SENSE FROM
THOUGHT DIVIDE
by Mark Clifton

"Remembrance and reflection, how allied;
What thin partitions sense from thought divide." -POPE
WHEN I opened the door to my secretary's office, I could
see her looking up from her desk at the Swami's face with
an expression of fascinated scepticism. The Swami's back was
towards me, and on it hung flowing folds of a black cloak.
His turban was white, except where it had rubbed against
the back of his neck.
"A tall, dark, and handsome man will soon come into
your life," he was intoning in that sepulchural voice men
habitually use in their dealings with the absolute.
Sara's green eyes focussed beyond him, on me, and began
to twinkle.
"And there he is right now," she commented dryly. "Mr.
Kennedy, Personnel Director for Computer Research."
The Swami whirled around, his heavy robe following the
movement in a practised swirl. His liquid black eyes looked
me over shrewdly, and he bowed towards me as he vaguely
touched his chest, lips and forehead. I expected him to
murmur, "Effendi," or "Bwana Sahib," or something, but he
must have felt silence was more impressive.
I acknowledged his greeting by pulling down one corner
of my mouth. Then I looked at his companion.
The young lieutenant was standing very straight, very stiff,
and a flush of pink was starting up from his collar and
spreading around his clenched jaws to leave a semi-circle of
white in front of his red ears.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Lieutenant Murphy." He managed to open his teeth a
bare quarter of  an inch for the words  to come out.
"Pentagon!" His light grey eyes pierced me to see if I were
impressed.
I wasn't.
"Division ,of MatMel and Supply," he continued in staccato,
imitating a machine gun.
I waited. It was obvious he wasn't through yet. He hesi-
tated, and I could see his Adam's apple travel up above the
knot of his tie and back down again as he swallowed. The
pink flush deepened into brilliant red.
"Poltergeist Section," he said defiantly.
"What?" The exclamation was out before I could catch it.
He tried to glare at me, but his eyes were pleading in-
stead.
"General Sanfordwaithe said you'd understand." He intend-
ed to make it matter of fact in a sturdy, confident voice,
but there was the undertone of a wail. It was time I lent
a band.
"You're West Point, aren't you?" I asked kindly.
He straightened still more. I hadn't believed it possible.
"Yes, sirl" He wanted to keep the gratitude out of his
voice, but it was there. And for the first time, he had
spoken the habitual term of respect to me.
"Well, what do you have here. Lieutenant Murphy?" I
nodded towards the Swami who had been wavering between
a proud, free stance and that of a drooping supplicant.
"According to my orders, sir," he said formally, "you
have requested the Pentagon furnish you with one half-
dozen, six, male-type poltergeists, I am delivering the first
of them to you, sir."
Sara's mouth, hanging wide open, reminded me to close
my own.
So the Pentagon was calling my bluff. Well, maybe they
did have something at that. I'd see.
"Float me over that ash tray there on the desk," I said
casually to the Swami.
He looked at me as if I'd insulted him, and I could antici-
pate some reply to the effect that he was not applying for
domestic service. But the humble supplicant rather than
the proud and fierce hill man won. He started to pick up the
ash tray from Sara's desk.
"No, no!" I exclaimed. "I didn't ask you to hand it to
me. I want you to TK it over to me. What's the matter?
Can't you even TK a simple ash tray?"
The lieutenant's eyes were getting bigger and bigger.
"Didn't your Poltergeist Section test this guy's aptitudes
for telekinesis before you brought him from Washington all
the way out here to Los Angeles?" I snapped at him.
The lieutenant's lips thinned to a bloodless line.
"I am certain, he must have qualified adequately," he
said stiffly, and this time left off the "sir".
"Well, I don't know," I answered doubtfully. "If he hasn't
even enough telekinetic ability to float me an ash tray
across the room"
The Swami recovered himself first. He put the tips of his
long fingers together in the shape of a swaybacked steeple,
and rolled his eyes upward.
"I am an instrument of infinite wisdom," he intoned. "Not
a parlour magician."
"You mean that with all your infinite wisdom you can't
do it," I accused flatly.
"The vibrations are not favourable" he rolled the
words sonorously.
"All right," I agreed. "We'll go somewhere else, where
they're better!"
"The vibrations throughout all this crass, materialistic West-
ern world" he intoned.
"All right," I interrupted, "we'll go to India, then. Sara,
call up and book tickets to Calcutta on the first possible
plane!" Sara's mouth had been gradually closing, but it un-
hinged again.
"Perhaps not even India," the Swami murmured, hastily.
"Perhaps Tibet."
"Now you know we can't get admission into Tibet while
the Communists control it," I argued seriously. "But how
about Nepal? "That's a fair compromise. The Maharajadhi-
raja's friendly now. I'll settle for Nepal."
The Swami couldn't keep the triumphant glitter out of his
eyes. He had me.
"I'm afraid it would have to be Tibet," he said positively.
"Nowhere else in all this troubled world are the vibra-
"Oh go on back to Flatbush!" I interrupted disgustedly.
"You know as well as I that you've never been outside
New York before in your life. Your accent's as phony as
the pear-shaped tones of a midwestern garden club presi-
dent. Can't even TK a simple ash tray!"
I turned to the amazed lieutenant.
"Will you come into my office?" I asked him.
He looked over at the Swami, in doubt.
"He can wait out here," I said. "He won't run away.
There isn't any subway, and he wouldn't know what to do.
Anyway, if he did get lost, your Army Intelligence could
find him. Give G-2 something to work on. Right through this
door, lieutenant."
"Yes, sir," he said meekly, and preceded me into my of-
fice.
I closed the door behind us and waved him over to the
crying chair. He folded at the knees and hips only, as if
there were no hinges at all in the ramrod of his back.
He sat up straight, on the edge of his chair, ready to spring
into instant charge of battle. I went around back to my
desk and sat down.
"Now, lieutenant," I said soothingly, "tell me all about it."
I could have sworn his square chin quivered at the note
of sympathy in my voice. I wondered, irrelevantly, if the
lads at West Point all slept with their faces confined in
wooden frames to get that characteristically rectangular look.
"You knew I was from West Point," he said, and his voice
held a note of awe. "And you knew, right away, that Swami
was a phony from Flatbush."
"Come now," I said with a shrug. "Nothing to get mystical
about. Patterns. Just patterns. Every environment leaves the
stamp of its matrix on the individual shaped in it. It's a per-
sonnel man's trade to recognize the make of a person, just
as you would recognize the make of a rifle."
"Yes, sir. I see, sir," he answered. But of course he didn't.
And there wasn't much use to make him try. Most people
cling too desperately to the ego-saving formula: Man can-
not know man.
"Look, lieutenant," I said, getting down to business, "Have
you been checked out on what this is all about?"
"Well, sir," he answered, as if he were answering a question
in class, pLLI was cleared for top security, and told that a
few months ago you and your Dr. Auerbach, here at
Computer Research, discovered a way to create antigravity.
I was told you claimed you had to have a poltergeist in the
process. You told General Sanfordwaithe that you needed
six of them, males. That's about all, sir. So the Poltergeist
Division discovered the Swami, and I was assigned to bring
him out here to you."
"Well then. Lieutenant Murphy, you go back to the Penta-
gon and tell General Sanfordwaithe that" I could see by
the look on his.. face that my message would probably not get
through verbatim. "Never mind, FU write it," I amended dis-
gustedly. "And you can carry the message."
