Waldo by Robert Heinlein

    The act was billed as ballet tap - which does not describe it.
His feet created an intricate tympany of crisp, clean taps. 
There was a breath-catching silence as he leaped high 
into the air, higher than a human being should - and 
performed, while floating there, a fantastically improbable
 entrechat douze.
He landed on his toes, apparently poised, yet producing 
a fortissimo of thunderous taps.
The spotlights cut, the stage lights came up. The audience 
stayed silent a long moment, then realized it was time to 
applaud, and gave.
He stood facing them, letting the wave of their emotion 
sweep through him. He felt as if he could lean against it; 
it warmed him through to his bones.
It was wonderful to dance, glorious to be applauded, to be 
liked, to be wanted.
When the curtain rang down for the last time he let his 
dresser lead him away. He was always a little bit drunk at 
the end of a performance; dancing was a joyous intoxication 
even in rehearsal, but to have an audience lifting him, 
carrying him along, applauding him - He never grew jaded 
to it. It was always new and heartbreakingly wonderful.
‘This way, chief. Give us a little smile.’ The flash bulb flared. 
‘Thanks.’
‘Thank’you. Have a drink.’ He motioned towards one end of 
his dressing room. They were all such nice fellows, such grand 
guys - the reporters, the photographers - all of them.
‘How about one standing up?’ He started to comply, but his 
dresser, busy with one slipper, warned him:
‘You operate in half an hour.’
‘Operate?’ the news photographer said. ‘What’s it this time?’
‘A left cerebrectomy,’ he answered. 
‘Yeah? How about covering it?’
‘Glad to have you - if the hospital doesn’t mind.’
‘We’ll fix that.’
Such grand guys.
‘-trying to get a little different angle on a feature article.’
 It was a feminine voice, near his ear. He looked around hastily, 
slightly confused. ‘For example, what made you decide to take 
up dancing as a career?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘I didn’t hear you. I’m afraid it’s 
pretty noisy in here.’
‘I said, why did you decide to take up dancing?’
‘Well, now, I don’t quite know how to answer that. I’m afraid 
we would have to go back quite a way-’

James Stevens scowled at his assistant engineer. ‘What have 
you got to look happy about?’ he demanded.
‘It’s just the shape of my face,’ his assistant apologized. 
‘Try laughing at this one: there’s been another crash.’
‘Oh, cripes! Don’t tell me,  let me guess. Passenger or freight?’
‘A Climax duo-freighter on the Chicago-Salt Lake shuttle, 
just west of North Platte. And, chief-’
‘Yes?’
‘The Big Boy wants to see you.’
‘That’s interesting. That’s very, very interesting. Mac-’
‘Yeah, chief.’
‘How would you like to be Chief Traffic Engineer of North 
American Power-Air? I hear there’s going to be a vacancy.’
Mac scratched his nose. ‘Funny that you should mention 
that, chief. I was just going to ask you what kind of a 
recommendation you could give me in case I went back into 
civil engineering. Ought to be worth something to you to 
get rid of me.’
‘I’ll get rid of you - right now. You bust out to Nebraska, 
find that heap before the souvenir hunters tear it apart, 
and bring back its deKalbs and its control board.’
‘Trouble with cops, maybe?’
‘You figure it out. Just be sure you come back.’
“With my slipstick, or on it.”
Stevens’s office was located immediately adjacent 
to the zone power plant; the business offices of 
North American were located in a hill, a good three 
quarters of a mile away. There was the usual inter-
connecting tunnel; Stevens entered it and 
deliberately chose the low-speed slide in order to 
have more time to think before facing the boss.
By the time he arrived he had made up his mind, 
but he did not like the answer.
The Big Boy,  Stanley F. Gleason, Chairman of the Board
greeted him quietly. ‘Come in, Jim. Sit down. Have a cigar.’
Stevens slid into a chair, declined the cigar and pulled out 
a cigarette, which he lit while looking around. Besides the 
chief and himself, there were present Harkness, head of the
 legal staff, Dr Rambeau, Stevens’s opposite number for 
research, and Striebel, the chief engineer for city power. 
Us five and no more, he thought grimly-  All the heavy-
weights and none of the middleweights. Heads will roll!-
 Starting with mine.
‘Well,’ he said, almost belligerently, ‘we’re all here. Who’s 
got the cards? Do we cut for deal?’
Harkness looked faintly distressed by the impropriety; 
Rambeau seemed too sunk in some personal gloom to pay 
any attention to wisecracks in bad taste. Gleason ignored it. 
‘We’ve been trying to figure a way out of our troubles,
 James. 
I left word for you on the chance that you might not have left.’
‘I stopped by simply to see if I had any personal mail,’ 
Stevens said bitterly. ‘Otherwise I’d be on the beach at Miami, 
turning sunshine into vitamin D.’
‘I know,’ said Gleason, ‘and I’m sorry. You deserve that 
vacation, Jimmie. But the situation has gotten worse instead 
of better. Any ideas?’
‘What does Dr Rambeau say?’
Rambeau looked up momentarily. ‘The deKalb receptors can't fail,’ 
he stated.
‘But they do.
’‘They can’t. You’ve operated them improperly.’ He sunk back
 into his personal prison.
Stevens turned back to Gleason and spread his hands. ‘So far 
as I know, Dr Rambeau is right, but if the fault lies in the 
engineering department, I haven’t been able to locate it. 
You can have my resignation.’
‘I don’t want your resignation,’ Gleason said gently. ‘What I 
want is results. We have a responsibility to the public.’
‘And to the stockholders,’ Harkness put in.
‘That will take care of itself if we solve the other,’ Gleason 
observed. ‘How about it, Jimmie? Any suggestions?’
Stevens bit his lip. ‘Just one,’ he announced, ‘and one I don’t 
like to make. Then I look for a job peddling magazine 
subscriptions.’
‘So? Well, what is it?’
‘We’ve got to consult Waldo.’
Rambeau suddenly snapped out of his apathy. ‘What! That 
charlatan? This is a matter of science.’
Harkness said, ‘Really, Dr Stevens-’
Gleason held up a hand. ‘Dr Stevens’s suggestion is logicaL 
But I’m afraid it’s a little late, Jimmie. I talked with him last week.’
Harkness looked surprised; Stevens looked annoyed as well. 
‘Without letting me know?’
‘Sorry, Jimmie. I was just feeling him out. But it’s no good. 
His terms, to us, amount to confiscation.’
‘Still sore over the Hathaway patents?’
‘Still nursing his grudge.’
‘You should have let me handle the matter,’ Harkness put in. 
‘He can’t do this to us - There is public interest involved. 
Retain him, if need be, and let the fee be adjudicated in equity. 
I’ll arrange the details.’
‘I’m afraid you would,’ Gleason said dryly. ‘Do you think a 
court order will make a hen lay an egg?’
Harkness looked indignant, but shut up.
Stevens continued, ‘I would not have suggested going to 
Waldo if I had not had an idea as to how to approach him. 
I know a friend of his-’
‘A friend of Waldo? I didn’t know he had any.’
‘This man is sort of an uncle to him,  his first physician. 
With his help I might get on Waldo’s good side.’
Dr Rambeau stood up. ‘This is intolerable,’ he announced. 
‘I must ask you to excuse me.’ He did not wait for an answer, 
but strode out, hardly giving the door time to open in front 
of him.
Gleason followed his departure with worried eyes. ‘Why does 
he take it so hard, Jimmie? You would think he hated Waldo 
personally.’
‘Probably he does, in a way. But it’s more than that; his whole 
universe is toppling. For the last twenty years, ever since 
Pryor’s reformulation of the General Field Theory did away 
with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, physics has been 
considered an exact science. The power failures and transmission 
failures we have been suffering are a terrific nuisance to you and 
to me, but to Dr Rambeau they amount to an attack on his faith. 
Better keep an eye on him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he might come unstuck entirely. It’s a pretty serious 
matter for a man’s religion to fail him.’
‘Hm-m-m. How about yourself? Doesn’t it hit you just as hard?’
‘Not quite. I’m an engineer- From Rambeau’s point of view just 
a high-priced tinker. Difference in orientation. Not but what I’m 
pretty upset.’
The audio circuit of the communicator on Gleason’s desk came 
to life. ‘Calling Chief Engineer Stevens - calling Chief Engineer 
Stevens.’ Gleason flipped the tab.
‘He’s here. Go ahead.’
‘Company code, translated. Message follows: “Cracked up 
four miles north of Cincinnati. Shall I go on to Nebraska, or 
bring in the you-know-what from my own crate?” Message 
ends. Signed “Mac”.’
‘Tell him to walk back!’ Stevens said savagely.
‘Very well, sir.’ The instrument cut off.
‘Your assistant?’ asked Gleason.
‘Yes. That’s about the last straw, chief. Shall I wait and try 
to analyse this failure, or shall I try to see Waldo?’
‘Try to see Waldo.’
‘OK. If you don’t hear from me, just send my severance pay 
care of Palmdale Inn, Miami. I’ll be the fourth beachcomber 
from the right.’
Gleason permitted himself an unhappy smile. ‘If you don’t get 
results, I’ll bç the fifth. Good luck.’
‘So long.’
When Stevens had gone, Chief Stationary Engineer Striebel 
spoke up for the first time. ‘If the power to the cities fails,’ he 
said softly, ‘you know where I’ll be, don’t you?’
‘Where? Beachcomber number six?’
‘Not likely. I’ll be number one in my spot,  first man to be lynched.’
‘But the power to the cities can’t fail. You’ve got too many cross-
connects and safety devices.’
‘Neither can the deKalbs fail, supposedly. Just the same, think 
about Sublevel 7 in Pittsburgh, with the lights out. Or, rather, 
don’t think about it!’

Doc Grimes let himself into the aboveground access which led 
into his home, glanced at the announcer, and noted with mild, 
warm interest that someone close enough to him to possess 
his house combination was inside. He moved ponderously 
downstairs, favouring his game leg, and entered the lounging 
room.
‘Hi, Doc!’ James Stevens got up when the door snapped open 
and came forward to greet him.
‘H’lo, James. Pour yourself a drink. I see you have. Pour me one.’
‘Right.’
While his friend complied, Grimes shucked himself out of the 
outlandish anachronistic greatcoat he was wearing and threw 
it more or less in the direction of the robing alcove. It hit the 
floor heavily, much more heavily than its appearance justified, 
despite its unwieldy bulk. It clunked.
Stooping, he peeled off thick overtrousers as massive as the coat.
He was dressed underneath in conventional business tights in 
blue and sable. It was not a style that suited him. To an eye 
unsophisticated in matters of civilized dress,  let us say the 
mythical Man-from-Antares - he might have seemed 
uncouth, even unsightly. He looked a good bit like an elderly 
fat beetle.
James Stevens’s eye made no note of the tights, but he looked 
with disapproval on the garments which had just been discarded. 
‘Still wearing that fool armour,’ he commented.
‘Certainly.’
‘Damn it, Doc - you’ll make yourself sick, carrying that junk around. 
It’s unhealthy.’
‘Danged sight sicker if I don’t.’
‘Rats! 1 don’t get sick, and I don’t wear armour - outside the lab.’
‘You should.’ Grimes walked over to where Stevens had reseated 
himself. ‘Cross your knees.’ Stevens complied; Grimes struck him 
smartly below the kneecap with the edge of his palm. The reflex 
jerk was barely perceptible. ‘Lousy,’ he remarked, then peeled back 
his friend’s right eyelid.
‘You’re in poor shape,’ he added after a moment. Stevens drew 
away impatiently. ‘i’m all right. It’s you we’re talking about.’
‘What about me?’
‘Well- Damnation, Doc, you’re throwing away your reputation. 
They talk about you.’
Grimes nodded. ‘I know. “Poor old Gus Grimes - a slight touch of 
cerebral termites.” Don’t worry about my reputation; I’ve always 
been out of step. What’s your fatigue index?’
‘I don’t know. It’s all right.’
‘It is, eh? I’ll wrestle you, two falls out of three.’ Stevens rubbed 
his eyes. ‘Don’t needle me, Doc. I’m rundown. I know that, but it 
isn’t anything but overwork.’
‘Humph! James, you are a fair-to-middlin’ radiation physicist - ‘Engineer.’
‘-engineer. But you’re no medical man. You can’t expect to pour every sort
of radiant energy through the human system year after year and not pay 
for it. It wasn't designed to stand it.’
‘But I wear armour in the lab. You know that.’
‘Surely. And how about outside the lab?’
‘But- Look, Doc - I hate to say it, but your whole thesis
is ridiculous. Sure there is radiant energy in the air these days, 
but nothing harmful. All the colloidal chemists agree-’
‘Colloidal, fiddlesticks!’
‘But you’ve got to admit that biological economy is a matter of 
colloidal chemistry.’
‘I’ve got to admit nothing. I’m not contending that colloids are 
not the fabric of living tissue- They are. But I’ve maintained for 
forty years that it was dangerous to expose living tissue to assorted 
radiation without being sure of the effect. From an evolutionary 
standpoint the human animal is habituated to and adapted to only 
the natural radiation of the sun, and he can’t stand that any too well, 
even under a thick blanket of ionization. Without that blanket- Did 
you ever see a solar-X type cancer?’
‘Of course not.'
‘No, you’re too young. I have. Assisted at the autopsy of one, when 
I was an intern. Chap was on the Second Venus Expedition. Four 
hundred and thirty-eight cancers we counted in him, then gave up.’
‘Solar-X is whipped.’
‘Sure it is. But it ought to be a warning. You bright young squirts 
can cook up things in your labs that we medicos can’t begin to 
cope with. We’re behind - bound to be. We usually don’t know 
what’s happened until the damage is done. This time you’ve torn it.’ 
He sat down heavily and suddenly looked as tired and whipped as 
did his younger friend.
Stevens felt the sort of tongue-tied embarrassment a man may feel 
when a dearly beloved friend falls in love with an utterly worthless 
person. He wondered what he could say that would not seem rude.
He changed the subject. ‘Doc, I came over because I had a couple 
of things on my mind-’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, a vacation for one. I know I’m run-down. I’ve been overworked, 
and a vacation seems in order. The other is your pal, Waldo.’
‘Huh?’
‘Yeah. Waldo Farthingwaite-Jones, bless his stiff-necked, bad-tempered 
heart.’
  ‘Why Waldo? You haven’t suddenly acquired an interest in 
 myasthenia gravis, have you?’
‘Well, no. I don’t care what’s wrong with him physically. 
He can have hives, dandruff, or the galloping never-get-overs, 
for all I care. I hope he has. What I want is to pick his brains.’
‘So?’
‘I can’t do it alone. Waldo doesn’t help people; he uses them. 
You’re his only normal contact with people.’
‘That is not entirely true-’
‘Who else?’
‘You misunderstand me. He has no normal contacts. I am 
simply the only person who dares to be rude to him.’
‘But I thought- Never mind. D’you know, this is an 
inconvenient setup? Waldo is the man we’ve got to have. 
Why should it come about that a genius of his calibre 
should be so unapproachable, so immune to ordinary social 
demands? Oh, I know his disease has a lot to do with it, but 
why should this man have this disease? It’s an improbable 
coincidence.’
‘It’s not a matter of his infirmity,’ Grimes told him. ‘Or, rather, 
not in the way you put it. His weakness is his genius, in a way-’
‘Huh?’
‘Well-’ Grimes turned his sight inward, let his mind roam back 
over his long association, lifelong, for Waldo,  with this 
particular patient. He remembered his subliminal misgivings 
when he delivered the child. The infant had been sound 
enough, superficially, except for a slight blueness. But then 
lots of babies were somewhat cyanotic in the delivery room. 
Nevertheless, he had felt a slight reluctance to give it the tunk 
on the bottom, the slap which would shock it into taking its 
first lungful of air.
But he had squelched his own feelings, performed the necessary 
‘laying on of hands’, and the freshly born human had declared its 
independence with a satisfactory squall. There was nothing else 
he could have done; he was a young GP then, who took his 
Hippocratic oath seriously. He still took it seriously, he supposed, 
even though he sometimes referred to it as the ‘hypocritical’ oath. 
Still, he had been right in his feelings; there had been something 
rotten about that child, something that was not entirely myasthenia 
gravis.He had felt sorry for the child at first, as well as having an 
irrational feeling of responsibility for its condition. Pathological 
muscular weakness is an almost totally crippling condition, since 
the patient has no unaffected limbs to retrain into substitutes. 
There the victim must lie, all organs, limbs, and functions present, 
yet so pitifully, completely weak as to be unable to perform any 
normal action. He must spend his life in a condition of exhausted 
collapse, such as you or I might reach at the finish line of a 
gruelling cross-country run. No help for him, and no relief.
During Waldo’s childhood he had hoped constantly that the child 
would die, since he was so obviously destined for tragic 
uselessness, while simultaneously, as a physician, doing 
everything within his own skill and the skills of numberless 
consulting specialists to keep the child alive and cure it.
Naturally, Waldo could not attend school; Grimes ferreted out 
sympathetic tutors. He could indulge in no normal play; Grimes 
invented sickbed games which would not only stimulate Waldo’s 
imagination but encourage him to use his flabby muscles to the full, 
weak extent of which he was capable.
Grimes had been afraid that the handicapped child, since it was not 
subjected to the usual maturing stresses of growing up, would remain 
infantile. He knew now,  had known for a long time,  that he need not 
have worried. Young Waldo grasped at what little life was offered him, 
learned thirstily, tried with a sweating tenseness of will to force his 
undisciplined muscles to serve him.
He was clever in thinking of dodges whereby to circumvent his 
muscular weakness. At seven he devised a method of controlling 
a spoon with two hands, which permitted him, painfully,  to feed himself. 
His first mechanical invention was made at ten.
It was a gadget which held a book for him, at any angle, controlled 
lighting for the book, and turned its pages. The gadget responded to 
fingertip pressure on a simple control panel. Naturally, Waldo could 
not build it himself, but he could conceive it, and explain it; the 
Farthingwaite-Joneses could well afford the services of a designing 
engineer to build the child’s conception.
Grimes was inclined to consider this incident, in which the child Waldo 
acted in a role of intellectual domination over a trained mature adult 
neither blood relation nor servant, as a landmark in the psychological 
process whereby Waldo eventually came to regard the entire human 
race as his servants, his hands, present or potential.
‘What’s eating you, Doc?’
‘Eh? Sorry, I was daydreaming. See here, son - you mustn’t be too harsh 
on Waldo. I don’t like him myself. But you must take him as a whole.’
‘You take him.’
‘Shush. You spoke of needing his genius. He wouldn’t have been a 
genius if he had not been crippled. You didn’t know his parents. 
They were good stock,  fine, intelligent people, but nothing spectacular. 
Waldo’s potentialities weren’t any greater than theirs, but he had to 
do more with them to accomplish anything. He had to do everything 
the hard way. He had to be clever.
‘Sure. Sure, but why should he be so utterly poisonous? Most 
big men aren’t.’
‘Use your head. To get anywhere in his condition he had to develop a 
will, a driving one-track mind, with a total disregard for any other 
considerations. What would you expect him to be but stinking selfish?’
‘I’d- Well, never mind. We need him and that’s that.’
‘Why?’
Stevens explained. 
It may plausibly be urged that the shape of a culture, 
 its mores, evaluations, family organization, eating habits, living 
patterns, pedagogical methods, institutions, forms of government, 
and so forth,  arise from the economic necessities of its technology. 
Even though the thesis be too broad and much oversimplified, it is 
nonetheless true that much which characterized the long peace which 
followed the constitutional establishrnent of the United Nations grew 
out of the technologies which were hot-house-forced by the needs of the 
belligerents in the war of the forties. Up to that time broadcast and 
beam-cast were used only for commercial radio, with rare exceptions. 
Even telephony was done almost entirely by actual metallic connexion 
from one instrument to another. If a man in Monterey wished to speak 
to his wife or partner in Boston, a physical, copper neuron stretched 
bodily across the continent from one to the other.
Radiant power was then a hop dream, found in Sunday supplements 
and comic books.
A concatenation,  no, a meshwork  of new developments was necessary 
before the web of copper covering the continent could be dispensed with. 
Power could not be broadcast economically; it was necessary to wait for 
the co-axial beam,  a direct result of the imperative military shortages of 
the Great War. Radio telephony could not replace wired telephony until 
ultra micro-wave techniques made room in the ether, so to speak, for the 
traffic load. Even then it was necessary to invent a tuning device which 
could be used by a nontechnical person, a ten-year-old child, let us say
 ,as easily as the dial selector which was characteristic of the commercial 
wired telephone of the era then terminating.
Bell Laboratories cracked that problem; the solution led directly to the 
radiant power receptor, domestic type, keyed, sealed, and metered. 
The way was open for commercial radio power transmission,  except in 
one respect: efficiency. Aviation waited on the development of the 
Otto-cycle engine; the Industrial Revolution waited on the steam 
engine; radiant power waited on a really cheap, plentiful power 
source. Since radiation of power is inherently wasteful, it was 
necessary to have power cheap and plentiful enough to waste.
The same war brought atomic energy. The physicists working for 
the United States Army,  the United States of North America had its 
own army then,  produced a superexplosive; the notebooks recording 
their tests contained, when properly correlated, everything necessary 
to produce almost any other sort of nuclear reaction, even the so-called 
Solar Phoenix, the hydrogen-helium cycle, which is the source of the 
sun’s power. 
The reaction whereby copper is broken down into phosphorus, 
 silicon29, and helium8, plus degenerating chain reactions, was one 
of the several cheap and convenient means developed for producing 
unlimited and practically free power.
Radiant power became economically feasible, and inevitable.
Of course Stevens included none of this in his explanation to Grimes. 
Grimes was absent-mindedly aware of the whole dynamic process; 
he had seen radiant power grow up, just as his grandfather had seen 
the development of aviation. He had seen the great transmission lines 
removed from the sky -‘mined’ for their copper; he had seen the heavy 
cables being torn from the dug-up streets of Manhattan. He might even 
recall his first independent-unit radiotelephone with its somewhat 
disconcerting double dial. He had gotten a lawyer in Buenos Aires 
on it when attempting to reach his neighbourhood delicatessen. 
For two weeks he made all his local calls by having them relayed back 
from South America before he discovered that it made a difference 
which dial he used first.
At that time Grimes had not yet succumbed to the new style in 
architecture. The London Plan did not appeal to him; he liked a 
house aboveground, where he could see it. When it became 
necessary to increase the floor space in his offices, he finally 
gave in and went subsurface, not so much for the cheapness, 
convenience, and general all-around practicability of living in a 
tri-conditioned cave, but because he had already become a little 
worried about the possible consequences of radiation pouring 
through the human body. The fused-earth walls of his new 
residence were covered with lead; the roof of the cave had a 
double thickness. His hole in the ground was as near radiation-
proof as he could make it. 
‘-the meat of the matter,’ Stevens was saying, ‘is that the 
delivery of power to transportation units has become erratic 
as the devil. Not enough yet to tie up traffic, but enough to be 
very disconcerting. There have been some nasty accidents; 
we can’t keep hushing them up forever. I’ve got to do 
something about it.’
‘Why?’
“Why?” Don’t be silly. In the first place as traffic engineer
for NAPA my bread and butter depends on it. In the second 
place the problem is upsetting in itself. A properly 
designed piece of mechanism ought to work - all the time, 
every time. These don’t, and we can’t find out why not. 
Our staff mathematical physicists have about reached the 
babbling stage.’
Grimes shrugged. Stevens felt annoyed by the gesture. 
‘I don’t think you appreciate the importance of this 
problem, Doc. Have you any idea of the amount of 
horsepower involved in transportation? Counting both 
private and commercial vehicles and common carriers, 
North American Power-Air supplies more than half the 
energy used in this continent. We have to be right. 
You can add to that our city-power affiliate. No trouble 
there,  yet. But we don’t dare think what a city-power 
breakdown would mean.’
‘I’ll give you a solution.’
‘Yeah? Well, give.’
‘Junk it. Go back to oil-powered and steam-powered 
vehicles. Get rid of these damned radiant-powered 
deathtraps.’
‘Utterly impossible. You don’t know what you’re 
saying. It took more than fifteen years to make the 
change-over. Now we’re geared to it. Gus, if NAPA 
closed up shop, half the population of the northwest 
seaboard would starve, to say nothing of the lake 
states and the Philly-Boston axis.'
‘Hrrmph- Well, all I’ve got to say is that that might 
be better than the slow poisoning that is going on now.’
Stevens brushed it away impatiently. ‘Look, Doc, 
nurse a bee in your bonnet if you like, but don’t ask 
me to figure it into my calculations. Nobody else 
sees any danger in radiant power.'
Grimes answered mildly. ‘Point is, son, they aren’t 
looking in the right place. Do you know what the 
high-jump record was last year?’
‘I never listen to the sports news.’
‘Might try it sometime. The record levelled off at 
seven foot two, ‘bout twenty years back. Been 
dropping ever since. You might try graphing 
athletic records against radiation in the air - artificial 
radiation. Might find some results that would surprise you.’
‘Shucks, everybody knows there has been a swing away 
from heavy sports. The sweat-and-muscles fad died out, 
that’s all. We’ve simply advanced into a more intellectual 
culture.’
‘Intellectual, hogwash! People quit playing tennis and 
such because they are tired all the time. Look at you. 
You’re a mess.’
‘Don’t needle me, Doc.’
‘Sorry. But there has been a clear deterioration in the 
performance of the human animal. If we had decent 
records on such things I could prove it, but any 
physician who’s worth his salt can see it, if he’s 
got eyes in him and isn’t wedded to a lot of fancy 
instruments. I can’t prove what causes it, not yet, 
but I’ve a damned good hunch that it’s caused by 
the stuff you peddle.’
‘Impossible. There isn’t a radiation put on the air 
that hasn’t been tested very carefully in the bio labs. 
We’re neither fools nor knaves.
‘Maybe you don’t test ‘em long enough. I’m not 
talking about a few hours, or a few weeks; I’m 
talking about the cumulative effects of years of 
radiant frequencies pouring through the tissues. 
What does that do?’
‘Why, nothing-I believe.’
‘You believe, but you don’t know. Nobody has 
ever tried to find out. F’rinstance - what effect 
does sunlight have on silicate glass? Ordinarily 
you would say “none”, but you’ve seen desert 
glass?’
‘That bluish-lavender stuff? Of course.’
‘Yes. A bottle turns coloured in a few months in 
the Mojave Desert. But have you ever seen the 
windowpanes in the old houses on Beacon Hill?’
‘I’ve never been on Beacon Hill.’
‘OK, then I’ll tell you. Same phenomena, only it 
takes a century more, in Boston. Now tell me, you 
savvy physics - could you measure the change 
taking place in those Beacon Hill windows?’
‘Mm-rn-in - probably not.’
‘But it’s going on just the same. Has anyone ever 
tried to measure the changes produced in human 
tissue by thirty years of exposure to ultra short
-wave radiation?’
‘No, but-’
‘No “buts”. I see an effect. I’ve made a wild guess at a
cause. Maybe I’m wrong. But I’ve felt a lot more spry 
since I’ve taken to invariably wearing my lead overcoat 
whenever I go out.’
Stevens surrendered the argument. ‘Maybe you’re right, 
Doc. I won’t fuss with you. How about Waldo? Will you 
take me to him and help me handle him?’
‘When do you want to go?’
‘The sooner the better.’
‘Now?’
‘Suits.’
‘Call your office.’
‘Are you ready to leave right now? It would suit me. As 
far as the front office is concerned, I’m on vacation; 
nevertheless, I’ve got this on my mind. I want to get at it.’
‘Quit talking and git.’
They went topside to where their cars were parked. 
Grimes headed towards his, a big-bodied, old-fashioned 
Boeing family landau. Stevens checked him. 
‘You aren’t planning to go in that? It ‘u’d take us the rest 
of the day.’
“Why not? She’s got an auxiliary space drive, and she’s 
tight. You could fly from here to the Moon and back.’
‘Yes, but she’s so infernal slow. We’ll use my “broomstick”.
 Grimes let his eyes run over his friend’s fusiformed little 
speedster. Its body was as nearly invisible as the plastic 
industry could achieve. A surface layer, two molecules 
thick, gave it a refractive index sensibly identical with that 
of air. When perfectly clean it was very difficult to see. 
At the moment it had picked up enough casual dust and 
water vapour to be faintly seen - a ghost of a soap bubble 
of a ship.
Running down the middle, clearly visible through the walls, 
was the only metal part of the ship - the shaft, or, more 
properly, the axis core, and the spreading sheaf of deKalb 
receptors at its terminus. The appearance was enough like 
a giant witch’s broom to justify the nickname. Since the 
saddles, of transparent plastic, were mounted tandem 
oven the shaft so that the metal rod passed between the 
legs of the pilot and passengers, the nickname was doubly 
apt.
‘Son,’ Grimes remarked, ‘I know I ain’t pretty, nor am I 
graceful. Nevertheless, I retain a certain residuum of self-
respect and some shreds of dignity. I am not going to 
tuck that thing between my shanks and go scooting 
through the air on it.
‘Oh, rats! You’re old-fashioned.’
‘I may be. Nevertheless, any peculiarities I have 
managed to retain to my present age I plan to 
hang on to. No.’
‘Look - I’ll polarize the hull before we raise. How about it?’
‘Opaque?’
‘Opaque.’
Grimes slid a regretful glance at his own frumpish boat, 
but assented by fumbling for the barely visible port of 
the speedster. Stevens assisted him; they climbed in 
and straddled the stick.
‘Atta boy, Doc,’ Stevens commended, ‘I’ll have you 
there in three shakes. That tub of yours probably won’t 
do over five hundred, and Wheelchair must be all of 
twenty-five thousand miles up.’
‘I’m never in a hurry,’ Grimes commented, ‘and don’t 
call Waldo’s house “Wheelchair” - not to his face.’
‘I’ll remember,’ Stevens promised. He fumbled, 
apparently in empty air; the hull suddenly became 
dead black, concealing them. It changed as suddenly 
to mirror bright; the car quivered, then shot up out of sight.

