by C. L. Moore
Paradine didn't answer. Instead, he mentioned to Holloway Scott's curious remark that the landscape, from the hill, had looked all wrong.
A moment later, he was inclined to regret his impulse, for the psychologist was off again.
"Scott's thought patterns are building up to a sum that doesn't equal this world. Perhaps he's subconsciously expecting to see the world where those toys came from."
Paradine stopped listening. Enough was enough. The kids were getting along all right, and the only remaining disturbing factor was Holloway himself. That night, however, Scott evinced an interest, later significant, in eels.
There was nothing apparently harmful in natural history. Paradine explained about eels.
"But where do they lay their eggs? Or do they?"
"That's still a mystery. Their spawning grounds are unknown. Maybe the Sargasso Sea, or the deeps, where the pressure can help them force the young out of their bodies."
"Funny," Scott said, thinking deeply.
"Salmon do the same thing, more or less. They go up rivers to spawn." Paradine went into detail. Scott was fascinated.
"But that's right, Dad. They're born in the river, and when they learn how to swim, they go down to the sea. And they come back to lay their eggs, huh?"
"Right."
"Only they wouldn't come back," Scott pondered. "They'd just send their eggs—"
"It'd take a very long ovipositor," Paradine said, and vouchsafed some well-chosen remarks upon oviparity.
His son wasn't entirely satisfied. Flowers, he contended, sent their seeds long distances.
"They don't guide them. Not many find fertile soil."
"Flowers haven't got brains, though. Dad, why do people live here?"
"Glendale?"
"No—here. This whole place. It isn't all there is, I bet."
"Do you mean the other planets?"
Scott was hesitant. "This is only—part of the big place. It's like the river where the salmon go. Why don't people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?"
Paradine realized that Scott was speaking figuratively. He felt a brief chill. The—ocean?
-
The young of the species are not conditioned to live in the more complete world of their parents. Having developed sufficiently, they enter that world. Later they breed. The fertilized eggs are buried in the sand, far up the river, where later they hatch.
And they learn. Instinct alone is fatally slow. Especially in the case of a specialized genus, unable to cope even with this world, unable to feed or drink or survive, unless someone has foresightedly provided for those needs.
The young, fed and tended, would survive. There would be incubators and robots. They would survive, but they would not know how to swim downstream, to the vaster world of the ocean.
So they must be taught. They must be trained and conditioned in many ways.
Painlessly, subtly, unobtrusively. Children love toys that do things, and if those toys teach at the same time—
-
In the latter half of the nineteenth century an Englishman sat on a grassy bank near a stream. A very small girl lay near him, staring up at the sky. She had discarded a curious toy with which she had been playing, and now was murmuring a wordless little song, to which the man listened with half an ear.
"What was that, my dear?" he asked at last.
"Just something I made up, Uncle Charles."
"Sing it again." He pulled out a notebook. The girl obeyed.
"Does it mean anything?"
She nodded. "Oh, yes. Like the stories I tell you, you know."
"They're wonderful stories, dear."
"And you'll put them in a book someday?"
"Yes, but I must change them quite a lot, or no one would understand. But I don't think I'll change your little song."
"You mustn't. If you did, it wouldn't mean anything."
"I won't change that stanza, anyway," he promised. "Just what does it mean?"
"It's the way out, I think," the girl said doubtfully. "I'm not sure yet. My magic toys told me."
"I wish I knew what London shop sold these marvellous toys!"
"Mama bought them for me. She's dead. Papa doesn't care."
She lied. She had found the toys in a box one day, as she played by the Thames. And they were indeed wonderful.
Her little song—Uncle Charles thought it didn't mean anything. (He wasn't her real uncle, she parenthesized. But he was nice.) The song meant a great deal. It was the way. Presently she would do what it said, and then—
But she was already too old. She never found the way.
-
Paradine had dropped Holloway. Jane had taken a dislike to him, naturally enough, since what she wanted most of all was to have her fears calmed. Since Scott and Emma acted normally now, Jane felt satisfied. It was partly wishful thinking, to which Paradine could not entirely subscribe.
Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she'd shake her head. Sometimes she would look doubtful. Very occasionally she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.
He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.
"But why this pebble right here?"
"It's hard and round, Dad. It belongs there."
"So is this one hard and round."
"Well, that's got vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can't see just a hard, round thing."
"What comes next? This candle?"
Scott looked disgusted. "That's toward the end. The iron ring's next." It was, Paradine thought, like a scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted—familiar logic—at Scott's motives in arranging the junk as he did.
Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.
Well—
Jane was lunching with Uncle Harry, and, on this hot Sunday afternoon, there was little to do but read the papers. Paradine settled himself in the coolest place he could find, with a Collins, and lost himself in the comic strips.
