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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 eye. 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 $1.60 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. Two-six-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 Encyclopedia 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 fellow men.

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 floor 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 upwards 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 unhappiness, 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.”


* * *

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