VI

Once more they found themselves seated almost as they had been that eventful day weeks ago. Keyes took his usual position at the head.

‘There is no need of telling any of you gentlemen what this achievement means to our country and for all mankind. Anti-gravity will revolutionize the military and peacetime transport of the world – and in time will take man to the stars.

‘Now – I have someone I would like to introduce to you.’

He stepped aside and beckoned through the doorway to the next room behind him. Someone came through in response. Then Keyes stood aside.

A startled gasp went through the audience. Before them stood Leon Dunning.

He smiled at the group a little wryly. ‘I see you know me, gentlemen. I hope none of you will bear me any hard feelings or consider me the repulsive character I have been painted. The script called for it. An unpleasant young jerk, is the way it was described, I believe.’

Jennings was on his feet. ‘What is the meaning of this, Dr Keyes? I think we are entitled to an explanation!’

‘Indeed you are, Dr Jennings. And you shall have one.’ Keyes replaced Dunning, who took a seat. ‘To a considerable extent, our friend, Professor Dykstra, was correct. The original data given you at the beginning of this project was a hoax.’

A wave of startled cries and protests arose from the assembly. Keyes raised a hand. ‘Just a moment, please. Hear me out. I said that the initial data was a hoax. There was no Leon Dunning, inventor of anti-gravity devices. We put on a show, and faked a film. There was no anti-gravity.

‘Today, there is an anti-gravity machine in existence. I want you to consider very carefully, gentlemen, just where the hoax in this matter truly lies.’ He paused for a moment, looking into the eyes of each of them, then stepped aside. ‘Our chief psychologist, Dr Kenneth Berkeley, will give you the remainder of the story.’

Berk got to his feet and moved to the front as if reluctant to do what had to be done.

‘If any of you are angry,’ he said, ‘I am the person to whom it should be directed. Project Levitation was the direct result of my proposal.

‘Do not think, however, that I am apologizing. I object to the term hoax, or fraud, which Professor Dykstra called it. How can we call it a hoax when out of it has come a thing with potentialities that cannot be grasped by any of us at this time?’

‘But why, man, why?’ Jennings exploded impatiently. ‘Why this hocus-pocus, this nonsense, this irrelevance about astrology, levitation, and mysticism! Why wasn’t it set up as a straightforward project. We aren’t a bunch of high school kids to be tricked into something we don’t want to do!’

‘Suppose you give me the answer to that?’ said Berk. ‘How would you have responded to a letter from Dr Keyes inviting you to take part in a project to build an anti-gravity machine? How many of you would have remained in your safe and sane universities where crackpots are not allowed to spend the people’s money as they are in Government institutions?

‘We are thankful we had no more than one Professor Dykstra on the project. He refused to accept the data we provided and his goal became to prove anti-gravity impossible. How many of you would have come with the same goal if our little make-believe had not spurred you on?

‘Dykstra could not face the data in a rational manner. As a result he suffered a nervous breakdown, which was, of course,the result of a long chain of previous incidents.

‘On the other hand, those of you who could accept the data we handed you were able to knock out the pre-conceptions about anti-gravity and achieve that which you had considered impossible.

‘Essentially, this was a project in psychology, not physics. We could have chosen something besides anti-gravity. The results, I predict, would have been the same. I have observed many scientists at work in the laboratory and library. I have studied the educational preconceptions they bring to their work. Before a problem is tackled, a decision is already made as to whether it is possible or impossible. In so many cases, as exemplified by Professor Dykstra, the interest in the problem is only to the extent of proving the decision correct.

‘If you will forgive me for using you for guinea pigs in my project, I submit to you that I have given a far more powerful technique for scientific investigation than you have ever possessed before. The technique of the conviction that any desired answer can be found. You have not been hoaxed at all. You have been shown a new and powerful scientific method.

‘If you could and did lick a problem previously impossible to you, in a matter of weeks, how many more of your own research problems are just waiting for this new approach?’

There was a good deal more said at the meeting. Some of it was highly confused. Berk’s explanation was not understood at all by several of them.

It would take a long time for it to sink in thoroughly, even for him, Mart thought. There was just a trace of anger within him that he found hard to put down. But he chuckled at the smooth way in which Berk had engineered the project. He’d bet the psychologist had had some uneasy moments because of Dykstra!

There was a sort of stunned feeling in his mind as he began to recognize the absolute truth of what Berk had demonstrated. He saw it reflected in the faces of some of the others, a sort of blank, why-didn’t-somebody-tell-me-this-before look.

It was finally agreed they would meet again the next day to thresh out their reactions to what had been done.

As soon as they were able to break away, Berk took Mart’s arm. ‘I almost forgot to tell you, you are invited to dinner tonight.’

‘That had better not be a hoax,’ said Mart.

