The Time Traveler's Almanac

Dappling had done what he could, and he did not doubt that it was enough. In any case, he saw his safeguards only as an excess of caution. There was no reason why he should not live until Emily herself was a grandmother, and he proposed to guard her tenderly through all those years. But such speculation about the far future was confined to moments of active planning; in his heart, in his day-to-day thought, she was forever five years old, forever a golden child laughing among flowers in a long golden afternoon. And that would be the reality, in a way.

Or, at any rate, a reality; one of the realities perceived by Loob, peering uncomprehendingly down the chasm of the years from his seat in the oriel window. He watched her often at play, skipping blithely with bare feet over sun-warmed grass, as he sat hunched motionless on his box, strange and gross, scoured by a gritty cold wind that he did not seem to feel, staring with lusterless eyes at the pantomime he watched almost every day without ever remembering that he had seen it before. There had never been pattern or sequence to his perception of the past, and scenes came and went apparently at random, but the child on the lawn was there for him almost every day. He looked through the window and saw her at play, and behind him in the room, if he turned his head to look, the pretty lady was playing the piano while a slim man with a mustache turned the pages of music for her, and through the door another man was entering the room.

It always ended then; abruptly Loob was looking at the desolate present or a different time in the past. No one could have said whether it mattered to him. No expression crossed the broad pallid face, the dull eyes neither brightened nor dimmed. But somewhere in the cloudy corridors of his brain something found that particular scene appealing, and it was endlessly repeated for Loob, child and dog in the sunlight, man and woman at the piano, the other man entering. And some sort of censor existed there, as well, cutting off his view each time at the same point; even Loob could not have borne to see again the scene played to its end.

Or perhaps he could have, and the shift in time had quite another explanation. There was no way of knowing what he felt, or indeed if he had feelings at all. What went on inside his head differed utterly – differed in kind – from the thinking processes of other people. He was not stupid or insane; those words apply to a mind’s efficiency in the handling of reality and rational thought, and what happened inside Loob’s skull bore no relation to those things. There was a power there that normal brains do not have, and Loob could see things long invisible to everyone else, but he did not – could not – think.

He had been born with a brain that was skewed and misshapen; the conduits that carry the impulses called thought were twisted and awry, in no way resembling the complex, symmetrical network which the genetic blueprint prescribes. They coiled upon themselves in tight nodes, forked where they should have continued singly, came to dead ends where they should have made a juncture, joined fortuitously where no connection should have been made. The energies that passed along them traveled unprecedented routes, and the result was not thought but something new and unique.

In a different age Loob would have been exposed and abandoned to die, and in a different place he would have been locked into an institution and forgotten. Here in this mountain town he was kept alive and, for what it was worth to him, permitted almost total freedom. The people clung to their immemorial folkways, and it had never been their way to send defective people to institutions. When seventeen-year-old Carolee Rankin came home to bear her bastard and depart again, this time to disappear forever, her mother, as a matter of course, kept the child to raise as one of the moil of children swarming through the ruinous house the welfare people supplied her. Loob shared his grandmother’s breast with his uncle, who was a year older than Loob. By his third birthday he was an inch taller than the uncle. It was by then evident, even to the grandmother, who herself lived at a certain remove from reality, that something was amiss inside Loob’s head. He walked into furniture and followed with his eyes the movements of invisible people and became frightened at the sight of things that were not there. It could not be doubted that he was in some way cracked.

The grandmother did not regard the fact as a major tragedy; most of the families she knew produced at least one natural in each generation. Loob received neither more nor less than his share of her fitful offerings of affection, and perhaps less than his share of the cuffings. He continued to grow with unnatural speed, almost visibly acquiring inches of height and layers of fat, feeding greedily on enormous quantities of the starchy foods provided by bureaucratic charity. When he was seven the grandmother died.