But with a different manner of extension—" He sought for words, grimacing.
"Fantasy," Paradine said, rather rudely, but annoyed because of Emma. "Babies don't have different senses from ours."
"Who said they did?" Holloway demanded. "They use their minds in a different way, that's all. But it's quite enough!"
"I'm trying to understand," Jane said slowly. "All I can think of is my Mixmaster.
It can whip up batter and potatoes, but it can squeeze oranges, too."
"Something like that. The brain's a colloid, a very complicated machine. We don't know much about its potentialities. We don't even know how much it can grasp. But it is known that the mind becomes conditioned as the human animal matures. It follows certain familiar theorems, and all thought thereafter is pretty well based on patterns taken for granted. Look at this." Holloway touched the abacus. "Have you experimented with it?"
"A little," Paradine said.
"But not much. Eh?"
"Well—"
"Why not?"
"It's pointless," Paradine complained. "Even a puzzle has to have some logic. But those crazy angles—"
"Your mind has been conditioned to Euclid," Holloway said. "So this—thing—
bores us, and seems pointless. But a child knows nothing of Euclid. A different sort of geometry from ours wouldn't impress him as being illogical. He believes what he sees."
"Are you trying to tell me that this gadget's got a fourth-dimensional extension?"
Paradine demanded.
"Not visually, anyway," Holloway denied. "All I say is that our minds, conditioned to Euclid, can see nothing in this but an illogical tangle of wires. But a child—especially a baby—might see more. Not at first. It'd be a puzzle, of course.
Only a child wouldn't be handicapped by too many preconceived ideas."
"Hardening of the thought-arteries," Jane interjected.
Paradine was not convinced. "Then a baby could work calculus better than Einstein? No, I don't mean that. I can see your point, more or less clearly. Only—"
"Well, look. Let's suppose there are two kinds of geometry—we'll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, which we'll call x. X hasn't much relationship to Euclid. It's based on different theorems. Two and two needn't equal four in it; they could equal y2, or they might not even equal. A baby's mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment. Start the infant on Euclid—"
"Poor kid," Jane said.
Holloway shot her a quick glance. "The basis of Euclid. Alphabet blocks. Math, geometry, algebra—they come much later. We're familiar with that development. On the other hand, start the baby with the basic principles of our x logic."
"Blocks? What kind?"
Holloway looked at the abacus. "It wouldn't make much sense to us. But we've been conditioned to Euclid."
Paradine poured himself a stiff shot of whiskey. "That's pretty awful. You're not limiting to math."
"Right! I'm not limiting it at all. How can I? I'm not conditioned to x logic."
"There's the answer," Jane said, with a sigh of relief. "Who is? It'd take such a person to make the sort of toys you apparently think these are."
Holloway nodded, his eyes, behind the thick lenses, blinking. "Such people may exist."
"Where?"
"They might prefer to keep hidden."
"Supermen?"
"I wish I knew. You see, Paradine, we've got yardstick trouble again. By our standards these people might seem super-doopers in certain respects. In others they might seem moronic. It's not a quantitative difference; it's qualitative. They think different. And I'm sure we can do things they can't."
"Maybe they wouldn't want to," Jane said.
Paradine tapped the fused gadgetry on the box. "What about this? It implies—"
"A purpose, sure."
"Transportation?"
"One minks of that first. If so, the box might have come from anywhere."
"Where—things are—different1!" Paradine asked slowly.
"Exactly. In space, or even time. I don't know; I'm a pyschologist. Unfortunately I'm conditioned to Euclid, too."
"Funny place it must be," Jane said. "Denny, get rid of those toys."
"I intend to."
Holloway picked up the crystal cube. "Did you question the children much?"
Paradine said, "Yeah. Scott said there were people in that cube when he first looked. I asked him what was in it now."
"What did he say?" The psychologist's eyes widened.
"He said they were building a place. His exact words. I asked him who—people?
But he couldn't explain."
"No, I suppose not," Holloway muttered. "It must be progressive. How long have the children had these toys?"
"About three months, I guess."
"Time enough. The perfect toy, you see, is both instructive and mechanical. It should do things, to interest a child, and it should teach, preferably unobtrusively.