"Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can't go on playing polo
forever."
It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology:
"The neglect has been criminal--and inexplicable. For about a century
it's been _assumed_ that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?"
"All right," he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. "Why?"
"Lieberman," she said. "Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the
old-line topological psychology men--don't let the lingo throw you,
Charles; it's just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on
the _mengenlehre_ psychology school--point-sets of emotions,
class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by
proving that their constructs didn't correspond to the emotions and
reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he
tried the same acid test on his _own_ school's constructs and found out
that they didn't correspond either. It didn't frighten him; he was a
scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full
professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools
of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as
dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn't
happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind
solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn't
be found in the real world! And that's the way it was all the way down
the line."
"So where does that leave us?" Charles demanded. "Is it or isn't it a
science?"
"It is," she said simply. "Lieberman and his followers went too far. It
became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager.
They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood
the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but
straw-man claims they had set up themselves."
"But--_psychology_!" Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at the
thought that man's mind was subject to scientific study--not because he
knew the first thing about it, but because _everybody_ knew psychology
was phony.
She shrugged. "I can't help it. We were doing physiology of the sensory
organs, trying to settle the oldie about focusing the eye, and I got to
grubbing around the pre-Lieberman texts looking for light in the
darkness. Some of it sounded so--not sensible, but _positive_ that I ran
off one of Lieberman's population checks. And the old boy had been dead
wrong. _Mengenlehre_ constructs correspond quite nicely to the actual
way people's minds work. I kept checking and the schools that were
destroyed as hopelessly fallacious a century ago checked out, some
closely and some not so closely, as good descriptions of the way the
mind works. Some have predictive value. I used _mengenlehre_ psychology
algorithms to compute the conditioning on you and me, including the
trigger release. It worked. You see, Charles? We're on the rim of
something tremendous!"
"When did this Lieberman flourish?"
"I don't have the exact dates in my head. The breakup of the schools
corresponded roughly with the lifetime of John G. Falcaro."
That pin-pointed it rather well. John G. succeeded Rafael, who succeeded
Amadeo Falcaro, first leader of the Syndic in revolt. Under John G., the
hard-won freedom was enjoyed, the bulging store-houses were joyously
emptied, craft union rules went joyously out the window and builders
_worked_, the dollar went to an all-time high and there was an all-time
number of dollars in circulation. It had been an exhuberant time still
fondly remembered; just the time for over-enthusiastic rebels against a
fusty scholasticism to joyously smash old ways of thought without too
much exercise of the conscience. It all checked out.
She started and he got to his feet. A hardly-noticed discomfort was
becoming acute; the speedboat was pitching and rolling quite seriously,
for the first time since their escape. "Dirty weather coming up," he
said. "We've been too damned lucky so far." He thought, but didn't
remark, that there was much to worry about in the fact that there seemed
to have been no pursuit. The meager resources of the North American Navy
wouldn't be spent on chasing a single minor craft--not if the weather
could be counted on to finish her off.
"I thought we were unsinkable?"
"In a way. Seal the boat and she's unsinkable the way a corked bottle
is. But the boat's made up of a lot of bits and pieces that go together
just so. Pound her for a few hours with waves and the bits and pieces
give way. She doesn't sink, but she doesn't steam or steer either. I
wish the Syndic had a fleet on the Atlantic."
"Sorry," she said. "The nearest fleet I know of is Mob ore boats on the
great lakes and they aren't likely to pick us up."
The sea-search radar pinged and they flew to the screen. "_Something_ at
273 degrees, about eight miles," he said. "It can't be pursuit. They
couldn't have any reason at all to circle around us and come at us from
ahead." He strained his eyes into the west and thought he could see a
black speck on the gray.
Lee Falcaro tried a pair of binoculars and complained: "These things
won't work."
"Not on a rolling, pitching platform they won't--not with an optical
lever eight miles long. I don't suppose this boat would have a
gyro-stabilized signal glass." He spun the wheel to 180; they staggered
and clung as the bow whipped about, searched and steadied on the new
course. The mounting waves slammed them broadside-to and the rolling
increased. They hardly noticed; their eyes were on the radarscope.
Fogged as it was with sea return, they nevertheless could be sure after
several minutes that the object had changed course to 135. Charles made
a flying guess at her speed, read their own speed off and scribbled for
a moment.
He said nothing, but spun the wheel to 225 and went back to the
radarscope. The object changed course to 145. Charles scribbled again
and said at last, flatly: "They're running collision courses on us.
Automatically computed, I suppose, from a radar. We're through."
He spun the wheel to 180 again, and studied the crawling green spark on
the radarscope. "This way we give 'em the longest run for their money
and can pray for a miracle. The only way we can use our speed to outrun
them is to turn around and head back into Government Territory--which
isn't what we want. Relax, Lee. Maybe if the weather thickens they'll
lose us--no; not with radar."
They sat together on a bunk, wordlessly, for hours while the spray
dashed higher and the boat shivered to hammering waves. Briefly they saw
the pursuer, three miles off, low, black and ugly, before fog closed in
again.
At nightfall there was the close, triumphant roar of a big reaction
turbine and a light stabbed through the fog, flooding the boat with
blue-white radiance. A cliff-like black hull loomed alongside as a
bull-horn roared at them: "Cut your engines and come about into the
wind."
Lee Falcaro read white-painted letters on the black hull: "_Hon. James
J. Regan, Chicago_." She turned to Charles and said wonderingly: "It's
an ore boat. From the Mob great lakes fleet."