I punched Sara's button on my intercom.
"After all the exposure out there to the Swami," I said,
"if you're still with us on this crass, materialistic plane, will
you bring your book?"
"My astral self has been hovering over you, guarding you,
every minute," Sara answered dreamily.
"Can it take shorthand?" I asked dryly.
"Maybe I'd better come in," she replied.
When she came through the door the lieutenant gave her
one appreciative glance, then returned to his aloof pedestal of
indifference. Obviously his patterns was to stand in majestic
splendour and allow the girls to fawn somewhere down
near his shoes. These lads with a glamour-boy complex almost
always gravitate towards some occupation which will require
them to wear a uniform. Sara catalogued him as quickly as I
did, and seemed unimpressed. But you never can tell about a
woman; the smartest of them will fall for the most transparent
poses.
"General Sanfordwaithe, dear sir," I began, as she sat
down at one corner of my desk and flipped open her book. "It
takes more than atowel wrapped around the head and some
mutterings about infinity to get poltergeist effects. So I am
returning  your phony  Swami  to you  with  my  compli-
ments"
"Beg your pardon, sir," the lieutenant interrupted, and
there was a certain note of suppressed triumph in his voice.
"In case you rejected our applicant for the poltergeist job
you have in mind, I was to hand you this." He undid a
lovingly polished button of his tunic, slipped his hand be-
neath the cloth and pulled forth a long, sealed envelope.
I took it from him and noted the three sealing-wax im-
prints on the flap. From being carried so close to his heart
for so long, the envelope was slightly less crisp than when
he had received it. I slipped my letter opener in under the
side flap, and gently extracted the letter without, in any
way, disturbing the wax seals which were to have guaranteed
its privacy. There wasn't any point in my doing it, of course,
except to demonstrate to the lieutenant that I considered the
whole deal as a silly piece of cloak and dagger stuff.
After the general formalities, the letter was brief: "Dear
Mr. Kennedy: We already know the Swami is a phony, but
our people have been convinced that in spite of this there
are some unaccountable effects. We have advised your gen-
eral manager, Mr. Henry Grenoble, that we are in the act
of carrying out our part of the agreement, namely, to provide
you with six male-type poltergeists, and to both you and
him we are respectfully suggesting that you get on with
the business of putting the antigravity units into immediate
production."
I folded the letter and tucked it into one side of my desk
pad. I looked at Sara.
"Never mind the letter to General Sandforwaithe," I said.
"He has successfully cut off my retreat in that direction." I
looked over at the lieutenant. "All right," I said resignedly,
"I'll apologize to the Swami, and make a try at using him."
I picked up the letter again and pretended to be reading
it.  But  this  was  just  a  stall,  because  I  had  suddenly  been
struck by the thought that my extreme haste in scoring off
the Swami and trying to get rid of him was because I didn't
want to get involved again with poltergeists. Not any, of
any nature.
Old Stone Face, our general manager, claimed to follow
the philosophy of building men, not machines. To an ex-
tent he did. His favourite phrase was, "Don't ask me how.
I hired you to tell me." He hired a man to do a job, and I
will say for him, he left that man alone as long as the job
got done. But when a man flubbed a job, and kept on flub-
bing it, then Mr. Henry Grenoble stepped in and carried
out his own jobgeneral managing.
He had given me the assignment of putting antigrav units
into production. He had given me access to all the money
I would need for the purpose. He had given me sufficient
time, months of it. And, in spite of all this cooperation, he
still  saw  no  production  lines  which  spewed  out  antigrav
units at some such rate as seventeen and five twelfths per
second.
Apparently he got his communication from the Pentagon
about the time I got mine. Apparently it contained some
implication that Computer Research, under his management,
was not pursuing the cause of manufacturing antigrav units
with diligence and dispatch. Apparently he did not like this.
I had no more than apologized to the Swami, and re-
ceived his martyred forgiveness, and arranged for a hotel
suite for him and the lieutenant, when Old Stone Face sent
for me. He began to manage with diligence and dispatch.
"Now you look here, Kennedy," he said forcefully,
and his use of my last name, rather than my first, was a
warning, "I've given you every chance. When you and Auer-
bach came up with that antigrav unit last fall, I didn't ask a
lot of fool questions. I figured you knew what you were do-
ing. But the whole winter has passed, and here it is spring,
and you haven't done anything that I can see. I didn't say
anything when you told General Sanfordwaithe that you'd
have to have poltergeists to carry on the work, but I looked
it up.  First I  thought you'd  flipped your  lid,  then  I  thought
you were sending us all on a wild goose chase so we'd leave
you alone, then I didn't know what to think."
I nodded. He wasn't through.
"Now I think you're just pretending the whole thing doesn't
exist because you don't want to fool with it."
I couldn't argue with that.
"For the first time, Kennedy, I'm asking you what hap-
pened?" he said firmly, but his tone was more telling than
asking. So I was to have to discuss frameworks with Old
Stone Face, after all.
"Henry," I asked slowly, "have you kept up your reading
in theoretical physics?"
He biinked at me. I couldn't tell whether it meant yes or
no.
"When we went to school, you and I" I hoped my
putting us both in the same age group would tend to mollify
him a little, "physics was all snug, secure safe, definite. A
fact was a fact, and that's all there was to it. But there's
been some changes made. There's the co-ordinate systems
of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change from
framework to framework. There's the application of multi-
valued logic to physics where a fact becomes not a fact any
longer. The astronomers talk about the expanding universe
it's a piker compared to man's expanding concepts about that
universe."
He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was
beating around the bush.
"That all has a bearing on what happened," I assured
him. "You have to understand what was behind the facts be-
fore you can understand  the  facts  themselves.  First,  we
weren't trying to make an antigrav unit at all. Dr. Auer-
bach was playing around with a chemical approach to cy- 
bemetics. He made up some goop which he thought would
store memory .impulses, the way the brain stores them. He
brought a plastic cylinder of it over to me, so I could discuss
it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went on with my
personnel management business at hand."
Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar.
He lit it slowly and deliberately and looked at me sharply
as he blew out the first puff of smoke.
"The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble
with a little girl, daughter of one of our production women.
She'd been throwing things, setting things on fire. The teach-
ers didn't know how she did it, she just did it. They sent her
to me. I asked her about it. She threw a tantrum, and when
it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goop was try-
ing to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what hap-
pened," I said.
He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for
me to tie the facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then
tried to reassure myself. After all, we were in the business
of manufacturing computers. The general manager ought to
be able to understand something beyond primary arithme-
tic.
"Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar back-
ground," I went on. "Her mother was from the old country,
a Slav. There's the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions.
Maybe she had passed them on to her daughter. She kept
Jennie locked up in their room. The kid never got out with
other children. Children, kept alone, never seeing anybody,
get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who knows what kind
of coordinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her
mother would come home at night and go,about her tasks
talking aloud, half to the daughter, half to herself. 1 really
burned that foreman up today,' she'd say. Or, 'Oh, boy, was
he fired in a hurry!' Or, 'She got herself thrown out of the
place,' things like that."
"So what does that mean, Ralph?" he asked. His switch
to my first name was encouraging.
