The Best of Henry Kuttner Read online

  “Holloway? I don’t—”

  “Rex Holloway. He’s—hm-m-m! He doesn’t live far from here. Do you suppose he might have had these things made himself?”

  Jane was examining the abacus. She grimaced and drew back. “If he did, I don’t like him. But see if you can find out, Denny.”

  Paradine nodded. “I shall.”

  He drank his highball, frowning. He was vaguely worried. But he wasn’t scared—yet.

  Rex Holloway was a fat, shiny man, with a bald head and thick spectacles, above which his thick, black brows lay like bushy caterpillars. Paradine brought him home to dinner one night a week later. Holloway did not appear to watch the children, but nothing they did or said was lost on him. His gray eyes, shrewd and bright, missed little.

  The toys fascinated him. In the living room the three adults gathered around the table, where the playthings had been placed. Holloway studied them carefully as he listened to what Jane and Paradine had to say. At last he broke his silence.

  “I’m glad I came here tonight. But not completely. This is very disturbing, you know.”

  “Eh?” Paradine stared, and Jane’s face showed her consternation. Holloway’s next words did not calm them.

  “We are dealing with madness.”

  He smiled at the shocked looks they gave him. “All children are mad, from an adult viewpoint. Ever read Hughes’ High Wind in Jamaica?”

  “I’ve got it.” Paradine secured the little book from its shelf. Holloway extended a hand, took the book and flipped the pages till he had found the place he wanted. He read aloud:

  Babies, of course, are not human—they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes; the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own, which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.

  Jane tried to take that calmly, but couldn’t. “You don’t mean that Emma—”

  “Could you think like your daughter?” Holloway asked. “Listen: ‘One can no more think like a baby than one can think like a bee.’”

  Paradine mixed drinks. Over his shoulder he said, “You’re theorizing quite a bit, aren’t you? As I get it, you’re implying that babies have a culture of their own, even a high standard of intelligence.”

  “Not necessarily. There’s no yardstick, you see. All I say is that babies think in other ways than we do. Not necessarily better—that’s a question of relative values. But with a different matter of extension.” He sought for words, grimacing.

  “Fantasy,” Paradine said, rather rudely but annoyed because of Emma. “Babies don’t have different senses from ours.”

  “Who said they did?” Holloway demanded. “They use their minds in a different way, that’s all. But it’s quite enough!”

  “I’m trying to understand,” Jane said slowly. “All I can think of is my Mixmaster. It can whip up batter and potatoes, but it can squeeze oranges, too.”

  “Something like that. The brain’s a colloid, a very complicated machine. We don’t know much about its potentialities. We don’t even know how much it can grasp. But it is known that the mind becomes conditioned as the human animal matures. It follows certain familiar theorems, and all thought thereafter is pretty well based on patterns taken for granted. Look at this.” Holloway touched the abacus. “Have you experimented with it?”

  “A little,” Paradine said.

  “But not much, eh?”

  “Well-”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s pointless,” Paradine complained. “Even a puzzle has to have some logic. But those crazy angles—”

  “Your mind has been conditioned to Euclid,” Holloway said. “So this—thing—bores us, and seems pointless. But a child knows nothing of Euclid. A different sort of geometry from ours wouldn’t impress him as being illogical. He believes what he sees.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that this gadget’s got a fourth-dimensional extension?” Paradine demanded.

  “Not visually, anyway,” Holloway denied. “All I say is that our minds, conditioned to Euclid, can see nothing in this but an illogical tangle of wires. But a child—especially a baby—might see more. Not at first. It’d be a puzzle, of course. Only a child wouldn’t be handicapped by too many preconceived ideas.”

  “Hardening of the thought arteries,” Jane interjected.

  Paradine was not convinced. “Then a baby could work calculus better than Einstein? No, I don’t mean that I can see your point, more or less clearly. Only—”

  “Well, look. Let’s suppose there are two kinds of geometry; we’ll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, we’ll call x. X hasn’t much relationship to Euclid. It’s based on different theorems. Two and two needn’t equal four in it; they could equal y2, or they might not even equal. A baby’s mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment. Start the infant on Euclid—”

  “Poor kid,” Jane said.

  Holloway shot her a quick glance. “The basis of Euclid. Alphabet blocks. Math, geometry, algebra—they come much later. We’re familiar with that development. On the other hand, start the baby with the basic principles of our x logic.”

  “Blocks? What kind?”

  Holloway looked at the abacus. “It wouldn’t make much sense to us. But we’ve been conditioned to Euclid.”

  Paradine poured himself a stiff shot of whisky. “That’s pretty awful. You’re not limiting to math.”

  “Right! I’m not limiting it at all. How can I? I’m not conditioned to x logic.”

  “There’s the answer,” Jane said, with a sigh of relief. “Who is? It’d take such a person to make the sort of toys you apparently think these are.”

  Holloway nodded, his eyes, behind the thick lenses, blinking. “Such people may exist.”

  “Where?”

  “They might prefer to keep hidden.”

  “Supermen?”

