Part 3

A. Well, some things improve, but their point of view keeps changing with regard to what should and what should not improve. It's hard to say whether the Greeks really believed in progress: they thought there had been a golden age and that the world had degenerated from it. Some of them may have wanted to return to it, but I always suspected their motives--by their own showing, they were decadent. During the Middle Ages, it was felt that art was on the way up--part of an evolutionary process--whereas science was not. Aristotle and the Thomists had science all cut and dried. Nowadays it's fashionable to say the art was as "good" in primitive times as it is now, while science on the other hand is evolving to a higher state of truth. The latter happens to be true, but they still have war.

Q. Perhaps it's inevitable.

A. If it is, we are wasting our time.

Q. That is for the Unity to decide. You set yourself up as Mankind's conscience.

A. Not conscience. I plead for self-examination--for a reappraisal of ideas.

Q. Yet you only succeed in irritating them.

A. That may be the best way. And you confuse conscience with consciousness. If there's one thing I've found out, it's that Man differs from the animals in having more consciousness, just as animals have more than plants. I don't suppose that hydrogen has any at all.

Q. But you have turned what was intended to be a field-trip for examination and analysis into a crusade. With all your nagging and irritating them, there have been no results--no real advances.

A. I thought you were complaining that I was altering what I was sent to examine. You talk about unification--or absorption--as if it were a catchword. That's the trouble with generalities: they're not necessarily true in all cases.

Q. You mean they are too general?

A. I mean that they are not general enough. I agree that men progress too slowly toward unification, but we mustn't confuse it with domination. We cannot _impose_ it on them. That would lead to a world divided into the ruled and the rulers--not a unity.

Q. Then you are for absorption?

A. You know, you twist things around much worse than I do.

Q. The Unity is incapable of--

A. Furthermore, I think you have been altered more than I have.

Q. You are part of the Unity.

A. And the least altered part. You won't be able to absorb them the way you can reabsorb me without destroying them as entities.

Q. You set yourself up as the only one to know this. Why?

A. Because I have been the one to make the trips. I have been your eye.

Q. But the others--the ones you called the spies?

A. They weren't there to look at Man, only to watch _me_. They weren't even sightseeing--they were slumming. However, I think I am ceasing to be the only one. I think you are coming to know these things, too.

Q. Very gratifying. Now, as to the latest trip?

A. There seems to have been a slip-up....

Q. _Another_ one?

A. Different. The ones _I_ made were errors in time; this one is not mine, and it's in hyper-time. I was trying to explain it to a friend, but he already knew all about it and that led to the slip-up. It caused it, yet it came afterward.

Q. How annoying for you. How did you explain hyper-time?

A. I said that when an object moves or changes, time is needed as one of the coordinates to describe that change. I said that consciousness moves _through_ time--from Monday to Tuesday--otherwise we would be merely aware of differences without experiencing them as change. I said that to describe this motion of consciousness along the dimension of time, _another_ coordinate is needed: hyper-time.

Q. And the slip-up--which you claim is not yours?

A. Is in hyper-time. It is the result of the Unity and Mankind affecting one another. You have, through my efforts, examined them--and thus changed them. Now they begin to examine you--with the result that _you_ change.

Q. They begin to examine _us_? You must mean they have examined _you_.

A. There is a man--a young physicist--and he has found out something. I think that without quite knowing it, he has detected you. At all events, he has found out where you are, and I think that perhaps you are aware.

Q. What makes you say that?

A. Obviously these things work both ways. Heisenberg's principle says--

Q. We want to hear no more of Heisenberg's principle! There's enough confusion as it is, without that!

A. I admit it. That's why I decided to--to close my eyes to everything but essentials on this trip.

Q. It is gratifying to hear you admit something for a change. What are you "closing your eyes to" in this case?

A. Appearances.

Q. Why?

A. Appearances are deceitful. That is, they are now; they weren't before, when the Unity was the Unity and Mankind was Mankind, not something of each. You ask me to keep my objectivity and you don't tell me how. You can't, of course--your own is too lost for you even to know it's gone. So I have to work out my way alone and the best method seems to be to work with as few senses as possible. That won't give me real objectivity, but it will mean somewhat less involvement.

