II

A long time afterwards, Martin Nagle recalled that he must have been in a partial stupor when he left that conference room. He felt a vague and unpleasant sensation about his head as if it had been beaten repeatedly with a pillow.

He and Kenneth Berkeley went out together. They paused only long enough to make polite greetings to his fellow physicists whom he had not seen for a long time. But he was in a hurry to leave. To get rid of that feeling in his head.

In front of the ONR building he stopped with his hands in his pockets and looked over the unpleasant grey of the city’s buildings. He could close his eyes and still see a man rising straight up into the air – soaring at an angle – dropping like a plummet.

All at once he realized he hadn’t even stopped to examine the remains of the instrument under the tarpaulin. He turned suddenly on Berkeley.

‘The psychology of this thing – is that where you’re in on it, Berk?’

His companion nodded. ‘Keyes called me in when he wanted an investigation into Dunning’s past. I’m staying, I guess.’

‘You know it’s impossible, don’t you?’ said Mart. ‘Utterly and completely impossible! There’s nothing in our basic science to explain this thing, let alone duplicate it.’

‘Impossible? Meaning what?’

‘Meaning that I’ve got to … that every one of us has got to shift gears, back up, retrace who knows how far – twenty years of learning – five hundred years of science? Where did we go off the track? Why was it left to a screwball like Dunning to hit it right?’

‘He was an odd character,’ mused Berk. ‘Astrology, mysticism, levitation. There’s quite a bit in the tape about levitation. That’s not so far removed from the concept of anti-gravity at that, is it?’

Mart made a rough noise in his throat. ‘I expect to hear any moment that his first successful flight was aboard a broomstick.’

‘Well, there’s quite a bit of lore about broomsticks – also magic carpets and such. Makes you wonder how it all got started.’

The shock was slow in wearing down. Martin returned to the hotel after the evening conference, which was spent mostly in examination of the wreckage.

It was as Keyes had said, hopeless. But there was an indefinable something about gazing upon the remains of what had been the realization of an impossible dream. Mart felt a kind of frantic yearning to reach out and touch that mass and convert it back to the instrument it had once been by sheer force of will. As if believing it possible would make it so.

And wasn’t there some essence of truth in this, he thought? Dunning had believed it could be done and had done it. Reputable men in science didn’t believe such things possible–

Now, in his hotel room, Mart sat on the edge of the bed looking out of the window and across the night lights of the city. There were certain things you had to accept as impossible. The foundation of science was built upon the concept of the impossible as well as the possible.

Perpetual motion.

The alchemist’s dream – as the alchemist dreamed it, anyway.

Anti-gravity–

All man’s experience in attempting to master nature showed these things could not be done. You had to set yourself some limitations. You had to let your work be bounded by certain Great Impossibles or you could spend a lifetime trying to solve the secret of invisibility or of walking through a brick wall.

Or trying to build a magic carpet.

He stood up and walked to the window. There had been growing all afternoon a sense of faint panic. And now he identified it. Where could you draw the line? It had to be drawn. He was sure of that.

It had been drawn once before, quite definitely. In the 1890s they had closed the books. Great minds believed then that science had encompassed the universe. All that was not known belonged to the Great Impossibles.

Then had come radium, the Roentgen tube, relativity, cosmic rays.

The line vanished. Where was it now? A few hours ago he would have said he could define it with fair accuracy. Tonight he did not know.

He went to bed. After an hour he got up and called Kenneth Berkeley. The clock said almost midnight. It didn’t matter.

‘Berk,’ he said into the phone. ‘Mart. I’ve just been thinking. The whole crowd will be going through Dunning’s lab and his library. What’s the chance of you getting me out there first thing in the morning? Just the two of us. I’d like to beat the crowd.’

‘I think I can arrange it,’ said Berk. ‘Keyes wants each of you to work as you wish. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow. I’ll call you as early as I can.’

It rained during the night, and when Berk called for Mart in his car, the city was dismal with fog, lessening even further the reality surrounding them.

‘Keyes wasn’t much in favour of this,’ said Berk as they drove away from the hotel. ‘It’s liable to make some of the others mad, but frankly, I’m sure he’s convinced that you’re the member of the class mostly likely to succeed.’

Mart grunted. ‘Least likely, I’d say. I’m not sure that I’m convinced yet that Dunning didn’t have some terrific joker in here somewhere.’

‘I know what you mean, but you will. It comes gradually. And easier for you. You’re the youngest of the group. Keyes thinks some of the older men may spend all their time proving Dunning couldn’t do it. How do you feel about that? Is that the way you’re heading, or are you going to try to find out what Dunning did?’

‘Anything a jerk like Dunning can do, Nagle can do double – once Nagle is convinced that Dunning did it.’

Berk threw back his head and laughed. ‘Keyes will love you, boy. He’s been afraid he wouldn’t find a single top John in the country who would really try.’

Dunning’s place was in the shabby, once fashionable sector of town where the owners of the gingerbread monsters were no longer able to meet the upkeep or sell them to anyone who was.

It had been learned that the house actually belonged to an uncle of Dunning, but so far he had not been located.

A guard was on duty at the front entrance. He nodded as Berk and Mart showed their passes.