"To a child who never knew anything else," I an-
swered, "one who had never learned to distinguish reality
from unrealityas we would define it from our agreed
framework-a special coordinate system might be built up
where 'Everybody was up in the air at work, today,' might
be taken literally. Under the old systems of physics that
couldn't happen, of courseit says in the textbooksbut
since it has been happening all through history, in thou-
sands of instances, in the new systems of multivalued phys-
ics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already had
all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our
smug certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling
along, trying to get some of the answers we thought we had.
"We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried.
We're still trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one
machine punch a tape and it can be fed into another ma-
chine, but that means you first have to know how to code
and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know how to
code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylin-
der will store a psi impulse, but we don't know how. So we
have to keep working with psi gifted people, at least until
we've established some of the basic laws governing psi."
I couldn't tell by Henry's face whether I <vas with him or
far far away. He told me he wanted to think about it, and
made a little motion with his hand that I should leave the
room.
I walked through the suite of executive offices and down
a sound-rebuffing hallway. "The throbbing clatter of manufac-
ture of metallic parts made a welcome sound as I went
through the far doorway into the factory. I saw a blueprint
spread on a foreman's desk as I walked past. Good old blue-
print. So many millimetres from here to there, made of such
and such an alloy, a tiole punched here with an allowance of
five-thousandths plus or minus tolerance. Snug, secure, safe.
I wondered if psi could ever be blueprinted. Or suppose you
put a hole here, but when you looked away and then looked
back it had moved, or wasn't there at all?
Quickly, I got myself into conversation with a supervisor
about the rising rate of employee turnover in his department.
That was something also snug, secure, safe. All you had to
do was figure out human beings.
I spent the rest of the morning on such pursuits, working
with things I understood.
On his first rounds of the afternoon, the interoffice mes-
senger brought me a memorandum from the general man-
ager's office. I opened it with some misgivings.
Mr. Grenoble felt he should work with me more closely
on the antigrav project. He understood, from his researches,
that the most positive psi effects were experienced during a
seance with a medium. Would I kindly arrange for the
Swami to hold a seance that evening, after office hours, so
that he might analyse the man's methods and procedures
to see how they could fit smoothly into Company Operation.
This was not to be construed as interference in the workings
of my department but in the interest of pursuing the entire
matter with deligence and dispatch
The seance was to be held in my office.
I had had many peculiar conferences in this roomfrom
union leaders stripping off their coats, throwing them on
the floor and stamping on them; to uplifters who wanted to
ban cosmetics on our women employees so the male em-
ployees  would  not  be  tempted  to  think  Questionable
Thoughts. I could not recall ever having held a seance before.
My desk had been moved out of the way, over into one
corner of the large room. A round table was brought over
from the salesmen's report writing room (used there more
for surreptitious poker playing than for writing reports) and
placed in the middle of my officeon the grounds that it
had no sharp corners to gouge people in their middles if it
got to cavorting about recklessly. In an industrial plant
one always has to consider the matter of safety rules and
accident insurance rates.
In the middle of the table there rested, with dark fluid
gloaming through clear plastic cases, six fresh cylinders which
Auerbach had prepared in his laboratory over in the plant.
Auerbach had shown considerable unwillingness to attend
the seance; he pleaded being extra busy with experiments
just now, but I gave him that look which told him I knew he
had just been stalling around the last few months, the same
as I had.
If the psi effect had never come out in the first place,
there wouldn't have been any mental conflict. He could have
gone on with his processes of refining, simplifying and in-
creasing the efficiency ratings of his goop. He would have
settled gladly for a chemical compound which could have
added two and two upon request; but when that compound
can learn and demonstrate that there's no such thing as
gravity, teaching it simple arithmetic is like ashes in the
mouth.
I said as much to him. I stood there in his laboratory,
leaned up against a work bench, and risked burning an
acid hole in the sleeve of my jacket just to put over an
air of unconcern. He was perched on the edge of an oppo-
site work bench, swinging his feet, and hiding the expression
in his eyes behind the window's reflection upon his polished
glasses. I said even more.
"You know," I said reflectively, "I'm completely unable to
understand the attitude of supposedly unbiased men of sci-
ence. Now you take all that mass of data about psi effects,
the odd and unexplainable happenings, the premonitions, the
specific predictions, the accurate  descriptions  of far away
simultaneously happening events. You take that whole moun-
tainous mass of data, evidence, phenomena"
A slight turn of his head gave me a glimpse of his eyes
behind the glasses. He looked as if he wished I'd change
the subject. In his dry, undemonstrative way, I think he liked
me. Or at least he liked me when I wasn't trying to make him
think about things outside his safe and secure little frame-
work. But I wasn't going to stop.
"Before Rhine came along, and brought all this down to
the level of laboratory experimentation," I pursued, "how
were those things to be explained? Say a fellow had some
unusual powers, things that happened around him, things he
knew without any explanation for knowing them. I'll tell you.
There were two courses open to him. He could express it in
the semantics of spiritism, or he could admit to witchcraft
and sorcery. Take your pick; those were the only two systems
of semantics available to him.
"We've got a third one nowparapsychology. If I had
asked you to  attend  an experiment in  parapsychology,
you'd have agreed at once. But when I ask you to attend
a seance, you balk! Man, what difference does it make what
we call it? Isn't it up to us to investigate the evidence
wherever we find it? No matter what kind of semantic de-
bris it's hiding in?"
Auerbach shoved himself down off the bench, and pulled
out a beat-up package of cigarettes.
"All right, Kennedy," he said resignedly, "I'll attend your
seance."
The other invited guests were Sara, Lieutenant Murphy,
Old Stone Face, myself, and, of course, the Swami. This was
probably not typical of the Swami's usual audience composi-
tion.
Six chairs were placed at even intervals around the table.
I had found soft white lights overhead to be most suitable
for my occasional night work, but the Swami insisted that a
blue light, a dim one, was most suitable for his night work.
I made no objection to that condition. One of the elemen-
tary basics of science is that laboratory conditions may be
varied to meet the necessities of the experiment. If a red-
lighted darkness is necessary to an operator's successful de-
velopment of photographic film, then I could hardly object
to a blue-tigated darkness for the development of the Swami's
effects.
Neither could I object to the Swami's insistence that he sit
with his back to the true North. When he came into the
room, accompanied by Lieutenant Murphy, his thoughts
seemed turned in upon himself, or wafted somewhere out
of this world. He stopped in midstride, struck an attitude
of listening, or feeling, perhaps, and slowly shifted his body
back and forth.
"Ah," he said at last, in a tone of satisfaction, "there is
the North!"
It was, but this was not particularly remarkable. There is
no confusing maze of hallways leading to the Personnel De-
partment from the outside. Applicants would be unable to
find us if there were. If he had got his bearings out on
the street, he could have managed to keep them.
He picked up the nearest chair with his own hands and
shifted it so that it would be in tune with the magnetic lines
of Earth. I couldn't object. The Chinese had insisted upon
such placement of household articles, particularly their beds,
long before the Earth's magnetism had been discovered by
science. The birds had had their direction-finders attuned
to it, long before there was man.
Instead of objecting, the lieutenant and I meekly picked up
the table and shifted it to the new position. Sara and Auer-
bach came in as we were setting the table down. Auerbach
gave one quick look at the Swami in his -black cloak and
nearly white turban, and then looked away.
"Remember semantics," I murmured to him, as I pulled
out Sara's chair for her. I seated her to the left of the
Swami. I seated Auerbach to the right of him. If the lieu-
tenant was, by chance, in cahoots with the Swami, I would
foil them to the extent of not letting them sit side by side
at least. I sat down at the opposite side of the table from
the Swami. The lieutenant sat down between me and Sara.
