Waldo

by Robert A. Heinlein

  ‘We live in the Other World?

  ‘How else could we live? The mind - not the brain, but the mind - is in the Other World, and reaches this world through the body. That is one true way of looking at it, though there are others.

  ‘Is there more than one way of looking at deKalb receptors?

  ‘Certainly.

  ‘If I had a set which is not working right brought in here, would you show me how to look at it?

  ‘It is not needful,' said Schneider, ‘and I do not like for machines to be in my house. I will draw you a picture.

  Waldo felt impelled to insist, but he squelched his feeling. ‘You have come here in humility,' he told himself, ‘asking for instruction. Do not tell the teacher how to teach.

  Schneider produced a pencil and a piece of paper, on which he made a careful and very neat sketch of the antennae sheaf and main axis of a skycar. The sketch was reasonably accurate as well, although it lacked several essential minor details

  ‘These fingers,' Schneider said, ‘reach deep into the Other World to draw their strength. In turn it passes down this pillar' - he indicated the axis - to where it is used to move the car.

  A fair allegorical explanation, thought Waldo. By consider­ing the ‘Other World' simply a term for the hypothetical ether, it could be considered correct if not complete. But it told him nothing. ‘Hugh Donald,' Schneider went on, ‘was tired and fretting. He found one of the bad truths.

  ‘Do you mean,' Waldo said slowly, ‘that McLeod's ship failed because he was worried about it?

  ‘How else?

  Waldo was not prepared to answer that one. It had become evident that the old man had some quaint superstitions; never­theless he might still be able to show Waldo what to do, even though Schneider did not know why. ‘And what did you do to change it?

  ‘I made no change; I looked for the other truth.

  ‘But how? We found some chalk marks-

  ‘Those? They were but to aid me in concentrating my at­tention in the proper direction. I drew them down so,' - he illustrated with pencil on the sketch - ‘and thought how the fingers reached out for power. And so they did.

  ‘That is all? Nothing more?

  ‘That is enough.

  Either, Waldo considered, the old man did not know how he had accomplished the repair, or he had had nothing to do with it - sheer and amazing coincidence. He had been resting the empty cup on the rim of his tank, the weight supported by the metal while his fingers merely steadied it. His preoccupation caused him to pay too little heed to it; it slipped from his tired fingers, clattered and crashed to the floor

  He was much chagrined. ‘Oh, I'm sorry, Grandfather. I'll send you another.

  ‘No matter. I will mend.' Schneider carefully gathered up the pieces and placed them on the desk. ‘You have tired,' he added. ‘That is not good. It makes you lose what you have gained. Go back now to your house, and when you have rested, you can practise reaching for the strength by yourself.

  It seemed a good idea to Waldo; he was growing very tired, and it was evident that he was to learn nothing specific from the pleasant old fraud. He promised, emphatically and quite in­sincerely, to practise ‘reaching for strength', and asked Schnei­der to do him the favour of summoning his bearers

  The trip back was uneventful. Waldo did not even have the spirit to bicker with the pilot

  Stalemate. Machines that did not work but should, and machines that did work but in an impossible manner. And no one to turn to but one foggy-headed old man. Waldo worked lackadaisically for several days, repeating, for the most part, investigations he had already made rather than admit to himself that he was stuck, that he did not know what to do, that he was, in fact, whipped and might as well call Gleason and admit it

  The two ‘bewitched' sets of deKalbs continued to work whenever activated, with the same strange and incredible flex­ing of each antenna. Other deKalbs which had failed in opera­tion and had been sent to him for investigation still refused to function. Still others, which had not yet failed, performed beautifully without the preposterous fidgeting

  For the umpteenth time he took out the little sketch Schneider had made and examined it. There was, he thought, just one more possibility: to return again to Earth and insist that Schneider actually do in his presence, whatever it was he had done which caused the deKalbs to work. He knew now that he should have insisted on it in the first place, but he had been so utterly played out by having to fight that devilish thick field that he had not had the will to persist

