“Well, sir,” he answered, as if he were answering a question in class, “I was cleared for top security, and told that a few months ago you and your Dr. Auerbach, here at Computer Research, discovered a way to create antigravity. I was told you claimed you had to have a poltergeist in the process. You told General Sanfordwaithe that you needed six of them, males. That’s about all, sir. So the Poltergeist Division discovered the Swami, and I was assigned to bring him out here to you.”
“Well then, Lieutenant Murphy, you go back to the Pentagon and tell General Sanfordwaithe that—” I could see by the look on his face that my message would probably not get through verbatim. “Never mind, I’ll write it,” I amended disgustedly. “And you can carry the message.” Lesser echelons do not relish the task of repeating uncomplimentary words verbatim to a superior. Not usually.
I punched Sara’s button on my intercom.
“After all the exposure out there to the Swami,” I said, “if you’re still with us on this crass, materialistic plane, will you bring your book?”
“My astral self has been hovering over you, guarding you, every minute,” Sara answered dreamily.
“Can it take shorthand?” I asked dryly.
“Maybe I’d better come in,” she replied.
When she came through the door the lieutenant gave her one appreciative glance, then returned to his aloof pedestal of indifference. Obviously his pattern was to stand in majestic splendor and allow the girls to fawn somewhere down near his shoes. These lads with a glamour boy complex almost always gravitate toward some occupation which will require them to wear a uniform. Sara catalogued him as quickly as I did, and seemed unimpressed. But you never can tell about a woman; the smartest of them will fall for the most transparent poses.
“General Sanfordwaithe, dear sir,” I began as she sat down at one corner of my desk and flipped open her book. “It takes more than a towel wrapped around the head and some mutterings about infinity to get poltergeist effects. So I am returning your phony Swami to you with my compliments—”
“Beg your pardon, sir,” the lieutenant interrupted, and there was a certain note of suppressed triumph in his voice. “In case you rejected our applicant for the poltergeist job you have in mind, I was to hand you this.” He undid a lovingly polished button of his tunic, slipped his hand beneath the cloth and pulled forth a long, sealed envelope.
I took it from him and noted the three sealing-wax imprints on the flap. From being carried so close to his heart for so long, the envelope was slightly less crisp than when he had received it. I slipped my letter opener in under the side flap, and gently extracted the letter without, in anyway, disturbing the wax seals which were to have guaranteed its privacy. There wasn’t any point in my doing it, of course, except to demonstrate to the lieutenant that I considered the whole deal as a silly piece of cloak and dagger stuff.
After the general formalities, the letter was brief: “Dear Mr. Kennedy: We already know the Swami is a phony, but our people have been convinced that in spite of this there are some unaccountable effects. We have advised your general manager, Mr. Henry Grenoble, that we are in the act of carrying out our part of the agreement, namely, to provide you with six male-type poltergeists, and to both you and him we are respectfully suggesting that you get on with the business of putting the antigravity units into immediate production.”
I folded the letter and tucked it into one side of my desk pad. I looked at Sara.
“Never mind the letter to General Sanfordwaithe,” I said. “He has successfully cut off my retreat in that direction.” I looked over at the lieutenant. “All right,” I said resignedly, “I’ll apologize to the Swami, and make a try at using him.”
I picked up the letter again and pretended to be reading it. But this was just a stall, because I had suddenly been struck by the thought that my extreme haste in scoring off the Swami and trying to get rid of him was because I didn’t want to get involved again with poltergeists. Not any, of any nature.
The best way on earth to avoid having to explain psi effects and come to terms with them is simply to deny them, convince oneself that they don’t exist. I sighed deeply. It looked as if I would be denied that little human privilege of closing my eyes to the obvious.
Old Stone Face, our general manager, claimed to follow the philosophy of building men, not machines. To an extent he did. His favorite phrase was, “Don’t ask me how. I hired you to tell me.” He hired a man to do a job, and I will say for him, he left that man alone as long as the job got done. But when a man flubbed a job, and kept on flubbing it, then Mr. Henry Grenoble stepped in and carried out his own job—general managing.
He had given me the assignment of putting antigrav units into production. He had given me access to all the money I would need for the purpose. He had given me sufficient time, months of it. And, in spite of all this coöperation, he still saw no production lines which spewed out antigrav units at some such rate as seventeen and five twelfths per second.
Apparently he got his communication from the Pentagon about the time I got mine. Apparently it contained some implication that Computer Research, under his management, was not pursuing the cause of manufacturing antigrav units with diligence and dispatch. Apparently he did not like this.
I had no more than apologized to the Swami, and received his martyred forgiveness, and arranged for a hotel suite for him and the lieutenant, when Old Stone Face sent for me. He began to manage with diligence and dispatch.
“Now you look here, Kennedy,” he said forcefully, and his use of my last name, rather than my first, was a warning, “I’ve given you every chance. When you and Auerbach came up with that antigrav unit last fall, I didn’t ask a lot of fool questions. I figured you knew what you were doing. But the whole winter has passed, and here it is spring, and you haven’t done anything that I can see. I didn’t say anything when you told General Sanfordwaithe that you’d have to have poltergeists to carry on the work, but I looked it up. First I thought you’d flipped your lid, then I thought you were sending us all on a wild goose chase so we’d leave you alone, then I didn’t know what to think.”
I nodded. He wasn’t through.
“Now I think you’re just pretending the whole thing doesn’t exist because you don’t want to fool with it.”
Perhaps he had come to the right decision after all. I’d resolutely washed the whole thing out of my mind. But I wasn’t going to get away with it. I could see it coming.
“For the first time, Kennedy, I’m asking you what happened?” he said firmly, but his tone was more telling than asking. So I was going to have to discuss frameworks with Old Stone Face, after all.
“Henry,” I asked slowly, “have you kept up your reading in theoretical physics?”
He blinked at me. I couldn’t tell whether it meant yes or no.
“When we went to school, you and I—” I hoped my putting us both in the same age group would tend to mollify him a little, “physics was all snug, secure, safe, definite. A fact was a fact, and that’s all there was to it. But there’s been some changes made. There’s the coördinate systems of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change from framework to framework. There’s the application of multivalued logic to physics where a fact becomes not a fact any longer. The astronomers talk about the expanding universe—it’s a piker compared to man’s expanding concepts about that universe.”
He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beating around the bush.
“That all has a bearing on what happened,” I assured him. “You have to understand what was behind the facts before you can understand the facts themselves. First, we weren’t trying to make an antigrav unit at all. Dr. Auerbach was playing around with a chemical approach to cybernetics. He made up some goop which he thought would store memory impulses, the way the brain stores them. He brought a plastic cylinder of it over to me, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went on with my personnel management business at hand.”