What Thin Partitions (3 page)

If I expected either a burst of tears or defiance, I was mistaken. I didn't have time to observe reactions at all.

It was as if a sudden hurricane and earthquake had hit the room at the same time. A desk tray full of papers whizzed by my head-my pen stand crashed through the window back of me, I got a shower of paper clips in the chest, my intercom described an arc and crashed broken into a corner. By the time I had wiped the ashes and tobacco from my ashtray out of my eyes and got them to stay open again, Jennie was gone. Sara was standing in the doorway with a look of consternation on her face.

I was on my way home before I remembered that when Sara and I had cleaned up the mess, I had not remembered picking up Auerbach's little cylinder, his chemical impulse storer. I last saw it laying on the corner of my desk where Auerbach had left it.

Probably Sara had picked it up and put it away. Anyway, the office was within security boundaries. The cylinder would be safe there.

I put it out of my mind, and wondered if the library had a card index classification under the heading of “Poltergeist."

I wasn't much better prepared when I came into my office the following morning. Yes, of course, there was plenty of literature on the subject under such writers as Fort, books on oriental philosophy and the like. Orthodox psychologists had left the subject strictly alone, their attitude apparently being better to ignore the phenomenon than to risk precious and precarious reputation.

Poltergeism, then, remained something which one read about as an obscure, far away thing. I found no handy hints to help when one had it to deal with at first hand, no how-to-do-it books on the subject.

Worse, I found myself with a hangover of uncertainty, indecision. My deft incisiveness was gone. I felt a growing doubt that I had always been as smart as I thought I was.

I shook off the mood as I walked through the outer personnel offices toward my own. No matter how unsure, one must be positive and definite for the sake of the people who depend upon him for some certainties.

Sara had not quite come to the same decision. There was a look of puzzlement on her face when I started through her office toward mine. Uncertainty of whether she should pick up the usual banter as though nothing had happened-or was I really in trouble? I decided to set her mind at rest at least.

"When you picked up last night, after that little wildcat had her tantrum,” I greeted her, “did you put away a little plastic cylinder?"

"Why no, Mr. Kennedy,” she said and followed me into my office. “I didn't see one."

We looked in the corners of the room, under the desk, behind the chairs. We did not find it. I opened the window where the broken pane had been replaced, and looked out on the ground. It might have followed the pen stand out the window. I did have a vague recollection of something dark flashing by my head just before I got my face full of ashes. There was no cylinder on the ground.

When Sara is puzzled, she has a way of tapping her chin with her finger and looking up at the ceiling.

"Is that what you're looking for?” she asked, and pointed to the corner above my head.

I looked up and saw the cylinder embedded in the broken plaster. Apparently the jagged edges had caught it and kept it from failing. We hadn't noticed it before, because who looks at a ceiling in a familiar room? Apparently the janitors don't look at ceilings, either.

"O.K., Sara, thanks,” I dismissed her. “Try to hold the hounds at bay, gal. I've got some thinking to do this morning."

"I shouldn't wonder,” she grinned. “Anybody who calls himself a personnel psychologist, and then forces little children to have tantrums in spite of themselves—” The door closed, and saved me the trouble of hearing the completion of her sentence.

Yes, Sara was back on familiar ground. I wished I were.

I dragged a spare straight chair over and stood up on it to get the cylinder. It didn't want to move. Plaster fell around me. The jagged pieces holding it now fell away, and still it didn't move. It gave off the impression of pressing upward against the buttonboard.

I took hold of it and tugged. It came away reluctantly, an identical sensation of lifting a heavy object from the ground, in reverse. It remained heavy, invertedly heavy, as I carried it down and over to my desk.

Habit made me lay it on top of my desk and take my hand away. Habit made me grab for it as it shot upward, just as habit makes me grab for a thing which is falling. This time I put it into a drawer, and held my hand over it to keep it down as I closed the drawer.

