“Very likely,” agreed Chalmers, “since the body records whatever sensations the mind permits. For complete demonstration it would be necessary to try it, and I don’t know that the risk would be worth it. The other world might have such different laws that it would be impossible to return.”
Shea asked: “You mean, if the world were that of classical mythology, for instance, the laws would be those of Greek magic instead of modern physics?”
“Precisely. But—”
“Hey!” said Shea. “Then this new science of paraphysics is going to include the natural laws of all these different worlds, and what we call physics is just a special case of paraphysics—”
“Not so fast, young man,” said Chalmers. “For the present, I think it wise to restrict the meaning of our term ‘paraphysics’ to the branch of knowledge that concerns the relationship of these multiple universes to each other, assuming that they actually exist. You will recall that careless use of the analogous term ‘metaphysics’ has resulted in its becoming practically synonymous with ‘philosophy’.”
“Which,” said Shea, “is regarded by some as a kind of scientific knowledge; by others as a land of knowledge outside of science; and by still others as unscientific and therefore not knowledge of any kind.”
“My, my, very neatly put,” said Chalmers, fishing out a little black notebook. “E.T. Bell could not have said it more trenchantly. I shall include that statement of the status of philosophy in my next book.”
“Hey,” said Shea, sitting up sharply, “don’t I even get a commission?”
Chalmers smiled blandly. “My dear Harold, you’re at perfect liberty to write a book of your own; in fact I encourage you.”
Bayard grinned: “Harold would rather play cowboy. When I think of a verbal pearl, I don’t go around casting it promiscuously. I wait till I can use it in print and get paid for it. But to get back to our subject, how would you go about working the shift?”
Chalmers frowned. “I’ll get to that, if you give me time. As I see it, the method consists of filling your mind with the fundamental assumptions of the world in question. Now, what are the fundamental assumptions of our world? Obviously, those of scientific logic.”
“Such as—” said Shea.
“Oh, the principle of dependence, for instance. ‘Any circumstance in which alone a case of the presence of a given phenomenon differs from the case of its absence is causally relevant to that phenomenon.’ ”
“Ouch!” said Shea. “That’s almost as bad as Frege’s definition of number.”
Bayard droned: “The number of things in a given class—’ ”
“Stop it, Walter! It drives me nuts!”
“ ‘—is the class of all classes that are similar to the given class.’ ”
“Hrrm,” remarked Chalmers. “If you gentlemen are through with your joke, I’ll go on. If one of these infinite other worlds—which up to now may be said to exist in a logical but not in an empirical sense—is governed by magic, you might expect to find a principle like that of dependence invalid, but principles of magic, such as the Law of Similarity, valid.”
“What’s the Law of Similarity?” asked Bayard sharply.
“The Law of Similarity may be stated thus: Effects resemble causes. It’s not valid for us, but primitive peoples firmly believe it. For instance, they think you can make it rain by pouring water on the ground with appropriate mumbo jumbo.”
“I didn’t know you could have fixed principles of magic,” commented Shea.
“Certainly,” replied Chalmers solemnly. “Medicine men don’t merely go through hocus-pocus. They believe they are working through natural laws. In a world where everyone firmly believed in these laws, that is, in one where all minds were attuned to receive the proper impressions, the laws of magic would conceivably work, as one hears of witch-doctors’ spells working in Africa today. Frazer and Seabrook have worked out some of these magical laws. Another is the Law of Contagion: Things once in contact continue to interact from a distance after separation. As you—”
Shea snapped his fingers for attention. “Just a second, Doctor. In a world such as you’re conceiving, would the laws of magic work because people believed in them, or would people believe in them because they worked?”
Chalmers put on the smile that always accompanied his intellectual rabbit-punches. “That question, Harold, is, in Russell’s immortal phrase, a meaningless noise.”