After dinner, the two of them went out into the patio with which Berk struggled to give his city lot the dignity of an estate. They sat down on a garden seat and watched the moon come up through the neighbour’s television antenna.

‘I want the rest of it,’ said Mart. –

‘The rest of what?’

‘Don’t be coy. The rest of the guys are going to get it out of you in the morning, but I want it first.’

Berk was silent for a while; then he started speaking. He lit a pipe and got it going well. ‘Jennings almost had it in that speech about the floodgates of the mind which you mentioned. You and I almost had it back there when we were trying to solve the problems of the Universe in school.

‘It boils down to the thing you asked me up in the mountains: what is the process of thinking? Where does original thought come from?

‘Consider the abstruse equations you cooked up in a matter of days on the gravitational flow around the curvature of space. Why didn’t you do it ten years ago? Why didn’t somebody else do it a long time ago? Why you, and nobody else?

‘I wanted you on the project especially, Mart, because I want you to give me a hand with this thing, if you will. It’s a little more than I can handle. I don’t know whether it’s physics or psychology or some weird cross between the two.

‘Anyway, here’s where I started: you know communication theory. You know that any kind of data can be put in code form consisting of pulses. For example, a complex photograph codified in terms of half-tone dots. There are many possible methods of coding information into pulses. The code can use dot-dash, it can use time-separation between pulses, it can use pulse amplitude, a thousand different factors and combinations of factors. But any information can be expressed as a special sequence of pulses.

‘One such sequence is: “Every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe”; another, “The secret of immorality is–“, and still another, “Gravity is itself the result of the action of – and it can be nullified by–‘

‘Any answer to any question can be expressed in terms of a special sequence of pulses, wherein some relationship between the pulses is a codified expression of the information.

‘But, by definition, pure noise is a completely random sequence of pulses, containing pulses in all possible relationships.

‘Therefore: any information-bearing message is a special sub-class of the class “noise”. Pure noise, therefore, includes all possible messages, all possible information. Hence, pure noise, which is actually another term for pure probability, is omniscient!

‘Now, that isn’t just an exercise in scholastic logic. It is a recognition that all things can be learned, all things can be achieved.’

Mart stirred and blew a violent cloud of cigar smoke at the moon. ‘Hold it!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s got to be some limit to the territory you take in.’

‘Why? Is my logic wrong in regard to noise and information?’

‘Gad, I don’t know. It sounds good. It’s right, of course, but exactly what does that have to do with the operation of the human mind and Project Levitation?’

‘From a structural standpoint, I can’t answer that question -yet. Functionally, it appears that there must be in the human mind a mechanism which is nothing but a pure noise generator, a producer of random impulses, pure omniscient noise.

‘Somewhere else there must be another mechanism which is set to either filter the production of random noise or control its production so that only semantically meaningful forms are allowed to come through. Evidently, the filter is capable of being set at any level to filter out anything we choose to define as noise.

‘So we go through the rough process of growing up, we go to school, and get educated, we get a red line setting on the noise filter which rejects all but a bare minimum of data presented by the external universe, and our internal creativeness as well.

‘Facts in the world about us are rejected from then on when they don’t fit. Creative imagination is whittled down. The filter takes care of it automatically once we give it a setting.’

‘And your project here,’ said Mart, ‘the stuff on Babylonian mysticism, astrology, and the rest of that crud–‘

‘The whole pattern was set to be as noisy as possible,’ said Berk. ‘We didn’t know how to produce anti-gravity, so we gave you a picture of a man who did, and made it as noisy as possible to loosen up your own noise filters on the subject. I offered you a dose of omniscient noise on the subject of anti-gravity, and the one inescapable conclusion that it had been done.

‘Everyone of you had previously set your filters to reject the idea of anti-gravity. Nonsense! No use looking for that. Work on something useful.

‘So I suggested to Keyes we assemble a bunch of you double-domes and slap you solidly with the fact that it ain’t nonsense, it can be done, Bud. Give you some omniscient noise to listen to, loosen up your filters, and let the answer come through out of your own mental productiveness.

‘It worked. It always will work. All you’ve got to do is get the lead out of your pants and the rocks out of your head, and the arbitrary noise filter settings corrected on a few of the other things you’ve always wanted to do – and you can find a proper answer to any problem you care to investigate!’

Mart glanced up at the moon spreading silver across the sky. ‘Yeah – there’s the stars,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted the stars. Now we’ve got anti-gravity–‘

‘And so you can go to the stars – if you want to.

Mart shook his head. ‘You and Dunning – first we’ve got it, then we haven’t.

‘You get us to produce anti-gravity. And it becomes a mere gimmick! Sure we could see the planets, maybe even go beyond the solar system before we die. But I guess I’m going to stay here and work with you. A paltry planet or two isn’t so much, after all. If we could learn to utilize the maximum noise level of the human mind we could master the whole Universe!’