Sense from Thought Divide

by Mark Clifton

Most people cling too desperately tothe ego-saving formula: Man cannot know man.

  "Look, lieutenant," I said, with an idea that we'd better get down tobusiness. "Have you been checked out on what this is all about?"

  "Well, sir," he answered, as if he were answering a question in class,"I was cleared for top security, and told that a few months ago you andyour Dr. Auerbach, here at Computer Research, discovered a way to createantigravity. I was told you claimed you had to have a poltergeist in theprocess. You told General Sanfordwaithe that you needed six of them,males. That's about all, sir. So the Poltergeist Division discovered theSwami, and I was assigned to bring him out here to you."

  "Well then, Lieutenant Murphy, you go back to the Pentagon and tellGeneral Sanfordwaithe that--" I could see by the look on his face thatmy message would probably not get through verbatim. "Never mind, I'llwrite it," I amended disgustedly. "And you can carry the message."Lesser echelons do not relish the task of repeating uncomplimentarywords verbatim to a superior. Not usually.

  I punched Sara's button on my intercom.

  "After all the exposure out there to the Swami," I said, "if you'restill with us on this crass, materialistic plane, will you bring yourbook?"

  "My astral self has been hovering over you, guarding you, every minute,"Sara answered dreamily.

  "Can it take shorthand?" I asked dryly.

  "Maybe I'd better come in," she replied.

  When she came through the door the lieutenant gave her one appreciativeglance, then returned to his aloof pedestal of indifference. Obviouslyhis pattern was to stand in majestic splendor and allow the girls tofawn somewhere down near his shoes. These lads with a glamour boycomplex almost always gravitate toward some occupation which willrequire them to wear a uniform. Sara catalogued him as quickly as I did,and seemed unimpressed. But you never can tell about a woman; thesmartest of them will fall for the most transparent poses.

  "General Sanfordwaithe, dear sir," I began as she sat down at one cornerof my desk and flipped open her book. "It takes more than a towelwrapped around the head and some mutterings about infinity to getpoltergeist effects. So I am returning your phony Swami to you with mycompliments--"

  "Beg your pardon, sir," the lieutenant interrupted, and there was acertain note of suppressed triumph in his voice. "In case you rejectedour applicant for the poltergeist job you have in mind, I was to handyou this." He undid a lovingly polished button of his tunic, slipped hishand beneath the cloth and pulled forth a long, sealed envelope.

  I took it from him and noted the three sealing-wax imprints on the flap.From being carried so close to his heart for so long, the envelope wasslightly less crisp than when he had received it. I slipped my letteropener in under the side flap, and gently extracted the letter without,in anyway, disturbing the wax seals which were to have guaranteed itsprivacy. There wasn't any point in my doing it, of course, except todemonstrate to the lieutenant that I considered the whole deal as asilly piece of cloak and dagger stuff.

  After the general formalities, the letter was brief: "Dear Mr. Kennedy:We already know the Swami is a phony, but our people have been convincedthat in spite of this there are some unaccountable effects. We haveadvised your general manager, Mr. Henry Grenoble, that we are in the actof carrying out our part of the agreement, namely, to provide you withsix male-type poltergeists, and to both you and him we are respectfullysuggesting that you get on with the business of putting the antigravityunits into immediate production."

  I folded the letter and tucked it into one side of my desk pad. I lookedat Sara.

  "Never mind the letter to General Sanfordwaithe," I said. "He hassuccessfully cut off my retreat in that direction." I looked over at thelieutenant. "All right," I said resignedly, "I'll apologize to theSwami, and make a try at using him."

  I picked up the letter again and pretended to be reading it. But thiswas just a stall, because I had suddenly been struck by the thought thatmy extreme haste in scoring off the Swami and trying to get rid of himwas because I didn't want to get involved again with poltergeists. Notany, of any nature.

  The best way on earth to avoid having to explain psi effects and come toterms with them is simply to deny them, convince oneself that they don'texist. I sighed deeply. It looked as if I would be denied that littlehuman privilege of closing my eyes to the obvious.

  * * * * *

  Old Stone Face, our general manager, claimed to follow the philosophy ofbuilding men, not machines. To an extent he did. His favorite phrasewas, "Don't ask me how. I hired you to tell me." He hired a man to do ajob, and I will say for him, he left that man alone as long as the jobgot done. But when a man flubbed a job, and kept on flubbing it, thenMr. Henry Grenoble stepped in and carried out his own job--generalmanaging.

