oom went on
when he flipped the switch, he didn't _want_ to know. To him, science was
just so much flummery, and he didn't want his brain cluttered up with it.

Facts mean nothing to a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and he
doesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so
unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all
mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the
mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion one
whit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding a
projected thought of scientific content; such a thought bounces off the
impregnable mind shield that the bigot has set up around his little area
of bigotry.

Colonel Spaulding had been aware of these circumstances since the
inception of the Operation Mapcase. Even though he, himself, had never
experienced telepathy more than half a dozen times in his life, he had
made a study of the subject and was pretty well aware of its limitations.
The colonel might have dismissed--as most men do--his own fleeting
experiences as "coincidence" or "imagination" if it had not been for the
things he had seen and felt in Africa during World War II. He had only
been a captain then, on detached duty with British Intelligence, under
crusty old Colonel Sir Cecil Haversham, who didn't believe a word of "all
that mystic nonsense." Colonel Haversham had made the mistake of
alienating one of the most powerful of the local witch doctors.

The British Government had hushed it all up afterwards, of course, but
Spaulding still shuddered when he thought of the broken-spirited,
shrunken caricature of his old self that Colonel Haversham had become
after he told the witch doctor where to get off.

Spaulding had known that there were weaknesses in the telepathic
communication linkage that was the mainspring of Operation Mapcase, but he
had thought that they could be overcome by the strengths of the system.
Lenny had no blockage whatever against receiving visual patterns and
designs. He could reproduce an electronic wiring diagram perfectly
because, to him, it was not a grouping of scientific symbols, but a design
of lines, angles, and curves.

At first, it is true, he had had a tendency to change them here and there,
to make the design balance better, to make it more aesthetically
satisfying to his artistic eye, but that tendency had been easily
overcome, and Colonel Spau