Lewis Padgett - Scott Quotes

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Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she'd shake her head. Sometimes she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends, and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.
He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.

Lewis Padgett
Perhaps Paradine and Jane had evinced too much interest in toys. Emma and Scott took to keeping them hidden, playing with them only in private. They never did it overtly, but with a certain unobtrusive caution. Nevertheless, Jane especially was somewhat troubled.

Lewis Padgett
Emma was sliding the beads to and fro in the abacus. The motions didn't seem so strange now. Even when the beads vanished. She could almost follow that new direction — almost —
Scott panted, staring into the crystal cube and mentally directing, with many false starts, the building of a structure somewhat more complicated than the one which had been destroyed by fire. He, too, was learning being conditioned —

Lewis Padgett
The tiny people were deftly building a house. Scott wished it would catch fire, so he could see the people put it out.
Flames licked up from the half-completed structure. The automatons, with a great deal of odd apparatus, extinguished the blaze.
It didn't take Scott long to catch on. But he was a little worried. The manikins would obey his thoughts. By the time he discovered that, he was frightened, and threw the cube from him.
Halfway up the bank, he reconsidered and returned.

Lewis Padgett
If it had not been for Holloway, life might have settled back into an almost normal routine. The toys were no longer active reminders. Emma still enjoyed her dolls and sand pile, with a thoroughly explicable delight. Scott was satisfied with baseball and his chemical set. They did everything other children did, and evinced few, if any, flashes of abnormality. But Holloway seemed to be an alarmist.
He was having the toys tested, with rather idiotic results. He drew endless charts and diagrams, corresponded with mathematicians, engineers, and other psychologists, and went quietly crazy trying to find rhyme or reason in the construction of the gadgets.

Lewis Padgett
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."

Lewis Padgett
This was fun. Like putting on a play, only more real. The little people did what Scott told them, inside of his head. If he made a mistake, they waited till he'd found the right way. They even posed new problems for him —
The cube, too, was a most instructive toy. It was teaching Scott, with alarming rapidity and teaching him very entertainingly. But it gave him no really knowledge as yet. He wasn't ready. Later — later —

Lewis Padgett
It was, Paradine thought, like a Scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted — familiar logic — at Scott's motives in arranging the junk as he did.
Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.

Lewis Padgett
Emma and Scott had free rein with the toys.
"What," Scott asked his father one evening, "is a wabe, dad?"
"Wave?"
He hesitated. "I … don't think so. Isn't wabe right?"
"Wab is Scot for web. That it?"
"I don't see how," Scott muttered, and wandered off, scowling, to amuse himself with the abacus. He was able to handle it quite deftly now. But, with the instinct of children for avoiding interruptions, he and Emma usually played with the toys in private. Not obviously, of course but the more intricate experiments were never performed under the eye of an adult.

Lewis Padgett
Paradine, his mouth working, his nerves ridiculously tense, forgot the phone and raced up the stairs. The door of Scott's room was open.
The children were vanishing.
They went in fragments, like thick smoke in a wind, or like movement in a distorting mirror. Hand in hand they went, in a direction Paradine could not understand, and as he blinked there on the threshold, they were gone.

Lewis Padgett
If the undeveloped minds have been turned into the x channel, it's necessary to divert them back. I'm not saying that's the wisest thing to do, but it probably is from our standards. After all, Emma and Scott will have to live in this world.

Lewis Padgett
Lunacy!
But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page — she'd translated Carroll's words into symbols both she and Scott could understand.
The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-space equation. And the mome raths outgrabe —
Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done — but he couldn't. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.
Even if he went insane, he still couldn't do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy.

Lewis Padgett
A little of Scott's thoughts could still be understood. But Emma had become conditioned to x much faster.
She was thinking, too.
Not like an adult or a child. Not even like a human. Except, perhaps, a human of a type shockingly unfamiliar to genus homo.
Sometimes Scott himself had difficulty in following her thoughts.

Lewis Padgett
Scott puzzled over the framework again. He experimented. This time there were no shocks, even slight. The abacus had showed him the correct method. Now it was up to him to do it on his own. The bizarre angles of the wires seemed a little less confusing now, somehow.
It was a most instructive toy —
It worked, Scott thought, rather like the crystal cube.

Lewis Padgett
His find he hid at the back of the closet in his own room upstairs. The crystal cube he slipped into his pocket, which already bulged with string, a coil of wire, two pennies, a wad of tinfoil, a grimy defenses stamp, and a chunk of feldspar. Emma, Scott's two-year-old sister, waddled unsteadily in from the hall and said hello.
"Hello, Slug," Scott nodded, from his altitude of seven years and some months. He patronized Emma shockingly, but she didn't know the difference. Small, plump, and wide-eyed, she flopped down on the carpet and stared dolefully at her shoes.
"Tie 'em, Scotty, please?"
"Sap," Scott told her kindly, but knotted the laces.

Lewis Padgett
Maybe it was a music box.
Scott shouldn't have felt depressed. The gadgetry would have given Einstein a headache and driven Steinmetz raving mad. The trouble was, of course, that the box had not yet completely entered the space-time continuum where Scott existed and therefore it could not be opened. At any rate, not till Scott used a convenient rock to hammer the helical nonhelix into a more convenient position.
He hammered it, in fact, from its contact point with the fourth dimension, releasing the space-time torsion it had been maintaining. There was a brittle snap. the box jarred slightly, and lay motionless, no longer only partially in existence. Scott opened it easily now.

Lewis Padgett
Scott stirred in his sleep. Without awakening, he called what was obviously a question, though it did not seem to be in any particular language. Emma gave a little mewling cry that changed pitch sharply.
She had not awakened. The children lay without stirring.
But Paradine thought, with a sudden sickness in his middle, it was exactly as though Scott had asked Emma something, and she had replied.
Had their minds changed so that even — sleep — was different to them?

Lewis Padgett
Paradine found himself growing slightly confused as he attempted to manipulate the beads. The angles were vaguely illogical. It was like a puzzle. This red bead, if slid along this wire to that junction, should reach there — but it didn't. A maze, odd, but no doubt instructive. Paradine had a well-founded feeling that he'd have no patience with the thing himself.
Scott did, however, retiring to a corner and sliding beads around with much fumbling and grunting. The beads did sting, when Scott chose the wrong ones or tried to slide them in the wrong direction. At last he crowed exultantly.

Lewis Padgett
The soft, woven helmet was the first thing that caught his eye, but he discarded that without much interest. It was just a cap. Next he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm — much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block.

Lewis Padgett
Scott's thought-patterns are building up to a sum that doesn't equal this world. Perhaps he's subconsciously expecting to see the world where those toys came from.

Lewis Padgett
Scott was learning fast. What he now saw in the crystal cube had little relationship to the original simple problems. But they were fascinatingly technical. Had Scott realized that his education was being guided and supervised — though merely mechanically — he would probably have lost interest. As it was, his initiative was never quashed.

Lewis Padgett