Homo Inferior Page 2

the museums."

  Walden smiled again. "Only mine. Books are fascinating things. All theknowledge of a race, gathered together on a few shelves...."

  "Knowledge?" Myron shrugged. "Imagine storing knowledge in those--boxes.What are they? What's in them? Just words...."

  The books faded as Walden sighed. "You'd be surprised what the old racedid, with just those--boxes."

  He looked across at Eric, who was now bouncing his ball and counting,out loud, up to three, and then going back and starting again.

  "The boy can learn what's in those books. Just as if he'd gone to schoolback in the old times."

  Myron and Gwin looked doubtfully at each other, and then over at thecorner where Eric played unheeding. Perhaps Walden could help.Perhaps....

  "Eric," Gwin said aloud.

  "Yes, mother?"

  "We've decided you're going to go to school, the way you want to. Mr.Walden here is going to be your teacher. Isn't that nice?"

  Eric looked at her and then at the old man. Strangers didn't often comeout on the sunporch. Strangers usually left him alone.

  He bounced the ball again without answering.

  "Say something, Eric," his mother commanded.

  Eric looked back at Walden. "He can't teach me to be like otherchildren, can he?"

  "No," Walden said. "I can't."

  "Then I don't want to go to school." Eric threw the ball across the roomas hard as he could.

  "But there once were other people like _you_," Walden said. "Lots ofthem. And you can learn about them, if you want to."

  "Other people like me? Where?"

  Myron and Gwin looked helplessly at each other and at the old man. Gwinbegan to cry and Myron cursed softly, on the perception level so thatEric wouldn't hear them.

  But Walden's face was gentle and understanding as he answered, sounderstanding that Eric couldn't help wanting desperately to believehim.

  "Everyone was like you once," Walden said. "A long time ago."

  * * * * *

  It was a new life for Eric. Every day he would go over to Walden's andthe two of them would pull back the curtains in the study and Waldenwould lift down some of the books. It was as if Walden was giving himthe past, all of it, as fast as he could grasp it.

  "I'm really like the old race, Walden?"

  "Yes, Eric. You'll see just how much like them...."

  Identity. Here in the past, in the books he was learning to read, in thepictures, the pages and pages of scenes and portraits. Strange scenes,far removed from the gardens and the quiet houses and the wordless smileof friend to friend.

  Great buildings and small. The Parthenon in the moonlight, not too manypages beyond the cave, with its smoky fire and first crude walldrawings. Cities bright with a million neon lights, and still later,caves again--the underground stations of the Moon colonies. All unreal,and yet--

  They were his people, these men in the pictures. Strange men, violentmen: the barbarian trampling his enemy to death beneath his horse'shooves, the knight in armor marching to the Crusade, the spaceman. Andthe quieter men: the farmer, the artisan, the poet--they too were hispeople, and far easier to understand than the others.

  The skill of reading mastered, and the long, sweeping vistas of thepast. Their histories. Their wars. "Why did they fight, Walden?" AndWalden's sigh. "I don't know, Eric, but they did."

  So much to learn. So much to understand. Their art and music andliterature and religion. Patterns of life that ebbed and flowed andebbed again, but never in quite the same way. "Why did they change somuch, Walden?" And the answer, "You probably know that better than I,Eric...."

  Perhaps he did. For he went on to the books that Walden ignored.Their mathematics, their science. The apple's fall, and the orbitsof planets. The sudden spiral of analysis, theory, technology. Themachines--steamships, airplanes, spaceships....

  And the searching loneliness that carried the old race from the caves ofEarth to the stars. The searching, common to the violent man and thequiet man, to the doer and the dreaming poet.

  _Why do we hunger, who own the Moon and trample the shifting dust of Mars?_

  _Why aren't we content with the worlds we've won? Why don't we rest, with the system ours?_

  _We have cast off the planets like outgrown toys, and now we want the stars...._

  "Have you ever been to the stars, Walden?"

  Walden stared at him. Then he laughed. "Of course not, Eric. Nobody goesthere now. None of our race has ever gone. Why should we?"

  There was no explaining. Walden had never been lonely.

  And then one day, while he was reading some fiction from the middleperiod of the race, Eric found the fantasy. Speculation about thefuture, about their future.... About the new race!

  He read on, his heart pounding, until the same old pattern came clear.They had foreseen conflict, struggle between old race and new, suspicionand hatred and tragedy. The happy ending was superficial. Everyone wasmotivated as they had been motivated.

  He shut the book and sat there, wanting to reach back across the yearsto the old race writers who had been so right and yet so terribly,blindly wrong. The writers who had seen in the new only a continuationof the old, of themselves, of their own fears and their own hungers.

  "Why did they die, Walden?" He didn't expect an answer.

  "Why does any race die, Eric?"

  His own people, forever removed from him, linked to him only through thebooks, the pictures, and his own backward-reaching emotions.

  "Walden, hasn't there _ever_ been anyone else like me, since they died?"

  Silence. Then, slowly, Walden nodded.

  "I wondered how long it would be before you asked that. Yes, there havebeen others. Sometimes three or four in a generation."

  "Then, perhaps...."

  "No," Walden said. "There aren't any others now. We'd know it if therewere." He turned away from Eric, to the plastic wall that looked outacross the garden and the children playing and the long, level,flower-carpeted plain.

  "Sometimes, when there's more than one of them, they go out there awayfrom us, out to the hills where it's wild. But they're found, of course.Found, and brought back." He sighed. "The last of them died when I was aboy."

  Others like him. Within Walden's lifetime, others, cut off from theirown race, lonely and rootless in the midst of the new. Others like him,but not now, in his lifetime. For him there were only the books.

  The old race was gone, gone with all its conflicts, all its violence,its stupidity--and its flaming rockets in the void and its Parthenon inthe moonlight.

  * * * * *

  Eric came into the study and stopped. The room was filled withstrangers. There were half a dozen men besides Walden, most of themfairly old, white-haired and studious looking. They all turned to lookat him, watched him gravely without speaking.

  "Well, there he is." Walden looked from face to face. "Are you stillworried? Do you still think that one small boy constitutes a threat tothe race? What about you, Abbot?"

  "I don't know. I still think he should have been institutionalized inthe beginning."

  "Why? So you could study the brain processes of the lower animals?"Walden's thoughts were as sarcastic as he could send them.

  "No, of course not. But don't you see what you've done, by teaching himto read? You've started him thinking of the old race. Don't deny it."

  "I don't."

  The thin man, Drew, broke in angrily. "He's not full grown yet. Justfourteen, isn't he? How can you be sure what he'll be like later? He'llbe a problem. They've always been problems."

  They were afraid. That was what was the matter with them. Walden sighed."Tell them what you've been studying, Eric," he said aloud.

  For a minute Eric was too tongue-tied to answer. He stood motionless,waiting for them to laugh at him.

  "Go on. Tell them."

  "I've been reading about the old race," Eric said. "All about the stars.Abo
ut the people who went off in the starships and explored our wholegalaxy."

  "What's a galaxy?" the thin man said. Walden could perceive that hereally didn't know.

  Eric's fear lessened. These men weren't laughing at him. They weren'tbeing just polite, either. They were interested. He smiled at them,shyly, and told them about the books and the wonderful, strange tales ofthe past that the books told. The men listened, nodding from time totime. But he knew that they didn't understand. The world of the bookswas his alone....

  "Well?" Walden looked at the others. They looked back.