"Now I think you're just pretending the whole thing doesn't exist
because you don't want to fool with it."
Perhaps he had come to the right decision after all. I'd resolutely
washed the whole thing out of my mind. But I wasn't going to get away
with it. I could see it coming.
"For the first time, Kennedy, I'm asking you what happened?" he said
firmly, but his tone was more telling than asking. So I was going to
have to discuss frameworks with Old Stone Face, after all.
"Henry," I asked slowly, "have you kept up your reading in theoretical
physics?"
He blinked at me. I couldn't tell whether it meant yes or no.
"When we went to school, you and I--" I hoped my putting us both in the
same age group would tend to mollify him a little, "physics was all
snug, secure, safe, definite. A fact was a fact, and that's all there
was to it. But there's been some changes made. There's the cooerdinate
systems of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change from
framework to framework. There's the application of multivalued logic to
physics where a fact becomes not a fact any longer. The astronomers talk
about the expanding universe--it's a piker compared to man's expanding
concepts about that universe."
He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beating
around the bush.
"That all has a bearing on what happened," I assured him. "You have to
understand what was behind the facts before you can understand the facts
themselves. First, we weren't trying to make an antigrav unit at all.
Dr. Auerbach was playing around with a chemical approach to cybernetics.
He made up some goop which he thought would store memory impulses, the
way the brain stores them. He brought a plastic cylinder of it over to
me, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went on
with my personnel management business at hand."
Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly
and deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puff
of smoke.
* * * * *
"The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a little
girl, daughter of one of our production women. She'd been throwing
things, setting things on fire. The teachers didn't know how she did it,
she just did it. They sent her to me. I asked her about it. She threw a
tantrum, and when it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goop
was trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what happened," I
said.
He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie the
facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself.
After all, we were in the business of manufacturing computers. The
general manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primary
arithmetic.
"Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background," I went
on. "Her mother was from the old country, one of the Slav races. There's
the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed them
on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kid
never got out with other children. Children, kept alone, never seeing
anybody, get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who, knows what kind of
a cooerdinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her mother would
come home at night and go about her tasks talking aloud, half to the
daughter, half to herself. 'I really burned that foreman up, today,'
she'd say. Or, 'Oh, boy, was he fired in a hurry!' Or, 'She got herself
thrown out of the place,' things like that."
"So what does that mean, Ralph?" he asked. His switch to my first name
indicated he was trying to work with me instead of pushing me.
"To a child who never knew anything else," I answered, "one who had
never learned to distinguish reality from unreality--as we would define
it from our agreed framework--a special cooerdinate system might be built
up where 'Everybody was up in the air at work, today,' might be taken
literally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn't happen, of
course--it says in the textbooks--but since it has been happening all
through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of
multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already
had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smug
certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to get
some of the answers we thought we had.
"We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We're still
trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tape
and it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have to
know how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know how to
code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder will store a
psi impulse, but we don't know how. So we have to keep working with psi
gifted people, at least until we've established some of the basic laws
governing psi."
I couldn't tell by Henry's face whether I was with him or away from him.
He told me he wanted to think about it, and made a little motion with
his hand that I should leave the room.
I walked through the suite of executive offices and down a sound
rebuffing hallway. The throbbing clatter of manufacture of metallic
parts made a welcome sound as I went through the far doorway into the
factory. I saw a blueprint spread on a foreman's desk as I walked past.
Good old blueprint. So many millimeters from here to there, made of such
and such an alloy, a hole punched here with an allowance of
five-ten-thousandths plus or minus tolerance. Snug, secure, safe. I
wondered if psi could ever be blue-printed. Or suppose you put a hole
here, but when you looked away and then looked back it had moved, or
wasn't there at all?
[Illustration]
Quickly, I got myself into a conversation with a supervisor about the
rising rate of employee turnover in his department. That was something
also snug, secure, safe. All you had to do was figure out human beings.
* * * * *
I spent the rest of the morning on such pursuits, working with things I
understood.
On his first rounds of the afternoon, the interoffice messenger brought
me a memorandum from the general manager's office. I opened it with some
misgivings. I was not particularly reassured.