The general manager came through the door at that instant,
and took charge immediately.
"All right now," Old Stone Face said crisply, in his low,
rumbling voice, "no fiddle-faddling around. Let's get down to
business."
The Swami closed his eyes.
"Please be seated," he intoned to Old Stone Face. "And
now, let us all join hands in an unbroken circle."
Henry shot him a beetlebrowed look as he sat down be-
tween Auerbach and me, but at least he was co-operative to
the extent that he placed both his hands on top of the ta-
ble. If Auerbach and I reached for them, we would be per-
mitted to grasp them.
I leaned back and snapped off the overhead light to dark-
en the room in an eerie, blue glow.
We sat there, holding hands, for a full ten minutes. Noth-
ing happened.
It was not difficult to estimate the pattern of Henry's mind.
Six persons, ten minutes, equals one man-hour. One man-
hour of idle time to be charged into the cost figure of the
antigrav unit. He was staring fixedly at the cylinders which
lay in random positions in the centre of the table, as if to
assess their progress at this processing point. He stirred
restlessly in his chair, obviously dissatisfied with the efficiency
rating of the manufacturing process.
The Swami seemed to sense the impatience, or it might
have been coincidence.
"There is some difficulty," he gasped in a strangulated, high
voice. "My guides refuse to come through."
"Harrumph!" exclaimed Old Stone Face. It left no doubt
about what he would do if his guides did not obey orders
on the double.
"Someone in this circle is not a True Believer!" the Swami
accused in an incredulous voice.
In the dim blue light I was able to catch a glimpse of
Sara's face. She was on the verge of breaking apart. I man-
aged to catch her eye and flash her a stern warning. Later
she told me she had interpreted my expression as stark
fear, but it served the same purpose. She smothered her
laughter in a most unladylike sound somewhere between a
snort and a squawk.
The Swami seemed to become aware that somehow he
was not holding his audience spellbound.
"Wait!" he commanded urgently; then he announced in
awestricken tones, "I feel a presence!"
There was a tentative, half-hearted rattle of some castanets
which could have been managed by the Swami wiggling
one knee, if he happened to have them concealed there.
This was followed by the thin squawk of a buglewhich
could have been accomplished by sitting over towards one
side and squashing the air out of a rubber bulb attached
to a ten-cent party horn taped to his thigh.
Then there was nothing. Apparently his guides had made
a tentative appearance and were, understandably, completely
inimidated by Old Stone Face. We sat for another five min-
utes.
"Harrumph!" Henry cleared his throat again, this time loud-
er and more commanding.
"That is all," the Swami said in a faint, exhausted voice.
"I have returned to you on your material plane."
The handholding broke up in the way bits of metal, sud-
denly charged positive and negative, would fly apart. I
leaned back again and snapped on the white lights. We all
sat there a few seconds, blinking in what seemed a sud-
den glare.
The Swami sat with his chin dropped down to his chest.
Then he raised stricken, liquid eyes.
"Oh, now I remember where I am," he said. "What hap-
pened? I never know."
Old Stone Face threw him a look of withering scorn. He
picked up one of the cylinders and hefted it in the palm
of his hand. It did not fly upward to bang against the ceil-
ing. It weighed about what it ought to weigh. He tossed the
cylinder, contemptuously, back into the pile, scattering them
over the table. He pushed back his chair, got to his feet,
and stalked out of the room without looking at any of us.
The Swami made a determined effort to recapture the spot-
light.
"I'm afraid I must have help to walk to the car," he
whispered. "I am completely exhausted. Ah, this work takes
so much out of me. Why do I go on with it? Why? Why?
Why?"
He drooped in his chair, then made a valiantly brave
effort  to  rise  under  his  own'  power  when  he  felt  the
lieutenant's hands lifting him up. He was leaning heavily
on the lieutenant as they went out the door.
Sara looked at me dubiously.
"Will there be anything else?" she asked. Her tone sug-
gested that since nothing had been accomplished, perhaps
we should get some work out before she left.
"No, Sara," I answered. "Good night. See you in the morn-
ing."
She nodded and went out the door.
Apparently none of them had seen what I saw. I won-
dered if Auerbach had. He was a trained observer. He was
standing beside the table looking down at the cylinders. He
reached over and poked one of them with his fore-finger.
He was pushing it back and forth. It gave him no resistance
beyond normal inertia. He pushed it a little further out of
parallel with true North. It did not try to swing back.
So he had seen it. When I'd laid the cylinders down on
the table they were in random positions. During the seance
there had been no jarring of the table, not even so much as
a rap or quiver which could have been caused by the Swami's
lifted knee. When we'd shifted the table, after the Swami had
changed his chair, the cylinders hadn't been disturbed. When
Old Stone Face had been staring at them during the seance
seance?, hah!they were lying in inert, random positions.
But when the lights came on, and just before Henry had
picked one up and tossed it back to scatter them, every cy-
linder had been  laid  in  orderly  paralleland  with  one
end pointing to true North!
I stood there beside Auerbach, and we both poked at the
cylinders  some  more.  They  gave  us  no  resistance,  nor
showed that they had any ideas about it one way or the
other.
"It's like so many things," I said morosely. "If you do just
happen to notice anything out of the ordinary at all, it
doesn't seem to mean anything."
"Maybe that's because you're judging it outside of its own
framework," Auerbach answered. I couldn't tell whether
he was being sarcastic or speculative. "What I don't under-
stand," he went on, "is that once the cylinders having been
activated by whatever force there was in actionall right,
call it psiwell, why didn't they retain it, the way the other
cylinders retained the antigrav force?"
I thought for a moment. Something about the conditional
setup seemed to give me an idea.
"You take a photographic plate," I reasoned. "Give it a
weak exposure to light, then give it a strong blast of over-
exposure. The first exposure is going to be blanked out by
the second. Old Stone Face was feeling pretty strongly towards
the whole matter."
Auerbach looked at me, unbelieving.
"There isn't any rule about who can have psi talent,"
I argued.  "I'm just wondering if I shouldn't wire Gen-
eral Sanfordwaithe and tell him to cut out order for polter-
geists to five."
I spent a glum, restless night. I knew, with certainty, that
Old Stone Face was going to give me trouble. I didn't need
any psi talent for that; it was an inevitable part of his pat-
tern. He had made up his mind to take charge of this
antigrav operation, and he wouldn't let one bogus seance
stop him more than momentarily.
If it weren't so close to direct interference with my de-
partment, I'd have been delighted to sit on the sidelines and
watch him try to command psi effects to happen. That would
be like commanding some random copper wire and me-
tallic cores to start generating electricity.
For once I could have overlooked the interference with
my department if I didn't know, from past experience, that
I'd be blamed for the consequent failure. And there was some-
thing else, too; I had the feeling that if I were allowed to go
along, carefully and experimentally, I just might discover a
few of the laws about psi. There was the tantalizing feeling
that I was on the verge of knowing at least something.
The Pentagon people had been right. The Swami was an
obvious phony of the baldest fakery, yet he had something.
He had something, but how was I to get hold it it? Just what
kind of turns with what around what did you make to gener-
ate a psi force? It took two thousand years for man to move
from the concept that amber was a stone with a soul to the
concept of static electricity. Was there any chance I could
find some shortcuts in reducing the laws governing psi? The
one bright spot of my morning was that Auerbach hadn't
denied seeing the evidence of the cylinders pointing North.
