The Very Best of F & SF v1 (11 page)

I’m ashamed.

PROGRESS REPORT II

April
21
Still didn’t go into the factory. I told Mrs.
Flynn my landlady to call and tell Mr. Donnegan I was sick. Mrs. Flynn looks at
me very funny lately like she’s scared of me.

I think it’s a
good thing about finding out how everybody laughs at me. I thought about it a
lot. It’s because I’m so dumb and I don’t even know when I’m doing something
dumb. People think it’s funny when a dumb person can’t do things the same way
they can.

Anyway, now I
know I’m getting smarter every day. I know punctuation and I can spell good. I
like to look up all the hard words in the dictionary and I remember them. I’m
reading a lot now, and Miss Kinnian says I read very fast.

Sometimes I even
understand what I’m reading about, and it stays in my mind. There are times
when I can close my eyes and think of a page and it all comes back like a
picture.

Besides history,
geography, and arithmetic, Miss Kinnian said I should start to learn a few
foreign languages. Dr. Strauss gave me some more tapes to play while I sleep. I
still don’t understand how that conscious and unconscious mind works, but Dr.
Strauss says not to worry yet. He asked me to promise that when I start
learning college subjects next week I wouldn’t read any books on
psychology—that is, until he gives me permission.

I feel a lot
better today, but I guess I’m still a little angry that all the time people
were laughing and making fun of me because I wasn’t so smart. When I become
intelligent like Dr. Strauss says, with three times my I.Q. of 68, then maybe I’ll
be like everyone else and people will like me and be friendly.

I’m not sure
what an I.Q. is. Dr. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent
you were—like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big
argument with him and said an I.Q. didn’t weigh intelligence at all. He said an
I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the
outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff.

Then when I
asked Burt, who gives me my intelligence tests and works with Algernon, he said
that both of them were wrong (only I had to promise not to tell them he said
so). Burt says that the I.Q. measures a lot of different things including some
of the things you learned already, and it really isn’t any good at all.

So I still don’t
know what
I.Q.
is except that mine is going to be over 200 soon. I didn’t want to
say anything, but I don’t see how if they don’t know what it is, or where it
is—I don’t see how they know how much of it you’ve got.

Dr. Nemur says I
have to take a Rorschach Test tomorrow. I wonder what that is.

April
22
I found out what a
Rorschach
is. It’s the test
I took before the operation—the one with the inkblots on the pieces of
cardboard. The man who gave me the test was the same one.

I was scared to
death of those inkblots. I knew he was going to ask me to find the pictures and
I knew I wouldn’t be able to. I was thinking to myself, if only there was some
way of knowing what kind of pictures were hidden there. Maybe there weren’t any
pictures at all. Maybe it was just a trick to see if I was dumb enough to look
for something that wasn’t there. Just thinking about that made me sore at him.

“All right,
Charlie,” he said, “you’ve seen these cards before, remember?”

“Of course I
remember.”

The way I said
it, he knew I was angry, and he looked surprised. “Yes, of course. Now I want
you to look at this one. What might this be? What do you see on this card?
People see all sorts of things in these inkblots. Tell me what it might be for
you—what it makes you think of.”

I was shocked.
That wasn’t what I had expected him to say at all. “You mean there are no
pictures hidden in those inkblots?”

He frowned and
took off his glasses. “What?”

“Pictures.
Hidden in the inkblots. Last time you told me that everyone could see them and
you wanted me to find them too.”

He explained to
me that the last time he had used almost the exact same words he was using now.
I didn’t believe it, and I still have the suspicion that he misled me at the
time just for the fun of it. Unless—I don’t know anymore— could I have been
that feebleminded?

We went through
the cards slowly. One of them looked like a pair of bats tugging at something.
Another one looked like two men fencing with swords. I imagined all sorts of
things. I guess I got carried away. But I didn’t trust him anymore, and I kept
turning them around and even looking on the back to see if there was anything
there I was supposed to catch. While he was making his notes, I peeked out of
the corner of my eye to read it. But it was all in code that looked like this:

WF+A DdF-Ad
orig. WF-A SF+obj

The test still
doesn’t make sense to me. It seems to me that anyone could make up lies about
things that they didn’t really see. How could he know I wasn’t making a fool of
him by mentioning things that I didn’t really imagine? Maybe I’ll understand it
when Dr. Strauss lets me read up on psychology.

April
25
I figured out a new way to line up the
machines in the factory, and Mr. Donnegan says it will save him ten thousand
dollars a year in labor and increased production. He gave me a
twenty-five-dollar bonus.

I wanted to take
Joe Carp and Frank Reilly out to lunch to celebrate, but Joe said he had to buy
some things for his wife, and Frank said he was meeting his cousin for lunch. I
guess it’ll take a little time for them to get used to the changes in me.
Everybody seems to be frightened of me. When I went over to Amos Borg and
tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped up in the air.

People don’t
talk to me much anymore or kid around the way they used to. It makes the job
kind of lonely.

April 27
I got up the nerve today to ask Miss Kinnian to have dinner with me
tomorrow night to celebrate my bonus.

At first she
wasn’t sure it was right, but I asked Dr. Strauss and he said it was okay. Dr.
Strauss and Dr. Nemur don’t seem to be getting along so well. They’re arguing
all the time. This evening when I came in to ask Dr. Strauss about having
dinner with Miss Kinnian, I heard them shouting. Dr. Nemur was saying that it
was his experiment and his research, and Dr. Strauss was shouting back that he
contributed just as much, because he found me through Miss Kinnian and he
performed the operation. Dr. Strauss said that someday thousands of
neurosurgeons might be using his technique all over the world.

