Sense from Thought Divide | Page 5

the business of manufacturing computers. The general
manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primary
arithmetic.
"Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background," I
went on. "Her mother was from the old country, one of the Slav races.
There's the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had
passed them on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their
room. The kid never got out with other children. Children, kept alone,
never seeing anybody, get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who,
knows what kind of a coördinate system she built up, or how it worked?
Her mother would come home at night and go about her tasks talking
aloud, half to the daughter, half to herself. 'I really burned that foreman
up, today,' she'd say. Or, 'Oh, boy, was he fired in a hurry!' Or, 'She got
herself thrown out of the place,' things like that."
"So what does that mean, Ralph?" he asked. His switch to my first
name indicated he was trying to work with me instead of pushing me.
"To a child who never knew anything else," I answered, "one who had
never learned to distinguish reality from unreality--as we would define
it from our agreed framework--a special coördinate system might be
built up where 'Everybody was up in the air at work, today,' might be
taken literally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn't happen,
of course--it says in the textbooks--but since it has been happening all
through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of
multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already
had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smug
certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to get
some of the answers we thought we had.

"We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We're still
trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tape
and it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have to
know how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know
how to code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder
will store a psi impulse, but we don't know how. So we have to keep
working with psi gifted people, at least until we've established some of
the basic laws governing psi."
I couldn't tell by Henry's face whether I was with him or away from
him. He told me he wanted to think about it, and made a little motion
with his hand that I should leave the room.
I walked through the suite of executive offices and down a sound
rebuffing hallway. The throbbing clatter of manufacture of metallic
parts made a welcome sound as I went through the far doorway into the
factory. I saw a blueprint spread on a foreman's desk as I walked past.
Good old blueprint. So many millimeters from here to there, made of
such and such an alloy, a hole punched here with an allowance of
five-ten-thousandths plus or minus tolerance. Snug, secure, safe. I
wondered if psi could ever be blue-printed. Or suppose you put a hole
here, but when you looked away and then looked back it had moved, or
wasn't there at all?
[Illustration]
Quickly, I got myself into a conversation with a supervisor about the
rising rate of employee turnover in his department. That was something
also snug, secure, safe. All you had to do was figure out human beings.
* * * * *
I spent the rest of the morning on such pursuits, working with things I
understood.
On his first rounds of the afternoon, the interoffice messenger brought
me a memorandum from the general manager's office. I opened it with
some misgivings. I was not particularly reassured.

Mr. Grenoble felt he should work with me more closely on the antigrav
project. He understood, from his researches, that the most positive psi
effects were experienced during a seance with a medium. Would I
kindly arrange for the Swami to hold a seance that evening, after office
hours, so that he might analyze the man's methods and procedures to
see how they could fit smoothly into Company Operation. This was not
to be construed as interference in the workings of my department but in
the interests of pursuing the entire matter with diligence and dispatch--
The seance was to be held in my office.
I had had many peculiar conferences in this room--from union leaders
stripping off their coats, throwing them on the floor and stomping on
them; to uplifters who wanted to ban cosmetics on our women
employees so the male employees would not be tempted to think
Questionable Thoughts. I could not recall ever having held a seance