Waldo

by Robert A. Heinlein

  Gleason pulled himself away from Stevens and Harkness, came to Waldo. ‘Mr Jones, can't we arrange this amicably?

  ‘What have you to suggest?

  It was quite an hour later that Waldo, with a sigh of relief, watched his guests' ship depart from the threshold flat. A fine caper, he thought, and it had worked; he had got away with it. He had magnanimously allowed himself to be persua­ded to consolidate, provided - he had allowed himself to be quite temperamental about this - the contract was concluded at once, no fussing around and fencing between lawyers. Now or never - put up or shut up. The proposed contract, he had pointed out virtuously, gave him nothing at all unless his alle­gations about the Jones-chneider-deKalb were correct

  Gleason considered this point and had decided to sign, had signed

  Even then Harkness had attempted to claim that Waldo had been an employee of NAPA. Waldo had written that first contract himself - a specific commission for a contingent fee. Harkness did not have a leg to stand on; even Gleason had agreed to that

  In exchange for all rights to the Jones-Schneider-deKalb, for which he agreed to supply drawings - wait till Stevens saw, and understood, those sketches! - for that he had received the promise of senior stock in NAPA, non-voting, but fully paid up and non- assessable. The lack of active participation in the company had been his own idea. There were going to be more headaches in the power business, headaches aplenty. He could see them coming - bootleg designs, means of out­witting the metering, lots of things. Free power had come, and efforts to stop it would in the long run, he believed, be fruitless

  Waldo laughed so hard that he frightened Baldur, who set up an excited barking

  He could afford to forget Hathaway now. His revenge on NAPA contained one potential flaw; he had assured Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs would continue to operate, would not come unstuck. He believed that to be true simply because he had faith in Gramps Schneider. But he was not prepared to prove it. He knew himself that he did not know enough about the phenomena associated with the Other World to be sure that something would, or would not, happen. It was still going to be necessary to do some hard, extensive research

  But the Other World was a devilishly difficult place to in­vestigate! Suppose, he speculated, that the human race were blind, had never developed eyes. No matter how civilized, enlightened, and scientific the race might have become, it is difficult to see how such a race could ever have developed the concepts of astronomy. They might know of the Sun as a cyclic source of energy having a changing, directional character, for the Sun is so overpowering that it may be ‘seen' with the skin. They would notice it and invent instruments to trap it and examine it

  But the pale stars, would they ever notice them? It seemed most unlikely. The very notion of the celestial universe, its silent depths and starlit grandeur, would be beyond them. Even if one of their scientists should have the concept forced on him in sueh a manner that he was obliged to accept the fantastic, incredible thesis as fact, how then would he go about investigating its details? Waldo tried to imagine an astronomical phototelescope, conceived and designed by a blind man, intended to he oper­ated by a blind man, and capable of collecting data which could he interpreted by a blind man. He gave it up; There were too many hazards. It would take a subtlety of genius far beyond his own to deal with the inescapably tortuous con­catenations of inferential reasoning necessary to the solution of such a problem. It would strain him to invent such instruments for a blind man; he did not see how a blind man could ever overcome the difficulties unassisted

  In a way that was what Schneider had done for him; alone, he would have bogged down

  But even with Schneider's hints the problem of investigat­ing the Other World was still much like the dilemma of the blind astronomer. He could not see the Other World; only through the Schneider treatment had he been able to contact it. Damnation! how could he design instruments to study it? He suspected that he would eventually have to go back to Schneider for further instruction, but that was an expedient so distasteful that he refused to think much about it. Further­more, Gramps Schneider might not be able to teach him much; they did not speak the same language

  This much he did know: the Other Space was there and it could be reached sometimes by proper orientation of the mind, deliberately as Schneider had taught him, or subconsciously as had happened to McLeod and others

  He found the idea distasteful. That thought and thought alone should be able to influence physical phenomena was con­trary to the whole materialistic philosophy in which he had grown up. He had a prejudice in favour of order and invari­able natural laws. His cultural predecessors, the experimental philosophers who had built up the world of science and its concomitant technology, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Steinmetz, Jeans, and their myriad colleagues - these men had thought of the physical universe as a mechanism proceeding by inexorable necessity. Any apparent failure to proceed thus was regarded as an error in observation, an insufficient formula­tion of hypothesis, or an insufficiency of datum

  Even the short reign of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle had not changed the fundamental orientation towards Order and Cosmos; the Heisenbcrg uncertainty was one they were certain of! It could be formulated, expressed, and a rigorous statistical mechanics could be built from it. In 1958 Horo­witz's reformulation of wave mechanics had eliminated the concept. Order and causation were restored. But this damned business! One might as well pray for rain, wish on the Moon, go to faith healers, surrender whole hog to Bishop Berkeley's sweetly cereb-al world-in-your-head. ‘-the tree's not a tree, when there's no one about on the quad!

