 THE WORLDS OF IF by Stanley G. Weinbaum I stopped on the way to the Staten Island airport to call up, and that was a mistake, doubtless, since I had a chance of making it otherwise. But the office was affable. We'll hold the ship five minutes for you," the clerk said. That's the best we can do. So I rushed back to my taxi, and we spun off to the third level and sped across the Staten Bridge like a comet treading a steel rainbow. I had to be in Moscow by evening, by eight o'clock in fact, for the opening of bids on the Ural Tunnel. The government required the personal presence of an agent of each bidder, but the firm should have known better than to send me, Dixon Wells, even though the N. J. Wells Corporation is, so to speak, my father. I have a, well, an undeserved reputation for being late to everything. Something always comes up to prevent me from getting anywhere on time. It's never my fault. This time it was a chance encounter with my old physics professor, old Haskell Van Manderpootz. I couldn't very well just say hello and good-bye to him. I'd been a favorite of his back in the college days of 2014. I missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when I heard the roar of the catapult on the Soviet rocket, Baikal, hummed over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame. We got the contract anyway. The firm wired our man in Beirut and he flew up to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation. However, I felt a great deal better when I saw the evening papers. The Baikal flying at the north edge of the eastbound lane to avoid a storm had locked wings with a British fruit ship, and all but a hundred of her five hundred passengers were lost. I had almost become the late Mr. Wells in a grimmer sense. I'd made an engagement for the following week with old Van Manderpootz. It seems he'd transferred to NYU as head of the Department of Newer Physics, that is, of Relativity. He deserved it. The old chap was a genius if ever there was one, and even now eight years out of college I remember more from his course than from half a dozen calculus, steam and gas mechanics, and other hazards on the path to an engineer's education. So on Tuesday night I dropped in an hour or so late to tell the truth, since I'd forgotten about the engagement until mid-evening. He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever. Humpf! he grunted! Time changes everything but habit I see. You were a good student dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward the middle of the lecture. I had a course in East Hall just before I explained. I couldn't seem to make it on time. Well, it's time you learn to be on time, he growled. Then his eyes twinkled. Time, he ejaculated, the most fascinating word in the language. Here, we've used it five times. There goes the sixth time and the seventh, in the first minute of conversation. Each of us understands the other, yet science is just beginning to learn its meaning. Science, I mean that I am beginning to learn. I sat down. You and science are synonymous, I grinned. Aren't you one of the world's outstanding physicists? One of them, he snorted. One of them, eh? And who are the others? Oh, Corvill, Hastings, Shrymsky. Bah! Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of Van Menderputz? A pack of jackals eating the crumbs of ideas that dropped from my feast of thoughts. Had you gone back into the last century? Now, had you mentioned Einstein and Desider? There, perhaps, are names worthy to rank with. Or just below Van Menderputz? I grinned again in amusement. Einstein was considered pretty good, wasn't he? I remarked. After all, he was the first to tie time and space to the laboratory. Before him, they were just philosophical concepts. He didn't, rest the professor. Perhaps in a dim, primitive fashion, and he showed the way, but I, I, Van Menderputz, am the first to seize time, drag it into my laboratory, and perform an experiment on it. Indeed. And what sort of experiment? What experiment, other than simple measurement, is it possible to perform, he snapped? Why, I don't know, to travel in it? Exactly. Like these time machines that are so popular in the current magazines? To go to the future or the past? Bah, many bahs. The future or the past? It needs no Van Menderputz to see the fallacy in that. Einstein showed us that much. How? It's conceivable, isn't it? Conceivable? And you, Dixon Wells, studied under Van Menderputz. He grew red with emotion, then grimly calm. Listen to me. You know how time varies with the speed of his system? Einstein's relativity? Yes? Very well. Now, suppose then that the great engineer Dixon Wells invents a machine capable of traveling very fast, enormously fast, nine tenths as fast as light. Do you follow? Good. Then you fuel this miracle ship for a little jaunt