5

“Greetings, Mr. Gleason. Quiet, Baldur! Come in. Be comfortable. How do you do, Dr. Stevens.”

“How do you do, Mr. Jones.”

“This,” said Gleason, indicating a figure trailing him, “is Mr. Harkness, head of our legal staff.”

“Ah, yes indeed. There will be matters of contract to be discussed. Welcome to Freehold, Mr. Harkness.”

“Thank you,” Harkness said coldly. “Will your attorneys be present?”

“They are present.” Waldo indicated a stereo screen. Two figures showed in it; they bowed and murmured polite forms.

“This is most irregular,” Harkness complained. “Witnesses should be present in person. Things seen and heard by television are not evidence.”

Waldo drew his lips back. “Do you wish to make an issue of it?”

“Not at all,” Gleason said hastily. “Never mind, Charles.” Harkness subsided.

“I won’t waste your time, gentlemen,” Waldo began. “We are here in order that I may fulfill my contract with you. The terms are known—we will pass over them.” He inserted his arms into his primary waldoes. “Lined up along the far wall you will see a number of radiant power receptors, commonly called deKalbs. Dr. Stevens may, if he wishes, check their serial numbers—”

“No need to.”

“Very well. I shall start my local beamcaster, in order that we may check the efficiency of their operation.” His waldoes were busy as he spoke. “Then I shall activate the receptors, one at a time.” His hands pawed the air; a little pair of secondaries switched on the proper switches on the control board of the last set in line. “This is an ordinary type, supplied to me by Dr. Stevens, which has never failed in operation. You may assure yourself that it is now operating in the normal manner, if you wish, Doctor.”

“I can see that it is.”

“We will call such a receptor a ‘deKalb’ and its operation ‘normal.'” The small waldoes were busy again. “Here we have a receptor which I choose to term a ‘Schneider-deKalb’ because of certain treatment it has received”—the antennae began to move—”and its operation ‘Schneider-type’ operation. Will you check it, Doctor?”

“O.K.”

“You fetched with you a receptor set which has failed?”

“As you can see.”

“Have you been able to make it function?”

“No, I have not.”

“Are you sure? Have you examined it carefully?”

“Quite carefully,” Stevens acknowledged sourly. He was beginning to be tired of Waldo’s pompous flubdubbery.

“Very well. I will now proceed to make it operative.” Waldo left his control ring, shoved himself over to the vicinity of the defective deKalb, and placed himself so that his body covered his exact actions from the sight of the others. He returned to the ring and, using waldoes, switched on the activating circuit of the deKalb.

It immediately exhibited Schneider-type activity.

“That is my case, gentlemen,” he announced. “I have found out how to repair deKalbs which become spontaneously inoperative. I will undertake to apply the Schneider treatment to any receptors which you may bring to me. That is included in my fee. I will undertake to train others in how to apply the Schneider treatment. That is included in my fee, but I cannot guarantee that any particular man will profit by my instruction. Without going into technical details I may say that the treatment is very difficult, much harder than it looks. I think that Dr. Stevens will confirm that.” He smiled thinly. “I believe that completes my agreement with you.”

“Just a moment, Mr. Jones,” put in Gleason. “Is a deKalb foolproof, once it has received the Schneider treatment?”

“Quite. I guarantee it.”

They went into a huddle while Waldo waited. At last Gleason spoke for them. “These are not quite the results we had expected, Mr. Jones, but we agree that you have fulfilled your commission—with the understanding that you will Schneider-treat any receptors brought to you and instruct others, according to their ability to learn.”

“That is correct.”

“Your fee will be deposited to your account at once.”

“Good. That is fully understood and agreed? I have completely and successfully performed your commission?”

“Correct.”

“Very well then. I have one more thing to show you. If you will be patient—” A section of the wall folded back; gigantic waldoes reached into the room beyond and drew forth a large apparatus, which resembled somewhat in general form an ordinary set of deKalbs, but which was considerably more complicated. Most of the complications were sheer decoration, but it would have taken a skilled engineer a long time to prove the fact.

The machine did contain one novel feature: a built-in meter of a novel type, whereby it could be set to operate for a predetermined time and then destroy itself, and a radio control whereby the time limit could be varied. Furthermore, the meter would destroy itself and the receptors if tampered with by any person not familiar with its design. It was Waldo’s tentative answer to the problem of selling free and unlimited power.

But of these matters he said nothing. Small waldoes had been busy attaching guys to the apparatus; when they were through he said, “This gentlemen, is an instrument which I choose to call a Jones-Schneider-deKalb. And it is the reason why you will not be in the business of selling power much longer.”

