Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “Any homework?”

  “N-no,” Scott said, flushing guiltily. To cover his embarrassment he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads. Paradine didn’t see it at first, but Emma did. She wanted to play with it.

  “No. Lay off, Slug,” Scott ordered. “You can watch me.” He fumbled with the beads, making soft, interested noises. Emma extended a fat forefinger and yelped.

  “Scotty,” Paradine said warningly.

  “I didn’t hurt her.”

  “Bit me. It did,” Emma mourned.

  Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in—

  “Is that an abacus?” he asked. “Let’s see it, please.”

  Somewhat unwillingly Scott brought the gadget across to his father’s chair. Paradine blinked. The “abacus,” unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thin, rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires the colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of jointure. But—a pierced bead couldn’t cross interlocking wires—

  So, apparently, they weren’t pierced. Paradine looked closer. Each small sphere had a deep groove running around it, so that it could be revolved and slid along the wire at the same time. Paradine tried to pull one free. It clung as though magnetically. Iron? It looked more like plastic.

  The framework itself—Paradine wasn’t a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that’s what the gadget was—a puzzle.

  Where’d you get this?”

  Uncle Harry gave it to me,” Scott said on the spur of the moment. “Last Sunday, when he came over.” Uncle Harry was out of town, a circumstance Scott well knew. At the age of seven, a boy soon learns that the vagaries of adults follow a certain definite pattern, and that they are fussy about the donors of gifts. Moreover, Uncle Harry would not return for several weeks; the expiration of that period was unimaginable to Scott, or, at least, the fact that his lie would ultimately be discovered meant less to him than the advantages of being allowed to keep the toy.

  Paradine found himself growing slightly confused as he attempted to manipulate the beads. The angles were vaguely illogical. It was like a puzzle. This red bead, if slid along this wire to that junction, should reach there—but it didn’t. A maze, odd, but no doubt instructive. Paradine had a well-founded feeling that he’d have no patience with the thing himself.

  Scott did, however, retiring to a corner and sliding beads around with much fumbling and grunting. The beads did sting, when Scott chose the wrong ones or tried to slide them in the wrong direction. At last he crowed exultantly.

  I did it, dad!”

  Eh? What? Let’s see.” The device looked exactly the same to Paradine, but Scott pointed and beamed.

  “I made it disappear.”

  “It’s still there?”

  “That blue bead. It’s gone now.”

  Paradine didn’t believe that, so he merely snorted. Scott puzzled over the framework again. He experimented. This time there were no shocks, even slight. The abacus had showed him the correct method. Now it was up to him to do it on his own. The bizarre angles of the wires seemed a little less confusing now, somehow.

  It was a most instructive toy—

  It worked, Scott thought, rather like the crystal cube. Reminded of that gadget, he took it from his pocket and relinquished the abacus to Emma, who was struck dumb with joy. She fell to work sliding the beads, this time without protesting against the shocks—which, indeed, were very minor—and, being imitative, she managed to make a bead disappear almost as quickly as had Scott. The blue bead reappeared—but Scott didn’t notice. He had forethoughtfully retired into an angle of the chesterfield and an overstuffed chair and amused himself with the cube.

  There were little people inside the thing, tiny manikins much enlarged by the magnifying properties of the crystal, and they moved, all right. They built a house. It caught fire, with realistic-seeming flames, and stood by waiting. Scott puffed urgently. “Put it out!”

  But nothing happened. Where was that queer fire engine, with revolving arms, that had appeared before? Here it was. It came sailing into the picture and stopped. Scott urged it on.

  This was fun. Like putting on a play, only more real. The little people did what Scott told them, inside of his head. If he made a mistake, they waited till he’d found the right way. They even posed new problems for him—

  The cube, too, was a most instructive toy. It was teaching Scott, with alarming rapidity—and teaching him very entertainingly. But it gave him no really new knowledge as yet. He wasn’t ready. Later—later—

  Emma grew tired of the abacus and went in search of Scott. She couldn’t find him, even in his room, but once there the contents of the closet intrigued her. She discovered the box. It contained treasure-trove—a doll, which Scott had already noticed but discarded with a sneer. Squealing, Emma brought the doll downstairs, squatted in the middle of the floor, and began to take it apart.

