by Anthology
But answers also carry in themselves their commands and their penalties. The penalty being that when one thinks he has the answer he stops looking for it. The command being that he must conduct himself in accord with the answer.
The long, long road that led him nowhere. That today still leads untold millions nowhere. For the penalty of a wrong answer is failure to solve the problem. That non-science had failed to provide any answer beyond the primitive one was self-evident.
To some, then, it became evident that the question must be reopened. Through the long written history of man, here and there, by accident often, sometimes by cerebration, the use of the brain with which he was endowed, man found on occasion he could do things to his environment that heretofore had been the province of the gods--and in the doing had not become a god! To the courageous, the brave, the daring, the foolhardy questions then that demanded new answers.
Perhaps the most daring and courageous question of all time was asked by Copernicus: What if man is not at the center of the universe, the reason for its creation?
He personally escaped the penalties for asking it. The question was too new, too revolutionary for the men of his day to grasp, for the non-science leaders, secure in their ascendancy at the center of things, to see in it the threat to their ascendancy. It was on his followers, those who saw sense in the question, that the wrath of non-science descended. Non-science used the only method it had ever devised to achieve the only result it had ever been able to countenance--torture and force to make dissidents kneel in subservience.
But the question had been asked! And once asked, it could not be erased!
Still, it was almost an accidental question. For the method of science, as something understood and communicable, as a calculated point of view, had not yet been discovered. The key that would unlock its door had not yet been found.
Cal lay back on the rock to bathe in the warm rays of Ceti, almost to doze, yet with thought running clear and unimpeded. The splashing and the laughter of the colonists below the rock were no more than accompanying music.
The key which opened the door to physical science was not discovered until 1646 by a bunch of loafers, ne'er-do-wells, beatniks, who hung around the coffee shops of London. Later, because non-science always persecutes those who dare ask questions and thereby demonstrate some subversion to subservience, many had to flee to Oxford which, at that time, was sanctuary for those who differed from popular thought.
As he lay there drinking in the sun, the peacefulness, he sent his vision back through the card index of his mind to find the reference, the key that opened the door to physical science, the pregnant point of view that would give birth to a whole new concept of man's relationship to the universe. He found the passages in Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society of London (1667).
"... to make faithful records of all the works of nature, or art which can come within their reach ... They have stud'd to make it, not only an enterprise of one season, or of some lucky opportunity; but a business of time; a steddy, a lasting, a popular, an uninterrupted work."
He stirred restlessly and changed his position to lay his head on one arm. Not quite, not yet the key. Ah, here it was, perhaps the most significant sentence ever written by man.
"They have attempted to free it from the artifice, and humors, and passions of sects; to render it an instrument whereby mankind may obtain a dominion over Things, and not only over one another's judgements."
That was it. That was the essence of its difference from non-science, for the only method ever discovered until then was the non-science method of making its judgments prevail over all others.
Once this answer was discovered, it too could not be erased in spite of all the efforts of non-science. With that answer, man had come this far.
And now?
Could it be that science, as with non-science, was only a partial answer? Only another stage? Only a section of the road man must travel? Something as limited in its way as non-science was limited? Something too narrow to contain the whole of reality? Something also to be left behind? A milestone passed, instead of the goal?
What comes after science? What new door must be opened into a still newer point of view? What pregnant new concept of his relationship to reality must man now discover before he could continue his journey down the long road toward total comprehension?
He could ask the question, but it was not the right question; for it contained no hint of an answer. He felt an irritation in himself, almost as if some teacher in the past had shaken his head in disapproval.
For a moment he welcomed the distracting shout from one of the colonists, and sat up. In the shallows of the river one of the men had caught a foot long fish and was holding it up in his hands. Delightedly, the others acknowledged his victory, and renewed their efforts. He lay back down again, and stretched his cramped muscles.
Too fast! He had come down the long, long road too fast. He had missed something, something early. Something man had known in pre-science, and had forgotten in science.
These colonists. Would they grow in awareness? Now they seemed only to be a part of their environment, without curiosity, their fears of even the day before forgotten. Wiped away, as though it had never been, was their memory of a previous existence to this. They were wholly at one with their environment--unaware.
Were they to begin the long road? To telescope its distance? Would they be able to continue living without peopling the trees, the streams, the clouds, the winds, with spirits benign and vengeful--created in their own image? Could they continue to live alone in the universe?
Yes, that was the thing he had missed. Loneliness.
In separating himself from the animals, man had cut off his kinship with them. And so he found companionship with the gods. And cutting himself off from the gods ...
Loneliness.
Was man the only thing aware throughout the universe? What purpose then his exploration of it? What might he find that he had not already found?
Already, like a minor thread almost unheard in the symphony of exploding exploration, the questions of the artists were already finding themselves woven into music, painting, literature.