Mr. Grenoble felt he should work with me more closely on the antigrav
project. He understood, from his researches, that the most positive psi
effects were experienced during a seance with a medium. Would I kindly
arrange for the Swami to hold a seance that evening, after office hours,
so that he might analyze the man's methods and procedures to see how
they could fit smoothly into Company Operation. This was not to be
construed as interference in the workings of my department but in the
interests of pursuing the entire matter with diligence and dispatch--
The seance was to be held in my office.
I had had many peculiar conferences in this room--from union leaders
stripping off their coats, throwing them on the floor and stomping on
them; to uplifters who wanted to ban cosmetics on our women employees so
the male employees would not be tempted to think Questionable Thoughts.
I could not recall ever having held a seance before.
My desk had been moved out of the way, over into one corner of the large
room. A round table was brought over from the salesmen's report writing
room (used there more for surreptitious poker playing than for writing
reports) and placed in the middle of my office--on the grounds that it
had no sharp corners to gouge people in their middles if it got to
cavorting about recklessly. In an industrial plant one always has to
consider the matter of safety rules and accident insurance rates.
In the middle of the table there rested, with dark fluid gleaming
through clear plastic cases, six fresh cylinders which Auerbach had
prepared in his laboratory over in the plant.
Auerbach had shown considerable unwillingness to attend the seance; he
pleaded being extra busy with experiments just now, but I gave him that
look which told him I knew he had just been stalling around the last few
months, the same as I had.
If the psi effect had never come out in the first place, there wouldn't
have been any mental conflict. He could have gone on with his processes
of refining, simplifying and increasing the efficiency ratings of his
goop. But this unexpected side effect, the cylinders learning and
demonstrating something he considered basically untrue, had tied his
hands with a hopeless sort of frustration. He would have settled gladly
for a chemical compound which could have added two and two upon request;
but when that compound can learn and demonstrate that there's no such
thing as gravity, teaching it simple arithmetic is like ashes in the
mouth.
I said as much to him. I stood there in his laboratory, leaned up
against a work bench, and risked burning an acid hole in the sleeve of
my jacket just to put over an air of unconcern. He was perched on the
edge of an opposite work bench, swinging his feet, and hiding the
expression in his eyes behind the window's reflection upon his polished
glasses. I said even more.
"You know," I said reflectively, "I'm completely unable to understand
the attitude of supposedly unbiased men of science. Now you take all
that mass of data about psi effects, the odd and unexplainable
happenings, the premonitions, the specific predictions, the accurate
descriptions of far away simultaneously happening events. You take that
whole mountainous mass of data, evidence, phenomena--"
* * * * *
A slight turn of his head gave me a glimpse of his eyes behind the
glasses. He looked as if he wished I'd change the subject. In his dry,
undemonstrative way, I think he liked me. Or at least he liked me when I
wasn't trying to make him think about things outside his safe and secure
little framework. But I didn't give in. If men of science are not going
to take up the evidence and work it over, then where are we? And are
they men of science?
"Before Rhine came along, and brought all this down to the level of
laboratory experimentation," I pursued, "how were those things to be
explained? Say a fellow had some unusual powers, things that happened
around him, things he knew without any explanation for knowing them.
I'll tell you. There were two courses open to him. He could express it
in the semantics of spiritism, or he could admit to witchcraft and
sorcery. Take your pick; those were the only two systems of semantics
which had been built up through the ages.
"We've got a third one now--parapsychology. If I had asked you to attend
an experiment in parapsychology, you'd have agreed at once. But when I
ask you to attend a seance, you balk! Man, what difference does it make
what we call it? Isn't it up to us to investigate the evidence wherever
we find it? No matter what kind of semantic debris it's hiding in?"
Auerbach shoved himself down off the bench, and pulled out a beat-up
package of cigarettes.
"All right, Kennedy," he had said resignedly, "I'll attend your seance."
* * * * *
The other invited guests were Sara, Lieutenant Murphy, Old Stone Face,
myself, and, of course, the Swami. This was probably not typical of the
Swami's usual audience composition.
