by Mark Clifton
I had already determined that Dr. Boulton would outlive his usefulness to us.
"And how would you approach the problem chemically?” I asked Dr. Auerbach.
We had more discussion in which I proved to him that I was top security cleared, that my chemistry was sadly lacking and he would have to speak as though to a layman, that indeed he was not going over his superior's head in discussing it with me, that there was a possibility I might assist if I became convinced enough to convince general management a separate department should be set up. And finally he began to answer my question.
"Let us take linseed oil as a crude example,” he said, and waved my offer of a cigarette aside. “Linseed oil, crudely, displays much of the same phenomena as the human mind. It learns, it remembers, it forgets, it relearns, it becomes inhibited, it becomes stimulated."
I don't usually sit with my mouth hanging open, and became conscious of it when I tried to draw on my cigarette without closing my lips.
"Place an open vessel of linseed oil in the light,” he instructed, and touched the tips of his two index fingers together, “and in about twenty-four hours it will begin to oxidize. It continues oxidization to a given point at an accelerated rate thereafter, as though finally having learned how, it can carry on the process more easily."
I nodded, with reservations on how much of this could fairly be termed “mental,” and how much was a purely chemical process. Then, in fairness, I reversed the coin and made the same reservations as to how much of brain activity could be called a chemical response to stimuli, and how much must be classed as pure thought over and beyond a specialized chemistry. I gave up.
"Put it in the dark,” he continued, “and it slows and ceases to oxidize. Bring it back into the light, within a short time, and it immediately begins to oxidize again, as if it had remembered how to do it.” He moved to his middle finger. “We have there, then, quite faithful replicas of learning and remembering."
I nodded again to show my willingness to speculate, at least, even if I didn't agree.
"But leave it in the dark for twenty-four hours,” he moved to his third finger, “then bring it back into the light and it takes it another twenty-four hours to begin oxidizing again. Now we have an equally faithful replica of forgetting and relearning.” He tapped each of his four fingers lightly for emphasis.
"The inhibitions and stimulations?” I prompted.
"Well, perhaps we go a little farther afield for that,” he said honestly, “in that we introduce foreign substances. We add other chemicals to it to slow down its oxidization rate-or stop it entirely-inhibitions. We add other substances to speed up the rate, as quick driers in paints. Perhaps it's a little far-fetched, but not essentially different from adrenalin being pumped into the bloodstream to make the brain act at a faster rate. The body has quite a few of these glandular secretions which it uses to change the so-called normal mental processes."
"Where do we go from there?” I asked, without committing myself. But he was not through with his instruction.
"I fail to see any essential difference,” he looked me squarely in the eyes, “between a stored impulse in a brain cell, a stored impulse in a mercury tube, a stored impulse in an electronic relay, or for that matter a hole punched in an old-fashioned tabulator card."
I pursed my lips and indicated I could go along with his analogy. He was beginning to talk my language now. Working with its results constantly, I, too, was not one to be impressed with how unusually marvelous was the brain. But I murmured something about relative complexity. It was not entirely simple either.
"Sure, complexity,” he agreed. He was becoming much more human now. “But we approach any complexity by breaking it down into its basic parts, and each part taken alone is not complex. Complexity is no more than arrangement, not the basic building blocks themselves."
That was how I approached human problems and told him so. We were getting to be two buddies now in a hot thinking session.
"Just so we don't grow too mechanistic about it,” I demurred.
"Let's don't get mystical about it, either,” he snapped back at me. “Let's get mechanistic about it. What's so wrong with that? Isn't adding two and two in a machine getting pretty mechanistic? Are we so frightened at that performance we will refuse to make one which will multiply three and three?"
"I guess I'm not that frightened,” I agreed with a smile. “We're in the computer business."
"We're supposed to be,” he amended.
"So you want time and money to work on a chemical which will store impulses,” I said with what I thought was my usual brilliant incisiveness. I began to remember that Sara probably had little Jennie Malasek outside by now, and that was an unfinished problem I had to handle tonight.
"No, no,” he said impatiently and rocked me back into my chair, “I've already got that. I wouldn't have come in here with nothing more than just an idea. I've been some years analyzing quantitatively and qualitatively the various chemicals of brain cells. I've made some crude syntheses."
He placed the cylinder on the desk. I looked at the long dark object; I looked particularly at the oily shimmering liquid inside the unbreakable plastic case. It caught the light from my window and seemed to look back at me.
"I want,” he continued, “to test this synthesis by hooking it up to a cybernetic machine, shooting controlled impulses through it, seeing what it will store on one impulse and give up on another. I simply want to test the results of my work."
"It will take a little doing,” I stuck my neck out and prepared to go to bat for him. “The human mind is not as logical or as accurate as a machine. There are certain previous arrangements of impulses stored in certain brains which will cause the mouth to say ‘No!’ I'll have to do some rearranging of such basic blocks first."
I was grinning broadly now, and he was grinning back at me.
