Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

WHAT THIN associates with other children, never has the opportunity to learn what our framework of thinking calls natural law, real world conditions. Such a child might formulate for itself a real world matrix quite different from ours.”’ Auerbach was silent, but looked at me fixedly. “For one example, it might take things very literally,” I said. “It might form natural laws out of slang phrases. The child’s mother uses the phrases, ‘It just burns me up.’ Suppose then the child, when it was vexed, just literally ‘burned things up.’ Ever hear of a poltergeist?”’ , “Oh come now, Kennedy,” he remonstrated, “that fairy-tale stuff.” “There are hundreds of carefully documented case histories,’ I said, without getting heated about it. ““Re- fusal to look at poltergeist phenomena is on the order of the biologist refusing to consider the minnow alive. Things just catch on fire where these polter- geists are. Things just fly through the air where they are. There must be an explanation. We know that.” : ‘We have some statements to that effect,” he corrected. “We have some statements about what is our own basic natural law, too,’”’ I countered. “And that’s all we have. Just some statements.” ‘And such statements apply only within the partitions of the frame- work?” he asked, neither skeptically nor in agreement. He looked up at the cylinder again. “So your explanation for that is a poltergeist phenomenon?” he mused. “Yes.” ‘“T. wish you had some other ex- planation,” he said. “I don’t like that one. Almost any other kind of an explanation would be better.” “So do I,” I answered in complete agreement, “but that’s the only one I’ve got. You see, I saw a poltergeist PARTITIONS 15 activate it. Apparently the force of her mind, acting on it, stored it with impulses from her own framework of reality. It would not be particular what it learns, so long as what it learns is consistent with the process used in learning it.” He sighed deeply. “I wish that biologist hadn’t picked up that min- now,” he said, wistfully. After my secretary had made suit- able protocol negotiations with the general manager’s secretary, | headed for Old Stone Face’s office, Mr. Henry Grenoble, that is. On the way out of my office, I had trouble with my feet. I was almost floating as I walked along, carrying the cylinder. I detoured over by Receiving and _ surreptitiously weighed myself on the scales. They read thirty pounds. “Obviously out of order,” I found myself giggling, and wondered if the mood had anything to do with my sensation of weightlessness. Suddenly from the odd looks of employees, it occurred to me that I was buoyantly tripping down the corridor on my toes and giggling to myself. I blushed and tried to look stern. It wasn’t easy to stride purposefully when you weren’t sure your feet were touching the floor. I hoped they wouldn’t think I was drunk, or worse. “Morning, Henry,” I said to the general manager, and received his noncommittal nod. I wasn’t his fair- haired boy, but neither was I a thorn in his side. We got along all right by mutual and tacit agreement to leave one another alone. It was the regret of his life that such inefficient machines as people had to be used in his plant, and he was glad enough to leave their management to my care. I walked over to a straight chair, put the cylinder down under its seat, and watched the chair float upward COMicdooksnco im