Tomorrow's Child Read online

«Isn't that terrific?» she said. «Even his voice is in the fourth dimension. Won't it be nice when he learns to talk later? We'll give him Hamlet's soliloquy to memorize and he'll say it but it'll come out like something from James Joyce! Aren't we lucky? Give me a drink.»

  «You've had enough,» he said.

  «Thanks, I'll help myself,» she said and did.

  October, and then November. Py was learning to talk now. He whistled and squealed and made a bell-like tone when he was hungry. Dr. Wolcott visited. «When his color is a constant bright blue,» said the doctor, «that means he's healthy. When the color fades, dull — the child is feeling poorly. Remember that.»

  «Oh, yes, I will, I will,» said Polly. «Robin's-egg blue for health, dull cobalt for illness.»

  «Young lady,» said Wolcott. «You'd better take a couple of these pills and come see me tomorrow for a little chat. I don't like the way you're talking. Stick out your tongue. Ah-hmm. You been drinking? Look at the stains on your fingers. Cut the cigarettes in half, See you tomorrow.»

  «You don't give me much to go on,» said Polly. «It's been almost a year now.»

  «My dear Mrs. Horn, I don't want to excite you continually. When we have our mechs ready we'll let you know. We're working every day. There'll be an experiment soon. Take those pills now and shut that nice mouth.» He chucked Py under the «chin.» «Good healthy baby, by God! Twenty pounds if he's an ounce!»

  Baby was conscious of the goings and comings of the two nice White Cubes who were with him during all of his waking hours. There was another cube, a gray one, who visited on certain days. But mostly it was the two White Cubes who cared for and loved him. He looked up at the one warm, rounder, softer White Cube and made the low warbling soft sound of contentment. The White Cube fed him. He was content. He grew. All was familiar and good.

  The New Year, the year 1989, arrived.

  Rocket ships flashed on the sky, and helicopters whirred and flourished the warm California winds.

  Peter Horn carted home large plates of specially poured blue and gray polarized glass, secretly. Through these, he peered at his «child.» Nothing. The pyramid remained a pyramid, no matter if he viewed it through X-ray or yellow cellophane. The barrier was unbreakable. Horn returned quietly to his drinking.

  The big thing happened early in February. Horn, arriving home in his helicopter, was appalled to see a crowd of neighbors gathered on the lawn of his home. Some of them were sitting, others were standing, still others were moving away, with frightened expressions on their faces.

  Polly was walking the «child» in the yard.

  Polly was quite drunk. She held the small blue pyramid by the hand and walked him up and down. She did not see the helicopter land, nor did she pay much attention as Horn came running up.

  One of the neighbors turned. «Oh, Mr. Horn, it's the cutest thing. Where'd you find it?»

  One of the others cried, «Hey, you're quite the traveler, Horn. Pick it up in South America?»

  Polly held the pyramid up. «Say Father!» she cried, trying to focus on her husband.

  «Wheel!» cried the pyramid.

  «Polly!» Peter Horn said.

  «He's friendly as a dog or a cat,» said Polly moving the child with her. «Oh, no, he's not dangerous. He's friendly as a baby. My husband brought him from Afghanistan.»

  The neighbors began to move off.

  «Come back!» Polly waved at them. «Don't you want to see my baby? Isn't he simply beautiful!»

  He slapped her face.

  «My baby,» she said, brokenly.

  He slapped her again and again until she quit saying it and collapsed. He picked her up and took her into the house. Then he came out and took Py in and then he sat down and phoned the Institute.

  «Dr. Wolcott, this is Horn. You'd better have your stuff ready. It's tonight or not at all.»

  There was a hesitation. Finally Wolcott sighed. «All right. Bring your wife and the child. We'll try to have things in shape.»

  They hung up.

  Horn sat there studying the pyramid.

  «The neighbors thought he was grand,» said his wife, lying on the couch, her eyes shut, her lips trembling …

  The Institute hall smelled clean, neat, sterile. Dr. Wolcott walked along it, followed by Peter Horn and his wife Polly, who was holding Py in her arms. They turned in at a doorway and stood in a large room. In the center of the room were two tables with large black hoods suspended over them.

