“I pays my money and I takes no choice, eh?” Weinbaum said ruefully.
“I’m afraid soand I don’t like it any better than you do.”
“Thor, what’s your opinion of all this?”
“It’s just faintly flabbergasting,” Wald said soberly. “However, it hangs together. The deterministic universe which Miss Lje paints was a common feature of the old relativity theories, and as sheer speculation has an even longer history.
I would say that, in the long run, how much credence we place in the story as a whole will rest upon her method of, as she calls it, reading the future. If it is demonstrable beyond any doubt, then the rest becomes perfectly crediblephilos-ophy and all. If it doesn’t, then what remains is an admirable job of acting, plus some metaphysics which, while self-consistent, is not original with Miss Lje.”
“That sums up the case as well as if I’d coached you, Dr.
Wald,” Dana said. “I’d like to point out one more thing. If I can read the future, then ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ never had any need for a staff of field operatives, and he never needed to send a single Dirac message which you might intercept. All he needed to do was to make predictions from his readings, which he knew to be infallible; no private espionage network had to be involved.”
“I see that,” Weinbaum said dryly. “All right, Dana, let’s put the proposition this way: / do not believe you. Much of what you say is probably true, but in totality I believe it to be false. On the other hand, if you’re telling the whole truth, you certainly deserve a place on the bureau staffit would be dangerous as hell not to have you with usand the marriage is a more or less minor matter, except to you and me. You can have that with no strings attached; I don’t want to be bought, any more than you would.