99 Classic Science-Fiction Short Stories. Айзек Азимов
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the gentleman your age, Saki!" directed Migraine. The Jap turned on his heel.
"One hunner an' ten," he said simply.
"Jumping Jehoshaphat!" I exclaimed to Migraine. "Do you expect me to believe him?"
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
"It's nothing to me whether you believe him or not." he replied.
But I was piqued that a sensible, hard-headed man of business like myself could not put the kibosh on all this nonsense more readily. Down at the office they always come to me when they want, some one to spot the fallacy in any new theory of how to corner Union Pacific. So I thought hard for a moment. Then it came to me.
"Very well," I replied confidently. "If it's not the eye, but the brain, that sees, it must be the brain, and not the tongue. that tastes; not the fingers, but the brain, that feels; not the nose–"
"Precisely," said Migraine.
"Eh?" I shouted. "Then I suppose you will be telling me next that there is nothing to prevent my smelling an Indian bazar over in Calcutta somewhere, or feeling some fellow chopping wood over in Central Park, or–"
"You've got it!" he replied. "You've caught the idea!"
"Rats!" I remarked rather impolitely.
"Speaking of rats," he retorted. "have you never known a woman who could feel a cat in some other part of the house?"
I stared at him helplessly.
I dropped my head upon my shirt bosom. Why, of course I had!
"All that is pretty well understood—the 'projection of sensation.' The French—they have done a lot of it—call it the 'Exteriorization of Sensation.' We don't know much about it or what causes it, but we know that it is a scientific fact. I am going to take it up myself when I get the time. It's entirely different, of course, from telepathy, properly speaking, where one mind acts directly upon another."
I had been drinking a good deal, or I should have dropped to the doctor's little Wall Street game long before this; but now I saw it all in a flash. Telepathy! Of course. The good doctor merely waited until some financier was about to make a coup, and then, entirely unknown to the other, entered into the game as a silent partner with him. I cursed myself for never having thought. of the thing before and learning to do it myself.
"So, ho," I cried, winking at him. "That's how you do the trick, is it?"
"That's how I do the trick," he repeated without a smile.
"And it always works?"
"Always when it works with the other fellow. You see, if some other chap, whose mind I am not in contact with, comes along and puts a new element into the situation, why, I may get left along with the others. But, I play a safe game. I know one or two men with sympathetic minds"—he mentioned a couple of market leaders—"and when I see that one or the other of them is about to create a movement in a stock, and there seems likely to be no outside interference, I follow along."
I looked at him in amazement; he said it so simply. I was aghast at the possibilities of the thing.
"I don't see what is to prevent your getting hold of all the money in the world!" I exclaimed.
Migraine looked at me queerly, with an odd look in his blue eyes.
"What good would it do me? Would it teach me the mysteries of life and death? Would it help me to conquer age and disease? These things are not so much a question of money as of mind. We must have, to be sure, institutions like the Rockefeller Institute devoted to scientific research! And that requires money. But more than that we need Newtons, Darwins, Galileos! What avails a man if he gain the whole world and then miserably die? What pleasure does one have who knows that joy is inevitably followed by pain? I am constantly astounded at the stupidity of mankind. They strain and struggle and suffer to get a few more ounces of gold out of an exhausted mine—to make an overburdened soil continue to yield a livelihood. They distract their minds with business problems to earn a few more dollars. And all the while they scoff at science as pedantry!"
Somehow, he impressed me immensely, and I began to feel that I had made a mistake in spending all the best years of my life in buying and selling stocks for other people, when I might have been controlling human destiny and finding the hidden wealth of Monte Cristo by means of my own private mental divining rod. This mind-reading trick seemed easy enough. I wondered if Migraine would put me on to it. If he only would! My mind gloated over the thoughts of the untold riches which lay so easily within my grasp if I could only learn Migraine's secret.
"For example," and the doctor's voice interrupted my vision of gold, "think of the enormous attention devoted by mankind to inventing machinery, making telescopes, breeding race—horses, and that sort of thing, when an equal amount of effort might have made engines and telescopes and horses entirely useless. I mean exactly what I say. Look at the pains men have been to to breed fox terriers and bulldogs and bloodhounds. Have they ever once tried to breed a man? With all their optical science have they ever tried to develop the powers of the human eye? We have had Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, and all the rest; but while composers have tortured themselves and the public by trying to invent some new combination of sound, has any one ever tried to increase the range of human hearing? Why, man, how much do you really see and hear and taste and feel? Only so much as our eyes, ears, tongue and fingers can perceive? And how much do they perceive? Only what is in their limited range of vision. One might as well say that, because you cannot perceive by the sense the electric wave that summons the trans-Atlantic liner to its sinking sister ship, it does not exist. There are sounds too fine for the ear to hear—the chirp of the minute insect—too low, like the throb of the organ. The ear is not tuned to receive the rapid vibrations of the insect voice or the slow vibrations of the organ's lowest notes. Sound is motion and comes to us in waves, like light and heat. The capacity of the eye and ear to respond to the vibrations of these waves determines our capacity to see and hear. A violinist can break a gas globe with a certain note, because the glass responds to the vibrations of the note, which it cannot do to a lower tone. So with color. The retinas of our eyes can absorb the visible colors of the spectrum—violet, blue, green, orange, yellow, red—but there are shades on either end of the color scale that our eyes cannot see, but could be made to see—yes, easily! The new man will hear sweeter notes than mortal ear has ever heard before, see fairer visions than have been vouchsafed to poets and dreamers, experience sensations beyond the imagination of Mohammed's paradise!"
Thrilled in spite of myself by his enthusiasm I leaned forward and broke in upon him.
"How will you do this?" I cried. "How will you break into this new world of sight. and sense? How do you know that such things are?"
"How!" he echoed rhapsodically. "Science has already demonstrated them. The X ray, the radium ray—these are accomplished facts of science. All we need is the eye to which they are visible. Increase in some way the power, the intensity, the range, capacity—what you will—of the senses, and a new world surrounds us. Intensify the power of the eye to receive and respond to increased vibrations of light, and man will see a myriad new forms and colors I've given you quite a scientific lecture," he concluded in a relaxed tone. "Shall we go back to the study?"
I began to fear that in his enthusiasm he had wandered so far from the subject. which I had most at heart that he would not return to it.
"What interests me," I remarked as we rose from the table, "is this telepathy business. Can anybody read another's thoughts, or is it a peculiar gift?"
"Generally speaking, it is something which is given to only a few," he replied. Then, noticing the disappointed expression on my face, he added with a laugh: "But if you intensified all a man's perceptive faculties no doubt you would, at the same time, give him a telepathic capacity of some sort—perhaps to an extraordinary degree. Patients in a hypnotic state readily see the infra-red and the ultra-violet–"
"Eh?" said I. "What is that? Infra-red–"
"Yes," he answered as we threw ourselves into the stuffed easy chairs by the fire in his library. "The infrared is the red just outside the visible red of the spectrum. It is the red given off by rays whose vibrations are not taken in by the retina, just as at the other or upper end