of half a million miles, which, since mass and with it inertia increases according to the Einstein formula with increasing speed, takes all the fuel in the world. But you solve that. You use atomic energy. Then, since at nine tenths light speed your ship weighs about as much as the sun, you disintegrate North America to give you sufficient mode of power. You start off at that speed, 168,000 miles per second, and you travel for 204,000 miles. The acceleration has now crushed you to death, but you have penetrated the future. He paused grinning sardonically. Haven't you? Yes. And how far? I hesitated. Use your Einstein formula, he screeched. How far? I'll tell you. One second. He grinned triumphantly. That's how possible it is to travel into the future. And as for the past, in the first place, you'd have to exceed light speed, which immediately entails the use of more than an infinite number of horsepower. We'll assume that the great engineer Dixon Wells solves that little problem too, even though the energy output of the whole universe is not an infinite number of horsepower. Then he applies this more than infinite power to travel at 204,000 miles per second for ten seconds. He has then penetrated the past. How far? Again, I hesitated. I'll tell you. One second. He glared at me. Now all you have to do is design such a machine, and then van Menderputz will admit the possibility of traveling into the future for a limited number of seconds. As for the past, I have just explained that all the energy in the universe is insufficient for that. But, I stammered, you just said that you... I did not say anything about traveling into either future or past, which I have just demonstrated to you to be impossible, a practical impossibility in the one case, and an absolute one in the other. Then how do you travel in time? Not even van Menderputz can perform the impossible, said the professor now faintly jovial. He tapped a thick pad of typewriter paper on the table beside him. See, Dick, this is the world, the universe. He swept a finger down it. It is long in time, sweeping his hand across it. It is broad in space. But, now jabbing his finger against the center, it is very thin in the fourth dimension. Van Menderputz takes always the shortest, the most logical course. I do not travel a long time into past or future. No. Me. I travel across time. Sideways. I gulped. Sideways into time. What's there? What would naturally be there, he snorted. Ahead is the future, behind is the past. Those are real, the worlds of past and future. What worlds are neither past nor future, but contemporary and yet extemporal, existing as it were in time parallel to our time. I shook my head. Idiot, he snapped. The conditional worlds of course, the worlds of if. Ahead are the worlds to be. Behind are the worlds that were. To either side are the worlds that might have been. The worlds of if. A. I was puzzled. Do you mean that you can see what will happen if I do such and such? No, he snorted. My machine does not reveal the past or predict the future. It will show, as I told you, the conditional worlds. You might express it by, if I had done such and such, so and so would have happened. The worlds of the subjunctive mode. Now how the devil does it do that? Simple. For van Mamderpoets, I use polarized light. Polarized not in the horizontal or vertical planes, but in the direction of the fourth dimension. An easy matter. One uses Iceland's spar under colossal pressures, that's all. And since the worlds are very thin in the direction of the fourth dimension, the thickness of a single light wave, though it be but millions of an inch, is sufficient. A considerable improvement over time traveling in past or future with its impossible velocities and ridiculous distances. But are those worlds of if real? Real? What is real? They are real, perhaps in the sense that two is a real number as opposed to the square root of two, which is imaginary. They are the worlds that would have been if, do you see? I nodded. Dimly, you could see, for instance, what New York would have been like if England had won the revolution instead of the colonies? That's the principle, true enough, but you couldn't see that on the machine. Part of it, you see, is a Horston psychomat, stolen from one of my ideas, by the way. And you, the user, become part of the device. Your own mind is necessary to furnish the background. For instance, if George Washington could have used the mechanism after the signing of peace, he could have seen what you suggest. We can't. You can't even see what would have happened if I hadn't invented the thing. But I can. Do you understand? Of course, you mean the background has to rest in the past experiences of the user. You're growing brilliant, he scoffed. Yes, the device will show 10 hours of what would have