Collected Fiction, page 420
Calderon said, “This business of coming from the future . . . you say Alexander sent you?”
“The adult Alexander. The mature superman. It’s a different culture, of course—beyond your comprehension. Alexander is one of the X Frees. He said to me, through the interpreting-machine, of course, ‘Bordent, I wasn’t recognized as a super till I was thirty years old. I had only ordinary homo sap development till then. I didn’t know my potential myself. And that’s bad.’ It is bad, you know,” Bordent digressed. “The full capabilities of an organism can’t emerge unless it’s given the fullest chance of expansion from birth on. Or at least from infancy. Alexander said to me, ‘It’s about five hundred years ago that I was born. Take a few guides and go into the past. Locate me as an infant. Give me specialized training, from the beginning. I think it’ll expand me.”
“The past,” Calderon said. “You mean it’s plastic?”
“Well, it affects the future. You can’t alter the past without altering the future, too. But things tend to drift back. There’s a temporal norm, a general level. In the original time sector, Alexander wasn’t visited by us. Now that’s changed. So the future will be changed. But not tremendously. No crucial temporal apexes are involved, no keystones. The only result will be that the mature Alexander will have his potential more fully realized.”
Alexander was carried back into the room, beaming. Quat resumed his lesson with the egg beater.
“There isn’t a great deal you can do about it,” Bordent said. “I think you realize that now.”
Myra said, “Is Alexander going to look like you?” Her face was strained.
“Oh, no. He’s a perfect physical specimen. I’ve never seen him, of course, but—”
Calderon said, “Heir to all the ages. Myra, are you beginning to get the idea?”
“Yes. A superman. But he’s our baby.”
“He’ll remain so,” Bordent put in anxiously. “We don’t want to remove him from the beneficial home and parental influence. An infant needs that. In fact, tolerance for the young is an evolutionary trait aimed at providing for the superman’s appearance, just as the vanishing appendix is such a preparation. At certain eras of history mankind is receptive to the preparation of the new race. It’s never been quite successful before—there were anthropological miscarriages, so to speak. My squeevers, it’s important! Infants are awfully irritating. They’re helpless for a very long time, a great trial to the patience of the parents—the lower the order of animal, the faster the infant develops. With mankind, it takes years for the young to reach an independent state. So the parental tolerance increases in proportion. The superchild won’t mature, actually, till he’s about twenty.”
Myra said, “Alexander will still be a baby then?”
“He’ll have the physical standards of an eight-year-old specimen of homo sap. Mentally . . . well, call it irrationality. He won’t be leveled out to an intellectual or emotional norm. He won’t be sane, any more than any baby is. Selectivity takes quite a while to develop. But his peaks will be far, far above the peaks of, say, you as a child.”
“Thanks,” Calderon said.
“His horizons will be broader. His mind is capable of grasping and assimilating far more than yours. The world is really his oyster. He won’t be limited. But it’ll take a while for his mind, his personality, to shake down.”
“I want another drink,” Myra said.
Calderon got it. Alexander inserted his thumb in Quat’s eye and tried to gouge it out. Quat submitted passively.
“Alexander!” Myra said.
“Sit still,” Bordent said. “Quat’s tolerance in this regard is naturally higher developed than yours.”
“If he puts Quat’s eye out,” Calderon said, “it’ll be. just too bad.”
“Quat isn’t important, compared to Alexander, He knows it, too.” Luckily for Quat’s binocular vision, Alexander suddenly tired of his new toy and fell to staring at the egg beater again. Dobish and Finn leaned over the baby and looked at him. But there was more to it than that, Calderon felt, “Induced telepathy,” Bordent said. “It takes a long time to develop, but we’re starting now. I tell you, it was a relief to hit the right time at last. I’ve rung this doorbell at least a hundred times. But never till now—”
“Move,” Alexander said clearly. “Real. Move.”
Bordent nodded. “Enough for today. We’ll be here again tomorrow. You’ll be ready?”
“As ready,” Myra said, “as we’ll ever be, I suppose.” She finished her drink.
