Ye of Little Faith Part 3

Then he had begun his lecture by remarking that they were behind schedule and would have to catch up. He had been speaking less than five minutes when a student by the name of Marvin Green jumped to his feet in great excitement, waving his hand and shouting, "Dr. Grant! Dr. Grant!"

Dr. Grant had stopped his lecture and frowned darkly, then said, "If you will please take your seat--"

"But Dr. Grant!" Marvin Green had interrupted him excitedly. "I've got it! I've got it!"

What had happened then was impossible for the mind to accept. Marvin Green had simply ceased to be.

There had been a stunned silence. And in that silence, it went on.

Student after student popping out of existence in what seemed to be a chain reaction.

He wasn't aware when Dr. Grant vanished. All he knew was that when at last he was alone he looked toward the podium and the professor was also gone.

He kept waiting to go himself. When he didn't, he lost the fear that had rooted him to the spot, and rushed to the exit where he at first tried to break down the door and make his escape, then subsided into pounding and shouting for help when he realized his physical strength was insufficient for the job.

Questioning didn't bring out any additional fact, nor alter any statement. There had been no sound to the vanishing, no movement of the person that could be considered significant, no flashes of light, no strange odors. Nothing.

Fred Grant got the flash on his hot rod radio on the way home from high school.

At the end of the report Fred wrote down Mark Smythe's address on a sc.r.a.p of paper, and drove home to be with his mother. It was three days before he could get away.

On the morning of the third day, his aunt Emily arrived to take charge of things, and he was able to slip away. He drove immediately to Mark Smythe's address. It was one of the better cla.s.s rooming houses near the campus. The land-lady wasn't going to let him in nor announce him until he explained he was the son of the professor who had vanished. She immediately swung to the other extreme and didn't bother to find out if Mark wanted to see him.

"My father was your teacher," Fred said.

"Oh? Come on in."

There were tennis rackets. On the bookshelves there were tennis books.

On a table there was a tennis trophy. Otherwise there was just a bed, a rug, and two or three chairs.

"I don't know what I can tell you more than I've already told the police and the reporters," Mark said apologetically. "I guess it's tough, losing your father...."

"Yeah," Fred agreed. "I wanted to ask you something though. Dad gave a lecture on his new theory a few days ago, didn't he?"

Mark looked at him blankly. Then, "Oh! I guess he did. As a matter of fact I didn't pay much attention to it." He grinned. Then he remembered he should be solemn and stopped grinning. "I--I sort of slipped by it.

He made the mistake of telling us ahead of time it was off the course and no questions on it would be in the finals, so I more or less rested up during the period for a tennis match afterwards. Why?"

"Didn't you get any of what he said?" Fred persisted.

"Oh, a little," Mark admitted. "It was about some system of arriving at the basic laws of nature by pure logic, only what you arrived at didn't agree with facts. Some kind of intellectual curiosity." He thought a minute. "Oh," he said, "I see what you want. Didn't he leave any notes on it? It would be too bad if his theory was lost to the world now that--" He left the rest unsaid.

"Maybe you can remember something," Fred coaxed. "Anything. Did he talk about his theory again?"

"Next day he gave a lecture on the necessity of unbelief in modern science. It was pretty good. He overemphasized it, though. Some of the kids thought he was making a religion of unbelief."

"What did they say about his theory?" Fred asked quickly.

"Oh, they were quite impressed. Two of them live--lived here in the rooming house. They were up here that evening tossing it back and forth.

I was too tired from the tag match. I let them talk."

"What did they think about it?"

Mark frowned in an effort to recall. "It had to do with this universe being basically illogical, or at least seeming to be, because it didn't agree with your father's theory. They started building up fantasies on it. One I remember was a good one."

"What was that?"

"I think it was Jimmy. He said it would be funny if we were here because we believed this universe was the only real one. Something about inherited memory. Our coming from a long line of people who believed this was the only place, because all our ancestors who didn't believe it shot off into some other universe and had their children there. Utterly crazy. You know."

"Yeah, I know," Fred agreed. "You going to be around in case I want to see you again?"

"G.o.d! I hope so!" Mark said. "It makes me nervous."

"You're safe enough," Fred said. "Well--thanks. I'll be seeing you."

He smoothed out the crumpled sheet of paper and glanced at it.

"What do you hope to find, Fred," his mother asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Anything, I--maybe this is something. Look."

Together they read, "Either: the universe is not constructed according to logical necessity, Or: the observable universe is not the universe."

There were doodlings along the right margin that meant nothing.

"What does it mean?" Mrs. Grant asked.

"Probably just something connected with his cla.s.ses," Fred shrugged. He went on searching the waste basket, giving his mother no hint that he had already found what he was searching for.

From the position of the paper in the waste basket he felt reasonably sure it had been recently written. It was probably a voicing of thoughts gained from the disappearance of Horace and John, because up to that time his father had a.s.sumed his theory was just an intellectual curiosity.

His father couldn't have asked himself if the observable universe might not be the universe unless something had happened to raise a doubt, or suggest an alternative as a possibility.

Mrs. Grant's interest lessened. She wandered about the room, perhaps reliving memories. It gave Fred a chance to put the piece of paper in his pocket so that when he put everything back in the waste basket his mother would dismiss the whole search.

There was, of course, the file with the entire theory in it. He knew the theory by heart, however, and had no need of that file.

"I think I'll go out for a while, Mom," he said.

"All right, Fred," she said disinterestedly.

Outside he climbed behind the wheel of his hot rod and sat there, making no motion to start the motor. He was thinking.

Mark Smythe had said that he overheard two of his fellow cla.s.s-men discussing the theory, one of them remarking that, "It would be funny if we were here just because we were descended from a long line of people who believed this was the only place."

Could that be the key?

Take gravitation, for instance. If it were something that some vital part of you had to believe, and that vital part didn't believe, would the entire person go flying off into s.p.a.ce?