"Not at all. I can take it."
"Then consider. Both you and your ... physicist ... are sensible,
useful citizens. Both of you can contribute much to civilization. Both
of you can and will be respectable people, for which other people will
have admiration.
"I am in the middle," said the doctor, "I can be no more than a
referee. I see both sides. I believe the cleavage came as a result
of frustration on your part--you know the details--and as such, you
become him when you are frustrated. The reason why he becomes you is
also clear. Whenever he finds himself in straits due to the necessity
of practical thought, the slip-over occurs. You awoke with a stripping
hammer in your hand, unpacking scientific equipment that the physicist
bought. He, obviously, became quite worried about the financial
situation upon viewing the stuff he bought and could face it no more."
"Sounds reasonable."
"Now consider again. Neither of you is dangerous. You are both
interesting and valuable to society. The only thing that is at all
bothersome is the fact that you, per se, are not happy. You need
an integration of personality. He needs the same. I might hope for
a coalescing of you two, but at the moment--and possibly for all
time--it is impossible. All I can tell you is the same thing that
I told him. Frustration to the extreme will exorcise the other
personality. He tried it by running you into debt; by purchasing
a laboratory full of things that you, as an engineer, can see no
practical use for. You frustrated him--or tried to--by making
something commercial out of his last experiment. That, unfortunately,
was not frustration for him.
"You must--if you wish to freeze him out--develop something that will
frustrate the physicist and still be possible to rationalize in your
own personality."
"Um."
"An insolvable problem would do it--if you can shun the problem
yourself."
"That might be difficult."
"Especially when the two of you are inclined to become the other when
faced with a problem that does not fit in your psyche."
"The problem--I wonder."
"What do you do when you are faced with a tough or impossible problem
in physics?"
"I don't get 'em, usually."
"Well, supposing some company required a casting of tungsten metal,
for instance."
"I'd ask that they show me exactly why the tungsten couldn't be formed
in another manner."
"Supposing they demanded that it be cast?"
"There isn't anything on God's green earth that could be used to
handle molten tungsten. Tungsten metal can be shaped, forged,
machined, or cold-rolled. But you can't cast it. Ergo, if I were
offered that problem I'd merely ask why they needed it. If they
require a tungsten shape, I'd recommend shaping or machining, for
instance, depending upon how the shape is. If they merely want a
tungsten casting for the sake of wanting a tungsten casting, I'd laugh
at them and tell 'em it was impossible as I close the door behind
them."
"And your physicist?"
"He wouldn't even consider it. To him, no real problem exists. He'd
have no truck with a production department in the first place, and
in the second, shaping metals isn't particularly of interest to a
physicist, excepting when the shape itself is important. And then he
doesn't give a howling hoot how it gets in that shape as long as it is
shaped properly."
"Well, as I see it, you must evolve something that will frustrate the
physicist while holding his interest. He must be compelled to consider
this insolvable problem by sheer interest alone. It also must be
something that you can see no interest in save as a problem for him,
otherwise you may find yourself biting your mutual fingernails over
your own devilish plan."
"Um--that's a large order."
"That's it," said Hamilton. "And in the meantime, I'd suggest that you
tinker around with some of the stuff you bought. It will lessen the
shock of your problem of the bankroll."
"That bank of junk might be the means to his own frustration," grinned
Tom. "Every time I look at it, I get a feeling of what can be done
about it that is practical, and that may force him into existence and
keep him there."
"Well, good luck. And remember, I am just a sort of referee. One
of you will become the stronger. One will succeed. I can hope for
coalescence, but I doubt that it will take place. Lacking that, all I
can hope for is that eventually you will become reintegrated and that
the lesser personality will be frozen out."
Tom Lionel returned home, thinking furiously.
"May the best man win, huh?"
* * * * *
It was seven solid weeks by the calendar. Seven solid weeks of hard,
backbreaking work during which everything went fine and dandy for Tom
Lionel, Consulting Engineer.