They got fairly high that night and talked it over. Their arguments were biased by their realization of the four little men’s obvious resources. Neither doubted any more. They knew that Bordent and his companions had come from five hundred years in the future, at the command of a future Alexander who had matured into a fine specimen of superman.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Myra said. “That fat little blob in the bedroom turning into a twelfth-power Quiz Kid.”
“Well, it’s got to start somewhere. As Bordent pointed out.”
“And as long as he isn’t going to look like those goblins—ugh!”
“He’ll be super. Deucalion and what’s-her-name—that’s us. Parents of a new race.”
“I feel funny,” Myra said. “As though I’d given birth to a moose.”
“That could never happen,” Calderon said consolingly. “Have another slug.”
“It might as well have happened. Alexander is a swoose.”
“Swoose?”
“I can use that goblin’s doubletalk, too. Vopishly woggle in the grand foyer. So there.”
“It’s a language to them,” Calderon said.
“Alexander’s going to talk English. I’ve got my rights.”
“Well, Bordent doesn’t seem anxious to infringe on them. He said Alexander needed a home environment.”
“That’s the only reason I haven’t gone crazy,” Myra said. “As long as he . . . they . . . don’t take our baby away from us—”
A week later it was thoroughly clear that Bordent had no intention of encroaching on parental rights—at least, any more than was necessary, for two hours a day. During that period the four little men fulfilled their orders by cramming Alexander with all the knowledge his infantile but super brain could hold. They did not depend on blocks or nursery rhymes or the abacus. Their weapons in tire battle were cryptic, futuristic, but effective. And they taught Alexander, there was no doubt of that. As B-1 poured on a plant’s roots forces growth, so the vitamin teaching of the dwarfs soaked into Alexander, and his potentially superhuman brain responded, expanding with brilliant, erratic speed.
He had talked intelligibly on the fourth day. On the seventh day he was easily able to hold conversations, though his baby muscles, lingually undeveloped, tired easily. His cheeks were still sucking-disks; he was not yet fully human, except in sporadic flashes. Yet those flashes came oftener now, and closer together.
The carpet was a mess. The little men no longer took their equipment back with them; they left it for Alexander to use. The infant crept—he no longer bothered to walk much, for he could crawl with more efficiency—among the Objects, selected some of them, and put them together. Myra had gone out to shop. The little men wouldn’t show up for half an hour. Calderon, tired from his day’s work at the University, fingered a highball and looked at his offspring.
“Alexander,” he said.
Alexander didn’t answer. He fitted a gadget to a Thing, inserted it peculiarly in a Something Else, and sat back with an air of satisfaction. Then—“Yes?” he said. It wasn’t perfect pronunciation, but it was unmistakable. Alexander talked somewhat like a toothless old man.
“What are you doing?” Calderon said.
“No.”
“What’s that?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I understand it,” Alexander said. “That’s enough.”
“I see.” Calderon regarded the prodigy with faint apprehension. “You don’t want to tell me.”
“No.”
“Well, all right.”
“Get me a drink,” Alexander said. For a moment Calderon had a mad idea that the infant was demanding a highball. Then he sighed, rose, and returned with a bottle.
“Milk,” Alexander said, refusing the potation.
“You said a drink. Water’s a drink, isn’t it?” My God, Calderon thought, I’m arguing with the kid. I’m treating him like . . . like an adult. But he isn’t. He’s a fat little baby squatting on his behind on the carpet, playing with a tinkertoy.
The tinkertoy said something in a thin voice. Alexander murmured, “Repeat.” The tinkertoy did.
Calderon said. “What was that?”
“No.”
“Nuts.” Calderon went out to the kitchen and got milk. He poured himself another shot. This was like having relatives drop in suddenly—relatives you hadn’t seen for ten years. How the devil did you act with a superchild?
He stayed in the kitchen, after supplying Alexander with His milk. Presently Myra’s key turned in the outer door. Her cry brought Calderon hurrying.
Alexander was vomiting, with the air of a research man absorbed in a fascinating phenomenon.