  Behind the tables were a number of machines with dials and levers on them. There was the faintest perceptible hum in the room. Pete Horn looked at Polly for a moment.

  Wolcott gave her a glass of liquid. «Drink this.» She drank it. «Now. Sit down.» They both sat. The doctor put his hands together and looked at them for a moment.

  «I want to tell you what I've been doing in the last few months,» he said. «I've tried to bring the baby out of whatever hell dimension, fourth, fifth, or sixth, that it is in. Each time you left the baby for a checkup we worked on the problem. Now, we have a solution, but it has nothing to do with bringing the baby out of the dimension in which it exists.»

  Polly sank back. Horn simply watched the doctor carefully for anything he might say. Wolcott leaned forward.

  «I can't bring Py out, but I can put you people in. That's it.» He spread his hands.

  Horn looked at the machine in the corner. «You mean you can send us into Py's dimension?»

  «If you want to go badly enough.»

  Polly said nothing. She held Py quietly and looked at him.

  Dr. Wolcott explained. «We know what series of malfunctions, mechanical and electrical, forced Py into his present state. We can reproduce those accidents and stresses. But bringing him back is something else. It might take a million trials and failures before we got the combination. The combination that jammed him into another space was an accident, but luckily we saw, observed, and recorded it. There are no records for bringing one back. We have to work in the dark. Therefore, it will be easier to put you in the fourth dimension than to bring Py into ours.»

  Polly asked, simply and earnestly, «Will I see my baby as he really is, if I go into his dimension?»

  Wolcott nodded.

  Polly said, «Then, I want to go.»

  «Hold on,» said Peter Horn. «We've only been in this office five minutes and already you're promising away the rest of your life.»

  «I'll be with my real baby. I won't care.»

  «Dr. Wolcott, what will it be like, in that dimension on the other side?»

  «There will be no change that you will notice. You will both seem the same size and shape to one another. The pyramid will become a baby, however. You will have added an extra sense, you will be able to interpret what you see differently.»

  «But won't we turn into oblongs or pyramids ourselves? And won't you, doctor, look like some geometrical form instead of a human?»

  «Does a blind man who sees for the first time give up his ability to hear or taste?»

  «No.»

  «All right, then. Stop thinking in terms of subtraction. Think in terms of addition. You're gaining something. You lose nothing. You know what a human looks like, which is an advantage Py doesn't have, looking out from his dimension. When you arrive 'over there' you can see Dr. Wolcott as both things, a geometrical abstract or a human, as you choose. It will probably make quite a philosopher out of you. There's one other thing, however.»

  «And that?»

  «To everyone else in the world you, your wife and the child will look like abstract forms. The baby a triangle. Your wife an oblong perhaps. Yourself a hexagonal solid. The world will be shocked, not you.»

  «We'll be freaks.»

  «You'll be freaks. But you won't know it. You'll have to lead a secluded life.»

  «Until you find a way to bring all three of us out together.»

  «That's right. It may be ten years, twenty. I won't recommend it to you, you may both go quite mad as a result of feeling apart
, different. If there's a grain of paranoia in you, it'll come out. It's up to you, naturally.»

  Peter Horn looked at his wife, she looked back gravely.

  «We'll go,» said Peter Horn.

  «Into Py's dimension?» said Wolcott.

  «Into Py's dimension.»

  They stood up from their chairs. «We'll lose no other sense, you're certain, doctor? Will you be able to understand us when we talk to you? Py's talk is incomprehensible.»

  «Py talks that way because that's what he thinks we sound like when our talk comes through the dimensions to him. He imitates the sound. When you are over there and talk to me, you'll be talking perfect English, because you know how. Dimensions have to do with senses and time and knowledge.»

  «And what: about Py? When we come into his strata of existence. Will he see us as humans, immediately, and won't that be a shock to him? Won't: it be dangerous?»

