‘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?
‘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.
‘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