FREE SILVER
SIXTEEN TO ONE
Schneider must be—old!
There was a narrow archway, which led into another room. Waldo could not see into it very well; the arch as draped with a fringed curtain of long strings of large ornamental beads.
The room was rich with odors, many of them old and musty, but not dirty.
Schneider straightened up and looked down at Waldo. “There is nought wrong with your body. Up get yourself and walk.”
Waldo shook his head feebly. “I am sorry, Grandfather, I cannot.”
“You must reach for the power and make it serve you. Try.”
“I am sorry. I do not know how.”
“That is the only trouble. All matters are doubtful, unless one knows. You send your force into the Other World. You must reach into the Other World and claim it.”
“Where is this ‘Other World,’ Grandfather?”
Schneider seemed a little in doubt as to how to answer this. “The Other World,” he said presently, “is the world you do not see. It is here and it is there and it is everywhere. But it is especially here.” He touched his forehead. “The mind sits in it and sends its messages through it to the body. Wait.” He shuffled away to a little cupboard, from which he removed a small jar. It contained a salve, or unguent, which he rubbed on his hands.
He returned to Waldo and knelt down beside him. Grasping one of Waldo’s hands in both of his, he began to knead it very gently. “Let the mind be quiet,” he directed. “Feel for the power. The Other World is close and full of power. Feel it.”
The massage was very pleasant to Waldo’s tired muscles. The salve, or the touch of the old man’s hand, produced a warm, relaxing tingle. If he were younger, thought Waldo, I would hire him as a masseur. He has a magnetic touch.
Schneider straightened up again and said, “There—that betters you? Now you rest while I some coffee make.”
Waldo settled back contentedly. He was very tired. Not only was the trip itself a nervous strain, but he was still in the grip of this damnable, thick gravitational field, like a fly trapped in honey. Gramps Schneider’s ministrations had left him relaxed and sleepy.
He must have dozed, for the last thing he remembered was seeing Schneider drop an eggshell into the coffeepot. Then the old man was standing before him, holding the pot in one hand and a steaming cup in the other. He set them down, got three pillows, which he placed at Waldo’s back, then offered him the coffee. Waldo laboriously reached out both hands to take it.
Schneider held it back. “No,” he reproved, “one hand makes plenty. Do as I showed. Reach into the Other World for the strength.” He took Waldo’s right hand and placed it on the handle of the cup, steadying Waldo’s hand with his own. With his other hand he stroked Waldo’s right arm gently, from shoulder to finger tips. Again the warm tingle.
Waldo was surprised to find himself holding the cup alone. It was a pleasant triumph; at the time he left Earth, seventeen years before, it had been his invariable habit never to attempt to grasp anything with only one hand. In Freehold, of course, he frequently handled small objects one-handed, without the use of waldoes. The years of practice must have improved his control. Excellent!
So, feeling rather cocky, he drank the cupful with one hand, using extreme care not to slop it on himself. It was good coffee, too, he was bound to admit—quite as good as the sort he himself made from the most expensive syrup extract—better, perhaps.
When Schneider offered him coffeecake, brown with sugar and cinnamon and freshly rewarmed, he swaggeringly accepted it with his left hand, without asking to be relieved of the cup. He continued to eat and drink, between bites and sips resting and steadying his forearms on the edges of the tank.
The conclusion of the Kaffeeklatsch seemed a good time to broach the matter of the deKalbs. Schneider admitted knowing McLeod and recalled, somewhat vaguely it seemed, the incident in which he had restored to service McLeod’s broomstick. “Hugh Donald is a good boy,” he said. “Machines I do not like, but it pleasures me to fix things for boys.”
“Grandfather,” asked Waldo, “will you tell me how you fixed Hugh Donald McLeod’s ship?”
“Have you such a ship you wish me to fix?”
“I have many such ships which I have agreed to fix, but I must tell you that I have been unable to do so. I have come to you to find out the right way.”
Schneider considered this. “That is difficult. I could show you, but it is not so much what you do as how you think about it. That makes only with practice.”
Waldo must have looked puzzled, for the old man looked at him and added, “It is said that there are two ways of looking at everything. That is true and less than true, for there are many ways. Some of them are good ways and some are bad. One of the ancients said that everything either is, or is not. That is less than true, for a thing can both be and not be. With practice one can see it both ways. Sometimes a thing which is for this world is a thing which is not for the Other World. Which is important, since we live in the Other World.”
“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 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 practice 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 practice “reaching for strength,” and asked Schneider to do him the favor 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 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. “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 man 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 reflection, 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 around, 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 discrete, 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 deKalb failures were probably on the part of the operators. The operators were probably run-down,
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 crashes though material was simply an aspect of the general myasthenia 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 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 him 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.
The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein Page 23
