High school went by, four years just like a day. Selim had made a big twisted hammered iron thing that said “Selim Loves Oread.” He suspected something very strongly about the iron. But he wasn’t a funny-fingers, so it took him three weeks instead of three seconds to make the thing. Many other things happened in those four years, but they were all happy things so there is no use mentioning them.
When they were in and almost through college (Oread still looked like a nine- or ten-year-old, and this was maddening) they were into some very intricate courses. Selim was a veritable genius, and Oread always knew in which pots the answers might be found, so the two of them qualified for the profound fields. It is good to have a piece of the deep raw knowledge as it births, it is good to see the future lifted out of the future pots.
“We have come to the point where we must invent a whole new system of concepts and symbols,” said the instructor of one powerful course one day. “Little girl, what are you doing in this room,” he added to Oread. “This is a college building and a college course.”
“I know it. We’ve been through this every day for a year,” she said.
“We are as much at a crossroads as was mankind when the concept of a crossroads was first invented,” the instructor continued. “If that concept (excluding choice pictured graphically with simple diverging lines) had not been invented, mankind would have remained at that situation, unchoosing and merely accepting. There are dozens of cases where mankind has remained in a particular situation for thousands of years for failure to invent a particular concept. I suspect that is the situation here; we have not moved in a certain area because we have not entertained the possibility of movement in that area. A whole new concept is needed, but I cannot even conceive what that concept should be.”
“Oh, I’ll make it for you tonight,” Oread said.
“Has that little girl wandered into the class again today?” the instructor asked with new irritation. “Oh yes, I remember now, you always come up with some sort of proof that you’re an enrolled member of the class and that you’re twenty-one years old. You’re not, though. You’re just a little girl with little-girl brains.”
“Oh, I know it,” Oread said sadly, “but I’ll still make the thing for you tonight.”
“Make what thing, little girl?”
“The new concept, and the symbol set that goes with it.”
“And just what does one make a concept out of?” that man asked her with near exasperation.
“I’ll make it mostly out of iron, I think,” Oread said. “I’ll use whatever is in the pots, but I guess it will be mostly iron.”
“Oh God help us!” the man cried out.
“Such a nice expression,” Oread told him, “and somebody had told me that you were an unbeliever.”
“Actually,” said the instructor, controlling himself and talking to the rest of the class and not to Oread Funnyfingers. “Actually, these things often appear simple in retrospect. So may this be if ever we are able to make it retro. The ABCs, the alphabet isn’t very hard, is it? Yes, Mr. Levkovitch, I know all about those hard letters after C. A little humor, it is said, is a tedious thing. But the alphabet was a hard thing when mankind stood at the foothills—”
“En daktulos, at the toes of, that’s what the original form of the expression was,” Oread told him.
“Be quiet, little girl,” the instructor muttered darkly. “—when mankind stood at the foothills of the alphabetical concept and looked up at the mountain, it was hard then.”
“Yes, the first alphabets were all made out of hammered iron,” Oread told the world, “and they were quite hard.”
“The same was the case with simple arithmetic,” said the instructor, disregarding Oread with a deep sigh. “It is easy as we look back on it in its ordered simplicity. But when it was only a crying need and not yet a real concept, then it was hard, very hard.”
“Sure, it was made out of iron too,” Oread whispered to Selim. “Why does he get so mad when I tell him about things being made out of iron?”
“It’s just a weakness of the man, Oread,” Selim whispered. “We’ll have to accept it.”
“And so we are probably at an end,” the instructor was ending his class for the day. “If we cannot come up with a new dimension, with a new symbolism, with a new thought and a new concept (having no idea at all what they should be) then we might as well end this class forever. We might as well, as a matter of likely fact, end the world forever. And on that somber note I leave you till tomorrow, if there should be a tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Zhelezovitch,” Oread said. “I’ll make it for you tonight.”
2.
The name Daktuloi (Fingers) is variously explained from their number being five or ten, or because they dwelt at the foot (en daktulois) of Mount Ida. The original number seems to have been three: i.e., Kelmis the smelter, Damnameneus the hammer, and Acmon the anvil. This number was afterward increased to five, then to ten … and finally to one hundred.
In the forests of Phrygian Ida there lived cunning magicians called the Dactyls. Originally there were three of them. Celmis, Damnameneus, and the powerful Acmon who in the caves of the mountains was the first to practice the art of Hephaestus and who knew how to work blue iron, casting it into the burning furnace. Later their number increased. From Phrygia they went to Crete where they taught the inhabitants the use of iron and how to work metals. To them is also attributed the discovery of arithmetic and the letters of the alphabet.
It is also said of the Dactyls (the Finger-Folk inside the hills) that they live very long lives and retain their youthful appearance for very many years.
Just after closing time that evening, Oread Funnyfingers went by City Museum to see Selim. Selim Elia worked as night watchman there to help pay his way through the University. There really wasn’t much to do on the job. He sat at a big administrator’s desk and studied all night. Studying all night every night is how he got to be a genius. Oread had brought some sandwiches with her.
“Peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches made out of iron,” Selim joked.
“No, they’re not of iron,” Oread said solemnly. “One would need iron teeth to eat an iron sandwich.”
“Surely a funnyfingers could manage iron teeth.”
“Oh, our third set comes in iron, but for me that should be many years yet.”
“Oread, I want to marry you.”
“Everyone calls you a cradle-robber.”
“I know they do. And yet we’re almost exactly the same age.”
“There’s so many people here,” Oread said. “Terra Cotta People, Marble People, Sandstone People, Basalt People, Raffia People, Wooden People, Wax People. I will have to find out from my uncles which ones are real. Some of them aren’t, you know; some of them never lived at all.”
“We have one of your friends or uncles here, Oread, in wax. Over here.”
“I know where. You have all three of my uncles here in wax,” Oread said. “You might not recognize them from the forms of their names on the plaques, though.