Six chairs were placed at even intervals around the table. I had found
soft white lights overhead to be most suitable for my occasional night
work, but the Swami insisted that a blue light, a dim one, was most
suitable for his night work.
I made no objection to that condition. One of the elementary basics of
science is that laboratory conditions may be varied to meet the
necessities of the experiment. If a red-lighted darkness is necessary to
an operator's successful development of photographic film, then I could
hardly object to a blue-lighted darkness for the development of the
Swami's effects.
Neither could I object to the Swami's insistence that he sit with his
back to the true North. When he came into the room, accompanied by
Lieutenant Murphy, his thoughts seemed turned in upon himself, or wafted
somewhere out of this world. He stopped in mid-stride, struck an
attitude of listening, or feeling, perhaps, and slowly shifted his body
back and forth.
"Ah," he said at last, in a tone of satisfaction, "there is the North!"
It was, but this was not particularly remarkable. There is no confusing
maze of hallways leading to the Personnel Department from the outside.
Applicants would be unable to find us if there were. If he had got his
bearings out on the street, he could have managed to keep them.
He picked up the nearest chair with his own hands and shifted it so that
it would be in tune with the magnetic lines of Earth. I couldn't object.
The Chinese had insisted upon such placement of household articles,
particularly their beds, long before the Earth's magnetism had been
discovered by science. The birds had had their direction-finders attuned
to it, long before there was man.
Instead of objecting, the lieutenant and I meekly picked up the table
and shifted it to the new position. Sara and Auerbach came in as we were
setting the table down. Auerbach gave one quick look at the Swami in his
black cloak and nearly white turban, and then looked away.
"Remember semantics," I murmured to him, as I pulled out Sara's chair
for her. I seated her to the left of the Swami. I seated Auerbach to the
right of him. If the lieutenant was, by chance, in cahoots with the
Swami, I would foil them to the extent of not letting them sit side by
side at least. I sat down at the opposite side of the table from the
Swami. The lieutenant sat down between me and Sara.
The general manager came through the door at that instant, and took
charge immediately.
"All right now," Old Stone Face said crisply, in his low, rumbling
voice, "no fiddle-faddling around. Let's get down to business."
The Swami closed his eyes.
"Please be seated," he intoned to Old Stone Face. "And now, let us all
join hands in an unbroken circle."
Henry shot him a beetle-browed look as he sat down between Auerbach and
me, but at least he was cooeperative to the extent that he placed both
his hands on top of the table. If Auerbach and I reached for them, we
would be permitted to grasp them.
I leaned back and snapped off the overhead light to darken the room in
an eerie, blue glow.
We sat there, holding hands, for a full ten minutes. Nothing happened.
* * * * *
It was not difficult to estimate the pattern of Henry's mind. Six
persons, ten minutes, equals one man-hour. One man-hour of idle time to
be charged into the cost figure of the antigrav unit. He was staring
fixedly at the cylinders which lay in random positions in the center of
the table, as if to assess their progress at this processing point. He
apparently began to grow dissatisfied with the efficiency rating of the
manufacturing process at this point. He stirred restlessly in his chair.
The Swami seemed to sense the impatience, or it might have been
coincidence.
"There is some difficulty," he gasped in a strangulated, high voice. "My
guides refuse to come through."
"Harrumph!" exclaimed Old Stone Face. It left no doubt about what _he_
would do if _his_ guides did not obey orders on the double.
"Someone in this circle is not a True Believer!" the Swami accused in an
incredulous voice.
In the dim blue light I was able to catch a glimpse of Sara's face. She
was on the verge of breaking apart. I managed to catch her eye and flash
her a stern warning. Later she told me she had interpreted my expression
as stark fear, but it served the same purpose. She smothered her
laughter in a most unladylike sound somewhere between a snort and a
squawk.
The Swami seemed to become aware that somehow he was not holding his
audience spellbound.
"Wait!" he commanded urgently; then he announced in awe-stricken tones,
"I feel a presence!"