Waldo F. Jones seemed to be floating in thin air at the centre 
of a spherical room. The appearance was caused by the fact 
that he was indeed floating in air. His house lay in a free orbit, 
with a period of just over twenty-four hours. No spin had 
been impressed on his home; the pseudo gravity of 
centrifugal force was the thing he wanted least. He had left 
Earth to get away from its gravitational field; he had not been 
down to the surface once in the seventeen years since his 
house was built and towed into her orbit; he never intended 
to do so for any purpose whatsoever.
Here, floating free in space in his own air-conditioned shell, 
he was almost free of the unbearable lifelong slavery to his 
impotent muscles. What little strength he had he could spend 
economically, in movement, rather than in fighting against the 
tearing, tiring weight of the Earth’s thick field.
Waldo had been acutely interested in space flight since early 
boyhood, not from any desire to explore the depths, but 
because his boyish, overtrained mind had seen the enormous 
advantage,  to him,  in weightlessness. While still in his teens 
he had helped the early experimenters in space flight over a 
hump by supplying them with a control system which a pilot 
could handle delicately while under the strain of two or three 
gravities.
Such an invention was no trouble at all to him; he had simply 
adapted manipulating devices which he himself used in 
combating the overpowering weight of one gravity. The first 
successful and safe rocket ship contained relays which had 
once aided Waldo in moving himself from bed to wheelchair.
The deceleration tanks, which are now standard equipment 
for the lunar mail ships, traced their parentage to a flotation 
tank in which Waldo habitually had eaten and slept up to 
the time when he left the home of his parents for his present, 
somewhat unique home. Most of his basic inventions had 
originally been conceived for his personal convenience, 
and only later adapted for commercial exploitation. Even 
the ubiquitous and grotesquely humanoid gadgets known 
universally as ‘waldocs’ - Waldo F. Jones’s Synchronous 
Reduplicating Pantograph, Pat #296,001,437, new series, 
et al - passed through several generations of development 
and private use in Waldo’s machine shop before he 
redesigned them for mass production. The first of them, 
a primitive gadget compared with the waldoes now to be 
found in every shop, factory, plant, and warehouse in the 
country, had been designed to enable Waldo to operate 
a metal lathe.
Waldo had resented the nickname the public had fastened 
on them-.I It struck him as overly familiar,  but he had coldly 
recognized the business advantage to himself in having 
the public identify him verbally with a gadget so useful 
and important.
When the newscasters tagged his spacehouse 
‘Wheelchair’, one might have expected him to regard it as 
more useful publicity. That he did not so regard it, that 
he resented it and tried to put a stop to it, arose from 
another and peculiarly Waldo-ish fact: Waldo did not 
think of himself as a cripple.
He saw himself not as a crippled human being, but as 
something higher than human, the next step up, a being so 
superior as not to need the coarse, brutal strength of the 
smooth apes. Hairy apes, smooth apes, then Waldo - so the 
progression ran in his mind. A chimpanzee, with muscles that 
hardly bulge at all, can tug as high as fifteen hundred 
pounds with one hand. This Waldo had proved by obtaining 
one and patiently enraging it into full effort. A well-
developed man can grip one hundred and fifty pounds with 
one hand. Waldo’s own grip, straining until the sweat sprang 
out, had never reached fifteen pounds.
Whether the obvious inference were fallacious or true, Waldo 
believed in it, evaluated by it. Men were overmuscled canaille, 
smooth chimps. He felt himself at least ten times superior to 
them.
He had much to go on.
Though floating in air, he was busy, quite busy. Although be 
never went to the surface of the Earth his business was there. 
Aside from managing his many properties he was in regular 
practice as a consulting engineer, specializing in motion 
analysis. Hanging close to him in the room were the 
paraphernalia necessary to the practice of his profession. 
Facing him was a four-by-five colour-stereo television receptor. 
Two sets of coordinates, rectilinear and polar, crosshatched it. 
Another smaller receptor hung above it and to the right. Both 
receptors were fully recording, by means of parallel circuits 
conveniently out of the way in another compartment.
The smaller receptor showed the faces of two men watching him. 
The larger showed a scene inside a large shop, hangar-like in 
its proportions. In the immediate foreground, almost full size, 
was a grinder in which was being machined a large casting of 
some sort. A workman stood beside it, a look of controlled 
exasperation on his face.
‘He’s the best you’ve got,’ Waldo stated to the two men in the 
smaller screen. ‘To be sure, he is clumsy and does not have the 
touch for fine work, but he is superior to the other morons 
you call machinists.’
The workman looked around, as if trying to locate the voice. 
It was evident that he could hear Waldo, but that no vision
receptor had been provided for him. 
‘Did you mean that crack for me?’ he said harshly.
‘You misunderstand me, my good man,’ Waldo said sweetly. ‘I was 
complimenting you. I actually have hopes of being able to teach 
you the rudiments of precision work. Then we shall expect you 
to teach those butter-brained oafs around you. The gloves, 
please.’
Near the man, mounted on the usual stand, were a pair of primary 
waldoes, elbow length and human digited. They were floating on 
the line, in parallel with a similar pair physically in front of 
Waldo. The secondary waldoes, whose actions could be controlled 
by Waldo himself by means of his primaries, were mounted in front 
of the power tool in the position of the operator.
Waldo’s remark had referred to the primaries near the workman. 
The machinist glanced at them, but made no move to insert his 
arms in them. ‘I don’t take no orders from nobody I can’t see,’ 
he said flatly. He looked sideways out of the scene as he spoke.
‘Now, Jenkins,’ commenced one of the two men in the smaller screen.
Waldo sighed. ‘I really haven’t the time or the inclination to 
solve your problems of shop discipline. Gentlemen, please turn 
your pickup, so that our petulant friend may see me.’
The change was accomplished; the workman’s face appeared in the 
background of the smaller of Waldo’s screens, as well as in the 
larger. 
‘There - is that better?’ Waldo said gently. The workman grunted.
‘Now.. . your name, please?’
‘Alexander Jenkins.’
‘Very well, friend Alec - the gloves.’
Jenkins thrust his arms into the waldoes and waited. Waldo put 
his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, 
including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to 
life. Jenkins bit his lip, as if he found unpleasant the 
sensation of having his fingers manipulated by the gauntlets he 
wore.
Waldo flexed and extended his fingers gently; the two pairs of 
waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous paral
-lelism. 
‘Feel it, my dear Alec,’ Waldo advised. ‘Gently, gently-
the sensitive touch. Make your muscles work for you.’ 
He then started hand movements of definite pattern; the 
waldoes at the power tool reached up, switched on the power, 
and began gently, gracefully, to continue the machining of 
the casting. A mechanical hand reached down, adjusting a 
vernier, while the other increased the flow of oil cooling 
the cutting edge. ‘Rhythm, Alec, rhythm. No jerkiness, no 
unnecessary movement. Try to get in time with me.’
The casting took shape with deceptive rapidity, disclosed 
what it was - the bonnet piece for an ordinary three-way 
nurse. The chucks drew back from it; it dropped to the 
belt beneath, and another rough casting took its place. 
Waldo continued with unhurried skill, his finger motions 
within his waldoes exerting pressure which would need to 
be measured in fractions of ounces, but the two sets of 
waldoes, paralleled to him thousands of miles below, 
followed his motions accurately and with force appropriate 
to heavy work at hand.
Another casting landed on the belt -  several more. Jenkins, 
although not called upon to do any work in his proper person, 
tired under the strain of attempting to anticipate and match 
Waldo’s motions. Sweat dripped down his forehead, ran off 
his nose, accumulated on his chin. Between castings he 
suddenly withdrew his arms from the paralleled primaries. 
‘That’s enough,’ he announced.
‘One more, Alec. You are improving.’
‘No!’ He turned as if to walk off. Waldo made a sudden 
movement -  so sudden as to strain him, even in his weight-
free environment. One steel hand of the secondary waldoes 
lashed out, grasped Jenkins by the wrist.
‘Not so fast, Alec.’
‘Let go of me!’
‘Softly, Alec, softly. You’ll do as you are told, won’t you?’ 
The steel hand clamped down hard, twisted. Waldo had exerted 
all of two ounces of pressure.
Jenkins grunted. The one remaining spectator - one had left 
soon after the lesson started - said, ‘Oh, I say, Mr Jones!’
‘Let him obey, or fire him. You know the terms of my contract.’
There was a sudden cessation of stereo and sound, cut from 
the Earth end. It came back on a few seconds later. 
Jenkins was surly, but no longer recalcitrant. Waldo 
continued as if nothing had happened. ‘Once more, my dear Alec.’
When the repetition had been completed, Waldo directed, 
‘Twenty times, wearing the wrist and elbow lights with the 
chronanalyser in the picture. I shall expect the superposed 
strips to match, Alec.’ He cut off the larger screen without 
further words and turned to the watcher in the smaller screen. 
‘Same time tomorrow, McNye. Progress is satisfactory. In time 
we’ll turn this madhouse of yours into a modern plant.’ He 
cleared that screen without saying goodbye.
Waldo terminated the business interview somewhat hastily, 
because he had been following with one eye certain 
announcements on his own local information board. A craft 
was approaching his house. Nothing strange about that; 
tourists were forever approaching and being pushed away by 
his auto-guardian circuit. But this craft had the approach 
signal, was now clamping to his threshold flat. It was a 
broomstick, but he could not place the licence number. 
Florida licence. Whom did he know with a Florida licence?
He immediately realized that he knew no one who possessed 
his approach signal - that list was very short - and who 
could also reasonably be expected to sport a Florida 
licence. The suspicious defensiveness with which he 
regarded the entire world asserted itself; he cut in the 
circuit whereby he could control by means of his primary 
waldoes the strictly illegal but highly lethal inner 
defences of his home. The craft was opaqued; he did 
not like that.
A youngish man wormed his way out. Waldo looked him over. 
A stranger - face vaguely familiar perhaps. An ounce of 
pressure in the primaries and the face would cease to be 
a face, but Waldo’s actions were under cold cortical 
control; he held his fire. The man turned, as if to 
assist another passenger. Yes, there was another. 
Uncle Gus! - but the doddering old fool had brought a 
stranger with him. He knew better than that. He knew 
how Waldo felt about strangers!
Nevertheless, he released the outer lock of the 
reception room and let them in.
Gus Grimes snaked his way through the lock, pulling 
himself from one handrail to the next, and panting a 
little as he always did when forced to move weight 
free. Matter of diaphragm control, he told himself 
as he always did; can’t be the exertion. Stevens 
streaked in after him, displaying a groundhog’s 
harmless pride in handling himself well in space 
conditions. Grimes arrested himself just inside 
the reception room, grunted, and spoke to a 
mansized dummy waiting there. 
‘Hello, Waldo.’
The dummy turned its eyes and head slightly. 
‘Greetings, Uncle Gus. I do wish you would 
remember to phone before dropping in. I would 
have had your special dinner ready.’
‘Never mind. We may not be here that long. Waldo, 
this is my friend, Jimmie Stevens.’
The dummy faced Stevens. ‘How do you do, Mr Stevens,’
the voice said formally. ‘Welcome to Freehold.’
‘How do you do, Mr Jones,’ Stevens replied, and eyed 
the dummy curiously. It was really surprisingly 
lifelike; he had been taken in by it at first. 
A ‘reasonable facsimile’. Come to think of it, 
he had heard of this dummy. Except in vision 
screen few had seen Waldo in his own person. 
Those who had business at Wheelchair - ‘Freehold’, 
he must remember that - those who had business at 
Freehold heard a voice and saw this simulacrum.
‘But you must stay for dinner, Uncle Gus,’ Waldo 
continued. ‘You can’t run out on me like that; 
you don’t come often enough for that. I can stir 
something up.’
‘Maybe we will,’ Grimes admitted. ‘Don’t worry 
about the menu. You know me. I can eat a turtle 
with the shell.’
It had really been a bright idea, Stevens 
congratulated himself, to get Doc Grimes to bring 
him. Not here five minutes and Waldo was insisting 
on them staying for dinner. Good omen!
He had not noticed that Waldo had addressed the 
invitation to Grimes alone, and that it had been 
Grimes who had assumed the invitation to be for 
both of them.
‘Where are you, Waldo?’ Grimes continued. ‘In the 
lab?’ He made a tentative movement, as if to leave 
the reception room.
‘Oh, don’t bother,’ Waldo said hastily. ‘I’m sure 
you will be more comfortable where you are. Just a 
moment and I will put some spin on the room so that 
you may sit down.’
‘What’s eating you, Waldo?’ Grimes said testily. 
‘You know I don't insist on weight. And I don’t 
care for the company of your talking doll. I want 
to see you.’ 
Stevens was a little surprised by the older man’s 
insistence; he had thought it considerate of Waldo 
to offer to supply acceleration. Weightlessness put 
him a little on edge.
Waldo was silent for an uncomfortable period. At 
last he said frigidly, ‘Really, Uncle Gus, what 
you ask is out of the question. You must be aware 
of that.’
Grimes did not answer him. Instead, he took Stevens’s 
arm. ‘Come on, Jimmie. We’re leaving.’
‘Why, Doc! What’s the matter?’
‘Waldo wants to play games. I don’t play games.’
‘But-’
‘Ne’ mind! Come along. Waldo, open the lock.’
‘Uncle Gus!’
‘Yes, Waldo?’
‘Your guest - you vouch for him?’
‘Naturally, you dumb fool, else I wouldn’t have 
brought him.’
‘You will find me in my workshop. The way is open.’
Grimes turned to Stevens. ‘Come along, son.’
Stevens trailed after Grimes as one fish might 
follow another, while taking in with his eyes as 
much of Waldo’s fabulous house as he could see. 
The place was certainly unique, he conceded to 
himself - unlike anything he had ever seen. It 
completely lacked up-and-down orientation. Space 
craft, even space stations, although always in free 
fall with respect to any but internally impressed 
accelerations, invariably are designed with up-and-
down; the up-and-down axis of a ship is determined 
by the direction of its accelerating drive; the 
up-and down of a space station is determined by its 
centrifugal spin. Some few police and military craft 
use more than one axis of acceleration; their up-
and-down shifts, therefore, and their personnel, 
must be harnessed when the ship manoeuvres. Some 
space stations apply spin only to living quarters. 
Nevertheless, the rule is general; human beings are 
used to weight; all their artifacts have that 
assumption implicit in their construction - except 
Waldo’s house.
It is hard for a groundhog to dismiss the notion of 
weight. We seem to be born with an instinct which 
demands it. If one thinks of a vessel in a free orbit 
around the Earth, one is inclined to think of the 
direction towards the Earth as ‘down’, to think of 
oneself as standing or sitting on that wall of the 
ship, using it as a floor. Such a concept is 
completely mistaken. To a person inside a freely 
falling body there is no sensation of weight 
whatsoever and no direction of up-and-down, except 
that which derives from the gravitatioiial field of 
the vessel itself. As for the latter, neither 
Waldo’s house nor any space craft as yet built is 
massive enough to produce a field dense enough for 
the human body to notice it. Believe it or not, that 
is true. It takes a mass as gross as a good-sized 
planetoid to give the human body a feeling of weight.
It may be objected that a body in a free orbit around 
the Earth is not a freely falling body. The concept 
involved is human, Earth surface in type, and 
completely erroneous. Free flight, free fall, and 
free orbit are equivalent terms. The Moon falls 
constantly towards the Earth; the Earth falls 
constantly towards the Sun, but the sideways vector 
of their several motions prevents them from 
approaching their primaries. It is free fall 
nonetheless. Consult any ballistician or any 
astrophysicist.
Where there is free fall there is no sensation 
of weight. A gravitational field must be opposed 
to be detected by the human body.
Some of these considerations passed through 
Stevens’s mind as he handwalked his way to 
Waldo’s workshop. Waldo’s home had been constructed 
without any consideration being given to up-and-down. 
Furniture and apparatus were affixed to any wall; 
there was no ‘floor’. Decks and platforms were 
arranged at any convenient angle and of any size or 
shape, since they had nothing to do with standing or 
walking. Properly speaking, they were bulkheads and 
working surfaces rather than decks. Furthermore, 
equipment was not necessarily placed close to such 
surfaces; frequently it was more convenient to 
locate it with space all around it, held in place 
by light guys or slender stanchions.
The furniture and equipment was all odd in design 
and frequently odd in purpose. Most furniture on 
Earth is extremely rugged, and at least 90 per cent 
of it has a single purpose - to oppose, in one way 
or another, the acceleration of gravity. Most of 
the furniture in an Earth-surface - or subsurface -
house is stator machines intended to oppose 
gravity. All tables, chairs, beds, couches, 
clothing racks, shelves, drawers, et cetera, have 
that as their one purpose. All other furniture 
and equipment have it as a secondary purpose 
which strongly conditions design and strength.
The lack of need for the rugged strength necessary 
to all terrestrial equipment resulted in a 
fairylike grace in much of the equipment in 
Waldo’s house. Stored supplies, massive in 
themselves, could be retained in convenient order 
by compartmentation of eggshell-thin transparent 
plastic. Ponderous machinery, which on Earth would 
necessarily be heavily cased and supported, was 
here either open to the air or covered by gossamer-
like envelopes and held stationary by light elastic 
lines.
Everywhere were pairs of waldoes, large, small, and 
life-size, with vision pickups to match. It was 
evident that Waldo could make use of the compartments 
through which they were passing without stirring out 
of his easy chair -~ if he used an easy chair. The 
ubiquitous waldoes, the insubstantial quality of the 
furniture, and the casual use of all walls as work or 
storage surfaces, gave the place a madly fantastic air. 
Stevens felt as if he were caught in a Disney.
So far the rooms were not living quarters. Stevens 
wondered what Waldo’s private apartments could be like 
and tried to visualize what equipment would be 
appropriate. No chairs, no rugs, no bed. Pictures, 
perhaps. Something pretty clever in the way of indirect 
lighting, since the eyes might be turned in any 
direction. 
Communication instruments might be much the same. But 
what could a washstand be like? Or a water tumbler? 
A trap bottle for the last - or would any container be 
necessary at all? He could not decide and realized 
that even a competent engineer may he confused in 
the face of mechanical conditions strange to him.
What constitutes a good ashtray when there is no 
gravity to hold the debris in place? Did Waldo smoke? 
Suppose he played solitaire; how did he handle the 
cards? Magnetized cards, perhaps, and a magnetized 
playing surface.
‘In through here, Jim.’ Grimes steadied himself with 
one hand, gesturing with the other. Stevens slid 
through the manhole indicated. Before he had had time 
to look around he was startled by a menacing bass growl. 
He looked up; charging through the air straight at him 
was an enormous mastiff, lips drawn back, jaws slavering. 
Its front legs were spread out stiffly as if to balance 
in flight; its hind legs were drawn up under its lean 
belly. By voice and manner it announced clearly its 
intention of tearing the intruder into pieces, then 
swallowing the pieces.
‘Baldur!’ A voice cut through the air from some point 
beyond. The dog’s ferocity wilted, but it could not check 
its lunge. A waldo snaked out a good thirty feet and grasped 
it by the collar. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ the voice added. 
‘My friend was not expecting you.’
Grimes said, ‘Howdy, Baldur. How’s your conduct?’ 
The dog looked at him, whined, and wagged his tail. 
Stevens looked for the source of the commanding voice, 
found it.
The room was huge and spherical; floating in its centre 
was a fat man - Waldo.
He was dressed conventionally enough in shorts and singlet, 
except that his feet were bare. His hands and forearms were 
covered by metallic gauntlets - primary waldoes. He was softly 
fat, with double chin, dimples, smooth skin; he looked like a 
great, pink cherub, floating attendance on a saint. But the 
eyes were not cherubic, and the forehead and skull were those 
of a man. He looked at Stevens. ‘Permit me to introduce you to 
my pet,’ he said in a high, tired voice. ‘Give the paw, Baldur.’
The dog offered a foreleg, Stevens shook it gravely. ‘Let him 
smell you, please.’
The dog did so, as the waldo at his collar permitted him to 
come closer. Satisfied, the animal bestowed a wet kiss on 
Stevens’s wrist. Stevens noted that the dog’s eyes were 
surrounded by large circular patches of brown in contrast to 
his prevailing white, and mentally tagged it the Dog with Eyes 
as Large as Saucers, thinking of the tale of the soldier and 
the flint box. He made noises to it of ‘Good boy!’ and ‘That’s 
a nice old fellow!’ while Waldo looked on with faint distaste.
‘Heel, sir!’ Waldo commanded when the ceremony was complete. 
The dog turned in mid air, braced a foot against Stevens’s thigh, 
and shoved, projecting himself in the direction of his master. 
Stevens was forced to steady himself by clutching at a handgrip. 
Grimes shoved himself away from the manhole and arrested his 
flight on a stanchion near their host. Stevens followed him.
Waldo looked him over slowly. His manner was not overtly rude, 
but was somehow, to Stevens, faintly annoying. He felt a slow 
flush spreading out from his neck; to inhibit it he gave his 
attention to the room around him. The space was commodious, 
yet gave the impression of being cluttered because of the 
assemblage of, well, junk which surrounded Waldo. 
There were half a dozen vision receptors of various sizes 
around him at different angles, all normal to his line of 
sight. Three of them had pickups to match. There were control 
panels of several sorts, some of which seemed obvious enough 
in their purpose - one for lighting, which was quite 
complicated, with little ruby tell-tales for each circuit, 
one which was the keyboard of a voder, a multiplex television 
control panel, a board which seemed to be power relays, 
although its design was unusual. But there were at least half 
a dozen which stumped Stevens completely.
There were several pairs of waldoes growing out of a steel ring 
which surrounded the working space. Two pairs, mere monkey 
fists in size, were equipped with extensors. It had been one 
of these which had shot out to grab Baldur by his collar. 
There were waldoes rigged near the spherical wall, too, 
including one pair so huge that Stevens could not conceive 
of a use for it. 
Extended, each hand spread quite six feet from little finger 
tip to thumb tip.
There were books in plenty on the wall, but no bookshelves. 
They seemed to grow from the wall like so many cabbages.
It puzzled Stevens momentarily, but he inferred - correctly 
it turned out later - that a small magnet fastened to the 
binding did the trick.
The arrangement of lighting was novel, complex, automatic, 
and convenient for Waldo. But it was not so convenient for 
anyone else in the room. The lighting was, of course, 
indirect; but, furthermore, it was subtly controlled, so 
that none of the lighting came from the direction in which 
Waldo’s head was turned. There was no glare - for Waldo. 
Since the lights behind his head burned brightly in order 
to provide more illumination for whatever he happened to be 
looking at, there was glare aplenty for anyone else. An 
electric eye circuit, obviously. Stevens found himself 
wondering just how simple such a circuit could be made.
Grimes complained about it. ‘Damn it, Waldo; get those 
lights under control. You’ll give us headaches.’
‘Sorry, Uncle Gus.’ He withdrew his right hand from its 
gauntlet and placed his fingers over one of the control 
panels. The glare stopped. Light now came from whatever 
direction none of them happened to be looking, and much 
more brightly, since the area source of illumination was 
much reduced. Lights rippled across the walls in pleasant 
patterns. Stevens tried to follow the ripples, a difficult 
matter, since the setup was made not to be seen. He found 
that he could do so by rolling his eyes without moving 
his head. It was movement of the head which controlled the 
lights; movement of an eyeball was a little too much for it.
‘Well, Mr Stevens, do you find my house interesting?’ 
Waldo was smiling at him with faint superciliousness.
‘Oh - quite! Quite! I believe that it is the most remarkable 
place I have ever been in.’
‘And what do you find remarkable about it?’
‘Well - the lack of definite orientation, I believe. That and
the remarkable mechanical novelties. I suppose I am a bit of 
a groundlubber, but I keep expecting a floor underfoot and a
ceiling overhead.’
‘Mere matters of functional designs, Mr Stevens; the 
conditions under which I live are unique; therefore, my house 
is unique. The novelty you speak of consists mainly in the
elimination of unnecessary parts and the addition of new 
conveniences.
‘To tell the truth, the most interesting thing I have seen 
yet is not a part of the house at all.’
‘Really? What is it, pray?’
‘Your dog, Baldur.’ The dog looked around at the mention of 
his name. ‘I’ve never before met a dog who could handle 
himself in free flight.’
Waldo smiled; for the first time his smile seemed gentle and 
warm. 
‘Yes, Baldur is quite an acrobat. He’s been at it since he was 
a puppy.’ He reached out and roughed the dog’s cars, showing 
momentarily his extreme weakness, for the gesture had none of 
the strength appropriate to the size of the brute. The finger 
motions were flaccid, barely sufficient to disturb the coarse 
fur and to displace the great ears. But he seemed unaware, or 
unconcerned, by the disclosure. Turning back to Stevens, he 
added, ‘But if Baldur amuses you, you must see Ariel.’
‘Ariel?’
Instead of replying, Waldo touched the keyboard of the voder, 
producing a musical whistling pattern of three notes. There 
was a rustling near the wall of the room ‘above’ them; a tiny 
yellow shape shot towards them - a canary. It sailed through 
the air with wings folded, bullet fashion. A foot or so 
away from Waldo it spread its wings, cupping the air, beat 
them a few times with tail down and spread, and came to a 
dead stop, hovering in the air with folded wings. Not quite 
a dead stop, perhaps, for it drifted slowly, came within an 
inch of Waldo’s shoulder, let down its landing gear, and dug 
its claws into his singlet.
Waldo reached up and stroked it with a fingertip. It preened.
‘No earth-hatched bird can learn to fly in that fashion,’ he 
stated. ‘I know. I lost half a dozen before I was sure that 
they were incapable of making the readjustment. Too much 
thalamus.’
‘What happens to them?’
‘In a man you would call it acute anxiety psychosis. They try to 
fly; their own prime skill leads them to disaster. Naturally, 
everything they do is wrong and they don’t understand it.
Presently they quit trying; a little later they die. Of a 
broken heart, one might say, poetically.’ He smiled thinly. 
‘But Ariel is a genius among birds. He came here as an egg; 
he invented, unassisted, a whole new school of flying.’ 
He reached up a finger, offering the bird a new perch, which 
it accepted.
‘That’s enough, Ariel. Fly away home.’
The bird started the ‘Bell Song’ from Lakmé.
He shook it gently. ‘No, Ariel. Go to bed.’
The canary lifted its feet clear of the finger, floated for 
an instant, then beat its wings savagely for a second or two 
to set course and pick up speed, and bulleted away whence he 
bad come, wings folded, feet streamlined under.
‘Jimmie’s got something he wants to talk with you about,’ 
Grimes commenced.
‘Delighted,’ Waldo answered lazily, ‘but shan’t we dine 
first? Have you an appetite, sir?’
Waldo full, Stevens decided, might be easier to cope with than 
Waldo empty. Besides, his own midsection informed him that 
wrestling with a calorie or two might be pleasant. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Excellent.’ They were served.
Stevens was never able to decide whether Waldo had prepared the 
meal by means of his many namesakes, or whether servants somewhere 
out of sight had done the actual work. Modern food-preparation 
methods being what they were, Waldo could have done it alone; 
he, Stevens, batched it with no difficulty, and so did Gus. 
But he made a mental note to ask Doc Grimes at the first 
opportunity what resident staff, if any, Waldo employed. 
He never remembered to do so.
The dinner arrived in a small food chest, propelled to their 
midst at the end of a long, telescoping, pneumatic tube. 
It stopped with a soft sigh and held its position. Stevens 
paid little attention to the food itself - it was adequate and 
tasty, he knew - for his attention was held by the dishes and 
serving methods. Waldo let his own steak float in front of him, 
cut bites from it with curved surgical shears, and conveyed 
them to his mouth by means of dainty tongs. He made hard work of 
chewing.
‘You can’t get good steaks any more,’ he remarked. ‘This one is 
tough. God knows I pay enough - and complain enough.’
Stevens did not answer. He thought his own steak had been 
tenderized too much; it almost fell apart. He was managing it 
with knife and fork, but the knife was superfluous. It appeared 
that Waldo did not expect his guests to make use of his own 
admittedly superior methods and utensils. Stevens ate from a 
platter clamped to his thighs, making a lap for it after 
Grimes’s example by squatting in mid air. The platter itself had 
been thoughtfully provided with sharp little prongs on its service 
side.
Liquids were served in small flexible skins, equipped with nipples. 
Think of a baby’s plastic nursing bottle.
The food chest took the utensils away with a dolorous insufflation. 
‘Will you smoke, sir?’
‘Thank you.’ He saw what a weight-free ashtray necessarily should be: 
a long tube with a bell-shaped receptacle on its end. A slight 
suction in the tube, and ashes knocked into the bell were swept 
away, out of sight and mind.
‘About that matter-’ Grimes commenced again. ‘Jimmie here is Chief 
Engineer for North American Power-Air.’
‘What?’ Waldo straightened himself, became rigid; his chest rose and 
fell. He ignored Stevens entirely. ‘Uncle Gus, do you mean to say 
that you have introduced an officer of that company into my - home?’
‘Don’t get your dander up. Relax. Damn it, I’ve warned you not to 
do anything to raise your blood pressure.’ Grimes propelled himself 
closer to his host and took him by the wrist in the age-old fashion 
of a physician counting pulse. ‘Breathe slower. Whatcha trying to do? 
Go on an oxygen jag?’
Waldo tried to shake himself loose. It was a rather pitiful gesture; 
the old man had ten times his strength. ‘Uncle Gus, you- 
‘Shut up!’
The three maintained a silence for several minutes, uncomfortable for 
at least two of them. Grimes did not seem to mind it.
‘There,’ he said at last. ‘That’s better. Now keep your shirt on and 
listen to me. Jimmie is a nice kid, and he has never done anything 
to you. And he has behaved himself while he’s been here. You’ve got 
no right to be rude to him, no matter who he works for. Matter of 
fact, you owe him an apology.’
‘Oh, really now, Doc,’ Stevens protested. ‘I’m afraid I have been 
here somewhat under false colours. I’m sorry, Mr Jones. I didn’t 
intend it to be that way. I tried to explain when we arrived.’
Waldo’s face was hard to read. He was evidently trying hard to 
control himself. ‘Not at all, Mr Stevens. I am sorry that I 
showed temper. It is perfectly true that I should not transfer to 
you any animus I feel for your employers though God knows I bear 
no love for them.’ 
‘I know it. Nevertheless, I am sorry to hear you say it.’
‘I was cheated, do you understand? Cheated - by as rotten a piece 
of quasi-legal chicanery as has ever-’
‘Easy, Waldo!’
‘Sorry, Uncle Gus.’ He continued, his voice less shrill. 
‘You know of the so-called Hathaway patents?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘“So-called” is putting it mildly. The man was a mere machinist. 
Those patents are mine.
Waldo’s version, as he proceeded to give it, was reasonably 
factual, Stevens felt, but quite biased and unreasonable. Perhaps 
Hathaway had been working, as Waldo alleged, simply as a servant - 
a hired artisan, but there was nothing to prove it, no contract, 
no papers of any sort. The man had filed certain patents, the 
only ones he had ever filed and admittedly Waldo-ish in their 
cleverness. Hathaway had then promptly died, and his heirs, 
through their attorneys, had sold the patents to a firm which 
had been dickering with Hathaway.
Waldo alleged that this firm had put Hathaway up to stealing from 
him, had caused him to hire himself out to Waldo for that purpose. 
But the firm was defunct; its assets had been sold to North 
American Power-Air. NAPA had offered a settlement; Waldo had 
chosen to sue. The suit went against him.
Even if Waldo were right, Stevens could not see any means by which the 
directors of NAPA could, legally, grant him any relief. The officers 
of a corporation are trustees for other
people’s money; if the directors of NAPA should attempt to give 
away property which had been adjudicated as belonging to the 
corporation, any stockholder could enjoin them before the act or 
recover from them personally after the act.
At least so Stevens thought. But he was no lawyer, he admitted to 
himself. The important point was that he needed Waldo’s services, 
whereas Waldo held a bitter grudge against the firm he worked for.
He was forced to admit that it did not look as if Doc Grimes’s 
presence was enough to turn the trick. 
‘All that happened before my time,’ he began, ‘and naturally I 
know very little about it. I’m awfully sorry it happened. It’s 
pretty uncomfortable for me, for right now I find myself in a 
position where I need your services very badly indeed.’
Waldo did not seem displeased with the idea. ‘So? How does this 
come about?’
Stevens explained to him in some detail the trouble they had been 
having with the deKalb receptors. Waldo listened attentively. 
When Stevens had concluded he said, ‘Yes, that is much the same 
story your Mr Gleason had to tell. Of course, as a technical 
man you have given a much more coherent picture than that money 
manipulator was capable of giving. But why do you come to me? 
I do not specialize in radiation engineering, nor do I have any 
degrees from fancy institutions.~
‘I come to you,’ Stevens said seriously, ‘for the same reason 
everybody else comes to you when they are really stuck with an 
engineering problem. So far as I know, you have an unbroken 
record of solving any problem you cared to tackle. Your record 
reminds me of another man-’
‘Who?’ Waldo’s tone was suddenly sharp.
‘Edison. He did not bother with degrees either, but he solved 
all the hard problems of his day.’
‘Oh, Edison- I thought you were speaking of a contemporary. 
No doubt he was all right in his day,’ he added with overt 
generosity.
‘I was not comparing him to you, I was simply recalling that 
Edison was reputed to prefer hard problems to easy ones. 
I’ve heard the same about you; I had hopes that this problem 
might be hard enough to interest you.~
‘It is mildly interesting,’ Waldo conceded. ‘A little out of 
my line, but interesting. I must say, however, that I am 
surprised to hear you, an executive of North American 
Power-Air, express such a high opinion of my talents. One 
would think that, if the opinion were sincere, it would not 
have been difficult to convince your firm of my indisputable 
handiwork in the matter of the so-called Hathway patents.'
Really, thought Stevens, the man is impossible. A mind like 
a weasel. Aloud, he said, ‘I suppose the matter was handled 
by the business management and the law staff. They would 
hardly be equipped to distinguish between routine 
engineering and inspired design.’
The answer seemed to mollify Waldo. He asked, ‘What does 
your own research staff say about the problem?’
Stevens looked wry. ‘Nothing helpful. Dr Rambeau does not 
really seem to believe the data I bring him. He says it’s 
impossible, but it makes him unhappy. I really believe that 
he has been living on aspirin and nembutal for a good many 
weeks.’
‘Rambeau,’ Waldo said slowly. ‘I recall the man. A mediocre 
mind. All memory and no intuition. I don’t think I would 
feel discouraged simply because Rambeau is puzzled.’
‘You really feel that there is some hope?’
‘It should not be too difficult. I had already given the 
matter some thought, after Mr Gleason’s phone call. You 
have given me additional data, and I think I see at least 
two new lines of approach which may prove fruitful. In 
any case, there is always some approach - the correct one.’
‘Does that mean you will accept?’ Stevens demanded, nervous 
with relief.
‘Accept?’ Waldo’s eyebrows climbed up. ‘My dear sir, what in 
the world are you talking about? We were simply indulging in 
social conversation. I would not help your company under 
any circumstances whatsoever. I hope to see your firm 
destroyed utterly, bankrupt, and ruined. This may well be 
the occasion.
Stevens fought to keep control of himself. Tricked! The fat 
slob had simply been playing with him, leading him on. There
was no decency in him. In careful tones he continued, 
‘I do not ask that you have any mercy on North American, 
Mr Jones, but I appeal to your sense of duty. There is 
public interest involved. Millions of people are vitally 
dependent on the service we provide. Don’t you see that the 
service must continue, regardless of you or me?’
Waldo pursed his lips. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am afraid that does 