"Are we alone? In all this glittering, sterile universe, are there none other than we who are aware?"
The theme would expand as the purposelessness of colonizing still more and more worlds became wider known. The minor would become major, the recessive dominant. The endless aim of non-science to make all others subservient had lost its purpose for those who could still think. The dominion over things instead of people, the goal of science--was that also to lose its purpose for those who could still think? Until man, defeated by purposelessness, sank back in apathy, lost the very willingness to live--and so died?
What if some other awareness did inhabit the universe, sentient--and lonely? What if, farther along in its explorations, it was feeling that apathy? Facing that dissolution?
When one is lonely, the sensible thing is to seek companionship! To discover in companionship purpose not apparent to the alone--or at least hope to discover it.
For companionship there must be communication. And yet the exasperation, the futility of trying to communicate with a friend who always interpreted everything one said and did as meaning something entirely different from the intent.
Some other friend was the normal answer. But what if there were no other? Wouldn't one extra effort, a final attempt to break through that closed mind be made?
All right.
Communication, then. That was wanted. He would try. But if Their frameworks were so different from his that They misinterpreted all his efforts?
He was interrupted by the soft pad of footsteps, bare feet on grass that sprang up to leave no sign it had been trod upon. A young colonist and his wife, hand in hand, laughing gaily, were coming toward him. The man was carrying a fresh-caught fish. They came to a stop at the base of his rock and looked up at him, the Ceti light glinting on their smiling faces.
"We gave Louie a fish because he said it was our duty," the young man said. "I don't remember why it is our duty. Perhaps it is our duty to give you one too."
At least they were being impartial.
22
When he had pulled the scaled skin of the fish away from the flesh, the flesh away from the bones, and eaten his fill, Cal lay back on the rock again, to doze, to continue his search for a means of communicating.
He was now sharply aware of Their presence, of Their urgency, of Their long patience. Awareness! Once man had got over his greedy delight in occupying more and more of the universe simply because he could, to protect himself against the cosmic loneliness that must follow, he too would be searching for awareness.
But he would define it in his own terms, and pass it by if it did not meet those terms.
That there was some other intelligence which had found man instead, Cal did not doubt. The experiment of Eden, the manipulation of natural laws, the denial of physical tools--for what purpose? To clear away the debris which prevented communication of awareness as They defined it?
There was a trace, a minor trace of awareness in man not dependent upon the tools and artifacts of physical science--extra-sensory perception, psi. Underdeveloped, because with physical tools its development had been made unnecessary? Because having found the answers with physical tools, man stopped looking for answers other than these?
Was there, then, a science of controlling things, forces, without the use of physical tools? Was there a road of transition from the crude manipulation of things and forces through tools to a manipulation without them? There was precedent in man's science. The elaborate wirings of the first bulky and crude electronic sets, that gave way to a printed diagram of such wirings on a card to obtain the same result?
A step farther? The visual picture, the mental image of the diagram to obtain the same result? But how?
To one whose total orientation is through the use of physical tools (for the material printed on the card diagram was the physical carrier of the current) how to cause the current to follow the mental image of that diagram? With voice and music bathing one's senses simply because one thought of the diagram of a receiver? How?
He felt like the turkey come up against the obstruction of a fence too low to justify the effort of flying over it. Instead of flying, he was walking around and around, looking for an opening, walking in an endless circle.
Circle?
Excitedly, he climbed down from the rock and headed for a patch of bare sand at the river's edge.
In every framework of thought which man had ever devised, the circle was prominent, vital. It played its part in every creed of every race, of every time. It was as essential to the ancient arts of magic as to the current methods of science. It played its part in the movement of planets, the shape of stars, perhaps the essence of the total universe.
Man might be too didactic in requiring that awareness develop a physical science comparable to his own, but surely awareness, whatever form it took, would know the circle.
He sank down on his haunches beside the smooth sand, and with the tip of his finger he quickly drew a circle.
The furrow, scratched in the sand, did not close or smooth out!
He sat back and waited. Nothing happened. It was almost as if the invisible intelligence were saying, "All right. You are aware of a circle. That was obvious to us from your artifacts. What else do you know?"
He leaned forward, and as nearly as he could estimate, he dotted the center of the circle with a finger, then scratched a radius to the perimeter. It stayed. To one side he drew another line, approximating the radius and in parenthesis he drew a small 2. Beside this he wrote R^2. He drew an equals sign. He scratched the pi sign.
Then he drew another circle and with the palm of his hand he smoothed all its interior. That should be plain enough. The symbols stayed. They understood his mathematics, then. The equation seemed undisturbed, yet there was something wrong with it. He had to look closely at the sand before he saw what it was.
The = had changed to : !
