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 M.D. who introduced me to Waldo—mutual friend.”
“I recall. Mm-m-m…it will be difficult to go about grounding men who don’t work for us. Still, I suppose several of our larger customers would co-operate 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. Rambeau?”
“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 shortwave 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 chicken pox 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 G.P. 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 90 per 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 hack 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.
He cautioned himself not to consider his tentative hypothesis of the Other World as proved; nevertheless, it was an adequate hypothesis even if it should develop that it did not apply to some of the cases of strange events.
The Other Space might have different physical laws—no reason why it should not. Nevertheless, he decided to proceed on the assumption that it was much like the space he knew.
The Other World might even be inhabited. That was an intriguing thought! In which case anything could happen through “magic.” Anything!
Time to stop speculating and get down to a little solid research. He had previously regretfully given up trying to apply the formulas of the medieval magicians. It appeared that they never wrote down all of a procedure; some essential—so the reports ran and so his experience confirmed—was handed down verbally from master to student. His experience with Schneider confirmed this; there were things, attitudes, which must needs be taught directly.
He regretfully set out to learn what he must unassisted.
“Gosh, Uncle Gus, I’m glad to see you!”
“Decided I’d better look in on you. You haven’t phoned me in weeks.”
“That’s true, but I’ve been working awfully hard, Uncle Gus.”
“Too hard, maybe. Mustn’t overdo it. Lemme see your tongue.”
“I’m O.K.” But Waldo stuck out his tongue just the same; Grimes looked at it and felt his pulse.
“You seem to be ticking all right. Learning anything?”
“Quite a lot. I’ve about got the matter of the deKalbs whipped.”
“That’s good. The message you sent Stevens seemed to indicate that you had found some hookup that could he used on my pet problem too.”
“In a way, yes; but around from the other end. It begins to seem as if it was your problem which created Stevens’s problem.”
“Huh?”
“I mean it. The symptoms caused by ultra short-wave radiation may have had a lot to do with the erratic behavior of the deKalbs.”
“How?”
“I don’t know myself. But I’ve rigged up a working hypothesis and I’m checking it.”
“Hm-m-m. Want to talk about it?”
“Certainly—to you.” Waldo launched into an account of his interview with Schneider, concerning which he had not previously spoken to Grimes, even though Grimes had made the trip with him. He never, as Grimes knew, discussed anything until he was ready to.
The story of the third set of deKalbs to be infected with the incredible writhings caused Grimes
to raise his eyebrows. “Mean to say you caught on to how to do that?”
“Yes indeed. Not ‘how’, maybe, but I can do it. I’ve done it more than once. I’ll show you.” He drifted away toward one side of the great room where several sets of deKalbs, large and small, were mounted, with their controls, on temporary guys. “This fellow over on the end, it just came in today. Broke down. I’ll give it Gramps Schneider’s hocus-pocus and fix it. Wait a minute. I forgot to turn on the power.”
He returned to the central ring which constituted his usual locus and switched on the beam-caster. Since the ship itself effectively shielded anything in the room from outer radiation, he had installed a small power plant and caster similar in type to NAPA’s giant ones; without it he would have had no way to test the reception of the deKalbs.
He rejoined Grimes and passed down the line of deKalbs, switching on the activizing circuits. All save two began to display the uncouth motions he had begun to think of as the Schneider flex. “That one on the far end,” he remarked, “is in operation but doesn’t flex. It has never broken down, so it’s never been treated. It’s my control; but this one”—he touched the one in front of him—“needs fixing. Watch me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“To tell the truth, I don’t quite know. But I’ll do it.” He did not know. All he knew was that it was necessary to gaze down the antennae, think about them reaching into the Other World, think of them reaching for power, reaching—
The antennae began to squirm.
“That’s all there is to it—strictly between ourselves. I learned it from Schneider.” They had returned to the center of the sphere, at Grimes’s suggestion, on the pretext of wanting to get a cigarette. The squirming deKalbs made him nervous, but he did not want to say so.
“How do you explain it?”
“I regard it as an imperfectly understood phenomenon of the Other Space. I know less about it than Franklin knew about lightning. But I will know—I will! I could give Stevens a solution right now for his worries if I knew some way to get around your problem too.”
“I don’t see the connection.”
“There ought to be some way to do the whole thing through the Other Space. Start out by radiating power into the Other Space and pick up it up from there. Then the radiation could not harm human beings. It would never get at them; it would duck around them. I’ve been working on my caster, but with no luck so far. I’ll crack it in time.”
“I hope you do. Speaking of that, isn’t the radiation from your own caster loose in this room?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll put on my shield coat. It’s not good for you either.”
“Never mind. I’ll turn it off.” As he turned to do so there was the sound of a sweet, chirruping whistle. Baldur barked. Grimes turned to see what caused it.
“What,” he demanded, “have you got there?”
“Huh? Oh, that’s my cuckoo clock. Fun, isn’t it?” Grimes agreed that it was, although he could not see much use for it. Waldo had mounted it on the edge of a light metal hoop which spun with a speed just sufficient to produce a centrifugal force of one g.
“I rigged it up,” Waldo continued, “while I was bogged down in this problem of the Other Space. Gave me something to do.”
“This ‘Other Space’ business—I still don’t get it.”
“Think of another continuum much like our own and superposed on it the way you might lay one sheet of paper on another. The two spaces aren’t identical, but they are separated from each other by the smallest interval you can imagine—coextensive but not touching—usually. There is an absolute one-to-one, point-for-point correspondence, as I conceive it, between the two spaces, but they are not necessarily the same size or shape.”