  He had given me the assignment of putting antigrav units intoproduction. He had given me access to all the money I would need for thepurpose. He had given me sufficient time, months of it. And, in spite ofall this cooeperation, he still saw no production lines which spewed outantigrav units at some such rate as seventeen and five twelfths persecond.

  Apparently he got his communication from the Pentagon about the time Igot mine. Apparently it contained some implication that ComputerResearch, under his management, was not pursuing the cause ofmanufacturing antigrav units with diligence and dispatch. Apparently hedid not like this.

  I had no more than apologized to the Swami, and received his martyredforgiveness, and arranged for a hotel suite for him and the lieutenant,when Old Stone Face sent for me. He began to manage with diligence anddispatch.

  "Now you look here, Kennedy," he said forcefully, and his use of my lastname, rather than my first, was a warning, "I've given you every chance.When you and Auerbach came up with that antigrav unit last fall, Ididn't ask a lot of fool questions. I figured you knew what you weredoing. But the whole winter has passed, and here it is spring, and youhaven't done anything that I can see. I didn't say anything when youtold General Sanfordwaithe that you'd have to have poltergeists to carryon the work, but I looked it up. First I thought you'd flipped your lid,then I thought you were sending us all on a wild goose chase so we'dleave you alone, then I didn't know what to think."

  I nodded. He wasn't through.

  "Now I think you're just pretending the whole thing doesn't existbecause you don't want to fool with it."

  Perhaps he had come to the right decision after all. I'd resolutelywashed the whole thing out of my mind. But I wasn't going to get awaywith it. I could see it coming.

  "For the first time, Kennedy, I'm asking you what happened?" he saidfirmly, but his tone was more telling than asking. So I was going tohave to discuss frameworks with Old Stone Face, after all.

  "Henry," I asked slowly, "have you kept up your reading in theoreticalphysics?"

  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 thesame age group would tend to mollify him a little, "physics was allsnug, secure, safe, definite. A fact was a fact, and that's all therewas to it. But there's been some changes made. There's the cooerdinatesystems of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change fromframework to framework. There's the application of multivalued logic tophysics where a fact becomes not a fact any longer. The astronomers talkabout the expanding universe--it's a piker compared to man's expandingconcepts about that universe."

  He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beatingaround the bush.

  "That all has a bearing on what happened," I assured him. "You have tounderstand what was behind the facts before you can understand the factsthemselves. 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, theway the brain stores them. He brought a plastic cylinder of it over tome, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went onwith my personnel management business
at hand."

  Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowlyand deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puffof smoke.

  * * * * *

  "The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a littlegirl, daughter of one of our production women. She'd been throwingthings, 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 atantrum, and when it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goopwas trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what happened," Isaid.

  He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie thefacts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself.After all, we were in the business of manufacturing computers. Thegeneral manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primaryarithmetic.

  "Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background," I wenton. "Her mother was from the old country, one of the Slav races. There'sthe inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed themon to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kidnever got out with other children. Children, kept alone, never seeinganybody, get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who, knows what kind ofa cooerdinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her mother wouldcome home at night and go about her tasks talking aloud, half to thedaughter, 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 herselfthrown out of the place,' things like that."

  "So what does that mean, Ralph?" he asked. His switch to my first nameindicated he was trying to work with me instead of pushing me.

  "To a child who never knew anything else," I answered, "one who hadnever learned to distinguish reality from unreality--as we would defineit from our agreed framework--a special cooerdinate system might be builtup where 'Everybody was up in the air at work, today,' might be takenliterally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn't happen, ofcourse--it says in the textbooks--but since it has been happening allthrough history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems ofmultivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we alreadyhad all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smugcertainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to getsome of the answers we thought we had.

  "We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We're stilltrying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tapeand it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have toknow how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know how tocode or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder will store apsi impulse, but we don't know how. So we have to keep working with psigifted people, at least until we've established some of the basic lawsgoverning 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 withhis hand that I should leave the room.