Dr. Nemur wanted
to publish the results of the experiment at the end of this month. Dr. Strauss
wanted to wait a while longer to be sure. Dr. Strauss said that Dr. Nemur was
more interested in the Chair of Psychology at Princeton than he was in the
experiment. Dr. Nemur said that Dr. Strauss was nothing but an opportunist who
was trying to ride to glory on his coattails.

When I left
afterwards, I found myself trembling. I don’t know why for sure, but it was as
if I’d seen both men clearly for the first time. I remember hearing Burt say
that Dr. Nemur had a shrew of a wife who was pushing him all the time to get
things published so that he could become famous. Burt said that the dream of
her life was to have a big-shot husband.

Was Dr. Strauss
really trying to ride on his coattails?

April
28
I don’t understand why I never noticed how
beautiful Miss Kinnian really is. She has brown eyes and feathery brown hair
that comes to the top of her neck. She’s only thirty-four! I think from the
beginning I had the feeling that she was an unreachable genius—and very, very
old. Now, every time I see her she grows younger and more lovely.

We had dinner
and a long talk. When she said that I was coming along so fast that soon I’d be
leaving her behind, I laughed.

“It’s true,
Charlie. You’re already a better reader than I am. You can read a whole page at
a glance while I can take in only a few lines at a time. And you remember every
single thing you read. I’m lucky if I can recall the main thoughts and the
general meaning.”

“I don’t feel
intelligent. There are so many things I don’t understand.”

She took out a
cigarette and I lit it for her. “You’ve got to be a little patient. You’re
accomplishing in days and weeks what it takes normal people to do in hall a
lifetime. That’s what makes it so amazing. You’re like a giant sponge now,
soaking things in. Facts, figures, general knowledge. And soon you’ll begin to
connect them, too. You’ll see how the different branches of learning are
related. There are many levels, Charlie, like steps on a giant ladder that take
you up higher and higher to see more and more of the world around you.

“I can see only
a little bit of that, Charlie, and I won’t go much higher than I am now, but
you’ll keep climbing up and up, and see more and more, and each step will open
new worlds that you never even knew existed.” She frowned. “I hope... I just
hope to God—”

“What?”

“Never mind,
Charles. I just hope I wasn’t wrong to advise you to go into this in the first
place.”

I laughed. “How
could that be? It worked, didn’t it? Even Algernon is still smart.”

We sat there
silently for a while and I knew what she was thinking about as she watched me
toying with the chain of my rabbit’s foot and my keys. I didn’t want to think
of that possibility any more than elderly people want to think of death. I
knew
that this was only the
beginning. I knew what she meant about levels because I’d seen some of them
already. The thought of leaving her behind made me sad.

I’m in love with
Miss Kinnian.

PROGRESS REPORT 12

April
30
I’ve quit my job with Donnegan’s Plastic Box
Company. Mr. Donnegan insisted that it would be better for all concerned if I
left. What did I do to make them hate me so?

The first I knew
of it was when Mr. Donnegan showed me the petition. Eight hundred and forty
names, everyone connected with the factory except Fanny Girden. Scanning the
list quickly, I saw at once that hers was the only missing name. All the rest
demanded that I be fired.

Joe Carp and
Frank Reilly wouldn’t talk to me about it. No one else would either, except
Fanny. She was one of the few people I’d known who set her mind to something
and believed it no matter what the rest of the world proved, said, or did—and
Fanny did not believe that I should have been fired. She had been against the
petition on principle and despite the pressure and threats she’d held out.

“Which don’t
mean to say,” she remarked, “that I don’t think there’s something mighty
strange about you, Charlie. Them changes. I don’t know. You used to be a good,
dependable, ordinary man—not too bright maybe, but honest. Who knows what you
done to yourself to get so smart all of a sudden. Like everybody around here’s
been saying, Charlie, it’s not right.”

“But how can you
say that, Fanny? What’s wrong with a man becoming intelligent and wanting to
acquire knowledge and understanding of the world around him?”

She stared down
at her work and I turned to leave. Without looking at me, she said: “It was
evil when Eve listened to the snake and ate from the tree of knowledge. It was
evil when she saw that she was naked. If not for that none of us would ever
have to grow old and sick, and die.”

Once again now I
have the feeling of shame burning inside me. This intelligence has driven a
wedge between me and all the people I once knew and loved. Before, they laughed
at me and despised me for my ignorance and dullness; now, they hate me for my
knowledge and understanding. What in Gods name do they want of me?

They’ve driven
me out of the factory. Now I’m more alone than ever before...

May 15
Dr. Strauss is very angry at me for not having written any progress
reports in two weeks. He’s justified because the lab is now paying me a regular
salary. I told him I was too busy thinking and reading. When I pointed out that
writing was such a slow process that it made me impatient with my poor
handwriting, he suggested that I learn to type. It’s much easier to write now because
I can type nearly seventy-five words a minute. Dr. Strauss continually reminds
me of the need to speak and write simply so that people will be able to
understand me.

I’ll try to
review all the things that happened to me during the last two weeks. Algernon
and I were presented to the American Psychological Association sitting in
convention with the World Psychological Association last Tuesday. We created
quite a sensation. Dr. Nemur and Dr. Strauss were proud of us.

I suspect that
Dr. Nemur, who is sixty—ten years older than Dr. Strauss— finds it necessary to
see tangible results of his work. Undoubtedly the result of pressure by Mrs.
Nemur.