--it says in the textbooks--but since it has been happening all
through history, in thousands of instances, in the new systems of
multivalued physics we recognize it. Under the old system, we already
had all the major answers, we thought. Now that we've got our smug
certainties knocked out of us, we're just fumbling along, trying to get
some of the answers we thought we had.

"We couldn't make that cylinder activate others. We tried. We're still
trying. In ordinary cybernetics you can have one machine punch a tape
and it can be fed into another machine, but that means you first have to
know how to code and decode a tape mechanically. We don't know how to
code or decode a psi effect. We know the Auerbach cylinder will store a
psi impulse, but we don't know how. So we have to keep working with psi
gifted people, at least until we've established some of the basic laws
governing psi."

I couldn't tell by Henry's face whether I was with him or away from him.
He told me he wanted to think about it, and made a little motion with
his hand that I should leave the room.

I walked through the suite of executive offices and down a sound
rebuffing hallway. The throbbing clatter of manufacture of metallic
parts made a welcome sound as I went through the far doorway into the
factory. I saw a blueprint spread on a foreman's desk as I walked past.
Good old blueprint. So many millimeters from here to there, made of such
and such an alloy, a hole punched here with an allowance of
five-ten-thousandths plus or minus tolerance. Snug, secure, safe. I
wondered if psi could ever be blue-printed. Or suppose you put a hole
here, but when you looked away and then looked back it had moved, or
wasn't there at all?

[Illustration]

Quickly, I got myself into a conversation with a supervisor about the
rising rate of employee turnover in his department. That was something
also snug, secure, safe. All you had to do was figure out human beings.

* * * * *

I spent the rest of the morning on such pursuits, working with things I
understood.

On his first rounds of the afternoon, the interoffice messenger brought
me a memorandum from the general manager's office. I opened it with some
misgivings. I was not particularly reassured.

Mr. Grenoble felt he should work with me more closely on the antigrav
project. He understood, from his researches, that the most positive psi
effects were experienced during a seance with