There was a tentative, half-hearted rattle of some castanets--which
could have been managed by the Swami wiggling one knee, if he happened
to have them concealed there. This was followed by the thin squawk of a
bugle--which could have been accomplished by sitting over toward one
side and squashing the air out of a rubber bulb attached to a ten-cent
party horn taped to his thigh.
Then there was nothing. Apparently his guides had made a tentative
appearance and were, understandably, completely intimidated by Old Stone
Face. We sat for another five minutes.
"Harrumph!" Henry cleared his throat again, this time louder and more
commanding.
"That is all," the Swami said in a faint, exhausted voice. "I have
returned to you on your material plane."
* * * * *
The handholding broke up in the way bits of metal, suddenly charged
positive and negative, would fly apart. I leaned back again and snapped
on the white lights. We all sat there a few seconds, blinking in what
seemed a sudden glare.
The Swami sat with his chin dropped down to his chest. Then he raised
stricken, liquid eyes.
"Oh, now I remember where I am," he said. "What happened? I never know."
Old Stone Face threw him a look of withering scorn. He picked up one of
the cylinders and hefted it in the palm of his hand. It did not fly
upward to bang against the ceiling. It weighed about what it ought to
weigh. He tossed the cylinder contemptuously, back into the pile,
scattering them over the table. He pushed back his chair, got to his
feet, and stalked out of the room without looking at any of us.
The Swami made a determined effort to recapture the spotlight.
"I'm afraid I must have help to walk to the car," he whispered. "I am
completely exhausted. Ah, this work takes so much out of me. Why do I go
on with it? Why? Why? Why?"
He drooped in his chair, then made a valiantly brave effort to rise
under his own power when he felt the lieutenant's hands lifting him up.
He was leaning heavily on the lieutenant as they went out the door.
Sara looked at me dubiously.
"Will there be anything else?" she asked. Her tone suggested that since
nothing had been accomplished, perhaps we should get some work out
before she left.
"No, Sara," I answered. "Good night. See you in the morning."
She nodded and went out the door.
Apparently none of them had seen what I saw. I wondered if Auerbach had.
He was a trained observer. He was standing beside the table looking down
at the cylinders. He reached over and poked at one of them with his
forefinger. He was pushing it back and forth. It gave him no resistance
beyond normal inertia. He pushed it a little farther out of parallel
with true North. It did not try to swing back.
So he had seen it. When I'd laid the cylinders down on the table they
were in random positions. During the seance there had been no jarring of
the table, not even so much as a rap or quiver which could have been
caused by the Swami's lifted knee. When we'd shifted the table, after
the Swami had changed his chair, the cylinders hadn't been disturbed.
When Old Stone Face had been staring at them during the seance--seance?,
hah!--they were laying in inert, random positions.
But when the lights came back on, and just before Henry had picked one
up and tossed it back to scatter them, every cylinder had been laying in
orderly parallel--and with one end pointing to true North!
I stood there beside Auerbach, and we both poked at the cylinders some
more. They gave us no resistance, nor showed that they had any ideas
about it one way or the other.
"It's like so many things," I said morosely. "If you do just happen to
notice anything out of the ordinary at all, it doesn't seem to mean
anything."
"Maybe that's because you're judging it outside of its own framework,"
Auerbach answered. I couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or
speculative. "What I don't understand," he went on, "is that once the
cylinders having been activated by whatever force there was in
action--all right, call it psi--well, why didn't they retain it, the way
the other cylinders retained the antigrav force?"
I thought for a moment. Something about the conditional setup seemed to
give me an idea.
"You take a photographic plate," I reasoned. "Give it a weak exposure to
light, then give it a strong blast of overexposure. The first exposure
is going to be blanked out by the second. Old Stone Face was feeling
pretty strongly toward the whole matter."
Auerbach looked at me, unbelieving.
"There isn't any rule about who can have psi talent," I argued. "I'm
just wondering if I shouldn't wire General Sanfordwaithe and tell him
to cut our order for poltergeists down to five."
* * * * *
I spent a glum, restless night. I knew, with certainty, that Old Stone
Face was going to give me trouble. I didn't need any psi talent for
that, it was an inevitable part of his pattern. He had made up his mind
to take charge of this antigrav operation, and he wouldn't let one bogus
seance stop him more than momentarily.
