“Uh . . . Buddy, I can’t write a T. And I can’t tell the time either.”
“How old did you say you were?”
“Well . . . Eight. And a half.”
“Yes, Tim. I’m actually aware both of your age and of your incompetence. Give me the pen, please . . . There. Now go to the nearest house and ask someone to telephone for an ambulance. Unless the driver, who I see is backing up, has a phone right in his car.”
“Yes, what do you want?” Jack Patterson stared at the couple who had arrived without warning on the doorstep.
“Mr Patterson? I’m William Vickers, from up on the 1100 block, and this is my wife Judy. We thought we ought to call around after what your boy Tim did today. Louise—that’s our daughter—she’s still in the hospital, of course, but . . . Well, they say she’s going to make a quick recovery.”
“What the hell is that about Tim?” From the living-area Lorna emerged, glowering and reeking of gin. “Did you say Tim put your daughter in the hospital? Well, that finishes it! Jack Patterson, I’m damned if I’m going to waste any more of my life looking after your goddamned son! I am through with him and you both—d’you hear me? Through!”
“But you’ve got it all wrong,” Vickers protested feebly. “Thanks to his quick thinking, and that Friend who goes with him everywhere, Louise got off amazingly lightly. Just some cuts, and a bit of blood lost—nothing serious. Nothing like as badly hurt as you’d expect a kid to be when a car had knocked her down.”
Lorna’s mouth stood half-open like that of a stranded fish. There was a pause; then Judy Vickers plucked at her husband’s sleeve.
“Darling, I—uh—think we came at a bad moment. We ought to get on home. But . . . Well, you do understand how grateful we are, don’t you?”
She turned away, and so, after a bewildered glance at both Jack and Lorna, did her husband.
“You stupid bitch!” Jack roared. “Why the hell did you have to jump to such an idiotic conclusion? Two people come around to say thanks to Tim for—for whatever the hell he did, and you have to assume the worst! Don’t you have any respect for your son at all . . . or any love?”
“Of course I love him! I’m his mother! I do care about him!” Lorna was returning to the living-area, crabwise because her head was turned to shout at Jack over her shoulder. “For you, though, he’s nothing but a possession, a status symbol, a—”
“A correction, Mrs Patterson,” a firm voice said. She gasped and whirled. In the middle of the living-area’s largest rug was Buddy, his green fur making a hideous clash with the royal blue of the oblong he was standing on.
“Hey! What are you doing down here?” Jack exploded. “You’re supposed to be up with Tim!”
“Tim is fast asleep and will remain so for the time being,” the Friend said calmly. “Though I would suggest that you keep your voices quiet.”
“Now look here! I’m not going to take orders from—”
“Mr Patterson, there is no question of orders involved. I simply wish to clarify a misconception on your wife’s part. While she has accurately diagnosed your attitude towards your son— as she just stated, you have never regarded him as a person, but only as an attribute to bolster your own total image which is that of the successful corporation executive—she is still under the misapprehension that she, quotes on and off, ‘loves’ Tim. It would be more accurate to say that she welcomes his intractability because it offers her the chance to vent her jealousy against you. She resents— No, Mrs Patterson, I would not recommend the employment of physical violence. I am engineered to a far more rapid level of nervous response than human beings enjoy.”
One arm upraised, with a heavy cut-crystal glass in it poised ready to throw, Lorna hesitated, then sighed and repented.
“Yeah, okay. I’ve seen you catch everything Tim’s thrown at you . . . But you shut up, hear me?” With a return of her former rage. “It’s no damned business of yours to criticise me! Nor Jack either!”
“Right!” Jack said. “I’ve never been so insulted in my life!”
“Perhaps it would have been salutary for you to be told some unpleasant truths long ago,” Buddy said. “My assignment is to help actualise the potential which—I must remind you—you arranged to build into Tim’s genetic endowment. He did not ask to be bom the way he is. He did not ask to come into the world as the son of parents who were so vain they could not be content with a natural child, but demanded the latest luxury model. You have systematically wasted his talents. No child of eight years and six months with an IQ in the range 160-175 should be incapable of reading, writing, telling the time, counting and so forth. This is the predicament you’ve wished on Tim.”
“If you don’t shut up I’ll—!”
“Mr Patterson, I repeat my advice to keep your voice down.”
“I’m not going to take advice or any other kind of nonsense from you, you green horror!”
“Nor am I!” Loma shouted. “To be told I don’t love my own son, and just use him as a stick to beat Jack with—”
“Right, right! And I’m not going to put up with being told I treat him as some kind of ornament, a. . . What did you call it?”
Prompt, Buddy said, “An attribute to bolster your image.”
“That’s it— Now just a second!” Jack
