III

After lunch, they returned to ONR. Mart was assigned an office and given a copy of the Dunning tape. He put aside the prepared transcript, as Keyes had suggested, and prepared to listen, unbiased.

He turned on the recorder and winced at the garble of sound that blared forth again. With one hand on the volume control he rested his chin on his arm in front of the speaker and strained to hear through the noise the scarcely audible voice of Dunning.

Near the beginning, he caught the word ‘levitation’ mentioned many times. There was a full phrase, ‘levitation which was first successfully demonstrated to the Western world by the English medium–‘ The buzz of a plane cut off the rest of it.

Mart rewound the tape and listened to that much of it again. At each mention of levitation an image flared up in Mart’s mind. An image of a dirty, scrawny Indian fakir equipped with a filthy turban, a coil of rope over one arm, and a basket with a snake in the other hand.

But Dunning had produced anti-gravity.

What semantic significance had he found in the word?

Mart growled to himself in irritation and let the tape run on. There was nothing more in those first few feet of it. He perked up his ears at a phrase ‘earth effect’ separated by a garble from ‘distribution of sunspots unexplained to date by astronomers, and politely ignored by all experts–‘

It struck a faint bell of recollection in Mart’s mind. He scratched a note on a pad to check on it.

The sound dissolved again to hissing and roaring, through which the dead man seemed to taunt him. He gathered that much talk was on the subject of ‘planetary configurations–.’ Astrology. He groaned aloud and closed his eyes through a comparatively long stretch of audibility: ‘Magnetic storms on Earth predictable through movements of the planets in terms of quadrature – fields of data observed through thousands of years and do not fit explanations now accepted for other phenomena.’

It shifted apparently, after many minutes, to comparative religion. ‘Galileo and Newton,’ Dunning said, ‘affected man’s thinking more than they knew. They clipped from religion its miracles and from physics its imagination … of India there’s more conquest of the physical universe than in a score of American research laboratories.’

And that was the last of it. The tape fizzled out in a long garble of buzzing planes and faulty recording. Mart turned off the machine.

That was it. The mind and work of the first man to directly conquer gravity!

With an almost physical weariness he turned to the transcript and scanned through it. There was more, but it was astonishing how little additional information was actually added from the memories of the original observers. Mart supposed Dunning’s words were such a shock to those military and scientific minds that they were stunned into semi-permanent amnesia in respect to the things he said.

He leaned back in the chair, summing up what he had heard. Dunning’s thesis seemed to be that much sound data had been excluded by conventional scientists from standard theories. The dead man had believed much of this data could be found and explained in the various realms of astrology, East Indian mysticism, movements of sunspots, the levitation of mediums, and a host of other unorthodox areas.

Where was the thread of rational thought that could find its way through this ? He closed his eyes again, trying to feel for a starting point.

There came a knock on the door, and a voice. ‘May I come in, Dr Nagle?’

It was Keyes. Mart rose and offered a chair. ‘I have just finished the tapes and transcription. There is very little to go on.’

‘Very little indeed,’ said Keyes. ‘When you were a youngster entering a contest for the first time you had a feeling for it. You know what I mean. It’s in your throat and chest, and in your stomach. It goes all the way through your legs to your toes.

‘It’s the feeling of your entire organism – a feeling that you haven’t got a chance to win – or that you are going to acquit yourself to the maximum ability within you, regardless of the strength of others. Do you understand me?’

Mart nodded.

‘What kind of a feeling do you have about this, Dr Nagle?’

Mart relaxed and leaned back with his eyes half closed. He understood Keyes. He had gone through the range of all possible feelings since yesterday afternoon. Which one of them had remained with him?

‘I can do it,’ he said quietly to Keyes. ‘I could wish for more data, and I’m not wholly in sympathy with Dunning’s approach. But I can examine the data he had, and re-examine the data I have. And I can do it.’

‘Good!’ Keyes stood up. ‘That’s what I came in to find out. And your answer is what I hoped to hear. You may expect that your reaction is not quite universal among your colleagues, although I feel all will co-operate. But some of them will be licked before they start, because they will feel, and persist in feeling, that the thing ought not to be.’

Dr Kenneth Berkeley had never ceased to wonder at the constitution of man. When he was very young he had wondered why some of his fellows believed in fairies, and others did not. He wondered why some could believe the moon was made of green cheese, and others were equally sure it could not be so.

He grew to wonder intensely just how man knew anything for sure, and that long road of wonder led to the present moment of his status as fellow in psychology at ONR.

He was grateful for the privilege of being on this project under the leadership of Dr Keyes. Keyes appreciated more than any other physicist that he had known the importance of the fact that an individual is a man first and a scientist second – that there is no true objectivity in science. There is no divorcing the observer from the observed, and every scientific theory and law, no matter how conscientiously propounded and objectively proved is nevertheless coloured by the observer.

