Waldo, and Magic, Inc Page 9

  Perhaps he could have Stevens do it and have the process stereophotoed for a later examination. No, the old man had a superstitious prejudice against artificial images.

  He floated gently over to the vicinity of one of the inoperative deKalbs. What Schneider had claimed to have done was preposterously simple. He had drawn chalk marks down each antenna so, for the purpose of fixing his attention. Then he had gazed down them and thought about them “reaching out for power,” reaching into the Other World, stretching—

  Baldur began to bark frantically.

  “Shut up, you fool!” Waldo snapped, without taking his eyes off the antennae.

  Each separate pencil of metal was wiggling, stretching. There was the low, smooth hum of perfect operation.

  Waldo was still thinking about it when the televisor demanded his attention. He had never been in any danger of cracking up mentally as Rambeau had done; nevertheless, he had thought about the matter in a fashion which made his head ache. He was still considerably bemused when he cut in his end of the sound-vision. “Yes?”

  It was Stevens. “Hello, Mr. Jones. Uh, we wondered . . . that is—”

  “Speak up, man!”

  “Well, how close are you to a solution?” Stevens blurted out. “Matters are getting pretty urgent.”

  “In what way?”

  “There was a partial breakdown in Great New York last night. Fortunately, it was not at peak load and the ground crew were able to install spares before the reserves were exhausted, but you can imagine what it would have been like during the rush hour. In my own department the crashes have doubled in the past few weeks, and our underwriters have given notice. We need results pretty quick.”

  “You’ll get your results,” Waldo said loftily. “I’m in the final stages of the research.” He was actually not that confident, but Stevens irritated him even more than most of the smooth apes.

  Doubt and reassurance mingled in Stevens’ face. “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’ 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 black 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 assumption 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 superstitious.

  Suppose he were to review the situation from a different viewpoint. Let it be assumed that everything Schneider had to say was coldly factual and enlightened, rather than allegorical and superstitious—

  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 space-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 assumption.

  Had Gramps Schneider meant that? A literal physical “Other World”? On reflection, 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 around, here, there, and everywhere. Well, was not that a fair description of a space superposed and in one-to-one correspondence? Such a space 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 discrete, one from the other.

  The Other Space 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 immeasurably 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, nobody 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 deKalb failures were probably failures on the part of the operators. The operators were probably run down, 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’ hypothesis! “Run down, tired out, worried about something!” Not proved yet, but he felt sure of it. The epidemic of crashes though material was simply an aspect of the general myasthenia caused by shortwave 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 tip-top 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 inte
rim 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 him 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 M.D. who introduced me to Waldo—mutual friend.”

  “I recall. Mm-m-m . . . 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. Rambeau?”

  “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.”

  “Then I see no alternative but to follow his advice. He’s our last hope. A forlorn one, perhaps, but our only one.”

  Stevens brightened a little. “I could talk to Doc Grimes about it. He knows more about Waldo than anyone else.”

  “You have to consult him anyway, don’t you? Very well—do so.”

  Grimes listened to the story without comment. When Stevens had concluded he said, “Waldo must be referring to the symptoms I have observed with respect to shortwave exposure. That’s easy; you can have the proofs of the monograph I’ve been preparing. It’ll tell you all about it.”

  The information did not reassure Stevens; it helped to confirm his suspicion that Waldo had lost his grip. But he said nothing. Grimes continued, “As for the other, Jim, I can’t visualize Waldo losing his mind that way.”

  “He never did seem very stable to me.”

  “I know what you mean. But his paranoid streak is no more like what Rambeau succumbed to than chicken pox is like mumps. Matter of fact, one psychosis protects against the other. But I’ll go see.”

  “You will? Good!”

  “Can’t go today. Got a broken leg and some children’s colds that’ll bear watching. Been some polio around. Ought to be able to make it the end of the week though.”

  “Doc, why don’t you give up G.P. work! It must be deadly.”

  “I used to think so when I was younger. But about forty years ago, I quit treating diseases and started treating people. Since then I’ve enjoyed it.”

  Waldo indulged in an orgy of reading, gulping the treatises on magic and related subjects as fast as he could. He had never been interested in such subjects before; now, in reading about them with the point of view that there might be—and even probably was—something to be learned, he found them intensely interesting.

  There were frequent references to another world; sometimes it was called the Other World, sometimes the Little World. Read with the conviction that the term referred to an actual, material, different continuum, he could see that many of the practitioners of the forbidden arts had held the same literal viewpoint. They gave directions for using this other world; sometimes the directions were fanciful, sometimes they were baldly practical.

  It was fairly evident that at least 90 percent of all magic, probably more, was balderdash and sheer mystification. The mystification extended even to the practitioners, he felt; they lacked the scientific method; they employed a single-valued logic as faulty as the two-valued logic of the obsolete Spencer determinism; there was no suggestion of modern extensional, many-valued logic.