“Hey? Come again—they would have to be.”
“Not at all. Which has the larger number of points in it? A line an inch long, or a line a mile long?”
“A mile long, of course.”
“No. They have exactly the same number of points. Want me to prove it?”
“I’ll take your word for it. But I never studied that sort of math.”
“All right. Take my word for it then. Neither size nor shape is any impediment to setting up a full, point-for-point correspondence between two spaces. Neither of the words is really appropriate. ‘Size’ has to do with a space’s own inner structure, its dimensions in terms of its own unique constants. ‘Shape’ is a matter which happens inside itself—or at least not inside our space—and has to do with how it is curved, open or closed, expanding or contracting.”
Grimes shrugged. “It all sounds like gibberish to me.” He returned to watching the cuckoo clock swing round and round its wheel.
“Sure it does,” Waldo assented cheerfully. “We are limited by our experience. Do you know how I think of the Other World?” The question was purely rhetorical. “I think of it as about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, but nevertheless a whole universe, existing side by side with our own, from here to the farthest star. I know that it’s a false picture, but it helps me to think about it that way.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Grimes, and turned himself around in the air. The compound motion of the clock’s pendulum was making him a little dizzy. “Say! I thought you turned off the caster?”
“I did,” Waldo agreed, and looked where Grimes was looking. The deKalbs were still squirming. “I thought I did,” he said doubtfully, and turned to the caster’s control board. His eyes then opened wider. “But I did. It is turned off.”
“Then what the devil—”
“Shut up!” He had to think—think hard. Was the caster actually out of operation? He floated himself over to it, inspected it. Yes, it was dead, dead as the dinosaurs. Just to make sure he went back, assumed his primary waldoes, cut in the necessary circuits, and partially disassembled it. But the deKalbs still squirmed.
The one deKalb set which had not been subjected to the Schneider treatment was dead; it gave out no power hum. But the others were working frantically, gathering power from—where?
He wondered whether or not McLeod had said anything to Gramps Schneider about the casters from which the deKalbs were intended to pick up their power. Certainly he himself had not. It simply had not come into the conversation. But Schneider had said something. “The Other World is close by and full of power!”
In spite of his own intention of taking the old man literally he had ignored that statement. The Other World is full of power. “I am sorry I snapped at you, Uncle Gus,” he said.
“’S all right.”
“But what do you make of that?”
“Looks like you’ve invented perpetual motion, son.”
“In a way, perhaps. Or maybe we’ve repealed the law of conservation of energy. Those deKalbs are drawing energy that was never before in this world!”
“Hm-m-m!”
To check his belief he returned to the control ring, donned his waldoes, cut in a mobile scanner, and proceeded to search the space around the deKalbs with the most sensitive pickup for the radio power band he had available. The needles never jumped; the room was dead in the wave lengths to which the deKalbs were sensitive. The power came from Other Space.
The power came from Other Space. Not from his own beamcaster, not from NAPA’s shiny stations, but from Other Space. In that case he was not even close to solving the problem of the defective deKalbs; he might never solve it. Wait, now—just what had he contracted to do? He tried to recall the exact words of the contract.
There just might be a way around it. Maybe. Yes, and this newest cockeyed trick of Gramps Schneider’s little pets could have some very tricky aspects. He began to see some possibilities, but he needed to think about it.
“Uncle Gus—”
“Yes, Waldo?”
“You can go back and tell Stevens that I’ll be ready with the answers. We’ll get his problem licked, and yours too. In the meantime I’ve got to do some really heavy thinking, so I
want to be by myself, please.”
“GREETINGS, MR. GLEASON. QUIET, BALDUR! Come in. Be comfortable. How do you do, Dr. Stevens.”
“How do you do, Mr. Jones.”
“This,” said Gleason, indicating a figure trailing him, “is Mr. Harkness, head of our legal staff.”
“Ah, yes indeed. There will be matters of contract to be discussed. Welcome to Freehold, Mr. Harkness.”
“Thank you,” Harkness said coldly. “Will your attorneys be present?”
“They are present.” Waldo indicated a stereo screen. Two figures showed in it; they bowed and murmured polite forms.
“This is most irregular,” Harkness complained. “Witnesses should be present in person. Things seen and heard by television are not evidence.”
Waldo drew his lips back. “Do you wish to make an issue of it?”
“Not at all,” Gleason said hastily. “Never mind, Charles.” Harkness subsided.
“I won’t waste your time, gentlemen,” Waldo began. “We are here in order that I may fulfill my contract with you. The terms are known—we will pass over them.” He inserted his arms into his primary waldoes. “Lined up along the far wall you will see a number of radiant power receptors, commonly called deKalbs. Dr. Stevens may, if he wishes, check their serial numbers—”
“No need to.”
“Very well. I shall start my local beamcaster, in order that we may check the efficiency of their operation.” His waldoes were busy as he spoke. “Then I shall activate the receptors, one at a time.” His hands pawed the air; a little pair of secondaries switched on the proper switches on the control board of the last set in line. “This is an ordinary type, supplied to me by Dr. Stevens, which has never failed in operation. You may assure yourself that it is now operating in the normal manner, if you wish, Doctor.”
“I can see that it is.”
“We will call such a receptor a ‘deKalb’ and its operation ‘normal.’” The small waldoes were busy again. “Here we have a receptor which I choose to term a ‘Schneider-deKalb’ because of certain treatment it has received”—the antennae began to move—“and its operation ‘Schneider-type’ operation. Will you check it, Doctor?”
The Fantasies of Robert A. Heinlein Page 24