  I walked through the suite of executive offices and down a soundrebuffing hallway. The throbbing clatter of manufacture of metallicparts made a welcome sound as I went through the far doorway into thefactory. 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 suchand such an alloy, a hole punched here with an allowance offive-ten-thousandths plus or minus tolerance. Snug, secure, safe. Iwondered if psi could ever be blue-printed. Or suppose you put a holehere, but when you looked away and then looked back it had moved, orwasn't there at all?

  Quickly, I got myself into a conversation with a supervisor about therising rate of employee turnover in his department. That was somethingalso 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 Iunderstood.

  On his first rounds of the afternoon, the interoffice messenger broughtme a memorandum from the general manager's office. I opened it with somemisgivings. I was not particularly reassured.

  Mr. Grenoble felt he should work with me more closely on the antigravproject. He understood, from his researches, that the most positive psieffects were experienced during a seance with a medium. Would I kindlyarrange 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 howthey could fit smoothly into Company Operation. This was not to beconstrued as interference in the workings of my department but in theinterests 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 leadersstripping off their coats, throwing them on the floor and stomping onthem; to uplifters who wanted to ban cosmetics on our women employees sothe 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 largeroom. A round table was brought over from the salesmen's report writingroom (used there more for surreptitious poker playing than for writingreports) and placed in the middle of my office--on the grounds that ithad no sharp corners to gouge people in their middles if it got tocavorting about recklessly. In an industrial plant one always has toconsider the matter of safety rules and accident insurance rates.

  In the middle of the table there rested, with dark fluid gleamingthrough clear plastic cases, six fresh cylinders which Auerbach hadprepared in his laboratory over in the plant.

  Auerbach had shown considerable unwillingness to attend the seance; hepleaded being extra busy with experiments just now, but I gave him thatlook which told him I knew he had just been stalling around the last fewmonths, the same as I had.

  If the psi effect had never come out in the first place, there wouldn'thave been any mental conflict. He could have gone on with his processesof refining, simplifying and increasing the efficiency ratings of hisgoop. But this unexpected side effect, the cylinders learning anddemonstrating something he considered basically untrue, had tied hishands with a hopeless sort of frustration. He would have settled gladlyfor a chemical compound which could have added two and two upon request;but when that compound can learn and demonstrate that there's no suchthing as gravity, teaching it simple arithmetic is like ashes in themouth.

  I said as much to him. I stood there in his laboratory, leaned upagainst a work bench, and risked burning an acid hole in the sleeve ofmy jacket just to put over an air of unconcern. He was perched on theedge of an opposite work bench, swinging his feet, and hiding theexpression in his eyes behind the window's reflection upon his polishedglasses. I said even more.

  "You know," I said reflectively, "I'm completely unable to understandthe attitude of supposedly unbiased men of science. Now you take allthat mass of data about psi effects, the odd and unexplainablehappenings, the premonitions, the specific predictions, the accuratedescriptions of far away simultaneously happening events. You take thatwhole mountainous mass of data, evidence, phenomena--"

  * * * * *

  A slight turn of his head gave me a glimpse of his eyes behind theglasses. 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 Iwasn't trying to make him think about things outside his safe and securelittle framework. But I didn't give in. If men of science are not goingto take up the evidence and work it over, then where are we? And arethey men of science?

  "Before Rhine came along, and brought all this down to the level oflaboratory experimentation," I pursued, "how were those things to beexplained? Say a fellow had some unusual powers, things that happenedaround him, things he knew without any explanation for knowing them.I'll tell you. There were two courses open to him. He could express itin the semantics of spiritism, or he could admit to witchcraft andsorcery. Take your pick; those were the
only two systems of semanticswhich had been built up through the ages.

  "We've got a third one now--parapsychology. If I had asked you to attendan experiment in parapsychology, you'd have agreed at once. But when Iask you to attend a seance, you balk! Man, what difference does it makewhat we call it? Isn't it up to us to investigate the evidence whereverwe 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-uppackage 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 theSwami's usual audience composition.

  Six chairs were placed at even intervals around the table. I had foundsoft white lights overhead to be most suitable for my occasional nightwork, but the Swami insisted that a blue light, a dim one, was mostsuitable for his night work.

  I made no objection to that condition. One of the elementary basics ofscience is that laboratory conditions may be varied to meet thenecessities of the experiment. If a red-lighted darkness is necessary toan operator's successful development of photographic film, then I couldhardly object to a blue-lighted darkness for the development of theSwami's