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.

It was late afternoon by the time Jimmy had his next moves figured out.
He left the home he'd grown up in, the home of his parents, of his own
babyhood. He'd wandered through it for the last time, touching this and
saying goodbye to that. He was certain that he would never see his things
again, nor the house itself, but the real vacuum of his loss hadn't yet
started to form. The concepts of "never" and "forever" were merely words
that had no real impact.