  Perhaps he could have Stevens do it and have the process stereophotoed for a later examination. No, the old man had a superstitious prejudice against artificial images

  He floated gently over to the vicinity of one of the inopera­tive deKalbs. What Schneider had claimed to have done was preposterously simple. He had drawn chalk marks down each antenna so, for the purpose of fixing his attention. Then he had gazed down them and thought about them ‘reaching out for power', reaching into the Other World, stretching- Baldur began to bark frantically

  ‘Shut up, you fool!' Waldo snapped, without taking his eyes off the antennae

  Each separate pencil of metal was wiggling, stretching. There was the low, smooth hum of perfect operation

  Waldo was still thinking about it when the televisor deman­ded his attention. He had never been in any danger of crack­ing up mentally as Rambeau had done; nevertheless, he had thought about the matter in a fashion which made his head ache. He was still considerably bemused when he cut in his end of the sound-vision circuit. ‘Yes?

  It was Stevens. ‘Hello, Mr Jones. Uh, we wondered... that is- ‘Speak up, man!

  ‘Well, how close are you to a solution?' Stevens blurted out. ‘Matters are getting pretty urgent.

  ‘In what way?

  ‘There was a partial breakdown in Great New York last night. Fortunately it was not at peak load and the ground crew were able to install spares before the reserves were ex­hausted, but you can imagine what it would have been like during the rush hour. In my own department the crashes have doubled in the past few weeks, and our underwriters have given notice. We need results pretty quick.

  ‘You'll get your results,' Waldo said loftily. ‘I'm in the final stages of the research.' He was actually not that confident, but Stevens irritated him even more than most of the smooth apes

  Doubt and reassurance mingled in Stevens's face. ‘I don't suppose you could care to give us a hint of the general nature of the solution?

  No, Waldo could not. Still - it would be fun to pull Stevens's leg. ‘Come close to the pickup, Dr Stevens. I'll tell you.' He leaned forward himself, until they were almost nose to nose - in effect. ‘Magic is loose in the world!

  He cut the circuit at once

  Down in the underground labyrinth of North America's home plant, Stevens stared at the blank screen. ‘What's the trouble, chief?' McLeod inquired

  ‘I don't know. I don't rightly know. But I think that Fatty has slipped his cams, just the way Rambeau did.

  McLeod grinned delightedly. ‘How sweet! I always did think he was a hoot owl.

  Stevens looked very sober. ‘You had better pray that he hasn't gone nuts. We're depending on him. Now let me see those operation reports.

  Magic loose in the world. It was as good an explanation as any, Waldo mused. Causation gone haywire; sacrosanct physi­cal laws no longer operative. Magic. As Gramps Schneider had put it, it seemed to depend on the way one looked at it

  Apparently Schneider had known what he was talking about, although he naturally had no real grasp of the physical theory involved in the deKalbs

  Wait a minute now! Wait a minute. He had been going at this problem wrongly perhaps. He had approached it with a certain point of view himself, a point of view which had made him critical of the old man's statements - an assumption that he, Waldo, knew more about the whole matter than Schneider did. To be sure he had gone to see Schneider, but he had thought of him as a back- country hex doctor, a ma
n who might possess one piece of information useful to Waldo, but who was basically ignorant and superstitious

  Suppose he were to review the situation from a different viewpoint. Let it be assumed that everything Schneider had to say was coldly factual and enlightened, rather than allegorical and superstitious- He settled himself to do a few hours of hard thinking. In the first place Schneider had used the phrase ‘the Other World' time and again. What did it mean, literally? A ‘world' was a space-time-energy continuum; an ‘Other World' was, therefore, such a continuum, but a different one from the one in which he found himself. Physical theory found nothing repugnant in such a notion; the possibility of infinite numbers of continua was a familiar, orthodox speculation. It was even convenient in certain operations to make such an assumption

  Had Gramps Schneider meant that? A literal, physical ‘Other World'? On rcflection, Waldo was convinced that he must have meant just that, even though he had not used con­ventional scientific phraseology. ‘Other World' sounds poeti­cal, but to say an ‘additional continuum' implies physical meaning. The terms had led him astray