  Waldo was not emotionally wedded to Absolute Order as Rambeau had been; he was in no danger of becoming ment­ally unbalanced through a failure of his basic conceptions; nevertheless, consarn it, it was convenient for things to work the way one expected them to. On order and natural law was based predictability; without predictability it was impossible to live. Clocks should run evenly; water should boil when heat is applied to it; food should nourish, not poison; deKalb recep­tors should work, work the way they were designed to; Chaos was insupportable - it could not be lived with

  Suppose Chaos were king and the order we thought we de­tected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagina­tion; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convic­tions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the no­tion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos - by Mind! The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, stud­ding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest moun­tains. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism dominated the world then

  More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them

  Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch ex­posure to radiation, had lost their confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty - and thereby let magic loose in the world

  He was beginning, he thought, to understand what had hap­pened to magic. Magic was the erratic law of an animistic world; it had been steadily pushed back by the advancing philosophy of invariant causation. It was gone now - until this new outbreak - and its world with it, except for backwaters of ‘superstition'. Naturally an experimental scientist reported failure when investigating haunted houses, apportations, and the like; his convictions prevent
ed the phenomena from hap­pening

  The deep jungles of Africa might be very different places -when there was no white man around to see! The strangely slippery laws of magic might still obtain

  Perhaps these speculations were too extreme; nevertheless, they had one advantage which orthodox concepts had not: they included Gramps Schncider's hexing of the deKalbs. Any working hypothesis which failed to account for Schneider's -and his own - ability to think a set of deKalbs into operation was not worth a continental. This one did, and it conformed to Gramps's own statements: ‘All matters are doubtful' and ‘A thing can both be, not be, and he anything. There are many true ways of looking at the same thing. Some ways are good, some are bad.

  Very well. Accept it. Act on it. The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it. He cast his vote for order and predictability! He would set the style. He would impress his own concept of the Other World on the cosmos! It had been a good start to assure Gleason that the Schnei­der-treated deKalbs were foolproof. Good. So let it be. They were foolproof. They would never get out of order

  He proceeded to formulate and clarify his own concept of the Other World in his mind. He would think of it as orderly and basically similar to this space. The connexion between the two spaces lay in the neurological system; the cortex, the thala­mus, the spinal cord, and the appended nerve system were closely connected with both spaces. Such a picture was consis­tent with what Schneider had told him and did not conflict with phenomena as he knew it

  Wait. If the neurological system lay in both spaces, then that might account for the relatively slow propagation of nerve impulses as compared with electromagnetic progression. Yes! If the other space had a c constant relatively smaller than that of this space, such would follow

  He began to feel a calm assurance that it was so

  Was he merely speculating - or creating a universe? Perhaps he would have to abandon his mental picture of the Other Space, as being the size and shape of an ostrich egg, since a space with a slower propagation of light is not smaller, but larger, than the space he was used to. No... no, wait a second, the size of a space did not depend on its c constant, but on its radius of curvature in terms of its c constant. Since c was a velocity, size was dependent on the notion of time - in this case time as entropy rate. Therein lay a characteristic which could be compared between the two spaces: they ex­changed energy; they affected each other's entropy. The one which degenerated the more rapidly towards a state of level entropy was the ‘smaller

  He need not abandon his picture of the ostrich egg-good old egg! The Other World was a closed space, with a slow c, a high entropy rate, a short radius, and an entropy state near level - a perfect reservoir of power at every point, ready to spill over into this space wherever he might close the interval. To its inhabitants, if any. it might seem to be hundreds of millions of light years around; to him it was an ostrich egg, turgid to bursting with power

  He was already beginning to think of ways of checking his hypothesis. If, using a Schneider-deKalb, he were to draw energy at the highest rate he could manage, would he affect the local potential? Would it establish an entropy gradient? Could he reverse the process by finding a way to pump power into the Other World? Could he establish different levels at different points and thereby check for degeneration towards level, maximum entropy? Did the speed of nerve impulse propagation furnish a clue to the c of the Other Space? Could such a clue be combined with the entropy and potential investigations to give a mathe­matical picture of the Other Space, in terms of its constants and its age? He set about it. His untrammeled, wild speculations had produced some definite good: he'd tied down at least one line of attack on that Other Space; he'd devised a working prin­ciple for his blind man's telescope mechanism. Whatever the truth ofthe thing was, it was more than a truth; it was a complete series of new truths. It was the very complexity of that series of new truths - the truths, the characteristic laws, that were inherent properties of the Other Space, plus the new truth laws resultant from the interaction of the characteristics of the Other Space with Normal Space. No wonder Rambeau had said anything could happen! Almost anything could, in all probability, by a proper application and combination of the three sets of laws: the laws of Our Space, the laws of Other Space, and the coordinate laws of Both Spaces

  But before theoreticians could begin work, new data were most desperately needed. Waldo was no theoretician, a fact he admitted left-handedly in thinking of theory as unpractical and unnecessary, time waste for him as a consulting engineer. Let the smooth apes work it out