“Alexander!” Myra cried. “Darling, are you sick?”
“No,” Alexander said. “I’m testing my regurgitative processes. I must learn to control my digestive organs.”
Calderon leaned against the door, grinning crookedly. “Yeah. You’d better start now, too.”
“I’m finished,” Alexander said. “Clean it up.”
Three days later the infant decided that his lungs needed developing. He cried. He cried at all hours, with interesting variations—whoops, squalls, wails, and high-pitched bellows. Nor would he stop till he was satisfied. The neighbors complained. Myra said, “Darling, is there a pin sticking you? Let me look—”
“Go away,” Alexander said. “You’re too warm. Open the window. I want fresh air.”.
“Yes, d-darling. Of course.” She came back to bed and Calderon put his arm around her. He knew there would be shadows under her eyes in the morning. In his crib Alexander cried on.
So it went. The four little men came daily and gave Alexander his lessons. They were pleased with the infant’s progress. They did not complain when Alexander indulged in his idiosyncrasies, such as batting them heavily on the nose or ripping their paper garments to shreds. Bordent tapped his metal helmet and smiled triumphantly at Calderon.
“He’s coming along. He’s developing.”
“I’m wondering. What about discipline?”
Alexander looked up from his rapport with Quat. “Homo sap discipline doesn’t apply to me, Joseph Calderon.”
“Don’t call me Joseph Calderon. I’m your father, after all.”
“A primitive biological necessity. You are not sufficiently well developed to provide the discipline I require. Your purpose is to give me parental care.”
“Which makes me an incubator,” Calderon said.
“But a deified one,” Bordent soothed him. “Practically a logos. The father of the new race.”
“I feel more like Prometheus,” the father of the new race said dourly. “He was helpful, too. And he ended up with a vulture eating his liver.”
“You will learn a great deal from Alexander.”
“He says I’m incapable of understanding it.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Sure. I’m just the papa bird,” Calderon said, and subsided into a sad silence, watching Alexander, under Quat’s tutelary eye, put together a gadget of shimmering glass and twisted metal. Bordent said suddenly, “Quat! Be careful of the egg!” And Finn seized a bluish ovoid just before Alexander’s chubby hand could grasp it.
“It isn’t dangerous,” Quat said. “It isn’t connected.”
“He might have connected it.”
“I want that,” Alexander said. “Give it to me.”
“Not yet, Alexander,” Bordent refused. “You must learn the correct way of connecting it first. Otherwise it might harm you.”
“I could do it.”
“You are not logical enough to balance your capabilities and lacks as yet. Later it will be safe. I think now, perhaps, a little philosophy, Dobish—eh?”
Dobish squatted and went en rapport with Alexander. Myra came out of the kitchen, took a quick look at the tableau, and retreated. Calderon followed her out.
“I will never get used to it if I live a thousand years,” she said with slow emphasis, hacking at the doughy rim of a pie. “He’s my baby only when he’s asleep.”
“We won’t live a thousand years.” Calderon told her. “Alexander will, though. I wish we could get a maid.”
“I tried again today,” Myra said wearily. “No use. They’re all in war plants. I mention a baby—”
“You can’t do all this alone.”
“You help,” she said, “when you can. But you’re working hard too, fella. It won’t be forever.”
“I wonder if we had another baby . . . if—”
Her sober gaze met his. “I’ve wondered that, too. But I should think mutations aren’t as cheap as that. Once in a lifetime. Still, we don’t know.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now, anyway. One infant’s enough for the moment.”
Myra glanced toward the door.
“Everything all right in there? Take a look. I worry.”
“It’s all right.”
“I know, but that blue egg—Bordent said it was dangerous, you know. I heard him.”
Calderon peeped through the door-crack. The four dwarfs were sitting facing Alexander, whose eyes were dosed. Now they opened. The infant scowled at Calderon.
“Stay out,” he requested. “You’re breaking the rapport.”
“I’m so sorry,” Calderon said, retreating. “He’s O.K., Myra. His own dictatorial little self.”
