4

“Uncle Gus?”

“Oh, hello, Waldo. Glad you called.”

“Would it be safe for me to come down to Earth?”

“Eh? How’s that? Speak up, man. I didn’t understand you.”

“I said would it hurt me to make a trip down to Earth.”

“This hookup,” said Grimes, “is terrible. It sounded just like you were saying you wanted to come down to Earth.”

“That’s what I did say.”

“What’s the matter, Waldo? Do you feel all right?”

“I feel fine, but I have to see a man at Earth surface. There isn’t any other way for me to talk to him, and I’ve got to talk to him. Would the trip do me any harm?”

“Ought not to, if you’re careful. After all, you were born there. Be careful of yourself, though. You’ve laid a lot of fat around your heart.”

“Oh dear. Do you think it’s dangerous!”

“No. You’re sound enough. Just don’t overstrain yourself. And be careful to keep your temper.”

“I will. I most certainly will. Uncle Gus?”

“Yes?”

“Will you come along with me and help me see it through?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Please, Uncle Gus. I don’t trust anybody else.”

“Time you grew up, Waldo. However, I will, this once.”

“Now remember,” Waldo told the pilot, “the absolute acceleration must never exceed one and one tenth gs, even in landing. I’ll be watching the accelograph the whole time.”

“I’ve been driving ambulances,” said the pilot, “for twelve years, and I’ve never given a patient a rough ride yet.”

“That’s no answer. Understand me? One and one tenth; and it should not even approach that figure until we are under the stratosphere. Quiet, Baldur! Quit snuffling.”

“I get you.”

“Be sure that you do. Your bonuses depend on it.”

“Maybe you’d like to herd it yourself.”

“I don’t like your attitude, my man. If I should die in the tank, you would never get another job.”

The pilot muttered something.

“What was that?” Waldo demanded sharply.

“Well, I said it might be worth it.”

Waldo started to turn red, opened his mouth.

Grimes cut in, “Easy, Waldo! Remember your heart.”

“Yes, Uncle Gus.”

Grimes snaked his way forward, indicated to the pilot that he wanted him to join him there.

“Don’t pay any attention to anything he says,” he advised the man quietly, “except what he said about acceleration. He really can’t stand much acceleration. He might die in the tank.”

“I still don’t think it would be any loss. But I’ll be careful.”

“Good.”

“I’m ready to enter the tank,” Waldo called out. “Will you help me with the straps, Uncle Gus?”

The tank was not a standard deceleration type, but a modification built for this one trip. The tank was roughly the shape of an oversized coffin and was swung in gimbals to keep it always normal to the axis of absolute acceleration. Waldo floated in water—the specific gravity of his fat hulk was low—from which he was separated by the usual flexible, gasketed tarpaulin. Supporting his head and shoulders was a pad shaped to his contour. A mechanical artificial resuscitator was built into the tank, the back pads being under water, the breast pads out of the water but retracted out of the way.

Grimes stood by with neoadrenalin; a saddle had been provided for him on the left side of the tank. Baldur was strapped to a shelf on the right side of the tank; he acted as a counterweight to Grimes.

Grimes assured himself that all was in readiness, then called out to the pilot, “Start when you’re ready.”

“O.K.” He sealed the access port; the entry tube folded itself back against the threshold flat of Freehold, freeing the ship. Gently they got under way.

Waldo closed his eyes; a look of seraphic suffering came over his face.

“Uncle Gus, suppose the deKalbs fail?”

“No matter. Ambulances store six times the normal reserve.”

“You’re sure?”

When Baldur began to feel weight, he started to whimper. Grimes spoke to him; he quieted down. But presently—days later, it seemed to Waldo—as the ship sank farther down into the Earth’s gravitational field, the absolute acceleration necessarily increased, although the speed of the ship had not changed materially. The dog felt the weary heaviness creeping over his body. He did not understand it and he liked it even less; it terrified him. He began to howl.

Waldo opened his eyes. “Merciful heavens!” he moaned. “Can’t you do something about that? He must be dying.”

“I’ll see.” Grimes undid his safety belt and swung himself across the tank. The shift in weight changed the balance of the load in the gimbals; Waldo was rocked against the side of the tank.

