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 then" 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."
Eidetic memory is a Mendelian recessive. Both Phyllis and Felix had the gene group for it from one ancestor; Theobald had it from both his parents, by selection. The potentiality, masked as recessive in each of his parents, was therefore effective in him. Both "recessive" and "dominant" are relative terms; dominants do not cancel recessives like symbols in an equation. Both Phyllis and Felix had excellent, unusual memories. Theobald's memory was well-nigh perfect.
Recessive Mendelian characteristics are usually undesirable ones. The reason is simple-dominant characteristics get picked over by natural selection every generation. Natural selection-the dying out of the poorly equipped-goes on day in and day out, inexorable and automatic. It is as tireless, as inescapable, as entropy. A really bad dominant will weed itself out of the race in a few generations. The worst dominants appear only as original mutations, since they either kill their bearers, or preclude reproduction. Embryo cancer is such a one-complete sterility is another. But a recessive may be passed on from generation to generation, masked and not subjected to natural selection. In time a generation may arrive in which a child receives the recessive from both parents-up it pops, strong as ever. That is why the earlier geneticists found it so hard to eliminate such recessives as hemophilia and deaf-mutism; it was impossible, until the genes in question were charted by extremely difficult indirect and inferential means, to tell whether or not an adult, himself in perfect health, was actually "clean." He might pass on something grisly to his children. Nobody knew.
Felix demanded of Mordan why, in view of the bad reputation of recessives, eidetic memory should happen to be recessive rather than dominant.
"I'll answer that twice," said Mordan. "In the first place the specialists still arguing as to why some things are recessives, and others dominants. In the second place, why call eidetic, memory a desirable trait?"
"But-for Egg's sake! You selected for it for Baldy!"
"To be sure we did-for Theobald. 'Desirable' is a relative term. Desirable for whom? Complete memory is an asset only if you have the mind to handle it; otherwise it's a curse. One used to find such cases occasionally, before your time and mine-poor simple souls who were bogged down in the complexities of their own experience; they knew every tree but could not find the forest. Besides that, forgetting is an anodyne and a blessing to most people. They don't need to remember much and they don't. It's different with Theobald."
They had been talking in Mordan's office. He took from his desk a file of memoranda, arranged systematically on perhaps a thousand small punched cards. "See this? I haven't looked it over yet-it's data the technicians supply me with. Its arrangement is quite as significant as its content-more so, perhaps." He took the file and dumped the cards out onto the floor. "The data are still all there, but what use is it now?" He pressed a stud on his desk; his new file secretary entered. "Albert, will you please have these fed into the sorter again? I'm afraid I've randomed them."
Albert looked surprised, but said, "Sure, chief," and took the pied cards away.
"Theobald has the brain power, to speak loosely, to arrange his data, to be able to find it when he wants it, and to use it. He will be able to see how what he knows is related to its various parts, and to abstract from the mass significantly related details. Eidetic memory is a desirable trait in him."
No doubt-but sometimes it did not seem so to Hamilton. As the child grew older he developed an annoying habit of correcting his elders about minutiae, in which he was always maddeningly accurate. "No, Mother, it was not last Wednesday; it was last Thursday. I remember because that was the day that Daddy took me walking up past the reservoir and we saw a pretty lady dressed in a green jumpsuit and Daddy smiled at her and she stopped and asked me what my name was and I told her my name was Theobald and that Daddy's name was Felix and that I was four years and one month old. And Daddy laughed and she laughed and then Daddy said-"
"That will do," said Felix. "You've made your point. It was Thursday. But it is not necessary to correct people on little things like that."
"But when they're wrong I have to tell them!"
Felix let it ride, but he reflected that Theobald might need to be inordinately fast with a gun when he was older.