Spectrum 5 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kingsley Amis

  It rained during the night, and when Berk called for Mart in his car, the city was dismal with fog, lessening even further the reality surrounding them.

  ‘Keyes wasn’t much in favour of this,’ said Berk as they drove away from the hotel. ‘It’s liable to make some of the others mad, but frankly, I’m sure he’s convinced that you’re the member of the class mostly likely to succeed.’

  Mart grunted. ‘Least likely, I’d say. I’m not sure that I’m convinced yet that Dunning didn’t have some terrific joker in here somewhere.’

  ‘I know what you mean, but you will. It comes gradually. And easier for you. You’re the youngest of the group. Keyes thinks some of the older men may spend all their time proving Dunning couldn’t do it. How do you feel about that? Is that the way you’re heading, or are you going to try to find out what Dunning did?’

  ‘Anything a jerk like Dunning can do, Nagle can do double - once Nagle is convinced that Dunning did it.’

  Berk threw back his head and laughed. ‘Keyes will love you, boy. He’s been afraid he wouldn’t find a single top John in the country who would really try.’

  Dunning’s place was in the shabby, once fashionable sector of town where the owners of the gingerbread monsters were no longer able to meet the upkeep or sell them to anyone who was.

  It had been learned that the house actually belonged to an uncle of Dunning, but so far he had not been located.

  A guard was on duty at the front entrance. He nodded as Berk and Mart showed their passes.

  ‘Dunning’s laboratories and shops are on the first floor,’ said Berk. ‘Upstairs, is his library. He slept in one of the third-floor bedrooms, but the rest are vacant. A lot of cooking seemed to have been done in the back kitchen. He left a well stocked larder. Where do you want to start?’

  ‘A quick look through the labs to begin. I want to get the feel of the layout.’

  On the right of the entrance hallway, they came into a small but extremely well equipped chemistry laboratory. The place seemed well used, but immaculate. A complex fractionating set up was on the worktable.

  ‘Almost the only piece of writing in the whole place was found on a small pad here,’ said Berk. ‘A bit of scratch work computation without any formulas or reactions.’

  Mart grunted and moved on to the adjacent room. Here was the more familiar hodgepodge of the electronic experimenter, but even in this there was instantly apparent the mark of a careful workman. Breadboard layouts were assembled with optimum care. Test leads were carefully made of rubber-covered or shielded wire and equipped with clips instead of being the usual random lengths of coloured connecting wire hastily stripped and tied to a terminal.

  A sizeable bank of rack and panel mounted equipment was not recognizable at once as to function. It appeared to be a set-up that might belong to any careful experimenter who had no regard for his bank account.

  This would need further study, but Mart continued moving through to the next room, a machine shop, as well equipped for its functions as the previous rooms. A six-inch lathe, a large drill press, and a milling machine were the chief items.

  Mart whistled softly as he stood in the middle of the room and looked back the way they had come.

  ‘When I was a kid in high school,’ he said, ‘this is exactly the kind of a place I thought Heaven would be.’

  ‘And it had to belong to a person like Dunning, eh?’ said Berk with a slow smile.

  Mart turned sharply. His voice became low and serious. ‘Berk - whatever Dunning may have been, he was no jug-head. A paranoid, maybe, but not a jug-head. He could do things. Look at this.’

  He picked up a weird looking assembly from a nearby-table and held it up in the light. It gleamed with a creamy sheen. A silver-plated bit of high-frequency plumbing.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ said Mart. ‘There’re not more than three or four university shops in the whole country that can turn out a piece like that. I’ve had to fight for weeks to get our machinists to come up with anything that complex and then it would be way out of tolerance.’

  He hefted the piece of plumbing lightly. He knew it was just right. It had the feel of being made right.

  Berk led the way across the hall. He opened the door for Mart. There, against the walls of the room, were panels of a compact digital computer, and on the other side an analogue computer.

  ‘But you haven’t seen anything yet,’ said Berk. ‘The surprise of your life is upstairs.’

  Gravity was a force, Mart thought as he climbed the stairs. You only lick force with force - in the world of physics, at least. In politics and human relations, force might yield to something more subtle, but if Dunning had licked gravity it was with some other - and presently known - force. Physics was at least aware of every force that existed. There were no gaps except perhaps the one temporarily occupied by the elusive neutrino.

  Dunning’s machine was ingenious. But it could be nothing but a clever application of well-known laws and forces. There was no miracle, no magic in it. Having decided this on a slow, verbal basis, Mart felt somewhat more at ease. He followed Berk into the library.

  There was not simply one room of it, but an entire suite had been converted and shelved. There were certainly several thousand volumes in the place.

  ‘This is the one that may interest you most.’ Berk stepped into the nearest room on his left. ‘A is for Astrology,’ he said. He gestured towards a full section of shelving.