An hour later a clatter of feet upstairs roused him from his doze. Scott's voice was crying exultantly, "This is it, Slug! Come on!"
Paradine stood up quickly, frowning. As he went into the hall the telephone began to ring. Jane had promised to call ...
His hand was on the receiver when Emma's faint voice squealed with excitement. Paradine grimaced. What the devil was going on upstairs?
Scott shrieked, "Look out! This way!"
Paradine, his mouth working, his nerves ridiculously tense, forgot the phone and raced up the stairs. The door of Scott's room was open.
The children were vanishing.
They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone.
"Emma!" he said, dry-throated. "Scotty!"
On the carpet lay a pattern of markers, pebbles, an iron ring—junk. A random pattern. A crumpled sheet of paper blew towards Paradine.
He picked it up automatically.
"Kids. Where are you? Don't hide—Emma! Scotty!"
Downstairs the telephone stopped its shrill, monotonous ringing. Paradine looked at the paper he held.
It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma's meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with Through the Looking Glass. His memory gave him the words—
-
'Twas brillig
, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
-
Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time. It has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was. Symbolism.
'Twas brillig.
A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The "toves" had to be made slithy—vaseline?—and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they'd gyre and gimble.
Lunacy!
But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page—she'd translated Carroll's words into symbols both she and Scott could understand.
The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-span equation. And the mome raths outgrabe—
Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done—But he couldn't. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.
Even if he went insane, he still couldn't do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy.
His mind had stopped working now. But in a moment the stasis of incredulous horror would pass—Paradine crumpled the page in his fingers. "Emma! Scotty!" he called in a dead voice, as though he could expect no response.
Sunlight slanted through the open windows, brightening the golden pelt of Mr. Bear. Downstairs the ringing of the telephone began again.
The End
SHOCK
Astounding Science-Fiction - March 1943
with Henry Kuttner
(as by Lewis Padgett)
The world of the future will be a wonderful place, and the men of the future will be supermen—always perfect. Of course. Naturally. Only—
-
When Gregg looked up from his book to see the man crawling through the wall of his apartment, he thought briefly that he was crazy. Such things don't happen to a middle-aged physicist who has arranged his life into an ordered pattern. Nevertheless, there was now a hole in the wall, and a half-naked person with macrocephalia was wedging himself through it.
"Who are you?" Gregg demanded, recovering the use of his tongue.
The man spoke an odd sort of English, slurred and with an extraordinary tonal range, but recognizable. "I'm a mugwump," he announced, balancing on his middle. "My mug's in ... eh? ... in 1943 and my wump's in ... uh!" He gave a convulsive wriggle and burst through, sprawling on the carpet and breathing hard. "That was a nardly squeeze. The valve isn't quite big enough yet. Forthever."
It made sense, but not much. Manning Gregg's heavy, leonine features darkened. He reached out, seized a heavy book end, and rose.
"I am Halison," the newcomer announced, adjusting his toga. "This should be 1943. Norvunder soverless."
"What?"
"Semantic difficulty," Halison told him. "I am from about ... well, several thousand years in the future. Your future."
Gregg's gaze went to the hole in the wall. "You're talking English."
"Learned it in 1970. This isn't my first trip into past. Many of them. Looking for something. Important—skandarly important. I use mental power to warp space-time pharron, so valve opens. Lend me clothes, if you please?"
Still holding the book end, Gregg walked to the wall and looked through the circular gap, just large enough to admit a small man's body. All he could see was a blue, bare wall apparently a few feet away. The adjoining apartment? Improbable.
"Valve will open wider later," Halison said. "Open at night, closed by day. I must be back before Thursday. Ranil-Mens visits me on Thursdays. But now may I beg clothes? There is something I must find—I have been searching in time for a long carvishtime. Please?"
He was still squatting on the floor. Gregg stared down at his extraordinary visitor. Halison was certainly not Homo sapiens 1943. He had a pinched, bright-pink face, with very large bright eyes, and his cranium was abnormally developed and totally bald. He had six fingers and his toes had fused. And he kept up a continual nervous trembling, as though his metabolism had gone haywire.
"Good Lord!" Gregg said, suddenly understanding. "This isn't a gag. Is it?" His voice rose.
"Gag, gag, gag. Nevishly holander sprae? Was mugwump wrong? Hard to know what to say in new time-world. You have no conception of our advanced culture, sorry. Hard to get down to same plane with you. Civilization moved fast, fast, after your century. There is not much time. Talk later, but important now that you lend me clothes."
There was a cold, hard knot just under Gregg's backbone. "Yes, but—wait. If this isn't some—"
"Forgive me," Halison remarked. "I am looking for something; great hurry. I will return soon. By Thursday anyway to see Ranil-Mens. I get much wisdom from him. Now, forgive reedishly." He touched Gregg's forehead.