“No, you don’t,” said Shea. “That’s the favorite dodge of modem epistemologists: every time you ask them a question they can’t answer, they smile and say you’re making a meaningless noise. I still think it’s a sensible question, and as such deserves a sensible answer.”
“Oh, but it is meaningless,” said Chalmers. “As I can very easily demonstrate, it arises from your attempt to build your—uh—conceptualistic structure on an absolutists rather than a relativistic basis. But I’ll come back to that later. Allow me to continue my exposition.
“As you know, you can build up a self-consistent logic on almost any set of assumptions—”
Bayard opened his half-closed eyes and injected another sharp observation: “Isn’t there a flaw in the structure there, Doctor? Seems to me your hypothesis makes transference to the future possible. We should then become aware of natural laws not yet discovered and inventions not yet made. But the future naturally won’t be ignorant of our method of transference. Therefore we could return to the present with a whole list of new inventions. These inventions, launched into the present, would anticipate the future, and, by anticipating, change it.”
“Very ingenious, Walter,” said Chalmers. “But I’m afraid you overlook something. You might indeed secure transference to a future, but it would not necessarily be the future, the actual future of our own empirico-positivist world. A mental frame of reference is required. That is, we need a complete set of concepts of the physical world, which concepts condition the impressions received by the mind. The concepts of the future will be the product of numerous factors not now known to us. That is—”
“I see,” said Shea. “The frame of reference for the actual future is not yet formed, whereas the frames of reference for all past worlds are fixed.”
“Precisely. I would go beyond that. Transference to any world exhibiting such a fixed pattern is possible, but to such worlds only. That is, one could secure admission to any of H.G. Wells’ numerous futures. We merely choose a series of basic assumptions. In the case of the actual future we are ignorant of the assumptions.
“But speculative extrapolation from our scanty supply of facts has already carried us—uh—halfway to Cloud-Cuckooland. So let us return to our own time and place and devote ourselves to the development of an experimental technique wherewith to attack the problems of para-physics.
“To contrive a vehicle for transposition from one world to another, we face the arduous task of extracting from the picture of such a world as that of the Iliad its basic assumptions, and expressing these in logical form—”
Shea interrupted: “In other words, building us a syllogismobile?”
Chalmers looked vexed for an instant, then laughed. “A very pithy way of expressing it, Harold. You are wasting your talents, as I have repeatedly pointed out, by not publishing more. I suggest, however, that the term ‘syllogismobile’ be confined for the present to discussions among us members of the Garaden Institute. When the time comes to try to impress our psychological colleagues with the importance of paraphysics, a somewhat more dignified mode of expression will be desirable.”
###
Harold Shea lay on his bed, smoked, and thought. He smoked expensive English cigarettes, not because he liked them especially, but because it was part of his pattern of affectation to smoke something unusual. He thought about Chalmers’ lecture.
It would no doubt be dangerous, as Chalmers had warned. But Shea was getting unutterably bored with life. Chalmers was able but stuffy; if brilliance and dullness could be combined in one
personality, Reed Chalmers combined them. While in theory all three members of the Institute were researchers, in practice the two subordinates merely collected facts and left to the erudite Doctor the fun of assembling them and generalizing from them.
Of course, thought Shea, he did get some fun out of his little poses, but they were a poor substitute for real excitements. He liked wearing his new breeches and boots, but riding a horse had been an excruciating experience. It also had none of the imaginary thrill of swinging along in a cavalry charge, which he had half-unconsciously promised himself. All he got was the fact that his acquaintances thought him a nut. Let ’em; he didn’t care.
But he was too good a psychologist to deceive himself long or completely. He did care. He wanted to make a big impression, but he was one of those unfortunates who adopt a method that produces the effect opposite to the one they want.
Hell, he thought, no use introspecting myself into the dumps. Chalmers says it’ll work. The old bore misses fire once in a while, like the time he tried to psychoanalyze the cleaning woman and she thought he was proposing marriage. But that was an error of technique, not of general theory. Chalmers was sound enough on theory, and he had already warned of dangers in the practical application in this case.
