Martian Time Slip

Perhaps, he had once conjectured, it was because there really was such a condition as autism. It was a childhood form of schizophrenia, which a lot of people had; schizophrenia was a major illness which touched sooner or later almost every family. It meant, simply, a person who could not live out the drives implanted in him by his society. The reality which the schizophrenic fell away from--or never incorporated in the first place--was the reality of interpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given values; it was not biological life, or any form of inherited life, but _life which was learned_. It had to be picked up bit by bit from those around one, parents and teachers, authority figures in general... from everyone a person came in contact with during his formative years.

The Public School, then, was right to eject a child who did not learn. Because what the child was learning was not merely facts or the basis of a money-making or even useful career. It went much deeper. The child learned that certain things in the culture around him were worth preserving at any cost. His values were fused with some objective human enterprise. And so he himself became a part of the tradition handed down to him; he maintained his heritage during his lifetime and even improved on it. He cared. True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values. And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn't of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point--to embalm them.

The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.

Once, a couple of years ago, he had told his wife his theory. Silvia had listened with a reasonable amount of attention and then she had said, "But you don't see the point, Jack. Try to understand. There are things so much worse than neurosis." Her voice had been low and firm, and he had listened. "We're just beginning to find them out. You know what they are. _You've gone through them_."

And he had nodded, because he did know what she meant. He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural, And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one's course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.

"Don't knock neurosis," Silvia had said to him and he understood. Neurosis was a deliberate stopping, a freezing somewhere along the path of life. Because beyond lay--.

Every schizophrenic knew what lay there. And every exschizophrenic, Jack thought, as he remembered his own episode.

The two men across the room from him gazed at him queerly. What had he said? _Herbert Hoover was a much better head of the FBI than Carrington will ever be_. "I know I'm right," he added. "I'll lay you odds." His mind seemed fuzzy, and he sipped at his beer. Everything had become heavy, his arm, and the glass itself; it was easier to look down rather than up... . He studied the match folder on the coffee table.

"You don't mean Herbert Hoover," Lou Notting said. "You mean J. Edgar--"