If it weren't so close to direct interference with my department, I'd
have been delighted to sit on the side lines and watch him try to
command psi effects to happen. That would be like commanding some random
copper wire and metallic cores to start generating electricity.
For once I could have overlooked the interference with my department if
I didn't know, from past experience, that I'd be blamed for the
consequent failure. That's a cute little trick of top executives,
generally. They get into something they don't understand, really louse
it up, then, because it is your department, you are the one who failed.
Ordinarily I liked my job, but if this sort of thing went too far--
But more than saving my job, I had the feeling that if I were allowed to
go along, carefully and experimentally, I just might discover a few of
the laws about psi. There was the tantalizing feeling that I was on the
verge of knowing at least something.
The Pentagon people had been right. The Swami was an obvious phony of
the baldest fakery, yet he had something. He had something, but how was
I to get hold of it? Just what kind of turns with what around what did
you make to generate a psi force? It took two thousand years for man to
move from the concept that amber was a stone with a soul to the concept
of static electricity. Was there any chance I could find some shortcuts
in reducing the laws governing psi? The one bright spot of my morning
was that Auerbach hadn't denied seeing the evidence of the cylinders
pointing North.
It turned out to be the only bright spot. I had no more than got to my
office and sorted out the routine urgencies which had to be handled
immediately from those which could be put off a little longer, when Sara
announced the lieutenant and the Swami. So I put everything else off,
and told her to send them right in.
The Swami was in an incoherent rage. The lieutenant was contracting his
eyebrows in a scowl and clenching his fists in frustration. In a voice,
soaring into the falsetto, the Swami demanded that he be sent back to
Brooklyn where he was appreciated. The lieutenant had orders to stay
with the Swami, but he didn't have any orders about returning either to
Brooklyn or the Pentagon. I managed, at last, to get the lieutenant
seated in a straight chair, but the Swami couldn't stay still long
enough. He stalked up and down the room, swirling his slightly odorous
black cloak on the turns. Gradually the story came out.
* * * * *
Old Stone Face, a strong advocate of Do It Now, hadn't wasted any time.
From his home he had called the Swami at his hotel and commanded him to
report to the general manager's office at once. Apparently they both got
there about the same time, and Henry had waded right in.
Apparently Henry, too, had spent a restless night. He accused the Swami
of inefficiency, bungling, fraud, deliberate insubordination, and a few
other assorted faults for having made a fool out of us all at the
seance. He'd as much as commanded the Swami to cut out all this
shilly-shallying and get down to the business of activating antigrav
cylinders, or else. He hadn't been specific about what the "or else"
would entail.
It was up to me to pick up the pieces, if I could.
"Now I'm sure he really didn't mean--" I began to pour oil on the
troubled waters. "With your deep insight, Swami--The fate of great
martyrs throughout the ages--" Gradually the ego-building phrases calmed
him down. He grew willing to listen, if for no more than the
anticipation of hearing more of them.
He settled down into the crying chair at last, and I could see his
valence shifting from outraged anger to a vast and noble forgiveness.
This much was not difficult. To get him to cooeperate, consciously and
enthusiastically, well that might not be so easy.
Each trade has its own special techniques. The analytical chemist has a
series of routines he tries when he wishes to reduce an unknown compound
to its constituents. To the chemically uneducated, this may appear to be
a fumbling, hit or miss, kind of procedure. The personnel man, too, has
his series of techniques. It may appear to be no more than random,
pointless conversation.
I first tried the routine process of reasoning. I didn't expect it to
work; it seldom does, but it can't be eliminated until it has been
tested.
* * * * *
"You must understand," I said slowly, soothingly, "that our intentions
are constructive. We are simply trying to apply the scientific method to
something which has, heretofore, been wrapped in mysticism."
The shocked freezing of his facial muscles told me that reasoning had
missed its mark. It told me more.
"Science understands nothing, nothing at all!" he snapped, "Science
tries to reduce everything to test tubes and formulae; but I am the
instrument of a mystery which man can never know."