“Oh!” he panted. “Be careful.”

“Take it easy.” Grimes caressed the dog’s head and spoke to him. When he had calmed down, Grimes grabbed a handful of hide between the dog’s shoulders, measured his spot, and jabbed in a hypo. He rubbed the area. “There, old fellow! That will make you feel better.”

Getting back caused Waldo to be rocked again, but he bore it in martyred silence.

The ambulance made just one jerky maneuver after it entered the atmosphere. Both Waldo and the dog yelped. “Private ship,” the pilot yelled back. “Didn’t heed my right-of-way lights.” He muttered something about women drivers.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Grimes told Waldo. “I saw it.”

The pilot set them down with exquisite gentleness in a clearing which had been prepared between the highway and Schneider’s house. A party of men was waiting for them there; under Grimes’s supervision they unslung the tank and carried Waldo out into the open air. The evolution was performed slowly and carefully, but necessarily involved some degree of bumping and uneven movement. Waldo stood it with silent fortitude, but tears leaked out from under his lowered lids.

Once outside he opened his eyes and asked, “Where is Baldur?”

“I unstrapped him,” Grimes informed him, “but he did not follow us out.”

Waldo called out huskily, “Here, Baldur! Come to me, boy.”

Inside the car the dog heard his boss’s voice, raised his head, and gave a low bark. He still felt that terrifying sickness, but he inched forward on his belly, attempting to comply. Grimes reached the door in time to see what happened.

The dog reached the edge of his shelf and made a grotesque attempt to launch himself in the direction from which he had heard Waldo’s voice. He tried the only method of propulsion he knew; no doubt he expected to sail through the door and arrest his flight against the tank on the ground. Instead he fell several feet to the inner floor plates, giving one agonized yelp as he did so, and breaking his fall most clumsily with stiffened forelegs.

He lay sprawled where he had landed, making no noise, but not attempting to move. He was trembling violently.

Grimes came up to him and examined him superficially, enough to assure him that the beast was not really hurt, then returned to the outside. “Baldur’s had a little accident,” he told Waldo; “he’s not hurt, but the poor devil doesn’t know how to walk. You had best leave him in the ship.”

Waldo shook his head slightly. “I want him with me. Arrange a litter.”

Grimes got a couple of the men to help him, obtained a stretcher from the pilot of the ambulance, and undertook to move the dog. One of the men said, “I don’t know as I care for this job. That dog looks vicious. Look’t those eyes.”

“He’s not,” Grimes assured him. “He’s just scared out of his wits. Here, I’ll take his head.”

“What’s the matter with him? Same thing as the fat guy?”

“No, he’s perfectly well and strong; he’s just never learned to walk. This is his first trip to Earth.”

“Well, I’ll be a crosseyed owl!”

“I knew a case like it,” volunteered the other. “Dog raised in Lunopolis—first week he was on Earth he wouldn’t move—just squatted down, and howled, and made messes on the floor.”

“So has this one,” the first said darkly.

They placed Baldur alongside Waldo’s tub. With great effort Waldo raised himself on one elbow, reached out a hand, and placed it on the creature’s head. The dog licked it; his trembling almost ceased. “There! There!” Waldo whispered. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? Easy, old friend, take it easy.”

Baldur thumped his tail.

It took four men to carry Waldo and two more to handle Baldur. Gramps Schneider was waiting for them at the door of his house. He said nothing as they approached, but indicated that they were to carry Waldo inside. The men with the dog hesitated. “Him, too,” he said.

When the others had withdrawn—even Grimes returned to the neighborhood of the ship—Schneider spoke again. “Welcome, Mr. Waldo Jones.”

“I thank you for your welcome, Grandfather Schneider.”

The old man nodded graciously without speaking. He went to the side of Baldur’s litter. Waldo felt impelled to warn him that the beast was dangerous with strangers, but some odd restraint—perhaps the effect of that enervating gravitational field—kept him from speaking in time. Then he saw that he need not bother.

Baldur had ceased his low whimpering, had raised his head, and was licking Gramps Schneider’s chin. His tail thumped cheerfully. Waldo felt a sudden tug of jealousy; the dog had never been known to accept a stranger without Waldo’s specific injunction. This was disloyalty—treason! But he suppressed the twinge and coolly assessed the incident as a tactical advantage to him.