  “Darling! What’s that?”

  “Mr. Bear!”

  Obviously it wasn’t Mr. Bear, who was blind, earless, but comforting in his soft fatness. But all dolls were named Mr. Bear to Emma.

  Jane Paradine hesitated. “Did you take that from some other little girl?”

  “I didn’t. She’s mine.”

  Scott came out from his hiding place, thrusting the cube into his pocket. “Uh—that’s from Uncle Harry.”

  “Did Uncle Harry give that to you, Emma?”

  “He gave it to me for Emma,” Scott put in hastily, adding another stone to his foundation of deceit. “Last Sunday.”

  “You’ll break it, dear.”

  Emma brought the doll to her mother. “She comes apart. See?”

  “Oh? It . . . ugh!” Jane sucked in her breath. Paradine looked up quickly.

  “What’s up?”

  She brought the doll over to him, hesitated, and then went into the dining room, giving Paradine a significant glance. He followed, closing the door. Jane had already placed the doll on the cleared table.

  “This isn’t very nice, is it, Denny?”

  “Hm-m-m.” It was rather unpleasant, at first glance. One might have expected an anatomical dummy in a medical school, but a child’s doll—

  The thing came apart in sections, skin, muscles, organs, miniature but quite perfect, as far as Paradine could see. He was interested. “Dunno. Such things haven’t the same connotations to a kid—”

  Look at that liver. Is it a liver?”

  Sure. Say, I . . . this is funny.”

  “What?”

  “It isn’t anatomically perfect, after all.” Paradine pulled up a chair. “The digestive tract’s too short. No large intestine. No appendix, either.”

  “Should Emma have a thing like this?”

  “I wouldn’t mind having it myself,” Paradine said. “Where on earth did Harry pick it up? No, I don’t see any harm in it. Adults are conditioned to react unpleasantly to innards. Kids don’t. They figure they’re solid inside, like a potato. Emma can get a sound working knowledge of physiology from this doll.”

  “But what are those? Nerves?”

  “No, these are the nerves. Arteries here; veins here. Funny sort of aorta—” Paradine looked baffled. “That . . . what’s Latin for network? Anyway . . . huh? Rita? Rata?”

  “Rales,” Jane suggested at random. “That’s a sort of breathing,” Paradine said . . . crushingly. “I can’t figure out what this luminous network of stuff is. It goes all through the body, like nerves.”

  “Blood.”

  “Nope. Not circulatory, not neural—funny. It seems to be hooked up with the lungs.”

  They became engrossed, puzzling over the strange doll. It was made with remarkable perfection of detail, and that in itself was strange, in view of the physiological variation fr
om the norm. “Wait’ll I get that Gould,” Paradine said, and presently was comparing the doll with anatomical charts. He learned little, except to increase his bafflement.

  But it was more fun than a jigsaw puzzle. Meanwhile, in the adjoining room, Emma was sliding the beads to and fro in the abacus. The motions didn’t seem so strange now. Even when the beads vanished. She could almost follow that new direction—almost—Scott panted, staring into the crystal cube and mentally directing, with many false starts, the building of a structure somewhat more complicated than the one which had been destroyed by fire. He, too, was learning—being conditioned—

  Paradine’s mistake, from a completely anthropomorphic standpoint, was that he didn’t get rid of the toys instantly. He did not realize their significance, and, by the time he did, the progression of circumstances had got well under way. Uncle Harry remained out of town, so Paradine couldn’t check with him. Too, the midterm exams were on, which meant arduous mental effort and complete exhaustion at night; and Jane was slightly ill for a week or so. Emma and Scott had free rein with the toys.

  “What,” Scott asked his father one evening, “is a wabe, dad?”

  “Wave?”

