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.
Felix had developed a fondness for country life, little as he had wanted to undertake it. Had it not been for his continuous work on the Great Research he might have taken up horticulture seriously. There was something deeply satisfying, he found, in making a garden do what he wanted it to do.
He would have spent all his holidays fussing with his plants, if Phyllis had concurred. But her holidays were less frequent than his, since she had resumed putting in one shift a day at the nearest primary development center as soon as Theobald was old enough to need the knocking around he would get from other children. When she did have a holiday she liked to go somewhere-a flying picnic, usually.
They had to live near the Capital, because of Felix’s work, but the Pacific was only a little over five hundred kilometres west of them. It was convenient to pack a lunch, get to the beach in time for a swim and a nice, long, lazy bake, then eat.
Felix wanted to see the boy’s reaction the first time he saw the ocean. “Well, son, this is it. What do you think of it?”