Ed Benedict smiled faintly. “I know there’s been enough government-supported research in communications equipment to quadruple the value of Telcom stocks in the last five years. Go on.”
“Okay, we’ve had more work than we knew what to do with,” McEvoy said. “My lab has been involved with temperature stresses on spacecraft components, especially the effects of extreme cold on guidance systems. We’ve been working in extremely low temperatures, approaching absolute zero, where molecular motion ceases altogether. A theoretical point, of course, because you’re never supposed to be quite able to get there. You get into problems of entropy and energy exchange…actual physical stress…that gets worse the closer you get to the theoretical point. Mass-energy conversion, a lot of otherwise-stable constants that don’t seem to obtain under these conditions…the very meat of the project, the reason we’re doing it.”
Ed Benedict nodded. “I don’t understand you, but I think I know what you’re talking about.”
“Fine. Things were going along very well until one of my men devised a radically new refrigerating pump that worked far better than anybody dreamed it could. We got our test material—a block of tungsten supported on an insulated tripod in the refrigerating vault—down closer to absolute zero than we’d ever hoped for. Maybe we hit absolute and dropped below it…I don’t even know that for sure.”
The phychologist blinked. “I don’t follow. From absolute zero, just where can the temperature drop to?”
“A good question,” McEvoy said. “I can’t answer it. Below absolute zero you might speculate on some kind of negative molecular motion. Maybe that’s what we did get.
Certainly something changed. The test block simply evaporated. Vanished. The tripod vanished, and so did the temperature-recording device. All we could see in the vault was a small, glowing hole in the center of the room where the block had been. Nothing in it, nothing. Just a pale, blue, glowing area about six inches across that looked to some of us very strangely like a hypercube.”
“A hypercube?”
“A three-dimensional picture of a four-dimensional object; just as you can draw a picture of a cube in perspective on a flat two-dimensional surface like a piece of paper. It looks like a cube when you look at it, but it doesn’t actually have any depth. This glowing area was in three dimensions—cubical—but the lines were distorted as if there were more than one cube in the same space. In fact, it looked very suspiciously like a four-dimensional hole in our three-dimensional space, as if the energy we had been applying had inadvertently cut through a corner or an edge of some…some other universe constructed in four spatial dimensions instead of three.”
Ed Benedict was silent for a moment, staring at the tennis ball. “So you investigated,”
he said finally.
“We investigated…and you know from the doctor what happened.”
“What about this?” Benedict pointed to the ball.
“That’s one of the characteristics of this thing we are able to investigate. That was an ordinary, normal tennis ball until we dropped it into the area of this hypercube. It came out the other side looking like this. I stuck a pencil into the area and it came out with a thin layer of graphite around a solid wooden core. A light bulb we pushed in just exploded and vaporized.”
Benedict toyed with the tennis ball. “And your investigators haven’t even been able to look into this little area of space?”
“No. When they’ve tried it, it’s frightened them, or shocked them, or done something to them. As if they had taken on some kind of terrible overload, beyond their ability to adjust.”
“It sounds as if you need a tough nervous system,” Ed Benedict said. “Somebody tough enough to look in there and investigate and at least come out alive.” He smiled. “Have you heard the old story about the South American farmers who tried to carry their goats over the Andes by muleback? The mules crossed the high passes and the narrow mountain trails along dreadful drop-offs just fine. But the goats all died of fright. It was old stuff for the mules, or else they were too stupid to be worried, but the goats couldn’t take it. Until they were blindfolded. Then everything went fine.”
Ed Benedict stood up, walked to the window and stared out across the growing jumble of buildings of the newly established Hoffman Medical Center. A high-riser was just now about halfway finished, its girders bare to the wind. A sign announced it as the Center’s future Administration Building and Main Evaluation Clinic.
“Do you have any idea of the kind of work we’ve been doing in my laboratory, Dr.
McEvoy?”
“Vaguely.”
“Patterns of adjustment. Given a new or altered environment, one man can adjust and survive while another breaks down and withdraws to avoid facing new circumstances. We’re trying to find out why. Young people usually adjust far more readily than adults. We’re trying to learn why. What is the mind’s mechanism of adjustment? How does it work? How can someone change his thinking to cope with a new environment? Why can one person adjust and another not? That’s what we’ve been working on.”
“And your results?”
Benedict shrugged. “We keep learning as we go. Confront a man with a sudden, radical change in the world around him and he has to do something—adjust or withdraw. His mind is full of things that he’s learned to help him stay alive in his old familiar environment. In the new environment he gets the wrong answers; the data in his mind is no good. So he can do one of two things. He can try to get by on the wrong-answer data, and end up with anything from a mild nervous breakdown to frank derangement, depending on how badly the new environment threatens him. Or—which amounts to the same thing—he can devote himself to wrenching the environment back to the old familiar pattern; okay if it works except that it seldom does and he just ends up frustrated as well.
“Alternatively, a man can recognize that his mental data is wrong, chuck it out as ‘no good under these circumstances’ and proceed to search for new data that is good. Of course, he has to relate what he can understand to what he can’t and use that for a starting place—sometimes a very tough job. But if he can do it, eventually he can adjust. Some people are just naturally good at it. They adjust readily, especially when they’ve had some training and practice. Others stumble, get wrong answers to begin with, end up with even more dangerously wrong answers, and get so confused and frightened that their minds just block the whole thing off and adjustment becomes impossible.”
McEvoy nodded. “But it all depends on having something understandable to hang onto.
And you’re talking about environments that are only partly different, say an ice station in Antarctica, or an exploratory post on the Moon. What would happen if one of these high-adaptive people were suddenly faced with an environment so completely foreign and incomprehensible that there was nothing he could relate to the world he knew before? No place to stand. What would he do then?”
Ed Benedict took the tennis ball from the desk and studied it for several moments before answering. Then he looked up at McEvoy. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to be responsible.”
McEvoy’s face fell. “You mean you think there’s be no chance of success?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that. Take someone with a very high degree of adaptability, someone with a keen mind and plenty of resourcefulness, and he might find something to work with in such an incomprehensible environment. You’d be amazed at the overload a human nervous system can take without cracking. We’ve tried everything we could devise on some of these youngsters. Ever try living on a forty-hour day? It’s an experience. Varied temperatures, disorientation, persistently irritating noise effects, distorted spacial environments like tilt-houses and such, induced successive dilemmas—everything. We’ve weeded out dozens of high-adaptives; when one threatens to crack we pull him back, let him get his feet on the ground, and then get him to help us devise new tests for the others. And some don’t crack.”