  He hesitated. “I . . . don’t think so. Isn’t wabe.”

  “Wab is Scot for web. That it?”

  “I don’t see how,” Scott muttered, and wandered off, scowling, to amuse himself with the abacus. He was able to handle it quite deftly now. But, with the instinct of children for avoiding interruptions, he and Emma usually played with the toys in private. Not obviously, of course—but the more intricate experiments were never performed under the eye of an adult.

  Scott was learning fast. What he now saw in the crystal cube had little relationship to the original simple problems. But they were fascinatingly technical. Had Scott realized that his education was being guided and supervised—though merely mechanically—he would probably have lost interest. As it was, his initiative was never quashed.

  Abacus, cube, doll—and other toys the children found in the box—

  Neither Paradine nor Jane guessed how much of an effect the contents of the time machine were having on the kids. How could they? Youngsters are instinctive dramatists, for purposes of self-protection. They have not yet fitted themselves to the exigencies—to them partially inexplicable—of a mature world. Moreover, their lives are complicated by human variables. They are told by one person that playing in the mud is permissible, but that, in their excavations, they must not uproot flowers or small trees. Another adult vetoes mud per se. The Ten Commandments are not carved on stone; they vary, and children are helplessly dependent on the caprice of those who give them birth and feed and clothe them. And tyrannize. The young animal does not resent that benevolent tyranny, for it is an essential part of nature. He is, however, an individualist, and maintains his integrity by a subtle, passive fight.

  Under the eyes of an adult he changes. Like an actor on-stage, when he remembers, he strives to please, and also to attract attention to himself. Such attempts are not unknown to maturity. But adults are less obvious—to other adults.

  It is difficult to admit that children lack subtlety. Children are different from the mature animal because they think in another way. We can more or less easily pierce the pretenses they set up—but they can do the same to us. Ruthlessly a child can destroy the pretenses of an adult. Iconoclasm is their prerogative.

  Foppishness, for example. The amenities of social intercourse, exaggerated not quite to absurdity. The gigolo—

  “Such savoir faire! Such punctilious courtesy!” The dowager and the blond young thing are often impressed. Men have less pleasant comments to make. But the child goes to the root of the matter.

  “You’re silly!”

  How can an immature human understand the complicated system of social relationships? He can’t. To him, an exaggeration of natural courtesy is silly. In his functional structure of life-patterns, it is rococo. He is an egotistic little animal, who cannot visualize himself in the position of another—certainly not an adult. A self-contained, almost perfect natural unit, his wants supplied by others, the child is much like a unicellular creature floating in the blood stream, nutriment carried to him, waste products carried away—

  From the standpoint of logic, a child is rather horribly perfect. A baby may be even more perfect, but so alien to an adult that only superficial standards of comparison apply. The thought processes of an infant are completely unimaginable. But babies think, even before birth. In the womb they move and sleep, not entirely through instinct. We are conditioned to react rather peculiarly to the idea that a nearly-viable embryo may think. We are surprised, shocked into laughter, and repelled. Nothing human is alien.

  But a baby is not human. An embryo is far less human.

  That, perhaps, was why Emma learned more from the toys than did Scott. He could communicate his thoughts, of course; Emma could not, except in cryptic fragments. The matter of the scrawls, for example—

  Give a young child pencil and paper, and he will draw something which looks different to him than to an adult. The absurd scribbles have little resemblance to a fire engine, but it is a fire engine, to a baby. Perhaps it is even three-dimensional. Babies think differently and see differently.

  Paradine brooded over that, reading his paper one evening and watching Emma and Scott communicate. Scott was questioning his sister. Sometimes he did it in English. More often he had resource to gibberish and sign language. Emma tried to reply, but the handicap was too great.

  Finally Scott got pencil and paper. Emma liked that. Tongue in cheek, she laboriously wrote a message. Scott took the paper, examined it, and scowled.

  “That isn’t right, Emma,” he said.