“So?” said Gleason. “May I ask why?”

“Because,” he was told, “I can sell it more cheaply and conveniently and under circumstances you cannot hope to match.”

“That is a strong statement.”

“I will demonstrate. Dr. Stevens, you have noted that the other receptors are operating. I will turn them off.” The waldoes did so. “I will now stop the beamcast and I will ask you to assure yourself, by means of your own instruments, that there is no radiant power, other than ordinary visible light in this room.”

Somewhat sullenly Stevens did so. “The place is dead,” he announced some minutes later.

“Good. Keep your instruments in place, that you may be sure it remains dead. I will now activate my receptor.” Little mechanical hands closed the switches. “Observe it, Doctor. Go over it thoroughly.”

Stevens did so. He did not trust the readings shown by its instrument board; he attached his own meters in parallel. “How about it, James?” Gleason whispered.

Stevens looked disgusted. “The damn thing draws power from nowhere?”

They all looked at Waldo. “Take plenty of time, gentlemen,” he said grandly. “Talk it over.”

They withdrew as far away as the room permitted and whispered. Waldo could see that Harkness and Gleason were arguing, that Stevens was noncommittal. That suited him. He was hoping that Stevens would not decide to take another look at the fancy gadget he had termed a Jones-Schneider-deKalb. Stevens must not learn too much about it—yet. He had been careful to say nothing but the truth about it, but perhaps he had not said all of the truth; he had not mentioned that all Schneider-treated deKalbs were sources of free power.

Rather embarrassing if Stevens should discover that!

The meter-and-destruction device Waldo had purposely made mysterious and complex, but it was not useless. Later he would be able to point out, quite correctly, that without such a device NAPA simply could not remain in business.

Waldo was not easy. The whole business was a risky gamble; he would have much preferred to know more about the phenomena he was trying to peddle, but—he shrugged mentally while preserving a smile of smug confidence—the business had dragged on several months already, and the power situation really was critical. This solution would do—if he could get their names on the dotted line quickly enough.

For he had no intention of trying to compete with NAPA.

Gleason pulled himself away from Stevens and Harkness, came to Waldo. “Mr. Jones, can’t we arrange this amicably?”

“What have you to suggest?”

*  *  *  *  *

It was quite an hour later that Waldo, with a sigh of relief, watched his guests’ ship depart from the threshold flat. A fine caper, he thought, and it had worked; he had gotten away with it. He had magnanimously allowed himself to be persuaded to consolidate, provided—he had allowed himself to be quite temperamental about this—the contract was concluded at once, no fussing around and fencing between lawyers. Now or never—put up or shut up. The proposed contract, he had pointed out virtuously, gave him nothing at all unless his allegations about the Jones-Schneider-deKalb were correct.

Gleason considered this point and had decided to sign, had signed.

Even then Harkness had attempted to claim that Waldo had been an employee of NAPA. Waldo had written that first contract himself—a specific commission for a contingent fee. Harkness did not have a leg to stand on; even Gleason had agreed to that.

In exchange for all rights to the Jones-Schneider-deKalb, for which he agreed to supply drawings—wait till Stevens saw, and understood, those sketches!—for that he had received the promise of senior stock in NAPA, nonvoting, but fully paid up and nonassessable. The lack of active participation in the company had been his own idea. There were going to be more headaches in the power business, headaches aplenty. He could see them coming—bootleg designs, means of outwitting the metering, lots of things. Free power had come, and efforts to stop it would in the long run, he believed, be fruitless.

Waldo laughed so hard that he frightened Baldur, who set up an excited barking.

He could afford to forget Hathaway now.

His revenge on NAPA contained one potential flaw; he had assured Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs would continue to operate, would not come unstuck. He believed that to be true simply because he had faith in Gramps Schneider. But he was not prepared to prove it. He knew himself that he did not know enough about the phenomena associated with the Other World to be sure that something would, or would not, happen. It was still going to be necessary to do some hard, extensive research.

But the Other World was a devilishly difficult place to investigate!

Suppose, he speculated, that the human race were blind, had never developed eyes. No matter how civilized, enlightened, and scientific the race might have become, it is difficult to see how such a race could ever have developed the concepts of astronomy. They might know of the Sun as a cyclic source of energy having a changing, directional character, for the Sun is so overpowering that it may be “seen” with the skin. They would notice it and invent instruments to trap it and examine it.