It turned out to be the only bright spot. I had no more than
got to my office and sorted out the routine urgencies from
those which had to be handled immediately, when Sara an-
nounced the lieutenant and the Swami. I put everything else
off, and told her to send them right in.
The Swami was in an incoherent rage. The lieutenant
was contracting his eyebrows in a scowl and clenching his
fists in frustration. In a voice, soaring into the falsetto, the
Swami demanded that he be sent back to Brooklyn where
he was appreciated. The lieutenant had orders to stay with
the Swami, but he didn't have any orders about returning
either to Brooklyn or the Pentagon. I managed, at last, to
get the lieutenant seated in a straight chair, but the Swami
couldn't stay still long enough. He stalked up and down the
room, swirling his slightly odorous black cloak on the turns.
Gradually the story came out.
Old Stone Face, a strong advocate of Do It Now, hadn't
wasted any time. From his home he had called the Swami
at his hotel and commanded him to report to the general
manager's office at once. They all got there about the same
time, and Henry had waded right in.
Apparently Henry, too, had spent a restless night. He ac-
cused the Swami of inefficiency, bungling, fraud, deliberate
insubordination, and a few other assorted faults for having
made a fool out of us all at the seance. He'd as much as
commanded the Swami to cut out all the shilly-shallying and
get down to the business of activating antigrav cylinders, or
else. He hadn't been specific about what the "or else" would
entail.
"Now I'm sure he really didn't mean" I began to pour
oil  on  the   troubled   waters.   "With  your   deep   insight,
SwamiThe fate of great martyrs throughout the ages.
" Gradually the ego-building phrases calmed him down.
He grew willing to listen, if for no more than the anticipa-
tion of hearing more of them.
He settled down into the crying chair at last, his valence
shifting from outraged anger to a vast and noble forgive-
ness. This much was not difficult. To get him to co-op-
erate, consciously and enthusiastically, might not be so easy.
Each trade has its own special techniques. The analytical
chemist has a series of routines he tries when he wishes to
reduce an unknown compound to its constituents. To the
chemically uneducated, this may appear to be fumbling, hit
or miss, kind of procedure. The personnel man, too, has his
series of techniques, which may appear to be no more than
random, pointless conversation.
I first tried the routine process of reasoning. I didn't ex-
pect it to work; it seldom does, but it can't be eliminated
until it has been tested.
"You must understand," I said slowly, soothingly, "that
our intentions are constructive. We are simply trying to ap-
ply the scientific method to something which has, heretofore,
been wrapped in mysticism."
The shocked freezing of his facial muscles gave me the
answer to that.
"'Science understands nothing, nothing at all!" he snapped.
"Science tries to reduce everything to test tubes and formulae;
but I am the instrument of a mystery which man can never
know."
"Well, now," I said reasonably. "Let us not be incon-
sistent. You say this is something man was not meant to
know; yet you, yourself, have devoted your life to gaining a
greater comprehension of it."
"I seek only to rise above my material self so that I might
place myself in harmony with the flowing symphony of
Absolute Truth," he lectured me sonorously. The terminology
didn't bother me; the jargon of the sciences sometimes grows
just as esoteric. Maybe it even meant something.
One thing I was sure it meant. There are two basic ap-
proaches to the meaning of life and the universe about us.
Man can know: That is the approach of science, its whole
meaning. There are mysteries which man was not meant to
know: That is the other approach. There is no reconciling of
the two on a reasoning basis. I represented the former. I
wasn't sure the Swami was a true representative of the lat-
ter,  but  at  least  he  had  picked  up  the  valence  and  the
phrases.
I made a mental note that reasoning was an unworkable
technique with this compound. Henry, a past master at it,
had already tried threats and abuse. That hadn't worked. I
next tried one of the oldest forms in the teaching of man,
a parable.
I told him of my old Aunt Dimity, who. was passionate-
ly fond of Rummy, but considered all other card games sin-
ful.
"Ah, how well she proves my point," the Swami coun-
tered. "There is an inner voice, a wisdom greater than the
mortal mind to guide us"
"Well now," I asked reasonably, "why would the inner
voice say that Rummy was okay, but Casino wasn't?" But
it was  obvious he liked the point he had made better than
he had liked the one I failed to make.
So I tried the next technique. Often an opponent will come
over to your side if you just confess, honestly, that he is a
better man than you are, and you need his help. What was
the road I must take to achieve the same understanding he
had? His eyes glittered at that.
"First there is fasting, and breathing, and contemplating
self," he murmured mendaciously. "I would be unable to aid
you until you gave me full ascendancy over you, so that I
might guide your every thought"
I decided to try inspiration.
"Do you realize, Swami," I asked, "that the one great
drawback throughout the ages to a full acceptance of psi is
the lack of permanent evidence? It has always been evanes-
cent, perishable. It always rests solely upon the word of wit-
nesses. But if I could show you a film print, then you could
' not doubt the existence of photography, could you?"
I opened my lower desk drawer and pulled out a couple
of the Auerbach cylinders which we had used the night be-
fore. I laid them on top of the desk.
"These cylinders," I said, "act like the photographic film.
They will record, in permanent form, the psi effects you com-
mand. At last, for all mankind the doubt will be stilled; man
will at once know the truth; and you will take your place
among the immortals."
I thought it was pretty good. It should have done the trick.
But the Swami was staring at the cylinders first in fascina-
tion, then fear, then in horror. He jumped to his feet, without
bothering to swirl his robe majestically, rushed over to the
door, fumbled with the knob as if he were in a burning
room, managed to get the door open, and rushed outside.
The lieutenant gave me a puzzled look, and went after him.
I drew a deep breath, and exhaled it audibly. My testing
procedures hadn't produced the results I'd expected, but
the last one had revealed something elseor rather, had
confirmed two things we knew already.
One: The Swami believed himself to be a fraud.
Two: He wasn't.
Both cylinders were pointing towards the door. I watched
them, at first not quite sure; like the Swami, I'd have pre-
ferred not to believe the evidence. But the change in their
perspective with the angles of the desk made the motion un-
mistakable.
Almost as slowly as the minute hand of a watch, they
were creeping across the desk towards the door. They, too,
were trying to escape from the room.
I nudged them with my fingers. They hustled along a little
faster, as if appreciative of the help, even coming from me.
I saw they were moving faster, as if they were learning as
they tried it. I turned one of them around. Slowly it turned
back and headed for the door again. I lifted one of them
down to the floor. It had no tendency to float, but it kept
' heading for the door. The other one fell off the desk while
I was fooling with the first one. The jar didn't seem to both-
er it any. It, too, began to creep across the rug towards the
door.
I opened the door for them. Sara looked up. She saw the
two cylinders come into view, moving under their own
power.
"Here we go again," she said, resignedly.
The two cylinders pushed themselves over the door sill,
got clear outside my office. Then they went inert. Both Sara
and I tried nudging them, poking them. They just lay there;
mission accomplished. I carried them back inside my office
and laid them on the floor. Immediately both of them began
to head for the door again.
"Simple," Sara said dryly, "they just can't stand to be in
the same room with you, that's all."
"You're not just whistling, gal," I answered. "That's the
whole point."
"Have I said something clever?" she asked seriously.
I took the cylinders back into my office and put them in
a desk drawer. I watched the desk for a while, but it didn't
change position. Apparently it was too heavy for the weak
force activating the cylinders.
