A minor honour came to Mart in his election as chairman of the seminar. It gave him uneasiness because he was junior in age and profession to all of them. But his eminence in electro-fields made him a likely coordinator of the project.
Mart selected a representative sample from the occult section of Dunning's library and took it to his own office. He settled down amid an aura of astrology, spiritualism, mysticism, religion, sunspot data, and levitation. He had no specific purpose, only to expose his own mind to the atmosphere in which Dunning had operated. Dunning had found the goal. The tracks he walked in had to be located, no matter where they were picked up.
Some of the stuff was boring, much could be nothing but sheer delusion. Yet his dogged pursuit left him intrigued by some of the material.
The reports on poltergeism at Leander Castle near London, for example. They were well reported. Independent cross references verified each other very well. The works on levitation were far more difficult to credit. There was a hodgepodge about purification of the body and the soul, of reaching assorted states of exaltation above the ordinary degree of mortal.
Yet levitation had occurred, according to reports of witnesses who might not be considered too unreliable.
And what did this have to do with religion — in which Dunning had had tremendous interest, to judge by the notations he made?
There were miracles in religion, Mart reflected.
Anti-gravity was a miracle.
Miracle: that which is considered impossible and which cannot be duplicated by the observers, even after it has been seen.
In scientific law there is a difference. It can be applied by anyone with sufficient IQ. But the worker of miracles does not come out of the laboratory or halls of learning.
He rises spontaneously out of the mountains or out of the wilderness, and gathers novices who seek with all their hearts to equal the Master. But they never do. Always there is a difference. The magic of miracles seems unteachable. It has its own spontaneous majesty, or is nothing but old-fashioned hoodwinking. There seemed, to Mart, no in-between.
Anti-gravity.
Was it natural law, or miracle? Had Dunning found the bridge that made only a single category of the two? Or was he a performer of miracles, whose art could not be taught, but would arise spontaneously, full blown?
Mart slammed the books shut and pushed them to the rear of the desk. He pulled a scratch pad out of the drawer and began pencilling furiously the basic Einstein equations.
By the end of the first week there was little to report. The daily seminars had been held, but outside of re-educating each other in the exotic concepts of the relativity world they had achieved nothing.
Or so it seemed to Mart. Keyes seemed quite pleased, however, and Berk mentioned that they should be congratulated on their progress. As if they had taken a major step forward in merely meeting and agreeing to undertake the project.
And maybe they had, Mart thought.
He found himself in difficulty as chairman of the seminar. Invariably, in such a group there is a member who undertakes to educate his colleagues anew in all the basic sciences. In this case, it was made doubly difficult because the self-appointed instructor was Professor Dykstra.
That he was capable of teaching them a good deal, there was no question. But on the Saturday at the end of this first week he arose with a particularly triumphant expression and strode to the blackboard, where he began scrawling his barely legible chicken marks.
'I have achieved the thing for which I have been looking, gentlemen,' he said. 'I am able to show that no such instrument as we have had described to us is possible without a violation of Dr Einstein's postulate of equivalence. If we admit the correctness of this postulate — as we all do, of course — then you will see from Equation One that--'
Mart stared at — and through — the equations that Dykstra had scrawled. He listened with half an ear. It looked and sounded all right. But something had to be done about Dykstra.
Dykstra was wrong — even with his equations being right. Where was it, thought Mart. It was something you couldn't name or scarcely define. Maybe it was in
He was dragging the feet of the whole group. But in spite of him, all the rest were pulling in the other direction, Mart knew. In this week, they had all achieved an acceptance of the validity of Dunning's accomplishment. And that, after all,
