den had acquired snippets, bits, and
wholesale chunks of a number of the arts and sciences and other
aggregations of information both pertinent and trivial for one reason
or another. As an instance, he had absorbed an entire bridge book by
Charles Goren just to provide a fourth to sit in with his parents and
Paul Brennan.

Consequently, James Holden had in data the education of a boy of about
sixteen, and in other respects, much more.

He escaped from the hospital simply because no one ever thought that a
five-year-old boy would have enough get-up-and-go to climb out of his
crib, rummage a nearby closet, dress himself, and then calmly walk out.
The clothing of a cocky teen-ager would have been impounded and his
behavior watched.

They did not miss him for hours. He went, taking the little
identification card from its frame at the foot of his bed--and that
ruined the correlation between tag and patient.

By the time an overworked nurse stopped to think and finally asked,
"Kitty, are you taking care of the little boy in Bed 6 over in 219?" and
received the answer, "No, aren't you?" Jimmy Holden was trudging up the
hill towards his home. Another hour went by with the two worried nurses
surreptitiously searching the rest of the hospital in the simple hope
that he had wandered away and could be restored before it came to the
attention of the officials. By the time they gave up and called in other
nurses (who helped them in their anxiety to conceal) Jimmy was entering
his home.

Each succeeding level of authority was loath to report the truth to the
next higher up.

By the time the general manager of the hospital forced himself to call
Paul Brennan, Jimmy Holden was demolishing the last broken bits of
disassembled subassemblies he had smashed from the heart-circuit of the
Holden Electromechanical Educator. He was most thorough. Broken glass
went into the refuse buckets, bent metal was buried in the garden,
inflammables were incinerated, and meltables and fusibles slagged down in
ashes that held glass, bottle, and empty tin-can in an unrecognizable
mass. He left a gaping hole in the machine that Brennan could not
fill--nor could any living man fill it now but James Quincy Holden.

And only when this destruction was complete did Jimmy Holden first begin
to understand his father's statement about the few men who see what has
to be done, do it, _and then_ look to the next inevitable problem created
by their own act.

I