  “I wish I knew. You see, Paradine, we’ve got yardstick trouble again. By our standards these people might seem super-dupers in certain respects. In others they might seem moronic. It’s not a quantitative difference; it’s qualitative. They think different. And I’m sure we can do things they can’t.”

  “Maybe they wouldn’t want to,” Jane said.

  Paradine tapped the fused gadgetry on the box. “What about this? It implies—”

  “A purpose, sure.”

  “Transportation?”

  “One thinks of that first. If so, the box might have come from anywhere.”

  “Where—things are—different?” Paradine asked slowly.

  “Exactly. In space, or even time. I don’t know; I’m a psychologist. Unfortunately I’m conditioned to Euclid, too.”

  “Funny place it must be,” Jane said. “Denny, get rid of those toys.”

  “I intend to.”

  Holloway picked up the crystal cube. “Did you question the children much?”

  Paradine said, “Yeah. Scott said there were people in that cube when he first looked. I asked him what was in it now.”

  “What did he say?” The psychologist’s eyes widened.

  “He said they were building a place. His exact words. I asked him who—people? But he couldn’t explain.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Holloway muttered. “It must be progressive. How long have the children had these toys?”

  “About three months, I guess.”

  “Time enough. The perfect toy, you see, is both instructive and mechanical. It should do things, to interest a child, and it should teach, preferably unobtrusively. Simple problems at first. Later—”

  “X logic,” Jane said, white-faced.

  Paradine cursed under his breath. “Emma and Scott are perfe
ctly normal!”

  “Do you know how their minds work—now?”

  Holloway didn’t pursue the thought. He fingered the doll. “It would be interesting to know the conditions of the place where these things came from. Induction doesn’t help a great deal, though. Too many factors are missing. We can’t visualize a world based on the x factor—environment adjusted to minds thinking in x patterns. This luminous network inside the doll. It could be anything. It could exist inside us, though we haven’t discovered it yet. When we find the right stain—” He shrugged. “What do you make of this?”

  It was a crimson globe, two inches in diameter, with a protruding knob upon its surface.

  “What could anyone make of it?”

  “Scott? Emma?”

  “I hadn’t even seen it till about three weeks ago. Then Emma started to play with it.” Paradine nibbled his lip. “After that, Scott got interested.”

  “Just what do they do?”

  “Hold it up in front of them and move it back and forth. No particular pattern of motion.”

  “No Euclidean pattern,” Holloway corrected. “At first they couldn’t understand the toy’s purpose. They had to be educated up to it.”

  “That’s horrible,” Jane said.

  “Not to them. Emma is probably quicker at understanding x than is Scott, for her mind isn’t yet conditioned to this environment.”

  Paradine said, “But I can remember plenty of things I did as a child. Even as a baby.”

  “Well?”

  “Was I—mad then?”

  “The things you don’t remember are the criterion of your madness,” Holloway retorted. “But I use the word ‘madness’ purely as a convenient symbol for the variation from the known human norm. The arbitrary standard of sanity.”

  Jane put down her glass. “You’ve said that induction was difficult, Mr. Holloway. But it seems to me you’re making a great deal of it from very little. After all, these toys—”

  “I am a psychologist, and I’ve specialized in children. I’m not a layman. These toys mean a great deal to me, chiefly because they mean so little.”

  “You might be wrong.”

  “Well, I rather hope I am. I’d like to examine the children.”

  Jane rose in arms. “How?”

  After Holloway had explained, she nodded, though still a bit hesitantly. “Well, that’s all right. But they’re not guinea pigs.”

  The psychologist patted the air with a plump hand. “My dear girl! I’m not a Frankenstein. To me the individual is the prime factor—naturally, since I work with minds. If there’s anything wrong with the youngsters, I want to cure them.”

  Paradine put down his cigarette and slowly watched blue smoke spiral up, wavering in an unfelt draught. “Can you give a prognosis?”

  “I’ll try. That’s all I can say. If the undeveloped minds have been turned into the x channel, it’s necessary to divert them back. I’m not saying that’s the wisest thing to do, but it probably is from our standards. After all, Emma and Scott will have to live in this world.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I can’t believe there’s much wrong. They seem about average, thoroughly normal.”

  “Superficially they may seem so. They’ve no reason for acting abnormally, have they? And how can you tell if they—think differently?”

  “I’ll call ’em,” Paradine said.

  “Make it informal, then. I don’t want them to be on guard.”

  Jane nodded towards the toys. Holloway said, “Leave the stuff there, eh?”

  But the psychologist, after Emma and Scott were summoned, made no immediate move towards direct questioning. He managed to draw Scott unobtrusively into the conversation, dropping key words now and then. Nothing so obvious as a word-association test; cooperation is necessary for that.

  The most interesting development occurred when Holloway took up the abacus. “Mind showing me how this works?”

  Scott hesitated. “Yes, sir. Like this.” He slid a bead deftly through the maze, in a tangled course, so swiftly that no one was quite sure whether or not it ultimately vanished. It might have been merely legerdemain. Then, again—

  Holloway tried. Scott watched, wrinkling his nose.