Schneider pushed the dog’s face out of the way and went over him thoroughly, prodding, thumping, extending his limbs. He grasped Baldur’s muzzle, pushed back his lips, and eyed his gums. He peeled back the dog’s eyelids. He then dropped the matter and came to Waldo’s side. “The dog is not sick,” he said; “his mind confuses. What made it?”

Waldo told him about Baldur’s unusual background. Schneider nodded acceptance of the matter—Waldo could not tell whether he had understood or not—and turned his attention to Waldo. “It is not good for a sprottly lad to lie abed. The weakness—how long has it had you?”

“All my life, Grandfather.”

“That is not good.” Schneider went over him as he had gone over Baldur. Waldo, whose feeling for personal privacy was much more intense than that of the ordinarily sensitive man, endured it for pragmatic reasons. It was going to be necessary, he felt, to wheedle and cajole this strange old creature. It would not do to antagonize him.

To divert his own attention from the indignity he chose to submit to, and to gain further knowledge of the old quack, Waldo let his eyes rove the room. The room where they were seemed to be a combination kitchen-living room. It was quite crowded, rather narrow, but fairly long. A fireplace dominated the kitchen end, but it had been bricked up, and a hole for the flue pipe of the baseburner had been let into the chimney. The fireplace was lopsided, as an oven had been included in its left side. The corresponding space at the right was occupied by a short counter which supported a tiny sink. The sink was supplied with water by a small hand pump which grew out of the counter.

Schneider, Waldo decided, was either older than he looked, which seemed incredible, or he had acquired his house from someone now long dead.

The living room end was littered and crowded in the fashion which is simply unavoidable in constricted quarters. Books filled several cases, were piled on the floor, hung precariously on chairs. An ancient wooden desk, crowded with papers and supporting a long-obsolete mechanical typewriter, filled one corner. Over it, suspended from the wall, was an ornate clock, carved somewhat like a house. Above its face were two little doors; while Waldo looked at it, a tiny wooden bird painted bright red popped out of the lefthand door, whistled “Th-wu th-woo!” four times, and popped frantically back into its hole. Immediately thereafter a little gray bird came out of the righthand door, said “Cuckoo” three times in a leisurely manner, and returned to its hole. Waldo decided that he would like to own such a clock; of course its pendulum-and-weight movement would not function in Freehold, but he could easily devise a one-g centrifuge frame to enclose it, wherein it would have a pseudo Earth-surface environment.

It did not occur to him to fake a pendulum movement by means of a concealed power source; he liked things to work properly.

To the left of the clock was an old-fashioned static calendar of paper. The date was obscured, but the letters above the calendar proper were large and legible: New York World’s Fair—Souvenir of the World of Tomorrow. Waldo’s eyes widened a little and went back to something he had noticed before, sticking into a pincushion on the edge of the desk. It was a round plastic button mounted on a pin whereby it could be affixed to the clothing. It was not far from Waldo’s eyes; he could read the lettering on it:

FREE SILVER
SIXTEEN TO ONE

Schneider must be—old!

There was a narrow archway, which led into another room. Waldo could not see into it very well; the arch was draped with a fringe curtain of long strings of large ornamental beads.

The room was rich with odors, many of them old and musty, but not dirty.

Schneider straightened up and looked down at Waldo. “There is nought wrong with your body. Up get yourself and walk.”

Waldo shook his head feebly. “I am sorry, Grandfather, I cannot.”

“You must reach for the power and make it serve you. Try.”

“I am sorry. I do not know how.”

“That is the only trouble. All matters are doubtful, unless one knows. You send your force into the Other World. You must reach into the Other World and claim it.”

“Where is this ‘Other World,’ Grandfather?”

Schneider seemed a little in doubt as to how to answer this. “The Other World,” he said presently, “is the world you do not see. It is here and it is there and it is everywhere. But it is especially here.” He touched his forehead. “The mind sits in it and sends its messages through it to the body. Wait.” He shuffled away to a little cupboard, from which he removed a small jar. It contained a salve, or unguent, which he rubbed on his hands.

