Young Mutants

by Asimov, Isaac

  Every effort was made to arouse his interest in language 216

  as a medium of communicating thought. He was studied, bribed, and even punished in the endeavor to make him utter a sound. He simply accepted any treatment with a certain degree of patience and kept on living his silent life.

  He played with the playthings of children of his age. He worked, ate, slept, loved, had pets, took trips with the family, grew into sturdy seven-year boyhood, in every way a nice, adaptable, lovable youngster, the pride of his family and their despair.

  He was a silent boy.

  At that he was never out of communication with the world. He learned what was expected of him, but he learned by imitation. Not that he was deaf; in fact, all the tests showed him to be peculiarly sensitive to sounds. When a snail crawled out of the aquarium at night and dropped to the carpeted floor, he heard it fall and went to its rescue. He liked to hear the birds sing, the radio play, the family talk; there was no doubt he could hear noises unheard by the older members of the family, but words, just plain words, the sound of letters conjoined, left him cold and uninterested. Thus he grew up learning what people expected of him and making his wants known, but never through the medium of language.

  From the age of two he had one outstanding habit, scribbling on paper with a pencil; later he used crayon, or pen and ink. At first it was just plain baby scrawls, the kind of marks any child would make, given white paper and a pencil; marks like this:

  But later on he developed a rather systematized series of marks which, while they varied from day to day, had a certain uniformity and a definite sequence, like this:

  “That is writing!” exclaimed a specialist who had come a .thousand miles to study the child. “That is writing, and the child is trying to communicate with the world.”

  It was all well enough to say that it was writing; in fact everyone knew that it was writing. What else could it be called? But what kind of writing? And what did it mean? Even when they found out by the boy’s actions that meant

  he would like grapefruit for breakfast, how much better off was he, and his family and the world?

  The specialist continued: “The child knows what he wants to express, and is expressing it in his own way. The marks he makes have no relation to any other known writing. An intensive study of these marks would ultimately bring him into communication with a selected few. He happens to belong to a wealthy family who could hire a few educated persons to learn some of the signs. If he were a child of a poor family he would end in a school for the feebleminded. The state would not, could not, afford to bother with him.”

  “But he is not a case of mental deficiency,” protested the mother.

  “That is purely an academic question,” argued the specialist. “For centuries the human race has communicated with one another, first by sounds, and later by writing. Writing is simply a mode of sound. I admit that people learn to read silently, but even then they transpose the typed symbols into sounds subconsciously and thus obtain the meaning of the printed line and page. The dot and dash of the Morse code simply replace letters which, in proper combination, have definite sounds, and those sounds for centuries have had definite meaning. This boy forms his own symbols. There is no doubt they mean definite things to him. You have shown me that, and my experiments with him have convinced me that you are right. But his refusal to adopt the symbols of the herd, to learn the alphabet, to follow the lines of communication used by his ancestors and his associates, stamps him at once as abnormal.”

  “But not feebleminded!” cried the father. “I have visited the schools where imbeciles are cared for. I have talked with the physicians who care for them. I have placed my son m every possible relation with them, made every possible comparison. I am not a neuropsychiatrist, don’t pretend to be a psychologist, but if my son is mentally deficient, then I am a white elephant.”

  The scientist smiled the smile of despair as he replied, Have it your own way. After all, he is your son. You have a right to have a familial pride. I admit that he is a nice boy, but that is all he will be, all he ever will be, just a nice boy, just a healthy animal. He will grow to be a man. and when he does, he will be just what he is today, only larger. The herd will not like him; they will shun him as they do everyone who does not conform to the pattern, who does not run in the common groove of life. He is an abnormal, and he will stay an abnormal unless he learns to adopt the means of communication used by the rest of the human race. A deaf-mute can be taught to write, he can even be taught to talk, but this boy is a psychic rebel. He refuses to learn.”

  “Perhaps he cannot learn. Is that refusing?” asked an interested sister, a college graduate w ho had majored in psychology, speech, and habit training because she loved her little brother and wanted to be of service to him.

  “You are right and I was wrong,” admitted the psychologist, “but after all I am wrong merely in the words used and not in the idea. The child is so bright in every other way that he creates the impression of willful resistance. Let me explain. I was working with him yesterday. Take his symbol for an egg; you know what it is, but let me draw it as he does:

  By that he means an egg. Now I write it the way we do in English:

  I show it to him. I hand him an egg. I show him his symbol. In every way that I can, I try to explain to him that his symbol and my symbol and the actual egg are all the same. Then I take away his symbol and give him another piece of paper and show him that I want him to copy my symbol for an egg. He simply shakes his head and draws his symbol. Now I know any number of children three years old who would copy my symbol and understand that it meant an egg, but he refuses to do it. He thinks that I am wrong. That shows his rebel mind. He refuses to accept instruction. He thinks his symbol for an egg is right and mine is wrong. You cannot teach a child like him. He wants us to learn his language, while refusing to learn ours. From a purely academic viewpoint it is possible to do so, but here is the difficulty. His language is not a sound language. It never can be spoken.”