  «He's awfully young. Things haven't got too set for him, There'll be a slight shock, but your odors will be the same, and your voices will have the same timber and pitch and you'll be just as warm and loving, which is most important of all. You'll get on with him well.»

  Horn scratched his head slowly. «This seems such a long way around to where we want to go.» He sighed. «I wish we could have another kid and forget all about this one.»

  «This baby is the one that counts. I dare say Polly here wouldn't want any other, would you, Polly?»

  «This baby, this baby,» said Polly.

  Wolcott gave Peter Horn a meaningful look. Horn interpreted it correctly. This baby or no more Polly ever again. This baby or Polly would be in a quiet room somewhere staring into space for the rest of her life.

  They moved toward the machine together. «I guess I can stand it, if she can,» said Horn, taking her hand. «I've worked hard for a good many years now, it might be fun retiring and being an abstract for a change.»

  «I envy you the journey, to be honest with you,» said Wolcott, making adjustments on the large dark machine. «I don't mind telling you that as a result of your being „over there“ you may very well write a volume of philosophy that will set Dewey, Bergson, Hegel, or any of the others on their ears. I might „come over“ to visit you one day.»

  «You'll be welcome. What do we need for the trip?»

  «Nothing. Just lie on these tables and be still.»

  A humming filled the room. A sound of power and energy and warmth.

  They lay on the tables, holding hands, Polly and Peter Horn. A double black hood came down over them. They were both in darkness. From somewhere far off in the hospital, a voice-clock sang, «Tick tock, seven o'clock. Tick tock, seven o'clock …» fading away in a little soft gong.

  The low humming grew louder. The machine glittered with hidden, shifting, compressed power.

  «Is there any danger?» cried Peter Horn.

  «None!»

  The power screamed. The very atoms of the room divided against each other, into alien and enemy camps. The two sides fought for supremacy. Horn gaped his mouth to shout. His insides became pyramidal, oblong with terrific electric seizures. He felt a pulling, sucking, demanding power claw at his body. The power yearned and nuzzled and pressed through the room. The dimensions of the black hood over his torso were stretched, pulled into wild planes of incomprehension. Sweat, pouring down his face, was not sweat, but a pure dimensional essence! His limbs were wrenched, flung, jabbed, suddenly Caught. He began to melt like running wax.

  A clicking sliding noise.

  Horn thought swiftly, but calmly. How will it be in the future with Polly and me and Py at home and people coming over for a cocktail party? How will it be?

  Suddenly he knew how it would be and the thought of it filled him with a great awe and a sense of credulous faith and time. They would live in the same white house on the same quiet, green hill, with a high fence around it to keep out the merely curious. And Dr. Wolcott would come to visit, park his beetle in the yard below, come up the steps and at the door would be a tall slim White Rectangle to meet him with a dry martini in its snakelike hand.

  And in an easy chair across the room would sit a Salt White Oblong with a copy of Nietzsche open, reading, smoking a pipe. And on the floor would be Py, running about. And there would be talk and more friends would come in and the White Oblong and the White Rectangle would laugh and joke and offer little finger sandwiches and more drinks and it would be a good evening of talk and laughter. That's how it would be. Click.

  The humming noise stopped. The hood lifted from Horn. It was all over.

  They were in another dimension. He heard Polly cry out. There was much light. Then he slipped from the table, stood blinking. Polly was running. She stopped and picked up something from the floor.

  It was Peter Horn's son. A living, pink-faced, blue-eyed boy, lying in her arms, gasping and blinking and crying.

  The pyramidal shape was gone. Polly was crying with happiness.

  Peter Horn walked across the room, trembling, trying to smile himself, to hold on to Polly and the child, both at the same time, and weep with them.

  «Well!» said Wolcott, standing back. He did not move for a long while. He only watched the White Oblong and the slim White Rectangle holding the Blue Pyramid on the opposite side of the room. An assistant came in the door.

  «Shhh,» said Wolcott, hand to his lips. «They'll want to be alone awhile. Come along.» He took the assistant by the arm and tiptoed across the room. The White Rectangle and the White Oblong didn't even look up when the door closed.

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