He returned to Waldo and knelt down beside him. Grasping one of Waldo’s hands in both of his, he began to knead it very gently. “Let the mind be quiet,” he directed. “Feel for the power. The Other World is close and full of power. Feel it.”

The massage was very pleasant to Waldo’s tired muscles. The salve, or the touch of the old man’s hand, produced a warm, relaxing tingle. If he were younger, thought Waldo, I would hire him as a masseur. He has a magnetic touch.

Schneider straightened up again and said, “There—that betters you? Now you rest while I some coffee make.”

Waldo settled back contentedly. He was very tired. Not only was the trip itself a nervous strain, but he was still in the grip of this damnable, thick gravitational field, like a fly trapped in honey. Gramps Schneider’s ministrations had left him relaxed and sleepy.

He must have dozed, for the last thing he remembered was seeing Schneider drop an eggshell into the coffeepot. Then the old man was standing before him, holding the pot in one hand and a steaming cup in the other. He set them down, got three pillows, which he placed at Waldo’s back, then offered him the coffee. Waldo laboriously reached out both hands to take it.

Schneider held it back. “No,” he reproved, “one hand makes plenty. Do as I showed. Reach into the Other World for the strength.” He took Waldo’s right hand and placed it on the handle of the cup, steadying Waldo’s hand with his own. With his other hand he stroked Waldo’s right arm gently, from shoulder to finger tips. Again the warm tingle.

Waldo was surprised to find himself holding the cup alone. It was a pleasant triumph; at the time he left Earth, seventeen years before, it had been his invariable habit never to attempt to grasp anything with only one hand. In Freehold, of course, he frequently handled small objects one-handed, without the use of waldoes. The years of practice must have improved his control. Excellent!

So, feeling rather cocky, he drank the cupful with one hand, using extreme care not to slop it on himself. It was good coffee, too, he was bound to admit—quite as good as the sort he himself made from the most expensive syrup extract—better, perhaps.

When Schneider offered him coffeecake, brown with sugar and cinnamon and freshly rewarmed, he swaggeringly accepted it with his left hand, without asking to be relieved of the cup. He continued to eat and drink, between bites and sips resting and steadying his forearms on the edges of the tank.

The conclusion of the Kaffeeklatsch seemed a good time to broach the matter of the deKalbs. Schneider admitted knowing McLeod and recalled, somewhat vaguely it seemed, the incident in which he had restored to service McLeod’s broomstick. “Hugh Donald is a good boy,” he said. “Machines I do not like, but it pleasures me to fix things for boys.”

“Grandfather,” asked Waldo, “will you tell me how you fixed Hugh Donald McLeod’s ship?”

“Have you such a ship you wish me to fix?”

“I have many such ships which I have agreed to fix, but I must tell you that I have been unable to do so. I have come to you to find out the right way.”

Schneider considered this. “That is difficult. I could show you, but it is not so much what you do as how you think about it. That makes only with practice.”

Waldo must have looked puzzled, for the old man looked at him and added, “It is said that there are two ways of looking at everything. That is true and less than true, for there are many ways. Some of them are good ways and some are bad. One of the ancients said that everything either is, or is not. That is less than true, for a thing can both be and not be. With practice one can see it both ways. Sometimes a thing which is for this world is a thing which is not for the Other World. Which is important, since we live in the Other World.”

“We live in the Other World?”

“How else could we live? The mind—not the brain, but the mind—is in the Other World, and reaches this world through the body. That is one true way of looking at it, though there are others.”

“Is there more than one way of looking at deKalb receptors?”

“Certainly.”

“If I had a set which is not working right brought in here, would you show me how to look at it?”

“It is not needful,” said Schneider, “and I do not like for machines to be in my house. I will draw you a picture.”

Waldo felt impelled to insist, but he squelched his feeling. “You have come here in humility,” he told himself, “asking for instruction. Do not tell the teacher how to teach.”

Schneider produced a pencil and a piece of paper, on which he made a careful and very neat sketch of the antennae sheaf and main axis of a skycar. The sketch was reasonably accurate as well, although it lacked several essential minor details.

“These fingers,” Schneider said, “reach deep into the Other World to draw their strength. In turn it passes down this pillar”—he indicated the axis—”to where it is used to move the car.”

