Sense from Thought Divide | Page 4

that man alone as long as the job got
done. But when a man flubbed a job, and kept on flubbing it, then Mr.
Henry Grenoble stepped in and carried out his own job--general
managing.
He had given me the assignment of putting antigrav units into
production. He had given me access to all the money I would need for

the purpose. He had given me sufficient time, months of it. And, in
spite of all this coöperation, he still saw no production lines which
spewed out antigrav units at some such rate as seventeen and five
twelfths per second.
Apparently he got his communication from the Pentagon about the time
I got mine. Apparently it contained some implication that Computer
Research, under his management, was not pursuing the cause of
manufacturing antigrav units with diligence and dispatch. Apparently
he did not like this.
I had no more than apologized to the Swami, and received his martyred
forgiveness, and arranged for a hotel suite for him and the lieutenant,
when Old Stone Face sent for me. He began to manage with diligence
and dispatch.
"Now you look here, Kennedy," he said forcefully, and his use of my
last name, rather than my first, was a warning, "I've given you every
chance. When you and Auerbach came up with that antigrav unit last
fall, I didn't ask a lot of fool questions. I figured you knew what you
were doing. But the whole winter has passed, and here it is spring, and
you haven't done anything that I can see. I didn't say anything when
you told General Sanfordwaithe that you'd have to have poltergeists to
carry on the work, but I looked it up. First I thought you'd flipped your
lid, then I thought you were sending us all on a wild goose chase so
we'd leave you alone, then I didn't know what to think."
I nodded. He wasn't through.
"Now I think you're just pretending the whole thing doesn't exist
because you don't want to fool with it."
Perhaps he had come to the right decision after all. I'd resolutely
washed the whole thing out of my mind. But I wasn't going to get away
with it. I could see it coming.
"For the first time, Kennedy, I'm asking you what happened?" he said
firmly, but his tone was more telling than asking. So I was going to

have to discuss frameworks with Old Stone Face, after all.
"Henry," I asked slowly, "have you kept up your reading in theoretical
physics?"
He blinked at me. I couldn't tell whether it meant yes or no.
"When we went to school, you and I--" I hoped my putting us both in
the same age group would tend to mollify him a little, "physics was all
snug, secure, safe, definite. A fact was a fact, and that's all there was to
it. But there's been some changes made. There's the coördinate systems
of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change from
framework to framework. There's the application of multivalued logic
to physics where a fact becomes not a fact any longer. The astronomers
talk about the expanding universe--it's a piker compared to man's
expanding concepts about that universe."
He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beating
around the bush.
"That all has a bearing on what happened," I assured him. "You have to
understand what was behind the facts before you can understand the
facts themselves. First, we weren't trying to make an antigrav unit at all.
Dr. Auerbach was playing around with a chemical approach to
cybernetics. He made up some goop which he thought would store
memory impulses, the way the brain stores them. He brought a plastic
cylinder of it over to me, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my
desk while I went on with my personnel management business at
hand."
Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly
and deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puff
of smoke.
* * * * *
"The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a little girl,
daughter of one of our production women. She'd been throwing things,

setting things on fire. The teachers didn't know how she did it, she just
did it. They sent her to me. I asked her about it. She threw a tantrum,
and when it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goop was
trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what happened," I
said.
He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie the
facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself. After
all, we were in