Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly and deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puff of smoke.
“The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a little girl, daughter of one of our production women. She’d been throwing things, setting things on fire. The teachers didn’t know how she did it, she just did it. They sent her to me. I asked her about it. She threw a tantrum, and when it was all over, Auerbach’s plastic cylinder of goop was trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That’s what happened,” I said.
He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie the facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself. After all, we were in the business of manufacturing computers. The general manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primary arithmetic.
“Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background,” I went on. “Her mother was from the old country, one of the Slav races. There’s the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed them on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kid never got out with other children. Children, kept alone, never seeing anybody, get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who, knows what kind of a coördinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her mother would come home at night and go about her tasks talking aloud, half to the daughter, half to herself. ‘I really burned that foreman up, today,’ she’d say. Or, ‘Oh, boy, was he fired in a hurry!’ Or, ‘She got herself thrown out of the place,’ things like that.”
“So what does that mean, Ralph?” he asked. His switch to my first name indicated he was trying to work with me instead of pushing me.
“To a child who never knew anything else,” I answered, “one who had never learned to distinguish reality from unreality—as we would define it from our agreed framework—a special coördinate system might be built up where ‘Everybody was up in the air at work, today,’ might be taken literally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn’t happen, of course—it says in the textbooks—but since it has been happening all through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we’ve got our smug certainties knocked out of us, we’re just fumbling along, trying to get some of the answers we thought we had.
“We couldn’t make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We’re still trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tape and it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have to know how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don’t know how to code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder will store a psi impulse, but we don’t know how. So we have to keep working with psi gifted people, at least until we’ve established some of the basic laws governing psi.”
I couldn’t tell by Henry’s face whether I was with him or away from him. He told me he wanted to think about it, and made a little motion with his hand that I should leave the room.
I walked through the suite of executive offices and down a sound rebuffing hallway. The throbbing clatter of manufacture of metallic parts made a welcome sound as I went through the far doorway into the factory. I saw a blueprint spread on a foreman’s desk as I walked past. Good old blueprint. So many millimeters from here to there, made of such and such an alloy, a hole punched here with an allowance of five-ten-thousandths plus or minus tolerance. Snug, secure, safe. I wondered if psi could ever be blue-printed. Or suppose you put a hole here, but when you looked away and then looked back it had moved, or wasn’t there at all?
Quickly, I got myself into a conversation with a supervisor about the rising rate of employee turnover in his department. That was something also snug, secure, safe. All you had to do was figure out human beings.
I spent the rest of the morning on such pursuits, working with things I understood.
On his first rounds of the afternoon, the interoffice messenger brought me a memorandum from the general manager’s office. I opened it with some misgivings. I was not particularly reassured.
Mr. Grenoble felt he should work with me more closely on the antigrav project. He understood, from his researches, that the most positive psi effects were experienced during a seance with a medium. Would I kindly arrange for the Swami to hold a seance that evening, after office hours, so that he might analyze the man’s methods and procedures to see how they could fit smoothly into Company Operation. This was not to be construed as interference in the workings of my department but in the interests of pursuing the entire matter with diligence and dispatch—
The seance was to be held in my office.
I had had many peculiar conferences in this room—from union leaders stripping off their coats, throwing them on the floor and stomping on them; to uplifters who wanted to ban cosmetics on our women employees so the male employees would not be tempted to think Questionable Thoughts. I could not recall ever having held a seance before.
My desk had been moved out of the way, over into one corner of the large room. A round table was brought over from the salesmen’s report writing room (used there more for surreptitious poker playing than for writing reports) and placed in the middle of my office—on the grounds that it had no sharp corners to gouge people in their middles if it got to cavorting about recklessly. In an industrial plant one always has to consider the matter of safety rules and accident insurance rates.
In the middle of the table there rested, with dark fluid gleaming through clear plastic cases, six fresh cylinders which Auerbach had prepared in his laboratory over in the plant.
Auerbach had shown considerable unwillingness to attend the seance; he pleaded being extra busy with experiments just now, but I gave him that look which told him I knew he had just been stalling around the last few months, the same as I had.
If the psi effect had never come out in the first place, there wouldn’t have been any mental conflict. He could have gone on with his processes of refining, simplifying and increasing the efficiency ratings of his goop. But this unexpected side effect, the cylinders learning and demonstrating something he considered basically untrue, had tied his hands with a hopeless sort of frustration. He would have settled gladly for a chemical compound which could have added two and two upon request; but when that compound can learn and demonstrate that there’s no such thing as gravity, teaching it simple arithmetic is like ashes in the mouth.
I said as much to him. I stood there in his laboratory, leaned up against a work bench, and risked burning an acid hole in the sleeve of my jacket just to put over an air of unconcern. He was perched on the edge of an opposite work bench, swinging his feet, and hiding the expression in his eyes behind the window’s reflection upon his polished glasses. I said even more.
“You know,” I said reflectively, “I’m completely unable to understand the attitude of supposedly unbiased men of science. Now you take all that mass of data about psi effects, the odd and unexplainable happenings, the premonitions, the specific predictions, the accurate descriptions of far away simultaneously happening events. You take that whole mountainous mass of data, evidence, phenomena—”