But the pale stars, would they ever notice them? It seemed most unlikely. The very notion of the celestial universe, its silent depths and starlit grandeur, would be beyond them. Even if one of their scientists should have the concept forced on him in such a manner that he was obliged to accept the fantastic, incredible thesis as fact, how then would he go about investigating its details?

Waldo tried to imagine an astronomical phototelescope, conceived and designed by a blind man, intended to be operated by a blind man, and capable of collecting data which could be interpreted by a blind man. He gave it up; there were too many hazards. It would take a subtlety of genius far beyond his own to deal with the inescapably tortuous concatenations of inferential reasoning necessary to the solution of such a problem. It would strain him to invent such instruments for a blind man; he did not see how a blind man could ever overcome the difficulties unassisted.

In a way that was what Schneider had done for him; alone, he would have bogged down.

But even with Schneider’s hints the problem of investigating the Other World was still much like the dilemma of the blind astronomer. He could not see the Other World; only through the Schneider treatment had he been able to contact it. Damnation! how could he design instruments to study it?

He suspected that he would eventually have to go back to Schneider for further instruction, but that was an expedient so distasteful that he refused to think much about it. Furthermore, Gramps Schneider might not be able to teach him much; they did not speak the same language.

This much he did know: the Other Space was there and it could be reached sometimes by proper orientation of the mind, deliberately as Schneider had taught him, or subconsciously as had happened to McLeod and others.

He found the idea distasteful. That thought and thought alone should be able to influence physical phenomena was contrary to the whole materialistic philosophy in which he had grown up. He had a prejudice in favor of order and invariable natural laws. His cultural predecessors, the experimental philosophers who had built up the world of science and its concomitant technology, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Steinmetz, Jeans, and their myriad colleagues—these men had thought of the physical universe as a mechanism proceeding by inexorable necessity. Any apparent failure to proceed thus was regarded as an error in observation, an insufficient formulation of hypothesis, or an insufficiency of datum.

Even the short reign of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle had not changed the fundamental orientation toward Order and Cosmos; the Heisenberg uncertainty was one they were certain of! It could be formulated, expressed, and a rigorous statistical mechanics could be built from it. In 1958 Horowitz’s reformulation of wave mechanics had eliminated the concept. Order and causation were restored.

But this damned business! One might as well pray for rain, wish on the Moon, go to faith healers, surrender whole hog to Bishop Berkely’s sweetly cerebral world-in-your-head. “—the tree’s not a tree, when there’s no one about the quad!”

*  *  *  *  *

Waldo was not emotionally wedded to Absolute Order as Rambeau had been; he was in no danger of becoming mentally unbalanced through a failure of his basic conceptions; nevertheless, consarn it, it was convenient for things to work the way one expected them to. On order and natural law was based predictability; without predictability it was impossible to live. Clocks should run evenly; water should boil when heat is applied to it; food should nourish, not poison; deKalb receptors should work, work the way they were designed to; Chaos was insupportable—it could not be lived with.

Suppose Chaos were king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos—by Mind!

The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountains. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism dominated the world then.

More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them.

Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost their confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty—and thereby let magic loose in the world.

He was beginning, he thought, to understand what had happened to magic. Magic was the erratic law of an animistic world; it had been steadily pushed back by the advancing philosophy of invariant causation. It was gone now—until this new outbreak—and its world with it, except for backwaters of “superstition.” Naturally an experimental scientist reported failure when investigating haunted houses, apportations, and the like; his convictions prevented the phenomena from happening.

The deep jungles of Africa might be very different places—when there was no white man around to see! The strangely slippery laws of magic might still obtain.

Perhaps these speculations were too extreme; nevertheless, they had one advantage which orthodox concepts had not: they included Gramps Schneider’s hexing of the deKalbs. Any working hypothesis which failed to account for Schneider’s—and his own—ability to think a set of deKalbs into operation was not worth a continental. This one did, and it conformed to Gramps’s own statements: “All matters are doubtful” and “A thing can both be, not be, and be anything. There are many true ways of looking at the same thing. Some ways are good, some are bad.”

Very well. Accept it. Act on it. The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it. He cast his vote for order and predictability!

He would set the style. He would impress his own concept of the Other World on the Cosmos!

It had been a good start to assure Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs were foolproof. Good. So let it be. They were foolproof. They would never get out of order.

He proceeded to formulate and clarify his own concept of the Other World in his mind. He would think of it as orderly and basically similar to this space. The connection between the two spaces lay in the neurological system; the cortex, the thalamus, the spinal cord, and the appended nerve system were closely connected with both spaces. Such a picture was consistent with what Schneider had told him and did not conflict with phenomena as he knew it.

