Paul came back to the study, and approached the stool.
“Come here, son,” the professor said, moved to try establishing a relationship that always eluded him.
Meekly, in silence, Paul padded over. Kadar looked into the slanted eyes, searching for some kind of warmth. There were undoubtedly little lights inside, but they conveyed nothing to his understanding. He put one hand on the boy’s silky hair, ruffling it, and Paul stepped back—not alarmed, but somehow rejecting the act. The professor felt a sudden urge to hug him, but quelled it, he couldn’t have said just why. Paul went back to the stool, scrambled up in his queerly uncoordinated way, and sat there, lumpishly, his eyes again turned inward.
It came to Kadar, then, that Eleanor had sometimes worn such a look: an expression of deep self-communion. And yet—and yet—Uncle Janos had also looked that way often—Crazy Janos, who bungled everything he tried. Come to think of it, didn’t Janos have an Oriental cast of features, too? It was all so far back, and in Hungary; Kadar couldn’t remember. Besides, Janos died while his nephew was still a child.
The professor reached for a fresh sheet of paper, and began again, searching for the high road to Paradise. Fifty pages of the most advanced research—a new field of mathematics; a place beside Gauss, Abel, and Galois— hung on his finding that path. If a certain sequence converged to an irrational number, the key theorem and all that it implied was valid. And still the proof eluded him. Enough; enough; no more today; his head was on fire. Return with a fresh mind, like Poincare and the Fuchsian Functions; that was the only hope, now. But he knew it wouldn’t solve anything. Only a fresh approach, something revolutionary, could smash through the iron wall.
Swaying a little, almost like Paul in his gait, Kadar left the room. He mixed a stiff Martini, drank it slowly, and felt some of the tension go out of his muscles. Mrs. Merrit hastily made him a hot snack; she was resigned to his behavior, and knew better than to try changing it.
“Tell me,” he asked her, “has Paul ever tried to say anything yet? Anything at all?”
“No,” she said, her eyes full of sympathy. “Just little noises in his throat. But he understands; I’m sure he understands. You know how good he is about doing what we tell him.”
“I know,” Kadar said darkly. “That’s hardly normal, either. No mischief; no rebellion; nothing. A vegetable— sweet, insipid; like a spoiled melon.”
And he thought of Eleanor—vital, alert, bubbling: beauty without slickness or affectation; warmth without sentimentality. This was the child not of Eleanor and himself, but Crazy Janos: that was a typical joke of heredity—genes and DNA and Janos ending in Paul Kadar, whose father had five paragraphs in “American Men of Science.”
He left most of the lunch untouched, and went back to the study. I won’t work, he told himself; but maybe just glance over the equations again. Let my mind refresh itself; no use to keep prodding it. Deep inside his brain a tiny alarm bell was ringing. What if the theorem is false? What then? Fifty pages of meaningless squiggles: a magnificent structure with no foundation.
He entered the study, and walked to the desk. The top sheet lay there, mocking him—but what was this? The last equation was crossed out, and above it there was a long line of pencil marks. Almost like mathematical symbols, but not—by God, upside down!
Bewildered, he reversed the sheet. For a moment the writing still seemed without content, then Kadar felt his heart contract like a clenched fist. A new integral transform—powerful, elegant, and startlingly original. It would crack the tough kernel of the problem as lightning shatters an oak.
He looked up, wild-eyed. Paul met his gaze squarely. The slender throat was working; the lips moved.
“Like that ... it has to be like that. Other way ... the pattern is ugly,” the boy mumbled, his voice a queer, high-pitched stammer, as if he had to claw the words out of a diaphragm never before used.
Kadar, still uncomprehending, stared at the writing again. Upside down—because that’s the way Paul, on his high perch, always saw the symbols. Their validity didn’t depend on how they were written, of course.
An illiterate might conceivably, while listing words, write a simple declarative sentence. With luck, he might even hit upon a compound one, perfectly grammatical. But what were the odds against his writing immortal poetry, like: “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May”?
Kadar looked at Paul again. The boy didn’t need blocks or crayons because his mind saw every concept with perfect and immediate clarity. Just sitting on the high stool, he had absorbed a complete mathematical education from Kadar’s work. Before that, he had overlooked Mrs. Merrit, but found nothing to stir his intellect. As for speaking, no doubt that, like his gait, was a matter of physique, and relatively unimportant to such a mind.
The professor felt a great surge of joy; yet, in a moment, it was tempered with sorrow. Paul was a monster, but a superior one. He was probably above—or beyond—love in the human sense. But their minds could commune, and maybe that was the best communion of all.
A short time ago, I attended a dinner meeting of the literary society, PEN, at which the subject of the evening was “The Two Cultures.” Arthur Clarke, as one of the speakers, delivered an eloquent argument to the (mostly) editors and publishers assembled, on the status of science fiction as a bridge across the gap.
I think this is largely true. But listening, that evening and since, to scientists and science writers, and to literary-academic people, I have come to feel even more strongly, with Max Beerbohm, that, “There are not two cultures, only half-cultured individuals.” Happily, I have also seen an increasing number of individuals reaching out from their culture-halves to complete themselves. I think I should prefer to say that SF is an area where such people often meet—and more and more often, contrive to communicate.
Arthur Porges and Donald Hall, juxtaposed here, come from opposite ends of the academic range. Porges is a retired college teacher of mathematics; in literature, an admirer of Kipling, London, Mundy, Edgar Wallace, T. H. Huxley. Hall is a member of the faculty of the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, and a former editor of the Paris Review.
What they both have to say, each one says very differently.
THE WONDERFUL DOG SUIT
Donald Hall
Lester was terribly intelligent and only nine years old. He was especially good at mathematics. “Hey, Lester,” his father would say to him, “if
Lester would come back with an answer, quick as Jackie Robinson.
So when he graduated into the fifth grade at the head of his class, his Uncle Fred gave him a dog suit. It was the best dog suit you ever saw, and it fitted Lester perfectly. The minute he put it on you’d swear it wasn’t Lester at all but some big fat mongrel.
Lester worked over his dog act until he was very good. He taught himself to shake hands, roll over, play dead and everything. Then he learned how to bury a bone, lift a leg against a bush and chase cars. When he was perfect, he showed his parents and they were impressed. “You are a Wunderkind, Lester,” said his father.
“Bow wow,” said Lester.