  Schneider had said that the Other World was all round, here, there, and everywhere. Well, was not that a fair descrip­tion of a space superposed and in one-to-one correspondence? Such a space might be so close to this one that the interval between them was an infinitesimal, yet unnoticed and unreach­able, just as two planes may be considered as coextensive and separated by an unimaginably short interval, yet be perfectly discreet, one from the other

  The Other Space was not entirely unreachable; Schneider had spoken of reaching into it. The idea was fantastic, yet he must accept it for the purposes of this investigation. Schneider had implied - no - stated that it was a matter of mental out­look

  Was that really so fantastic? If a continuum were an un­measurably short distance away, yet completely beyond one's physical grasp, would it be strange to find that it was most easily reached through some subtle and probably subconscious operation of the brain? The whole matter was subtle - and Heaven knew that no one had any real idea of how the brain works. No idea at all. It was laughably insufficient to try to explain the writing of a symphony in terms of the mechanics of colloids. No, nobody knew how the brain worked; one more inexplicable ability in the brain was not too much to swallow

  Come to think of it, the whole notion of consciousness and thought was fantastically improbable. All right, so McLeod disabled his skycar himself by think­ing bad thoughts; Schneider fixed it by thinking the correct thoughts. Then what? He reached a preliminary conclusion almost at once: by ex­tension, the other deKalh failures were probably failures on the part of the operators. The operators were probably run­down, tired out, worried about something, and in some fashion still not clear they infected, or affected, the deKalbs with their own troubles. For convenience let us say that the deKalbs were short- circuited into the Other World. Poor terminology, but it helped him to form a picture

  Grimes's hypothesis! ‘Run-down, tired out, worried about something!' Not proved yet, but he felt sure of it. The epi­demic of crashcs through material was simply an aspect of the general anyasthenia caused by short-wave radiation

  If that were true- He cut in a sight-sound circuit to Earth and demanded to talk with Stevens

  ‘Dr Stevens,' he began at once, ‘There is a preliminary pre­cautionary measure which should be undertaken right away.

  ‘Yes?

  ‘First, let me ask you this: Have you had many failures of deKalbs in private ships? What is the ratio?

  ‘I can't give you exact figures at the moment,' Stevens answered, somewhat mystified, ‘but there have been practically none. It's the commercial lines which have suffered.

  ‘Just as I suspected. A private pilot won't fly unless he feels up to it, but a man with a job goes ahead no matter how he feels. Make arrangements for special physical and psycho ex­aminations for all commercial pilots flying deKalb-type ships. Ground any who are not feeling in tiptop shape. Call Dr Grimes. He'll tell you what to look for.

  ‘That's a pretty tall order, Mr Jones. After all, most of those pilots, practically all of them, aren't our employees. We don't have much control over them.

  ‘That's your problem,' Waldo shrugged. ‘I'm trying to tell you how to reduce crashes in the interim before I submit my complete solution.

  ‘But-' Waldo heard no more of the remark; he had cut off when he himself was through. He was already calling over a perman­ently energized, leased circuit which kept in touch with his terrestrial business office - with his ‘trained seals'. He gave Them some very odd instructions - orders for books, old books, rare books. Books dealing with magic

  Stevens consulted with Gleason before attempting to do anything about Waldo's difficult request. Gleason was dubi­ous. ‘He offered no reason for the advice?

  ‘None. He told me to look up Dr Grimes and get his advice as to what specifically to look for.

  ‘Dr Grimes?

  ‘The MD who introduced me to Waldo - mutual friend.

  ‘I recall. him... it will be difficult to go about ground­ing men who don't work for us. Still, I suppose several of our larger customers would cooperate if we asked them to and gave them some sort of a reason. What are you looking so odd about?

  Stevens told him of Waldo's last, inexplicable statement. ‘Do you suppose it could be affecting him the way it did Dr Rarnbeau?

