More Than Human

‘Anything.’ She eyed him. ‘You’re sort of stoopid, you know that, Lone. I got to tell you every little thing four times. Now listen, if you want to know something you tell me and I’ll tell Baby and he’ll get the answer and tell the twins and they’ll tell me and I’ll tell you, now what do you want to know?’

Lone stared at the fire. ‘I don’t know anything I want to know.’

‘Well, you sure think up a lot of silly things to ask me.’

Lone, not offended, sat and thought. Janie went to work on a scab on her knee, picking it gently round and round with fingernails the colour and shape of parentheses.

‘Suppose I got a truck,’ Lone said a half-hour later, ‘it gets stuck in a field all the time, the ground’s too tore up. Suppose I want to fix it so it won’t stick no more. Baby tell me a thing like that?’

‘Anything, I told you,’ said Janie sharply. She turned and looked at Baby. Baby lay as always, staring dully upward. In a moment she looked at the twins.

‘He don’t know what is a truck. If you’re going to ask him anything you have to explain all the pieces before he can put ‘em together.’

‘Well you know what a truck is,’ said Lone, ‘and soft ground and what stickin’ is. You tell him.’

‘Oh all right,’ said Janie.

She went through the routine again, sending to Baby, receiving from the twins. Then she laughed. ‘He says stop driving on the field and you won’t get stuck. You could of thought of that yourself, you dumbhead.’

Lone said, ‘Well suppose you got to use it there, then what?’

‘You ‘spect me to go on askin’ him silly questions all night?’

‘All right, he can’t answer like you said.’

‘He can too!’ Her facts impugned, Janie went to the task with a will. The next answer was, ‘Put great big wide wheels on it.’

‘Suppose you ain’t got money nor time nor tools for that?’

This time it was, ‘ Make it real heavy where the ground is hard and real light where the ground is soft and anything in between.’

Janie very nearly went on strike when Lone demanded to know how this could be accomplished and reached something of a peak of impatience when Lone rejected the suggestion of loading and unloading rocks. She complained that not only was this silly, but that Baby was matching every fact she fed him with every other fact he had been fed previously and was giving correct but unsolicited answers to situational sums of tyres plus weight plus soup plus bird’s nests, and babies plus soft dirt plus wheel diameters plus straw. Lone doggedly clung to his basic question and the day’s impasse was reached when it was determined that there was such a way but it could not be expressed except by facts not in Lone’s or Janie’s possession. Janie said it sounded to her like radio tubes and with only that to go on, Lone proceeded by entering the next night a radio service shop and stealing a heavy armload of literature. He bulled along unswerving, unstoppable, until at last Janie relinquished her opposition because she had not energy for it and for the research as well. For days she scanned elementary electricity and radio texts which meant nothing to her but which apparently Baby could absorb faster than she scanned.

And at last the specifications were met: something which Lone could make himself, which would involve only a small knob you pushed to make the truck heavier and pulled to make it lighter, as well as an equally simple attachment to add power to the front wheels – according to Baby a sine qua non.

In the half-cave, half-cabin, with the fire smoking in the centre of the room and the meat turning slowly in the up-draft, with the help of two tongue-tied infants, a mongoloid baby and a sharp-tongued child who seemed to despise him but never failed him, Lone built the device. He did it, not because he was particularly interested in the thing for itself, nor because he wished to understand its principles (which were and would always be beyond him), but only because an old man who had taught him something he could not name was mad with bereavement and needed to work and could not afford a horse.

He walked most of the night with it and installed it in the dim early hours of the morning. The idea of ‘pleasant surprise’ was far too whimsical a thing for Lone but it amounted to the same thing. He wanted it ready for the day’s work, without any time lost by the old man prancing around asking questions that he couldn’t answer.

The truck stood bogged in the field. Lone unwound the device from around his neck and shoulders and began to attach it according to the exact instructions he had winnowed out of Baby. There wasn’t much to do. A slender wire wrapped twice around the clutch housing outside and led to clamps on the front spring shackles, the little brushes touching the insides of the front wheels; and that was the front-wheel drive. Then the little box with its four silvery cables, box clamped to steering post, each cable leading to a corner of the frame.