In exchange for all rights to the Jones-Schneider-deKalb, for which he agreed to supply drawings – wait till Stevens saw, and understood, those sketches! – for that he had received the promise of senior stock in NAPA, non-voting, but fully paid up and non- assessable. The lack of active participation in the company had been his own idea. There were going to be more headaches in the power business, headaches aplenty. He could see them coming – bootleg designs, means of outwitting the metering, lots of things. Free power had come, and efforts to stop it would in the long run, he believed, be fruitless
Waldo laughed so hard that he frightened Baldur, who set up an excited barking
He could afford to forget Hathaway now. His revenge on NAPA contained one potential flaw; he had assured Gleason that the Schneider-treated deKalbs would continue to operate, would not come unstuck. He believed that to be true simply because he had faith in Gramps Schneider. But he was not prepared to prove it. He knew himself that he did not know enough about the phenomena associated with the Other World to be sure that something would, or would not, happen. It was still going to be necessary to do some hard, extensive research
But the Other World was a devilishly difficult place to investigate! Suppose, he speculated, that the human race were blind, had never developed eyes. No matter how civilized, enlightened, and scientific the race might have become, it is difficult to see how such a race could ever have developed the concepts of astronomy. They might know of the Sun as a cyclic source of energy having a changing, directional character, for the Sun is so overpowering that it may be ‘seen’ with the skin. They would notice it and invent instruments to trap it and examine it
But the pale stars, would they ever notice them? It seemed most unlikely. The very notion of the celestial universe, its silent depths and starlit grandeur, would be beyond them. Even if one of their scientists should have the concept forced on him in sueh a manner that he was obliged to accept the fantastic, incredible thesis as fact, how then would he go about investigating its details? Waldo tried to imagine an astronomical phototelescope, conceived and designed by a blind man, intended to he operated by a blind man, and capable of collecting data which could he interpreted by a blind man. He gave it up; There were too many hazards. It would take a subtlety of genius far beyond his own to deal with the inescapably tortuous concatenations of inferential reasoning necessary to the solution of such a problem. It would strain him to invent such instruments for a blind man; he did not see how a blind man could ever overcome the difficulties unassisted
In a way that was what Schneider had done for him; alone, he would have bogged down
But even with Schneider’s hints the problem of investigating the Other World was still much like the dilemma of the blind astronomer. He could not see the Other World; only through the Schneider treatment had he been able to contact it. Damnation! how could he design instruments to study it? He suspected that he would eventually have to go back to Schneider for further instruction, but that was an expedient so distasteful that he refused to think much about it. Furthermore, Gramps Schneider might not be able to teach him much; they did not speak the same language
This much he did know: the Other Space was there and it could be reached sometimes by proper orientation of the mind, deliberately as Schneider had taught him, or subconsciously as had happened to McLeod and others
He found the idea distasteful. That thought and thought alone should be able to influence physical phenomena was contrary to the whole materialistic philosophy in which he had grown up. He had a prejudice in favour of order and invariable natural laws. His cultural predecessors, the experimental philosophers who had built up the world of science and its concomitant technology, Galileo, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Steinmetz, Jeans, and their myriad colleagues – these men had thought of the physical universe as a mechanism proceeding by inexorable necessity. Any apparent failure to proceed thus was regarded as an error in observation, an insufficient formulation of hypothesis, or an insufficiency of datum