  But the consulting engineer had to find out onething: would the Schneider- deKalbs continue to function uninterrup­tedly as guaranteed? If not, what must be done to assure con­tinuous function? The most difficult and the most interesting aspect of the in­vestigation had to do with the neurological system in relation to Other Space. Neither electromagnetic instruments nor neural surgery was refined enough to do accurate work on the levels he wished to investigate

  But he had waldoes

  The smallest waldoes he had used up to this time were ap­proximately half an inch across their palms - with micro-scanners to match, of course. They were much too gross for his purpose. He wished to manipulate living nerve tissue, ex­amine its insulation and its performance in situ

  He used the tiny waldoes to create tinier ones

  The last stage was tiny metal blossoms hardly an eighth of an inch across. The helices in their stems, or forearms, which served them as pseudo muscles, could hardly be seen by the naked eye - but then, he used scanners

  His final team of waldoes used for nerve and brain surgery varied in succeeding stages from mechanical hands nearly life­size down to these fairy digits which could manipulate things much too small for the eye to see. They were mounted in bank to work in the same locus. Waldo controlled them all from the same primaries; he could switch from one size to another without removing his gauntlets.

  The same change in circuits which brought another size of waldoes under control automatically accomplished the change in sweep of scanning to increase or decrease the magnification so that Waldo always saw before him in his stereo receiver a ‘life-size' image of his other hands

  Each level of waldoes had its own surgical instruments, its own electrical equipment

  Such surgery had never been seen before, but Waldo gave that aspect little thought; no one had told him that such sur­gery was unheard-of

  He established, to his own satisfaction, the mechanism whereby short- wave radiation had produced a deterioration in human physical performance. The synapses between dendrites acted as if they were points of leakage. Nerve impulses would sometimes fail to make the jump, would leak off - to where? To Other Space, he was sure. Such leakage seemed to estab­lish a preferred path, a canalization, whereby the condition of the victim became steadily worse. Motor action was not lost entirely, as both paths were still available, but efficiency was lost. It reminded him of a metallic electrical circuit with a partial ground

  An unfortunate cat, which had become dead undergoing the experimentation, had supplied him with much of his data. The kitten had been born and raised free from exposure to power radiation. He subjected it to heavy exposure and saw it acquire a myasthenia nearly as complete as his own - while studying in minute detail what actually went on in its nerve tissues. He felt quite sentimental about it when it died

  Yet, if Gramps Schneider were right, human beings need not be damaged by radiation. If they had the wit to look at it with the proper orientation, the radiation would not affect them; they might even draw power out of the Other World

  That was what Grarnps Schneider had told him to do

  That was what Gramps Schneider had told him to do! Gramps Schneider had told him he need not be weak! That he could be strong-Strong! STRONG! He had never thought of it. Schneider's friendly ministra­tions to him, his ] advice about overcoming the weakness, he had ignor
ed, had thrown off as inconsequential. His own weakness, his own peculiarity which made him different from the smooth apes, he had regarded as a basic, implicit fact. He had accepted it as established when he was a small child, a final unquestioned factor

  Naturally he had paid no attention to Schneider's words in so far as they referred to him

  To be strong! To stand alone - to walk, to run! Why, he ... he could, he could go down to Earth surface without fear. He wouldn't mind the field. They said they didn't mind it; they even carried things - great, heavy things. Every­body did. They threw things

  He made a sudden convulsive movement in his primary waldoes, quite unlike his normal, beautifully economical rhythm. The secondaries were oversize, as he was making a new setup. The guys tore loose, a brace plate banged against the wall. Baldur was snoozing nearby; he pricked up his ears, looked around, then turned his face to Waldo, questioning him

  Waldo glared at him and the dog whined. ‘Shut up!

  The dog quieted and apologized with his eyes

  Automatically he looked over the damage - not much, but he would have to fix it. Strength. Why, if he were strong, he could do anything - anything! No 6 extension waldoes and some new guys- Strong! Absent-mindedly he shifted to the No 6 waldoes

  Strength! He could even meet women - be stronger than they were! He could swim. He could ride. He could fly a ship - run, jump. He could handle things with his bare hands. He could even learn to dance! Strong! He would have muscles! He could break things

  He could- He could- He switched to the great waldoes with hands the size of a man's body. Strong - they were strong! With one giant waldo he hauled from the stock pile a quarter-inch steel plate, held it up, and shook it. A booming rumble. He shook it again. Strong

  He took it in both waldoes, bent it double. The metal buckled unevenly. Convulsively he crumpled it like wastepaper between the two huge palms. The grinding racket raised hackles on Baldur; he himself had not been aware of it. He relaxed for a moment, gasping. There was sweat on his forehead; blood throbbed in his ears. But he was not spent; he wanted something heavier~ stronger. Cutting to the adjoining storeroom he selected an L-beam twelve feet long, shoved it through to where the giant hands could reach it, and cut back to them