  “Certainly it can!” exclaimed the sister. “He makes a sign for an egg. I understand the sign. I translate it into sound and say the word ‘Egg.’ What do you mean by saying that it cannot be spoken?”

  The man shook his head.

  “I insist that there can be no language without sound.”

  “How about the finger talk of the deaf-mutes?” asked the father.

  “What is it? They form signs with their fingers, and those signs are words or letters; and the letters make words, and the words are the words everybody uses and knows the signs and sounds of. Even the Maya symbols are meaningless till we translate them into words, and then we have to speak the words. If your son would only learn the finger language of the deaf-mute, it would at once change the entire picture. What I am trying to say is that he refuses to accept the modes of communication used by any group of the human race. To that extent he has a rebel mind.”

  “I have been close to the lad,” the father retorted. “I have been with him a lot recently. We have gone fishing together and camping out and all that sort of thing. He may have a rebel mind, though it is my opinion that he is the way he is because he cannot help it. But there is one thing I do believe. He is perfectly satisfied with his written language, and it means something to him. He is very much pleased when the family uses it. Somehow it makes him feel we are interested in him and love him. His writing means a lot to him, and he is proud of it. I think that at times he is sad because we are not intelligent enough to understand it.”

  “You find someone to translate it into sound, and then I will accept it as a bona fide language, and that is my last word,” said the scientist, and with that he left.

  The father, the following year, took David Phillips 3rd to London. There was a man there, Henry Jordon, who had gained international renown by his work with vibrations. He was the inventor of the vibrowriter, the new typewriter that could be talked to, and which transposed the spoken sound into typed words, a contrivance w
hich made perfect spelling possible, provided the words were perfectly pronounced. The father had an idea and was willing to travel four-thousand miles and spend any amount of money to find out whether he was right or wrong. His letters of introduction opened the door to the scientist’s workshop; his story opened the door to the man’s heart; the adorable, healthy boy at once won the inventor’s interest and love.

  “I may be asking the impossible,” explained David Phillips, Jr., “but the boy is my son, and perhaps the impossible can be made possible. You have a machine that can turn sound into a written language. Can you make a machine that can do the reverse? Can you make some kind of apparatus we could run this lad’s writing through and change it into sound?”

  “What kind of sound?”

  “Any kind. Take this symbol for egg to start with.”

  “But you know what the sound is for that. It is E G—

  EGG—just egg. You do not need a machine to do that.”

  “Yes, but that is our sound, the English sound. His sound may be entirely different.”

  “How can it be? You have just told me that he never talks, never even vocalizes.”

  “That is true, but the experts in America tell me that there can be no language without a foundation of sound, so there must be some corresponding sounds to his symbols even if he does not make them. But here are his papers. You may not believe it, but on the way over from New York, he was writing all the time, having the best kind of a time, and I think he was writing a story. At least he was happy doing it. And here is something else. He wants a typewriter.”

  “Why not buy him one?”

  “I would, but he does not want our kind. He keeps on showing me his writing, and then points to my portable machine.”

  “In other words, you mean that he is telling you he wants a machine of his own, with his own symbols?”

  “That must be it.”

  “I will make it for him,” declared Henry Jordon. “You leave his papers here. I will have them analyzed and broken up into units and have a typewriter made that he can write with, just as well as he can write with a pen or pencil. You take him to see the Tower of London and Trafalgar Square. Come back in three days, and I will have a present for him.”

  On the third day father and son returned to the workshop of Henry Jordon. The inventor took them into a room that had only a chair and a table, but on the table was a typewriter, and in it was a sheet of white paper. Jordon touched five keys, took the paper out and showed it to the boy. He had written the symbols for egg:

  David Phillips 3rd looked at it, then at the machine, and then he took the paper and showed that he wanted it put back into the machine. Then he looked at the keyboard, and slowly, painfully slowly, he started to write his symbols for eggs. Then he started to cry, great tears of happiness, and he kissed his father, and went and hugged the inventor, and all the rest of that day he wrote on the machine while the two men watched him and compared the writing with his papers and experimented, handing him simple objects, and urging him to write their names on the machine.

  That night, in the hotel, he would not go to sleep till the machine was securely placed on the bed where he could hold it while he slept.

  “All you have to do now,” said the father, “is to take his typed manuscripts and translate them into sound.”

  “That is all,” replied Jordon, “but that may not be so easy as you think. Come back in a week.”

  That night the father could not sleep. He sat most of the night by the boy’s bed, looking at him, the pride and hope, the last hope of the family. The boy slept peacefully, but in his sleep he never lost contact with the typewriter. Early in the morning the father arrived at a decision. He sent a radiogram to his daughter, the one who had majored in psychology, speech and habit training, because she loved her little brother. He said:

  Anna Phillips;

  57 Park Place;

  New York City, N. Y.

