“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.”
“Oh-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. Intransdection — 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 understood. 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 The toys were no longer active reminders.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.
Once in a while there were lapses. Scott was hiking with his father one Saturday afternoon, and the two had paused at the summit of a hill. Beneath them a rather lovely valley was spread.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Paradine remarked.
Scott examined the scene gravely. “It’s all wrong,” he said.
“Eh?”
“I dunno.”
“What’s wrong about it?”
“Gee.” Scott lapsed into puzzled silence. “I dunno.”
The children had missed their toys, but not for long. Emma recovered first, though Scott still moped.
He held unintelligible conversations with his sister, and studied meaningless scrawls she drew on paper he supplied. It was almost as though he was consulting her, anent difficult problems beyond his grasp.
If Emma understood more, Scott had more real intelligence, and manipulatory skill as well. He built a gadget with his Meccano set, but was dissatisfied. The apparent cause of his dissatisfaction was exactly why Paradine was relieved when he viewed the structure. It was the sort of thing a normal boy would make, vaguely reminiscent of a cubistic ship.
It was a bit too normal to please Scott. He asked Emma more questions, though in private. She thought for a time, and then made more scrawls, with an awkwardly clutched pencil.
“Can you read that stuff?” Jane asked her son one morning.
“Not read it, exactly. I can tell what she means. Not all the time, but mostly.”
“Is it writing?”
“N-no. It doesn’t mean what it looks like.”
“Symbolism,” Paradine suggested over his coffee.
Jane looked at him, her eyes widening. “Denny—”
He winked and shook his head. Later, when they were alone, he said, ‘Don’t let Holloway upset you.
I’m not implying that the kids are corresponding in an unknown tongue. If Emma draws a squiggle and says it’s a flower, that’s an arbitrary rule — Scott remembers that. Next time she draws the same sort of squiggle, or tries to-well!”
“Sure,” Jane said doubtfully. “Have you noticed Scott’s been doing a lot of reading lately?”
“I noticed. Nothing unusual, though. No Kant or Spinoza.”
“He browses, that’s all.”
“Well, so did I, at his age,” Paradine said, and went off to his morning classes. He lunched with Holloway, which was becoming a daily habit, and spoke of Emma’s literary endeavors.
“Was I right about symbolism, Rex?”
The psychologist nodded. “Quite right. Our own language is nothing but arbitrary symbolism now.
At least in its application. Look here.” On his napkin he drew a very narrow ellipse. “What’s that?”
“You mean what does it represent?”
“Yes. What does it suggest to you? It could be a crude representation of-what?”
“Plenty of things,” Paradine said. “Rim of a glass. A fried egg. A loaf of French bread. A cigar.”
Holloway added a little triangle to his drawing, apex joined to one end of the ellipse. He looked up at Paradine.
“A fish,” the latter said instantly.
“Our familiar symbol for a fish. Even without fins, eyes or mouth, it’s recognizable, because we’ve been conditioned to identify this particular shape with our mental picture of a fish. The basis of a rebus.
A symbol, to us, means a lot more than what we actually see on paper. What’s in your mind when you look at this sketch?”
“Why — a fish.”
“Keep going. What do you visualize? Everything!”
“Scales,” Paradine said slowly, looking into space. “Water. Foam. A fish’s eye. The fins. The colors.”
“So the symbol represents a lot more than just the abstract idea Josh. Note the connotation’s that of a noun, not a verb. It’s harder to express actions by symbolism, you know. Anyway — reverse the process.