The balance of his debt was paid off when Americal Electric purchased
the rights and royalties of the cyclotronic spectrograph. The
equipment in Tom's laboratory had been kept in good shape, polished
and even used occasionally. It was all connected for operation, and
though the laboratory had changed from a spacious building into a
place where aisles and areas abounded between banks of equipment, it
did make an impressive sight.
Even the transit came into use.
And then at the end of the seventh week, Tom Lionel looked at his
notebook and started to consider in all of its aspects the rather
improbable phenomenon recorded there. He not only let it prey on his
mind; he stopped hourly and invited his mind to consider the evidence.
At first his mind rejected it on the basis that science was not
equipped to consider it, and then as the evidence seemed definite and
leading, his mind accepted the fact that this problem did exist and
that it was a real and utterly baffling problem.
Then his mind rejected it on the basis of impracticality. It would be
nice--but.
No known physical effect could possibly explain it in a satisfactory
manner.
Tom went to sleep.
* * * * *
And Thomas Lionel, Ph.D. M.M., awoke. His first consideration was the
chessboard. It baffled him. He didn't really think that the engineer
would capture his queen. It was too easy. Obviously, there was more to
the set-up than appeared. For offering the trap of the double-check
and subsequent loss of his queen, Thomas had opened the row blocked by
the knight. That left him in the desirable position of capturing the
engineer's rook, after which if the engineer was not more than careful
in his counterattack, he would find himself staring a checkmate in
the face. Either the engineer was blind to the trap, or he had a more
complicated trap to spring once the physicist started to move in.
He had time. He wanted to consider the whole thing. He was going to
be darned sure that he was right before he moved.
He dressed slowly, and as he entered his kitchenette to prepare
breakfast, he saw a new notebook on the table. He picked it up,
riffled the pages first, and then read the lettering on the front page.
PHYSICAL DATA AND OBSERVATIONS MADE ON THE OCCURRENCE OF THE
MANIPULATION OF NATURAL FORCES WHICH HAVE NO EXPLANATION IN THE
KNOWN REALM OF PHYSICS.
Contents:
173 pages of text.
77 pages of calculations.
48 tables of figures.
67 photographs.
13 statements made by unbiased--but not trained--observers.
7 similar incidents not given scientific attention.
29 graphs and curves.
25 pages of description and data pertaining to:
meteorological conditions.
terran constants--gravity and magnetism.
sunspot activity.
chemical analyses of earth at discrete intervals near the
occurrence.
analysis of atmosphere during phenomena.
Accompanying information and data are samples of earth mentioned
above. Atmospheric samples were contaminated during analysis and
have therefore been destroyed.
"Little Tommy has been a busy lad," mused the physicist. "'No
explanation' huh? That's a laugh. _Anything_ can be explained. Well,
my engineering friend, let's see what you have cooked up for me."
Thomas Lionel started to read the "173 pages of text" and got down as
far as the bottom of the first page. He blinked, did a double take,
and reread it.
"Great howling entropy," he grunted. "The unmitigated screwball
has spent weeks in the compilation of data on his own, personal
observations of a _poltergeist_ in action!"
Thomas took the cigarette case from his pocket and extracted a
cigarette. He snapped the lighter and was amazed to see the colors on
the case. They were scintillating, iridescent, and beautiful. They
danced and changed as he moved the lighter, and the swift play of
color across the surface of the case caught his fancy.
It also caught his scientific sense. He looked at the case carefully
and swore. Tom had been using the ruling engine. The surface of the
cigarette case was a mirror-grating and it was as good a job as the
ruling engine could produce.
Thomas fumed. The idea! And then he smiled a bit. For the engineer's
use of the ruling engine to decorate a cigarette case was a sort of
prostitution of the machine, but it had not harmed the engine in
any way. And it was certainly no worse on the physicist's nerves
than the irrelevant mixture of precision and utter sloppiness that
characterized the physicist's work.
It was, the physicist admitted, beautiful.
He returned to the engineering data.
* * * * *
A poltergeist!
