“Shove it, good people, shove it,” the machine Epiktistes said. “We will meet here again tomorrow. Now you to your pleasures, and we to ours.”
The people talked that evening away from the machines where they could make foolish conjectures without being laughed at.
“Let’s pull a random card out of the pack and go with it,” said Louis Lobachevski. “Let’s take a purely intellectual crux of a little later date and see if the changing of it will change the world.”
“I suggest Ockham,” said Johnny Konduly.
“Why?” Valery demanded. “He was the last and least of the medieval schoolmen. How could anything he did or did not do affect anything?”
“Oh no, he held the razor to the jugular,” Gregory said. “He’d have severed the vein if the razor hadn’t been snatched from his hand. There is something amiss here, though. It is as though I remembered when things were not so stark with Ockham, as though, in some variant, Ockham’s Terminalism did not mean what we know that it did mean.”
“Sure, let’s cut the jugular,” said Willy. “Let’s find out the logical termination of Terminalism and see just how deep Ockham’s razor can cut.”
“We’ll do it,” said Gregory. “Our world has become something of a fat slob; it cloys; it has bothered me all evening. We will find whether purely intellectual attitudes are of actual effect. We’ll leave the details to Epikt, but I believe the turning point was in the year 1323 when John Lutterell came from Oxford to Avignon where the Holy See was then situated. He brought with him fifty-six propositions taken from Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences, and he proposed their condemnation. They were not condemned outright, but Ockham was whipped soundly in that first assault, and he never recovered. Lutterell proved that Ockham’s nihilism was a bunch of nothing. And the Ockham thing did die away, echoing dimly through the little German courts where Ockham traveled peddling his wares, but he no longer peddled them in the main markets. Yet his viewpoint could have sunk the world if, indeed, intellectual attitudes are of actual effect.”
“We wouldn’t have liked Lutterell,” said Aloysius. “He was humorless and he had no fire in him, and he was always right. And we would have liked Ockham. He was charming, and he was wrong, and perhaps we will destroy the world yet. There’s a chance that we will get our reaction if we allow Ockham free hand. China was frozen for thousands of years by an intellectual attitude, one not nearly so unsettling as Ockham’s. India is hypnotized into a queer stasis which calls itself revolutionary and which does not move—hypnotized by an intellectual attitude. But there was never such an attitude as Ockham’s.”
So they decided that the former chancellor of Oxford, John Lutterell, who was always a sick man, should suffer one more sickness on the road to Avignon in France, and that he should not arrive there to lance the Ockham thing before it infected the world.
“Let’s get on with it, good people,” Epikt rumbled the next day. “Me, I’m to stop a man getting from Oxford to Avignon in the year 1323. Well, come, come, take your places, and let’s get the thing started.” And Epiktistes’s great sea-serpent head glowed every color as he puffed on a seven-branched pooka-dooka and filled the room with wonderful smoke.
“Everybody ready to have his throat cut?” Gregory asked cheerfully.
“Cut them,” said Diogenes Pontifex, “but I haven’t much hope for it. If our yesterday’s essay had no effect, I cannot see how one English schoolman chasing another to challenge him in an Italian court in France, in bad Latin, nearly seven hundred years ago, on fifty-six points of unscientific abstract reasoning, can have effect.”
“We have perfect test conditions here,” said the machine Epikt. “We set out a basic text from Cobblestone’s History of Philosophy. If our test is effective, then the text will change before our eyes. So will every other text, and the world.
“We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world,” the machine Epiktistes said, “ten humans and three machines. Remember that there are thirteen of us. It might be important.”
“Regard the world,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “I said that yesterday, but it is required that I say it again. We have the world in our eyes and in our memories. If it changes in any way, we will know it.”
“Push the button, Epikt,” said Gregory Smirnov.
From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. And along about sundown on the road from Mende to Avignon in the old Languedoc district of France, in the year 1323, John Lutterell was stricken with one more sickness. He was taken to a little inn in the mountain country, and perhaps he died there. He did not, at any rate, arrive at Avignon.
“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Aloysius asked.
“Let’s look at the evidence,” said Gregory.
The four of them, the three humans and the ghost Epikt who was a kachenko mask with a speaking tube, turned to the evidence with mounting disappointment.
“There is still the stick and the five notches in it,” said Gregory. “It was our test stick. Nothing in the world is changed.”
“The arts remain as they were,” said Aloysius. “Our picture here on the stone on which we have worked for so many seasons is the same as it was. We have painted the bears black, the buffalos red, and the people blue. When we find a way to make another color, we can represent birds also. I had hoped that our experiment might give us that other color. I had even dreamed that birds might appear in the picture on the rock before our very eyes.”
“There’s still rump of skunk to eat and nothing else,” said Valery. “I had hoped that our experiment would have changed it to haunch of deer.”
“All is not lost,” said Aloysius. “We still have the hickory nuts. That was my last prayer before we began our experiment. ‘Don’t let them take the hickory nuts away,’ I prayed.”
They sat around the conference table that was a large flat natural rock, and cracked hickory nuts with stone fisthammers. They were nude in the crude, and the world was as it had always been. They had hoped by magic to change it.
“Epikt has failed us,” said Gregory. “We made his frame out of the best sticks, and we plaited his face out of the finest weeds and grasses. We chanted him full of magic and placed all our special treasures in his cheek pouches. So, what can the magic mask do for us now?”
“Ask it, ask it,” said Valery. They were the four finest minds in the world—the three humans, Gregory, Aloysius, and Valery (the only humans in the world unless you count those in the other valleys), and the ghost Epikt, a kachenko mask with a speaking tube.
“What do we do now, Epikt?” Gregory asked. Then he went around behind Epikt to the speaking tube.
“I remember a woman with a sausage stuck to her nose,” said Epikt in the voice of Gregory. “Is that any help?”
“It may be some help,” Gregory said after he had once more taken his place at the flat-rock conference table. “It is from an old (What’s old about it? I made it up myself this morning) folk tale about the three wishes.”
“Let Epikt tell it,” said Valery. “He does it so much better than you do.” Valery went behind Epikt to the speaking tube and blew smoke through it from the huge loose black-leaf uncured stogie that she was smoking.
“The wife wastes one wish for a sausage,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery. “A sausage is a piece of deer-meat tied in a piece of a deer’s stomach. The husband is angry that the wife has wasted a wish, since she could have wished for a whole deer and had many sausages. He gets so angry that he wishes the sausage might stick to her nose forever. It does, and the woman wails, and the man realized that he had used up the second wish. I forget the rest.”