Q. The less you see, the more you can observe? Does that make sense?

A. Nothing does any more. Oh, if you had only stopped in time--no, that wasn't possible.

Q. Why not?

A. Because, being in hyper-time, the slip-up is both in the past and the future in simple time. The last trip is going on now....

* * * * *

Katherine was lying on the lab sofa with her hands behind her head. The sofa was shabby and was alleged to have belonged at one time to a psychoanalyst. Its present function was to offer temporary rest to anyone working late in the lab. Today was Sunday and no undergraduates were there.

"What are you fiddling around with, Phil?" Katherine asked.

"The electron microscope," he said. Phil Kaufman was an assistant physics professor, short, bony and intense-looking, and at the moment he was engaged in extra-curricular research.

"You know, I bet this old chaise-longue could many a tale unfold," she said.

"Well, according to rumor, many have been unfolded on it."

"Professor, your mind wanders. I'm thinking of its previous condition of servitude. Think of the dreams it used to hear."

Phil Kaufman didn't answer. There was a pause and she said, "This afternoon you're working with the microscope, and last night it was the telescope. You were in the observatory until dawn."

"How did you find that out?"

"I have my methods, Watson. I don't see how you expect to keep going on no sleep at all. Russ is worried about you."

"Pro or con?"

"Pro, of course. He likes you very much. In fact, he thinks you are the best brain on the faculty."

"Coming from the president, that's praise indeed." Phil got up and went to a desk, where he looked at some notes. "Speaking as my boss's wife, would you say he was pro or con about this work I'm doing?"

"I would say he can't make it out. Alternating between the Microcosm and the Macrocosm. Incidentally, why don't they call that thing in the observatory a macroscope? I don't think Russ is very good at understanding the unfamiliar. I was telling him about the concept of hyper-time the other day, and his reaction was one of solicitude--he got me a drink." Katherine stretched her arms. "What are you doing now?"

"Checking some figures. You know, that was odd, your bringing up the business of hyper-time. This thing I'm working on seems to involve it."

"Oh?" Katherine put her arms behind her head again. "Tell me something, Phil--what does he look like?"

"Doctor Russell Farley?"

"Yes. I suppose it's a funny sort of question to ask about one's husband. How does he look to you?"

"Like the youngest college president in America, I guess. Brawny but brainy. You make what they call a handsome couple."

"Yes, I was going to ask you what I looked like, only it's a waste of time. People never tell you."

"I can," Phil said, "but I won't, for fear of giving you a swelled head."

* * * * *

"As a matter of fact, it's silly of me to ask," she went on. "I wouldn't understand. I don't even know what 'pretty' means, although I have a dim idea what 'ugly' does. Color is another enigma to me. Somebody once told me it's like a smell, but when I get a bad cold, I can't remember what smells are like. It's like not being able to think of the word 'bubble' when your mouth is wide open--you think of '_Ah_-uh.'"

"I'll tell you one thing about yourself," Phil said. "You don't look as though...."

"As though I was blind?"

"Correct. And it's incredible the way you get around. You never bump into anything, and you look people right in the eye when they talk to you."

"They say it's hearing faint echoes from an obstacle--like a bat. Personally, I _feel_ the wall in front of me. I admit when my ears are stopped up I can't hear the wall, but I'm not so sure that's a convincing proof. It's the same with pit vipers--some smart investigator discovered that when you plug up their little heat-detecting organs--I guess those are the pits--they can't locate warm prey in the dark. Conversely, in the dark and not plugged up, they will strike at a hot-water bottle."

"Sounds pretty convincing to me," Phil said, and went back to the electron microscope.

"Tush," Katherine said. "How about people not wanting to smoke in the dark? Does that prove that the sense of taste depends on sight? _I_ smoke. In fact, you might bring me a cigarette and an ashtray. The only reason most blind people don't smoke is they're afraid of fire." She took the cigarette Phil brought her. "Thanks."