Why had they changed the meaning by substituting "proportionate to" for "equals"? He felt a flash of exasperation. Well sure, without tools he could not draw a perfect circle, nor two of them entirely equal. It was pedantic of them to split hairs over that? He must practice, without tools, to draw a perfect circle?
Or was that running around inside his low fence?
He looked down at the sand, and saw the entire scratching was now smoothed out. Apparently he was on the wrong track. Hadn't got what they meant.
He wrote again in the sand: "pi = 3.14159265...."
Again = changed to : .
Again he felt his flash of exasperation. It must be obvious by his string of dots that he knew pi had never been exactly resolved. They were being too pedantic. He must exactly resolve it? Yet the numbers could be continued to infinity and never exactly resolved. He looked down again, and the equation was gone.
Wrong track again.
He sat forward, hugged his knees, and stared into the water.
The equation had never been exactly resolved, yet man used it as a constant, an absolute. An obvious fallacy. Was the difference between physical science and psi science based in this insignificant difference in exactness? Try something else. See what happens. There was an equation which had proved its effectiveness, upon which the whole science of atomics was based.
"E = MC^2," he wrote.
Again = changed to : .
What were they saying? That the fallacy lay in using the equals sign? That the science of psi was one of proportion. But equals was one of the possible proportions. Had we become walled in our low fence because we were too dependent upon the exact balance? Been satisfied to find that answer, and therefore stopped looking for the possibilities inherent in unbalanced equations?
He looked down at the symbols again half expecting to see them erased. But they were still there. So he was starting on the right track. But wait.
Before his eyes he saw the C^2 smooth out, disappear. Only "E : M" remained. Were they saying that dependence upon constants was the low fence? That man must learn to do without his firm absolutes? That was the ultimate in relativity: Energy is proportionate to matter. But so all-inclusive as to be too vague for use.
For more than three centuries now, controversy had raged over Einstein's use of C^2 in his expression. Some held that it was a product of his time, that he was able to make only one step beyond classical physics where all things must be related to a fixed value. Others held that its inclusion was a deliberate fallacy; that Einstein, by his other work, had shown he knew it was a fallacy; that, tongue in cheek, he inserted it into his equation in full knowledge that his fellow scientists of his day could not even bear to think of the awesome concept of things without orientation to an absolute; that he knew they would reject him entirely, refuse even to consider his thought unless he catered that much to their superstitions.
The need of the absolute was not mathematical or scientific, but emotional. Man was still tortured by his determination to be the center of things, himself the fixed absolute! The need of a familiar, fixed cave where he might run and hide, close himself in securely when the chaos of storm outside became too frightening to bear. The need of a fixed absolute, whether in philosophy or science, a fixed spot that would not shift.
The science of psi, then, was based in a willingness to shift?
He looked down at the equation, to see if he were still on the track.
It had changed again. Now it read "E{d}M": The form of the function of energy to matter is variable.
Quickly, another change. "Df(em)": The form of the function and the independent variable of the function vary together.
Still another: "E = f(M)": There is a general relationship of energy to matter.
And then: "F(e,m) = 0": There is a general unspecified relationship between energy and matter.
He slapped his hand down on the sand i
n frustration.
"All right," he said. "You've made your point. And it means about as much as if I said to the turkey, 'All you have to do is fly'."
There was a stir behind him. He turned his head and saw Louie. A deep sigh, almost a sob came from Louie as he stared down at the symbols in the sand.
"They talked to you," Louie said brokenly. "I wanted only to serve Them, but it was to you They talked."
And all the tragedy of his life was contained therein.
Cal sprang to his feet, and put his arms around the other man's shoulders. The two of them, the bitter and the sympathetic, looked down at the sand. The symbols were still changing, and now read "There is an infinity of relationships between matter and energy, an infinity of forms to be taken by matter as you control the energy."
The signs were wiped out, and the sense of Their presence was gone. Cal felt the withdrawal, the sense of a lesson being over. He did not regret it, he had enough to think about. But first, there was Louie, racked with broken sobbing.
Here was a man whose life had been a search for certainties, absolutes that would not shift under the weight of his questioning. No doubt in his youth he had turned to the religions of the day--and found them a tissue of rationalizations without contact in reality. Then to science--and found it, too, constantly shifting in its interpretations, making new evaluations as evidence discounted the old. The shock of landing on Eden to drive him back into childhood interpretations again--at last, the clear evidence that had been denied his belief in youth.
Wholehearted in his belief of Them, yet it was not to him They had talked.
"Louie," Cal said slowly. "If you were lonely, very lonely, if you had searched through the years for companionship, and thought you might have found it, would it please you to have that companion drop to his knees, grovel before you? Would this be your idea of companionship?
"What manner of monstrous egotism would require that? What but the incredible vanity of primitive man, to whom life meant nothing more than conquering or being conquered, could imagine such conduct would be pleasing to another intelligence?