'I have reached no conclusion as yet, Dr Berkeley. But when I do, I do not believe it is going to be that young Dunning was the unadulterated genius some of you people consider him. Surely you, a psychologist, can understand the type of mind that would produce such a mixture of unrelated and irrelevant, not to say mythological, material!'
'There are many strange things about the human mind, which we do not know,' said Berk. 'One of the least understood is the point at which genius ends and nonsense begins.'
'In physics the march is steadily upwards! We have no doubt as to which way lies progress.'
Berk let that one ride. A man who saw in the world such terrible simplicity might ultimately find Dunning's mystery completely transparent. He couldn't risk that possibility by arguing.
They drew up to the old mansion Dunning had occupied. Dykstra surveyed it from the car. 'The kind of a place you would expect,5 he grunted.
It was difficult to estimate what was going on in the physicist's mind as he came into the laboratories.
In the first room he scanned the shelves of reagents. He took down a dozen bottles and examined their labels closely. Of some he removed the stoppers and sniffed cautiously, then replaced them all on the shelf in mild disdain.
He spent a long time examining the fractionating set-up in the centre of the room. He spotted the pad of computations left there and drew an old envelope from his pocket and did some comparison scribbling.
In the electronics room he turned to look through the doorway. 'Why would any man want two such laboratories as these?'
His inspection was much more thorough than that of any of the others, including Martin Nagle. Berk supposed that Mart and many of the others would be back, but Dykstra was going through with a fine-toothed comb the first time.
He poked through the machine shop. 'Well equipped,' he muttered, 'for a man who likes to tinker.'
But he was highly impressed by the computer room. He examined the settings of the instruments and the chart papers. He opened every desk drawer and shuffled through the scattering of papers inside.
Red-faced, he turned to Berk. 'This is absurd! Certainly there would be charts, papers, or something showing the man's calculations. These instruments are not here for show; they've obviously been used. Someone has removed the computational material from this room!'
'It's just as we found it,' said Berk. 'We don't understand it any better than you.'
'I don't believe it,' said Dykstra flatly.
The reaction of the physicist to the library was the thing Berk was most interested in. He let Dykstra look at will over the strange and exotic collection of volumes.
At first Dykstra reacted like a suddenly caged animal. He ran from the shelves of mythology, got a glance at the section on astrology, hurried from there to the books on faith-healing, and made a spiral turn that brought him up against the region of material on East Indian philosophy.
'What is this,' he bellowed hoarsely, 'a joke?'
The pudgy figure seemed to swell visibly with indignation.
'The next room would interest you most, perhaps,' said Berk.
Dykstra almost ran through the adjoining door as if escaping some devil with whom he had come face to face. Then, catching sight of the titles here, he began to breathe easily and with an audible sighing of relief. He was among friends.
With an air of reference, he took down a worn copy of Weyl's
'It isn't possible,' he murmured, 'that Dunning owned and understood both of these libraries.'
'He understood and conquered gravity,' said Berk. 'And this is the last of the clues we have to show you.'
Dykstra put the books carefully back on the shelves. 'I don't like it.' He glanced back to the other room as if it were a place of terror.
'There's something wrong,' he murmured. 'Anti-gravity! Whoever heard of such a thing? And how could it come out of a place like this?'
That afternoon, they met again in conference. There was agreement that they would tackle the problem. Only Professor Dykstra exhibited a continuing belligerence towards the affair, yet he made no move to withdraw.
Full cooperation of military facilities was pledged by the representatives of the services. The centre of investigation was to be at ONR, however, with branching research wherever needed.
No one had conceived even a tentative starting point which he cared to discuss with his colleagues. Most of them had spent the morning re-reading the relativity papers and staring at the ceiling of their respective offices. They agreed to work as loosely or as closely as the problem demanded. Until some working programme could be initiated by some of them, it was decided to hold daily seminars to try to spark each other into creative thought.