Berkeley was intrigued by the study of the physicists’ reactions to the situation in which Dunning’s discovery and death had placed them.

Martin Nagle had reacted approximately as Berkeley expected. They had known each other well during undergraduate days in college, drifting apart later as their professions diverged.

Through the day Berkeley conducted the rest of the scientists through the house. A number of them had made requests to go privately as Mart had done. Others went in groups of three or four. But by the end of the day all had visited the place except Professor Wilson Dykstra.

During the first day, Dykstra confined himself to a study of the tape and transcription. He did not present himself for a visit to the Dunning house until the following morning.

Berk called at his hotel. He kept the psychologist waiting fifteen minutes before he finally appeared through the revolving doors.

Dykstra was a small, round man in his late sixties, owlish in heavy framed glasses. His jutting lower lip seemed to signify his being perpetually on the defensive, as if he couldn’t believe the world were really as he saw it. But Berk knew he was a great man in his own field. He had contributed much to the elucidation of Einstein’s work in relation to gravity, which was the reason for his being invited to participate in the project.

The sky was threatening, and Dykstra clutched a black umbrella to his chest as he emerged from the hotel. Berk waited with the car door open.

‘Good morning, Dr Dykstra. It looks as if we’ll be alone this morning. Everyone else took a visit to Dunning’s yesterday.’

Dykstra grunted and got in. ‘That’s the way I wanted it. I spent a full day yesterday going over that ridiculous tape recording.’

Berk moved the car out into the line of traffic. He had rather felt from the very first that the project could get along just as well without Dykstra.

‘Were you able to derive anything at all from it?’

‘I have reached no conclusion as yet, Dr Berkeley. But when I do, I do not believe it is going to be that young Dunning was the unadulterated genius some of you people consider him. Surely you, a psychologist, can understand the type of mind that would produce such a mixture of unrelated and irrelevant, not to say mythological, material!’

‘There are many strange things about the human mind, which we do not know,’ said Berk. ‘One of the least understood is the point at which genius ends and nonsense begins.’

‘In physics the march is steadily upwards! We have no doubt as to which way lies progress.’

Berk let that one ride. A man who saw in the world such terrible simplicity might ultimately find Dunning’s mystery completely transparent. He couldn’t risk that possibility by arguing.

They drew up to the old mansion Dunning had occupied. Dykstra surveyed it from the car. ‘The kind of a place you would expect, he grunted.

It was difficult to estimate what was going on in the physicist’s mind as he came into the laboratories.

In the first room he scanned the shelves of reagents. He took down a dozen bottles and examined their labels closely. Of some he removed the stoppers and sniffed cautiously, then replaced them all on the shelf in mild disdain.

He spent a long time examining the fractionating set-up in the centre of the room. He spotted the pad of computations left there and drew an old envelope from his pocket and did some comparison scribbling.

In the electronics room he turned to look through the doorway. ‘Why would any man want two such laboratories as these?’

His inspection was much more thorough than that of any of the others, including Martin Nagle. Berk supposed that Mart and many of the others would be back, but Dykstra was going through with a fine-toothed comb the first time.

He poked through the machine shop. ‘Well equipped,’ he muttered, ‘for a man who likes to tinker.’

But he was highly impressed by the computer room. He examined the settings of the instruments and the chart papers. He opened every desk drawer and shuffled through the scattering of papers inside.

Red-faced, he turned to Berk. ‘This is absurd! Certainly there would be charts, papers, or something showing the man’s calculations. These instruments are not here for show; they’ve obviously been used. Someone has removed the computational material from this room!’

‘It’s just as we found it,’ said Berk. ‘We don’t understand it any better than you.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Dykstra flatly.

The reaction of the physicist to the library was the thing Berk was most interested in. He let Dykstra look at will over the strange and exotic collection of volumes.

At first Dykstra reacted like a suddenly caged animal. He ran from the shelves of mythology, got a glance at the section on astrology, hurried from there to the books on faith-healing, and made a spiral turn that brought him up against the region of material on East Indian philosophy.

‘What is this,’ he bellowed hoarsely, ‘a joke?’

The pudgy figure seemed to swell visibly with indignation.

‘The next room would interest you most, perhaps,’ said Berk.

Dykstra almost ran through the adjoining door as if escaping some devil with whom he had come face to face. Then, catching sight of the titles here, he began to breathe easily and with an audible sighing of relief. He was among friends.

With an air of reference, he took down a worn copy of Weyl’s Space Time Matter, and a reissue of the relativity papers.

‘It isn’t possible,’ he murmured, ‘that Dunning owned and understood both of these libraries.’

‘He understood and conquered gravity,’ said Berk. ‘And this is the last of the clues we have to show you.’

Dykstra put the books carefully back on the shelves. ‘I don’t like it.’ He glanced back to the other room as if it were a place of terror.

‘There’s something wrong,’ he murmured. ‘Anti-gravity! Whoever heard of such a thing? And how could it come out of a place like this?’