  Mart scanned the titles: Astrology for the Novice, Astrology and the Infinite Destiny, The Babylonian Way, The Course of the Stars.

  He hopefully pulled the latter volume from the shelf against the possibility it might be an astronomy text. It wasn’t. He quickly put it back with its fellows.

  ‘Well read, too,’ said Berk. ‘We examined quite a number and they have copious notations in Dunning’s handwriting. This may be the one place we can find real clues to his thinking - in such marginal notes.’

  Mart waved a hand in violent rejection of the sombre volumes and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Junk!’ he muttered. ‘This has no bearing on Keyes’ problem at all, of course. But it certainly ought to be a problem of interest to you.’

  ‘A guy would need two separate heads to hold an interest in the things downstairs and in this nonsense at the same time.’

  ‘But Dunning had only a single head,’ said Berk quietly. ‘Maybe it’s all part of a whole that we don’t see - and that Dunning did.’

  Mart pursed his lips and looked at the psychologist.

  ‘I’m serious,’ said Berk. ‘My field is primarily the human mind, and only secondarily the subjects with which the mind deals. But we see in Dunning a single mind that can whip the matter of anti-gravity, that can hold an interest in the fields represented by the laboratories below, and can digest the material of this library.

  ‘Now, actually, there is no true schizophrenia. In the skull of each of us is only a single individual, and anyone examined closely enough can be found to have a remarkably consistent goal, no matter how apparently erratic his activities.

  ‘Perhaps much of the material Dunning found in both the library and in the laboratory proved redundant, but I would say that Dunning’s genius apparently lay in his ability to extract relevant material from the redundant without categorically rejecting entire areas of human thought.’

  Mart smiled tolerantly and turned away. He found himself facing a section of shelves covered with works on East Indian philosophy. Six of eight feet of space was devoted to the subject of Levitation. Mart jabbed a finger at the titles.

  ‘Anything those boys can do by hocus-pocus Nagle can do twice as fast by x’s and y’s and by making electrons jump through hoops.’

  ‘That’s all Keyes wants. How soon can you deliver ?

  * * * *

  III

  After lunch, they returned to ONR. Mart was assigned an office and given a copy of the Dunning tape. He put aside the prepared transcript, as Keyes had suggested, and
prepared to listen, unbiased.

  He turned on the recorder and winced at the garble of sound that blared forth again. With one hand on the volume control he rested his chin on his arm in front of the speaker and strained to hear through the noise the scarcely audible voice of Dunning.

  Near the beginning, he caught the word ‘levitation’ mentioned many times. There was a full phrase, ‘levitation which was first successfully demonstrated to the Western world by the English medium—’ The buzz of a plane cut off the rest of it.

  Mart rewound the tape and listened to that much of it again. At each mention of levitation an image flared up in Mart’s mind. An image of a dirty, scrawny Indian fakir equipped with a filthy turban, a coil of rope over one arm, and a basket with a snake in the other hand.

  But Dunning had produced anti-gravity.

  What semantic significance had he found in the word?

  Mart growled to himself in irritation and let the tape run on. There was nothing more in those first few feet of it. He perked up his ears at a phrase ‘earth effect’ separated by a garble from ‘distribution of sunspots unexplained to date by astronomers, and politely ignored by all experts—’

  It struck a faint bell of recollection in Mart’s mind. He scratched a note on a pad to check on it.

  The sound dissolved again to hissing and roaring, through which the dead man seemed to taunt him. He gathered that much talk was on the subject of ‘planetary configurations—.’ Astrology. He groaned aloud and closed his eyes through a comparatively long stretch of audibility: ‘Magnetic storms on Earth predictable through movements of the planets in terms of quadrature - fields of data observed through thousands of years and do not fit explanations now accepted for other phenomena.’

  It shifted apparently, after many minutes, to comparative religion. ‘Galileo and Newton,’ Dunning said, ‘affected man’s thinking more than they knew. They clipped from religion its miracles and from physics its imagination ... of India there’s more conquest of the physical universe than in a score of American research laboratories.’

  And that was the last of it. The tape fizzled out in a long garble of buzzing planes and faulty recording. Mart turned off the machine.

  That was it. The mind and work of the first man to directly conquer gravity!

  With an almost physical weariness he turned to the transcript and scanned through it. There was more, but it was astonishing how little additional information was actually added from the memories of the original observers. Mart supposed Dunning’s words were such a shock to those military and scientific minds that they were stunned into semi-permanent amnesia in respect to the things he said.

  He leaned back in the chair, summing up what he had heard. Dunning’s thesis seemed to be that much sound data had been excluded by conventional scientists from standard theories. The dead man had believed much of this data could be found and explained in the various realms of astrology, East Indian mysticism, movements of sunspots, the levitation of mediums, and a host of other unorthodox areas.

  Where was the thread of rational thought that could find its way through this ? He closed his eyes again, trying to feel for a starting point.

