“Any chemistry majors?
“Chemistry major! You’d be better off as a cook!”
Ted finished, “And so on, down to the, ahem, baloney majors.”
“He was number happy,” said Ed, smiling.
“No. He was right, in a way.” Ted continued. “The race had found its new notions were crudities, simple copies of algebras and geometries past. What it thought was vigor was really sloth and decay.
“It knew how to add and multiply, but it had forgotten what a field was, and what commutivity was. If entropy and time wreaked harm on matter, they did worse by this race. It wasn’t interested in expeditions though the fiber bundles; rather it wanted to count apples.
“There was conflict and argument, but it was too late to turn back. The race had already degenerated too far to turn back. Then life was discovered.
“The majority of the race took matter for a bride. Its esthetic and creative powers ruined, it wallowed in passion and pain. Only remnants of reason remained.
“For the rest, return to abstraction was impossible. Time, entropy, had robbed them of their knowledge, their heritage. Yet they still hoped and expended themselves to leave, well, call it a ‘seed’ of sorts.”
“Mathematics?” cried Pearl.
“It explains some things,” mused Goldwasser softly. “Why abstract mathematics, developed in the mind, turns out fifty years or a century later to accurately describe the physical universe. Tensor calculus and relativity, for example. If you look at it this way, the math was there first.”
“Yes, yes, yes. Mathematicians talked about their subject as an art form. One system is more ‘elegant’ than another if its logical structure is more austere. But Occam’s Razor, the law of simplest hypothesis, isn’t logical.
“Many of the great mathematicians did their greatest work as children and youths before they were dissipated by the sensual world. In a trivial sense, scientists and mathematicians most of all are described as ‘unworldly’ . . .”
Anderson bobbled his head in the old familiar way. “You. have almost returned,” he said quietly. “This ship is really a heuristic device, an aid to perception. You are on the threshold. You have come all the way back.”
The metamathematician took his notebook, and seemed to set all his will upon it. “See Ephraim gets this,” he murmured. “He, you, I ... the oneness—”
Abruptly he disappeared. The notebook fell to the floor.
I took it up. Neither Ed nor Johnny Pearl met my eyes. We may have sat and stood there for several hours, numbed, silent. Presently the two began setting up the isomorphomechanism for realization. I joined them.
The National Mathenautics and Hyperspace Administration had jurisdiction over civilian flights then, even as it does today. Ted was pretty important, it seemed. Our preliminary debriefing won us a maximum-security session with their research chief.
Perhaps, as I’d thought passionately for an instant, I’d have done better to smash the immy, rupture the psychic ecology, let the eggshell be shattered at last. But that’s not the way of it. For all of our progress, some rules of scientific investigation don’t change. Our first duty was to report back. Better heads than ours would decide what to do next.
They did. Ephraim Cohen didn’t say anything after he heard us out and looked at Ted’s notebook. Old Ice Cream sat there, a big teddy-bear-shaped genius with thick black hair and a dumb smile, and grinned at us. It was in Institute code.
The B.C.N.Y. kids hadn’t seen anything, of course. So nobody talked.
Johnny Pearl married a girl named Judy Shatz and they had fifteen kids. I guess that showed Johnny’s views on the matter of matter.
Ed Goldwasser got religion. Zen-Judaism is pretty orthodox these days, yet somehow he found it suited him. But he didn’t forget what had happened back out in space. His book, The Cosmic Mind, came out last month, and it’s a good summation of Ted’s ideas, with a minimum of spiritual overtones.
Myself. Well, a mathematician, especially a topologist, is useless after thirty, the way progress is going along these days. But Dim-Dustries is a commercial enterprise, and I guess I’m good for twenty years more as a businessman.
Goldwasser’s Grahm-Schmidt generator worked, but that was just the beginning. Dimensional extension’s made Earth a paradise, with housing hidden in the probabilities and automated industries tucked away in the dimensions.
The biggest boon was something no one anticipated. A space of infinite dimensions solves all the basic problems of modern computer-circuit design. Now all components can be linked with short electron paths, no matter how big and complex the device.
There have been any number of other benefits. The space hospitals, for example, where topological surgery can cure the most terrible wounds—and topological psychiatry the most baffling syndromes. (Four years of math is required for pre-meds these days.) Patapsychology and patasociology finally made some progress, so that political and economic woes have declined—thanks, too, to the spaces, which have drained off a good deal of poor Earth’s overpopulation. There are even spaces resorts, or so I’m told —I don’t get away much.
I’ve struck it lucky. Fantastically so. The Private Enterprise Acts had just been passed, you’ll recall, and I had decided I didn’t want to go spacing again. With the training required for the subject, I guess I was the only qualified man who had a peddler’s pack, too. Jaffee, one of my friends down at Securities and Exchange, went so far as to say that Dim-Dustries was a hyper-spherical trust (math is required for pre-laws too). But I placated him and I got some of my mathemateers to realign the Street on a moebius strip, so he had to side with me.
Me, I’ll stick to the Earth. The “real” planet is a garden spot now, and the girls are very lovely.
Ted Anderson was recorded lost in topological space. He wasn’t the first, and he was far from the last. Twiddles circuits have burned out, DaughtAmsRevs have gone mad, and no doubt there have been some believers who have sought out the Great Race.
If you have not yet heard of Alfred Jarry, you were just about to.
I came across the name first in a small, brilliant-red, extremely outspoken Moroccan magazine, Gnaoua, in which one item was not only printable (by U.S. standards) but eminently reprintable—Jarry’s “The Other Alcestis.”
Turned out it was not only -able, but very much -ed. Jarry lived in France at the turn of the century—and wrote in a vein startlingly similar to the newest surreal-science-fantasy. He is currently having a revival among the avant-garde, with an off-Broadway production of his play, Uhu Roi, and new editions of his work from New Directions. He is also the founder (prophet? inventor? perpetrator? saint?) of the Science of ‘Pataphysics.
Actually the Jarry renaissance began in 1961 with a special issue of Evergreen Review, edited by Roger Shattuck (Provediteur-General Propagator for the Islands and the Americas, in the College of ‘Pataphysics).
Space limitations prevent me from attempting here what Shattuck (pessimistically) set out to perform in 192 pages complete with magnificent maps, charts, photographs and footnotes, describing the history, scope, and organization of the illustrious
College: i.e., “the self-contradictory task of defining ‘Pataphysics in nonpataphysical terms.” I can offer only some gleanings. ‘Pataphysics (according to Shattuck) is—
—the science of the realm beyond metaphysics (as far beyond metaphysics as metaphysics is beyond physics—in one direction or another).
—the science of imaginary solutions,