  “That’s right?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s gotta go there.”

  “Here? Why?”

  “Well, that’s the only way to make it work.”

  But Holloway was conditioned to Euclid. There was no apparent reason why the head should slide from this particular wire to the other. It looked like a random factor. Also, Holloway suddenly noticed, this wasn’t the path the bead had taken previously, when Scott had worked the puzzle. At least, as well as he could tell.

  “Will you show me again?”

  Scott did, and twice more, on request. Holloway blinked through his glasses. Random, yes. And a variable. Scott moved the bead along a different course each time.

  Somehow, none of the adults could tell whether or not the bead vanished. If they had expected to see it disappear, their reactions might have been different.

  In the end nothing was solved. Holloway, as he said good night, seemed ill at ease.

  “May I come again?”

  “I wish you would,” Jane told him. “Any time. You still think—”

  He nodded. “The children’s minds are not reacting normally. They’re not dull at all, but I’ve the most extraordinary impression that they arrive at conclusions in a way we don’t understand. As though they used algebra while we used geometry. The same conclusion, but a different method of reaching it.”

  “What about the toys?” Paradine asked suddenly.

  “Keep them out of the way. I’d like to borrow them, if I may.”

  That night Paradine slept badly. Holloway’s parallel had been ill chosen. It led to disturbing theories. The x factor … The children were using the equivalent of algebraic reasoning, while adults used geometry.

  Fair enough. Only …

  Algebra can give you answers that geometry cannot, since there are certain terms and symbols which cannot be expressed geometrically. Suppose x logic showed conclusions inconceivable to an adult mind.

  “Damn!” Paradine whispered. Jane stirred beside him.

  “Dear? Can’t you sleep either?”

  “No.” He got up and went into the next room. Emma slept peacefully as a cherub, her fat arm curled around Mr. Bear. Through the open doorway Paradine could see Scott’s dark head motionless on the pillow.

  Jane was beside him. He slipped his arm around her.

  “Poor little people,” she murmured. “And Holloway called them mad. I think we’re the ones who are crazy, Dennis.”

  “Uh-huh. We’ve got jitters.”

  Scott stirred in his sleep. Without awakening, he called what was obviously a question, though it did not seem to be in any particular language. Emma gave a little mewling cry that changed pitch sharply.

  She had not wakened. The children lay without stirring.

  But, Paradine thought, with a sudden sickness in his middle, it was exactly as though Scott had asked Emma something, and she had replied.

  Had their minds changed so that even—sleep was different to them?

  He thrust the thought away. “You’ll catch cold. Let’s get back to bed. Want a drink?”

  “I think I do,” Jane said, watching Emma. Her hand reached out blindly towards the child; she drew it back. “Come on. We’ll wake the kids.”

  They drank a little brandy together, but said nothing. Jane cried in her sleep, later.

  Scott was not awake, but his mind worked in slow, careful building. Thus—

  “They’ll take the toys away. The fat man—listava dangerous, maybe. But the Ghoric direction won’t show—evankrus dun hasn’t them. In-transdection—bright and shiny. Emma. She’s more khopranik-high now than—I still don’t see how to—thavarar lixery dist …”

  A little of Scott’s thoughts could still be und
erstood. But Emma had become conditioned to x much faster.

  She was thinking, too.

  Not like an adult or a child. Not even like a human being. Except, perhaps, a human being of a type shockingly unfamiliar to genus Homo.

  Sometimes, Scott himself had difficulty in following her thoughts.

  If it had not been for Holloway, life might have settled back into an almost normal routine. The toys were no longer active reminders. Emma still enjoyed her dolls and sandpile, with a thoroughly explicable delight. Scott was satisfied with baseball and his chemical set. They did everything other children did, and evinced few, if any, flashes of abnormality. But Holloway seemed to be an alarmist.

  He was having the toys tested, with rather idiotic results. He drew endless charts and diagrams, corresponded with mathematicians, engineers and other psychologists, and went quietly crazy trying to find rhyme or reason in the construction of the gadgets. The box itself, with its cryptic machinery, told nothing. Fusing had melted too much of the stuff into slag. But the toys …

  It was the random element that baffled investigation. Even that was a matter of semantics. For Holloway was convinced that it wasn’t really random. There just weren’t enough known factors. No adult could work the abacus, for example. And Holloway thoughtfully refrained from letting a child play with the thing.

  The crystal cube was similarly cryptic. It showed a mad pattern of colors, which sometimes moved. In this it resembled a kaleidoscope. But the shifting of balance and gravity didn’t affect it. Again the random factor.

  Or, rather, the unknown. The x pattern. Eventually, Paradine and Jane slipped back into something like complacence, with a feeling that the children had been cured of their mental quirk, now that the contributing cause had been removed. Certain of the actions of Emma and Scott gave them every reason to quit worrying.

  For the kids enjoyed swimming, hiking, movies, games, the normal functional toys of this particular time-sector. It was true that they failed to master certain rather puzzling mechanical devices which involved some calculation. A three-dimensional jigsaw globe Paradine had picked up, for example. But he found that difficult himself.