'Well read, too,' said Berk. 'We examined quite a number and they have copious notations in Dunning's handwriting. This may be the one place we can find real clues to his thinking — in such marginal notes.'
Mart waved a hand in violent rejection of the sombre volumes and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. 'Junk!' he muttered. 'This has no bearing on Keyes' problem at all, of course. But it certainly ought to be a problem of interest to you.'
'A guy would need two separate heads to hold an interest in the things downstairs and in this nonsense at the same time.'
'But Dunning had only a single head,' said Berk quietly. 'Maybe it's all part of a whole that we don't see — and that Dunning did.'
Mart pursed his lips and looked at the psychologist.
'I'm serious,' said Berk. 'My field is primarily the human mind, and only secondarily the subjects with which the mind deals. But we see in Dunning a single mind that can whip the matter of anti-gravity, that can hold an interest in the fields represented by the laboratories below, and can digest the material of this library.
'Now, actually, there is no true schizophrenia. In the skull of each of us is only a single individual, and anyone examined closely enough can be found to have a remarkably consistent goal, no matter how apparently erratic his activities.
'Perhaps much of the material Dunning found in both the library and in the laboratory proved redundant, but I would say that Dunning's genius apparently lay in his ability to extract relevant material from the redundant without categorically rejecting entire areas of human thought.'
Mart smiled tolerantly and turned away. He found himself facing a section of shelves covered with works on East Indian philosophy. Six of eight feet of space was devoted to the subject of Levitation. Mart jabbed a finger at the titles.
'Anything those boys can do by hocus-pocus Nagle can do twice as fast by
'That's all Keyes wants. How soon can you deliver?
After lunch, they returned to ONR. Mart was assigned an office and given a copy of the Dunning tape. He put aside the prepared transcript, as Keyes had suggested, and prepared to listen, unbiased.
He turned on the recorder and winced at the garble of sound that blared forth again. With one hand on the volume control he rested his chin on his arm in front of the speaker and strained to hear through the noise the scarcely audible voice of Dunning.
Near the beginning, he caught the word 'levitation' mentioned many times. There was a full phrase, 'levitation which was first successfully demonstrated to the Western world by the English medium-' The buzz of a plane cut off the rest of it.
Mart rewound the tape and listened to that much of it again. At each mention of levitation an image flared up in Mart's mind. An image of a dirty, scrawny Indian fakir equipped with a filthy turban, a coil of rope over one arm, and a basket with a snake in the other hand.
But Dunning had produced anti-gravity.
What semantic significance had
Mart growled to himself in irritation and let the tape run on. There was nothing more in those first few feet of it. He perked up his ears at a phrase 'earth effect' separated by a garble from 'distribution of sunspots unexplained to date by astronomers, and politely ignored by all experts-'
It struck a faint bell of recollection in Mart's mind. He scratched a note on a pad to check on it.
The sound dissolved again to hissing and roaring, through which the dead man seemed to taunt him. He gathered that much talk was on the subject of 'planetary configurations-.' Astrology. He groaned aloud and closed his eyes through a comparatively long stretch of audibility: 'Magnetic storms on Earth predictable through movements of the planets in terms of quadrature — fields of data observed through thousands of years and do not fit explanations now accepted for other phenomena.'
It shifted apparently, after many minutes, to comparative religion. 'Galileo and Newton,' Dunning said, 'affected man's thinking more than they knew. They clipped from religion its miracles and from physics its imagination… of India there's more conquest of the physical universe than in a score of American research laboratories.'
And that was the last of it. The tape fizzled out in a long garble of buzzing planes and faulty recording. Mart turned off the machine.
That was it. The mind and work of the first man to directly conquer gravity!
With an almost physical weariness he turned to the transcript and scanned through it. There was more, but it was astonishing how little additional information was actually added from the memories of the original observers. Mart supposed Dunning's words were such a shock to those military and scientific minds that they were stunned into semi-permanent amnesia in respect to the things he said.
