Short Stories by Robert A. Heinlein Vol 2 Part 71

'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 a.s.sumption 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 superst.i.tious.

Suppose he were to review the situation from a different viewpoint. Let it be a.s.sumed that everything Schneider had to say was coldly factual and enlightened, rather than allegorical and superst.i.tious- 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 s.p.a.ce-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 a.s.sumption.

Had Gramps Schneider meant that? A literal, physical 'Other World'? On rcflection,

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 round, here, there, and everywhere.

Well, was not that a fair description of a s.p.a.ce superposed and in one-to-one correspondence? Such a s.p.a.ce 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 discreet, one from the other.

The Other s.p.a.ce 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, n.o.body 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 deKalh failures were probably failures on the part of the operators. The operators were probably rundown, 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 crashcs through material was simply an aspect of the general anyasthenia 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 I submit 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 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.

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 MD who introduced me to Waldo - mutual friend.'

'I recall. him... it will be difficult to go about grounding men who don't work for us. Still, I suppose several of our larger customers would cooperate 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 Rarnbeau?'

'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.'