  ‘Mm-m-m. Could be, I suppose. In which case it would not be well to follow his advice. Have you anything else to sug­gest?

  ‘No - frankly.

  ‘Then I see no alternative but to follow his advice. He's our last hope. A forlorn one, perhaps, but our only one.

  Stevens brightened a little. ‘I could talk to Doc Grimes about it. He knows more about Waldo than anyone else.

  ‘You have to consult him anyway, don't you? Very well -do so.

  Grimes listened to the story without comment. When Stevens had concluded he said, ‘Waldo must be referring to the symptoms I have observed with respect to short-wave exposure. That's easy; you can have the proofs of the mono­graph I've been preparing. It'll tell you all about it.

  The information did not reassure Stevens; it helped to con­firm his suspicion that Waldo had lost his grip. But he said nothing. Grimes continued, ‘As for the other, Jim, I can't visu­alize Waldo losing his mind that way.

  ‘He never did seem very stable to me.

  ‘I know what you mean. But his paranoid streak is no more like what Rambeau succumbed to than chickenpox is like mumps. Matter of fact, one psychosis protects against the other. But I'll go see.

  ‘You will? Good!

  ‘Can't go today. Got a broken leg and some children's colds that'll bear watching. Been some polio around. Ought to be able to make it the end of the week though.

  ‘Doc, why don't you give up GP work? It must be deadly.

  ‘Used to think so when I was younger. But about forty years ago I quit treating diseases and started treating people. Since then I've enjoyed it.

  Waldo indulged in an orgy of reading, gulping the treatises on magic and related subjects as fast as he could. He had never been interested in such subjects before; now, in reading about them with the point of view that there might be - and even probably was - something to be learned, he found them in­tensely interesting

  There were frequent references to another world; sometimes it was called the Other World, sometimes the Little World. Read with the conviction that the term referred to an actual, material, different continuum, he could see that many of the practitioners of the forbidden arts had held the same literal viewpoint. They gave directions for using this other world; sometimes the directions were fanciful, sometimes they were baldly practical

  It was fairly evident that at least 90per cent of all magic, probably more, was balderdash and sheer mystification. The mystification extended even to the practitioners, he felt; they lacked the scientific method; they employed a single-valued logic as faulty as the two-valued logic of the
obsolete Spencer determinism; there was no suggestion of modern extensional, many-valued logic

  Nevertheless, the laws of contiguity, of sympathy, and of homeopathy had a sort of twisted rightness to them when con­sidered in relation to the concept of another, different, but accessible, world. A man who had some access to a different space might well believe in a logic in which a thing could be, not be, or be anything with equal ease

  Despite the nonsense and confusion which characterized the treatments of magic which dated back to the period when the art was in common practice, the record of accomplishment of the art was impressive. There was curare and digitalis, and quinine, hypnotism, and telepathy. There was the hydraulic engineering of the Egyptian priests. Chemistry itself was de­rived from alchemy; for that matter, most modern science owed its' origins to the magicians. Science had stripped off the surplusage, run it through the wringer of two-valued logic, and placed the knowledge in a form in which anyone could use it

  Unfortunately, that part of magic which refused to conform to the neat categories of the nineteenth-century methodologists was lopped off and left out of the body of science. It fell into disrepute, was forgotten save as fable and superstition

  Waldo began to think of the arcane arts as aborted sciences, abandoned before they had been clarified

  And yet the manifestations of the sort of uncertainty which had characterized some aspects of magic and which he now attributed to hypothetical additional continua had occurred frequently, even in modern times. The evidence was over­whelming to anyone who approached it with an open mind: Poltergeisten, stones falling from the sky, apportation. ‘be­witched' persons - or, as he Thought of them, persons who for some undetermined reason were loci of uncertainty - ‘haunted' houses, strange fires of the sort that would have once been attributed to salamanders. There were hundreds of such cases, carefully recorded and well vouched for, but ignored by ortho­dox science as being impossible. They were impossible, by known law, but considered from the standpoint of a coexten­sive additional continuum, they became entirely credible