The "throwing-ghost" of the ancient lore and myth. The fearsome
manifestation of unrealism. Superstition!
Sheer superstition!
The physicist's mind rejected it, at first. But that which made
him the physicist prodded neatly and patiently and quietly. "Where
there's smoke, there's fire," it said. And it mentioned situations
where, though exact engineering data had not been taken, certainly the
observers were not incompetent. They were not trained, but they did
attempt to give a valid picture.
Well, so there might be something to it. So the poltergeist might be
something.
This case was no flash in the pan. It was real and valid. For nine
full days it had persisted. For nine full days, stones passed through
the air at the direction of--the poltergeist. Pictures of the stones
in full flight. A step-by-step, frame-by-frame sequence picture of
a stone leaving the ground and speeding away gave Thomas a wriggly
feeling up and down his spine.
Barometric pressure 29.77 inches, temperature 84.66 degrees, both
rising slightly. A graph gave the pressure and temperature throughout
the nine days. The total number of stones and the masses, individual
and aggregate. The district, with a map of both the entire township
and a close-up map-diagram of the area, with motion-traces across it,
each labeled, notated, numbered, and keyed to the text.
Physical data on the gravitational field. Maps of the magnetic field,
both transverse and vertical. Wind direction during each passage of
the stones.
A faked report.
Couldn't be real. Absolutely impossible. Ridiculous, and the work of a
frantic mind, working avidly to create a situation.
And yet the engineer was a good engineer. He couldn't--it was
psychologically impossible for him--to present fake data.
Ergo this report must be real.
Thomas considered the reports of peculiar activity. Mostly the
newspapers reported them as small boys throwing stones as a method
of exerting their ability to be annoying to the police and duly
constituted authority.
There were reports, he knew. About twelve authentic reports per year,
which considering the possibility of having the poltergeist phenomena
present when no observer was there--how many times had he heard small
stones rattling from the roof or rattling noises of one sort or
another--meant that the poltergeist was a rather common phenomenon.
There were cases he recalled wherein earthquake temblor had been
blamed for the upsetting of a grand piano. He'd wondered about that
one--a grand piano is stable, positionwise--and how it could have been
rolled across the room and dumped upside down.
Poltergeist phenomena.
Ah yes. It might be advisable to get slightly soused tonight. But
Thomas was a physicist. He did not quail or get slightly panicky at
the idea of the unknown, even though the unknown was known to have
tossed a slab of marble--appropriately, a tombstone--several hundred
feet through a caretaker's shed.
To be sure, it was slightly running against the grain to sit there in
the broad daylight and read about things that according to all physics
from Archimedes to Einstein claimed impossible, racial superstition,
and old wives' tales. It was very disquieting to read of stones--dead,
inert, lifeless, immobile bits of granite--that took off from Mother
Earth with no visible means of support, to go whizzing through the
thin daylight air at speeds that raised bruises, cut nicks in trees,
and shattered windows. It bothered the sense of propriety. It was not
right. It was like seeing Lake Louise in violent flame, or watching
Niagara go tumbling up from the whirling pools to the ledge that
flanked Goat Island. It was crushing chrome-vanadium test-bars between
your fingers just after removal from a tensile strength machine that
failed to fracture them at fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. It
was watching phosphorus lying inert in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.
It was all wrong.
And yet, thought the physicist, what must the Ancient One have
thought when he considered the act of fire melting hard metal? They
did strange things, in those days. They invented phlogiston, and spent
centuries trying to isolate it. Galileo and his telescope, looking
through it to Jupiter, must have been startled at the concept as well
as the sight of a planetary system in operation.
Science knew that the poltergeist was a problem--but like the man
who does not care to go crazy because of the insoluble problem,
science shrugged, admitted that it was stumped--intelligently enough,
under the circumstances--and then remarked that after finding the
next decimal place, it would, perhaps, take a look into the natural
phenomena of things that were thrown by nothing.
Until that date, it could look the other way and claim that small boys
were throwing stones.
Little boys that they could not see.