not affect me. The welfare of those nameless swarms of Earth 
crawlers is, I fear, not my concern. I have done more for 
them already than there was any need to do. 
They hardly deserve help. Left to their own devices, most of 
them would sink back to caves and stone axes. Did you ever 
see a performing ape, Mr Stevens, dressed in a man’s clothcs 
and cutting capers on roller skates? Let me leave you with 
this thought: I am not a roller-skate mechanic for apes.’
If I stick around here much longer, Stevens advised himself, 
there will be hell to pay. Aloud, he said, ‘I take it that 
is your last word?’
‘You may so take it. Good day, sir. I enjoyed your visit. 
Thank you.’
‘Goodbye. Thanks for the dinner.’
‘Not at all.’
As Stevens turned away and prepared to shove himself towards 
the exit, Grimes called after him, ‘Jimmie, wait for me in 
the reception room.
As soon as Stevens was out of earshot, Grimes turned to Waldo 
and looked him up and down. ‘Waldo,’ he said slowly, ‘I always 
did know that you were one of the meanest, orneriest men 
alive, but-’
‘Your compliments don’t faze me, Uncle Gus.’
‘Shut up and listen to me. As I was saying, I knew you were too 
rotten selfish to live with, but this is the first time I ever 
knew you to be a fourflusher to boot.’
‘What do you mean by that? Explain yourself.’
‘Shucks! You haven’t any more idea of how to crack the problem 
that boy is up against than I have. You traded on your 
reputation as a miracle man just to make him unhappy. 
Why, you cheap tinhorn bluffer, if you-’
‘Stop it!’
‘Go ahead,’ Grimes said quietly. ‘Run up your blood pressure. 
I won’t interfere with you. The sooner you blow a gasket the better.’
Waldo calmed down. ‘Uncle Gus - what makes you think I was blufiing?’
‘Because I know you. If you had felt able to deliver the goods, 
you would have looked the situation over and worked out a plan to get 
NAPA by the short hair, through having something they had to have. 
That way you would have proved your revenge.'
Waldo shook his head. ‘You underestimate the intensity of my feeling 
in the matter.’
‘I do like hell! I hadn’t finished. About that sweet little talk you 
gave him concerning your responsibility to the race. You’ve got a 
head on you. You know damned well, and so do I, that of all people 
you can least afford to have anything serious happen to the setup 
down on Earth. That means you don’t see any way to prevent it.
‘Why, what do you mean? I have no interest in such troubles; I’m 
independent of such things. You know me better than that.’
‘Independent, eh? Who mined the steel in these walls? Who raised 
that steer you dined on tonight? You’re as independent as a queen 
bee, and about as helpless.’
Waldo looked startled. He recovered himself and answered, ‘Oh no, 
Uncle Gus. I really am independent. Why, I have supplies here for years.’
‘How many years?’
‘Why. . . uh, five, about.’
‘And then what? You may live another fifty - if you have regular supply 
service. How do you prefer to die - starvation or thirst?’
‘Water is no problem,’ Waldo said thoughtfully; ‘as for supplies, I 
suppose I could use hydroponics a little more and stock up with some 
meat animals-’
Grimes cut him short with a nasty laugh. ‘Proved my point. You don’t 
know how to avert it, so you are figuring some way to save your own 
skin. I know you. You wouldn’t talk about starting a truck garden 
if you knew the answers.’
Waldo looked at him thoughtfully. ‘That’s not entirely true. I don’t 
know the solution, but I do have some ideas about it. I’ll bet you a 
half interest in hell that I can crack it. Now that you have called 
my attention to it, I must admit I am rather tied in with the economic 
system down below, and’ - he smiled faintly - ‘I was never one to 
neglect my own interests. Just a moment - I’ll call your friend.’
‘Not so fast. I came along for another reason, besides introducing 
Jimmie to you. It can’t be just any solution; it’s got to be a 
particular solution.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s got to be a solution that will do away with the need for 
filling up the air with radiant energy.’
‘Oh, that. See here, Uncle Gus, I know how interested you are in your 
theory, and I’ve never disputed the possibility that you may be right, 
but you can’t expect me to mix that into another and very difficult 
problem.’
‘Take another look. You’re in this for self-interest. Suppose 
everybody was in the shape you are in.’
‘You mean my physical condition?’
‘I mean just that. I know you don’t like to talk about it, but
we blamed well need to. If everybody was as weak as you are - presto! 
No coffee and cakes for Waldo. And that’s just what I see coming. 
You’re the only man I know of who can appreclate what it means.’
‘It seems fantastic.’
‘It is. But the signs are there for anybody to read who wants to. 
Epidemic myasthenia, not necessarily acute, but enough to raise hell 
with our mechanical civilization. Enough to play hob with your 
supply lines. I’ve been collating my data since I saw you last and 
drawing some curves. You should see ‘em’
‘Did you bring them?’
‘No, but I’ll send ‘em up. In the meantime, you can take my word 
for it.’ He waited. ‘Well, how about it?’
‘I’ll accept it as a tentative working hypothesis,’ Waldo said slowly, 
‘until I see your figures. I shall probably want you to conduct some 
further research for me, on the ground - if your data is what you say 
it is.’
‘Fair enough. G’bye.’ Grimes kicked the air a couple of times as he 
absent-mindedly tried to walk.
Stevens’s frame of mind as he waited for Grimes is better left 
undescribed. The mildest thought that passed through his mind was a 
plaintive one about the things a man had to put up with to hold down 
what seemed like a simple job of engineering. Well, he wouldn’t have 
the job very long. But he decided not to resign - he’d wait until they 
fired him; he wouldn’t run out.
But he would damn well get that vacation before he looked for another 
job.
He spent several minutes wishing that Waldo were strong enough for him 
to be able to take a poke at him. Or kick him in the belly - that would 
be more fun!
He was startled when the dummy suddenly came to life and callcd him by 
name. ‘Oh, Mr Stevens.’
‘Huh? Yes?’
‘I have decided to accept the commission. My attorneys will arrange 
the details with your business office.’
He was too surprised to answer for a couple of seconds; when he did 
so the dummy had already gone dead. He waited impatiently for Grimes 
to show up.
‘Doc!’ he said, when the old man swam into view. ‘What got into him? 
How did you do it?’
‘He thought it over and reconsidered,’ Grimes said succinctly. ‘Let’s 
get going.’
Stevens dropped Dr Augustus Grimes at the doctor’s home, then 
proceeded to his office. He had no more than parked his car and 
entered the tunnel leading towards the zone plant when he ran into his 
assistant. McLcod seemed a little out of breath. ‘Gee, chief,’ he said, 
‘I hoped that was you. I’ve had ‘em watching for you. I need to see you.’
‘What’s busted now?’ Stevens demanded apprehensively.. ‘One of the cities?’
‘No. What made you think so?’
‘Go ahead with your story.’
‘So far as I know ground power is humming sweet as can be. No trouble 
with the cities. What I had on my mind is this: I fixed my heap.’
‘Huh? You mean you fixed the ship you crashed in?’
‘It wasn’t exactly a crash. I had plenty of power in the reserve banks; 
when reception cut off, I switched to emergency and landed her.’
‘But you fixed it? Was it the deKalbs? Or something else?’
‘It was the deKalbs all right. And they’re fixed. But I didn’t exactly 
do it myself. I got it done. You see-’
‘What was the matter with them?’
‘I don’t know exactly. You see I decided that there was no point in 
hiring another skycar and maybe having another forced landing on the way 
home. Besides, it was my own crate I was flying, and I didn’t want to 
dismantle her just to get the deKalbs out and have her spread out all 
over the countryside. So I hired a crawler, with the idea of taking her 
back all in one piece. I struck a deal with a guy who had a twelve-ton 
semitractor combination, and we-’
‘For criminy’s sake, make it march! What happened?’
‘I’m trying to tell you. We pushed on into Pennsylvania and we were making 
pretty fair time when the crawler broke down. The right lead wheel, 
ahead of the treads. Honest to goodness, Jim, those roads are something fierce.’
‘Never mind that. Why waste taxes on roads when ninety per cent of the 
traffic is in the air? You messed up a wheel. So then what?’
‘Just the same, those roads are a disgrace,’ McLeod maintained stubbornly. 
‘I was brought up in that part of the country. When I was a kid the road 
we were on was six lanes wide and smooth as a baby’s fanny. They ought to be 
kept up; we might need ‘em someday.’ Seeing the look in his senior’s eye, 
he went on hastily: ‘The driver mugged in with his home office, and they 
promised to send a repair car out from the next town. All told, it would 
take three, four hours - maybe more. Well, we were laid up in the country 
I grew up in. I says to myself, “McLeod, this is a wonderful chance to 
return to the scenes of your childhood and the room where the sun came 
peeping in the morn.” Figuratively speaking, of course. Matter of fact, 
our house didn’t have any windows.’
‘I don’t care if you were raised in a barrel!’
'Temper ... temper-’ McLeod said imperturbably. ‘I’m telling you this so 
you will understand what happened. But you aren’t going to like it.’
‘I don’t like it now.
‘You’ll like it less. I climbed down Out of the cab and took a look 
around. We were about five miles from my home town - too far for me 
to want to walk it. But I thought I recognized a clump of trees on 
the brow of a little rise maybe a quarter of a mile off the road, 
so I walked over to see. I was right; just over the rise was the 
cabin where Gramps Schneider used to live.’
‘Gramps Snyder?’
‘Not Snyder - Schneider. Old boy we kids used to be friendly with. 
Ninety years older than anybody. I figured he was dead, but it 
wouldn’t hurt any to walk down and see. He wasn’t. “Hello, Gramps,” 
I said. “Come in, Hugh Donald,” he said. “Wipe the feet on the mat.”
‘I came in and sat down. He was fussing with something simmering in 
a stewpan on his base-burner. I asked him what it was. “For morning 
aches,” he said. Gramps isn’t exactly a hex doctor.’
‘Huh?’
‘I mean he doesn’t make a living by it. He raises a few chickens and 
garden truck, and some of the Plain People -House Amish, mostly - give 
him pies and things. But he knows a lot about herbs and such.
‘Presently he stopped and cut me a slice of shoo-fly pie. I told 
him danke. He said, “You’ve been up-growing, Hugh Donald,’ and asked 
me how I was doing in school. I told him I was doing pretty well. 
He looked at me again and said, “But you have trouble fretting you.” 
It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. While I finished the pie I 
found myself trying to tell him what kind of troubles I had.
‘It wasn’t easy. I don’t suppose Gramps has ever been off the ground 
in his life. And modern radiation theory isn’t something you can 
explain in words of one syllable. I was getting more and more tangled 
up when he stood up, put on his hat and said, “We will see this car 
you speak about.”
‘We walked over to the highway. The repair gang had arrived, but the 
crawler wasn’t ready yet. I helped Gramps up on to the platform and 
we got into my bus. I showed him the deKalbs and tried to explain 
what they did - or rather what they were supposed to do. Mind you, I 
was just killing time.
‘He pointed to the sheaf of antennae and asked, “These fingers - they 
reach out for the power?” It was as good an explanation as any, so I 
let it ride. He said, “I understand,” and pulled a piece of chalk out 
of his trousers, and began drawing lines on each antenna, from front 
to back. I walked up front to see how the repair crew were doing. 
After a bit Gramps joined me. “Hugh Donald,” he says, “the fingers -
now they will make.”
‘I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I thanked him plenty. The 
crawler was ready to go; we said goodbye, and he walked back towards 
his shack. I went back to my car, and took a look in, just in case. 
I didn’t think he could hurt anything, but I wanted to be sure. 
Just for the ducks of it I tried out the receptors. They worked!’
‘What!’ put in Stevens. ‘You don’t mean to stand there and tell me 
an old witch doctor fixed your deKalbs.’
‘Not witch doctor - hex doctor. But you get the idea.’
Stevens shook his head. ‘It’s simply a coincidence. Sometimes they 
come back into order as spontaneously as they go out.’
‘That’s what you think. Not this one. I’ve just been preparing you 
for the shock you’re going to get. Come take a look.’
‘What do you mean? Where?’
‘In the inner hangar.’ While they walked to where McLeod had left 
his broomstick, he continued, ‘I wrote out a credit for the crawler 
pilot and flew back. I haven’t spoken to anyone else about it. I’ve 
been biting my nails down to my elbows waiting for you to show up.’
The skycar seemed quite ordinary. Stevens examined the deKalbs and 
saw some faint chalk marks on their metal sides - nothing else 
unusual. 
‘Watch while I cut in reception,’ McLeod told him.
Stevens waited, heard the faint hum as the circuits became activized, 
and looked.
The antennae of the deKalbs, each a rigid pencil of metal,were bending, 
flexing, writhing like a cluster of worms. They were reaching out, like 
fingers.
Stevens remained squatting down by the deKalbs, watching their 
outrageous motion. McLeod left the control saddle, came back, and 
joined him. 
‘Well, chief,’ he demanded, ‘tell me about it. Whaduh yuh make of it?’
‘Got a cigarette?’
‘What are those things sticking Out of your pocket?’
‘Oh! Yeah - sure.’ Stevens took one out, lighted it, and burned it 
halfway down, unevenly, with two long drags.
‘Go on,’ McLeod urged. ‘Give us a tell. What makes it do that?’
‘Well,’ Stevens said slowly, ‘I can think of three things to do next-’
‘Yeah?’
“The first is to fire Dr Rambeau and give his job to Gramps Schneider.’
‘That’s a good idea in any case.'
‘The second is to just wait here quietly until the boys with the 
strait-jackets show up to take us home.’
‘And what’s the third?’
‘The third,’ Stevens said savagely, ‘is to take this damned heap out 
and sink it in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean and pretend 
like it never happened!’
A mechanic stuck his head in the door of the car. ‘Oh, Dr Stevens--’
‘Get out of here!’
The head hastily withdrew; thc voice picked up in aggrieved tones. 
‘Message from the head office.’
Stevens got up, went to the operator’s saddle, cleared the board, 
then assured himself that the antennae had ceased their disturbing 
movements. They had; in fact, they appeared so beautifully straight 
and rigid that he was again tempted to doubt the correctness of his 
own senses. He climbed out to the floor of the hangar, McLeod behind 
him. 
‘Sorry to have blasted at you, Whitey,’ he said to the workman in 
placating tones. ‘What is the message?’
‘Mr Gleason would like for you to come into his office as soon as 
you can.’
‘I will at once. And, Whitey, I’ve a job for you.’
‘Yeah?’
‘This heap here - seal up its doors and don’t let anybody monkey with 
it. Then have it dragged, dragged, mind you; don’t try to start it - 
have it dragged over into the main lab.’
‘OK.’
Stevens started away; McLeod stopped him. ‘What do I go home in?’
‘Oh yes, it’s your personal property, isn’t it? Tell you what, Mac - 
the company needs it. Make out a purchase order and I’ll sign it.’
‘Weeell, now - I don’t rightly know as I want to sell it. It might 
be the only job in the country working properly before long.’
‘Don’t be silly. If the others play out, it won’t do you any good 
to have the only one in working order. Power will be shut down.’
‘I suppose there’s that,’ McLeod conceded. ‘Still,’ he said, 
brightening visibly, ‘a crate like that, with its special talents, 
ought to be worth a good deal more than list. You couldn’t just go 
out and buy one.’
‘Mac,’ said Stevens, ‘you’ve got avarice in your heart and thievery 
in your fingertips. How much do you want for it?’
‘Suppose we say twice the list price, new. That’s letting you off easy.'
‘I happen to know you bought that job at a discount. But go ahead. 
Either the company can stand it, or it won’t make much difference 
in the bankruptcy.’
Gleason looked up as Stevens came in. ‘Oh, there you are, Jim. 
You seemed to have pulled a miracle with our friend Waldo the 
Great. Nice work.’
‘How much did he stick us for?’
‘Just his usual contract. Of course his usual contract is a bit 
like robbery with violence. But it will be worth it if he is 
successful. And it’s on a straight contingent basis. He must 
feel pretty sure of himself. They say he’s never lost a 
contingent fee in his life. Tell me - what is he like? Did you 
really get into his house?’
‘I did. And I’ll tell you about it - sometime. Right now another 
matter has come up which has me talking to myself. You ought 
to hear about it at once.
‘So? Go ahead.’
Stevens opened his mouth, closed it again, and realized that it 
had to be seen to be believed. ‘Say, could you come with me to 
the main lab? I’ve got something to show you.’
‘Certainly.’
Gleason was not as perturbed by the squirming metal rods as 
Stevens had been. He was surprised, but not upset. The truth 
of the matter is that he lacked the necessary technical 
background to receive the full emotional impact of the 
inescapable implications of the phenomenon. 
‘That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?’ he said quietly.
‘Unusual! Look, chief, if the sun rose in the west, what would 
you think?’
‘I think I would call the observatory and ask them why.’
‘Well, all I can say is that I would a whole lot rather that 
the sun rose in the west than to have this happen.’
‘I admit it is pretty disconcerting,’ Gleason agreed. 
‘I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anything like it. What is 
Dr Rambeau’s opinion?’
‘He hasn’t seen it.
‘Then perhaps we had better send for him. He may not have 
gone home for the night as yet.’
‘Why not show it to Waldo instead?’
‘We will. But Dr Rambeau is entitled to see it first. After 
all, it’s his bailiwick, and I’m afraid the poor fellow’s nose 
is pretty well out of joint as it is. I don’t want to go over 
his head.’
Stevens felt a sudden flood of intuition. ‘Just a second, chief. 
You’re right, but if it’s all the same to you I would rather that 
you showed it to him than for me to do it.’
‘Why so, Jimmie? You can explain it to him.’
‘I can’t explain a damn thing to him I haven’t already told you. 
And for the next few hours I’m going to be very, very busy indeed.’
Gleason looked him over, shrugged his shoulders, and said mildly, 
‘Very well, Jim, if you prefer it that way.’
Waldo was quite busy, and therefore happy. He would never have 
admitted - he did not admit even to himself, that there were 
certain drawbacks to his self-imposed withdrawal from the world 
and that chief among these was boredom. He had never had much 
opportunity to enjoy the time-consuming delights of social 
intercourse; he honestly believed that the smooth apes had nothing 
to offer him in the way of companionship. Nevertheless, the pleasure 
of the solitary intellectual life can pall.
He repeatedly urged Uncle Gus to make his permanent home in Freehold, 
but he told himself that it was a desire to take care of the old 
man which motivated him. True - he enjoyed arguing with Grimes, but 
he was not aware how much those arguments meant to him. The truth of 
the matter was that Grimes was the only one of the human race who 
treated him entirely as another human and an equal - and Waldo wallowed 
in it, completely unconscious that the pleasure he felt in the old 
man’s company was the commonest and most precious of all human 
pleasures. But at present he was happy in the only way he knew 
how to be happy - working.
There were two problems: that of Stevens and that of Grimes. Required: 
a single solution which would satisfy each of them. There were three 
stages to each problem; first, to satisfy himself that the problems 
really did exist, that the situations were in fact as they had been 
reported to him verbally; second, to undertake such research as the 
preliminary data suggested; and third, when he felt that his data was 
complete, to invent a solution.
‘Invent’, not ‘find’. Dr Rambeau might have said ‘find’, or ‘search for’. 
To Rambeau the universe was an inexorably ordered cosmos, ruled by 
unvarying law. To Waldo the universe was the enemy, which he strove to 
force to submmiit to his will. They might have been speaking of the 
same thing, but their approaches were different.
There was much to be done. Stevens had supplied him with a mass of data, 
both on the theoretical nature of the radiated power system and the 
deKalb receptors which were the keystone of the system, and also on the 
various cases of erratic performance of which they had lately been 
guilty. Waldo had not given serious attention to power radiation up to 
this time, simply because he had not needed to. He found it interesting 
but comparatively simple. Several improvements suggested themselves to 
his mind. That standing wave, for example, which was the main factor in 
the co-axial beam - the efficiency of reception could be increased 
considerably by sending a message back over it which would 
automatically correct the aiming of the beam. Power delivery to moving 
vehicles could be made nearly as efficient as the power reception to 
stationary receivers.
Not that such an idea was important at present. Later, when he had 
solved the problem at hand, he intended to make NAPA pay through the 
nose for the idea; or perhaps it would be more amusing to compete with 
them. He wondered when their basic patents ran out - must look it up.
Despite inefficiencies the deKalb receptors should work every time, 
all the time, without failure. He went happily about finding out why 
they did not.
He had suspected some obvious - obvious to him - defect in manufacture. 
But the inoperative deKalbs which Stevens had delivered to him refused 
to give up their secret. He X-rayed them, measured them with micrometer 
and interferometer, subjected them to all the usual tests and some 
that were quite unusual and peculiarly Waldo-ish. They would not perform.
He built a deKalb in his shop, using one of the inoperative ones as a 
model and using the reworked metal of another of the same design, also 
inoperative, as the raw material, he used his finest scanners to see 
with and his smallest waldoes -tiny pixy hands, an inch across - for 
manipulation in the final stages. He created a deKalb which was as 
nearly identical with its model as technology and incredible skill 
could produce.
It worked beautifully.
Its elder twin still refused to work. He was not discouraged by this. 
On the contrary, he was elated. He had proved, proved with certainty, 
that the failure of the deKalbs was not a failure of workmanship, 
but a basic failure in theory. The problem was real.
Stevens had reported to him the scandalous performance of the deKalbs 
in McLeod’s skycar, but he had not yet given his attention to the matter. 
Presently, in proper order, when he got around to it, he would look 
into the matter. In the meantime he tabled the matter. The smooth apes 
were an hysterical lot; there was probably nothing to the story. 
Writhing like Medusa’s locks, indeed!
He gave fully half his time to Grimes’s problem.
He was forced to admit that the biological sciences - if you could call 
them science! - were more fascinating than he had thought. He had shunned 
them, more or less; the failure of expensive ‘experts’ to do anything 
for his condition when he was a child had made him contemptuous of such 
studies. Old wives nostrums dressed up in fancy terminology! Grimes he 
liked and even respected, but Grimes was a special case.
Grimes’s data had convinced Waldo that the old man had a case. Why, 
this was serious! The figures were incomplete, but nevertheless 
convincing. The curve of the third decrement, extrapolated not too 
unreasonably, indicated that in twenty years there would not be a man 
left with strength enough to work in the heavy industries. Button 
pushing would be all they would be good for.
It did not occur to him that all he was good for was button pushing; 
he regarded weakness in the smooth apes as an old-style farmer 
might regard weakness in a draft animal. The farmer did not expect 
to pull the plough - that was the horse’s job.
Grimes’s medical colleagues must be utter fools.
Nevertheless, he sent for the best physiologists, neurologists, brain 
surgeons, and anatomists he could locate, ordering them as one might 
order goods from a catalogue. He must understand this matter.
He was considerably annoyed when he found that he could not make 
arrangements, by any means, to perform vivisection on human beings. 
He was convinced by this time that the damage done by ultra short-wave 
radiation was damage to the neurological system, and that the whole 
matter should be treated from the standpoint of electromagnetic theory. 
He wanted to perform certain delicate manipulations in which human 
beings would be hooked up directly to apparatus of his own design to 
find out in what manner nerve impulses differed from electrical current. 
He felt that if he could disconnect portions of a man’s nervous circuit, 
replace it in part with electrical hookups, and examine the whole matter 
in situ, he might make illuminating discoveries. True, the man might not 
be much use to himself afterwards.
But the authorities were stuffy about it; he was forced to content 
himself with cadavers and with animals.
Nevertheless, he made progress. Extreme short-wave radiation had a 
definite effect on the nervous system - a double effect: it produced 
‘ghost’ pulsations in the neurons, Insufficient to accomplish muscular 
motor response, but, he suspected, strong enough to keep the body in a 
continual state of inhibited nervous excitation; and, secondly, a living 
specimen which had been subjected to this process for any length of time 
showed a definite, small but measurable, lowering in the efficiency of 
its neural impulses. If it had been an electrical circuit, he would have 
described the second effect as a decrease in insulating efficiency.
The sum of these two effects on the subject individual was a condition of 
mild tiredness, somewhat similar to the malaise of the early stages of 
pulmonary tuberculosis. The victim did not feel sick; he simply lacked pep. 
Strenuous bodily activity was not impossible; it was simply distasteful; 
it required too much effort, too much willpower.
But an orthodox pathologist would have been forced to report that the 
victim was in perfect health - a little run-down, perhaps, but nothing wrong 
with him. Too sedentary a life, probably. What he needed was fresh air, 
sunshine, and healthy exercise.
Doc Grimes alone had guessed that the present, general, marked preference 
for a sedentary life was the effect and not the cause of the prevailing lack 
of vigour. The change had been slow, at least as slow as the increase in 
radiation in the air. The individuals concerned had noticed it, if at all, 
simply as an indication that they were growing a little bit older,‘slowing 
down, not so young as I used to be’. And they were content to slow down; it 
was more comfortable than exertion.
Grimes had first begun to be concerned about it when he began to notice that 
all of his younger patients were ‘the bookish type’. It was all very well 
for a kid to like to read books, he felt, but a normal boy ought to be out 
doing a little hell raising too. What had become of the sand-lot football 
games, the games of scrub, the clothes-tearing activity that had 
characterized his own boyhood?
Damn it, a kid ought not to spend all his time poring over a stamp collection.
Waldo was beginning to find the answer.
The nerve network of the body was not dissimilar to antennae. Like antennae, 
it could and did pick up electromagnetic waves. But the pickup was evidenced 
not as induced electrical current, but as nerve pulsation - impulses which were 
maddeningly similar to, but distinctly different from, electrical current. 
Electromotive force could be used in place of nerve impulses to activate muscle 
tissue, but emf was not nerve impulse. For one thing they travelled at vastly 
different rates of speed. Electrical current travcls at a speed approaching 
that of light; neural impulse is measured in feet per second.
Waldo felt that somewhere in this matter of speed lay the key to the problem.
He was not permitted to ignore the matter of McLeod’s fantastic skycar as 
long as he had intended to. Dr Rambeau called him up. Waldo accepted the call, 
since it was routed from the laboratories of NAPA. ‘Who are you and what do you 
want?’ he demanded of the image.
Rambeau looked around cautiously. ‘Sssh! Not so loud,’ he whispered. ‘They 
might be listening.’
‘Who might be? And who are you?’
‘“They” are the ones who are doing it. Lock your doors at night. I’m Dr 
Rambeau.’
‘Dr Rambeau? Oh yes. Well, Doctor, what is the meaning of this intrusion?’
The doctor leaned forward until he appeared about to fall out of the stereo 
picture. ‘I’ve learned how to do it,’ he said tensely.
‘How to do what?’
‘Make the deKalbs work. The dear, dear deKalbs.’ He suddenly thrust his 
hands at Waldo, while clutching frantically with his fingers. ‘They go like 
this: Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!’
Waldo felt a normal impulse to cut the man off, but it was overruled by a 
fascination as to what he would say next. Rambeau continued, ‘Do you know 
why? Do you? Riddle me that.’
‘Why?’
Rambeau placed a finger beside his nose and smiled roguishly. ‘Wouldn’t you 
like to know? Wouldn’t you give a pretty to know? But I’ll tell you!’
‘Tell me, then.’
Rambeau suddenly looked terrified. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t. Perhaps they are 
listening. But I will, I will! Listen carefully:
Nothing is certain.
‘Is that all?’ inquired Waldo, now definitely amused by the man’s antics.
‘“Is that all?” Isn’t that enough? Hens will crow and cocks will lay. You 
are here and I am there. Or maybe not. Nothing is certain. Nothing, nothing, 
NOTHING is certain! Around and around the little ball goes, and where it 
stops nobody knows. Only I’ve learned how to do it.’
‘How to do what?’
‘How to make the little ball stop where I want it to. Look.’ He whipped 
out a penknife. ‘When you cut yourself, you bleed, don’t you? Or do you?’ 
He sliced at the forefinger of his left hand. ‘See?’ He held the finger 
close to the pickup; the cut though deep, was barely discernible and it 
was bleeding not at all.
Capital! thought Waldo. Hysteric vascular control - a perfect clinical case. 
‘Anybody can do that,’ he said aloud. ‘Show me a hard one.’
‘Anybody? Certainly anybody can - if they know how. Try this one.’ He jabbed 
the point of the penknife straight into the palm of his left hand, so that 
it stuck out the back of his hand. He wiggled the blade in the wound, 
withdrew it, and displayed the palm. No blood, and the incision was closing
rapidly. ‘Do you know why? The knife is only probably there, and I’ve found 
the improbability!’
Amusing as it had been, Waldo was beginning to be bored by it. ‘Is that all?’
‘There is no end to it,’ pronounced Rambeau, ‘for nothing is certain any 
more. Watch this.’ He held the knife flat on his palm, then turned his 
hand over.
The knife did not fall, but remained in contact with the underside of his 
hand.
Waldo was suddenly attentive. It might be a trick; it probably was a 
trick - but it impressed him more, much more, than Rambeau’s failure to 
bleed when cut. One was common to certain types of psychosis; the other 
should not have happened. He cut in another vicwphonc circuit. ‘Get me 
Chief Engineer Stevens at North American Power-Air,’ he said sharply. 
‘At once!’
Rambeau paid no attention, but continued to speak of the penknife. ‘It 
does not know which way is down,’ he crooned, ‘for nothing is certain any 
more. Maybe it will fall - maybe not. I think it will. There - it has. Would 
you like to see me walk on the ceiling?’
‘You called me, Mr Jones?’ It was Stevens.
Waldo cut his audio circuit to Rambeau. ‘Yes. That jumping jack, Rambeau. 
Catch him and bring him to me at once. I want to see him.’
‘But Mr Jo-’
‘Move!’ He cut Stevens off, and renewed the audio to Rambeau.
‘-uncertainty. Chaos is King, and Magic is loose in the world!’ 
Rambeau looked vaguely at Waldo, brightened, and added, ‘Good day, 
Mr Jones. Thank you for calling.’
The screen went dead.
Waldo waited impatiently. The whole thing had been a hoax, he told himself. 
Rambeau had played a gigantic practical joke. Waldo disliked practical jokes. 
He put in another call for Stevens and left it in.
When Stevens did call back his hair was mussed and his face was red. 
‘We had a bad time of it,’ he said.
‘Did you get him?’
‘Rambeau? Yes, finally.’
‘Then bring him up.’
‘To Freehold? But that’s impossible. You don’t understand. He’s blown his 
top; he’s crazy. They’ve taken him away to a hospital.’
‘You assume too much,’ Waldo said icily. ‘I know he’s crazy, but I meant 
what I said. Arrange it. Provide nurses. Sign affidavits. Use bribery. Bring 
him to me at once. It is necessary.~
‘You really mean that?’
‘I’m not in the habit of jesting.’
‘Something to do with your investigations? He’s in no shape to be useful to 
you, I can tell you that.’
‘That,’ pronounced Waldo, ‘is for me to decide.’
‘Well,’ said Stevens doubtfully, ‘I’ll try.’
‘See that you succeed.’
Stevens called back thirty minutes later. ‘I can’t bring Rambeau.’
‘You clumsy incompetent.’
Stevens turned red, but held his temper. ‘Never mind the personalities. 
He’s gone. 
He never got to the hospital.’
‘What?’
‘That’s the crazy part about it. They took him away in a confining 
stretcher, laced up like a corset. I saw them fasten him in myself. 
But when they got there he was gone. And the attendants claim the 
straps weren’t even unbuckled.’
Waldo started to say, ‘Preposterous,’ thought better of it. Stevens 
went on.
‘But that’s not the half of it. I’d sure like to talk to him myself. 
I’ve been looking around his lab. You know that set of deKalbs that 
went nuts -. the ones that were hexed?’
‘I know to what you refer.’
‘Rambeau’s got a second set to do the same thing!’ Waldo remained 
silent for several seconds, then said quietly, ‘Dr Stevens-’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to thank you for your efforts. And will you please have 
both sets of receptors, the two sets that are misbehaving, sent 
to Freehold at once?’
There was no doubt about it. Once he had seen them with his own 
eyes, watched the inexplicable squirming of the antennae, applied 
such tests as suggested themselves to his mind, Waldo was forced 
to conclude that he was faced with new phenomena, phenomena for 
which he did not know the rules.
If there were rules.
For he was honest with himself. If he saw what he thought he saw, 
then rules were being broken by the new phenomena, rules which he 
had considered valid, rules to which he had never previously 
encountered exceptions. He admitted to himself that the original 
failures of the deKalbs should have been considered just as 
overwhelmingly upsetting to physical law as the unique behaviour 
of these two; the difference lay in that one alien phenomenon 
was spectacular, the other was not.
Quite evidently Dr Rambeau had found it so; he had been informed 
that the doctor had been increasingly neurotic from the first 
instance of erratic performance of the deKalb receptors.
He regretted the loss of Dr Rambeau. Waldo was more impressed by 
Rambeau crazy than he had ever been by Rambeau sane. Apparently 
the man had had some modicum of ability after all; he had found 
out something - more, Waldo admitted, than he himself had been able 
to find out so far, even though it had driven Rambeau insane.
Waldo had no fear that Rambeau’s experience, whatever it had been, 
could unhinge his own reason. His own self-confidence was, perhaps, 
fully justified. His own mild paranoid tendency was just sufficient 
to give him defences against an unfriendly world. For him it was 
healthy, a necessary adjustment to an otherwise intolerable 
situation, no more pathological than a callous, or an acquired 
immunity.
Otherwise he was probably more able to face disturbing facts with 
equanimity than ninety-nine per cent of his contemporaries. He had 
been born to disaster; he had met it and had overcome it, time and 
again. The very house which surrounded him was testimony to the 
calm and fearless fashion in which he had defeated a world to 
which he was not adapted.
He exhausted, temporarily, the obvious lines of direct research 
concerning the strangely twisting metal rods. Rambeau was not 
available for questioning. Very well, there remained one other 
man who knew more about it than Waldo did. He would seek him out. 
He called Stevens again.
‘Has there been any word of Dr Rambeau?’
‘No word, and no sign. I’m beginning to think the poor old fellow 
is dead.’
‘Perhaps. That witch doctor friend of your assistant - was Schneider 
his name?’
‘Gramps Schneider.’
‘Yes indeed. Will you please arrange for him to speak with me?’
‘By phone, or do you want to see him in person?’
‘I would prefer for him to come here, but I understand that he is 
old and feeble; it may not be feasible for him to leave the ground. 
If he is knotted up with spacesickness, he will be no use to me.’
‘I’ll see what can be done.’
‘Very good. Please expedite the matter. And, Dr Stevens-’
‘Well?’
‘If it should prove necessary to use the phone, arrange to have a 
portable full stereo taken to his home. I want the circumstances 
to be as favourable as possible.’
‘OK.’
‘Imagine that,’ Stevens added to McLeod when the circuit had been 
broken. ‘The Great-I-Am’s showing consideration for somebody else’s 
convenience.
‘The fat boy must be sick,’ McLeod decided.
‘Seems likely. This chore is more yours than mine, Mac. Come along 
with me; we’ll take a run over into Pennsylvania.’
‘How about the plant?’
‘Tell Carruthers he’s “It”. If anything blows, we couldn’t help it 
anyway.’
Stevens mugged back later in the day. ‘Mr Jones-’
‘Yes, Doctor?’
‘What you suggest can’t be arranged.’
‘You mean that Schneider can’t come to Freehold?’
‘I mean that and I mean that you can’t talk with him on the viewphone.’
‘I presume that you mean he is dead.’
‘No, I do not. I mean that he will not talk over the view-phone under 
any circumstances whatsoever, to you or to anyone. He says that he is 
sorry not to accommodate you, but that he is opposed to everything of 
that nature - cameras, einécams, television, and so forth. He considers 
them dangerous. I am afraid he is set in his superstition.’
‘As an ambassador, Dr Stevens, you leave much to be desired.’
Stevens counted up to ten, then said, ‘I assure you that I have done 
everything in my power to comply with your wishes. If you are 
dissatisfied with the quality of my cooperation, I suggest that you speak 
to Mr Gleason.’ He cleared the circuit.
‘How would you like to kick him in the teeth?’ McLeod said dreamily.
‘Mac, you’re a mind reader.’

