oach to cybernetics.
He made up some goop which he thought would store memory impulses, the
way the brain stores them. He brought a plastic cylinder of it over to
me, so I could discuss it with you. I laid it on my desk while I went on
with my personnel management business at hand."

Old Stone Face opened a humidor and took out a cigar. He lit it slowly
and deliberately and looked at me sharply as he blew out the first puff
of smoke.

* * * * *

"The nursery over in the plant had been having trouble with a little
girl, daughter of one of our production women. She'd been throwing
things, setting things on fire. The teachers didn't know how she did it,
she just did it. They sent her to me. I asked her about it. She threw a
tantrum, and when it was all over, Auerbach's plastic cylinder of goop
was trying to fall upward, through the ceiling. That's what happened," I
said.

He looked at his cigar, and looked at me. He waited for me to tie the
facts to the theory. I hesitated, and then tried to reassure myself.
After all, we were in the business of manufacturing computers. The
general manager ought to be able to understand something beyond primary
arithmetic.

"Jennie Malasek was a peculiar child with a peculiar background," I went
on. "Her mother was from the old country, one of the Slav races. There's
the inheritance of a lot of peculiar notions. Maybe she had passed them
on to her daughter. She kept Jennie locked up in their room. The kid
never got out with other children. Children, kept alone, never seeing
anybody, get peculiar notions all by themselves. Who, knows what kind of
a cooerdinate system she built up, or how it worked? Her mother would
come home at night and go about her tasks talking aloud, half to the
daughter, half to herself. 'I really burned that foreman up, today,'
she'd say. Or, 'Oh, boy, was he fired in a hurry!' Or, 'She got herself
thrown out of the place,' things like that."

"So what does that mean, Ralph?" he asked. His switch to my first name
indicated he was trying to work with me instead of pushing me.

"To a child who never knew anything else," I answered, "one who had
never learned to distinguish reality from unreality--as we would define
it from our agreed framework--a special cooerdinate system might be built
up where 'Everybody was up in the air at work, today,' might be taken
literally. Under the old systems of physics that couldn't happen, of
course