He got up out of his chair and walked toward my door. “I'll leave the cylinder with you,” he said. “I read in a salesmanship course that a prospect will buy much easier if you place the article in his hands."
"What were you doing, studying salesmanship?” I asked, still grinning.
"Apparently it was justified,” he said cryptically, and walked out the door.
Sara came to the door and looked in. “You took long enough on that one,” she accused.
"It takes a little longer,” I said with pedantic gravity, “to lead a scientist to the essential point. He's a little more resourceful in figuring out hazards to keep himself from getting where he wants to go.
But I remembered Auerbach's remarks about salesmanship. “However, in this instance,” I mused honestly, “I'm not just sure as to who was leading whom."
"You wanted little Jennie Malasek,” Sara said. “You may have her."
I wasn't reassured by the phrasing, the emphasis, or the look on her face.
The time I had lost on the last two interviews, I made up on this one. Children are realists and only poorly skilled in hypocrisy. They will go along with the gag if an adult insists on being whimsical, conciliatory or fantastic, but only because adults are that way and there's nothing they can do about it.
Sara brought Jennie in, gave me a cryptic look, and closed the door behind her as she left.
Jennie stood at the door, a dark little thing, showing some evidence that the nursery teachers had made an attempt to clean her up before sending her over. They hadn't quite succeeded. There was no chocolate around her pinched little mouth, so Sara hadn't succeeded in capturing her either. I wondered why they hadn't combed her black hair, and then realized Jennie might have pulled it down in front of her face for something to hide behind. Her black eyes gleamed as she peered at me through the oily strands.
"Sit in this chair, Jennie,” I said casually, and went on being busy with things on the top of my desk. My request wasn't quite a command, but took obedience entirely for granted. It didn't work with Jennie.
She still stood at the door, the toe of one slip
pered foot on the arch of the other, her thin little legs twisted at an odd angle. Her look was neither defiant nor bashful. Nor was it courage covering fear. I was the nearest source of immediate danger. I should be watched. It was simply that, no more.
I felt I should pity her, that I should warm to her desperate isolation. I was willing to feel sympathy because she did not ask for it. Because ordinarily I admired and liked people who did not accentuate their pathos with calculated fraud.
I found, to my surprise, that I did not like her. Oddly, I felt she knew it. And even worse, I felt that, knowing it, she was not hurt. But at least she did call for respect. Whatever she was, she was sincerely-whatever she was. I would not be a fraud either. I went to the point.
"They tell me, Jennie,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could, and I'm experienced at it, “that you throw things and set things on fire."
If I expected either a burst of tears or defiance, I was mistaken. I didn't have time to observe reactions at all.
It was as if a sudden hurricane and earthquake had hit the room at the same time. A desk tray full of papers whizzed by my head-my pen stand crashed through the window back of me, I got a shower of paper clips in the chest, my intercom described an arc and crashed broken into a corner. By the time I had wiped the ashes and tobacco from my ashtray out of my eyes and got them to stay open again, Jennie was gone. Sara was standing in the doorway with a look of consternation on her face.
I was on my way home before I remembered that when Sara and I had cleaned up the mess, I had not remembered picking up Auerbach's little cylinder, his chemical impulse storer. I last saw it laying on the corner of my desk where Auerbach had left it.
Probably Sara had picked it up and put it away. Anyway, the office was within security boundaries. The cylinder would be safe there.
I put it out of my mind, and wondered if the library had a card index classification under the heading of “Poltergeist."
* * * *
I wasn't much better prepared when I came into my office the following morning. Yes, of course, there was plenty of literature on the subject under such writers as Fort, books on oriental philosophy and the like. Orthodox psychologists had left the subject strictly alone, their attitude apparently being better to ignore the phenomenon than to risk precious and precarious reputation.
Poltergeism, then, remained something which one read about as an obscure, far away thing. I found no handy hints to help when one had it to deal with at first hand, no how-to-do-it books on the subject.
Worse, I found myself with a hangover of uncertainty, indecision. My deft incisiveness was gone. I felt a growing doubt that I had always been as smart as I thought I was.
I shook off the mood as I walked through the outer personnel offices toward my own. No matter how unsure, one must be positive and definite for the sake of the people who depend upon him for some certainties.
Sara had not quite come to the same decision. There was a look of puzzlement on her face when I started through her office toward mine. Uncertainty of whether she should pick up the usual banter as though nothing had happened-or was I really in trouble? I decided to set her mind at rest at least.
"When you picked up last night, after that little wildcat had her tantrum,” I greeted her, “did you put away a little plastic cylinder?"
"Why no, Mr. Kennedy,” she said and followed me into my office. “I didn't see one."
We looked in the corners of the room, under the desk, behind the chairs. We did not find it. I opened the window where the broken pane had been replaced, and looked out on the ground. It might have followed the pen stand out the window. I did have a vague recollection of something dark flashing by my head just before I got my face full of ashes. There was no cylinder on the ground.
When Sara is puzzled, she has a way of tapping her chin with her finger and looking up at the ceiling.