"Aren't you afraid of fire?" he asked.

"Of course not. I can detect a match flame at fifteen feet."

"You ought to go to Duke University sometime and have Rhine take a look at you."

"I did. All he said was 'Hmm,' and I joined the other statistics."

There was silence for a while, interrupted at one point by a muffled "Damn!" from Phil peering into the electron microscope, and the warm sun lay across Katherine's lap. Finally he straightened up and switched off the current. "Well, it's there, all right," he said, and got up and went to the couch and sat at her feet.

"What is?"

"The red shift."

"Aren't you confusing things?" she said. "You're not in the observatory now, Buster; this is the lab. I thought the red shift was the recession of the distant galaxies ... whatever 'red' is."

"Quite right, Holmes. However, in this case, it's the recession of the not-so-distant atoms. They are small-sized solar systems, too, in a way, and when I say 'red' I mean something I can only infer mathematically, because I'm not dealing with light in the ordinary sense."

"You mean they're _receding_?"

"Only in this context," he said. "Motion is length over time; in this case, it's length over hyper-time, so they're still here in the lab."

"I'm relieved to hear it," she said. "However, I should think they'd be receding into tomorrow."

"They are, but into yesterday, and new ones from tomorrow are continually coming in to take their place. It's like Fred Hoyle's theory of the continuous birth of hydrogen."

"You're making me feel like my poor husband," Katherine said. "I understand the necessity of hyper-time to describe the motion of consciousness along time, but what's this got to do with the atoms?"

* * * * *

There was a knock at the door and Phil stood up, just as Doctor Russell Chalmers Farley came in without waiting for an answer. Phil and Katherine felt faintly embarrassed--there was scarcely any need to knock on the door to the physics lab; it somehow suggested that the door should be kept open when entertaining callers.

Doctor Farley was a handsome man of thirty-eight with a blond mustache that gave him the look of a Kipling colonial officer.

"Ah, there you are, Katherine," he said cheerfully. "Hello, Kaufman. How's the Research Magnificent?"

"It's beginning to show signs of life," Phil said. "I think I can detect a sort of fetal pulse."

Doctor Farley blinked his pale eyelashes and smiled. He sat down at the end of the couch where Phil had been sitting and looked up at him. Part of his charm was that, when he talked to a man shorter than himself, he got below him and looked up. At his evening "sherries" at home, he had a way of deferring to the newest and least important visitor, who was thus raised to the temporary rank of philosopher, while Russell Chalmers Farley was reduced to the position of listener.

The role of humble servitor of the Truth was his most useful one--it had worked rather well with Katherine, and he had an adroit and imaginative way of expressing his ideas, which usually disguised the fact that they were generally borrowed.

They had met at a street corner in New York City where she was waiting for the sound of traffic to abate so that she could cross. He was on the opposite side, and with his extraordinary eyesight and intuition instantly recognized that the beautiful, odd-looking girl facing him on the other side of the street was blind. He was at her side before the light--and the sound of traffic--had changed, and said, "I hope you don't think I'm being forward, but let me offer you my arm. Taxis have a way of making illegal turns sometimes...."

"You are very kind," she replied, pulling him back from the path of a taxi making an illegal turn. "You have a very nice voice," she said as they got to the other side. "I guess being blind makes one ... forward!" She laughed and started to walk on.

"No, please wait!" he said, and caught up with her. "I wish you hadn't said that. It can be taken in another way: that I am forward because you are blind. I should like to say that _you_ have a very nice voice."

She stopped and laughed again. "That's one of the nicest things I've ever had said to me!"

"Do let's ... I mean would you let me...." He floundered, and laughed, too. "Can't we have a drink together? Now?"

"I think it would be lovely," she said.

Later on, he said to her, "You may think this impertinent of me, but you make me envy you. If I were braver, I should wish that I were blind. You actually see more than I do."