I picked up the phone and called Old Stone Face. I told him
about the cylinders.
"There!" he examined with satisfaction. "I knew all that
fellow needed was a good old-fashioned talking to. Some day,
my boy, you'll realize that you still have a lot to learn about
handling men."
"Yes, sir," I answered.
At that. Old Stone Face had a point. If he hadn't got in and
riled things up, maybe the Swami would not have been emo-
tionally upset enough to generate the psi force which had
activated these new cylinders.
Did that mean that psi was linked with emotional up-
heaval? Well, maybe. Not necessarily, but Rhine had proved
that strength of desire had an effect upon the frequency
'index of telekinesis.
Was there anything at all we knew about psi, so that we
could start cataloguing, sketching in the beginnings of a pat-
tern? Yes, of course there was.
First, it existed. No one could dismiss the mountainous
mass of evidence unless he just refused to think about the
subject.
Second, we could, in time, know what it was and how it
worked. You'd have to give up the entire basis of scientific at-
titude if you didn't admit that.
Third, it acted like a sense, rather than as something
dependent upon the intellectual process of thought. You
could, for example1 argued to my imaginary listenercom-
mand your nose to smell a rose, and by autosuggestion
you might think you were succeeding; that is, until you
really did smell a real rose, then you'd know that you'd
failed to create  it through  a thought pattern.  The  sense
would have to be separated from the process of thinking
about the sense.
So what was psi? But, at this point, did it matter much?
Wasn't the main issue one of learning how to produce it,
use it? How long did we work with electricity and get a lot
of benefits from it before we formed some theories about
what it was? And, for that matter, did we know what it
was, even yet? "A flow of electrons" was a pretty mean-
ingless phrase, when you stopped to think about it. I could
say psi was a flow of psitrons, and it would mean as much.
I reached over and picked up a cigarette. I started fum-
bling around in the centre drawer of my desk for a match-
book. I didn't find any. Without thinking, I opened the
drawer containing the two cylinders. "They were pressing up
against the side of the desk drawer, still trying to get out of
the room. Single-purposed little beasts, weren't they?
I closed the drawer, and noticed that I was crushing out
my cigarette in the ash tray, just as if I'd smoked it.
My nerves weren't all they should be this morning.
Which brought up the fourth point, and also took me
right back to where I started.
Nerves...
Emotional upheavals.
Rhine's correlations between interest, belief, and ability to
perform...
It seemed very likely that a medium such as the Swami,
whose basic belief was There Are Mysteries, would be una-
ble to function in a framework where the obvious intent..
was to unveil those mysteries!
That brought up a couple more points. I felt pretty
sure of them. I felt as if I were really getting somewhere.
And I had a situation which was ideal for proving my
points.
I flipped the intercom key, and spoke to Sara.
"Will you arrange with her foreman for Annie Malasek
to come to my office right now?" I asked. Sara is flippant
when things are going along all right, but she knows when
to buckle down and do what she's asked. She gave me no
personal reactions to this request.
Yes, Annie Malasek would be a good one. If anybody in
the plant believed There Are Mysteries, it would be Annie.
Further, she was exaggeratedly loyal to me. She believed I
was responsible .for turning her little Jennie, the little girl
who'd started all this poltergeist trouble, into a Good Little
Girl. In this instance, I had no qualms about taking ad-
vantage of that loyalty.
While I waited for her I called the lieutenant at his hotel.
He was in. Yes, the Swami was also in. They'd just re-
turned. Yes, the Swami was ranting and raving about leaving
Los Angeles at once. He had said he absolutely would have
nothing more to do with us here at Computer Research. I
told Lieutenant Murphy to scare him with tales of the secret
underground working of Army Intelligence, to quiet him
down. And I scared the lieutenant a little by pointing out
that holding a civilian against his will without the proper
writ was tantamount to kidnapping. So if the Army didn't
want trouble with the Civil Courts, all brought about because
the lieutenant didn't know how to handle his man
The lieutenant became immediately anxious to co-operate
with me. So then I soothed him. I told him that, naturally,
the Swami was unhappy. He was used to Swami-ing, and out
here he had been stifled, frustrated. What he needed was
some credulous women to catch their breath at his awe-
inspiring insight and gaze with fearful rapture into bis eyes.
The lieutenant didn't know where he could find any women
like that. I told him, dryly, that I would furnish some.
Annie was more than co-operative. Sure, the whole plant
was buzzing about that foreign-looking Swami who had been
seen coming in and out of my office. Sure, a lot of the
Girls believed in seances.
"Why? Don't you, Mr. Kennedy?" she asked curiously.
I said I wasn't sure, and she clucked her tongue in
sympathy. It must be terrible not to be sure, so... well, it
must be just terrible. And I was such a kind man, too. ..
But when I asked her to go to the hotel and persuade the
Swami to give her a reading, she was reluctant. I thought
my plan was going to be frustrated, but it turned out that her
reluctance was only because she did not have a thing to wear,
going into a high-toned place like that.
Sara wasn't the right size, but one of the older girls
in the outer office would lend Annie some clothes if I
would let her go see the Swami, too. It developed that her
own teacher was a guest of Los Angeles County for a while,
purely on a trumped-up charge, you understand, Mr. Ken-
nedy. Not that she was a cop hater or anything like that.
She was perfectly aware of what a fine and splendid job
those noble boys in blue did for us all, but
In my own office! Well, you never knew.
Yet, what was the difference between her and me? We
were both trying to get hold of and benefit by psi effects,
weren't we?
And the important thing was that we could combine
our efforts to our mutual advantage. My interviewer's teach-
er had quite a large following, and now they were all at
loose ends. If the Swami were willing, she could provide a
large and ready-made audience for him. She would be glad
to talk to him about it.
Annie hurriedly said that she would be glad to talk to
him about it, too; that she could get up a large audience,
too. So, even before it got started, I had my rival factions
at work. I egged them both on, and promised that I'd get
Army Intelligence to work with the local boys in blue to
hold off making any raids.
Annie told me again what a kind man I was. My inter-
viewer spoke up quickly and said how glad she was to find
an opportunity for expressing how grateful she was for the
privilege of working right in the same department with such
an understanding, really intellectually developed adult. She
eyed Annie sidelong, as if to gauge the effects of her
attempts  to  set  me  up  on  a pedestal,  out  of  Annie's
reach.
I hoped I wouldn't start believing either one of them. I
hoped I wasn't as inaccurate in my estimates of people as
was my interviewer. I wondered if she were really quali-
fied for the job she held. Then I realized this was a contest
between two women and I, a mere male, was simply being
used as the pawn. Well, that worked both ways. In a fair
bargain both sides received satisfaction. I felt a little easier
about my tactical manoeuvres.
But the development of rivalry between factions of the
audience gave me an additional idea. Perhaps that's what the
Swami really needed, a little rivalry. Perhaps he was being a
little too hard to crack because he knew .he was the only
egg in the basket.
I called Old Stone Face and told him what I planned.
He responded that it was up to me. He'd stepped in and
got things under way for me, got things going, now it was
my job to keep them going. It looked as if he were edging
out from underor maybe he really believed that.
Before I settled into the day's regular routine, I wired
General Sanfordwaithe, and told him that if he had any more
prospects ready would he please ship me one at once, via
air mail, special delivery.