Wait. If the neurological system lay in both spaces, then that might account for the relatively slow propagation of nerve impulses as compared with electromagnetic progression. Yes! If the other space had a c constant relatively smaller than that of this space, such would follow.

He began to feel a calm assurance that it was so.

Was he merely speculating—or creating a universe?

Perhaps he would have to abandon his mental picture of the Other Space as being the size and shape of an ostrich egg, since a space with a slower propagation of light is not smaller, but larger, than the space he was used to. No… no, wait a second, the size of a space did not depend on its c constant, but on its radius of curvature in terms of its c constant. Since c was a velocity, size was dependent on the notion of time—in this case time as entropy rate. Therein lay a characteristic which could be compared between the two spaces: they exchanged energy; they affected each other’s entropy. The one which degenerated the more rapidly toward a state of level entropy was the “smaller.”

He need not abandon his picture of the ostrich egg—good old egg! The Other World was a closed space, with a slow c, a high entropy rate, a short radius, and an entropy state near level—a perfect reservoir of power at every point, ready to spill over into this space wherever he might close the interval.To its inhabitants, if any, it might seem to be hundreds of millions of light years around; to him it was an ostrich egg, turgid to bursting with power.

He was already beginning to think of ways of checking his hypothesis. If, using a Schneider-deKalb, he were to draw energy at the highest rate he could manage, would he affect the local potential? Would it establish an entropy gradient? Could he reverse the process by finding a way to pump power into the Other World? Could he establish different levels at different points and thereby check for degeneration toward level, maximum entropy?

Did the speed of nerve impulse propagation furnish a clue to the c of the Other Space? Could such a clue be combined with the entropy and potential investigations to give a mathematical picture of the Other Space, in terms of its constants and its age?

He set about it. His untrammeled, wild speculations had produced some definite good: he’d tied down at least one line of attack on that Other Space; he’d devised a working principle for his blind man’s telescope mechanism. Whatever the truth of the thing was, it was more than a truth; it was a complete series of new truths. It was the very complexity of that series of new truths—the truths, the characteristic laws, that were inherent properties of the Other Space, plus the new truth laws resultant from the interaction of the characteristics of the Other Space with Normal Space. No wonder Rambeau had said anything could happen! Almost anything could, in all probability, by a proper application and combination of the three sets of laws: the laws of Our Space, the laws of Other Space, and the coordinate laws of Both Spaces.

But before theoreticians could begin work, new data were most desperately needed. Waldo was no theoretician, a fact he admitted lefthandedly in thinking of theory as impractical and unnecessary, time waste for him as a consulting engineer. Let the smooth apes work it out.

But the consulting engineer had to find out one thing: would the Schneider-deKalbs continue to function uninterruptedly as guaranteed? If not, what must be done to assure continuous function?

The most difficult and the most interesting aspect of the investigation had to do with the neurological system in relation to Other Space. Neither electromagnetic instruments nor neural surgery was refined enough to do accurate work on the levels he wished to investigate.

But he had waldoes.

The smallest waldoes he had used up to this time were approximately half an inch across their palms—with microscanners to match, of course. They were much too gross for his purpose. He wished to manipulate living nerve tissue, examine its insulation and its performance in situ.

He used the tiny waldoes to create tinier ones.

The last stage was tiny metal blossoms hardly an eighth of an inch across. The helices in their stems, or forearms, which served them as pseudo muscles, could hardly be seen by the naked eye—but, then, he used scanners.

His final team of waldoes used for nerve and brain surgery varied in succeeding stages from mechanical hands nearly lifesize down to these fairy digits which could manipulate things much too small for the eye to see. They were mounted in bank to work in the same locus. Waldo controlled them all from the same primaries; he could switch from one size to another without removing his gauntlets. The same change in circuits which brought another size of waldoes under control automatically accomplished the change in sweep of scanning to increase or decrease the magnification so that Waldo always saw before him in his stereo receiver a “lifesize” image of his other hands.

Each level of waldoes had its own surgical instruments, its own electrical equipment.

Such surgery had never been seen before, but Waldo gave that aspect little thought; no one had told him that such surgery was unheard-of.

