Waldo

For he had no intention of trying to compete with NAPA

Gleason pulled himself away from Stevens and Harkness, came to Waldo. ‘Mr Jones, can't we arrange this amicably?

‘What have you to suggest?

It was quite an hour later that Waldo, with a sigh of relief, watched his guests' ship depart from the threshold flat. A fine caper, he thought, and it had worked; he had got away with it. He had magnanimously allowed himself to be persuaded to consolidate, provided - he had allowed himself to be quite temperamental about this - the contract was concluded at once, no fussing around and fencing between lawyers. Now or never - put up or shut up. The proposed contract, he had pointed out virtuously, gave him nothing at all unless his allegations about the Jones-chneider-deKalb were correct

Gleason considered this point and had decided to sign, had signed

Even then Harkness had attempted to claim that Waldo had been an employee of NAPA. Waldo had written that first contract himself - a specific commission for a contingent fee. Harkness did not have a leg to stand on; even Gleason had agreed to that

In exchange for all rights to the Jones-Schneider-deKalb, for which he agreed to supply drawings - wait till Stevens saw, and understood, those sketches! - for that he had received the promise of senior stock in NAPA, non-voting, but fully paid up and non- assessable. The lack of active participation in the company had been his own idea. There were going to be more headaches in the power business, headaches aplenty. He could see them coming - bootleg designs, means of outwitting the metering, lots of things. Free power had come, and efforts to stop it would in the long run, he believed, be fruitless

Waldo laughed so hard that he frightened Baldur, who set up an excited barking

He could afford to forget Hathaway now. His revenge on NAPA contained one potential flaw; he had assured Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs would continue to operate, would not come unstuck. He believed that to be true simply because he had faith in Gramps Schneider. But he was not prepared to prove it. He knew himself that he did not know enough about the phenomena associated with the Other World to be sure that something would, or would not, happen. It was still going to be necessary to do some hard, extensive research

But the Other World was a devilishly difficult place to investigate! Suppose, he speculated, that the human race were blind, had never developed eyes. No matter how civilized, enlightened, and scientific the race might have become, it is difficult to see how such a race could ever have developed the concepts of astronomy. They might know of the Sun as a cyclic source of energy having a changing, directional character, for the Sun is so overpowering that it may be ‘seen' with the skin. They would notice it and invent instruments to trap it and examine it

But the pale stars, would they ever notice them? It seemed most unlikely. The very notion of the celestial universe, its silent depths and starlit grandeur, would be beyond them. Even if one of their scientists should have the concept forced on him in sueh a manner that he was obliged to accept the fantastic, incredible thesis as fact, how then would he go about investigating its details? Waldo tried to imagine an astronomical phototelescope, conceived and designed by a blind man, intended to he operated by a blind man, and capable of collecting data which could he interpreted by a blind man. He gave it up; There were too many hazards. It would take a subtlety of genius far beyond his own to deal with the inescapably tortuous concatenations of inferential reasoning necessary to the solution of such a problem. It would strain him to invent such instruments for a blind man; he did not see how a blind man could ever overcome the difficulties unassisted

In a way that was what Schneider had done for him; alone, he would have bogged down

But even with Schneider's hints the problem of investigating the Other World was still much like the dilemma of the blind astronomer. He could not see the Other World; only through the Schneider treatment had he been able to contact it. Damnation! how could he design instruments to study it? He suspected that he would eventually have to go back to Schneider for further instruction, but that was an expedient so distasteful that he refused to think much about it. Furthermore, Gramps Schneider might not be able to teach him much; they did not speak the same language

This much he did know: the Other Space was there and it could be reached sometimes by proper orientation of the mind, deliberately as Schneider had taught him, or subconsciously as had happened to McLeod and others

He found the idea distasteful. That thought and thought alone should be able to influence physical phenomena was contrary to the whole materialistic philosophy in which he had grown up. He had a prejudice in favour of order and invariable natural laws. His cultural predecessors, the experimental philosophers who had built up the world of science and its concomitant technology, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Steinmetz, Jeans, and their myriad colleagues - these men had thought of the physical universe as a mechanism proceeding by inexorable necessity. Any apparent failure to proceed thus was regarded as an error in observation, an insufficient formulation of hypothesis, or an insufficiency of datum

Even the short reign of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle had not changed the fundamental orientation towards Order and Cosmos; the Heisenbcrg uncertainty was one they were certain of! It could be formulated, expressed, and a rigorous statistical mechanics could be built from it. In 1958 Horowitz's reformulation of wave mechanics had eliminated the concept. Order and causation were restored. But this damned business! One might as well pray for rain, wish on the Moon, go to faith healers, surrender whole hog to Bishop Berkeley's sweetly cereb-al world-in-your-head. ‘-the tree's not a tree, when there's no one about on the quad!

Waldo was not emotionally wedded to Absolute Order as Rambeau had been; he was in no danger of becoming mentally unbalanced through a failure of his basic conceptions; nevertheless, consarn it, it was convenient for things to work the way one expected them to. On order and natural law was based predictability; without predictability it was impossible to live. Clocks should run evenly; water should boil when heat is applied to it; food should nourish, not poison; deKalb receptors should work, work the way they were designed to; Chaos was insupportable - it could not be lived with

Suppose Chaos were king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos - by Mind! The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountains. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism dominated the world then

More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them