"Well, now," I said reasonably. "Let us not be inconsistent. You say
this is something man was not meant to know; yet you, yourself, have
devoted your life to gaining a greater comprehension of it."
"I seek only to rise above my material self so that I might place
myself in harmony with the flowing symphony of Absolute Truth," he
lectured me sonorously. Oh well, his enrapturement with such terminology
differed little from some of the sciences which tended to grow equally
esoteric. And maybe it meant something. Who was I to say that mine ears
alone heard all the music being played?
It did mean one thing very specifically. There are two basic approaches
to the meaning of life and the universe about us. Man can know: That is
the approach of science, its whole meaning. There are mysteries which
man was not meant to know: That is the other approach. There is no
reconciling of the two on a reasoning basis. I represented the former. I
wasn't sure the Swami was a true representative of the latter, but at
least he had picked up the valence and the phrases.
I made a mental note that reasoning was an unworkable technique with
this compound. Henry, a past master at it, had already tried threats and
abuse. That hadn't worked. I next tried one of the oldest forms in the
teaching of man, a parable.
I told him of my old Aunt Dimity, who was passionately fond of Rummy,
but considered all other card games sinful.
"Ah, how well she proves my point," the Swami countered. "There is an
inner voice, a wisdom greater than the mortal mind to guide us--"
"Well now," I asked reasonably, "why would the inner voice say that
Rummy was O.K., but Casino wasn't?" But it was obvious he liked the
point he had made better than he had liked the one I failed to make.
So I tried the next technique. I tried an appeal for instruction. Often
an opponent will come over to your side if you just confess, honestly,
that he is a better man than you are, and you need his help. What was
the road I must take to achieve the same understanding he had achieved?
His eyes glittered at that, and a mercenary expression underlay the tone
of his answer.
"First there is fasting, and breathing, and contemplating self," he
murmured mendaciously. "I would be unable to aid you until you gave me
full ascendancy over you, so that I might guide your every thought--"
I decided to try inspiration. In breaking down recalcitrant materials in
the laboratory of my personnel office, sometimes one method worked,
sometimes another.
"Do you realize, Swami," I asked, "that the one great drawback
throughout the ages to a full acceptance of psi is the lack of permanent
evidence? It has always been evanescent, perishable. It always rests
solely upon the word of witnesses. But if I could show you a film print,
then you could not doubt the existence of photography, could you?"
I opened my lower desk drawer and pulled out a couple of the Auerbach
cylinders which we had used the night before. I laid them on top of the
desk.
"These cylinders," I said, "act like the photographic film. They will
record, in permanent form, the psi effects you command. At last, for all
mankind the doubt will be stilled; man will at once know the truth; and
you will take your place among the immortals."
[Illustration]
I thought it was pretty good, and that, with his overweening ego, it
would surely do the trick. But the Swami was staring at the cylinders
first in fascination, then fear, then in horror. He jumped to his feet,
without bothering to swirl his robe majestically, rushed over to the
door, fumbled with the knob as if he were in a burning room, managed to
get the door open, and rushed outside. The lieutenant gave me a puzzled
look, and went after him.
* * * * *
I drew a deep breath, and exhaled it audibly. My testing procedures
hadn't produced the results I'd expected, but the last one had revealed
something else.
The Swami believed himself to be a fraud!
As long as he could razzle-dazzle with sonorous phrases, and depend upon
credulous old women to turn them into accurate predictions of things to
come, he was safe enough. But faced with something which would prove
definitely--
Well, what would he do now?
And then I noticed that both cylinders were pointing toward the door. I
watched them, at first, not quite sure; then I grew convinced by the
change in their perspective with the angles of the desk. Almost as
slowly as the minute hand of a watch, they were creeping across the desk
toward the door. They, too, were trying to escape from the room.
I nudged them with my fingers. They hustled along a little faster, as if
appreciative of the help, even coming from me. I saw they were moving
faster, as if they were learning as they tried it. I turned one of them
around. Slowly it turned back and headed for the door again. I lifted
one of them to the floor. It had no tendency to float, but it kept
heading for the door. The other one fell off the desk while I was
fooling with the first one. The jar didn't seem to bother it any. It,
too, began to creep across the rug toward the door.