“Well, he is a superman,” she said doubtfully.
“No. He’s a superbaby. There’s all the difference.”
“His latest trick,” Myra said, busy with the oven, “is riddles. Of something like riddles. I feel so small when he catches me up. But he says it’s good for his ego. It compensates for his physical frailness.”
“Riddles, ell? I know a few too.”
“They won’t work on Alexander,” Myra said, with grim assurance.
Nor did they. “What goes up a chimney up?” was treated with the contempt it deserved; Alexander examined his father’s riddles, turned them over in his logical mind, analyzed them for flaws in semantics and logic, and rejected them. Or else he answered them, with such fine accuracy that Calderon was too embarrassed to give the correct answers. He was reduced to asking why a raven was like a writing desk, and since not even the Mad Hatter had been able to answer his own riddle, was slightly terrified to find himself listening to a dissertation on comparative ornithology. After that, he let Alexander needle him with infantile gags about the relations of gamma rays to photons, and tried to be philosophical. There are few things as irritating as a child’s riddles. His mocking triumph pulverizes itself into the dust in which you grovel.
“Oh, leave your father alone,” Myra said, coming in with her hair disarranged. “He’s trying to read the paper.”
“That news is unimportant.”
“I’m reading the comics,” Calderon said. “I want to see if the Katzenjammers get even with the Captain for hanging them under a waterfall.”
“The formula for the humor of an incongruity predicament,” Alexander began learnedly, but Calderon disgustedly went into the bedroom, where Myra joined him. “He’s asking me riddles again,” she said. “Let’s see what the Katzenjammers did.”
“You look rather miserable. Got a cold?”
“I’m not wearing make-up. Alexander says the smell makes him ill.”
“So what? He’s no petunia.”
“Well.” Myra said, “he does get ill. But of course he does it on purpose.”
“Listen. There he goes again. What now?”
But Alexander merely wanted an audience. He had found a new way of making imbecilic noises with his fingers and lips. At times the child’s normal phases were more trying than his super periods. After a month had passed, however, Calderon felt that the worst was yet to come. Alexander had progressed into fields of knowledge hitherto untouched by homo sap, and he had developed a leechlike habit of sucking his father’s brains dry of every scrap of knowledge the wretched man possessed.
It was the same with Myra. The world was indeed Alexander’s oyster. He had an insatiable curiosity about everything, and there was no longer any privacy in the. apartment. Calderon took to locking the bedroom door against his son at night—Alexander’s crib was now in another room—but furious squalls might waken him at any hour.
In the midst of preparing dinner, Myra would be forced to stop and explain the caloric mysteries of the oven to Alexander. He learned all she knew, took a jump into more abstruse aspects of the matter, and sneered at her ignorance. He found out Calderon was a physicist, a fact which the man had hitherto kept carefully concealed, and thereafter pumped his father dry. He asked questions about geodetics and geopolitics. He inquired about monotremes and monorails. He was curious about biremes and biology. And he was skeptical, doubting the depth of his father’s knowledge. “But,” he said, “you and Myra Calderon are my closest contacts with homo sap as yet, and it’s a beginning. Put out that cigarette. It isn’t good for my lungs.”
“All right,” Calderon said. He rose wearily, with his usual feeling these days of being driven from room to room of the apartment, and went in search of Myra. “Bordent’s about due. We can go out somewhere. O.K.?”
“Swell.” She was at the mirror, fixing her hair, in a trice. “I need a permanent. If I only had the time—!”
“I’ll take off tomorrow and stay here. You need a rest.”
“Darling, no. The exams are coming up. You simply can’t do it.”
Alexander yelled. It developed that he wanted his mother to sing for him. He was curious about the tonal range of homo sap and the probable emotional and soporific effect of lullabies. Calderon mixed himself a drink, sat in the kitchen and smoked, and thought about the glorious destiny of his son. When Myra stopped singing, he listened for Alexander’s wails, but there was no sound till a slightly hysterical Myra burst in on him, dithering and wide-eyed.
