Only Alien on the Planet Read Online Free PDF Page B

us.
    “Just make yourselves comfortable,” she said, reaching in for the light switch. A small but brilliant chandelier flamed to life. She closed the door softly behind us.
    “Sit here,” Caulder told me. I pulled out a chair and sat down. These chairs were awfully formal, but at least they were wooden, and I didn't have to worry about making a mess out of them.
    I think I must have been wringing my hands or something.
    “Come on,” Caulder said, cuffing me on the arm. “Relax.”
    I dropped my jaw and gaped at him. “Relax,” I repeated. I sat on my hands and started looking around the room. The first thing you had to notice was this big portrait on the wall—Mr. and Mrs. Tibbs and Smitty and another kid, older than Smitty, but somewhat like him—all sitting there looking very beautiful inside this heavy wood and gold frame.
    “So, Smitty's got a brother?” I asked. I don't know why that surprised me so much.
    “More or less,” Caulder said.
    Before I had a chance to ask him what that was supposed to mean, Mrs. Tibbs put her head in at the door. “He'll be down in a minute. Now Caulder—”
    “We won't be long,” Caulder said. “Thank you, Mrs. Tibbs.”
    She smiled, but you could tell she still wasn't entirely comfortable with the situation. Fine. She wasn't the only one. “Good night,” she said one last time, lingering just another second before she finally gave up and left. We looked at each other and rolled our eyes. A moment later, we heard the front door close.
    And then Smitty Tibbs came in and sat down.
    I jumped.
    I hadn't heard a sound. One second we were alone, the next, he was there, pulling out a chair for himself.
    He was wearing glasses—round lenses with thin tortoiseshell frames. They looked kind of old-fashioned and jaunty. It was weird to see something jaunty on that empty, beautiful face.
    “This is Ginny,” Caulder said. “She's not real bright, but she's my friend.”
    I kicked him under the table.
    “I'm only kidding,” Caulder said, rather melodramatically rubbing at his shin. “Actually, she's kind of bright. Not overwhelmingly. We just have this problem with these problems.” He went on for another minute, explaining things. I just sat there, staring at Smitty. I figured it was okay to stare—it wasn't as if he was going to see. His eyes were fixed…well, not really fixed. He wasn't staring. He was just kind of absently looking — like when you lose yourself in your thoughts. Anyway, it seemed like his attention was lost on something across the room—his mother's hutch, maybe.
    Caulder nudged me. “Do the problem,” he said. “Show him.”
    “I can't do the problem,” I whined.
    “ Show him,” Caulder said to me, keeping his teeth very close together.
    So I flipped open my notebook—not very gracefully—dragged out the assignment sheet, found the diagram in my book, and explained to the human void sitting next to me just exactly what the problem was. I was thinking this was about the stupidest, most useless thing I had ever done in my life.
    Until he moved that stare from his mother's hutch to my paper.
    So, he was listening.
    Of course he did it like— Oh. Here's a math problem that just happens to be lying on my dining room table. Not that he seemed surprised. He never seemed anything.
    Finally, I finished. I sat there, waiting. All the echoes of my voice had settled out of the air, and I was beginning to get the uncanny feeling I'd never really spoken at all.
    Smitty Tibbs pulled the book a little closer. Then he reached for my notebook, removed a blank piece of paper, picked up a pencil—all very simple movements and unselfconscious, as if he were alone in the whole world. He tapped the diagram lightly with the eraser of the pencil.
    He began to work the problem. He went through it slowly, writing everything—documenting theorems and corollaries—in detail, taking no shortcuts, with absolutely no abbreviations, no assumptions—and he did it in