The recital hall, hired for the Swami's Los Angeles debut,
was large enough to accommodate all the family friends
and relatives of any little Maribel who, having mastered
"Daffodils In May," for four fingers, was being given to
the World. It had the usual small stage equipped with pull-
back curtains to give a dramatic flourish, or to shut off from
view the effects of any sudden nervous catastrophe brought
about by stage fright.
I got there, purposely a little late, in hopes the house
lights would already be dimmed and everything in progress;
but about a hundred and fifty people were milling around
outside on the walk and in the corridors. Both factions had
really been busy.
Most of them were women, but, to my intense relief,
there were a few men. Some of these were only husbands,
but a few of the men wore a look which said they'd been
far away for a long time. Somehow I got the impression that
instead of looking into a crystal ball, they would be more
inclined to look out of one.
It was a little disconcerting to realize that no one noticed
me, or seemed to think I was any different from anybody
else. I supposed I should be thankful that I wasn't attract-
ing any attention. I saw my interviewer amid a group of
Older Girls. She winked at me roguishly, and patted her
heavy handbag significantly. As per instructions, she was
carrying a couple of the Auerbach cylinders.
I found myself staring in perplexity for a full minute at
another woman, before I realized it was Annie. I had never
seen her before, except dressed in factory blue jeans, man's
blue shirt, and a bandanna wrapped around her head. Her
companion, probably another of the factory assemblers,
nudged her and pointed, not too subtly, in my direction.
Annie saw me then, and lit up with a big smile. She started
towards me, hesitated when I frowned and shook my head,
flushed with the thought that I didn't want to speak to her
in public; then got a flash of better sense than that. She, too,
gave me a conspiratorial wink and patted her handbag.
My confederates were doing nicely.
Almost immediately thereafter a horsefaced, moustached
old gal started rounding people up in a honey-sweet, pear-
shaped voice; and horded them into the auditorium. I chose
one of the wooden folding chairs in the back row.
A heavy-jowled old gal came out in front of the closed
curtains and gave a little introductory talk about how lucky
we all were that the Swami had consented to visit with us.
There was the usual warning to anyone who was not of the
esoteric that we must not expect too much, that sometimes
nothing at all happened, that true believers did not attend
just to see effects. She reminded us kittenishly that the guides
were capricious, and that we must all help by merging our-
selves in the great flowing currents of absolute infinity.
She finally faltered, realized she was probably saying all
the things the Swami would want to sayin the manner
of people who introduce speakers everywhereand with a
girlish little flourish she waved  at someone  off  stage.
The house lights dimmed. The curtains swirled up and
back.
The Swami was doing all right for himself. He was seated
behind a small table in the centre of the stage. A pale violet
light diffused through a huge crystal ball on the table, and
threw his dark features into sharp relief. It gave an astonish-
ingly remote and inscrutable wisdom to his features. In the
pale light, and at this distance, his turban looked quite
clean.
He began to speak slowly and sonorously. A hush settled
over the audience, and gradually I felt myself merging with
the mass reaction of the rest. As I listened, I got the feeling
that what he was saying was of tremendous importance, that
somehow his words contained great and revealing wonders
or would contam them if I were only sufficiently ad-
vanced to comprehend their true meanings. The man was
good, he knew his trade. All men search for truth at one
level or another. I began to realize why such a proportion-
ate few choose the cold and impersonal laboratory. Per-
haps if there were a way to put science to music
The Swami talked on for about twenty .minutes, and then
I noticed his voice had grown deeper and deeper in tone,
and suddenly, without any apparent transition, we all knew
it was not really the Swami's voice we were hearing. And then
he began to tell members of the audience little intimate
things about themselves, things which only they should know.
He was good at this, too. He has mastered the trick of
making universals sound like specifics. I could do the same
thing. The patterns of people's lives have multiple similari-
ties.  To  a  far  greater  extent  than  generally  realized  the
same things happen to everyone. The idea was to take some
of the lesser known ones and word them so they seemed
to apply to one isolated individual.
For instance, I could tell a fellow about when he was a
little boy there was a little girl in a red dress with blonde
pigtails who used to scrap with him and tattle things about
him to her mother. If he were inclined to be credulous,
this was second sight I had. But it is a universal. What
average boy didn't, at one time or another, know a little
girl  with  blonde  pigtails?  What  blonde  little  girl  didn't
occasionally wear a red dress? What little girl didn't tattle
to her mother about the naughty things the boys were doing?
The Swami did that for a while. The audience was leaning
forward in a rapture of ecstasy. First the organ tones of his
voice soothed and softened. The phrases which should mean
something if only you had the comprehension. The univer-
sals applied as specifics. He had his audience in the palm of
his hand. He didn't need his crystal ball to tell him that.
But he wanted it to be complete. Most of the responses
had been from women. He gave them the generalities which
didn't sound like generalities. They confirmed with specifics.
But most were women. He wanted the men, too. He began
to concentrate on the men. He made it easy.
"I have a message," he said. "From. . . now let me get it
right... from R. S. It is for a man in this audience.
Will the man who knew R.S. acknowledge?"
There was a silence. And that was such an easy one, too.
I hadn't planned to participate, but, on impulse, since none
of the other men were co-operating, I spoke up.
"Robert Smith!" I exclaimed. "Good old Bob!"
Several of the women sitting near me looked at me and
beamed their approval. One of the husbands scowled at me.
"I can tell by your tone," the Swami said, and apparent-
ly he hadn't recognized my tone, "that you have forgiven
him. That is the message. He wants you to know that he is
happy. He is much wiser now. He knows now that he was
wrong."
One of the women reached over and patted me on the
shoulder.
But the Swami had no more messages for men. He was
smart enough to know where to stop. He'd tried one of the
simplest come-ons,  and there had been too much of a
pause. It had almost not come oS.
I wondered who good old Bob Smith was? Surely, among
the thousands of applicants I'd interviewed, there must have
been a number of them. And, being applicants, of course,
some of them had been wrong.
The Swami's tones, giving one message after another
faster and faster now, not waiting for acknowledgment or
confirmationbegan to sink into a whisper. His speech be-
came ragged, heavy. The words became indistinguishable.
About his head there began to float a pale, luminescent
sphere. There was a subdued gasp from the audience and
then complete stillness. As though, unbreathing, in the depths
of a tomb, they watched the sphere. It bobbed about,
over the Swami's head and around him. At times it seemed
as if about to float off stage, but it came back. It swirled
out over the audience, but not too far, and never at such
an angle that the long, flexible dull black wire supporting it
would be silhouetted against the glowing crystal ball.
Then it happened. There was a gasp, a smothered scream.
And over at one side of the auditorium a dark object began
bobbing about in the air up near the ceiling. It swerved and
swooped. The Swami's luminiscent sphere jerked to a sudden
stop. The Swami sat with open mouth and stared at the dark
object which he was not controlling.
The dark object was not confined to any dull black wire.
It went where it willed. It went too high and brushed against
the ceiling.
There was a sudden shower of coins to the floor. A com-
pact hit the floor with a flat spat. A handkerchief floated
down more slowly.
"My purse!" a woman gasped. I recognized my inter-
viewer's voice. Her purse contained two Auerbach cylinders,
and they were having themselves a ball.
In alarm, I looked quickly at the stage, hoping the Swami
wasn't astute enough to catch on. But he Was gone. The au-
dience, watching the bobbing purse, hadn't realized it as yet.
