"Personally, I think that some day man will realize just what he is
searching for and will invent a machine that will enable the child to
project, just as a film throws an image on a screen, the visions in his
psyche.
"I see you're interested," he continued. "You would be, naturally, since
you're a professor of philosophy. Now, let's call the toy a
specterscope, because through it the subject sees the spectres that
haunt his unconscious. Ha! Ha! But how does it work? If you'll keep it
to yourself, Mr. Crane, I'll tell you something: My native country's
scientists have developed a rather simple device, though they haven't
published anything about it in the scientific journals. Let me give you
a brief explanation: Light strikes the retina of the eye; the rods and
cones pass on impulses to the bipolar cells, which send them on to the
optic nerve, which goes to the brain ..."
"Elementary and full of gaps," said Jack's father.
"Pardon me," said Mister. "A bare outline should be enough. You'll be
able to fill in the details. Very well. This specterscope breaks up the
light going into the eye in such a manner that the rods and cones
receive only a certain wavelength. I can't tell you what it is, except
that it's in the visual red. The scope also concentrates like a
burning-glass and magnifies the power of the light.
"Result? A hitherto-undiscovered chemical in the visual purple of the
rods is activated and stimulates the optic nerve in a way we had not
guessed possible. An electrochemical stimulus then irritates the
subconscious until it fully wakes up.
"Let me put it this way. The subconscious is not a matter of location
but of organization. There are billions of possible connections between
the neurons of the cortex. Look at those potentialities as so many cards
in the same pack. Shuffle the cards one way and you have the common
workaday _cogito, ergo sum_ mind. Reshuffle them, and, bingo! you have
the combination of neurons, or cards, of the unconscious. The
specterscope does the redealing. When the subject gazes through it, he
sees for the first time the full impact and result of his underground
mind's workings in other perspectives than dreams or symbolical
behavior. The subjective Garden of Eden is resurrected. It is my
contention that this specterscope will some day be available to all
children.
"When that happens, Mr. Crane, you will understand that the world will
profit from man's secret wishes. Earth will be a far better place.
Paradise, sunken deep in every man, can be dredged out and set up
again."
"I don't know," said Jack's father, stroking his chin thoughtfully with
a finger. "Children like my son are too introverted as it is. Give them
this psychological toy you suggest, and you would watch them grow, not
into the outside world, but into themselves. They would fester. Man has
been expelled from the Garden. His history is a long, painful climb
toward something different. It is something that is probably better than
the soft and flabby Golden Age. If man were to return, he would regress,
become worse than static, become infantile or even embryonic. He would
be smothered in the folds of his own dreams."
"Perhaps," said the salesman. "But I think you have a very unusual child
here. He will go much farther than you may think. Why? Because he is
sensitive and has an imagination that only needs the proper guidance.
Too many children become mere bourgeois ciphers with paunches and round
'O' minds full of tripe. They'll stay on earth. That is, I mean they'll
be stuck in the mud."
"You talk like no insurance salesman I've ever met."
"Like all those who really want to sell, I'm a born psychologist,"
Mister shrilled. "Actually, I have an advantage. I have a Ph.D. in
psychology. I would prefer staying at home for laboratory work, but
since I can help my starving children--I am not joking--so much more by
coming to a foreign land and working at something that will put food in
their mouths, I do it. I can't stand to see my little ones go hungry.
Moreover," he said with a wave of his long-fingered hand, "this whole
planet is really a lab that beats anything within four walls."
"You spoke of famine. Your accent--your name. You're a Greek, aren't
you?"
"In a way," said Mister. "My name, translated, means gracious or kindly
or well-meaning." His voice became brisker. "The translation is apropos.
I'm here to do you a service. Now, about these monthly premiums ..."
Jack shook himself and stepped out of the mold of fascination that
Mister's glasses seemed to have poured around him. Uncas again, he
crawled on all fours from chair to divan to stool to the fallen log
which the adults thought was an easy chair. He stuck his head from
behind it and sighted along the broomstick-musket at his father. He'd
shoot that white man dead and then take his scalp. He giggled at that,
because his father really didn't have any hairlock to take.
At that moment Mister decided to take off his specs and polish them with
his breast-pocket handkerchief. While he answered one of Mr. Crane's
questions, he let them dangle from his fingers. Accidentally, the lenses
were level with Jack's gaze. One careless glance was enough to jerk his
eyes back to them. One glance stunned him so that he could not at once
understand that what he was seeing was not reality.
There was his father across the room. But it wasn't a room. It was a
space outdoors under the low branch of a tree whose trunk was so big it
was as wide as the wall had been. Nor was the Persian rug there. It was
replaced by a close-cropped bright green grass. Here and there foot-high
flowers with bright yellow petals tipped in scarlet swayed beneath an
internal wind. Close to Mr. Crane's feet a white horse no larger than a
fox terrier bit off the flaming end of a plant.
All those things were wonderful enough--but was that naked giant who
sprawled upon a moss-covered boulder father? No! Yes! Though the
features were no longer pinched and scored and pale, though they were
glowing and tanned and smooth like a young athlete's they were his
father's! Even the thick, curly hair that fell down over a wide forehead
and the panther-muscled body could not hide his identity.
Though it tore at his nerves, and though he was afraid that once he
looked away he would never again seize the vision, Jack ripped his gaze
away from the rosy view.
The descent to the grey and rasping reality was so painful that tears
ran down his cheeks, and he gasped as if struck in the pit of the
stomach. How could beauty like that be all around him without his
knowing it?
He felt that he had been blind all his life until this moment and would
be forever eyeless again, an unbearable forever, if he did not look
through the glass again.
He stole another hurried glance, and the pain in his heart and stomach
went away, his insides became wrapped in a soft wind. He was lifted. He
was floating, a pale red, velvety air caressed him and buoyed him.
He saw his mother run from around the tree. That should have seemed
peculiar, because he had thought she was dead. But there she was, no
longer flat-walking and coughing and thin and wax-skinned, but
golden-brown and curvy and bouncy. She jumped at Daddy and gave him a
long kiss. Daddy didn't seem to mind that she had no clothes on. Oh, it
was so wonderful. Jack was drifting on a yielding and wine-tinted air
and warmed with a wind that seemed to swell him out like a happy
balloon....
Suddenly he was falling, hurtling helplessly and sickeningly through a
void while a cold and drab blast gouged his skin and spun him around and
around. The world he had always known shoved hard against him. Again he
felt the blow in the solar plexus and saw the grey tentacles of the
living reality reach for his heart.
Jack looked up at the stranger, who was just about to put his spectacles
on the bridge of his long nose. His eyelids were closed. Jack never did
see the pink eyes.
That didn't bother him. He had other things to think about. He crouched
beside the chair while his brain tried to move again, tried to engulf a
thought and failed because it could not become fluid enough to find the
idea that would move his tongue to shriek, _No! No! No!_
And when the salesman rose and placed his papers in his case and patted
Jack on the head and bent his opaque rose spectacles at him and said
good-by and that he wouldn't be coming back because he was going out of
town to stay, Jack was not able to move or say a thing. Nor for a long
time after the door had closed could he break through the mass that
gripped him like hardened lava. By then, no amount of screams and
weeping would bring Mister back. All his father could do was to call a
doctor who took the boy's temperature and gave him some pills.