Waldo tried again through his own agents, received the same answer. 
The situation was, to him, almost intolerable; it had been years since 
he had encountered a man whom he could not buy, bully, nor - in 
extremity - persuade. Buying had failed; he had realized instinctively 
that Schneider would be unlikely to be motivated by greed. And how 
can one bully, or wheedle, a man who cannot be seen to be talked with?
It was a dead end - no way out. Forget it.
Except, of course, for a means best classed as a Fate-Worse-Than-Death.
No. No, not that. Don’t think about it. Better to drop the whole matter, 
admit that it had him licked, and tell Gleason so. It had been seventeen 
years since he had been at Earth surface; nothing could induce him to 
subject his body to the intolerable demands of that terrible field. Nothing!
It might even kill him. He might choke to death, suffocate. No.
He sailed gracefully across his shop, an overpadded Cupid. Give up this 
freedom, even for a time, for that tortuous bondage? Ridiculous! It was 
not worth it.
Better to ask an acrophobe to climb Half Dome, or demand that a 
claustrophobe interview a man in the world’s deepest mine.
‘Uncle Gus?’
‘Oh, hello. Waldo. Glad you called.’
‘Would it be safe for me to come down to Earth?’ 
‘Eh? How’s that? Speak up, man. I didn’t understand you.’ 
‘I said would it hurt me to make a trip down to Earth.’ 
‘This hookup,’ said Grimes, ‘is terrible. It sounded just like you were 
saying you wanted to come down to Earth.’
‘That’s what I did say.’
‘What’s the matter, Waldo? Do you feel all right?’
‘I feel fine, but I have to see a man at Earth surface. There isn’t any 
other way for me to talk to him, and I’ve got to talk to him. Would the 
trip do me any harm?’
‘Ought not to, if you’re careful. After all, you were born there. Be careful 
of yourself, though. You’ve laid a lot of fat around your heart.’
‘Oh dear. Do you think it’s dangerous?’
‘No. You’re sound enough.. Just don’t overstrain yourself. And be careful 
to keep your temper.’
‘I will. I most certainly will. Uncle Gus?’
‘Yes?’
‘Will you come along with me and help me see it through?’
‘Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary.’
‘Please, Uncle Gus. I don’t trust anybody else.’
‘Time you grew up, Waldo. However, I will, this once.’