happened if, condensed, of course, as in a movie, to half an hour's actual time. Say, that sounds interesting. You'd like to see it? Is there anything you'd like to find out? Any choice, you daughter? I'll say a thousand of them. I'd like to know what would have happened if I'd sold out my stocks in 2009 instead of 10. I was a millionaire in my own right then, but I was little, well, a little late in liquidating. As usual, remarked Van Manderpootz, let's go over to the laboratory then. The professor's quarters were but a block from the campus. He ushered me into the physics building and thence into his own research laboratory, much like the one I had visited during my courses under him. The device, he called it his subjunct divisor since it operated in hypothetical worlds, occupied the entire center table. Most of it was merely a Horst and Psychomat, but glittering crystalline and glassy was the prism of Iceland's spar, the polarizing agent that was the heart of the instrument. Van Manderpootz pointed to the headpiece. Put it on, he said, and I sat staring at the screen of the Psychomat. I suppose everyone is familiar with the Horst and Psychomat. It was as much a fat a few years ago as the Ouija board a century back. Yet it isn't just a toy. Sometimes, much as the Ouija board, it's a real aid to memory. A maze of vague and colored shadows is caused to drift slowly across the screen and one watches them, meanwhile visualizing whatever scene or circumstances he's trying to remember. He turns a knob that alters the arrangement of lights and shadows and, when by chance the design corresponds to his mental picture, presto. There is his scene, recreated under his eyes. Of course, his own mind adds the details. All the screen actually shows are these tinted blobs of light and shadow, but the thing can be amazingly real. I've seen occasions when I could have sworn the Psychomat showed pictures almost as sharp and detailed as reality itself. The illusion is sometimes as startling as that. Van Manderpootz switched on the light and the play of shadows began. Now recall the circumstances of, say, a half a year after the market crash. Turn the knob until the picture clears, then stop. At that point I direct the light of the subjunctivizer upon the screen, and you have nothing to do but watch. I did as directed. Momentary pictures formed and vanished. The inchoate sounds of the device hummed like distant voices. But without the added suggestion of the picture, they meant nothing. My own face flashed and dissolved, and then finally I had it. There was a picture of myself sitting in an ill-defined room. That was all. I released the knob and gestured. A click followed. The light dimmed, then brightened. The picture cleared and, amazingly, another figure emerged—a woman. I recognized her. It was whimsy, white, erstwhile star of television and premier of the vision varieties of O9. She was changed on that picture, but I recognized her. I'll say I did. I'd been trailing her all through the boom years of 07 to 10, trying to marry her while old NJ raved and ranted and threatened to leave everything to the society for the rehabilitation of the Gobi Desert. I think those threats were what kept her from accepting me. But after I took my own money and ran it up to a couple million in that crazy market of 08 and 09, she softened. Temporarily, that is. When the crash of the Spring of 10 came and bounced me back on my father and into the firm of NJ Wells, her favor dropped a dozen points to the market's one. In February we were engaged. In April we were hardly speaking. In May they sold me out. I'd been late again. And now there she was on the psychomat screen. Obviously plumping out and not nearly so pretty as memory had pictured her, she was staring at me with an expression of enmity, and I was glaring back. The buzzes became voices. You nitwit, she snapped. You can't bury me out here. I want to go back to New York where there's a little life. I'm bored with you and your golf. And I'm bored with you and your whole dizzy crowd. At least they're alive. You're a walking corpse. Just because you were lucky enough to gamble yourself into the money, you think you're a tin god. Well, I don't think you are Cleopatra. Those friends of yours, they trail after you because you give parties and spend money. My money. Better than spending it to knock a white walnut along a mountainside. Indeed, you ought to try it, Marie. That was her real name. It might help your figure, though I doubt if anything could. She glared in rage. Well, that was a painful half-hour. I won't give all the details, but I was glad when the screen dissolved into meaningless colored clouds. I said, staring at Van Manderpootz, who had been reading. You liked it? Liked it. Say, I guess I was lucky to be cleaned out. I won't regret it from now on. That, said the professor grandly, is Van Manderpootz's great contribution to human happiness. