Short Stories by Robert A. Heinlein Vol 2 Part 76

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.

d.a.m.nation! 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 s.p.a.ce 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 d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.ds and had nothing to do with the calculus of air ma.s.ses. 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.

Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost their confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty - and thereby let magic loose in the world.

He was beginning, he thought, to understand what had happened to magic.

Magic was the erratic law of an animistic world; it had been steadily pushed back by the advancing philosophy of invariant causation. It was gone now - until this new outbreak - and its world with it, except for backwaters of 'superst.i.tion'. Naturally an experimental scientist reported failure when investigating haunted houses, apportations, and the like; his convictions prevented the phenomena from happening.

The deep jungles of Africa might be very different places -when there was no white man around to see! The strangely slippery laws of magic might still obtain.

Perhaps these speculations were too extreme; nevertheless, they had one advantage which orthodox concepts had not: they included Gramps Schncider's hexing of the deKalbs. Any working hypothesis which failed to account for Schneider's -and his own - ability to think a set of deKalbs into operation was not worth a continental.

This one did, and it conformed to Gramps's own statements: 'All matters are doubtful' and 'A thing can both be, not be, and he anything. There are many true ways of looking at the same thing. Some ways are good, some are bad.'

Very well. Accept it. Act on it. The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it.

He cast his vote for order and predictability!

He would set the style. He would impress his own concept of the Other World on the cosmos!

It had been a good start to a.s.sure Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs were foolproof. Good. So let it be. They were foolproof. They would never get out of order.

He proceeded to formulate and clarify his own concept of the Other World in his mind. He would think of it as orderly and basically similar to this s.p.a.ce.

The connexion between the two s.p.a.ces lay in the neurological system; the cortex, the thalamus, the spinal cord, and the appended nerve system were closely connected with both s.p.a.ces. Such a picture was consistent with what Schneider had told him and did not conflict with phenomena as he knew it.

Wait. If the neurological system lay in both s.p.a.ces, then that might account for the relatively slow propagation of nerve impulses as compared with electromagnetic progression. Yes! If the other s.p.a.ce had a c constant relatively smaller than that of this s.p.a.ce, such would follow.

He began to feel a calm a.s.surance that it was so.

Was he merely speculating - or creating a universe?

Perhaps he would have to abandon his mental picture of the Other s.p.a.ce, as being the size and shape of an ostrich egg, since a s.p.a.ce with a slower propagation of light is not smaller, but larger, than the s.p.a.ce he was used to.

No . . . no, wait a second, the size of a s.p.a.ce did not depend on its c constant, but on its radius of curvature in terms of its c constant. Since c was a velocity, size was dependent on the notion of time - in this case time as entropy rate. Therein lay a characteristic which could be compared between the two s.p.a.ces: they exchanged energy; they affected each other's entropy. The one which degenerated the more rapidly towards a state of level entropy was the 'smaller'.

He need not abandon his picture of the ostrich egg-good old egg! The Other

World was a closed s.p.a.ce, with a slow c, a high entropy rate, a short radius, and an entropy state near level - a perfect reservoir of power at every point, ready to spill over into this s.p.a.ce wherever he might close the interval.

To its inhabitants, if any. it might seem to be hundreds of millions of light years around; to him it was an ostrich egg, turgid to bursting with power.

He was already beginning to think of ways of checking his hypothesis. If, using a Schneider-deKalb, he were to draw energy at the highest rate he could manage, would he affect the local potential? Would it establish an entropy gradient? Could he reverse the process by finding a way to pump power into the Other World? Could he establish different levels at different points and thereby check for degeneration towards level, maximum entropy?

Did the speed of nerve impulse propagation furnish a clue to the c of the Other

s.p.a.ce? Could such a clue be combined with the entropy and potential investigations to give a mathematical picture of the Other s.p.a.ce, in terms of its constants and its age?

He set about it. His untrammeled, wild speculations had produced some definite good: he'd tied down at least one line of attack on that Other s.p.a.ce; he'd devised a working principle for his blind man's telescope mechanism.

Whatever the truth of the thing was, it was more than a truth; it was a complete series of new truths. It was the very complexity of that series of new truths - the truths, the characteristic laws, that were inherent properties of the Other s.p.a.ce, plus the new truth laws resultant from the interaction of the characteristics of the Other s.p.a.ce with Normal s.p.a.ce.

No wonder Rambeau had said anything could happen! Almost anything could, in all probability, by a proper application and combination of the three sets of laws: the laws of Our s.p.a.ce, the laws of Other s.p.a.ce, and the coordinate laws of Both s.p.a.ces.

But before theoreticians could begin work, new data were most desperately needed. Waldo was no theoretician, a fact he admitted left-handedly in thinking of theory as unpractical and unnecessary, time waste for him as a consulting engineer. Let the smooth apes work it out.

But the consulting engineer had to find out one thing: would the Schneider- deKalbs continue to function uninterruptedly as guaranteed? If not, what must be done to a.s.sure continuous function?