A fair allegorical explanation, thought Waldo. By considering the “Other World” simply a term for the hypothetical ether, it could be considered correct if not complete. But it told him nothing. “Hugh Donald,” Schneider went on, “was tired and fretting. He found one of the bad truths.”

“Do you mean,” Waldo said slowly, “that McLeod’s ship failed because he was worried about it?”

“How else?”

Waldo was not prepared to answer that one. It had become evident that the old man had some quaint superstitions; nevertheless, he might still be able to show Waldo what to do, even though Schneider did not know why. “And what did you do to change it?”

“I made no change; I looked for the other truth.”

“But how? We found some chalk marks—”

“Those? They were but to aid me in concentrating my attention in the proper direction. I drew them down so”—he illustrated with pencil on the sketch—”and thought how the fingers reached out for power. And so they did.”

“That is all? Nothing more?”

“That is enough.”

Either, Waldo considered, the old man did not know how he had accomplished the repair, or he had had nothing to do with it—sheer and amazing coincidence.

He had been resting the empty cup on the rim of his tank, the weight supported by the metal while his fingers merely steadied it. His preoccupation caused him to pay too little heed to it; it slipped from his tired fingers, clattered and crashed to the floor.

He was much chagrined. “Oh, I’m sorry, Grandfather. I’ll send you another.”

“No matter. I will mend.” Schneider carefully gathered up the pieces and placed them on the desk. “You have tired,” he added. “That is not good. It makes you lose what you have gained. Go back now to your house, and when you have rested, you can practice reaching for the strength by yourself.”

It seemed a good idea to Waldo; he was growing very tired, and it was evident that he was to learn nothing specific from the pleasant old fraud. He promised, emphatically and quite insincerely, to practice “reaching for strength,” and asked Schneider to do him the favor of summoning his bearers.

The trip back was uneventful. Waldo did not even have the spirit to bicker with the pilot.

Stalemate. Machines that did not work but should, and machines that did work but in an impossible manner. And no one to turn to but one foggy-headed old man. Waldo worked lackadaisically for several days, repeating, for the most part, investigations he had already made rather than admit to himself that he was stuck, that he did not know what to do, that he was, in fact, whipped and might as well call Gleason and admit it.

The two “bewitched” sets of deKalbs continued to work whenever activated, with the same strange and incredible flexing of each antenna. Other deKalbs which had failed in operation and had been sent to him for investigation still refused to function. Still others, which had not yet failed, performed beautifully without the preposterous fidgeting.

For the umpteenth time he took out the little sketch Schneider had made and examined it. There was, he thought, just one more possibility: to return again to Earth and insist that Schneider actually do, in his presence, whatever it was he had done which caused the deKalbs to work. He knew now that he should have insisted on it in the first place, but he had been so utterly played out by having to fight that devilish thick field that he had not had the will to persist.

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’s 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’s 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 spacetime-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 unmeasurably 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 rundown, 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’s hypothesis! “Rundown, 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 tiptop 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 interim 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.”

“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 per cent 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 lightness 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’s 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 checking 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—

The antennae began to squirm.

“That’s all there is to it—strictly between ourselves. I learned it from Schneider.” They had returned to the center of the sphere, at Grimes’s suggestion, on the pretext of wanting to get a cigarette. The squirming deKalbs made him nervous, but he did not want to say so.

“How do you explain it?”

“I regard it as an imperfectly understood phenomenon of the Other Space. I know less about it than Franklin knew about lightning. But I will know—I will! I could give Stevens a solution right now for his worries if I knew some way to get around your problem too.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“There ought to be some way to do the whole thing through the Other Space. Start out by radiating power into the Other Space and pick up it up from there. Then the radiation could not harm human beings. It would never get at them; it would duck around them. I’ve been working on my caster, but with no luck so far. I’ll crack it in time.”

“I hope you do. Speaking of that, isn’t the radiation from your own caster loose in this room?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll put on my shield coat. It’s not good for you either.”

“Never mind. I’ll turn it off.” As he turned to do so there was the sound of a sweet, chirruping whistle. Baldur barked. Grimes turned to see what caused it.

“What,” he demanded, “have you got there?”