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these. It might have been. True no longer, my friend Dick. Van Manderpootz has shown that the proper reading is, it might have been worse. It was very late when I returned home, and as a result very late when I rose, and equally late when I got to the office. My father was unnecessarily worked up about it, but he exaggerated when he said I'd never been on time. He forgets the occasions when he's awakened me and dragged me down with him. Nor was it necessary to refer so sarcastically to my missing the Baikal. I reminded him of the wrecking of the liner, and he responded very heartlessly that if I'd been aboard the rocket would have been late, and so would have missed colliding with the British fruit ship. It was likewise superfluous for him to mention that when he and I had tried to snatch a few weeks of golfing in the mountains, even the spring had been late. I had nothing to do with that. Dickson, he concluded, you have no conception whatever of time. None, whatever. The conversation with Van Manderpootz recurred to me. I was impelled to ask, and have you, sir? I have, he said grimly. I most assuredly have. Time, he said oracularly, is money. You can't argue with a viewpoint like that. But those aspersions of his rankled, especially that about the Baikal. Tardy I might be, but it was hardly conceivable that my presence aboard the rocket could have averted the catastrophe. It irritated me in a way. It made me responsible for the deaths of those unrescued hundreds among the passengers and crew, and I didn't like the thought. Of course, if they'd waited an extra five minutes for me, or if I'd been on time and they'd left on schedule instead of five minutes late, or if—if—if—the word called up Van Manderpootz in his subjunctivizer. The worlds of if—the weird, unreal worlds that existed beside reality, neither past nor future, but contemporary, yet extemporal. Somewhere along their ghostly infinites existed one that represented the world that would have been had I made the liner. I had only to call up Haskell Van Manderpootz, make an appointment, and then find out. Yet it wasn't an easy decision. Suppose—just suppose—that I found myself responsible. Not legally responsible. Certainly, there'd be no question of criminal negligence or anything of that sort. Not even morally responsible, because I couldn't possibly have anticipated that my presence or absence could weigh so heavily in the scales of life and death. Nor could I have known in which direction the scales would tip. Just responsible. That was all. Yet I hated to find out. I hated equally not finding out. Uncertainty has its pangs, too—quite as painful as those of remorse. It might be less nerve-wracking to know myself responsible than to wonder, to waste thoughts in vain doubts and futile reproaches. So I seized the visifone, dialed the number of the university, and at length gazed upon the broad, humorous intelligent features of Van Manderpootz, dragged from a morning lecture by my call. I was all but prompt for the appointment the following evening and might actually have been on time but for an unreasonable traffic officer who insisted on booking me for speeding. At any rate, Van Manderpootz was impressed. Well, he rumbled. I almost missed you, Dixon. I was just going over to the club since I didn't expect you for an hour. You're only ten minutes late. I ignored this. Professor, I want to use your, uh, your subjunctivizer. A. Oh, yes. You're lucky, then. I was just about to dismantle it. Dismantle it? Why? It has served its purpose. It has given birth to an idea far more important than itself. I shall need the space it occupies. But what is the idea if it's not too presumptuous of me to ask? It's not too presumptuous. You and the world which awaits it so eagerly may both know. But you hear it from the lips of the author. It is nothing less than the autobiography of Van Manderpootz. He paused impressively. I gaped. Your autobiography? Yes. The world, though perhaps unaware, is crying for it. I shall detail my life, my work. I shall reveal myself as the man responsible for the three years duration of the Pacific War of 2004. You? None other. Had I not been a loyal Netherlands subject at that time, and therefore neutral, the forces of Asia would have been crushed in three months instead of three years. The subjunctivizer tells me so. I would have invented a calculator to forecast the changes of every engagement. Van Manderpootz would have removed the hit or miss element in the conduct of war. He frowned solemnly. There is my idea. The autobiography of Van Manderpootz. What do you think of it? I recovered my thoughts. It's colossal, I said