Murder cellar truculent
It is tempting to abandon detachment and intellection entirely at a time when we are discovering, with astonished joy, the uses of involvement, immersion, sensual and transcendent experience. But we are no more suited to the role of exultant flowers than of emotionless computers: we are human beings, equipped for both sensual and sensible experience and behavior. Mathematicians began to create new syntaxes for their new concepts a hundred years ago; scientists today have frames of reference in which to manipulate the multiplex symbols of space-time. In sociology, theology, psychology, we are just starting to seek the new matrixes. If it seems the tines are out of joint, it is rather that our syntaxes— in mythology, in language — are out of joint with the times. "I, me, myself am actually an honest to goodness golden. I just found out today." You understand, I am exaggerating—but not much. At Marcias spoken command, the cockroach would march up and down, to the left and to the right. Suspecting that her phobia had matured into madness, Marcia left her warm bed, turned on the light, and cautiously approached the roach, which remained motionless, as she had bade it.Wiggle your antennas, she commanded. The cockroach wiggled its antennae. Madame Gioconda peered round the darkened stage, then lowered her eyes. Kenebuck jerked his head away from what was rushing toward him. Then, with a howl like a beaten dog, he turned and flung himself through the window before those hands could touch him, into ninety-odd stories of unsupported space. And his howl carried away down into silence. Or make any sudden motion toward you? Susan, said Miss Hutton, and her voice whispered and creaked, I remember you when you came to this school, a little smidgin of a thing, all plaits and eyes. Now you are taller than I. Ive watched you grow, over the years, and I know,I know, that you have more understanding than I, and more compassion than any of us ... I was tempted to say, than any of us poor humans. And yet by our standards you are a half-grown child.” She shook her head again. “And like any child you are a die, a matrix. But the shape you will stamp out, when you are grown, is past my imagining.” In some ways, the nonfiction submissions are even more curious: we got Sullivans superb We Are Not Alone (McGraw-Hill, 1964), and Bonestell-Ley’s Beyond the Solar System (Viking, 1964), but not Arthur C. Clarke’s Man in Space (Life Library, 1964); we were sent Rosalind Heywood’s ESP: A Personal Memoir (Dutton, 1964)—one of the most sensible, as well as best-written, books on the subject I’ve ever seen— but not David Solomon’s fascinating anthology of articles, LSD, The Consciousness-Expanding Drug (Putnam, 1964).* * * * The fires of forever, she mused, and she stamped them out, `with small, firm feet. I wish I could dance like that.” So much so that the banker had moved over to stand protectively in front of her, as if to shield her from further accusations. He said angrily,Whatever your purpose in attempting to persecute this innocent young woman, Quincannon, I wont stand for any more of it. Consider your services terminated. If you ever dare to bother Miss Dupree or me again, you’ll answer to the police and my attorneys. TheTribs headline, all-encompassing in its simplicity, said:NO TOMORROW? So it went, peaches all day, complaints all night.If not too big a work, could you make the voice somewhat softer? he said to his wife. “I pick the peaches ten large hours today and even my ears fall down from tiredness.” By the theory, the ships didntgo anywhere. But the effect was somehow real. Just as a materialist mightsee organic machines instead of people, so the mathenauts saw the raw mathematical structure of space—Riemann space, Hausdorf space, vector space—without matter. A crowd of people existed as an immensely complicatedsomething in vector space. The study of thesesomethings was yielding immense amounts of knowledge. Pataphysics, patasociology, patapsychology were wild, baffling new fields of knowledge. Do you remember the old theory about putting ten monkeys to work at ten typewriters, just hitting the keys at random? The argument was that if you kept them at it a million years they would write the complete works of Shakespeare. Along with trillions of pages of gibberish, of course. It was a question of mathematical probability— sooner or later, in a million years, one of the monkeys would justhappen to hit the keys in the sequence that would produceHamlet, and another would doLear, and so on..