  There came a knock on the door, and a voice. ‘May I come in, Dr Nagle?’

  It was Keyes. Mart rose and offered a chair. ‘I have just finished the tapes and transcription. There is very little to go on.’

  ‘Very little indeed,’ said Keyes. ‘When you were a youngster entering a contest for the first time you had a feeling for it. You know what I mean. It’s in your throat and chest, and in your stomach. It goes all the way through your legs to your toes.

  ‘It’s the feeling of your entire organism - a feeling that you haven’t got a chance to win - or that you are going to acquit yourself to the maximum ability within you, regardless of the strength of others. Do you understand me?’

  Mart nodded.

  ‘What kind of a feeling do you have about this, Dr Nagle?’

  Mart relaxed and leaned back with his eyes half closed. He understood Keyes. He had gone through the range of all possible feelings since yesterday afternoon. Which one of them had remained with him?

  ‘I can do it,’ he said quietly to Keyes. ‘I could wish for more data, and I’m not wholly in sympathy with Dunning’s approach. But I can examine the data he had, and re-examine the data I have. And I can do it.’

  ‘Good!’ Keyes stood up. ‘That’s what I came in to find out. And your answer is what I hoped to hear. You may expect that your reaction is not quite universal among your colleagues, although I feel all will co-operate. But some of them will be licked before they start, because they will feel, and persist in feeling, that the thing ought not to be.’

  Dr Kenneth Berkeley had never ceased to wonder at the constitution of man. When he was very young he had wondered why some of his fellows believed in fairies, and others did not. He wondered why some could believe the moon was made of green cheese, and others were equally sure it could not be so.

  He grew to wonder intensely just how man knew anything for sure, and that long road of wonder led to the present moment of his status as fellow in psychology at ONR.

  He was grateful for the privilege of being on this project under the leadership of Dr Keyes. Keyes appreciated more than any other physicist that he had known the importance of the fact that an individual is a man first and a scientist second - that there is no true objectivity in science. There is no divorcing the observer from the observed, and every scientific theory and law, no matter how conscientiously propounded and objectively proved is nevertheless coloured by the observer.

  Berkeley was intrigued by the study of the physicists’ reactions to the situation in which Dunning’s discovery and death had placed them.

  Martin Nagle had reacted approximately as Berkeley expected. They had known each other well during undergraduate days in college, drifting apart later as their professions diverged.

  Through the day Berkeley conducted the rest of the scientists through the house. A number of them had made requests to go privately as Mart had done. Others went in groups of three or four. But by the end of the day all had visited the place except Professor Wilson Dykstra.

  During the first day, Dykstra confined himself to a study of the tape and transcription. He did not present himself for a visit to the Dunning house until the following morning.

  Berk called at his hotel. He kept the psychologist waiting fifteen minutes before he finally appeared through the revolving doors.

  Dykstra was a small, round man in his late sixties, owlish in heavy framed glasses. His jutting lower lip seemed to signify his being perpetually on the defensive, as if he couldn’t believe the world were really as he saw it. But Berk knew he was a great man in his own field. He had contributed much to the elucidation of Einstein’s work in relation to gravity, which was the reason for his being invited to participate in the project.

  The sky was threatening, and Dykstra clutched a black umbrella to his chest as he emerged from the hotel. Berk waited with the car door open.

  ‘Good morning, Dr Dykstra. It looks as if we’ll be alone this morning. Everyone else took a visit to Dunning’s yesterday.’

  Dykstra grunted and got in. ‘That’s the way I wanted it. I spent a full day yesterday going over that ridiculous tape recording.’

  Berk moved the car out into the line of traffic. He had rather felt from the very first that the project could get along just as well without Dykstra.

  ‘Were you able to derive anything at all from it?’

  ‘I have reached no conclusion as yet, Dr Berkeley. But when I do, I do not believe it is going to be that young Dunning was the unadulterated genius some of you people consider him. Surely you, a psychologist, can understand the type of mind that would produce such a mixture of unrelated and irrelevant, not to say mythological, material!’

  ‘There are many strange things about the human mind, which we do not know,’ said Berk. ‘One of the least understood is the
point at which genius ends and nonsense begins.’

  ‘In physics the march is steadily upwards! We have no doubt as to which way lies progress.’

  Berk let that one ride. A man who saw in the world such terrible simplicity might ultimately find Dunning’s mystery completely transparent. He couldn’t risk that possibility by arguing.

  They drew up to the old mansion Dunning had occupied. Dykstra surveyed it from the car. ‘The kind of a place you would expect,’ he grunted.

  It was difficult to estimate what was going on in the physicist’s mind as he came into the laboratories.

  In the first room he scanned the shelves of reagents. He took down a dozen bottles and examined their labels closely. Of some he removed the stoppers and sniffed cautiously, then replaced them all on the shelf in mild disdain.