  Come to London on next boat. We need you.

  Father.

  Because of this there were three of the family who called on Henry Jordon at the expiration of a week. They found the inventor tired and hollow eyed but happy.

  “I have done it,” he said simply, “and you do not owe me a cent. I can use the same principle with any type. In a month’s time, tired people will be placing pages of a book in their machine and hear it read to them. Suppose we try it. Have the lad write something on his machine.”

  By signs they explained to David Phillips 3rd what they wanted. He wrote three lines double spaced. Then the inventor took the paper, placed it in another machine, and pressed a button. Sounds came from the machine, sounds that seemed to be speech, but that were unintelligible to the audience. But the boy was spellbound. He looked from his father to his sister and then to Jordon and by signs asked that it all 226

  be done over again. Jordon wrote his signs for the word egg and showed it to him. When he put it in the second machine and pressed the button, a single sound was heard.

  “And that,” commented Jordon, “is the sound that means ‘egg’ to him. It is the sound that corresponds to his symbol. Suppose we learn to make that sound. I will get twenty different objects and place them on the table. Then his sister can make that sound and we will see what he does.”

  Again and again they had the machine sound the word for egg, till the sister learned to say it. Then a watch, keys, matches, money, pins, and an egg were placed on the table. The sister took the lad over and made the sound, just once, pointing to the table. The lad listened and without hesitation picked up the egg and handed it to his sister.

  “That tells the story,” commented the father. “My boy can hear. We always knew that. He can hear but cannot talk, but he can write. What he writes can be transposed into sound, and when that sound is reproduced he can understand it, and the rest is just training.”

  “It is a track,” frowned Jordon, “on which the trains run only one way.”

  “At least it is a track,” insisted the father. “Suppose you put a whole page of his type in and see how it sounds.”

  “It is gibberish to me,” commented the inventor.

  “That is because you are not a linguist,” retorted the sister sharply. “Perhaps someone else could understand it.”

  “Let us put it to the test,” said the inventor, smiling. “At this very time there is a meeting in London of scientists from all over the world. Perhaps fifty different languages are represented. We will go there and have them listen to it. Someone there may recognize some of the sounds.”

  A day later, sixty men from every part of the world assembled in a room with perfect acoustics. The problem was explained to them. A hundred questions were asked and answered, so they would have a clear understanding of the situation. Then an entire page of the lad’s typing was run through the sound-transposing machine, purposely slowed so that the sounds could be differentiated.

  And then silence, followed by a mixture of speech, but no one seemed to be sure. One by one the lingual experts rose and, saying that they could not understand it, left the room. At last only one man was left. He came up to the disappointed experimenters.

  “I am not sure of what I am going to say, but it may help,” he began, in a rather apologetic tone. “I am from Wales, and I know a few of the Welsh dialects but not all. I believe that these words are Welsh, but it is not any dialect I am familiar with. But there was a little corner of Wales where they had an odd language years ago, something different from the other dialects. I went there five years ago to investigate it, and there was just one old woman there—Granny Lanarch they called her—who could talk it, but no one could understand her. She talked it for me, and as I remember it, it sounded a little like this language you have had us listen to. So the best I can say is that it may be an old Welsh dialect and Granny Lanarch can talk it. I will give you her address. She talks fairly good English in addition to her dialect, so you could have her listen to it and even make some phonographic records o
f her old speech.”

  “We will go there,” said David Phillips.

  “But it cannot be Welsh,” commented the inventor. “You are from New York.”

  “My family came from that town in 1765,” announced the New Yorker, “so we certainly were Welsh at that time.”

  “And it may be a case of inherited memory,” added the daughter. “At least the psychologists think that there may be such a thing.”

  They went to Wales, and at last they came to the little town by the Irish Sea where Granny Lanarch had lived. Had lived, for she had been dead these two years. They went into her little cottage, they sat on her old chairs, they looked out on the waves through windows she had looked out of, but Granny Lanarch was dead.

  The inventor beat a restless tattoo on the table with his fingers, not knowing what to say or how to say it. The father sat unstrung and nerve-broken. The boy, interested in new sights, smiled happily. The sister sat with white face and closed eyes. At last the father shook himself, as though waking from a dream.

  “We have come to the end of the trail,” he whispered. “My son knows something, but it is a lost language. He will have to live his life alone.”

  The sister opened her eyes, opened her arms, and pulled her brother to her lap. She turned fiercely to her father.

  “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What do you mean by saying that he will be alone? He can write what he thinks, and when I put it in the machine I can hear it and learn to understand it; and if I can understand it I can learn to talk it, and when I talk it, he can hear me and answer me on his typewriter. What do you mean by saying that he will be alone when he has me?”

  “You cannot do that,” whispered her father gently, almost with a caress in his tone. “You cannot do that, Anna. It would mean a life of sacrifice, a life of solitary devotion. You could not do anything else. Why should you sacrifice everything for him?”