* * * * *

Katherine was intrigued. She had been told this before, but always with mystical and pseudo-religious implications. This man, with the attractive voice and smell, had no trace of the mystic.

"Let me tell you a fable to illustrate what I mean," he went on. "There was a man who was born blind, and he went to work as a coal miner because the darkness was no hindrance to him. One day while he was working alone in an unlighted gallery, his sight was miraculously given to him.... He shouted out in amazement and awe, and the other miners came stumbling to him in the total darkness.

"'What is it?' they cried. 'What's the matter?'

"'I can see!' he told them. But they were puzzled, for they had brought no lights.

"'What can you see?' they asked. 'There is nothing to be seen here in the dark.'

"'I see _black_!' he said. 'In front of my face is blackness--however, at the back of my head, I'm still blind and I see nothing.'"

Katherine was delighted. "I'm not quite sure I understand."

"Why, to the blind there are no shadows," Farley said. "Another drink?"

"I think it would be lovely," she had said, and since she could see no shadows, she had begun to fall in love.

Doctor Russell Chalmers Farley looked up at Phil and smiled. It was a charming smile and it was as genuine as a guaranteed, ten-carat, real, honest-to-goodness zircon. "As Katherine has probably told you," he said, "what you are doing is completely over my bowed head. I am enormously impressed and at the same time unable to comprehend."

"I find it hard to comprehend, too," Phil Kaufman said. "And I suppose that's what leads me on."

"Well, the thing is," Farley continued, "Washington seems to have gotten wind of it, and you know how they are. They don't like things to be over their heads."

Phil Kaufman looked at him in astonishment and sat on a lab stool. "I don't understand. How can they possibly be interested in what I'm doing? It's purely theoretical research."

"Surely you don't deny that Lisa Meitner's researches began by being theoretical? And look what _they_ led to. The point is, Kaufman, that I have been informed that we are about to receive a visit from a man from the A.E.C. He's arriving here sometime this afternoon."

"But that's absurd! I'm not _doing_ anything to atoms. I'm merely examining them!"

Katherine frowned when he said this. Phil knew better. Worse yet, so did she.

"When the A.E.C. hears of somebody working in atomic research," Farley said, "they want to know what's cooking. I hate you to be subjected to this, but it won't do any harm to be polite to the fellow and let him, as it were, look over your shoulder."

"I'm damned if I see why I should!" Phil said. "What does he expect to do? Classify me?"

* * * * *

Farley laughed placatingly. "I know it seems high-handed, but I think we all ought to remember there is such a thing as Security."

"Security, my foot!" Phil said. "It was that kind of demented thinking that caused Germany to lose Lisa Meitner! _And_ Einstein."

"What strikes _me_ as rather odd," Katherine said, "is their sending someone here on a Sunday. When did you hear about it, Russ?"

"A little while ago. On the phone."

"Curiouser and curiouser."

"He was very polite and apologetic."

"Quite typical," Phil said. "It's the velvet-glove touch."

Farley looked at his wristwatch. "He won't be here for a while, so I wish you could brief me about the inwardness of what you are doing, Phil." He'd never used his first name before, and Phil became a little wary. "I know you can't give me a ten-year course in advanced physics this afternoon, but--well, I'd like to know what kind of stand to take. I'll be representing the university, after all."

Phil Kaufman looked down from his perch on the stool at the earnest, kindly face and wondered what really lay behind it. So far as he could see, Doctor Farley had no reason to take any stand on the question at all, except to tell the A.E.C. man to go sit on a tack. If he wanted to represent the university, let him do it in the name of Academic Freedom. Phil glanced at Katherine. She was sitting very still and he had the impression that she was thinking about something else.

"All right, I'll give it a try," he said. "There's an idea that's been around for quite a while that there is an analogy between the stars and the atoms."

Doctor Farley's face lighted. "I believe I've heard of it. Back in the 'twenties, by a man called Dunn, wasn't it?"