‘Now remember,’ Waldo told the pilot, ‘the absolute acceleration 
must never exceed one and one tenth gs, even in landing. I’ll be 
watching the accelograph the whole time.’
‘I’ve been driving ambulances,’ said the pilot, ‘for twelve years, 
and I’ve never given a patient a rough ride yet.’
‘That’s no answer. Understand me? One and one tenth; and it should 
not even approach that figure until we are under the stratosphere. 
Quiet, Baldur! Quit snuffling.’
‘I get you.’
‘Be sure that you do. Your bonuses depend on it.’
‘Maybe you’d like to herd it yourself.’
‘I don’t like your attitude, my man. If I should die in the tank, 
you would never get another job.’
The pilot muttered something.
‘What was that?’ Waldo demanded sharply. ‘Well, I said it might be 
worth it.’
Waldo started to turn red, opened his mouth’.
Grimes Cut in: ‘Easy, Waldo! Remember your heart.’
‘Yes, Uncle Gus.’
Grimes snaked his way forward, indicated to the pilot that he wanted 
him to join him there.
‘Don’t pay any attention to anything he says,’ he advised the man 
quietly, ‘except what he said about acceleration. He really can’t 
stand much acceleration. He might die in the tank.’
‘I still don’t think it would be any loss. But I’ll be careful.’
‘Good.’
‘I’m ready to enter the tank,’ Waldo called out. ‘Will you help me 
with the straps, Uncle Gus?’
‘Be there in a second.’
The tank was not a standard deceleration type, but a modification 
built for this one trip. The tank was roughly the shape of an 
oversized coffin and was swung in gimbals to keep it always normal 
to the axis of absolute acceleration. Waldo floated in water - the 
specific gravity of his fat hulk was low -from which he was 
separated by the usual flexible, gasketed tarpaulin. Supporting 
his head and shoulders was a pad shaped to his contour. A 
mechanical artificial resuscitator was built into the tank, the 
back pads being under water, the breast pads out of the water but 
retracted out of the way.
Grimes stood by with neoadrenalin; a saddle had been provided for 
him on the left side of the tank. Baldur was strapped to a shelf on 
the right side of the tank; he acted as a counterweight to Grimes.
Grimes assured himself that all was in readiness, then called Out to
 the pilot, ‘Start when you’re ready.’
‘OK.’ He sealed the access port; the entry tube folded itself back 
against the threshold flat of Freehold, freeing the ship. Gently they 
got under way.
Waldo closed his eyes; a look of seraphic suffering came over his face.
‘Uncle Gus, suppose the deKalbs fail?’
‘No matter. Ambulances store six times the normal reserve.’
‘You’re sure?’
When Baldur began to feel weight, he started to whimper. Grimes 
spoke to him; he quieted down. But presently - days later, it seemed 
to Waldo - as the ship sank farther down into the Earth’s gravitational 
field, the absolute acceleration necessarily increased, although the 
speed of the ship had not changed materially. The dog felt the weary 
heaviness creeping over his body. He did not understand it and he liked 
it even less; it terrified him. He began to howl.
Waldo opened his eyes. ‘Merciful heavens!’ he moaned. ‘Can’t you do 
something about that? He must be dying.’
‘I’ll see.’ Grimes undid his safety belt and swung himself across the tank. 
The shift in weight changed the balance of the load in the gimbals; Waldo 
was rocked against the side of the tank.
‘Oh!’ he panted. ‘Be careful.’
‘Take it easy.’ Grimes caressed the dog’s head and spoke to him. When he 
had calmed down, Grimes grabbed a handful of hide between the dog’s shoulders, 
measured his spot, and jabbed in a hypo. He rubbed the area. ‘There, old fellow! 
That will make you feel better.’
Getting back caused Waldo to be rocked again, but he bore it in martyred silence.
The ambulance made just one jerky manoeuvre after it entered the atmosphere. Both 
Waldo and the dog yelped. ‘Private ship~’ the pilot yelled back. ‘Didn’t heed 
my right-of-way lights.’ He muttered something about women drivers.
‘It wasn’t his fault,’ Grimes told Waldo. ‘I saw it.’
The pilot set them down with exquisite gentleness in a clearing which had been 
prepared between the highway and Schneider’s house. A party of men was 
waiting for them there; under Grimes’s supervision they unslung the tank and 
carried Waldo out into the open air. The evolution was performed slowly and 
carefully, but necessarily involved some degree of bumping and uneven movement. 
Waldo stood it with silent fortitude, but tears leaked out from under his lowered 
lids.
Once outside he opened his eyes and asked, ‘Where is Baldur?’
‘I unstrapped him,’ Grimes informed him, ‘but he did not follow us out.’
Waldo called out huskily, ‘Here, Baldur! Come to me, boy.’
Inside the car the dog heard his boss’s voice, raised his head, and gave a low 
bark. He still felt that terrifying sickness, but he inched forward on his belly, 
attempting to comply. Grimes reached the door in time to see what happened.
The dog reached the edge of his shelf and made a grotesque attempt to launch 
himself in the direction from which he had heard Waldo’s voice. He tried the 
only method of propulsion he knew; no doubt he expected to sail through the door 
and arrest his flight against the tank on the ground. Instead he fell several 
feet to the inner floor plates, giving one agonized yelp as he did so, and 
breaking his fall most clumsily with stiffened forelegs.
He lay sprawled where he had landed, making no noise, but not attempting to 
move. He was trembling violently.
Grimes came up to him and examined him superficially, enough to assure him 
that the beast was not really hurt, then returned to the outside. 
‘Baldur’s had a little accident,’ he told Waldo; ‘he’s not hurt, but the 
poor devil doesn’t know how to walk. You had best leave him in the ship.’
Waldo shook his head slightly. ‘I want him with me. Arrange a litter.’
Grimes got a couple of the men to help him, obtained a stretcher from 
the pilot of the ambulance, and undertook to move the dog. One of the men 
said, ‘I don’t know as I care for this job. That dog looks vicious. Look’t 
those eyes.’
‘He’s not,’ Grimes assured him. ‘He’s just scared out of his wits. Here, 
I’ll take his head.’
‘What’s the matter with him? Same thing as the fat guy?’
‘No, he’s perfectly well and strong; he’s just never learned to walk. 
This is his first trip to Earth.’
‘Well, I’ll be a cross-eyed owl!’
‘I knew a case like it,’ volunteered the other. ‘Dog raised in Lunopolis - 
first week he was on Earth he wouldn’t move -just squatted down, and howled, 
and made messes on the floor.’
‘So has this one,’ the first said darkly.
They placed Baldur alongside Waldo’s tub. With great effort Waldo raised 
himself on one elbow, reached out a hand, and placed it on the creature’s 
head. The dog licked it; his trembling almost ceased. ‘There! There!’ 
Waldo. whispered. ‘It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? Easy, old friend, take it easy.’
Baldur thumped his tail.
It took four men to carry Waldo and two more to handle Baldur. Gramps 
Schneider was waiting for them at the door of his house. He said nothing 
as they approached, but indicated that they were to carry Waldo inside. 
The men with the dog hesitated. ‘Him, too,’ he said.
When the others had withdrawn - even Grimes returned to the neighbourhood 
of the ship - Schneider spoke again. ‘Welcome, Mr Waldo Jones.’
‘I thank you for your welcome, Grandfather Schneider.’
The old man nodded graciously without speaking. He went to the side of 
Baldur’s litter. Waldo felt impelled to warn him that the beast was 
dangerous with strangers, but some odd restraint - perhaps the effect 
of that enervating gravitational field - kept him from speaking in time. 
Then he saw that he need not bother.
Baldur had ceased his low whimpering, had raised his head, and was licking 
Gramps Schneider’s chin. His tail thumped cheerfully. Waldo felt a sudden 
tug of jealousy; the dog had never been known to accept a stranger without 
Waldo’s specific injunction. This was disloyalty - treason! But he 
suppressed the twinge and coolly assessed the incident as a tactical 
advantage to him.
Schneider pushed the dog’s face out of the way and went over him thoroughly, 
prodding, thumping, extending his limbs. He grasped Baldur’s muzzle, pushed 
back his lips, and eyed his gums. He peeled back the dog’s eyelids. He then 
dropped the matter and came to Waldo’s side. ‘The dog is not sick,’ he said; 
‘his mind confuses. What made it?’
Waldo told him about Baldur’s unusual background. Schneider nodded acceptance 
of the matter - Waldo could not tell whether he had understood or not - and 
turned his attention to Waldo. ‘It is not good for a sprottly lad to lie abed. 
The weakness - how long has it had you?’
‘All my life, Grandfather.’
'That is not good.’ Schneider went over him as he had gone over Baldur. 
Waldo, whose feeling for personal privacy was much more intense than that of 
the ordinarily sensitive man, endured it for pragmatic reasons. It was going 
to be necessary, he felt, to wheedle and cajole this strange old creature. 
It would not do to antagonize him.
To divert his own attention from the indignity he chose to submit to, and 
to gain further knowledge of the old quack, Waldo let his eyes rove the room. 
The room where they were seemed to be a combination kitchen-living room. 
It was quite crowded, rather narrow, but fairly long. A fireplace dominated 
the kitchen end, but it had been bricked up, and a hole for the flue pipe of 
the base-burner had been let into the chimney. The fireplace was lopsided, 
as an oven had been included in its left side. The corresponding space at the 
right was occupied by a short counter which supported a tiny sink. The sink 
was supplied with water by a small hand pump which grew out of the counter.
Schneider, Waldo decided, was either older than he looked, which seemed 
incredible, or he had acquired his house from someone now long dead.
The living room end was littered and crowded in the fashion which is simply 
unavoidable in constricted quarters. Books filled several cases, were piled 
on the floor, hung precariously on chairs. An ancient wooden desk, crowded 
with papers and supporting a long-obsolete mechanical typewriter, filled 
one corner. Over it, suspended from the wall, was an ornate clock, carved 
somewhat like a house. Above its face were two little doors; while Waldo 
looked at it, a tiny wooden bird painted bright red popped out of the 
left-hand door, whistled ‘Th-wu th-woo!’ four times, and popped frantically 
back into its hole. Immediately thereafter a little grey bird came out of 
the right-hand door, said ‘Cuckoo’ three times in a leisurely manner, and 
returned to its hole. 
Waldo decided that he would like to own such a clock; of course its 
pendulum-and-weight movement would not function in Freehold, but he 
could easily devise a one-g centrifuge frame to enclose it, wherein it 
would have a pseudo Earth-surface environment.
It did not occur to him to fake a pendulum movement by means of a 
concealed power source; he liked things to work properly.
To the left of the clock was an old-fashioned static calendar of paper. 
The date was obscured, but the letters above the calendar proper were 
large and legible: New York World’s Fair - Souvenir of the World of 
Tomorrow. Waldo’s eyes widened a little and went back to something he 
had noticed before, sticking into a pincushion on the edge of the desk. 
It was a round plastic button mounted on a pin whereby it could be 
affixed to the clothing. It was not far from Waldo’s eyes; he could read 
the lettering on it:

FREE SILVER
SIXTEEN TO ONE

Schneider must be - old!
There was a narrow archway, which led into another room. Waldo could not 
see into it very well; the arch was draped with a fringe curtain of 
long strings of large ornamental beads.
The room was rich with odours, many of them old and musty, but not dirty.
Schneider straightened up and looked down at Waldo. 
‘There is nought wrong with your body. Up get yourself and walk.’
Waldo shook his head feebly. ‘I am sorry, Grandfather. I cannot.’
‘You must reach for the power and make it serve you. Try.’
‘I am sorry. I do not know how.’
‘That is the only trouble. All matters are doubtful, unless one knows. 
You send your force into the Other World. You must reach into the Other 
World and claim it.’
‘Where is this “Other World”, Grandfather?’
Schneider seemed a little in doubt as to how to answer this. ‘The Other World,’ 
he said presently, ‘is the world you do not see. It is here and it is there and 
it is everywhere. But it is especially here.’ He touched his forehead. ‘The mind 
sits in it and sends its messages through it to the body. Wait.’ Hc shuffled 
away to a little cupboard, from which he removed a small jar. It contained a 
salve, or unguent, which he rubbed on his hands.
He returned to Waldo and knelt down beside him. Grasping one of Waldo’s hands in 
both of his, he began to knead it very gently. ‘Let the mind be quiet)’ he 
directed. ‘Feel for the power. The Other World is close and full of power. 
Feel it.’ The massage was very pleasant to Waldo’s tired muscles.
The salve, or the touch of the old man’s hand, produced a warm, relaxing tingle. 
If he were younger, thought Waldo, I would hire him as a masseur. He has a 
magnetic touch.
Schneider straightened up again and said, ‘There - that betters you? Now you 
rest while I some coffee make.’
Waldo settled back contentedly. He was very tired. Not only was the trip 
itself a nervous strain, but he was still in the grip of this damnable, 
thick gravitational field, like a fly trapped in honey. Gramps Schneider’s 
ministrations had left him relaxed and sleepy. He must have dozed, for 
the last thing he remembered was seeing Schneider drop an eggshell into 
the coffeepot. Then the old man was standing before him, holding the pot 
in one hand and a steaming cup in the other. He set them down, got three 
pillows, which he placed at Waldo’s back, then offered him the coffee. 
Waldo laboriously reached out both hands to take it. Schneider held it back. 
‘No,’ he reproved, ‘one hand makes plenty. Do as I showed. Reach into the 
Other World for the strength.’ He took Waldo’s right hand and placed it on the 
handle of the cup, steadying Waldo’s hand with his own. With his other hand 
he stroked Waldo’s right arm gently, from shoulder to fingertips. Again the 
warm tingle.
Waldo was surprised to find himself holding the cup alone. It was a pleasant 
triumph; at the time he left Earth, seventeen years before, it had been his 
invariable habit never to attempt to grasp anything with only one hand. In 
Freehold, of course, he frequently handled small objects one-handed, without 
the use of waldoes. The years of practice must have improved his control. 
Excellent!
So, feeling rather cocky, he drank the cupful with one hand, using extreme
care not to slop it on himself. It was good coffee, too, he was bound to 
admit - quite as good as the sort he himself made from the most expensive 
syrup extract - better, perhaps.
When Schneider offered him coffeecake, brown with sugar and cinnamon and 
freshly rewarmed, he swaggeringly accepted it with his left hand, without 
asking to be relieved of the cup. He continued to eat and drink, between 
bites and sips resting and steadying his forearms on the edges of the tank.
The conclusion of the Kaffeeklatsch seemed a good time to broach the matter 
of the deKalbs. Schneider admitted knowing McLeod and recalled, somewhat 
vaguely it seemed, the incident in which he had restored to service McLeod’s 
broomstick. 
‘Hugh Donald is a good boy,’ he said. ‘Machines I do not like, but it 
pleasures me to fix things for boys.’
‘Grandfather,’ asked Waldo, ‘will you tell me how you fixed Hugh Donald 
McLeod’s ship?’
‘Have you such a ship you wish me to fix?’
‘I have many such ships which I have agreed to fix, but I must tell you that 
I have been unable to do so. I have come to you to find out the right way.’
Schneider considered this. ‘That is difficult. I could show you, but it 
is not so much what you do as how you think about it. That makes only with 
practice.’
Waldo must have looked puzzled, for the old man looked at him and added, 
‘It is said that there are two ways of looking at everything. That is 
true and less than true, for there are many ways. Some of them are good 
ways and some are bad. One of the ancients said that everything either 
is, or is not. That is less than true, for a thing can both be and not he. 
With practice one can see it both ways. Sometimes a thing which is for 
this world is a thing which is not for the Other World. Which is important, 
since we live in the Other World.’
‘We live in the Other World?’
‘How else could we live? The mind - not the brain, but the mind - is in the 
Other World, and reaches this world through the body. That is one true way 
of looking at it, though there are others.’
‘Is there more than one way of looking at deKalb receptors?’
‘Certainly.’
‘If I had a set which is not working right brought in here, would you 
show me how to look at it?’
‘It is not needful,’ said Schneider, ‘and I do not like for machines to 
be in my house. I will draw you a picture.’
Waldo felt impelled to insist, but he squelched his feeling. ‘You have come 
here in humility,’ he told himself, ‘asking for instruction. Do not tell 
the teacher how to teach.’
Schneider produced a pencil and a piece of paper, on which he made a 
careful and very neat sketch of the antennae sheaf and main axis of a skycar. 
The sketch was reasonably accurate as well, although it lacked several 
essential minor details.
‘These fingers,’ Schneider said, ‘reach deep into the Other World to draw 
their strength. In turn it passes down this pillar’ - he indicated the axis - 
to where it is used to move the car.’
A fair allegorical explanation, thought Waldo. By considering the ‘Other 
World’ simply a term for the hypothetical ether, it could be considered 
correct if not complete. But it told him nothing. ‘Hugh Donald,’ 
Schneider went on, ‘was tired and fretting. He found one of the bad 
truths.’
‘Do you mean,’ Waldo said slowly, ‘that McLeod’s ship failed because he 
was worried about it?’
‘How else?’
Waldo was not prepared to answer that one. It had become evident that 
the old man had some quaint superstitions; nevertheless he might still 
be able to show Waldo what to do, even though Schneider did not know why. 
‘And what did you do to change it?’
‘I made no change; I looked for the other truth.’
‘But how? We found some chalk marks-’
‘Those? They were but to aid me in concentrating my attention in the 
proper direction. I drew them down so,’ - he illustrated with pencil 
on the sketch - ‘and thought how the fingers reached out for power. 
And so they did.’
‘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.
The Other Space was not entirely unreachable; Schneider had spoken of reaching 
into it. The idea was fantastic, yet he must accept it for the purposes of this 
investigation. 
Schneider had implied - no - stated that it was a matter of mental outlook.
Was that really so fantastic? If a continuum were an unmeasurably short 
distance away, yet completely beyond one’s physical grasp, would it be strange 
to find that it was most easily reached through some subtle and probably 
subconscious operation of the brain? The whole matter was subtle - and Heaven 
knew that no one had any real idea of how the brain works. No idea at all. 
It was laughably insufficient to try to explain the writing of a symphony 
in terms of the mechanics of colloids. No, nobody knew how the brain worked; 
one more inexplicable ability in the brain was not too much to swallow.
Come to think of it, the whole notion of consciousness and thought was 
fantastically improbable. All right, so McLeod disabled his skycar himself 
by thinking bad thoughts; Schneider fixed it by thinking the correct thoughts. 
Then what?
He reached a preliminary conclusion almost at once: by extension, the other 
deKalh failures were probably failures on the part of the operators. The 
operators were probably rundown, tired out, worried about something, and in 
some fashion still not clear they infected, or affected, the deKalbs with 
their own troubles. For convenience let us say that the deKalbs were short-
circuited into the Other World. Poor terminology, but it helped him to form 
a picture.
Grimes’s hypothesis! ‘Run-down, tired out, worried about something!’ Not 
proved yet, but he felt sure of it. The epidemic of crashcs through material 
was simply an aspect of the general anyasthenia caused by short-wave radiation.
If that were true- He cut in a sight-sound circuit to Earth and demanded to 
talk with Stevens.
‘Dr Stevens,’ he began at once, ‘There is a preliminary precautionary 
measure which should be undertaken right away.’
‘Yes?’
‘First, let me ask you this: Have you had many failures of deKalbs in private 
ships? What is the ratio?’
‘I can’t give you exact figures at the moment,’ Stevens answered, somewhat 
mystified, ‘but there have been practically none. It’s the commercial lines 
which have suffered.’
‘Just as I suspected. A private pilot won’t fly unless he feels up to it, but 
a man with a job goes ahead no matter how he feels. Make arrangements for 
special physical and psycho examinations for all commercial pilots flying 
deKalb-type ships. Ground any who are not feeling in tiptop shape. Call Dr 
Grimes. He’ll tell you what to look for.’
‘That’s a pretty tall order, Mr Jones. After all, most of those pilots, 
practically all of them, aren’t our employees. We don’t have much control 
over them.’
‘That’s your problem,’ Waldo shrugged. ‘I’m trying to tell you how to 
reduce crashes in the interim before I submit my complete solution.’
‘But-’ 
Waldo heard no more of the remark; he had cut off when he himself was through. 
He was already calling over a permanently energized, leased circuit which kept 
in touch with his terrestrial business office - with his ‘trained seals’. 
He gave Them some very odd instructions - orders for books, old books, rare 
books. Books dealing with magic.
Stevens consulted with Gleason before attempting to do anything about Waldo’s 
difficult request. Gleason was dubious. ‘He offered no reason for the advice?’
‘None. He told me to look up Dr Grimes and get his advice as to what 
specifically to look for.’
‘Dr Grimes?’
‘The MD who introduced me to Waldo - mutual friend.’
‘I recall. him... it will be difficult to go about grounding men who don’t 
work for us. Still, I suppose several of our larger customers would 
cooperate if we asked them to and gave them some sort of a reason. 
What are you looking so odd about?’
Stevens told him of Waldo’s last, inexplicable statement. ‘Do you suppose 
it could be affecting him the way it did Dr Rarnbeau?’
‘Mm-m-m. Could be, I suppose. In which case it would not be well to follow 
his advice. Have you anything else to suggest?’
‘No - frankly.’
‘Then I see no alternative but to follow his advice. He’s our last hope. 
A forlorn one, perhaps, but our only one.’
Stevens brightened a little. ‘I could talk to Doc Grimes about it. He knows 
more about Waldo than anyone else.’
‘You have to consult him anyway, don’t you? Very well -do so.’

Grimes listened to the story without comment. When Stevens had concluded he 
said, ‘Waldo must be referring to the symptoms I have observed with respect 
to short-wave exposure. That’s easy; you can have the proofs of the monograph 
I’ve been preparing. It’ll tell you all about it.’
The information did not reassure Stevens; it helped to confirm his suspicion 
that Waldo had lost his grip. But he said nothing. 
Grimes continued, ‘As for the other, Jim, I can’t visualize Waldo losing 
his mind that way.’
‘He never did seem very stable to me.’
‘I know what you mean. But his paranoid streak is no more like what Rambeau 
succumbed to than chickenpox is like mumps. Matter of fact, one psychosis 
protects against the other. But I’ll go see.’
‘You will? Good!’
‘Can’t go today. Got a broken leg and some children’s colds that’ll bear 
watching. Been some polio around. Ought to be able to make it the end of 
the week though.’
‘Doc, why don’t you give up GP work? It must be deadly.’
‘Used to think so when I was younger. But about forty years ago I quit 
treating diseases and started treating people. Since then I’ve enjoyed it.’
Waldo indulged in an orgy of reading, gulping the treatises on magic and 
related subjects as fast as he could. He had never been interested in such 
subjects before; now, in reading about them with the point of view that 
there might be - and even probably was - something to be learned, he found 
them intensely interesting.
There were frequent references to another world; sometimes it was called 
the Other World, sometimes the Little World. Read with the conviction that 
the term referred to an actual, material, different continuum, he could 
see that many of the practitioners of the forbidden arts had held the same 
literal viewpoint. They gave directions for using this other world; 
sometimes the directions were fanciful, sometimes they were baldly practical.
It was fairly evident that at least 90 per cent of all magic, probably more, 
was balderdash and sheer mystification. The mystification extended even to 
the practitioners, he felt; they lacked the scientific method; they employed 
a single-valued logic as faulty as the two-valued logic of the obsolete 
Spencer determinism; there was no suggestion of modern extensional, 
many-valued logic.
Nevertheless, the laws of contiguity, of sympathy, and of homeopathy had 
a sort of twisted rightness to them when considered in relation to the 
concept of another, different, but accessible, world. 
A man who had some access to a different space might well believe in a 
logic in which a thing could be, not be, or be anything with equal ease.
Despite the nonsense and confusion which characterized the treatments 
of magic which dated back to the period when the art was in common 
practice, the record of accomplishment of the art was impressive. 
There was curare and digitalis, and quinine, hypnotism, and telepathy. 
There was the hydraulic engineering of the Egyptian priests. Chemistry 
itself was derived from alchemy; for that matter, most modern science 
owed its’ origins to the magicians. Science had stripped off the 
surplusage, run it through the wringer of two-valued logic, and placed 
the knowledge in a form in which anyone could use it.
Unfortunately, that part of magic which refused to conform to the neat 
categories of the nineteenth-century methodologists was lopped off and 
left out of the body of science. It fell into disrepute, was forgotten 
save as fable and superstition.
Waldo began to think of the arcane arts as aborted sciences, abandoned 
before they had been clarified.
And yet the manifestations of the sort of uncertainty which had 
characterized some aspects of magic and which he now attributed to 
hypothetical additional continua had occurred frequently, even in 
modern times. The evidence was overwhelming to anyone who approached 
it with an open mind:
Poltergeisten, stones falling from the sky, apportation. ‘bewitched’ 
persons - or, as he Thought of them, persons who for some undetermined 
reason were loci of uncertainty - ‘haunted’ houses, strange fires of the 
sort that would have once been attributed to salamanders. There were 
hundreds of such cases, carefully recorded and well vouched for, but 
ignored by orthodox science as being impossible. They were impossible, 
by known law, but considered from the standpoint of a coextensive 
additional continuum, they became entirely credible.
He cautioned himself not to consider his tentative hypothesis of the 
Other World as proved; nevertheless, it was an adequate hypothesis 
even if it should develop that it did not apply to some of the 
cases of strange events.
The Other Space might	have different physical laws - no reason why it 
should not. 
Nevertheless, he decided to proceed on the assumption that it was 
much like the space he knew.
The Other World might even be inhabited. That was an intriguing 
thought! In which case anything could happen through ‘magic’. 
Anything!
Time to stop speculating and get down to a little solid research. 
He had previously regretfully given up trying to apply the formulas 
of the medieval magicians. It appeared that they never wrote down all 
of a procedure; some essential - so the reports ran and so his 
experience confirmed - was handed down verbally from master to student. 
His experience with Schneider confirmed this; there were things, attitudes, 
which must needs be taught directly.
He regretfully set out to learn what he must unassisted.

