Berk let that one ride. A man who saw in the world such terrible simplicity might ultimately find Dunning's mystery completely transparent. He couldn't risk that possibility by arguing.
They drew up to the old mansion Dunning had occupied. Dykstra surveyed it from the car. 'The kind of a place you would expect,5 he grunted.
It was difficult to estimate what was going on in the physicist's mind as he came into the laboratories.
In the first room he scanned the shelves of reagents. He took down a dozen bottles and examined their labels closely. Of some he removed the stoppers and sniffed cautiously, then replaced them all on the shelf in mild disdain.
He spent a long time examining the fractionating set-up in the centre of the room. He spotted the pad of computations left there and drew an old envelope from his pocket and did some comparison scribbling.
In the electronics room he turned to look through the doorway. 'Why would any man want two such laboratories as these?'
His inspection was much more thorough than that of any of the others, including Martin Nagle. Berk supposed that Mart and many of the others would be back, but Dykstra was going through with a fine-toothed comb the first time.
He poked through the machine shop. 'Well equipped,' he muttered, 'for a man who likes to tinker.'
But he was highly impressed by the computer room. He examined the settings of the instruments and the chart papers. He opened every desk drawer and shuffled through the scattering of papers inside.
Red-faced, he turned to Berk. 'This is absurd! Certainly there would be charts, papers, or something showing the man's calculations. These instruments are not here for show; they've obviously been used. Someone has removed the computational material from this room!'
'It's just as we found it,' said Berk. 'We don't understand it any better than you.'
'I don't believe it,' said Dykstra flatly.
The reaction of the physicist to the library was the thing Berk was most interested in. He let Dykstra look at will over the strange and exotic collection of volumes.
At first Dykstra reacted like a suddenly caged animal. He ran from the shelves of mythology, got a glance at the section on astrology, hurried from there to the books on faith-healing, and made a spiral turn that brought him up against the region of material on East Indian philosophy.
'What is this,' he bellowed hoarsely, 'a joke?'
The pudgy figure seemed to swell visibly with indignation.
'The next room would interest you most, perhaps,' said Berk.
Dykstra almost ran through the adjoining door as if escaping some devil with whom he had come face to face. Then, catching sight of the titles here, he began to breathe easily and with an audible sighing of relief. He was among friends.
With an air of reference, he took down a worn copy of Weyl's Space Time Matter, and a reissue of the relativity papers.
'It isn't possible,' he murmured, 'that Dunning owned and understood both of these libraries.'
'He understood and conquered gravity,' said Berk. 'And this is the last of the clues we have to show you.'
Dykstra put the books carefully back on the shelves. 'I don't like it.' He glanced back to the other room as if it were a place of terror.
'There's something wrong,' he murmured. 'Anti-gravity! Whoever heard of such a thing? And how could it come out of a place like this?'
IV
That afternoon, they met again in conference. There was agreement that they would tackle the problem. Only Professor Dykstra exhibited a continuing belligerence towards the affair, yet he made no move to withdraw.
Full cooperation of military facilities was pledged by the representatives of the services. The centre of investigation was to be at ONR, however, with branching research wherever needed.
No one had conceived even a tentative starting point which he cared to discuss with his colleagues. Most of them had spent the morning re-reading the relativity papers and staring at the ceiling of their respective offices. They agreed to work as loosely or as closely as the problem demanded. Until some working programme could be initiated by some of them, it was decided to hold daily seminars to try to spark each other into creative thought.
A minor honour came to Mart in his election as chairman of the seminar. It gave him uneasiness because he was junior in age and profession to all of them. But his eminence in electro-fields made him a likely coordinator of the project.
Mart selected a representative sample from the occult section of Dunning's library and took it to his own office. He settled down amid an aura of astrology, spiritualism, mysticism, religion, sunspot data, and levitation. He had no specific purpose, only to expose his own mind to the atmosphere in which Dunning had operated. Dunning had found the goal. The tracks he walked in had to be located, no matter where they were picked up.
Some of the stuff was boring, much could be nothing but sheer delusion. Yet his dogged pursuit left him intrigued by some of the material.
The reports on poltergeism at Leander Castle near London, for example. They were well reported. Independent cross references verified each other very well. The works on levitation were far more difficult to credit. There was a hodgepodge about purification of the body and the soul, of reaching assorted states of exaltation above the ordinary degree of mortal.
Yet levitation had occurred, according to reports of witnesses who might not be considered too unreliable.
And what did this have to do with religion — in which Dunning had had tremendous interest, to judge by the notations he made?
There were miracles in religion, Mart reflected.
Anti-gravity was a miracle.
Miracle: that which is considered impossible and which cannot be duplicated by the observers, even after it has been seen.
In scientific law there is a difference. It can be applied by anyone with sufficient IQ. But the worker of miracles does not come out of the laboratory or halls of learning.
He rises spontaneously out of the mountains or out of the wilderness, and gathers novices who seek with all their hearts to equal the Master. But they never do. Always there is a difference. The magic of miracles seems unteachable. It has its own spontaneous majesty, or is nothing but old-fashioned hoodwinking. There seemed, to Mart, no in-between.
Anti-gravity.
Was it natural law, or miracle? Had Dunning found the bridge that made only a single category of the two? Or was he a performer of miracles, whose art could not be taught, but would arise spontaneously, full blown?
Mart slammed the books shut and pushed them to the rear of the desk. He pulled a scratch pad out of the drawer and began pencilling furiously the basic Einstein equations.
By the end of the first week there was little to report. The daily seminars had been held, but outside of re-educating each other in the exotic concepts of the relativity world they had achieved nothing.
Or so it seemed to Mart. Keyes seemed quite pleased, however, and Berk mentioned that they should be congratulated on their progress. As if they had taken a major step forward in merely meeting and agreeing to undertake the project.
And maybe they had, Mart thought.
He found himself in difficulty as chairman of the seminar. Invariably, in such a group there is a member who undertakes to educate his colleagues anew in all the basic sciences. In this case, it was made doubly difficult because the self-appointed instructor was Professor Dykstra.
That he was capable of teaching them a good deal, there was no question. But on the Saturday at the end of this first week he arose with a particularly triumphant expression and strode to the blackboard, where he began scrawling his barely legible chicken marks.