vehemently. I'll buy a copy myself. Several copies. I'll send them to friends. I, said Van Manderpootz expansively, shall autograph your copy for you. It will be priceless. I shall write in some fitting phrase, perhaps something like Magnificus said non-superbous. Great but not proud. That well describes Van Manderpootz, who despite his greatness is simple, modest, and unassuming. Don't you agree? Perfectly. A very apt description of you, but couldn't I see your subjunctivizer before it's dismantled to make way for the greater work? Ah, you wish to find out something. Yes, Professor, do you remember the bi-call disaster of a week or two ago? I was to have taken that liner to Moscow. I just missed it. I related the circumstances. He grunted. You wish to discover what would have happened had you caught it, well, I see several possibilities. Among the world of if is the one that would have been real if you had been on time, the one that depended on the vessel waiting for your actual arrival, and the one that hung on your arriving within the five minutes they actually waited, in which are you interested? Oh, the last one. That seemed the like-list. After all, it was too much to expect that Dixon Wells could ever be on time. And as to the second possibility, well, they hadn't waited for me, and that, in a way, removed the weight of responsibility. Come on, rumbled van Manderpootz. I followed him across to the physics building and into his littered laboratory. The device still stood on the table, and I took my place before it, staring at the screen of the Horst and Psychomat. The clouds wavered and shifted as I sought to impress my memories on their suggestive shapes, to read into them some picture of that vanishing morning. Then I had it. I made out the vista from the Staten Bridge, and was speeding across the giant span toward the airport. I waved a signal to van Manderpootz. The thing clicked, and the subjunctivizer was on. The grassless clay of the field appeared. It is a curious thing about the psychomat that you see only through the eyes of your image on the screen. It lends a strange reality to the working of the toy. I suppose a sort of self-hypnosis is partly responsible. I was rushing over the ground toward the glittering silver-winged projectile that was the Baikal. A glowering officer waved me on, and I dashed up the slant of the gangplank and into the ship. The port dropped, and I heard a long whew of relief. Sit down, barked the officer gesturing toward an unoccupied seat. I fell into it. The ship quivered under the thrust of the catapult, grated harshly into motion, and then was flung bodily into the air. The blast roared instantly, then settled to a more muffled throbbing, and I watched Staten Island drop down and slide back beneath me. The giant rocket was under way. I breathed again, made it. I caught an amused glance from my right. I was in an aisle seat. There was no one to my left, so I turned to the eyes that had flashed, glanced, and froze, staring. It was a girl. Perhaps she wasn't actually as lovely as she looked to me. After all, I was seeing her through the half-visionary screen of the psychomat. I've told myself since that she couldn't have been as pretty as she seemed. That it was due to my own imagination filling in the details. I don't know. I remember only that I stared at curiously lovely silver-blue eyes and velvety brown hair and a small, amused mouth and an impudent nose. I kept staring until she flushed. I'm sorry, I said quickly. I was startled. There's a friendly atmosphere aboard a trans-oceanic rocket. The passengers are forced into a crowded intimacy for anywhere from seven to twelve hours, and there isn't much room for moving about. Generally one strikes up an acquaintance with his neighbors. Introductions aren't at all necessary, and the custom is simply to speak to anybody you choose—something like an all-day trip on the railroad trains of the last century, I suppose. You make friends for the duration of the journey, and then, nine times out of ten, you never hear of your traveling companions again. The girl smiled. Are you the individual responsible for the delay in starting? I admitted it. I seemed to be chronically late, even watches lose time as soon as I wear them. She laughed. Your responsibilities can't be very heavy. Well, they weren't, of course, though it's surprising how many clubs, caddies, and chorus girls have depended on me at various times for appreciable portions of their incomes. But somehow I didn't feel like mentioning those things to the silvery-eyed girl. We talked. Her name, it developed, was Joanna Caldwell. And she was going as far as Paris. She was an artist, or hoped to be, one day, and, of course, there is no place in the world that can supply both training and inspiration, like Paris. So it was there