Waldo

The deep jungles of Africa might be very different places -when there was no white man around to see! The strangely slippery laws of magic might still obtain

Perhaps these speculations were too extreme; nevertheless, they had one advantage which orthodox concepts had not: they included Gramps Schncider's hexing of the deKalbs. Any working hypothesis which failed to account for Schneider's -and his own - ability to think a set of deKalbs into operation was not worth a continental. This one did, and it conformed to Gramps's own statements: ‘All matters are doubtful' and ‘A thing can both be, not be, and he anything. There are many true ways of looking at the same thing. Some ways are good, some are bad.

Very well. Accept it. Act on it. The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it. He cast his vote for order and predictability! He would set the style. He would impress his own concept of the Other World on the cosmos! It had been a good start to assure Gleason that the Schnei­der-treated deKalbs were foolproof. Good. So let it be. They were foolproof. They would never get out of order

He proceeded to formulate and clarify his own concept of the Other World in his mind. He would think of it as orderly and basically similar to this space. The co

Wait. If the neurological system lay in both spaces, then that might account for the relatively slow propagation of nerve impulses as compared with electromagnetic progression. Yes! If the other space had a c constant relatively smaller than that of this space, such would follow

He began to feel a calm assurance that it was so

Was he merely speculating - or creating a universe? Perhaps he would have to abandon his mental picture of the Other Space, as being the size and shape of an ostrich egg, since a space with a slower propagation of light is not smaller, but larger, than the space he was used to. No... no, wait a second, the size of a space did not depend on its c constant, but on its radius of curvature in terms of its c constant. Since c was a velocity, size was dependent on the notion of time - in this case time as entropy rate. Therein lay a characteristic which could be compared between the two spaces: they ex­changed energy; they affected each other's entropy. The one which degenerated the more rapidly towards a state of level entropy was the ‘smaller

He need not abandon his picture of the ostrich egg-good old egg! The Other World was a closed space, with a slow c, a high entropy rate, a short radius, and an entropy state near level - a perfect reservoir of power at every point, ready to spill over into this space wherever he might close the interval. To its inhabitants, if any. it might seem to be hundreds of millions of light years around; to him it was an ostrich egg, turgid to bursting with power

He was already begi

But before theoreticians could begin work, new data were most desperately needed. Waldo was no theoretician, a fact he admitted left-handedly in thinking of theory as unpractical and u

But the consulting engineer had to find out onething: would the Schneider- deKalbs continue to function uninterrup­tedly as guaranteed? If not, what must be done to assure con­tinuous function? The most difficult and the most interesting aspect of the in­vestigation had to do with the neurological system in relation to Other Space. Neither electromagnetic instruments nor neural surgery was refined enough to do accurate work on the levels he wished to investigate

But he had waldoes

The smallest waldoes he had used up to this time were ap­proximately half an inch across their palms - with micro-sca

He used the tiny waldoes to create tinier ones

The last stage was tiny metal blossoms hardly an eighth of an inch across. The helices in their stems, or forearms, which served them as pseudo muscles, could hardly be seen by the naked eye - but then, he used sca

His final team of waldoes used for nerve and brain surgery varied in succeeding stages from mechanical hands nearly life­size down to these fairy digits which could manipulate things much too small for the eye to see. They were mounted in bank to work in the same locus. Waldo controlled them all from the same primaries; he could switch from one size to another without removing his gauntlets.

The same change in circuits which brought another size of waldoes under control automatically accomplished the change in sweep of sca

Each level of waldoes had its own surgical instruments, its own electrical equipment

Such surgery had never been seen before, but Waldo gave that aspect little thought; no one had told him that such sur­gery was unheard-of

He established, to his own satisfaction, the mechanism whereby short- wave radiation had produced a deterioration in human physical performance. The synapses between dendrites acted as if they were points of leakage. Nerve impulses would sometimes fail to make the jump, would leak off - to where? To Other Space, he was sure. Such leakage seemed to estab­lish a preferred path, a canalization, whereby the condition of the victim became steadily worse. Motor action was not lost entirely, as both paths were still available, but efficiency was lost. It reminded him of a metallic electrical circuit with a partial ground

An unfortunate cat, which had become dead undergoing the experimentation, had supplied him with much of his data. The kitten had been born and raised free from exposure to power radiation. He subjected it to heavy exposure and saw it acquire a myasthenia nearly as complete as his own - while studying in minute detail what actually went on in its nerve tissues. He felt quite sentimental about it when it died