He established, to his own satisfaction, the mechanism whereby shortwave radiation had produced a deterioration in human physical performance. The synapses between dendrites acted as if they were points of leakage. Nerve impulses would sometimes fail to make the jump, would leak off—to where? To Other Space, he was sure. Such leakage seemed to establish a preferred path, a canalization, whereby the condition of the victim became steadily worse. Motor action was not lost entirely, as both paths were still available, but efficiency was lost. It reminded him of a metallic electrical circuit with a partial ground.

An unfortunate cat, which had become dead undergoing the experimentation, had supplied him with much of his data. The kitten had been born and raised free from exposure to power radiation. He subjected it to heavy exposure and saw it acquire a. myasthenia nearly as complete as his own—while studying in minute detail what actually went on in its nerve tissues.

He felt quite sentimental about it when it died.

*  *  *  *  *

Yet, if Gramps Schneider were right, human beings need not be damaged by radiation. If they had the wit to look at it with the proper orientation, the radiation would not affect them; they might even draw power out of the Other World.

That was what Gramps Schneider had told him to do.

That was what Gramps Schneider had told him to do!

Gramps Schneider had told him he need not be weak!

That he could be strong—

Strong!

STRONG!

He had never thought of it. Schneider’s friendly ministrations to him, his advice about overcoming the weakness, he had ignored, had thrown off as inconsequential. His own weakness, his own peculiarity which made him different from the smooth apes, he had regarded as a basic implicit fact. He had accepted it as established when he was a small child, a final unquestioned factor.

Naturally he had paid no attention to Schneider’s words in so far as they referred to him.

To be strong!

To stand alone—to work, to run!

Why, he… he could, he could go down to Earth surface without fear. He wouldn’t mind the field. They said they didn’t mind it; they even carried things—great, heavy things. Everybody did. They threw things.

He made a sudden convulsive movement in his primary waldoes, quite unlike his normal, beautifully economical rhythm. The secondaries were oversize, as he was making a new setup. The guys tore loose, a brace plate banged against the wall. Baldur was snoozing nearby; he pricked up his ears, looked around, then turned his face to Waldo, questioning him.

Waldo glared at him and the dog whined. “Shut up!”

The dog quieted and apologized with his eyes.

Automatically he looked over the damage—not much, but he would have to fix it. Strength. Why, if he were strong, he could do anything—anything! No. 6 extension waldoes and some new guys—Strong! Absentmindedly he shifted to the No. 6 waldoes.

Strength!

He could even meet women—be stronger than they were!

*  *  *  *  *

He could swim. He could ride. He could fly a ship—run, jump. He could handle things with his bare hands. He could even learn to dance!

Strong!

He would have muscles! He could break things.

He could—He could—

He switched to the great waldoes with hands the size of a man’s body. Strong—they were strong! With one giant waldo he hauled from the stock pile a quarter-inch steel plate, held it up, and shook it. A booming rumble. He shook it again. Strong!

He took it in both waldoes, bent it double. The metal buckled unevenly. Convulsively he crumpled it like wastepaper between the two huge palms. The grinding racket raised hackles on Baldur; he himself had not been aware of it.

He relaxed for a moment, gasping. There was sweat on his forehead; blood throbbed in his ears. But he was not spent; he wanted something heavier, stronger. Cutting to the adjoining storeroom he selected an L-beam twelve feet long, shoved it through to where the giant hands could reach it, and cut back to them.

The beam was askew in the port; he wrenched it loose, knocking a big dent in the port frame. He did not notice it.

The beam made a fine club in the gross fist. He brandished it. Baldur backed away, placing the control ring between himself and the great hands.

Power! Strength! Smashing, unbeatable strength—

With a spastic jerk he checked his swing just before the beam touched the wall. No—But he grabbed the other end of the club with the left waldo and tried to bend it. The big waldoes were built for heavy work, but the beam was built to resist. He strained inside the primaries, strove to force the great fists to do his will. A warning light flashed on his control board. Blindly he kicked in the emergency overload and persisted.

The hum of the waldoes and the rasp of his own breath were drowned out by the harsh scrape of metal on metal as the beam began to give way. Exulting, he bore down harder in the primaries. The beam was bending double when the waldoes blew out. The righthand tractors let go first; the fist flung open. The left fist, relieved of the strain, threw the steel from it.

It tore its way through the thin bulkhead, making a ragged hole, crashed and clanged in the room beyond.

But the giant waldoes were inanimate junk.

He drew his soft pink hands from the waldoes and looked at them. His shoulders heaved, and racking sobs pushed up out of him. He covered his face with his hands; the tears leaked out between his fingers. Baldur whimpered and edged in closer. On the control board a bell rang persistently.