After her early moments of uncertainty over Gulliver and Sinbad and Odysseus, she made no attempts to eliminate from his growing library of picture tapes anything that might stir some disturbing thoughts in him about his own plight. Children, she knew, were less easily disturbed than adults feared they were. And even an occasional nightmare wouldn't do any real harm. No child had ever died of fright while hearing the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, even though it was, on its most literal level, a horrifying tale. None of the slavering wolves and shambling bogeymen and terrible trolls of childhood fable had left any lasting scars. Children loved to hear about such things.
Was the bogeyman of myth-beetle-browed, shaggy, glowering-a vestige of the racial memory of the time when Neanderthals roamed Europe? Miss Fellowes had seen a reference to that theory in one of the books she had borrowed from Dr. Mclntyre. Would Timmie be upset by the thought that he was a member of a tribe that had survived in folk tale as something to fear and loathe? No, no, she thought: it would never occur to him. Only overeducated adults would worry about such contingencies. Timmie would be as fascinated by bogeymen as any child, and would huddle under his coverlet in delicious terror, seeing shapes in the dark-and there wasn't a chance in a billion that he would draw any dire conclusions about his own genetic status from those scary stories.
So the tapes came flooding in, and the boy watched them one after another after another: as though a dam had been breached and the whole glorious river of the human imagination was rushing into Timmie's soul. Theseus and the Minotaur, Perseus and the Gorgon, King Midas and his golden touch, the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the labors of Hercules, Bellerophon and the Chimaera, Alice through the Looking-Glass, Jack and the beanstalk, Aladdin and the magic lamp, the Fisherman and the Genie, Gulliver among the Lilliputians and the Houyhnhnms, the adventures of Odin and Thor, the battle between Osiris and Set, the wanderings of Odysseus, the voyage of Captain
Nemo-there was no end of it, and Timmie devoured it all. Did it all get muddled in his mind? Was he able to tell one tale from another, or remember any of them an hour later? Miss Fellowes didn't know, and didn't try to find out. For the moment, she was concerned only with allowing him to immerse himself in this tremendous torrent of story-of filling his mind with it-of reaching out toward the magical world of myth, since the real world of houses and airplanes and highways and people must forever remain beyond his grasp.
When he tired of watching tapes, she read to him out of ordinary books. The tales were the same; but now he created the pictures in his own mind as she read the words.
There had to be some impact. More than once she heard him telling some wildly garbled version of one of his picture tapes to Jerry-Sinbad traveling by submarine, or Hercules tied down by Lilliputians-and Jerry would listen solemnly, enjoying the story as much as Timmie enjoyed telling it.
Miss Fellowes made sure that everything the boy said was being recorded. It was vital evidence of his intelligence. Let anyone who imagined that the Neanderthals had been mere bestial shaggy half-men listen to Timmie retelling the story of Theseus in the Labyrinth! Even if he did seem to think that the Minotaur was the hero of the story.
But then there were the dreams. He was having them more often, now that the world outside the bubble was becoming a reality in his mind.*.
It was always the same dream, so far as she could tell- always about the outside. Timmie tried haltingly to describe it to Miss Fellowes. In his dreams he invariably found himself outside, in that big empty place about which he had told her so often. It was no longer empty in the newer dreams. Now there were children in it, and queer indescribable objects half-digested in his thought out of bookish descriptions half-understood, or out of distant Neanderthal memories half-recalled.
But the children ignored him and the objects eluded him when he tried to touch them. Though he was in the world, he was never part of it. He wandered through the big empty place of his dreams in a solitude just as absolute as that of his own room. And would wake up crying more often than not.
Miss Fellowes wasn't always there to hear him when he cried out in the night. She had begun sleeping three or four nights a week in the apartment elsewhere on the grounds that Hoskins had offered her long ago. It seemed wise to begin weaning Timmie from his dependence on her perpetual presence. The first few nights she tried it, she felt so guilty over abandoning him that she could scarcely sleep; but Timmie said nothing in the morning about her absence. Perhaps he expected to be left on his own, sooner or later. She allowed herself to feel more comfortable about sleeping away from the dollhouse, after a time. She realized that Timmie wasn't the only one being weaned from a dependence.
She took elaborate notes every morning about his dreams and tried to regard them as nothing more than useful material for the psychological study of Timmie's mind that would ultimately be one of the most valuable products of this experiment. But there were nights when she was alone in her room when she cried, too.
One day as Miss Fellowes was reading to him-the book was Tales from the Arabian Nights, one of his special favorites-Timmie put his hand under her chin and lifted it gently so that her eyes left the book and met his.
He said, "Every time you read me that story it's exactly the same. How do you always know how to say it the same way, Miss Fellowes?"
"Why, I'm reading it right from this page!"
"Yes, I know. But what does that mean, reading?"
"Why-why-" The question was so basic that she scarcely knew at first how to tackle it. Ordinarily, when children learned to read, they seemed somehow intuitively to divine die nature of the process by themselves, and then went on to the next step of learning the meaning of the coded symbols on the page. But Timmie's ignorance seemed to be more deeply rooted than that of the usual four-or-five-year-old who was just beginning to discover that there was such a thing as reading which perhaps he or she might actually be able someday to master. The essential concept was foreign to him.
She said, "You know how, in your picture books- not the tapes, the books-there are marks along the bottoms of the pages?"
"Yes," he said. "Words."
"The book I'm reading is all words. No pictures, just words. These marks are the words. I look at the marks and I hear words in my mind. That's what reading is-turning the marks on the page into words."
"Let me see."
She handed him the book. He swung it around sideways and then upside down. Miss Fellowes laughed and turned it right side up again.
"The marks only make sense when you look at them this way," she said.
He nodded. He bent low over the page, so low that the words couldn't possibly have been in focus, and stared long and curiously. Then he backed off a few inches, until the text was legible. Experimentally he turned the book sideways again. Miss Fellowes said nothing this time. He turned it back the right way.
"Some of these marks are the same," he said, after a very long time.
"Yes. Yes." She laughed with pleasure at this sign of shrewdness. "So they are, Timmie!"
"But how do you know which marks mean what word?"
"You have to learn."
"There are so many words, though! How could anyone learn all that many marks?"
"Little marks are used to make the big marks. The big marks are the words; the little marks are called letters. And actually there aren't that many little marks," she said. "Only twenty-six." She held up her hand and flashed her fingers five times, and then one finger more. "All the words are made up out of those few little letter-marks, arranged in different ways."
"Show me."
"Here. Look." She pointed to Sinbad on the page. "Do you see these six little marks here, between the two blank spaces? Those are the marks that mean Sinbad. This one is the Y sound. This is the*f and this is the 'n'." She spoke the letters phonetically instead of pronouncing their names. "You read them one by one and you put all the sounds together-Ess-ih-nnn-bbb-aaah-ddd. Sinbad,"
Did the boy even begin to understand?
"Sinbad," Timmie said softly, and traced the name on the page with his fingertip.
"And this word is ship. You see, it begins with the same little mark as Sinbad? Ssssss. The name of that mark is 's.' This time she pronounced it, "ess". "And this one is 'i,' from Sinbad, only here it is in ship, over here."