“Huh? Oh, that’s my cuckoo clock. Fun, isn’t it?” Grimes agreed that it was, although he could not see much use for it. Waldo had mounted it on the edge of a light metal hoop which spun with a speed just sufficient to produce a centrifugal force of one g.

“I rigged it up,” Waldo continued, “while I was bogged down in this problem of the Other Space. Gave me something to do.”

“This ‘Other Space’ business—I still don’t get it.”

“Think of another continuum much like our own and superposed on it the way you might lay one sheet of paper on another. The two spaces aren’t identical, but they are separated from each other by the smallest interval you can imagine—coextensive but not touching—usually. There is an absolute one-to-one, point-for-point correspondence, as I conceive it, between the two spaces, but they are not necessarily the same size or shape.”

“Hey? Come again—they would have to be.”

“Not at all. Which has the larger number of points in it? A line an inch long, or a line a mile long?”

“A mile long, of course.”

“No. They have exactly the same number of points. Want me to prove it?”

“I’ll take your word for it. But I never studied that sort of math.”

“All right. Take my word for it then. Neither size nor shape is any impediment to setting up a full, point-for-point correspondence between two spaces. Neither of the words is really appropriate. ‘Size’ has to do with a space’s own inner structure, its dimensions in terms of its own unique constants. ‘Shape’ is a matter which happens inside itself—or at least not inside our space—and has to do with how it is curved, open or closed, expanding or contracting.”

Grimes shrugged. “It all sounds like gibberish to me.” He returned to watching the cuckoo clock swing round and round its wheel.

“Sure it does,” Waldo assented cheerfully. “We are limited by our experience. Do you know how I think of the Other World?” The question was purely rhetorical. “I think of it as about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, but nevertheless a whole universe, existing side by side with our own, from here to the farthest star. I know that it’s a false picture, but it helps me to think about it that way.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Grimes, and turned himself around in the air. The compound motion of the clock’s pendulum was making him a little dizzy. “Say! I thought you turned off the caster?”

“I did,” Waldo agreed, and looked where Grimes was looking. The deKalbs were still squirming. “I thought I did,” he said doubtfully, and turned to the caster’s control board. His eyes then opened wider. “But I did. It is turned off.”

“Then what the devil—”

“Shut up!” He had to think—think hard. Was the caster actually out of operation? He floated himself over to it, inspected it. Yes, it was dead, dead as the dinosaurs. Just to make sure he went back, assumed his primary waldoes, cut in the necessary circuits, and partially disassembled it. But the deKalbs still squirmed.

The one deKalb set which had not been subjected to the Schneider treatment was dead; it gave out no power hum. But the others were working frantically, gathering power from—where?

He wondered whether or not McLeod had said anything to Gramps Schneider about the casters from which the deKalbs were intended to pick up their power. Certainly he himself had not. It simply had not come into the conversation. But Schneider had said something. “The Other World is close by and full of power!”

In spite of his own intention of taking the old man literally he had ignored that statement. The Other World is full of power. “I am sorry I snapped at you, Uncle Gus,” he said.

“‘S all right.”

“But what do you make of that?”

“Looks like you’ve invented perpetual motion, son.”

“In a way, perhaps. Or maybe we’ve repealed the law of conservation of energy. Those deKalbs are drawing energy that was never before in this world!”

“Hm-m-m!”

To check his belief he returned to the control ring, donned his waldoes, cut in a mobile scanner, and proceeded to search the space around the deKalbs with the most sensitive pickup for the radio power band he had available. The needles never jumped; the room was dead in the wave lengths to which the deKalbs were sensitive. The power came from Other Space.

The power came from Other Space. Not from his own beamcaster, not from NAPA’s shiny stations, but from Other Space. In that case he was not even close to solving the problem of the defective deKalbs; he might never solve it. Wait, now—just what had he contracted to do? He tried to recall the exact words of the contract.

There just might be a way around it. Maybe. Yes, and this newest cockeyed trick of Gramps Schneider’s little pets could have some very tricky aspects. He began to see some possibilities, but he needed to think about it.

“Uncle Gus—”

“Yes, Waldo?”

“You can go back and tell Stevens that I’ll be ready with the answers. We’ll get his problem licked, and yours too. In the meantime I’ve got to do some really heavy thinking, so I want to be by myself, please.”