Yes. If he said that one could transport oneself to a different place and time by formula, it could be done. The complete escape from—well, from insignificance, Shea confessed to himself. He would be the Columbus of a new kind of journey!
Harold Shea got up and began to pace the floor, excited by the trend of his own thoughts. To explore—say the world of the Iliad. Danger: one might not be able to get back. Especially not, Shea told himself grimly, if one turned out to be one of those serf soldiers who died by thousands under the gleaming walls of Troy.
Not the Iliad. The Slavic twilight? No; too full of man-eating witches and werewolves. Ireland! That was it—the Ireland of Cuchulinn and Queen Maev. Blood there, too, but what the hell, you can’t have adventure without some danger. At least, the dangers were reasonable open-eye stuff you could handle. And the girls of that world—they were something pretty slick by all description.
###
It is doubtful whether Shea’s colleagues noticed any change in his somewhat irregular methods of working. They would hardly have suspected him of dropping Havelock Ellis for the Ulster and Fenian legendary cycles with which he was conditioning his mind for the attempted “trip.” If any of them, entering his room suddenly, had come on a list with many erasures, which included a flashlight, a gun, and mercurochrome, they would merely have supposed that Shea intended to make a rather queer sort of camping expedition.
And Shea was too secretive about his intentions to let anyone see the equipment he selected: A Colt .38 revolver with plenty of ammunition, a stainless-steel hunting knife—they ought to be able to appreciate metal like that, he told himself—a flashlight, a box of matches to give him a reputation as a wonder worker, a notebook, a Gaelic dictionary, and, finally, the Boy Scout Handbook, edition of 1926, as the easiest source of ready reference for one who expected to live in the open air and in primitive society.
Shea went home after a weary day of asking questions of neurotics, and had a good dinner. He put on the almost-new riding clothes and strapped over his polo coat a shoulder pack to hold his kit. He put on the hat with the green feather, and sat down at his desk. There, on sheets of paper spread before him, were the logical equations, with their little horseshoes, upside-down Ts, and identity signs.
His scalp prickled a trifle as he gazed at them. But what the hell! Stand by for adventure and romance! He bent over, giving his whole attention to the formulas, trying not to focus on one spot, but to apprehend the whole:
“If P equals not-Q, Q implies not-P, which is equivalent to saying either P or Q or neither, but not both. But if not-P is not implied by not-Q, the counter-implicative form of the proposition—”
There was nothing but six sheets of paper. Just that, lying in two neat rows of three sheets, with perhaps half an inch between them. There should be strips of table showing between them. But there was nothing—nothing.
“The full argument thus consists in an epicheirematic syllogism in Barbara, the major premise of which is not the conclusion of an enthymeme, though the minor premise of which may or may not be the conclusion of a non-Aristotelian sorites—”
The papers were still there, but overlaying the picture of those six white rectangles was a whirl of faint spots of color. All the colors of the spectrum were represented, he noted with the back of his mind, but there was a strong tendency toward violet. Round and round they went—round—and round—
“If either P or Q is true or (Q or R) is true then either Q is true or (P or R) is false—”
Round and round—He could hear nothing at all. He had no sense of heat or cold, or of the pressure of the chair seat against him. There was nothing but millions of whirling spots of color.
Yes, he could feel temperature now. He was cold. There was sound, too, a distant whistling sound, like that of a wind in a chimney. The spots were fading into a general grayness. There was a sense of pressure, also, on the soles of his feet. He straightened his legs—yes, standing on something. But everything around him was gray—and bitter cold, with a wind whipping the skirts of his coat around him.
