when he’d first seen María Torres.
And beyond those things, which he was sure he would eventually figure out, there were the other things, the concepts he was beginning to feel certain he would never understand.
Love.
That was something he couldn’t get any kind of grasp on. His mother was always telling him that she loved him, and he didn’t really doubt that she did.
The trouble was, he didn’t understand what love was. He’d looked it up, and read that it was a feeling of affection.
But, as he had slowly come to understand as he read more, apparently he didn’t have feelings.
It was something he was only beginning to be aware of, and he didn’t know whether he should talk to Dr. Torres about it or not. All he knew so far was that things seemed to happen to other people that didn’t happen to him.
Things like anger.
He knew Lisa had been angry at him this afternoon, and he knew it was a feeling that she got when he did something she didn’t approve of.
But what did it feel like?
He thought, from what he’d read, that it must be like pain, only it affected the mind instead of the body. But what was it like?
He was beginning to suspect he’d never know, for every day he was becoming more and more aware that something had, indeed, gone wrong, and that he was no longer like other people.
But he was supposed to be like other people. That was the whole idea of Dr. Torres’s operation—to make him the way he’d been before.
The problem was that he couldn’t remember how he’d been before. If he could remember, it would be easy. He could act as though he was the same, and then people wouldn’t know he was different.
He was already doing some of it.
He’d learned to hug his mother, and kiss her, and whenever he did that, she seemed to like it.
He’d decided not to act on any of the things he seemed to remember until he’d determined if his memory of them was correct.
And after this afternoon, he’d remember to hold Lisa’s hand when they were walking together, and to pay a check if Bob Carey asked him to.
But what about other people? Were there other people he used to borrow money from and loan money to?
Tomorrow, when he saw Lisa, he’d ask her.
No, he decided, he wouldn’t ask her. He couldn’t keep asking everybody questions all the time.
He’d seen the look on Bob Carey’s face when he’d asked Lisa what city she was talking about, and he knew what it meant, even though it hadn’t bothered him.
Still, Bob Carey thought he was stupid, even though he wasn’t. In fact, after the tests on Monday, he knew he was just the opposite. If anything, he was a lot smarter than everybody else.
He got out of bed and went to the family room. In the bookcase next to the fireplace, there was an Encyclopaedia Britannica. He switched on a lamp, then pulled Volume VIII of the Micropaedia off the shelf. A few minutes later, he began reading every article in the encyclopedia that referred to San Francisco.
By the time they got there, he would be able to tell them more about the city than they knew themselves. And, he decided, he would know his way around.
Tomorrow—Friday—he would find a map of San Francisco, and memorize it by the next morning.
Memorizing things was easy.
Figuring out what was expected of him, and then doing it, was not so easy.
But he would do it.
He didn’t know how long it would take, but he knew that if he watched carefully, and remembered everything he saw, sooner or later he would be able to act just like everybody else.
But he still wouldn’t feel anything.
And that, he decided, was all right. If he could learn to act as though he felt things, it would be good enough.
Already he’d learned that it didn’t matter what he was or wasn’t.
The only thing that really mattered was what people thought you were.
He closed the book and put it back on the shelf, then turned around to see his father standing in the doorway.
“Alex? Are you all right?”
“I was just looking something up,” Alex replied.
“Do you know what time it is?”
Alex glanced at the big clock in the corner. “Three-thirty.”
“How come you’re not asleep?”
“I just got to thinking about something, so I decided to look it up. I’ll go back to bed now.” He started out of the room, but his father stopped him