Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost their confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty - and thereby let magic loose in the world
He was beginning, he thought, to understand what had happened to magic. Magic was the erratic law of an animistic world; it had been steadily pushed back by the advancing philosophy of invariant causation. It was gone now - until this new outbreak - and its world with it, except for backwaters of ‘superstition'. Naturally an experimental scientist reported failure when investigating haunted houses, apportations, and the like; his convictions prevented the phenomena from happening
The deep jungles of Africa might be very different places -when there was no white man around to see! The strangely slippery laws of magic might still obtain
Perhaps these speculations were too extreme; nevertheless, they had one advantage which orthodox concepts had not: they included Gramps Schncider's hexing of the deKalbs. Any working hypothesis which failed to account for Schneider's -and his own - ability to think a set of deKalbs into operation was not worth a continental. This one did, and it conformed to Gramps's own statements: ‘All matters are doubtful' and ‘A thing can both be, not be, and he anything. There are many true ways of looking at the same thing. Some ways are good, some are bad.
Very well. Accept it. Act on it. The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it. He cast his vote for order and predictability! He would set the style. He would impress his own concept of the Other World on the cosmos! It had been a good start to assure Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs were foolproof. Good. So let it be. They were foolproof. They would never get out of order
He proceeded to formulate and clarify his own concept of the Other World in his mind. He would think of it as orderly and basically similar to this space. The connexion between the two spaces lay in the neurological system; the cortex, the thalamus, the spinal cord, and the appended nerve system were closely connected with both spaces. Such a picture was consistent with what Schneider had told him and did not conflict with phenomena as he knew it
Wait. If the neurological system lay in both spaces, then that might account for the relatively slow propagation of nerve impulses as compared with electromagnetic progression. Yes! If the other space had a c constant relatively smaller than that of this space, such would follow
He began to feel a calm assurance that it was so
Was he merely speculating - or creating a universe? Perhaps he would have to abandon his mental picture of the Other Space, as being the size and shape of an ostrich egg, since a space with a slower propagation of light is not smaller, but larger, than the space he was used to. No... no, wait a second, the size of a space did not depend on its c constant, but on its radius of curvature in terms of its c constant. Since c was a velocity, size was dependent on the notion of time - in this case time as entropy rate. Therein lay a characteristic which could be compared between the two spaces: they exchanged energy; they affected each other's entropy. The one which degenerated the more rapidly towards a state of level entropy was the ‘smaller
He need not abandon his picture of the ostrich egg-good old egg! The Other World was a closed space, with a slow c, a high entropy rate, a short radius, and an entropy state near level - a perfect reservoir of power at every point, ready to spill over into this space wherever he might close the interval. To its inhabitants, if any. it might seem to be hundreds of millions of light years around; to him it was an ostrich egg, turgid to bursting with power
He was already beginning to think of ways of checking his hypothesis. If, using a Schneider-deKalb, he were to draw energy at the highest rate he could manage, would he affect the local potential? Would it establish an entropy gradient? Could he reverse the process by finding a way to pump power into the Other World? Could he establish different levels at different points and thereby check for degeneration towards level, maximum entropy? Did the speed of nerve impulse propagation furnish a clue to the c of the Other Space? Could such a clue be combined with the entropy and potential investigations to give a mathematical picture of the Other Space, in terms of its constants and its age? He set about it. His untrammeled, wild speculations had produced some definite good: he'd tied down at least one line of attack on that Other Space; he'd devised a working principle for his blind man's telescope mechanism. Whatever the truth ofthe thing was, it was more than a truth; it was a complete series of new truths. It was the very complexity of that series of new truths - the truths, the characteristic laws, that were inherent properties of the Other Space, plus the new truth laws resultant from the interaction of the characteristics of the Other Space with Normal Space. No wonder Rambeau had said anything could happen! Almost anything could, in all probability, by a proper application and combination of the three sets of laws: the laws of Our Space, the laws of Other Space, and the coordinate laws of Both Spaces
But before theoreticians could begin work, new data were most desperately needed. Waldo was no theoretician, a fact he admitted left-handedly in thinking of theory as unpractical and unnecessary, time waste for him as a consulting engineer. Let the smooth apes work it out
But the consulting engineer had to find out onething: would the Schneider- deKalbs continue to function uninterruptedly as guaranteed? If not, what must be done to assure continuous function? The most difficult and the most interesting aspect of the investigation had to do with the neurological system in relation to Other Space. Neither electromagnetic instruments nor neural surgery was refined enough to do accurate work on the levels he wished to investigate
But he had waldoes
The smallest waldoes he had used up to this time were approximately half an inch across their palms - with micro-scanners to match, of course. They were much too gross for his purpose. He wished to manipulate living nerve tissue, examine its insulation and its performance in situ
He used the tiny waldoes to create tinier ones
The last stage was tiny metal blossoms hardly an eighth of an inch across. The helices in their stems, or forearms, which served them as pseudo muscles, could hardly be seen by the naked eye - but then, he used scanners
His final team of waldoes used for nerve and brain surgery varied in succeeding stages from mechanical hands nearly lifesize down to these fairy digits which could manipulate things much too small for the eye to see. They were mounted in bank to work in the same locus. Waldo controlled them all from the same primaries; he could switch from one size to another without removing his gauntlets.
The same change in circuits which brought another size of waldoes under control automatically accomplished the change in sweep of scanning to increase or decrease the magnification so that Waldo always saw before him in his stereo receiver a ‘life-size' image of his other hands
Each level of waldoes had its own surgical instruments, its own electrical equipment
Such surgery had never been seen before, but Waldo gave that aspect little thought; no one had told him that such surgery was unheard-of