He looked down. His feet were there all right—hello, feet, pleased to meet you. But they were fixed in grayish-yellow mud which had squelched up in little ridges around them. The mud belonged to a track, only two feet wide. On both sides of it the gray-green of dying grass began. On the grass large flakes of snow were scattered, dandruffwise. More were coming, visible as dots of darker gray against the background of whirling mist, swooping down long parallel inclines, growing and striking the path with the tiniest ts. Now and then one spattered against Shea’s face.
He had done it. The formula worked!
Two
“Welcome to Ireland!” Harold Shea murmured to himself. He thanked heaven that his syllogismobile had brought his clothes and equipment along with his person. It would never have done to have been dumped naked onto this freezing landscape. The snow was not alone responsible for the grayness. There was also a cold, clinging mist that cut off vision at a hundred yards or so. Ahead of him the track edged leftward around a little mammary of a hill, on whose flank a tree rocked under the melancholy wind. The tree’s arms all reached one direction, as though the wind were habitual; its branches bore a few leaves as gray and discouraged as the landscape itself. The tree was the only object visible in that wilderness of mud, grass and fog. Shea stepped toward it. The serrated leaves bore the indentations of the Northern scrub oak.
But that grows only in the Arctic Circle, he thought. He was bending closer for another look when he heard the clop-squash of a horse’s hoofs on the muddy track behind him.
He turned. The horse was very small, hardly more than a pony, and shaggy, with a luxuriant tail blowing round its withers. On its back sat a man who might have been tall had he been upright, for his feet nearly touched the ground. But he was hunched before the icy wind driving in behind. From saddle to eyes he was enveloped in a faded blue cloak. A formless slouch hat was pulled tight over his face, yet not so tight as to conceal the fact that he was full-bearded and gray.
Shea took half a dozen quick steps to the roadside. He addressed the man with the phrase he had composed in advance for his first human contact in the world of Irish myth:
“The top of the morning to you my good man, and would it be fare to the nearest hostel?”
He had meant to say more, but paused uncertainly as the man on the horse lifted his head to reveal a proud, unsmiling face in which the left eye socket was unpleasantly vacant. Shea smiled weakly, then gathered his courage and plunged on: “It’s a rare bitter December you do be having in Ireland.”
The stranger looked at him with much of the same clinical detachment he himself would have given to an interesting case of schizophrenia, and spoke
in slow, deep tones: “I have no knowledge of hostels, nor of Ireland; but the month is not December. We are in May, and this is the Fimbulwinter.”
A little prickle of horror filled Harold Shea, though the last word was meaningless to him. Faint and far, his ear caught a sound that might be the howling of a dog—or a wolf. As he sought for words there was a flutter of movement. Two big black birds, like oversize crows, slid down the wind past him and came to rest on the dry grass, looked at him for a second or two with bright, intelligent eyes, then took the air again.
“Well, where am I?”
“At the wings of the world, by Midgard’s border.”
“Where in hell is that?”
The deep voice took on an edge of annoyance. “For all things there is a time, a place, and a person. There is none of the three for ill-judged questions and empty jokes.” He showed Shea a blue-clad shoulder, clucked to his pony and began to move wearily ahead.
“Hey!” cried Shea. He was feeling good and sore. The wind made his fingers and jaw muscles ache. He was lost in this arctic wasteland, and this old goat was about to trot off and leave him stranded. He leaned forward, planting himself squarely in front of the pony. “What land of a runaround is this, anyway? When I ask someone a civil question—”
The pony had halted, its muzzle almost touching Shea’s coat. The man on the animal’s back straightened suddenly so that Shea could see he was very tall indeed, a perfect giant. But before he had time to note anything more he felt himself caught and held with an almost physical force by that single eye. A stab of intense, burning cold seemed to run through him, inside his head, as though his brain had been pierced by an icicle. He felt rather than heard a voice which demanded, “Are you trying to stop me, niggeling?”
For his life, Shea could not have moved anything but his lips. “N-no,” he stammered. “That is, I just wondered if you could tell me how I could get somewhere where it’s warm—”
The Complete Compleat Enchanter Page 2