“But I had no such motives at the beginning. Actually, there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed.
What we called motives evidently are rationalizations by the helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough to smell an event comingand, since it cannot avert the event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen.”
“Wow,” Dr. Wald said, inelegantly but with considerable force.
“Either ‘wow’ or ‘balderdash’ seems to be called for1
can’t quite decide which,” Weinbaum agreed. “We know that Dana is an actress, Thor, so let’s not fall off the apple tree quite yet. Dana, I’ve been saving the really hard question for the last. That question is: How? How did you arrive at this modification of the Dirac transmitter? Remember, we know your background, where we didn’t know that of *J. Shelby Stevens.’ You’re not a scientist. There were some fairly high-powered intellects among your distant relatives, but that’s as close as you come.”
“I’m going to give you several answers to that question,”
Dana Lje said. “Pick the one you like best. They’re all true, but they tend to contradict each other here and there.
‘To begin with, you’re right about my relatives, of course.
If you’ll check your dossier again, though, you’ll discover that those so-called ‘distant’ relatives were the last surviving members of my family besides myself. When they died, second and fourth and ninth cousins though they were, then-estates reverted to me, and among their effects I found a sketch of a possible instantaneous communicator based on de Broglie-wave inversion. The material was in very rough form, and mostly beyond my comprehension, because I am, as you say, no scientist myself. But I was interested; I could see, dimly, what such a thing might be worthand not only in money.