The physicist said, "Talk a bit slower, pl—"
Halison was gone.
Gregg whirled, searching the room with his gaze. Nothing. Except that the hole in the wall had doubled in diameter. What the hell.
He looked at the clock. It was just past eight. It should have been about seven. An hour had passed, it seemed, since Halison had reached out to touch his forehead.
As a sample of hypnotism, it was damned impressive.
-
Gregg carefully found a cigarette and lit it. Drawing smoke into his lungs, he looked at the valve from across the room and considered. A visitor from the future, eh? Well—
Struck by an obvious thought, he went into the bedroom and discovered that a suit of clothes, a brown Harris tweed, had been confiscated. A shirt was missing, a tie, and a pair of shoes. But the hole in the wall eliminated the chance that this was merely a clever theft. For one thing, Gregg's wallet was still in his trousers pocket.
He looked through the valve again, but still could see nothing but the blue wall. It obviously wasn't in the next-door apartment of Tommy MacPherson, the aging playboy who had given up night-clubbing for more peaceful pursuits, at his doctor's suggestion. Nevertheless, Gregg went into the hall and rang the buzzer beside MacPherson's door.
" 'Lo, Mac," he said when a round, pale face, topped by carefully dyed chestnut hair, appeared to blink sleepily at him. "Busy? I'd like to come in a minute."
MacPherson enviously eyed Gregg's cigarette. "Sure. Make yourself at home. I've been going over some incunabula my Philadelphia man sent me, and wishing for a drink. Highball?"
"If you'll join me."
"Wish I could," MacPherson groaned. "But I'm too young to die. What's up?" He followed Gregg into the kitchen and watched the other man carefully examining the wall. "Ants?"
"There's a hole in my wall," Gregg said. "It doesn't come through, though." Which proved that the valve was definitely off the beam. It had to open either into MacPherson's kitchen or else—some other place.
"Hole in your wall? How come?"
"I'll show you."
"I'm not that curious," MacPherson remarked. "Phone the landlord. He may be interested."
Gregg scowled. "I mean it, Mac. I want you to take a look. It's—funny. And I'd rather like confirmation."
"It's either a hole or it isn't," MacPherson said simply. "Is that razor-edged brain of yours poisoned by alcohol? I wish mine was." He looked wistfully at the portable bar.
"You're no help," Gregg said. "But you're better than nobody. Come on!" He lugged the protesting MacPherson into his apartment and pointed to the valve. Mac went over, muttering something about a mirror, and peered into the gap. He whistled softly. Then he put his arm through, stretching it as far as possible, and tried to touch the blue wall. He couldn't quite make it.
"The hole's got bigger," Gregg said quietly, "even since a few minutes ago. You see it too, eh?"
MacPherson found a chair. "Let
's have a drink," he grunted. "I need it. Anyhow it's an excuse. Make it short, though," he added with a flash of last-minute caution.
Gregg mixed two highballs and gave MacPherson one. As they drank, he told the other what had happened. Mac was unhelpful.
"Out of the future? Glad it didn't happen to me. I'd have gone off my crock."
"It's perfectly logical," Gregg argued, partly with himself. "The guy—Halison—certainly wasn't a 1943 product."
"He must have looked like a combination of Baby Sandy and Karloff."
"Well, you don't look like a Neanderthaler or a Piltdown man, do you? That skull of his—Halison must have a tremendous brain. His I. Q.—well!"
"What good's all that if he wouldn't talk to you?" MacPherson asked cogently.
For some reason Gregg felt a slow flush creeping warmly up his neck. "I must have seemed like an ape to him," he said flatly. "I could scarcely understand him—and no wonder. But he'll be back."
"By Thursday? Who's this Ranilpants?"
"Ranil-Mens," Gregg said. "A friend, I suppose. A ... a teacher. Halison said he got wisdom from him. Perhaps Ranil-Mens is a professor at some future university. I can't quite think straight. You don't realize the implications of all this, Mac, do you?"
"I don't want to," MacPherson said, tasting his drink. "I'm a bit scared."
"Rationalize it away," Gregg advised. "I'm going to." He looked again at the wall. "That hole's getting pretty big. Wonder if I could step through it?" He walked close to the valve. The blue wall was still there, and a blue floor at a slightly lower level than his own gray carpet. A pungent, pleasant breath of air floated in from the unknown, oddly reassuring.
"Better not," MacPherson said. "It might close up on you."
For answer Gregg vanished into the kitchen and returned with a length of thin clothesline. He made a loop around his waist, handed the other end to MacPherson, and crushed out his cigarette in a convenient tray.