Beyond This Horizon (23 page)

“Why should she be?”

“Wouldn’t you be—at her age?”

He hadn’t thought of it from that point of view. “Maybe you’re right. Sands of time, and so forth. What did the two of you talk about?”

“Oh—lots of things. When I expected the baby and what we were going to name him and what plans we had for him and things.”

“I’ll bet she did most of the talking.”

“No, I did most of the talking. Occasionally she put in a question.”

“Do you know, Phyllis,” he said soberly, “one of the things I like least about the whole business of you and me and
him
is the quivering interest that outsiders take in it. No more privacy than a guppy in an aquarium.”

“I know what you mean, but I didn’t feel that way with her. We talked women talk. It was nice.”

“Hrummph!”

“Anyway, she didn’t talk much about Theobald. I told her we intended to have a little sister for Theobald presently. She was very much interested. She wanted to know when, and what plans we had for
her
, and what we intended to name her. I hadn’t thought about that. What do you think would be a nice name, Felix?”

“Egg knows—seems to me that’s rushing matters a little. I hope you told her that it would be a long, long tune.”

“I did, but she seemed a little disappointed. But I want to be
myself
for a while, after Theobald comes. How do you like the name ‘Justina’?”

“Seems all right,” he answered. “What about it?”

“She suggested it.”

“She did? Whose baby does she think it’s going to be?”

“—and beat him when he sneezes”

“N
OW, Felix, don’t get yourself excited.”

“But dammit, Claude, she’s been in there a long time!”

“Not very long. First babies are often a little slow arriving.”

“But—Claude, you biologist johnnies should have worked out something better than this. Women shouldn’t have to go through with this.”

“Such as?”

“How should I know? Ectogenesis, maybe.”

“We could practice ectogenesis,” Mordan answered imperturbably, “if we wished. It has been done. But it would be a mistake.”

“Egg’s sake-why?”

“Contra-survival in nature. The race would be dependent on complex mechanical assistance to reproduce. The time might come when it wasn’t available. Survivor types are types that survive in difficult times as well as easy times. An ectogenetic race couldn’t cope with really hard, primitive conditions. But ectogenesis isn’t new—it’s been in use for millions of years.”

“No, I suppose it—Huh? How long did you say?”

“Millions of years. What is egg-laying but ectogenesis? It’s not efficient; it risks the infant zygotes too hazardously. The great auk and the dodo might still be alive today, if they had not been ectogenetic. No, Felix, we mammals have a better method.”

“That’s all right for you to say,” Felix replied glumly. “It’s not your wife that’s concerned.”

Mordan forebore to answer this. He went on, making conversation. “The same applies to any technique which makes life easier at the expense of hardiness. Ever hear of a bottle-baby, Felix? No, you would not have—it’s an obsolete term. But it has to do with why the barbarians nearly died out after the Second Genetic War. They weren’t all killed, you know—there are always survivors, no matter how fierce the war. But they were mostly bottle-babies, and the infant-generation thinned out to almost nothing. Not enough bottles and not enough cows. Their mothers could not feed them.”

Hamilton raised a hand irritably. Mordan’s serene detachment—for such he assumed it to be—from the events at hand annoyed him.

“The deuce with that stuff. Got another cigaret?”

“You have one in your hand,” Mordan pointed out.

“Eh? So I have!” Quite unconsciously he snuffed it out, and took another one from his own pouch. Mordan smiled and said nothing.

“What time is it?”

“Fifteen forty.”

“Is that all? It must be later.”

“Wouldn’t you be less jumpy if you were inside?”

“Phyllis won’t let me. You know how she is, Claude—a whim of steel.” He smiled, but there was no gayety in it.

“You are both rather dynamic and positive.”

“Oh, we get along. She lets me have my own way, and later I find out I’ve done just what she wanted me to do.”

Mordan had no difficulty in repressing his smile. He was beginning to wonder at the delay himself. He told himself that his interest was detached, impersonal, scientific. But he had to go on telling himself.

The door dilated; an attendant showed herself. “You may come in now,” she announced with brisk cheeriness.

