‘That is all? Nothing more?
‘That is enough.
Either, Waldo considered, the old man did not know how he had accomplished the repair, or he had had nothing to do with it - sheer and amazing coincidence. He had been resting the empty cup on the rim of his tank, the weight supported by the metal while his fingers merely steadied it. His preoccupation caused him to pay too little heed to it; it slipped from his tired fingers, clattered and crashed to the floor
He was much chagrined. ‘Oh, I'm sorry, Grandfather. I'll send you another.
‘No matter. I will mend.' Schneider carefully gathered up the pieces and placed them on the desk. ‘You have tired,' he added. ‘That is not good. It makes you lose what you have gained. Go back now to your house, and when you have rested, you can practise reaching for the strength by yourself.
It seemed a good idea to Waldo; he was growing very tired, and it was evident that he was to learn nothing specific from the pleasant old fraud. He promised, emphatically and quite insincerely, to practise ‘reaching for strength', and asked Schneider to do him the favour of summoning his bearers
The trip back was uneventful. Waldo did not even have the spirit to bicker with the pilot
Stalemate. Machines that did not work but should, and machines that did work but in an impossible manner. And no one to turn to but one foggy-headed old man. Waldo worked lackadaisically for several days, repeating, for the most part, investigations he had already made rather than admit to himself that he was stuck, that he did not know what to do, that he was, in fact, whipped and might as well call Gleason and admit it
The two ‘bewitched' sets of deKalbs continued to work whenever activated, with the same strange and incredible flexing of each antenna. Other deKalbs which had failed in operation and had been sent to him for investigation still refused to function. Still others, which had not yet failed, performed beautifully without the preposterous fidgeting
For the umpteenth time he took out the little sketch Schneider had made and examined it. There was, he thought, just one more possibility: to return again to Earth and insist that Schneider actually do in his presence, whatever it was he had done which caused the deKalbs to work. He knew now that he should have insisted on it in the first place, but he had been so utterly played out by having to fight that devilish thick field that he had not had the will to persist
Perhaps he could have Stevens do it and have the process stereophotoed for a later examination. No, the old man had a superstitious prejudice against artificial images
He floated gently over to the vicinity of one of the inoperative deKalbs. What Schneider had claimed to have done was preposterously simple. He had drawn chalk marks down each antenna so, for the purpose of fixing his attention. Then he had gazed down them and thought about them ‘reaching out for power', reaching into the Other World, stretching- Baldur began to bark frantically
‘Shut up, you fool!' Waldo snapped, without taking his eyes off the antennae
Each separate pencil of metal was wiggling, stretching. There was the low, smooth hum of perfect operation
Waldo was still thinking about it when the televisor demanded his attention. He had never been in any danger of cracking up mentally as Rambeau had done; nevertheless, he had thought about the matter in a fashion which made his head ache. He was still considerably bemused when he cut in his end of the sound-vision circuit. ‘Yes?
It was Stevens. ‘Hello, Mr Jones. Uh, we wondered... that is- ‘Speak up, man!
‘Well, how close are you to a solution?' Stevens blurted out. ‘Matters are getting pretty urgent.
‘In what way?
‘There was a partial breakdown in Great New York last night. Fortunately it was not at peak load and the ground crew were able to install spares before the reserves were exhausted, but you can imagine what it would have been like during the rush hour. In my own department the crashes have doubled in the past few weeks, and our underwriters have given notice. We need results pretty quick.
‘You'll get your results,' Waldo said loftily. ‘I'm in the final stages of the research.' He was actually not that confident, but Stevens irritated him even more than most of the smooth apes
Doubt and reassurance mingled in Stevens's face. ‘I don't suppose you could care to give us a hint of the general nature of the solution?
No, Waldo could not. Still - it would be fun to pull Stevens's leg. ‘Come close to the pickup, Dr Stevens. I'll tell you.' He leaned forward himself, until they were almost nose to nose - in effect. ‘Magic is loose in the world!
He cut the circuit at once
Down in the underground labyrinth of North America's home plant, Stevens stared at the blank screen. ‘What's the trouble, chief?' McLeod inquired
‘I don't know. I don't rightly know. But I think that Fatty has slipped his cams, just the way Rambeau did.
McLeod grinned delightedly. ‘How sweet! I always did think he was a hoot owl.
Stevens looked very sober. ‘You had better pray that he hasn't gone nuts. We're depending on him. Now let me see those operation reports.
Magic loose in the world. It was as good an explanation as any, Waldo mused. Causation gone haywire; sacrosanct physical laws no longer operative. Magic. As Gramps Schneider had put it, it seemed to depend on the way one looked at it
Apparently Schneider had known what he was talking about, although he naturally had no real grasp of the physical theory involved in the deKalbs
Wait a minute now! Wait a minute. He had been going at this problem wrongly perhaps. He had approached it with a certain point of view himself, a point of view which had made him critical of the old man's statements - an assumption that he, Waldo, knew more about the whole matter than Schneider did. To be sure he had gone to see Schneider, but he had thought of him as a back- country hex doctor, a man who might possess one piece of information useful to Waldo, but who was basically ignorant and superstitious
Suppose he were to review the situation from a different viewpoint. Let it be assumed that everything Schneider had to say was coldly factual and enlightened, rather than allegorical and superstitious- He settled himself to do a few hours of hard thinking. In the first place Schneider had used the phrase ‘the Other World' time and again. What did it mean, literally? A ‘world' was a space-time-energy continuum; an ‘Other World' was, therefore, such a continuum, but a different one from the one in which he found himself. Physical theory found nothing repugnant in such a notion; the possibility of infinite numbers of continua was a familiar, orthodox speculation. It was even convenient in certain operations to make such an assumption
Had Gramps Schneider meant that? A literal, physical ‘Other World'? On rcflection, Waldo was convinced that he must have meant just that, even though he had not used conventional scientific phraseology. ‘Other World' sounds poetical, but to say an ‘additional continuum' implies physical meaning. The terms had led him astray
Schneider had said that the Other World was all round, here, there, and everywhere. Well, was not that a fair description of a space superposed and in one-to-one correspondence? Such a space might be so close to this one that the interval between them was an infinitesimal, yet unnoticed and unreachable, just as two planes may be considered as coextensive and separated by an unimaginably short interval, yet be perfectly discreet, one from the other