"Is that what you're looking for?” she asked, and pointed to the corner above my head.
I looked up and saw the cylinder embedded in the broken plaster. Apparently the jagged edges had caught it and kept it from failing. We hadn't noticed it before, because who looks at a ceiling in a familiar room? Apparently the janitors don't look at ceilings, either.
"O.K., Sara, thanks,” I dismissed her. “Try to hold the hounds at bay, gal. I've got some thinking to do this morning."
"I shouldn't wonder,” she grinned. “Anybody who calls himself a personnel psychologist, and then forces little children to have tantrums in spite of themselves—” The door closed, and saved me the trouble of hearing the completion of her sentence.
Yes, Sara was back on familiar ground. I wished I were.
I dragged a spare straight chair over and stood up on it to get the cylinder. It didn't want to move. Plaster fell around me. The jagged pieces holding it now fell away, and still it didn't move. It gave off the impression of pressing upward against the buttonboard.
I took hold of it and tugged. It came away reluctantly, an identical sensation of lifting a heavy object from the ground, in reverse. It remained heavy, invertedly heavy, as I carried it down and over to my desk.
Habit made me lay it on top of my desk and take my hand away. Habit made me grab for it as it shot upward, just as habit makes me grab for a thing which is falling. This time I put it into a drawer, and held my hand over it to keep it down as I closed the drawer.
I sank back into my chair and hooked my toes under the ledge of the desk. It raised into the air, slowly, buoyantly. I took the pressure of my toes away hurriedly. The desk hovered for a moment, tilted in the air. I put my hand on the top and nervously pressed it back to the floor again. I didn't really expect to hear raps on wood or tin bugles blowing, because I knew it was the cylinder in the drawer which was lifting the desk corner.
There was a very logical explanation of why the desk was trying to float upward. The cylinder was pushing it upward, of course. Yes, very logical. I took one of my nice clean handkerchiefs from another drawer and wiped the sweat off my forehead. There was a logical reason for the sweat, too. I was scared.
"Get me Auerbach,” I said to Sara in my new intercom. No doubt it was all over the plant by now that I had smashed my old one in a fit of rage. I settled back into my chair again, and pressed my knees against the desk to keep them from shaking. I shouldn't have done it. The desk bobbed away from me and settled slowly again. I left it there and waited. I sat well away from it, and tried to speculate on what survival factor shaking knees could represent.
Auerbach was not long in arriving. His expression, when he came through the door, was a mixed one of hope I had already got some results for him and touchiness that he should have been summoned like an ordinary employee.
"Take hold of that corner of the desk and lift,” I suggested. He looked puzzled, but complied. The desk buoyed upward, this time so strongly that my papers and pen stand slid off to the floor.
"Not so hard, man,” I shouted.
"But I barely touched it,” he said, incredulously.
I waved him to the crying chair and ignored the accusation written all over his face that I was playing tricks on him. I reached into the desk drawer and pulled out the cylinder. I handed it to him and he took it-from beneath, naturally, to hold it up. It shot up out of his hand and crashed against the ceiling. Plaster fell around him. He spit a sliver of it out of his open mouth as he gazed up at the cylinder.
"Must you be so careless and drop it up?” I snapped.
He didn't answer, and I just let it lay there where it had fallen against the ceiling.
"It isn't particular about what it learns, is it?” I asked, as if there were nothing at all abnormal about the situation.
He brought his eyes away from it and tried to answer, but there was a glaze over his eyes. I noticed his hands begin to shake, and that gave me confidence. My knees had stopped now, with only a small tremor now and then. Auerbach reached over and tugged at the desk corner, but the desk now hugged the floor as if it liked it and
refused to budge.
"It doesn't care what it learns, does it?” I repeated. This time he did a better job of trying to come to his senses. His face was a study in attempts to rationalize what he had seen with what he thought he knew. Apparently he wasn't having much luck. But at least he didn't deny what he had seen. I took courage from that. He might prove to be more intelligent than learned after all.
"Let us,” I began in a dry classroom manner, “assume, for sake of discussion, that your cylinder can store impulses."
He nodded, as if this were a safe enough assumption. It was a hopeful sign that I was getting through to him.
"It wouldn't know, of itself, which was up and which was down,” I pursued.
"Gravity is a real world condition,” he started answering now. “Not dependent upon knowledge. It works whether we know it or not."
"Well that's a point which has been debated for the last several thousand years to no conclusion,” I disagreed. “But let's take an illustration. Let's formulate a hypothesis, a variant world condition where biologists might know only natural air breathing animals."
He nodded again, a little more of the daze gone from his eyes. He was capable of a hypothesis.
"An entirely different structure of theory and expression of natural laws would be built up from that,” I reasoned. “One of these would be the basic law that to be classified as alive a thing must breathe natural air.” I pushed the point into my desk top with my finger.
He felt he should object as a matter of principle; should, in scientific tradition, discard the main point in favor of arguing semantics and definitions. That was always safe and didn't require one to think. But I didn't let him escape that easily.