Mordan was closer to the door; he started to go in first. Hamilton made a long arm, grabbed him by the shoulder. “Hey! What goes on here? Who’s the father in this deal, anyhow?” He pushed himself into the lead. “You wait your turn.”

She looked a little pale. “Hello, Felix.”

“Hello, Phil.” He bent over her. “You all right?”

“Of course I’m all right—this is what I’m for.” She looked at him. “And get that silly smirk off your face. After all, you didn’t
invent
fatherhood.”

“You’re sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. But I must look a fright.”

“You look beautiful.”

A voice at his ear said, “Don’t you want to see your son?”

“Eh? Oh—sure!” He turned and looked. Mordan straightened up and stood out of the way. The attendant held the baby up, half inviting him to hold it, but he kept his arms down and looked it over gingerly. It seemed to have the usual number of arms and legs, he thought, but that bright orange color—well, he didn’t know. Maybe it was normal.

“Don’t you approve of him?” Phyllis asked sharply.

“Huh? Sure, sure. It’s a beautiful baby. He looks like you.”

“Babies,” said Phyllis, “don’t look like anyone, except other babies.”

“Why, Master Hamilton,” put in the attendant, “how you are sweating! Don’t you feel well?” Transferring the baby with casual efficiency to her left arm, she picked up a pad and wiped his forehead. “Take it easy. Seventy years in this one location and we’ve never lost a father.”

Hamilton started to tell her that the gag was ancient when the establishment was new, but he restrained himself. He felt a little inhibited, a rare thing for him. “We’ll take the child out for a while,” the attendant went on. “Don’t stay too long.”

Mordan excused himself cheerily and left.

“Felix,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“So?”

“We’ve got to move.”

“Why? I thought you liked our place.”

“I do. But I want a place in the country.”

He looked suddenly apprehensive. “Now, darling, you know I’m not the bucolic type.”

“You don’t have to move if you don’t want to. But Theobald and I are going to. I want him to be able to get himself dirty and have a dog and things like that.”

“But why be so drastic? All development centers run to the air, sunshine, and the good earth motif.”

“I don’t want him spending all his time in development centers. They’re necessary, but they’re no substitute for family life.”

“
I
was raised in development centers.”

“Take a look at yourself in the mirror.”

The child grew in no particularly spectacular fashion. He crawled at a reasonable age, tried to stand, burned his fingers a few times, tried to swallow the usual quota of unswallowable objects.

Mordan seemed satisfied. So did Phyllis. Felix had no criteria.

At nine months Theobald attempted a few words, then shut up for a long time. At fourteen months he began speaking in sentences, short and of his own structure, but sentences. The subjects of his conversation, or, rather, his statements, were consistently egocentric. Normal again—no one expects an infant to write essays on the beauties of altruism.

“That,” remarked Hamilton to Mordan one day, hooking a thumb toward where Theobald sat naked in the grass, trying to remove the ears from a non co-operative and slightly indignant puppy, “is your superchild, is he not?”

“Mm, yes.”

“When does he start doing his miracles?”

“He won’t do miracles. He is not unique in any one respect; he is simply the best we can conceive in every respect. He is uniformly
normal
, in the best sense of the word—optimum, rather.”

“Hmm. Well, I’m glad he doesn’t have tentacles growing out of his ears, or a bulging forehead, or something like that. Come here, son.”

Theobald ignored him. He could be deaf when he chose; he seemed to find it particularly difficult to hear the word “No.” Hamilton got up, went over and picked him up. He had no useful purpose in mind; he just wanted to cuddle the child for a while for his own amusement. Theobald resisted being separated from the pup for a moment, then accepted the change. He could soak up a great deal of petting—when it suited him. If it really did not suit him he could be extremely uncooperative.

Even to the extent of biting. He and his father had put in a difficult and instructive half hour in his fifteenth month settling the matter. Beyond cautioning Felix to be careful not to damage the brat Phyllis had let them have it out. Theobald did not bite anymore, but Felix had a permanent, small, ragged scar on his left thumb.

Hamilton was almost inordinately fond of the child, although he was belligerently off-hand in his manner. It hurt him that the child did not really seem to care anything about him and would as readily accept petting and endearments from “Uncle Claude”—or a total stranger—if he happened to be in the mood to accept anything of the sort.