she was bound for a year of study, and despite her demurely humorous lips and laughing eyes, I could see that the business was of vast importance to her. I gathered that she had worked hard for the year in Paris, had scraped and saved for three years as fashion illustrator for some women's magazine, though she couldn't have been many months over twenty-one. Her painting meant a great deal to her, and I could understand that. I'd felt that way about Polo once. So you see, we were sympathetic spirits from the beginning. I knew that she liked me, and it was obvious that she didn't connect Dixon Wells with the N.J. Wells Corporation. And as for me, well, after that first glance into her cool silver eyes, I simply didn't care to look anywhere else. The hours seemed to drip away like minutes while I watched her. You know how those things go. Suddenly I was calling her Joanna, and she was calling me Dick, and it seemed as if we'd been doing just that all our lives. I decided to stop over in Paris on my way back from Moscow, and I'd secured her promise to let me see her. She was different, I tell you. She was nothing like the calculating whimsy white, and still less like the dancing, simpering, giddy youngsters one meets around at social affairs. She was just Joanna, cool and humorous, yet sympathetic and serious, and as pretty as a Majolica figurine. We could scarcely realize it when the steward passed along to take orders for luncheon. Four hours out? It seemed like forty minutes. And we had a pleasant feeling of intimacy in the discovery that both of us liked lobster salad and detested oysters. It was another bond. I told her whimsically that it was an omen, nor did she object to considering it so. Afterwards we walked along the narrow aisle to the glassed-in observation room up forward. It was almost too crowded for entry, but we didn't mind that at all as it forced us to sit very close together. We stayed long after both of us had begun to notice the stuffiness of the air. It was just after we had returned to our seats that the catastrophe occurred. There was no warning save a sudden lurch, the result, I suppose, of the pilot's futile last-minute attempt to swerve. Just that, and then a grinding crash and a terrible sensation of spinning, and after that a chorus of shrieks that were like the sounds of battle. It was battle. Five hundred people were picking themselves up from the floor, were trampling each other, milling around, being cast helplessly down as the great rocket plane its left wing but a broken stub circled downward toward the Atlantic. The shouts of officers sounded, and a loudspeaker blared. Be calm, it kept repeating. And then, there has been a collision. We have contacted a surface ship. There is no danger. There is no danger. I struggled up from the debris of shattered seats. Joanna was gone. Just as I found her crumpled between the rows, the ship struck the water with a jar that set everything crashing again. The speaker blared, Put on the cork belts under the seats. The life belts are under the seats. I dragged a belt loose and snapped it around Joanna, then donned one myself. The crowd was surging forward now, and the tail end of the ship began to drop. There was water behind us, sloshing in the darkness as the lights went out. An officer came sliding by, stooped, and fastened to belt about an unconscious woman ahead of us. You all right, he yelled, and passed on without waiting for an answer. The speaker must have been cut onto a battery circuit. And get as far away as possible, it ordered suddenly. Jump from the forward port, and get as far away as possible. A ship is standing by. You will be picked up. Jump from the— It went dead again. I got Joanna untangled from the wreckage. She was pale. Her silvery eyes were closed. I started dragging her slowly and painfully toward the forward port, and the slant of the floor increased until it was like the slide of a ski jump. The officer passed again. Can you handle her, he asked, and again dashed away. I was getting there. The crowd around the port looked smaller, or was it simply huddling closer. Then suddenly a wail of fear and despair went up, and there was a roar of water. The observation-room walls had given. I saw the green surge of waves and a billowing deluge rushed down upon us. I had been late again. That was all. I raised, shocked, and frightened eyes from the subjunctivizer to face Van Manderpootz, who was scribbling on the edge of the table. Well, he asked. I shuddered. Horrible, I murmured. We—I guess we—wouldn't have been among the survivors. We, eh? We? His eyes twinkled. I did not enlighten him. I thanked him, bade him good night, and went deluriously home. Even my father noticed something queer about me. The day I got to the office only five minutes late, he called me in for