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special physical and psycho examinations for all commercial pilots flying
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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?'
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'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.'
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'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
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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
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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.
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