said the doorman.

“… And the worst of it is,” said Hank to Arlie, as they sat in Hank’s office, two days later, “Margie is going to marry him.”

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Arlie.

“What’s wrong with it? Look at that!” Hank waved his hand at an object in the center of his desk.

“I’ve seen it,” said Arlie.

They both examined the object. It appeared to be an ordinary moveable telephone with a cord and wall plug. The plug, however, was plugged into a small cardboard box the size of a cheese carton, filled with a tangled mess of wire and parts cannibalized from a cheap portable radio. The box was plugged into nothing.

“What was that number again … oh, yes,” said Arlie. He picked up the phone and dialed a long series of numbers. He held the phone tip so that they could both hear. There was a faint buzzing ring from the earphone and then a small, tinny voice filled the office.

“… The time is eight forty-seven. The temperature is eighteen degrees above zero, the wind westerly at eight miles an hour. The forecast for the Anchorage area is continued cloudy and some snow with a high of twenty-two degrees, a low tonight of nine above. Elsewhere in Alaska –”

Arlie sighed, and replaced the phone in its cradle.

“We bring him back here,” said Hank, “stewed to the gills. In forty minutes, before he passed out, he builds this trick wastebasket of his that holds five times as much as it ought to. He sleeps seven hours and wakes up as good as ever. What should I do? Shoot him, or something? I must have some responsibility to the human race – if not to Marcie.”

“He seems sensible now?”

“Yes, but what do I do?”

“Hypnosis.”

“You keep saying that. I don’t see –”

“We must,” said Arlie, “inhibit the connection of his conscious mind with the intuitive mechanism. The wall between the two – the normal wall – seems to have been freakishly thin in his case. Prolonged sleeplessness, combined with the abnormal stimulation of your monster, has caused him to break through – to say to the idiot solvant, ‘Solve!’ And the idiot solvant in the back of his head has provided him with a solution.”

“I still think it would be better for me to shoot him.”

“You are a physician –”

“You would remind me of that. All right, so I can’t shoot him. I don’t even want to shoot him. But, Arlie, what’s going to happen to everybody? Here I’ve raised up a sort of miracle worker who can probably move the North American continent down to the South Pacific if he wants to – only it just happens he’s also a feather-headed butterfly who never lit on one notion for more than live minutes at a time in his life. Sure, I’ve got a physician’s responsibility toward him. But what about my responsibility to the rest of the people in the world?”

“There is no responsibility being violated here,” said Arlie patiently. “Simply put him back the way you found him.”

“No miracles?”

“None. At least, except accidental ones.”

“It might be kinder to shoot him.”

“Nonsense,” said Arlie sharply. “It’s for the good of everybody.” Hank sighed, and rose.

“All right,” be said. “Let’s go.”

They went down the hall to Art’s room. They found him seated thoughtfully in his armchair, staring at nothing, his books and maps ignored around him.

“Good morning, Art,” said Arlie.

“Oh? Hello,” said Art, waking up. “Is it time for tests?”

“In a way,” said Arlie. He produced a small box surmounted by a cardboard disk on which were inked alternate spirals of white and black. He plugged the box into a handy electric socket by means of the cord attached to it, and set it on a small table in front of Art. The disk began to revolve. “I want you to watch that,” said Arlie.

Art stared at it.

“What do you see?” asked Arlie.

“It looks like going down a tunnel,” said Art.

“Indeed it does,” said Arlie. “Just imagine yourself going down that tunnel. Down the tunnel. Faster and faster …” He continued to talk quietly and persuasively for about a minute and a half, at the end of which Art was limply demonstrating a state of deep trance. Arlie brought him up a bit for questioning.

“… And how do these realizations, these answers, come to you?” Arlie was asking a few minutes later.

“In a sort of a flash,” replied Art. “A blinding flash.”

“That is the way they have always come to you?”

“More lately,” said Art.

“Yes,” said Arlie, “that’s the way it always is just before people outgrow these flashes – you know that.”

There was a slight pause.

“Yes,” said Art.

“You have now outgrown these flashes. You have had your last flash. Flashes belong to childhood. You have had a delayed growing-up, but from now on you will think like an adult. Logically. You will think like an adult. Repeat after me.”

“I will think like an adult,” intoned Art.

Arlie continued to hammer away at his point for a few more minutes; then he brought Art out of his trance, with a final command that if Art felt any tendency to a recurrence of his flashes he should return to Arlie for further help in suppressing them.

“Oh, hello, Doctor,” said Art to Hank, as soon as he woke up. “Say, how much longer are you going to need me as a test subject?”

Hank made a rather unhappy grimace. “In a hurry to leave?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Art, enthusiastically, rubbing his long hands together as he sat up in the chair, “but I was just thinking maybe it’s time I got to work. Settled clown. As long as I’m going to be a married man shortly.”

“We can turn you loose today, if you want,” said Hank.

Illustration by RICK BRYANT

When Art stepped once more into his room, closing the door behind him and taking off his leather jacket to hang it up on the hook holding his bagpipes, the place seemed so little changed that it was hard to believe ten full days had passed. Even the raccoon was back asleep in the wastebasket. It was evident the landlady had been doing her duty about keeping the small animal fed – Art had worried a little about that. The only difference, Art thought, was that the room seemed to feel smaller.

He sighed cheerfully and sat down at the desk, drawing pencil and paper to him. The afternoon sun, shooting the gap of the missing slat on the venetian blind at the window, splashed fair in Art’s eyes, blinding him.

“Blast!” he said aloud. “Got to do something about that –”

He checked himself suddenly with one hand halfway up to shield his eyes, and smiled. Opening a drawer of the desk, he took out a pair of heavy kitchen scissors. He made a single cut into the rope slot at each end of the plastic slat at the bottom of the blind, snapped the slat out of position, and snapped it back in where the upper slat was missing.

Still smiling, he picked up the pencil and doodled the name Margie with a heart around it in the upper left-hand corner as he thought, with gaze abstracted. The pencil moved to the center of the piece of paper and hovered there.

After a moment, it began to sketch.

What it sketched was a sort of device to keep the sun out of Art’s eyes. At the same time, however, it just happened to be a dome-shaped all-weather shield capable of protecting a city ten miles in diameter the year round. The “skin” of the dome consisted of a thin layer of carbon dioxide such as one finds in the bubbles of champagne, generated and maintained by magnetic lines of force emanating from three heavily charged bodies, in rotation about each other at the apex of the dome and superficially housed in a framework the design of which was reminiscent of the wing structure found in the family Syrphidae of the order Diptera.

Art continued to smile as the design took form. But it was a thoughtful smile, a mature smile. Hank and Arlie had been quite right about him. He had always been a butterfly, flitting from notion to notion, playing.

But then, too, he had always been a bad hypnotic subject, full of resistances.

And he was about to have a wife to care for. Consequently it is hard to say whether Arlie and Hank would have been reassured if they could have seen Art at that moment. His new thinking was indeed adult, much more so than the other two could have realized. Where miracles were concerned, he had given up playing.

Now, he was working.

CONTENTS