Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg The Ugly Little Boy

Archiwum

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the scissors. The idea of having a barber in here for
Timmie displeased her; and in any case the very clumsiness of the cut she gave
him served to mask the retreating fore part of his skull and the bulging
hinder part.
Carefully Miss Fellowes said, "Where did you hear about school, Timmie?"
It was inevitable, she knew, that Jerry would talk about the outside world
with Timmie. They communicated freely and easily-two small boys who understood
each other without difficulty. And Jerry, the emissary from the mysterious and
forbidden world beyond the door of the Stasis bubble, would certainly want to
tell Timmie all about it. There was no way of avoiding that.
But it was a world that Timmie could never enter.
Miss Fellowes said, with a studied gaiety that was her best attempt at
distracting him from the anguish he must surely feel, "Why, whatever would you
do out there, Timmie? Why would you want to go there? Do you know how cold it
gets out there in the winter?"
"Cold?"
A blank look. He didn't know the word.
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(But why would cold bother him, this boy who had learned how to walk in the
snowfields of Ice Age Europe?)
"Cold is like the way it is in die refrigerator. You go outside and in a
minute or two your nose begins to hurt from it, and your ears. But that's only
in the winter. In the summer, outside gets very hot. It feels like an oven.
Everyone sweats and complains about how hot it is outside. And then there's
rain, too. Water falling down on you out of the sky, soaking your clothes,
getting you all damp and nasty-"
"Jerry says that at school they can play all kinds of games that I don't have
here. They have picture tapes and music. He says there are lots of children in
the kin-der-gar-ten. He says-he says-" A moment of thought, then a triumphant
upholding of both small hands with the fingers splayed apart. "He says this
many."
Miss Fellowes said, "You have picture tapes."
"Just a few. Jerry says he sees more picture tapes in a day than I see all the
time."
"We can get you more picture tapes. Very nice ones. And music tapes, too."
"Can you?"
"I'll get some this afternoon."
"Will you get me the Forty Thieves?"
"Is that a story Jerry heard in kindergarten?"
"There are these thieves in a cave, and these jars-" He paused. "Big jars.
What are thieves?"
"Thieves are-people who take things that belong to other people."
"Oh."
"I can get you the Forty Thieves picture tape," Miss Fellowes told him.
"It's a very famous story. And there are others like it. Sinbad the Sailor,
who traveled everywhere in the world, who saw-everything." Her voice faltered
afterward trying to find his way home to his family." Again a pang. Her heart
went out to the boy. Like Gulliver, like Sinbad, like Odysseus, Timmie too was
a stranger in a strange land, and she could never forget that. Were all the
great stories of the world about wanderers carried to strange places who were
striving to reach their homes?
Timmie's eyes were glowing, though. "Will you get them right now? Will you?"
And so he was temporarily comforted.
[48]
She ordered all the picture tapes of myth and fable that were in the catalog.
They stacked up higher dian Timmie in the playroom. On days when Jerry wasn't
there he pored over them hour after hour.
How much he actually understood was hard to say. Certainly they were full of
concepts, images, locales, that could make very little sense to him.
But how much did any child of five or six understand of those stories?
There was no way for an adult to enter a child's mind and know for sure.
Miss Fellowes had loved those stories herself without fully understanding them
when she was a child, though, and so had children before her for hundreds,
even thousands of years; and whatever they might have lacked
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
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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,
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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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