a few years
ago as the ouija board a century back. Yet it isn't just a toy;
sometimes, much as the ouija board, it's a real aid to memory. A maze of
vague and colored shadows is caused to drift slowly across the screen,
and one watches them, meanwhile visualizing whatever scene or
circumstances he is trying to remember. He turns a knob that alters the
arrangement of lights and shadows, and when, by chance, the design
corresponds to his mental picture--presto! There is his scene re-created
under his eyes. Of course his own mind adds the details. All the screen
actually shows are these tinted blobs of light and shadow, but the thing
can be amazingly real. I've seen occasions when I could have sworn the
psychomat showed pictures almost as sharp and detailed as reality
itself; the illusion is sometimes as startling as that.

Van Manderpootz switched on the light, and the play of shadows began.
"Now recall the circumstances of, say, a half-year after the market
crash. Turn the knob until the picture clears, then stop. At that point
I direct the light of the subjunctivisor upon the screen, and you have
nothing to do but watch."

I did as directed. Momentary pictures formed and vanished. The inchoate
sounds of the device hummed like distant voices, but without the added
suggestion of the picture, they meant nothing. My own face flashed and
dissolved and then, finally, I had it. There was a picture of myself
sitting in an ill-defined room; that was all. I released the knob and
gestured.

A click followed. The light dimmed, then brightened. The picture
cleared, and amazingly, another figure emerged, a woman. I recognized
her; it was Whimsy White, erstwhile star of television and premiere of
the "Vision Varieties of '09." She was changed on that picture, but I
recognized her.

I'll say I did! I'd been trailing her all through the boom years of '07
to '10, trying to marry her, while old N. J. raved and ranted and
threatened to leave everything to the Society for Rehabilitation of the
Gobi Desert. I think those threats were what kept her from accepting me,
but after I took my own money and ran it up to a couple of million in
that crazy market of '08 and '09, she softened.

Temporarily, that is. When the crash of the spring of '10 came and
bounced me back on my father and into the firm of N. J. Wells, her favor
dropped a dozen points to the market's one. In February we were engaged,
in April we were hardly speaking. In May the