I sank back into my chair and hooked my toes under the ledge of the desk. It raised into the air, slowly, buoyantly. I took the pressure of my toes away hurriedly. The desk hovered for a moment, tilted in the air. I put my hand on the top and nervously pressed it back to the floor again. I didn't really expect to hear raps on wood or tin bugles blowing, because I knew it was the cylinder in the drawer which was lifting the desk corner.

There was a very logical explanation of why the desk was trying to float upward. The cylinder was pushing it upward, of course. Yes, very logical. I took one of my nice clean handkerchiefs from another drawer and wiped the sweat off my forehead. There was a logical reason for the sweat, too. I was scared.

"Get me Auerbach,” I said to Sara in my new intercom. No doubt it was all over the plant by now that I had smashed my old one in a fit of rage. I settled back into my chair again, and pressed my knees against the desk to keep them from shaking. I shouldn't have done it. The desk bobbed away from me and settled slowly again. I left it there and waited. I sat well away from it, and tried to speculate on what survival factor shaking knees could represent.

Auerbach was not long in arriving. His expression, when he came through the door, was a mixed one of hope I had already got some results for him and touchiness that he should have been summoned like an ordinary employee.

"Take hold of that corner of the desk and lift,” I suggested. He looked puzzled, but complied. The desk buoyed upward, this time so strongly that my papers and pen stand slid off to the floor.

"Not so hard, man,” I shouted.

"But I barely touched it,” he said, incredulously.

I waved him to the crying chair and ignored the accusation written all over his face that I was playing tricks on him. I reached into the desk drawer and pulled out the cylinder. I handed it to him and he took it-from beneath, naturally, to hold it up. It shot up out of his hand and crashed against the ceiling. Plaster fell around him. He spit a sliver of it out of his open mouth as he gazed up at the cylinder.

"Must you be so careless and drop it up?” I snapped.

He didn't answer, and I just let it lay there where it had fallen against the ceiling.

"It isn't particular about what it learns, is it?” I asked, as if there were nothing at all abnormal about the situation.

He brought his eyes away from it and tried to answer, but there was a glaze over his eyes. I noticed his hands begin to shake, and that gave me confidence. My knees had stopped now, with only a small tremor now and then. Auerbach reached over and tugged at the desk corner, but the desk now hugged the floor as if it liked it and refused to budge.

"It doesn't care what it learns, does it?” I repeated. This time he did a better job of trying to come to his senses. His face was a study in attempts to rationalize what he had seen with what he thought he knew. Apparently he wasn't having much luck. But at least he didn't deny what he had seen. I took courage from that. He might prove to be more intelligent than learned after all.

"Let us,” I began in a dry classroom manner, “assume, for sake of discussion, that your cylinder can store impulses."

He nodded, as if this were a safe enough assumption. It was a hopeful sign that I was getting through to him.

"It wouldn't know, of itself, which was up and which was down,” I pursued.

"Gravity is a real world condition,” he started answering now. “Not dependent upon knowledge. It works whether we know it or not."

"Well that's a point which has been debated for the last several thousand years to no conclusion,” I disagreed. “But let's take an illustration. Let's formulate a hypothesis, a variant world condition where biologists might know only natural air breathing animals."

He nodded again, a little more of the daze gone from his eyes. He was capable of a hypothesis.

"An entirely different structure of theory and expression of natural laws would be built up from that,” I reasoned. “One of these would be the basic law that to be classified as alive a thing must breathe natural air.” I pushed the point into my desk top with my finger.

He felt he should object as a matter of principle; should, in scientific tradition, discard the main point in favor of arguing semantics and definitions. That was always safe and didn't require one to think. But I didn't let him escape that easily.

"Now suppose, within that framework, a biologist fished a minnow out of a stream, carried it dry to his laboratory and proceeded to analyze it. You and I know the minnow would die in transit. Now he observes that it does not breathe air, and could not have breathed air down in the water, therefore it does not represent a life form at all. That is his real world condition, isn't it?"

"Yes,” he agreed hesitantly. “But there would be so many other evidences that it does represent life. He would have to be extremely stupid not to recognize that his basic rules defining life were wrong.