And they were delayed in realizing it by a diversion
from the other side of the auditorium.
"I can't hold it down any longer, Mr. Kennedy!" a wom-
an gasped out. "It's taking me up into the air!"
"Hold on, Annie!" I shouted back. "I'm coming!"
A chastened and subdued Swami sat in my office the fol-
lowing morning, and this time he was inclined to be co-opera-
tive. More, he was looking to me for guidance, understanding,
and didn't mind acknowledging my ascendancy. And, with
the lieutenant left in the outer office, he didn't have any face
to preserve.
Later, last night, he'd learned the truth of what happened
after he had run away in a panic. I'd left a call at the hotel
for the lieutenant. When the lieutenant had got him calmed
down and returned my call, I'd instructed him to tell the
Swami about the Auerbach cylinders; to tell the Swami he
was not a fake after all.
The Swami had obviously spent a sleepless night. It is a
terrible thing to have spent years perfecting the art of fakery,
and then to realize you needn't have faked at all. More ter-
rible, he had swallowed some of his own medicine, and all
through the night he had shivered in fear of some instant
and horrible retaliation. For him it was still a case of There
Are Mysteries.
And it was no comfort to his state of mind right now that
the four cylinders we had finally captured last night were, at
this moment, bobbing about in my office, swooping and swerv-
ing around in the upper part of the room, like bats trying to
find some opening. I was giving him the full treatment. The
first  two  cylinders, ' down  on  the  floor,  were  pressing  up
against my closed door, like frightened little things trying to
escape a room of horror.
The Swami's face was twitching, and his long fingers kept
twining themselves into King's X symbols. But he was sit-
ting it out. He was swallowing some of the hair of the dog
that bit him. I had to give him A for that.
"I've been trying to build up a concept of the framework
wherein psi seems to function." I told him casually, just as if
it were all a formularized laboratory procedure. "I had to pull
last night's stunt to prove something."
He tore his eyes away from the cylinders which were over
exploring one corner of the ceiling, and looked at me.
"Let's go to e'eitricity," I said speculaticely. "Not that we
know psi and electricity have anything in common, other
than some similar analogies, but we don't know they don't.
Both of them may be just different manifestations of the same
thing. We don't really know why a magnetized core, turning
"inside a coil of copper wire, generates electricity.
"Oh we've got some phrases," I acknowledged. "We've
got a whole structure of phrases, and when you listen to
them they sound as if they ought to mean somethinglike the
phrases you were using last night. Everybody assumes they do
mean something to the pundits. So, since it is human to want
to be a pundit, we repeat these phrases over and over, and
call them explanations. Yet we do know what happens, even
if we do just theorize about why. We know how to wrap
something around something and get electricity.
"Take the induction coil," I said. "We feed a low-voltage
current into one end, and we draw off a high-voltage current
from the other. But anyone who wants, any time, can dis-
prove the whole principle of the induction coil. All you have
to do is wrap your core with a nonconductor, say nylon
thread, and presto, nothing comes out. You see, it doesn't
work; and anybody who claims it does is a faker and a liar.
That's what happens when science tries to investigate psi by
the standard methods.
"You surround a psi-gifted individual with nonbelievers
and probably nothing will come out of it. Surround him with
true believers; and it all seems to act like an induction coil.
Things happen. Yet even when things do happen, it is usu-
ally impossible to prove it.
"Take yourself, Swami. And this is significant. First we
have the North point effect. Then those two little beggars
trying to get out the door. Then the ones which are bobbing
around up there. Without the cylinders there would have
been no way to know that anything had happened at all.
"Now, about this psi framework. It isn't something you can
turn on and off, at will. We don't know enough yet for that.
Aside from 'some believers and those individuals who do
seem to attract psi forces, we don't know, yet, what to wrap
around what. So here's what you're to do: You're to keep
a supply of these cylinders near you at all times. If any psi
effects happen, they'll record it. Fair enough?
"Now," I said with finality. "I have anticipated that you
might refuse. But you're not the only person who has psi abil-
ity. I've wired General Sanfordwaithe to send me another
fellow; one who will co-operate."
The Swami thought it over. Here he was with a suite in
a good hotel; with an army lieutenant to look after his
earthly needs; on the payroll of a respectable company; with
a ready-made flock .of believers; and no fear of the bunco
squad. He had never had it so good. "The side money, for
private readings alone, should be substantial.
Further, and he watched me narrowly, I didn't seem to be
afraid of the cylinders.
"I'll co-operate," he said.
For three days there was nothing. The Swami called me a
couple times a day and reported that the cylinders just lay
around his room. I didn't know what to tell him. I recom-
mended he read biographies of famous mediums. I recom-
mended fasting, and breathing, and contemplating self. He
seemed dubious, but said he'd try it.
On the moniing of the third day, Sara called me on the
intercom and told me there was another Army lieutenant in
her office, and another. . . gentleman. I opened my door and
went out to Sara's office to greet them.
The new lieutenant was no more than the standard output
from the same production line as Lieutenant Murphy, but
the wizened little old man he had in tow was from a differ-
ent and much rarer matrix. As fast as I had moved, I was
none too soon. The character reached over and tilted up
Sara's chin as I was coming through the door.
"Now you're a healthy young wench," he said with a leer.
"What are you doing tonight, baby?" The guy was at least
eighty years, old.
"Hey, you, pop!" I exclaimed in anger. "Be your age!"
He turned around and looked me up and down.
"I'm younger, that way, than you are, right now!" he
snapped.
A disturbance in the outer office kept me from thinking
up a retort. There were some subdued screams, some scuffling
of heavy shoes, the sounds of some ruiming feet as appli-
cants got away. The outer door to Sara's office was flung open.
Framed in the doorway, breast high, floated the Swamil
He was sitting, cross-legged, on a hotel bathmat. From both
front corners, where they had been attached by loops of twine,
there peeked Auerbach cylinders. Two more rear cylinders
were grasped in Lieutenant Murphy's strong hands. He was
propelling the Swami along, mid-air, in Atlantic City Board-
walk style.
The Swami looked down at us with aloof disdain, then his
eyes focused on the old man. His glance wavered; he threw a
startled and fearful look at the cylinders holding up his bath-
L mat. They did not fall. A vast relief overspread his face, and
he drew himself erect with more disdain than ever. The old
man was not so aloof.
"Harry Glotz!" he exclaimed. "Why you... you faker!
What are you doing in that get-up?"
The Swami took a casual turn about the room, leaning to
one side on his magic carpet as if banking an aeroplane.
"Peasant!" He spat the word out and motioned grandly
towards the door. Lieutenant Murphy pushed him through.
"Why, that no-good bum!" the old man shouted at me.
'That no-good from nowhere! I'll fix him! Thinks he's some-
thing, does he? I'll show him! Anything he can do I can do
"better!"
His rage got the better of him. He rushed through the door,
shaking both fists above his white head, shouting impreca-
tions, threats, and pleading to be shown how the trick was
done, all in the same breath. The new lieutenant cast a
stricken look at us and then sped after his charge.
"Looks as if we're finally in production," I said to Sara.
"That's only the second one," she said mournfully. "When
you get all six of them, this joint's sure going to be jumping!"
I looked out of her window at the steel and concrete
walls of the factory. They were solid, real, secure; they were
a symbol of reality, the old reality a man could understand.
"I hope you don't mean that literally, Sara," I answered
dubiously.