Perry glanced after him. "Funny little guy. What is he, kind of a glorified janitor?"
"My heavens, no. He's the chief psychiatrist and director of the whole institution." Perry whistled, then he changed the subject.
"How soon do you have to go?"
"Why, I don't have to go. I don't have a broadcast until Tuesday."
"Do you mean they will let you stay here?"
"Surely. Why not? I'll have to be away a good deal because there is no place to rehearse here, nor to broadcast. They may want me to leave you a good bit of the time, but I'm certainly staying over night and most nights—if I'm asked." She lowered her lashes.
He placed a finger under her chin, turned it up and kissed her. "Of course you're asked."
The next morning Hedrick appeared and asked if he might come in and talk for a while. The men settled down to becoming acquainted, as Diana announced that she was going to run over and pick up Captain Kidd. The conversation rambled on for hour after hour. Perry found himself led into doing most of the talking and doing so with great freedom. The little man was curiously disarming. His bird-like twitter and mild ways broke down the younger man's reticence. Gradually he found himself talking about factual events alone. To it all Hedrick offered a sympathetic attention, his head cocked on one side, his eyes bright and alert. When he arose to leave, Perry inquired somewhat nervously as to when the treatment would commence. Hedrick beamed. "It has commenced. Didn't you know it?" Then he departed, having promised to arrange as soon as possible for a competent economist to come in for a chat, which Perry had requested.
The talks continued, both with and without others present. Hedrick turned over a part of Perry's case to Olga, a sturdy blond earthy person who seemed out of place on the staff of a psychiatric institution. She had the hips and breasts for childbearing and the calm eyes of the natural mother. But Diana assured him that Olga had more than once collaborated with Diana's mother in complicated brain surgery. Olga directed Perry in a more comprehensive study of the modern world than he had undertaken with Diana's help. In addition to technical and non-fiction works, Olga selected for him many fictional and dramatic works which she urged him to read or view. The two women got along together like old friends. Often Olga would appear with some book or record that she wished Perry to absorb, then the ladies would go for long walks in the surrounding hills. During Diana's numerous absences Olga would frequently eat and spend the evening with him.
Olga required Perry to do considerable writing, which he referred to facetiously as his 'homework' or his 'examinations'. There was an entire series in which he was asked to define terms. In the earlier papers the words to be defined were comparatively simple, such as 'walking', 'road', 'apple', 'cat'. Perry started in on these blithely determined to show that he positively was not chasing butterflies. But these papers came back to him with discrepancies and confusing terms pointed out and with a request for more nearly unmistakable definitions. He grew hot and sweaty and struggled with attempts to say in words just exactly what he meant. Then his second attempts came back with a congratulatory note on the care with which he had made his definitions, but with a comment on his definition of 'horse': 'Does this definition include clothes' horse, saw horse, horse play, horse dice? Please examine your other definitions with this comment in mind.' Grimly he sat down to modify the definitions which he had believed to be so beautifully exact. He hit upon the following dodge, a phrase which he added to each definition:'—and many other meanings, determined by the context, the speaker and listener, and the idiom of the period.' Finally he stated the proposition that a word is adequately defined when it is used in such a fashion that it means the same thing to the listener as it means to the speaker. He sent this in with the hope that it would settle the matter. He was soon undeceived for he was requested the next day to define 'human nature', 'patriotism', 'justice', 'love', 'honor', 'duty', 'space', 'matter', 'religion', 'god', 'life', 'time', 'society', 'right', and 'wrong'. After three days of fruitless struggle in an attempt to do something with these words, he sent back the following statement: 'Insofar as I am able to tell these words have no meaning whatsoever, for I am unable to devise any means of defining them so that they mean the same to the speaker as to the listener.' The answer that came back was cryptic: 'Let the problem lie, but do not abandon it. Could you design a turbine without a knowledge of calculus and of entropy?' He was then requested to formulate a mechanics of a pseudo-gravitation based on a law of attraction by inverse cubes instead of inverse squares. He became fascinated with the beautiful logical consequences of this problem and produced a monograph on the resulting ballistics. He was then asked if he could design sights for a gun to be fired under the postulated conditions. This request struck him as ridiculous and he demanded an explanation of Olga.
"Olga, what is all this rigamarole? What possible use is it for me to design a worthless gun?"
Olga smiled a long slow smile. "I would like to tell you the meaning but I can't. If you knew the meaning the rigamarole would not be necessary. But you must discover meaning for yourself. We are trying to help you discover the meaning of the words you didn't define."
"I'd like to lay hands on the guy who thought up this last little joke." She took his hand and placed it on her shoulder. "You did? Olga, I thought you were a pal of mine."
"I am, Perry, but it's part of my business to see that your treatment is approached through fields you understand and to watch its effect on you. However I think we can skip a step at this point. You obviously don't want to bother with designing this gun sight. But you could design it, could you not?"
"Certainly. Nothing to it. You see—" Perry launched into a flow of the technicalities used in ordnance and ballistics, and described with sweeps of his hands what would happen to a shell unlucky enough to be constrained by an inversed-cube type acceleration. "—and all this is in vacuo, of course. I wouldn't attempt to predict without empirical data the effect of a gaseous medium constrained by the same field."
"That's enough, Perry. I didn't understand a third of what you said, but I'm convinced that you could design the gunsight. Suppose we had such a gun and set it up here. Could you hit that sailboat over there across the lake?"
"Of course not."
"Why not?"
"Why, the mathematical formulas under which it was designed don't apply to the conditions under which the gun is fired. The more carefully you aimed the more certain you would be of missing."
"Does that suggest anything to you, Perry?"
"No, not offhand."
"You remember those words you didn't define—Weren't those words the names for things by which a man guides his life?—Honor, love, truth, justice, duty, and so forth?"
A look of dawning comprehension came into his face. "Yes, yes, I think so."
"Aren't these things just as powerful to move a man as the hunger of the belly or the stirring of the loins. "
"Yes, yes indeed. More powerful."
"Then they aren't meaningless. But like that gunsight, unless the meaning you attribute to them bears a correct relationship to the world in which you act, you cannot possibly use them as guides to go where you wish to go. Yet without these guides, a man himself is as meaningless as a gun that can't be aimed."
"You make it sound very plausible, yet a man is not a shell in a gun and truth and honor are not gunsights."