Phil shook his head. "Twenty years earlier by a man called Fournier-d'Albe. He wrote a book called _Two New Worlds_, in which he suggested that the solar systems are actually atoms in some vast cloud of super-gas. Of course, this notion ignores the celestial absence of molecular structure--unless you count double stars as molecules--but it might be accounted for by assuming a high temperature. Then he said that the newly hypothesized Rutherford model of the atom was a sub-microscopic solar system, but he didn't stop there.

"The atoms and their electrons, he said, were in turn made up of sub-atoms and were perhaps populated by sentient beings who looked through their telescopes and counted the atoms in their vicinity, no doubt arranging them into constellations. You can carry this imaginary process in both directions and as far as you like, but are we to decide arbitrarily that it goes on infinitely? Or is it like Einsteinian space, finite but unbounded?

"I have asked myself this question and I believe the latter statement to be in a sense correct, but what does it mean? Well, it means that if you move further and further into larger universes, you eventually get to where you started. Not that Big is the same thing as Small, but that from wherever you happen to be, the ones in the direction--outward--look successively bigger, while the ones in the other direction--inward--look successively smaller. Now if there were some kind of super-telescope that could look beyond our universe of super-atoms, and beyond the next and so on indefinitely, you would find yourself staring up through a super-microscope at your own eye."

"Get along with you!" Katherine said. "This is the pipe dream to end all pipe dreams. Tell us more."

* * * * *

"Well, I'll revise it to this extent," said Phil. "It wouldn't be your eye that you'd see, any more than you'd see your own face if you looked far enough across ordinary intergalactic space. You'd see the back of your head--or, rather, the other side of the Earth--provided there was nothing in the way."

"And in this case it would be what?" she asked.

"I don't know," Phil said, looking worried. "What is the equivalent of the back of your head--looked at along the direction of hyper-time? Could it be that what you saw would not be from behind, but from ... inside?"

Katherine's beautiful sightless eyes seemed to be turned inward, and she sat very still. Then she said, "You evoke something in my mind like the echo of a picture I once knew, and will know again."

Farley looked at her sharply.

"You mean something in your subconscious?" Phil asked.

"Perhaps that's what it is, and yet they say that you try to escape knowledge of your subconscious--that it frightens you. I am not frightened, Phil. I feel ... expectant."

"I'd feel more expectant," he said, "if I were quite sure of what I was doing. The trouble is that while ordinary light could in theory show you the super-astronomy of the stars and planets that are made up of atoms consisting of our stars and planets, it won't work the other way."

"Why not?" Farley wanted to know.

"Wave length. As it is, we have to use an electron microscope to see the larger molecules; the wave length of visible light is too coarse-grained to show anything that small. So just try to imagine how impossible it would be to see the sub-atoms--infra-atoms--that I'm talking about if one had to rely on ordinary light! The electron microscope wouldn't help, either. It would be exactly as though some gigantic, super-researcher were trying to look at one of our molecules by bombarding it with a shower of planets."

"Then how can you see this 'red shift'?" Katherine asked.

"I can't," he said. "I detect it by a kind of mathematical diagnosis. It's an inferential process--as most forms of observation are, in modern physics."

Farley was looking as intelligent as he possibly could, but it was plain that he was out of his depth. He had heard of the red shift, but he decided he had better not have it explained.

"There's another thing," Phil said. "The time it would take light to make the round trip of our Einsteinian finite universe would be so great--in the order of 4[Greek: pi] x 10^8 years--that not only would you not see your not-yet born self, but the Earth wouldn't have been formed either. The light you saw would be that many years out of date. However, in this case the elapsed time would be hyper-time, and you'd be there in ordinary time."

* * * * *

Doctor Farley got up and walked to one of the windows and stood looking out at the observatory across the campus. "Am I to understand then," he said, "that you are trying to formulate a new atomic theory?"

"Not in the sense of in any way modifying the accepted one," Phil said. "If I'm right, it will merely be a new way of looking at the Universe as a whole, and it won't have the slightest effect on anything."