‘Gosh, Uncle Gus, i’m glad to see you!’
‘Decided I’d better look in on you. You haven’t phoned me in weeks.’
‘That’s true, but I’ve been working awfully hard, Uncle Gus.’
‘Too hard, maybe. Mustn’t overdo it. Lemme see your tongue.~
‘I’m OK.’ But Waldo stuck out his tongue just the same; Grimes looked 
at it and felt his pulse.
‘You seem to be ticking all right. Learning anything?’
‘Quite a lot. I’ve about got the matter of the deKalbs whipped.’
‘That’s good. The message you sent Stevens seemed to indicate that you 
had found some hookup that could be used on my pet problem too.~
‘In a way, yes; but around from the other end. It begins to seem as if 
it was your problem which created Stevens’s problem.’
‘Huh?’
‘I mean it. The symptoms caused by ultra short-wave radiation may have 
had a lot to do with the erratic behaviour of the deKalbs.’
‘How?’ 
‘I don’t know myself. But I’ve rigged up a working hypothesis and I’m 
checking it.’
‘Hm-m-m. Want to talk about it?’
‘Certainly - to you.’ Waldo launched into an account of his interview with 
Schneider, concerning which he had not previously spoken to Grimes, even 
though Grimes had made the trip with him. He never, as Grimes knew, 
discussed anything until he was ready to.
The story of the third set of deKalbs to be infected with the incredible 
writhings caused Grimes to raise his eyebrows. ‘Mean to say you caught 
on how to do that?’
‘Yes indeed. Not “how”, maybe, but I can do it. I’ve done it more than 
once. I’ll show you.’ He drifted away towards one side of the great room 
where several sets of deKalbs, large and small, were mounted, with their 
controls, on temporary guys. 
‘This fellow over on the end, it just came in today. Broke down. I’ll give 
it Gramps Schneider’s hocus-pocus and fix it. Wait a minute. I forgot to 
turn on the power.’
He returned to the central ring which constituted his usual locus and 
switched on the beamcaster. Since the ship itself effectively shielded 
anything in the room from outer radiation, he had installed a small power 
plant and caster similar in type to NAPA’s giant ones; without it he 
would have had no way to test the reception of the deKalbs.
He rejoined Grimes and passed down the line of deKalbs, switching on the 
activizing circuits. All save two began to display the uncouth motions he 
had begun to think of as the Schneider flex. 
‘That one on the far end,’ he remarked, ‘is in operation but doesn’t flex. 
It has never broken down, so it’s never been treated. It’s my control; 
but this one’ - he touched the one in front of him - ‘needs fixing. 
Watch me.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘To tell the truth, I don’t quite know. But I’ll do it.’ He did not know. 
All he knew was that it was necessary to gaze down the antennae, think 
about them reaching into the Other World, think of them reaching for power, 
reaching - The antennae began to squirm.
‘That’s all there is to it - strictly between ourselves. I learned it from 
Schneider.’ They had returned to the centre of the sphere, at Grimes’s 
suggestion, on the pretext of wanting to get a cigarette. The squirming 
deKalbs made him nervous, but he did not want to say so.
‘How do you explain it?’
‘I regard it as an imperfectly understood phenomenon of the Other Space. 
I know less about it than Franklin knew about lightning. But I will know- 
I will! I could give Stevens a solution right now for his worries if I 
knew some way to get around your problem too.’
‘I don’t see the connexion.’
‘There ought to be some way to do the whole thing through the Other Space. 
Start out by radiating power into the Other Space and pick it up from there. 
Then the radiation could not harm human beings. It would never get at them; 
it would duck around them. I’ve been working on my caster, but with no luck 
so far. I’ll crack it in time.’
‘I hope you do. Speaking of that, isn’t the radiation from your own caster 
loose in this room?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll put on my shield coat. It’s not good for you either.’
‘Never mind. I’ll turn it off.’ As he turned to do so there was the sound of 
a sweet, chirruping whistle. Baldur barked. Grimes turned to see what caused it.
‘What,’ he demanded, ‘have you got there?’
‘Huh? Oh, That’s my cuckoo clock. Fun, isn’t it?’ Grimes agreed that it was, 
although he could not see much use for it. Waldo had mounted it on the edge 
of a light metal hoop which spun with a speed just sufficient to produce a 
centrifugal force of one g.
‘I rigged it up,’ Waldo continued, ‘while I was bogged down in this problem 
of the Other Space. Gave me something to do.’
‘This “Other Space” business - I still don’t get it.’
‘Think of another continuum much like our own and superposed on it the way 
you might lay one sheet of paper on another. The two spaces aren’t identical, 
but they are separated from each other by the smallest interval you can 
imagine - coextensive but not touching - usually. There is an absolute one-to-
one, point-for-point correspondence, as I conceive it, between the two spaces, 
but they are not necessarily the same size or shape.’
‘Hey? Come again - they would have to be.’
‘Not at all. Which has the larger number of points in it? A line an inch long, 
or a line a mile long?’
‘A mile long, of course.’
‘No. They have exactly the same number of points. Want me to prove it?’
‘I’ll take your word for it. But I never studied that sort of maths.’
‘All right. Take my word for it then. Neither size nor shape is any 
impediment to setting up a full, point-for-point correspondence between 
two spaces. Neither of the words is really appropriate. “Size” has to do 
with a space’s own inner structure, its dimensions in terms of its own 
unique constants. “Shape” is a matter which happens inside itself - or at 
least not inside our space - and has to do with how it is curved, open or 
closed, expanding or contracting.’
Grimes shrugged. ‘It all sounds like gibberish to me.’ He returned to 
watching the cuckoo clock swing round and round its wheel.
‘Sure it does,’ Waldo assented cheerfully. ‘We are limited by our experience. 
Do you know how I think of the Other World?’ The question was purely 
rhetorical. ‘I think of it as about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, 
but nevertheless a whole universe, existing side by side with our own, from 
here to the farthest star. I know that it’s a false picture, but it helps 
me to think about it that way.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Grimes, and turned himself around in the air. The 
compound motion of the clock’s pendulum was making him a little dizzy. 
‘Say! I thought you turned off the caster?’
‘I did,’ Waldo agreed, and looked where Grimes was looking. The deKalbs were 
still squirming. ‘I thought I did,’ he said doubtfully, and turned to the 
caster’s control board. His eyes then opened wider. ‘But I did. It is 
turned off.’
‘Then what the devil-’
‘Shut up!’ He had to think - think hard. Was the caster actually out of 
operation? He floated himself over to it, inspected it. Yes, it was dead, 
dead as the dinosaurs. Just to make sure he went back, assumed his primary 
waldoes, cut in the necessary circuits, and partially disassembled it. 
But the deKalbs still squirmed.
The one deKalb set which had not been subjected to the Schneider treatment 
was dead; it gave out no power hum. But the others were working frantically, 
gathering power from -where?’
He wondered whether or not McLeod had said anything to Granmps Schneider 
about the casters from which the deKalbs were intended to pick up their 
power. Certainly he himself had not. It simply had not come into the 
conversation. But Schneider had said something. 
‘The Other World is close by and full of power!’
In spite of his own intention of taking the old man literally he had ignored 
that statement. The Other World is full of power. I am sorry I snapped at you, 
Uncle Gus,’ he said.
'S all right.’
‘But what do you make of that?’
‘Looks like you’ve invented perpetual motion, son.’
‘In a way, perhaps. Or maybe we’ve repealed the law of conservation of energy. 
Those de Kalbs are drawing energy that was never before in this world!’
‘Hm-m-m!’
To check his belief he returned to the control ring, donned his waldoes, 
cut in a mobile scanner, and proceeded to search the space around the 
deKalbs with the most sensitive pickup for the radio power band he had 
available. 
The needles never jumped; the room was dead in the wave lengths to which the 
deKalbs were sensitive. The power came from Other Space.
The power came from Other Space. Not from his own beamcaster, not from 
NAPA’s shiny stations, but from Other Space. In that case he was not even 
close to solving the prob1cm of the defective deKalbs; he might never 
solve it. Wait, now - just what had he contracted to do? He tried to 
recall the exact words of the contract.
There just might be a way around it. Maybe. Yes, and this newest cockeyed 
trick of Gramps Schneider’s little pets could have some very tricky aspects. 
He began to see some possibilities, but he needed to think about it.
‘Uncle Gus-’
‘Yes, Waldo?’
‘You can go back and tell Stevens that I’ll be ready with the answers. 
We’ll get his problem licked, and yours too. In the meantime I’ve got to 
do some really heavy thinking, so I want to be by myself, please.’

‘Greetings, Mr Gleason. Quiet, Baldur! Come in. Be comfortable. How do 
you do, Dr Stevens.’
‘How do you do, Mr Jones.’
‘This,’ said Gleason, indicating a figure trailing him, ‘is Mr. Harkness, 
head of our legal staff.’
‘Ah, yes indeed. There will be matters of contract to be discussed. 
Welcome to Freehold, Mr Harkness.’
‘Thank you,’ Harkness said coldly. ‘Will your attorneys be present?’
‘They are present.’ Waldo indicated a stereo screen. Two figures 
showed in it; they bowed and murmured polite forms.
‘This is most irregular,’ Harkness complained. ‘Witnesses should be 
present in person. Things seen and heard by television are not evidence.’
Waldo drew his lips back. ‘Do you wish to make an issue of it?’
‘Not at all,’ Gleason said hastily. ‘Never mind, Charles.’ Harkness subsided.
‘I won’t waste your time, gentlemen,’ Waldo began. ‘We are here in order 
that I may fulfil my contract with you. The terms are known,  we will pass 
over them.’ 
He inserted his arms into his primary waldoes. ‘Lined up along the far wall you
will see a number of radiant power receptors, commonly called deKalbs. 
Dr Stevens may, if he wishes, check their serial numbers-’
‘No need to.’
‘Very well. I shall start my local beamcaster, in order that we may check 
the efficiency of their operation.’ His waldoes were busy as he spoke. 
‘Then I shall activate the receptors, one at a time.’ His hands pawed the 
air; a little pair of secondaries switched on the proper switches on the 
control board of the last set in line. ‘This is an ordinary type, supplied 
to me by Dr Stevens, which has never failed in operation. You may assure 
yourself that it is now operating in the normal manner, if you wish, Doctor.’
‘I can see that it is.’
‘We will call such a receptor a “deKalb” and its operation “normal”.’ The 
small waldoes were busy again. ‘Here we have a receptor which I choose to 
term a “Schneider-deKalb” because of certain treatment it has received’ 
the antennae began to move - ‘and its operation “Schneider-type” operation. 
Will you check it, Doctor?’
‘OK.’
‘You fetched with you a receptor set which has failed?’
‘As you can see.’
‘Have you been able to make it function?’
‘No, I have not.’
‘Are you sure? Have you examined it carefully?’
‘Quite carefully,’ Stevens acknowledged sourly. He was beginning to be tired 
of Waldo’s pompous flubdubbery.
‘Very well. I will now proceed to make it operative.’ Waldo left his control 
ring, shoved himself over to the vicinity of the defective deKalb, and placed 
himself so that his body covered his exact actions from the sight of the 
others. He returncd to the ring and, using waldoes, switched on the activating 
circuit of the dcKalb.
It immediately exhibited Schneider-type activity.
‘That is my case, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘I have found out how to repair 
deKalbs which become spontaneously inoperative. I will undertake to apply 
the Schneider treatment to any receptors which you may bring to me. That is 
included in my fee. I will undertake to train others in how to apply the 
Schneider treatment. That is included in my fee, but I cannot guarantee that 
any particular man will profit by my instruction. Without going into 
technical details I may say that the treatment is very difficult, much 
harder than it looks. I think that Dr Stevens will confirm that.’ 
He smiled thinly. 
‘I believe that completes my agreement with you.’
‘Just a moment, Mr Jones,’ put in Gleason. ‘Is a deKalb foolproof, once 
it has received the Schneider treatment?’
‘Quite. I guarantee it.’
They went into a huddle while Waldo waited. At last Gleason spoke for them. 
‘These are not quite the results we had expected, Mr Jones, but we agree 
that you have fulfilled your commission - with the understanding that you 
will Schneider-treat any receptors brought to you and instruct others, 
according to their ability to learn.’
‘That is correct.’
‘Your fee will be deposited to your account at once.’
‘Good. That is fully understood and agreed? I have completely and 
successfully performed your commission?’
‘Correct.’
‘Very well then. I have one more thing to show you. If you will be 
patient-’ 
A section of the wall folded back; gigantic waldoes reached into 
the room beyond and drew forth a large apparatus, which resembled 
somewhat in general form an ordinary set of deKalbs, but which 
was considerably more complicated. Most of the complications were 
sheer decoration, but it would have taken a skilled engineer a 
long time to prove the fact.
The machine did contain one novel feature: a built-in meter of a 
novel type, whereby it could be set to operate for a 
predetermined time and then destroy itself, and a radio control 
whereby the time limit could be varied. Furthermore, the meter 
would destroy itself and the receptors if tampered with by any 
person not familiar with its design. It was Waldo’s tentative 
answer to the problem of selling free and unlimited power.
But of these matters he said nothing. Small waldoes had been 
busy attaching guys to the apparatus; when they were through 
he said, ‘This, gentlemen, is an instrument which I choose 
to call a Jones-Schneider-deKalb. And it is the reason why 
you will not be in the business of selling power much longer.~
‘So?’ said Gleason. ‘May I ask why?’
‘Because,’ he was told, ‘I can sell it more cheaply and 
conveniently and under circumstances you cannot hope to match.’
‘That is a strong statement.’
‘I will demonstrate. Dr Stevens, you have noted that the other 
receptors are operating. I will turn them off.’ The waldoes did 
so. 
‘I will now stop the beamcast and I will ask you to assure 
yourself, by means of your own instruments, that there is 
no radiant power, other than ordinary visible light, in this room.’
Somewhat sullenly Stevens did so. ‘The place is dead,’ he 
announced some minutes later.
‘Good. Keep your instruments in place, that you may be sure it 
remains dead. I will now activate my receptor.’ Little mechanical 
hands closed the switches. 
‘Observe it, Doctor. Go over it thoroughly.’
Stevens did so. He did not trust the readings shown by its 
instrument hoard; he attached his own meters in parallel. 
‘How about it, James?’ Gleason whispered.
Stevens looked disgusted. ‘The damn thing draws power from nowhere!’
They all looked at Waldo. ‘Take plenty of time, gentlemen,’ he 
said grandly. ‘Talk it over.’
They withdrew as far away as the room permitted and whispered. 
Waldo could see that Harkness and Stevens were arguing, that 
Stevens was noncommittal. That suited him. He was hoping that 
Stevens would not decide to take another look at the fancy 
gadget he had termed a Jones-Schneider-deKalb. Stevens must 
not learn too much about it - yet. He had been careful to say 
nothing but the truth about it, but perhaps he had not said 
all of the truth; he had not mentioned that all Schneider-treated 
deKalbs were sources of free power.
Rather embarrassing if Stevens should discover that!
The meter-and-destruction device Waldo had purposely made 
mysterious and complex, but it was not useless. Later he would 
be able to point out, quite correctly, that without such a 
device NAPA simply could not remain in business.
Waldo was not easy. The whole business was a risky gamble; 
he would have much preferred to know more about the phenomena 
he was trying to peddle, but - he shrugged mentally while 
preserving a smile of smug confidence - the business had 
dragged on several months already, and the power situation 
really was critical. This solution would do - if he could get 
their names on the dotted line quickly enough.
For he had no intention of trying to compete with NAPA.
Gleason pulled himself away from Stevens and Harkness, came to 
Waldo. ‘Mr Jones, can’t we arrange this amicably?’
‘What have you to suggest?’

It was quite an hour later that Waldo, with a sigh of relief, 
watched his guests’ ship depart from the threshold flat. 
A fine caper, he thought, and it had worked; he had got away 
with it. He had magnanimously allowed himself to be persuaded 
to consolidate, provided - he had allowed himself to be quite 
temperamental about this - the contract was concluded at once, 
no fussing around and fencing between lawyers. Now or never - 
put up or shut up. The proposed contract, he had pointed out 
virtuously, gave him nothing at all unless his allegations 
about the Jones-chneider-deKalb were correct.
Gleason considered this point and had decided to sign, had signed.
Even then Harkness had attempted to claim that Waldo had been an 
employee of NAPA. Waldo had written that first contract himself - 
a specific commission for a contingent fee. Harkness did not have 
a leg to stand on; even Gleason had agreed to that.
In exchange for all rights to the Jones-Schneider-deKalb, for 
which he agreed to supply drawings - wait till Stevens saw, and 
understood, those sketches! - for that he had received the promise 
of senior stock in NAPA, non-voting, but fully paid up and non-
assessable. The lack of active participation in the company had 
been his own idea. There were going to be more headaches in the 
power business, headaches aplenty. He could see them coming - bootleg 
designs, means of outwitting the metering, lots of things. Free 
power had come, and efforts to stop it would in the long run, he 
believed, be fruitless.
Waldo laughed so hard that he frightened Baldur, who set up an 
excited barking.
He could afford to forget Hathaway now. His revenge on NAPA 
contained one potential flaw; he had assured Gleason that the 
Schneider-treated deKalbs would continue to operate, would not 
come unstuck. He believed that to be true simply because he had 
faith in Gramps Schneider. But he was not prepared to prove it. 
He knew himself that he did not know enough about the phenomena 
associated with the Other World to be sure that something would, 
or would not, happen. It was still going to be necessary to do 
some hard, extensive research.
But the Other World was a devilishly difficult place to investigate!
Suppose, he speculated, that the human race were blind, had never 
developed eyes. No matter how civilized, enlightened, and scientific 
the race might have become, it is difficult to see how such a race 
could ever have developed the concepts of astronomy. They might know 
of the Sun as a cyclic source of energy having a changing, directional 
character, for the Sun is so overpowering that it may be ‘seen’ with 
the skin. They would notice it and invent instruments to trap it and 
examine it.
But the pale stars, would they ever notice them? It seemed most 
unlikely. The very notion of the celestial universe, its silent 
depths and starlit grandeur, would be beyond them. Even if one of 
their scientists should have the concept forced on him in sueh a 
manner that he was obliged to accept the fantastic, incredible 
thesis as fact, how then would he go about investigating its details?
Waldo tried to imagine an astronomical phototelescope, conceived 
and designed by a blind man, intended to he operated by a blind man, 
and capable of collecting data which could he interpreted by a blind 
man. He gave it up; There were too many hazards. It would take a 
subtlety of genius far beyond his own to deal with the inescapably 
tortuous concatenations of inferential reasoning necessary to the 
solution of such a problem. It would strain him to invent such 
instruments for a blind man; he did not see how a blind man could 
ever overcome the difficulties unassisted.
In a way that was what Schneider had done for him; alone, he would 
have bogged down.
But even with Schneider’s hints the problem of investigating the 
Other World was still much like the dilemma of the blind astronomer. 
He could not see the Other World; only through the Schneider 
treatment had he been able to contact it. 
Damnation! how could he design instruments to study it?
He suspected that he would eventually have to go back to Schneider 
for further instruction, but that was an expedient so distasteful 
that he refused to think much about it. Furthermore, Gramps 
Schneider might not be able to teach him much; they did not speak 
the same language.
This much he did know: the Other Space was there and it could be 
reached sometimes by proper orientation of the mind, deliberately 
as Schneider had taught him, or subconsciously as had happened to 
McLeod and others.
He found the idea distasteful. That thought and thought alone should 
be able to influence physical phenomena was contrary to the whole 
materialistic philosophy in which he had grown up. He had a prejudice 
in favour of order and invariable natural laws. His cultural 
predecessors, the experimental philosophers who had built up the world 
of science and its concomitant technology, Galileo, Newton, Edison, 
Einstein, Steinmetz, Jeans, and their myriad colleagues - these men had 
thought of the physical universe as a mechanism proceeding by 
inexorable necessity. Any apparent failure to proceed thus was regarded 
as an error in observation, an insufficient formulation of hypothesis, 
or an insufficiency of datum.
Even the short reign of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle had not 
changed the fundamental orientation towards Order and Cosmos; the 
Heisenbcrg uncertainty was one they were certain of! It could be 
formulated, expressed, and a rigorous statistical mechanics could be 
built from it. 
In 1958 Horowitz’s reformulation of wave mechanics had eliminated the 
concept. Order and causation were restored. 
But this damned business! One might as well pray for rain, wish on the 
Moon, go to faith healers, surrender whole hog to Bishop Berkeley’s 
sweetly cereb-al world-in-your-head. ‘-the tree’s not a tree, when 
there’s no one about on the quad!’