I opened the door for them. Sara looked up. She saw the two cylinders
come into view, moving under their own power.
"Here we go again," she said, resignedly.
The two cylinders pushed themselves over the door sill, got clear
outside my office. Then they went inert. Both Sara and I tried nudging
them, poking them. They just lay there; mission accomplished. I carried
them back inside my office and lay them on the floor. Immediately both
of them began to head for the door again.
"Simple," Sara said dryly, "they just can't stand to be in the same room
with you, that's all."
"You're not just whistling, gal," I answered. "That's the whole point."
"Have I said something clever?" she asked seriously.
I took the cylinders back into my office and put them in a desk drawer.
I watched the desk for a while, but it didn't change position.
Apparently it was too heavy for the weak force activating the cylinders.
I picked up the phone and called Old Stone Face. I told him about the
cylinders.
"There!" he exclaimed with satisfaction. "I knew all that fellow needed
was a good old-fashioned talking to. Some day, my boy, you'll realize
that you still have a lot to learn about handling men."
"Yes, sir," I answered.
* * * * *
Sara asked me if I were ready to start seeing people, and I told her I
wasn't, that I had some thinking to do. She quipped something about
making the world wait, meaning that I should be occupying my time with
personnel managing, and closed the door.
At that, Old Stone Face had a point. If he hadn't got in and riled
things up, maybe the Swami would not have been emotionally upset enough
to generate the psi force which had activated these new cylinders.
What was I saying? That psi was linked with emotional upheaval? Well,
maybe. Not necessarily, but Rhine had proved that strength of desire had
an effect upon the frequency index of telekinesis. Was there anything at
all we knew about psi, so that we could start cataloguing, sketching in
the beginnings of a pattern? Yes, of course there was.
First, it existed. No one could dismiss the mountainous mass of evidence
unless he just refused to think about the subject.
Second, we could, in time, know what it was and how it worked. You'd
have to give up the entire basis of scientific attitude if you didn't
admit that.
Third, it acted like a sense, rather than as something dependent upon
the intellectual process of thought. You could, for example--I argued to
my imaginary listener--command your nose to smell a rose, and by
autosuggestion you might think you were succeeding; that is, until you
really did smell a real rose, then you'd know that you'd failed to
create it through a thought pattern. The sense would have to be
separated from the process of thinking about the sense.
So what was psi? But, at this point, did it matter much? Wasn't the main
issue one of learning how to produce it, use it? How long did we work
with electricity and get a lot of benefits from it before we formed some
theories about what it was? And, for that matter, did we know what it
was, even yet? "A flow of electrons" was a pretty meaningless phrase,
when you stopped to think about it. I could say psi was a flow of
positrons, and it would mean as much.
I reached over and picked up a cigarette. I started fumbling around in
the center drawer of my desk for a matchbook. I didn't find any. Without
thinking, I opened the drawer containing the two cylinders. They were
pressing up against the side of the desk drawer, still trying to get out
of the room. Single purposed little beasts, weren't they?
I closed the drawer, and noticed that I was crushing out my cigarette in
the ash tray, just as if I'd smoked it. It was the first overt
indication I'd had that maybe my nerves weren't all they should be this
morning.
The sight of the cylinders brought up the fourth point. Experimental
psychology was filled with examples of the known senses being unable to
make correct evaluations when confronted with a totally new object,
color, scent, taste, sound, impression. It was necessary to have a point
of orientation before the new could be fitted into the old. What we
really lacked in psi was the ability to orient its phenomena. The
various psi gifted individuals tried to do this. If they believed in
guides from beyond the veil, that's the way they expressed themselves.
On the other hand, a Rhine card caller might not be able to give you a
message from your dear departed Aunt Minnie if his life depended upon
it--yet it could easily be the same force working in both instances.
Consequently, a medium, such as the Swami, whose basic belief was There
Are Mysteries, would be unable to function in a framework where the
obvious intent was to unveil those mysteries!
That brought up a couple more points. I felt pretty sure of them. I
felt as if I were really getting somewhere. And I had a situation which
was ideal for proving my points.