Lewis Padgett

"She had found the toys in a box one day, as she played by the Thames. And they were indeed wonderful. Her little song — Uncle Charles thought it didn't mean anything. (He wasn't her real uncle, she parenthesized. But he was nice.) The song meant a great deal. It was the way. Presently she would do what it said, and then — But she was already too old. She never found the way."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"On the carpet lay a pattern of markers, pebbles, an iron ring — junk. A random pattern. A crumpled sheet of paper blew towards Paradine. He picked it up automatically."

"Paradine looked at the paper he held. It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma's meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with Through the Looking Glass. His memory gave him the words —"

"Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time — it has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was. Symbolism. 'Twas brillig — A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The toves had to be made slithy — vaseline? and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they'd gyre and gimbel."

"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."