‘Dunning’s laboratories and shops are on the first floor,’ said Berk. ‘Upstairs, is his library. He slept in one of the third-floor bedrooms, but the rest are vacant. A lot of cooking seemed to have been done in the back kitchen. He left a well stocked larder. Where do you want to start?’

‘A quick look through the labs to begin. I want to get the feel of the layout.’

On the right of the entrance hallway, they came into a small but extremely well equipped chemistry laboratory. The place seemed well used, but immaculate. A complex fractionating set up was on the worktable.

‘Almost the only piece of writing in the whole place was found on a small pad here,’ said Berk. ‘A bit of scratch work computation without any formulas or reactions.’

Mart grunted and moved on to the adjacent room. Here was the more familiar hodgepodge of the electronic experimenter, but even in this there was instantly apparent the mark of a careful workman. Breadboard layouts were assembled with optimum care. Test leads were carefully made of rubber-covered or shielded wire and equipped with clips instead of being the usual random lengths of coloured connecting wire hastily stripped and tied to a terminal.

A sizeable bank of rack and panel mounted equipment was not recognizable at once as to function. It appeared to be a set-up that might belong to any careful experimenter who had no regard for his bank account.

This would need further study, but Mart continued moving through to the next room, a machine shop, as well equipped for its functions as the previous rooms. A six-inch lathe, a large drill press, and a milling machine were the chief items.

Mart whistled softly as he stood in the middle of the room and looked back the way they had come.

‘When I was a kid in high school,’ he said, ‘this is exactly the kind of a place I thought Heaven would be.’

‘And it had to belong to a person like Dunning, eh?’ said Berk with a slow smile.

Mart turned sharply. His voice became low and serious. ‘Berk – whatever Dunning may have been, he was no jug-head. A paranoid, maybe, but not a jug-head. He could do things. Look at this.’

He picked up a weird looking assembly from a nearby-table and held it up in the light. It gleamed with a creamy sheen. A silver-plated bit of high-frequency plumbing.

‘That’s beautiful,’ said Mart. ‘There’re not more than three or four university shops in the whole country that can turn out a piece like that. I’ve had to fight for weeks to get our machinists to come up with anything that complex and then it would be way out of tolerance.’

He hefted the piece of plumbing lightly. He knew it was just right. It had the feel of being made right.

Berk led the way across the hall. He opened the door for Mart. There, against the walls of the room, were panels of a compact digital computer, and on the other side an analogue computer.

‘But you haven’t seen anything yet,’ said Berk. ‘The surprise of your life is upstairs.’

Gravity was a force, Mart thought as he climbed the stairs. You only lick force with force – in the world of physics, at least. In politics and human relations, force might yield to something more subtle, but if Dunning had licked gravity it was with some other – and presently known – force. Physics was at least aware of every force that existed. There were no gaps except perhaps the one temporarily occupied by the elusive neutrino.

Dunning’s machine was ingenious. But it could be nothing but a clever application of well-known laws and forces. There was no miracle, no magic in it. Having decided this on a slow, verbal basis, Mart felt somewhat more at ease. He followed Berk into the library.

There was not simply one room of it, but an entire suite had been converted and shelved. There were certainly several thousand volumes in the place.

‘This is the one that may interest you most.’ Berk stepped into the nearest room on his left. ‘A is for Astrology,’ he said. He gestured towards a full section of shelving.

Mart scanned the titles: Astrology for the Novice, Astrology and the Infinite Destiny, The Babylonian Way, The Course of the Stars.

He hopefully pulled the latter volume from the shelf against the possibility it might be an astronomy text. It wasn’t. He quickly put it back with its fellows.

‘Well read, too,’ said Berk. ‘We examined quite a number and they have copious notations in Dunning’s handwriting. This may be the one place we can find real clues to his thinking – in such marginal notes.’

Mart waved a hand in violent rejection of the sombre volumes and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Junk!’ he muttered. ‘This has no bearing on Keyes’ problem at all, of course. But it certainly ought to be a problem of interest to you.’

‘A guy would need two separate heads to hold an interest in the things downstairs and in this nonsense at the same time.’

‘But Dunning had only a single head,’ said Berk quietly. ‘Maybe it’s all part of a whole that we don’t see – and that Dunning did.’

Mart pursed his lips and looked at the psychologist.

‘I’m serious,’ said Berk. ‘My field is primarily the human mind, and only secondarily the subjects with which the mind deals. But we see in Dunning a single mind that can whip the matter of anti-gravity, that can hold an interest in the fields represented by the laboratories below, and can digest the material of this library.

‘Now, actually, there is no true schizophrenia. In the skull of each of us is only a single individual, and anyone examined closely enough can be found to have a remarkably consistent goal, no matter how apparently erratic his activities.

‘Perhaps much of the material Dunning found in both the library and in the laboratory proved redundant, but I would say that Dunning’s genius apparently lay in his ability to extract relevant material from the redundant without categorically rejecting entire areas of human thought.’

Mart smiled tolerantly and turned away. He found himself facing a section of shelves covered with works on East Indian philosophy. Six of eight feet of space was devoted to the subject of Levitation. Mart jabbed a finger at the titles.

‘Anything those boys can do by hocus-pocus Nagle can do twice as fast by x’s and y’s and by making electrons jump through hoops.’

‘That’s all Keyes wants. How soon can you deliver?