The Haunted Bell | Page 8

mouth drooped at the corners. The small, white hands which twisted and turned the object-glass into focus were possessed of extraordinarily long, slender fingers.
This man of the large head and small body was the undisputed leader in contemporaneous science. His was the sanest, coldest, clearest brain in scientific achievement. His word was the final one. Once upon a time a newspaperman, Hutchinson Hatch, had dubbed him The Thinking Machine, and so it came about that the world at large had heard of and knew him by that title. The reporter, a tall, slender young man, sat now watching him curiously and listening. The scientist spoke in a tone of perpetual annoyance; but a long acquaintance had taught the reporter that it was what he said and not the manner of its saying that was to be heeded.
"Imagination, Mr. Hatch, is the single connecting link between man and the infinite," The Thinking Machine was saying. "It is the one quality which distinguishes us from what we are pleased to call the brute creation, for we have the same passions, the same appetites, and the same desires. It is the most valuable adjunct to the scientific mind, because it is the basis of all scientific progress. It is the thing which temporarily bridges gaps and makes it possible to solve all material problems--not some, but all of them. We can achieve nothing until we imagine it. Just so far as the human brain can imagine it can comprehend. It fails only to comprehend the eternal purpose, the Omnipotent Will, because it cannot imagine it. For imagination has a limit, Mr. Hatch, and beyond that we are not to go--beyond that is Divinity."
This wasn't at all what Hatch had come to hear, but he listened with a sort of fascination.
"The first intelligent being," the irritated voice went on, "had to imagine that when two were added to two there would be a result. He found it was four, he proved it was four, and instantly it became immutable--a point in logic, a thing by which we may solve problems. Thus two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time."
"I had always supposed that imagination was limitless," Hatch ventured for a moment, "that it knows no bounds."
The Thinking Machine squinted at him coldly.
"On the contrary," he declared, "it has a boundary beyond which the mind of man merely reels, staggers, collapses. I'll take you there." He spoke as if it were just around the corner. "By aid of a microscope of far less power than the one there, the atomic or molecular theory was formulated. You know that--it is that all matter is composed of atoms. Now, imagination suggested and logic immutably demonstrates that the atoms themselves are composed of other atoms, and that those atoms in turn are composed of still others, ad infinitum. They are merely invisible, and imagination--I am not now stating a belief, but citing an example of what imagination can do--imagination can make us see the possibility of each of those atoms, down to infinity, being inhabited, being in itself a world relatively as distant from its fellows as we are from the moon. We can even imagine what those inhabitants would look like."
He paused a minute; Hatch blinked several times.
"But the boundary lies the other way--through the telescope," continued the scientist. "The most powerful glass ever devised has brought no suggestion of the end of the universe. It only brings more millions of worlds, invisible to the naked eye into sight. The stronger the glass, the more hopeless the task of even conjecturing the end, and here, too, the imagination can apply the atomic theory, and logic will support it. In other words, atoms make matter, matter makes the world, which is an inconceivably tiny speck in our solar system, an atom; therefore, all the millions and millions of worlds are mere atoms, infinitesimal parts of some far greater scheme. What greater scheme? There is the end of imagination! There the mind stops!"
The immensity of the conception made Hatch gasp a little. He sat silent for a long time, awed, oppressed. Never before in his life had he felt of so little consequence.
"Now, Mr. Hatch, as to this little problem that is annoying you," continued The Thinking Machine, and the matter-of-fact tone was a great relief. "What I have said has had, of course, no bearing on it, except in so far as it demonstrates that imagination is necessary to solve a problem, that all material problems may be solved, and that, in meeting them, logic is the lever. It is a fixed quantity; its simplest rules have enabled me to solve petty affairs for you in the past, so--"
The reporter came to himself with a start. Then he laid before this master brain the circumstances