Waldo was not emotionally wedded to Absolute Order as Rambeau had been; 
he was in no danger of becoming mentally unbalanced through a failure 
of his basic conceptions; nevertheless, consarn it, it was convenient 
for things to work the way one expected them to. 
On order and natural law was based predictability; without 
predictability it was impossible to live. Clocks should run evenly; 
water should boil when heat is applied to it; food should nourish, 
not poison; deKalb receptors should work, work the way they were designed 
to; Chaos was insupportable - it could not be lived with.
Suppose Chaos were king and the order we thought we detected in the 
world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that 
lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that 
a ten-pound weight did fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight 
until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was 
not so. 
Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the 
convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion 
to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses 
by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created 
out of Chaos - by Mind!
The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. 
The world was flat, and the Sun, tub size, rose in the east and set in 
the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which 
barely cleared the tallest mountains. Storms were the wrath of gods and 
had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A Mind-created animism 
dominated the world then.
More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic 
and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole 
involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines worked, 
the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them.
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 of the 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 one thing: 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.
He established, to his own satisfaction, the mechanism whereby short-
wave radiation had produced a deterioration in human physical 
performance. The synapses between dendrites acted as if they were 
points of leakage. Nerve impulses would sometimes fail to make the 
jump, would leak off - to where? To Other Space, he was sure. Such leakage 
seemed to establish a preferred path, a canalization, whereby the condition 
of the victim became steadily worse. Motor action was not lost entirely, as 
both paths were still available, but efficiency was lost. It reminded him 
of a metallic electrical circuit with a partial ground.
An unfortunate cat, which had become dead undergoing the experimentation, had 
supplied him with much of his data. The kitten had been born and raised free 
from exposure to power radiation. He subjected it to heavy exposure and saw 
it acquire a myasthenia nearly as complete as his own - while studying in minute 
detail what actually went on in its nerve tissues. He felt quite sentimental 
about it when it died.
Yet, if Gramps Schneider were right, human beings need not be damaged by 
radiation. If they had the wit to look at it with the proper orientation, the 
radiation would not affect them; they might even draw power out of the 
Other World.
That was what Grarnps Schneider had told him to do.
That was what Gramps Schneider had told him to do!
Gramps Schneider had told him he need not be weak!
That he could be strong-Strong!
STRONG!
He had never thought of it. Schneider’s friendly ministrations to him, his ]
advice about overcoming the weakness, he had ignored, had thrown off as 
inconsequential. His own weakness, his own peculiarity which made him different 
from the smooth apes, he had regarded as a basic, implicit fact. He had accepted 
it as established when he was a small child, a final unquestioned factor.
Naturally he had paid no attention to Schneider’s words in so far as they 
referred to him.
To be strong!
To stand alone - to walk, to run!
Why, he ... he could, he could go down to Earth surface without fear. He wouldn’t 
mind the field. They said they didn’t mind it; they even carried things - great, heavy 
things. Everybody did. They threw things.
He made a sudden convulsive movement in his primary waldoes, quite unlike his 
normal, beautifully economical rhythm. The secondaries were oversize, as he was 
making a new setup. The guys tore loose, a brace plate banged against the wall. 
Baldur was snoozing nearby; he pricked up his ears, looked around, then turned 
his face to Waldo, questioning him.
Waldo glared at him and the dog whined. ‘Shut up!’
The dog quieted and apologized with his eyes.
Automatically he looked over the damage - not much, but he would have to fix it. 
Strength. Why, if he were strong, he could do anything - anything! No 6 extension 
waldoes and some new guys- Strong! Absent-mindedly he shifted to the No 6 
waldoes.
Strength!
He could even meet women - be stronger than they were!
He could swim. He could ride. He could fly a ship - run, jump. He could handle 
things with his bare hands. He could even learn to dance!
Strong!
He would have muscles! He could break things.
He could- He could- He switched to the great waldoes with hands the size of a
man’s body. Strong - they were strong! With one giant waldo he hauled from the 
stock pile a quarter-inch steel plate, held it up, and shook it. A booming rumble. 
He shook it again. Strong’
He took it in both waldoes, bent it double. The metal buckled unevenly. 
Convulsively he crumpled it like wastepaper between the two huge palms. 
The grinding racket raised hackles on Baldur; he himself had not been aware of 
it. He relaxed for a moment, gasping. There was sweat on his forehead; blood 
throbbed in his ears. But he was not spent; he wanted something heavier~ stronger. 
Cutting to the adjoining storeroom he selected an L-beam twelve feet long, 
shoved it through to where the giant hands could reach it, and cut back to them.
The beam was askew in the port; he wrenched it loose, knocking a big dent in the 
port frame. He did not notice it.
The beam made a fine club in the gross fist. He brandished it. Baldur backed away, 
placing the control ring between himself and the great hands.
Power! Strength! Smashing, unbeatable strength- With a spastic jerk he checked his 
swing just before the beam touched the wall. No- But he grabbed the other end of 
the club with the left waldo and tried to bend it. The big waldoes were built 
for heavy work, but the beam was built to resist. He strained inside the primaries, 
strove to force the great fists to do his will. A warning light flashed on his 
control board. Bliiidly he kicked in the emergency overload and persisted.
The hum of the waldoes and the rasp of his own breath were drowned out by the 
harsh scrape of metal on metal as the beam began to give way. Exulting, he bore 
down harder in the primaries. The beam was bending double when the waldobs blew 
out. The right-hand tractors let go first; the fist flung open. The left fist, 
relieved of the strain, threw the steel from it.
It tore its way through the thin bulkhead, making a ragged hole, crashed and 
clanged in the room beyond.
But the giant waldoes were inanimate junk.
	He drew his soft pink hands from the waldoes and looked at them. His shoulders 
  heaved, and racking sobs pushed up out of him. He covered his face with his 
hands; the tears leaked out between his fingers. Baldur whimpered and edged 
in closer.
On the control board a bell rang persistently.
The wreckage had been cleared away and an adequate, neat patch covered the place 
where the L-beam had made its own exit. But the giant waldoes had not yet been 
replaced; their frame was uninhabited. Waldo was busy rigging a strength tester.
It had been years since he had paid any attention to the exact strength of his 
body. He had had so little use for strength; he had concentrated on dexterity, 
particularly on the exact and discriminating control of his namesakes. In the 
selective, efficient, and accurate use of his muscles he was second to none; 
he had control - he had to have. But he had had no need for strength.
With the mechanical equipment at hand it was not difficult to jury-rig a device 
which would register strength of grip as pounds-force on a dial. 
A spring-loaded scale and a yoke to act on it sufficed. He paused and looked at 
the contrivance.
He need only take off the primary waldoes, place his bare hand on the grip, bear 
down - and he would know. Still he hesitated.
It felt strange to handle anything so large with his bare hand. Now. Reach into 
the Other World for power. He closed his eyes and pressed. He opened them. 
Fourteen pounds - less than he used to have.
But he had not really tried yet. He tried to imagine Gramps Schneider’s hands 
on his arm, that warm tingle. Power. Reach Out and claim it.
Fourteen pounds, fifteen - seventeen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-one! He was 
winning! He was winning!
Both his strength and his courage failed him, in what order he could not say. 
The needle spun back to zero; he had to rest.
Had he really shown exceptional strength - or was twenty
one pounds of grip simply normal for him at his present age and weight? A 
normally strong and active man, he knew, should have a grip of the order of 
one hundred and fifty pounds.
Nevertheless, twenty-one pounds of grip was six pounds higher than he had ever 
before managed on test.
Try, again. Ten, eleven - twelve. Thirteen. The needle hesitated. Why, he had 
just started - this was ridiculous. Fourteen.
There it stopped. No matter how he strained and concentrated his driving will 
he could not pass that point. Slowly, he dropped back from it.
Sixteen pounds was the highest he managed in the following days. Twenty-one 
pounds seemed to have been merely a fluke, a good first effort. He ate bitterness.
But he had not reached his present position of wealth and prominence by easy 
surrender. He persisted, recalling carefully just what Schneider had said to 
him, and trying to feel the touch of Schneider’s hands. He told himself now 
that he really had been strong under Schneider’s touch, but that he had failed 
to realize it because of the Earth’s heavy field. He continued to try.
In the back of his mind he knew that he must eventually seek out Gramps Schneider 
and ask his help, if he did not find the trick alone. But he was extremely 
reluctant to do so, not because of the terrible trip it entailed - though that 
would ordinarily have been more than enough reason - but because if he did so 
and Schneider was not able to help him, then there would be no hope, no hope 
at all.
It was better to live with disappointment and frustration than to live without 
hope. He continued to postpone it.
Waldo paid little attention to Earth time; he ate and slept when he pleased. 
He might catch a cat nap at any time; however, at fairly regular intervals 
he slept for longer periods. Not in a bed, of course. A man who floats in 
air has no need for a bed. But he did make it a habit to guy himself into 
place before undertaking eight hours of solid sleep, as it prevented him 
from casual drifting in random air currents which might carry him, 
unconscious, against controls or switches.
Since the obsession to become strong had possessed him he had frequently 
found it necessary to resort to soporifics to ensure sleep.
Dr Rambeau had returned and was looking for him. Rambeau - crazy and filled 
with hate. Rambeau, blaming his troubles on Waldo. He was not safe, even 
in Freehold, as the crazy physicist had found out how to pass from one 
space to another. There he was now! Just his head, poked through from 
the Other World. ‘I’m going to get you, Waldo!’ He was gone - no, there 
he was behind him! Reaching, reaching out with hands that were writhing 
antennae. ‘You, Waldo!’ But Waldo’s own hands were the giant waldoes; he 
snatched at Rambeau.
The big waldoes went limp.
Rambeau was at him, was on him; he had him around the throat.
Gramps Schneider said in his ear, in a voice that was calm and strong, 
‘Reach out for the power, my son. Feel it in your fingers.’ Waldo 
grabbed at the throttling fingers, strained, tried.
They were coming loose. He was winning. He would stuff Rambeau back into 
the Other World and keep him there. There! He had one hand free. Baldur 
was barking frantically; he tried to tell him to shut up, to bite 
Rambeau, to help- The dog continued to bark.
He was in his own home, in his own great room. Baldur let out one more 
yipe. 
‘Quiet!’ He looked himself over.
When he had gone to sleep he had been held in place by four light guys, 
opposed like the axes of a tetrahedron. Two of them were still fastened 
to his belt; he swung loosely against the control ring. Of the other 
two, one had snapped off at his belt; its end floated a few feet away. 
The fourth had been broken in two places, near his belt and again 
several feet out; the severed piece was looped loosely around his neck.
He looked the situation over. Study as he might, he could conceive no 
way in which the guys could have been broken save by his own struggles 
in the nightmare. The dog could not have done it; he had no way to get 
a purchase. He had done it himself. 
The lines were light, being intended merely as stays. Still- It took 
him a few minutes to rig a testing apparatus which
would test pull instead of grip; the yoke had to be reversed. When it 
was done, he cut in a medium waldo pair, fastened the severed piece 
of line to the tester, and, using the waldo, pulled.
The line parted at two hundred and twelve pounds.
Hastily, but losing time because of nervous clumsiness, he re-rigged 
the tester for grip. He paused, whispered softly, ‘Now is the time, 
Gramps!’ and bore down on the grip.
Twenty pounds - twenty-one. Twenty-five!
Up past thirty. He was not even sweating! Thirty-five -forty, -one, 
-two, -three. Forty-five! And -six! And a half. Forty-seven pounds!
With a great sigh he let his hand relax. He was strong. Strong.
When he had somewhat regained his composure, he considered what to 
do next. His first impulse was to call Grimes, but he suppressed it. 
Soon enough when he was sure of himself.
He went back to the tester and tried his left hand. Not as strong as 
his right, but almost - nearly forty-five pounds. Funny thing, he 
didn’t feel any different. Just normal, healthy. No sensation.
He wanted to try all of his muscles. It would take too long to rig 
testers for kick, and shove, and back lift, and, oh, a dozen others. 
He needed a field, that was it, a one-g field. Well, there was the 
reception room; it could be centrifuged.
But its controls were in the ring and it was long corridors away. 
There was a nearer one, the centrifuge for the cuckoo clock. He had 
rigged the wheel with a speed control as an easy way to regulate the 
clock. He moved back to the control ring and stopped the turning of 
the big wheel; the clockwork was disturbed by the sudden change; 
the little red bird popped out, said, ‘TIz-wu th-woo’ once, hopefully, 
and subsided.
Carrying in his hand a small control panel radio hooked to the motor 
which inipelled the centrifuge wheel, he propelled himself to the 
wheel and placed himself inside, planting his feet on the inner surface 
of the rim and grasping one of the spokes, so that he would be in a 
standing position with respect to the centrifugal force, once it 
was impressed. He started the wheel slowly.
Its first motion surprised him and he almost fell off. But he 
recovered himself and gave it a littlc more power. All right so far. 
He speeded it up gradually, triumph spreading through him as he felt 
the pull of the pseudo gravitational field, felt his legs grow heavy, 
but still strong!
He let it out, one full g. He could take it. He could, indeed! To be 
sure, the force did not affect the upper part of his body so strongly 
as the lower, as his head was only a foot or so from the point of 
rotation. He could fix that; he squatted down slowly, hanging on 
tight to the spoke. It was all right.
But the wheel swayed and the motor complained. His unbalanced weight, 
that far out from the centre of rotation, was putting too much of 
a strain on a framework intended to support a cuckoo clock and its 
counterweight only. He straightened up with equal caution, feeling 
the fine shove of his thigh muscles and calves. He stopped the wheel.
Baldur had been much perturbed by the whole business. He had almost 
twisted his neck off trying to follow the motions of Waldo.
He still postponed calling Grimes. He wanted to arrange for some 
selective local controls on the centrifuging of the reception room, 
in order to have a proper place in which to practice standing up. 
Then he had to get the hang of this walking business; it looked 
easy, but he didn’t know. Might be quite a trick to learn it.
Thereafter he planned to teach Baldur to walk. He tried to get Baldur 
into the cuckoo-clock wheel, but the dog objected. He wiggled free 
and retreated to the farthest part of the room. No matter - when he 
had the beast in the reception room he would damn well have to learn 
to walk. Should have seen to it long ago. A big brute like that, 
and couldn’t walk!
He visualized a framework into which the dog could be placed which 
would force him to stand erect. It was roughly equivalent to a baby’s 
toddler, but Waldo did not know that. He had never seen a baby’s toddler.
‘Uncle Gus-’
‘Oh, hello, Waldo. How you been?’
‘Fine. Look, Uncle Gus, could you come up to Freehold -right away?’
Grimes shook his head. ‘Sorry. My bus is in the shop.’
‘Your bus is too slow anyhow. Take a taxi, or get somebody to drive you.’
‘And have you insult ‘em when we get there? Huh-uh.’
‘I’ll be sweet as sugar.’
‘Well, Jimmie Stevens said something yesterday about wanting to see you.’
Waldo grinned. ‘Get him. I’d like to see him.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Call me back. Make it soon.’
Waldo met them in the reception room, which he had left uncentrifuged. 
As soon as they came in he started his act. ‘My, I’m glad you’re here. 
Dr Stevens - could you fly me down to Earth rightaway? Something’s 
comeup.’
‘Why - I suppose so.’
‘Let’s go.’
‘Wait a minute, Waldo. Jimmie’s not prepared to handle you the way you 
have to be handled.’
‘I’ll have to chance it, Uncle Gus. This is urgent.’
‘But-’
‘No “buts”. Let’s leave at once.’
They bustled Baldur into the ship and tied him down. Grimes saw to it 
that Waldo’s chair was tilted back in the best approximation of a 
deceleration rig. Waldo settled himself into it and closed his eyes 
to discourage questions. He sneaked a look and found Grimes grimly 
silent. 
Stevens made very nearly a record trip, but set them down quite gently 
on the parking flat ovcr Grimes’s home. Grimes touched Waldo’s arm. 
‘How do you feel? I’ll get someone and we’ll get you inside. I want 
to get you to bed.’
‘Can’t do that, Uncle Gus. Things to do. Give me your arm, will you?’
‘Huh?’ But Waldo reached for the support requested and drew himself up.
‘I’ll be all right now, I guess.’ He let go the physician’s arm and 
started for the door. ‘Will you untie Baldur?’
‘Waldo!’
He turned around, grinning happily. ‘Yes, Uncle Gus, it’s true. I’m 
not weak any more. I can walk.’
Grimes took hold of the back of one of the seats and said shakily, 
‘Waldo, I’m an old man. You ought not to do things like this to me.’ 
He wiped at his eyes.
‘Yes,’ agreed Stevens, ‘it’s a damn dirty trick.’
Waldo looked blankly from one face to the other. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said 
humbly. ‘I just wanted to surprise you.’
‘It’s all right. Let’s go downside and have a drink. You can tell 
us about it then.’
‘All right. Come on, Baldur.’ The dog got up and followed after his 
master. He had a very curious gait; Waldo’s trainer gadget had taught 
him to pace instead of trot.
Waldo stayed with Grimes for days, gaining strength, gaining new 
reflex patterns, building up his flabby muscles. He had no setbacks; 
the myasthenia was gone. All he required was conditioning.
Grimes had forgiven him at once for his unnecessarily abrupt and 
spectacular revelation of his cure, but Grimes had insisted that he 
take it easy and become fully readjusted before he undertook to 
venture out unescorted. It was a wise precaution. Even simple 
things were hazards to him. Stairs, for example. He could walk 
on the level, but going downstairs had to be learned. Going up 
was not so difficult.
Stevens showed up one day, let himself in, and found Waldo alone 
in the living room, listening to a stereo show. ‘Hello, Mr Jones.’
‘Oh - hello, Dr Stevens.’ Waldo reached down hastily, fumbled for 
his shoes, zipped them on. ‘Uncle Gus says I should wear them all 
the time,’ he explained. ‘Everybody does. But you caught me unawares.’
‘Oh, that’s no matter. You don’t have to wear them in the house. 
Where’s Doc?’
‘Gone for the day. Don’t you, really? Seems to me my nurses always wore 
shoes.’
‘Oh yes, everybody does - but there’s no law to make you.’
‘Then I’ll wear them. But I can’t say that I like them. They feel dead, 
like a pair of disconnected waldoes. But I want to learn how.’
‘How to wear shoes?’
‘How to act like people act. It’s really quite difficult,’ he said 
seriously.
Stevens felt a sudden insight, a welling of sympathy for this man 
with no background and no friends. It must be odd and strange to him. 
He felt an impulse to confess something which had been on his mind 
with respect to Waldo. ‘You really are strong now, aren’t you?’
Waldo grinned happily. ‘Getting stronger every day. I gripped two 
hundred pounds this morning. And see how much fat I’ve worked off.’
‘You’re looking fit, all right. Here’s a funny thing. Ever since 
I first met you I’ve wished to high heaven that you were as strong 
as an ordinary man.’
‘You really did? Why?’
‘Well . .. I think you will admit that you used some pretty poisonous 
language to me, one time and another. You had me riled up all the 
time. I wanted you to get strong so that I could just beat the hell 
out of you.’
Waldo had been walking up and down, getting used to his shoes. He 
stopped and faced Stevens. He seemed considerably startled. ‘You 
mean you wanted to fist-fight me?’
‘Exactly. You used language to me that a man ought not to use 
unless he is prepared to back it up with his fists. If you had 
not been an invalid I would have pasted you one, oh, any number 
of times.’
Waldo seemed to be struggling with a new concept. ‘I think I see,’ 
he said slowly. ‘Well - all right.’ On the last word he delivered 
a roundhouse swipe with plenty of power behind it. Stevens was 
not in the least expecting it; it happened to catch him on the 
button. He went down. out cold.
When he came to he found himself in a chair. Waldo was shaking 
him. ‘Wasn’t that right?’ he said anxiously.
‘What did you hit me with?’
‘My hand. Wasn’t that right? Wasn’t that what you wanted?’
‘Wasn’t that what I-’ He still had little bright lights floating 
in front of his eyes, but the situation began to tickle him. 
‘Look here - is that your idea of the proper way to start a fight?’
‘Isn’t it?’
Stevens tried to explain to him the etiquette of fisticuffs, 
contemporary American. Waldo seemed puzzled, but finally he 
nodded. ‘I get it. You have to give the other man warning. 
All right - get up, and we’ll do it over.’
‘Easy, easy! Wait a minute. You never did give me a chance 
to finish what I was saying. I was sore at you, but I’m not 
any more. That is what I was trying to tell you. Oh, you 
were utterly poisonous; there is no doubt about that. But 
you couldn’t help being.’
‘I don’t mean to be poisonous,’ Waldo said seriously.
‘I know you don’t, and you’re not. I rather like you 
now -now that you’re strong.’
‘Do you really?’
‘Yes, I do. But don’t practise any more of those punches on me.’
‘I won’t. But I didn’t understand. But, do you know, Dr Stevens, 
it’s-’
‘Call inc Jim.’
‘Jim. It’s a very hard thing to know just what people do expect. 
There is so little pattern to it. Take belching; I didn’t know 
it was forbidden to burp when other people are around. It seems 
obviously necessary to me. But Uncle Gus says not.’
Stevens tried to clear up the matter for him - not too well, as he 
found that Waldo was almost totally lacking in any notion, even 
theoretical, of social conduct. Not even from fiction had he 
derived a concept of the intricacies of mores, as he bad read 
almost no fiction. He had ceased reading stories in his early 
boyhood, because he lacked the background of experience necessary 
to appreciate fiction.
He was rich, powerful, and a mechanical genius, but he still needed 
to go to kindergarten.
Waldo had a proposition to make. ‘Jim, you’ve been very helpful. 
You explain these things better than Uncle Gus does. I’ll hire you 
to teach me.’
Stevens suppressed a slight feeling of pique. ‘Sorry. I’ve got a 
job that keeps me busy.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. I’ll pay you better than they do. You can 
name your own salary. It’s a deal.’
Stevens took a deep breath and sighed. ‘You don’t understand. I’m 
an engineer and I don’t hire out for personal service. You can’t 
hire me. Oh, I’ll help you all I can, but I won’t take money for it.
‘What’s wrong with taking money?’
The question, Stevens thought, was stated wrongly. As it stood it 
could not be answered. He launched into a long, involved 
discussion of professional and business conduct. He was really not 
fitted for it; Waldo soon bogged down. 
‘I’m afraid I don’t get it. But see here - could you teach me how to 
behave with girls ~ Uncle Gus says he doesn’t dare take me out 
in company.
‘Well, I’ll try. I’ll certainly try. But, Waldo, I came over to 
see you about some of the problems we’re running into at the 
plant. About this theory of the two spaces that you were telling 
me about-’
‘It’s not theory; it’s fact.’
‘All right. What I want to know is this: When do you expect to go 
back to Freehold and resume research? We need some help.’
‘Go back to Freehold? I haven’t any idea. I don’t intend to 
resume research.’
‘You don’t? But, my heavens, you haven’t finished half the 
investigations you outlined to me.’
‘You fellows can do ‘em. I’ll help out with suggestions, of course.’
‘Well - maybe we could interest Gramps Schneider,’ Stevens said 
doubtfully.
‘I would not advise it,’ Waldo answered. ‘Let me show you a letter 
he sent me.’ He left and fetched it back. ‘Here.’
Stevens glanced through it. ‘-your generous offer of your share in 
the new power project I appreciate, but, truthfully, I have no 
interest in such things and would find the responsibility a burden. 
As for the news of your new strength I am happy, but not surprised. 
The power of the Other World is his who would claim it-’ 
There was more to it. It was written in a precise Spencerian hand, 
a trifle shaky; the rhetoric showed none of the colloquialisms with 
which Schneider spoke.
‘Hm-m-m - I think I see what you mean.’
‘I believe,’ Waldo said seriously, ‘that he regards our manipulations 
with gadgets as rather childish.’
‘I suppose. Tell me, what do you intend to do with your-self?’
‘Me? I don’t know, exactly. But I can tell you this: I’m going to 
have fun. I’m going to have lots of fun. I’m just beginning to find 
out bow much fun it is to be a man!’

His dresser tackled the other slipper. ‘To tell you just why I took 
up dancing would be a long story,’ he continued. 
‘I want details.’
‘Hospital calling,’ someone in the dressing room said. 
‘Tell ‘em I’ll be right there, fast. Suppose you come in tomorrow 
afternoon?’ he added to the woman reporter. ‘Can you?’
‘Right.’
A man was shouldering his way through the little knot around him. 
Waldo caught his eye. ‘Hello, Stanley. Glad to see you.’
‘Hello, Waldo.’ Gleason pulled some papers out from under his cape 
and dropped them in the dancer’s lap. ‘Brought these over myself 
as I wanted to see your act again.’
‘Like it?’
‘Swell!’
Waldo grinned and picked up the papers. ‘Where is the dotted line?’
‘Better read them first,’ Gleason cautioned him.
‘Oh shucks, no. If it suits you, it suits me. Can I borrow your stylus?’
A worried little man worked his way up to them. ‘About that recording, 
Waldo-’
‘We’ve discussed that,’ Waldo said flatly. ‘I only perform before 
audiences.’
‘We’ve combined it with the Warm Springs benefit.’
‘That’s different. OK.’
‘While you’re about it, take a look at this layout.’ It was a 
reduction, for a twenty-four sheet:

                     THE GREAT WALDO
                      AND HIS TROUPE

with the opening date and theatre left blank, but with a picture 
of Waldo, as Harlequin, poised high in the air.
‘Fine, Sam, fine!’ Waldo nodded happily.
‘Hospital calling again!’
‘I’m ready now,’ Waldo answered, and stood up. His dresser draped 
his street cape over his lean shoulders. Waldo whistled sharply. 
‘Here, Baldur! Come along.’ At the door he stopped an instant, 
and waved. ‘Goodnight, fellows!’
‘Goodnight, Waldo.’
They were all such grand guys.