"Let us concede,” I said dryly, “that he is very stupid. But let us be kind. Let us say that it is the entire framework of thought in which he finds himself which is stupid. All his life, he has been educated to this framework. Science and society have weighted him down with immutable laws. To question them would represent nothing less than chaos."

"Yes,” he urged me now to go on.

"We come along, you and I, and we operate in a different framework of thought. In our world condition, fish obtain oxygen directly from water. But we could not prove that to him."

"I don't see-"

"Look,” I said patiently, “since his base law requires life to breathe air, he would demand, as proof of our contention, that we show it breathing air. We couldn't do it. He will not give up the foundation of his science. We can't prove our claim until he does."

"Stalemate,” Auerbach agreed. “But where does that leave us?"

"It leaves us with the conception that there may be any number of frameworks, separated from one another by perhaps the thinnest of partitions, each containing its own set of real world conditions, natural laws, consistent within itself, obeying its own logic, having its own peculiar cause-effect sequences."

"And one of these substitutes down for up?” he asked skeptically.

"Some of the most noted thinkers the world has ever produced contend that the mind is the only reality,” I said slowly. “Now suppose we have a child of an ignorant parent. The child has been neglected, left to vegetate alone in its room, never associates with other children, never has the opportunity to learn what our framework of thinking calls natural law, real world conditions. Such a child might formulate for itself a real world matrix quite different from ours."

Auerbach was silent, but looked at me fixedly.

"For one example, it might take things very literally,” I said. “It might form natural laws out of slang phrases. The child's mother uses the phrase, ‘It just burns me up.’ Suppose then the child, when it was vexed, just literally ‘burned things up.’ Ever hear of a poltergeist?"

"Oh come now, Kennedy,” he remonstrated, “that fairy tale stuff."

"There are hundreds of carefully documented case histories,” I said, without getting heated about it. “Refusal to look at poltergeist phenomena is on the order of the biologist refusing to consider the minnow alive. Things just catch on fire where these poltergeists are. Things just fly through the air where they are. There must be an explanation. We know that."

"We have some statements to that effect,” he corrected.

"We have some statements about what is our own basic natural law, too,” I countered. “And that's all we have. Just some statements."

"And such statements apply only within the partitions of the framework?” he asked, neither skeptically nor in agreement. He looked up at the cylinder again. “So your explanation for that is a poltergeist phenomenon?” he mused.

"Yes."

"I wish you had some other explanation,” he said. “I don't like that one. Almost any other kind of an explanation would be better."

"So do I,” I answered in complete agreement, “but that's the only one I've got. You see, I saw a poltergeist activate it. Apparently the force of her mind, acting on it, stored it with impulses from her own framework of reality. It would not be particular what it learns, so long as what it learns is consistent with the process used in learning it."

He sighed deeply. “I wish that biologist hadn't picked up that minnow,” he said, wistfully.

After my secretary had made suitable protocol negotiations with the general manager's secretary, I headed for Old Stone Face's office, Mr. Henry Grenoble, that is. On the way out of my office, I had trouble with my feet. I was almost floating as I walked along, carrying the cylinder. I detoured over by Receiving and surreptitiously weighed myself on the scales. They read thirty pounds.

"Obviously out of order,” I found myself giggling, and wondered if the mood had anything to do with my sensation of weightlessness. Suddenly from the odd looks of employees, it occurred to me that I was buoyantly tripping down the corridor on my toes and giggling to myself. I blushed and tried to look stern. It wasn't easy to stride purposefully when you weren't sure your feet were touching the floor. I hoped they wouldn't think I was drunk, or worse.

"Morning, Henry,” I said to the general manager, and received his noncommittal nod. I wasn't his fair-haired boy, but neither was I a thorn in his side. We got along all right by mutual and tacit agreement to leave one another alone. It was the regret of his life that such inefficient machines as people had to be used in his plant, and he was glad enough to leave their management to my care.