red
forgiveness, and arranged for a hotel suite for him and the lieutenant,
when Old Stone Face sent for me. He began to manage with diligence and
dispatch.

"Now you look here, Kennedy," he said forcefully, and his use of my last
name, rather than my first, was a warning, "I've given you every chance.
When you and Auerbach came up with that antigrav unit last fall, I
didn't ask a lot of fool questions. I figured you knew what you were
doing. But the whole winter has passed, and here it is spring, and you
haven't done anything that I can see. I didn't say anything when you
told General Sanfordwaithe that you'd have to have poltergeists to carry
on the work, but I looked it up. First I thought you'd flipped your lid,
then I thought you were sending us all on a wild goose chase so we'd
leave you alone, then I didn't know what to think."

I nodded. He wasn't through.

"Now I think you're just pretending the whole thing doesn't exist
because you don't want to fool with it."

Perhaps he had come to the right decision after all. I'd resolutely
washed the whole thing out of my mind. But I wasn't going to get away
with it. I could see it coming.

"For the first time, Kennedy, I'm asking you what happened?" he said
firmly, but his tone was more telling than asking. So I was going to
have to discuss frameworks with Old Stone Face, after all.

"Henry," I asked slowly, "have you kept up your reading in theoretical
physics?"

He blinked at me. I couldn't tell whether it meant yes or no.

"When we went to school, you and I--" I hoped my putting us both in the
same age group would tend to mollify him a little, "physics was all
snug, secure, safe, definite. A fact was a fact, and that's all there
was to it. But there's been some changes made. There's the cooerdinate
systems of Einstein, where the relationships of facts can change from
framework to framework. There's the application of multivalued logic to
physics where a fact becomes not a fact any longer. The astronomers talk
about the expanding universe--it's a piker compared to man's expanding
concepts about that universe."

He waited for more. His face seemed to indicate that I was beating
around the bush.

"That all has a bearing on what happened," I assured him. "You have to
understand what was behind the facts before you can understand the facts
themselves. First, we weren't trying to make an antigrav unit at all.
Dr. Auerbach was playing around with a chemical appr