  Nevertheless, the laws of contiguity, of sympathy, and of homeopathy had a sort of twisted rightness to them when considered in relation to the concept of another, different, but accessible, world. A man who had some access to a different space might well believe in a logic in which a thing could be, not be, or be anything with equal ease.

  Despite the nonsense and confusion which characterized the treatments of magic which dated back to the period when the art was in common practice, the record of accomplishment of the art was impressive. There was curare and digitalis, and quinine, hypnotism, and telepathy. There was the hydraulic engineering of the Egyptian priests. Chemistry itself was derived from alchemy; for that matter, most modern science owed its origins to the magicians. Science had stripped off the surplusage, run it through the wringer of two-valued logic, and placed the knowledge in a form in which anyone could use it.

  Unfortunately, that part of magic which refused to conform to the neat categories of the nineteenth-century methodologists was lopped off and left out of the body of science. It fell into disrepute, was forgotten save as fable and superstition.

  Waldo began to think of the arcane arts as aborted sciences, abandoned before they had been clarified.

  And yet the manifestations of the sort of uncertainty which had characterized some aspects of magic and which he now attributed to hypothetical additional continua had occurred frequently, even in modern times. The evidence was overwhelming to anyone who approached it with an open mind: Poltergeisten, stones falling from the sky, apportation, “bewitched” persons—or, as he thought of them, persons who for some undetermined reason were loci of uncertainty—“haunted” houses, strange fires of the sort that would have once been attributed to salamanders. There were hundreds of such cases, carefully recorded and well vouched for, but ignored by orthodox science as being impossible. They were impossible, by known law, but considered from the standpoint of a coextensive additional continuum, they became entirely credible.

  He cautioned himself not to consider his tentative hypothesis of the Other World as proved; nevertheless, it was an adequate hypothesis even if it should develop that it did not apply to some of the cases of strange events.

  The Other Space might have different physical laws—no reason why it should not. Nevertheless, he decided to proceed on the assumption that it was much like the space he knew.

  The Other World might even be inhabited. That was an intriguing thought! In which case anything could happen through “magic.” Anything!

  Time to stop speculating and get down to a little solid research. He had previously regretfully given up trying to apply the formulas of the medieval magicians. It appeared that they never wrote down all of a procedure; some essential—so the reports ran and so his experience confirmed—was handed down verbally from master to student. His experience with Schneider confirmed this; there were things, attitudes, which must needs be taught directly.

  He regretfully set out to learn what he must unassisted.

  “Gosh, Uncle Gus, I’m glad to see you!”

  “Decided I’d better look in on you. You haven’t phoned me in weeks.”

  “That’s true, but I’ve been working awfully hard, Uncle Gus.”

  “Too hard, maybe. Mustn’t overdo it. Lemme see your tongue.”

  “I’m O.K.” But Waldo stuck out his tongue just the same; Grimes looked at it and felt his pulse.

  “You seem to be ticking all right. Learning anything?”

  “Quite a lot. I’ve about got the matter of the deKalbs whipped.”

  “That’s good. The message you sent Stevens seemed to indicate that you had found some hookup that could be used on my pet problem too.”

  “In a way, yes; but around from the other end. It begins to seem as if it was your problem which created Stevens’ problem.”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean it. The symptoms caused by ultra shortwave radiation may have had a lot to do with the erratic behavior of the deKalbs.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know myself. But I’ve rigged up a working hypothesis and I’m c
hecking it.”

  “Hm-m-m. Want to talk about it?”

  “Certainly—to you.” Waldo launched into an account of his interview with Schneider, concerning which he had not previously spoken to Grimes, even though Grimes had made the trip with him. He never, as Grimes knew, discussed anything until he was ready to.

  The story of the third set of deKalbs to be infected with the incredible writhings caused Grimes to raise his eyebrows. “Mean to say you caught on to how to do that?”

  “Yes indeed. Not how, maybe, but I can do it. I’ve done it more than once. I’ll show you.” He drifted away toward one side of the great room where several sets of deKalbs, large and small, were mounted, with their controls, on temporary guys. “This fellow over on the end, it just came in today. Broke down. I’ll give it Gramps Schneider’s hocus-pocus and fix it. Wait a minute. I forgot to turn on the power.”

  He returned to the central ring which constituted his usual locus and switched on the beamcaster. Since the ship itself effectively shielded anything in the room from outer radiation, he had installed a small power plant and caster similar in type to NAPA’s giant ones; without it he would have had no way to test the reception of the deKalbs.

  He rejoined Grimes and passed down the line of deKalbs, switching on the activizing circuits. All save two began to display the uncouth motions he had begun to think of as the Schneider flex. “That one on the far end,” he remarked, “is in operation but doesn’t flex. It has never broken down, so it’s never been treated. It’s my control; but this one”—he touched the one in front of him—“needs fixing. Watch me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t quite know. But I’ll do it.” He did not know. All he knew was that it was necessary to gaze down the antennae, think about them reaching into the Other World, think of them reaching for power, reaching—