On Mordan’s advice and by Phyllis’s decision (Felix was not offered a vote in the matter—she was quite capable of reminding him that
she
, and not he, was a psycho-pediatrician) Theobald was not taught to read any earlier than the usual age of thirty months, although experimental testing showed that he could comprehend the basic idea of abstracted symbols a little earlier than that. She used the standard extensionalized technique of getting a child to comprehend symbolic grouping-by-abstracted-characteristics while emphasizing individual differences. Theobald was rather bored with the matter and appeared to make no progress at all for the first three weeks. Then he seemed suddenly to get the idea that there might be something in it for him—apparently by recognizing his own name on a stat which Felix had transmitted from his office, for shortly thereafter he took the lead in his own instruction and displayed the concentrated interest he was capable of.

Nine weeks after the instruction began it was finished. Reading was an acquired art: further instruction would merely have gotten in his way. Phyllis let him be and restricted her efforts in the matter to seeing to it that only such reading matter was left in his reach as she wished him to attempt. Otherwise he would have read anything he could lay hands on; as it was she had to steal scrolls from him when she wanted him to exercise or eat.

Felix worried about the child’s obsession with printed matter. Phyllis told him not to. “It will wear off. We’ve suddenly extended his psycho field; he’s got to explore it for a while.”

“It didn’t with me. I still read when I should be doing something else. It’s a vice.”

He read stumblingly and with much subvocalization and was, of course, forced to call for help frequently when he ran on to symbols new to him and not sufficiently defined by context. A home is not as well equipped for extensional instruction as a development center. In a center no words appear in a primer which are not represented by examples which can be pointed to, or, if the words are action symbols, the actions are such that they can be performed there and then.

But Theobald was through with primers before he should have been and their home, although comfortably large, would have needed to be of museum size to accommodate samples in groups of every referent he inquired about. Phyllis’s resourcefulness and histrionic ability were stretched to the limit, but she stuck to the cardinal principle of semantic pedagogy: never define a new symbol in terms of symbols already known if it is possible to point to a referent instead.

The child’s eidetic memory first became evident in connection with reading. He read rapidly if badly and remembered what he read. Not for him was the childish custom of cherishing and rereading favorite books. A once-read scroll was to him an empty sack; he wanted another.

“What does ‘infatuated’ mean, Mama?” He made this inquiry in the presence of his father and Mordan.

“Hmmm,” she began guardedly, “tell me what words you found it sitting with.”

“‘It is not that I am merely infatuated with you, as that old goat Mordan seems to think—’ I don’t understand that either. Is Uncle Claude a goat? He doesn’t look like one.”

“What,” said Felix, “has that child been reading now?” Mordan said nothing, but he cocked a brow at Felix.

“I think I recognize it,” Phyllis said in an aside to Felix. Then, turning back to the child, she added, “Where did you find it? Tell Phyllis.”

No answer.

“Was it in Phyllis’s desk?” She knew that it had been; there was secreted in there a bundle of stats, mementos of the days before she and Felix had worked out their differences. She had the habit of rereading them privately and secretly. “Tell Phyllis.”

“Yes.”

“That’s out of bounds, you know.”

“You didn’t see me,” he stated triumphantly.

“No, that is true.” She thought rapidly. She wished to encourage his truthfulness, but to place a deterrent on disobedience. To be sure, disobedience was more often a virtue than a sin, but—Oh, well! She tabled the matter.

Felix muttered, “That child seems to have no moral sense whatsoever.”

“Have you?” she asked him, and turned back to Theobald.

“There was lots more, Mama. Want to hear it?”

“Not just now. Let’s answer your two questions first.”

“But Phyllis,” Felix interrupted.

“Wait, Felix. I’ve got to answer his questions.”

“Suppose you and I step out into the garden for a smoke,” Mordan suggested. “Phyllis is going to be fairly busy for a while.”

Quite busy. “Infatuated” was, in itself, quite a hurdle, but how to explain to a child in his forty-second month the allegorical use of symbols? She was not entirely successful; Theobald referred to Mordan indiscriminately thereafter as “Uncle Claude” or “Old Goat.”