  Emma nodded vigorously. She seized the pencil again and made more scrawls. Scott puzzled for a while, finally smiled rather hesitantly, and got up. He vanished into the hall. Emma returned to the abacus.

  Paradine rose and glanced down at the paper, with some mad thought that Emma might abruptly have mastered calligraphy. But she hadn’t. The paper was covered with meaningless scrawls, of a type familiar to any parent. Paradine pursed his lips.

  It might be a graph showing the mental variations of a manic-depressive cockroach, but probably wasn’t. Still, it no doubt had meaning to Emma. Perhaps the scribble represented Mr. Bear.

  Scott returned, looking pleased. He met Emma’s gaze and nodded. Paradine felt a twinge of curiosity.

  “Secrets?”

  “Nope. Emma . . . uh . . . asked me to do something for her.”

  “Oh.” Paradine, recalling instances of babies who had babbled in unknown tongues and baffled linguists, made a note to pocket the paper when the kids had finished with it. The next day he showed the scrawl to Elkins at the university. Elkins had a sound working knowledge of many unlikely languages, but he chuckled over Emma’s venture into literature.

  “Here’s a free translation, Dennis. Quote. I don’t know what this means, but I kid the hell out of my father with it. Unquote.”

  The two men laughed and went off to their classes. But later Paradine was to remember the incident. Especially after he met Holloway. Before that, however, months were to pass, and the situation to develop even further toward its climax.

  Perhaps Paradine and Jane had evinced too much interest in the toys. Emma and Scott took to keeping them hidden, playing with them only in private. They never did it overtly, but with a certain unobtrusive caution. Nevertheless, Jane especially was somewhat troubled.

  She spoke to Paradine about it one evening.

  “That doll Harry gave Emma.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I was downtown today and tried to find out where it came from. No soap.”

  “Maybe Harry bought it in New York.” Jane was unconvinced. “I asked them about the other things, too. They showed me their stock—Johnson’s a big store, you know. But there’s nothing like Emma’s abacus.”

  “Hm-m-m.” Paradine wasn’t much int
erested. They had tickets for a show that night, and it was getting late. So the subject was dropped for the nonce.

  Later it cropped up again, when a neighbor telephoned Jane.

  “Scotty’s never been like that, Denny. Mrs. Burns said he frightened the devil out of her Francis.”

  “Francis? A little fat bully of a punk, isn’t he? Like his father. I broke Burns’ nose for him once, when we were sophomores.”

  “Stop boasting and listen,” Jane said, mixing a highball. “Scott showed Francis something that scared him. Hadn’t you better—”

  “I suppose so.” Paradine listened. Noises in the next room told him the whereabouts of his son. “Scotty!”

  “Bang,” Scott said, and appeared smiling. “I killed ’em all. Space pirates. You want me, dad?”

  “Yes. If you don’t mind leaving the space pirates unburied for a few minutes. What did you do to Francis Burns?”

  Scott’s blue eyes reflected incredible candor, “Huh?”

  Try hard. You can remember, I’m sure.” Uh. Oh, that. I didn’t do nothing.” Anything,” Jane corrected absently. Anything. Honest. I just let him look into my television set, and it . . . it scared him.”

  “Television set?”

  Scott produced the crystal cube. “It isn’t really that. See?”

  Paradine examined the gadget, startled by the magnification. All he could see, though, was a maze of meaningless colored designs. “Uncle Harry—”

  Paradine reached for the telephone. Scott gulped. “Is . . . is Uncle Harry back in town?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I gotta take a bath.” Scott headed for the door. Paradine met Jane’s gaze and nodded significantly.

  Harry was home, but disclaimed all knowledge of the peculiar toys. Rather grimly, Paradine requested Scott to bring down from his room all of the playthings. Finally they lay in a row on the table, cube, abacus, doll, helmetlike cap, several other mysterious contraptions. Scott was cross-examined. He lied valiantly for a time, but broke down at last and bawled, hiccuping his confession.

  “Get the box these things came in,” Paradine ordered. “Then head for bed.”