some anxious questioning as to my health. I couldn't tell him anything, of course. How could I explain that I'd been late once too often, and had fallen in love with a girl two weeks after she was dead? The thought drove me nearly crazy. Joanna, Joanna with her silvery eyes, now lay somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic. I went around half-days, scarcely speaking. One night I actually lacked the energy to go home, and sat smoking in my father's big overstuffed chair in his private office until I finally dozed off. The next morning when old N.J. entered and found me there before him, he turned pale as paper, staggered and gasped, My heart! It took a lot of explaining to convince him that I wasn't early at the office, but just very late at going home. At last I felt that I couldn't stand it. I had to do something, anything at all. I thought finally of the subjunctivizer. I could see—yes, I could see what would have transpired if the ship hadn't been wrecked. I could trace out that weird, unreal romance hidden somewhere in the worlds of if. I could perhaps ring a somber vicarious joy from the things that might have been. I could see Joanna once more. It was late afternoon when I rushed over to Van Manderpootz's quarters. He wasn't there. I encountered him finally in the hall of the physics building. Dick, he exclaimed, Are you sick? Sick? No, not physically, Professor. I've got to use your subjunctivizer again. I've got to. Eh? Oh, that toy. You're too late, Dick. I've dismantled it. I have a better use for the space. I gave a miserable groan and was tempted to dam the autobiography of the great fan Van Manderpootz. A gleam of sympathy showed in his eyes, and he took my arm, dragging me into the little office adjoining his laboratory. Tell me, he commanded. I did. I guess I made the tragedy plain enough, for his heavy brows knit in a frown of pity. Not even Van Manderpootz can bring back the dead, he murmured. I'm sorry, Dick. Take your mind from the affair. Even were my subjunctivizer available, I wouldn't permit you to use it. That would be but to turn the knife in the wound. He paused. Find something else to occupy your mind. Do as Van Manderpootz does. Find forgetfulness in work. Yes, I responded dully, but who would want to read my autobiography? That's all right for you. Autobiography? Oh, I remember. No, I have abandoned that. History itself will record the life and works of Van Manderpootz. Now I am engaged in a far grander project. Indeed, I was utterly gloomily disinterested. Yes, Gogli has been here. Gogli the sculptor. He is to make a bust of me. What better legacy can I leave to the world than a bust of Van Manderpootz sculptured from life? Perhaps I shall present it to the city, perhaps to the university. I would have given it to the Royal Society if they had been a little more receptive if they, if, if, the last was a shout. Huh? If, cried Van Manderpootz, what you saw in the subjunctivizer was what would have happened if you had caught the ship. I know that. But something quite different might really have happened. Don't you see? She—she—where are those old newspapers? He was pawing through a pile of them. He flourished one finally. Here! Here are the survivors. Like letters of flame, Joanna Caldwell's name leapt out at me. There was even a little paragraph about it, as I saw once my reeling brain permitted me to read. At least a score of survivors owe their lives to the bravery of twenty-eight-year-old navigator, Oris Hope, who patrolled both aisles during the panic, lacing lifebelts on the injured and helpless and carrying many to the port. He remained on the sinking liner until the last, finally fighting his way to the surface through the broken walls of the observation room. Among those who owe their lives to the young officer are Patrick Owensby, New York City, Mrs. Campbell Warren, Boston, Miss Joanna Caldwell, New York City. I suppose my shout of joy was heard over in the administration building blocks away. I didn't care. If Van Manderpootz hadn't been armored in stubby whiskers, I'd have kissed him. Perhaps I did anyway. I can't be sure of my actions during those chaotic minutes in the professor's tiny office. At last I calmed. I can look her up, I gloated. She must have landed with the other survivors, and they were all on that British tramp freighter, the Osgood, that docked here last week. She must be in New York. And if she's gone over to Paris, I'll find out, and I'll follow her. Well, it's a queer ending. She was in New York. But, you see, Dixon Wells had, so to speak, known Joanna Caldwell by means of the professor's subjunctivizer. But Joanna had never known Dixon Wells. What the ending might have been if, if. But it wasn't. She had married Oris Hope, the young officer who had rescued her. I was late again. End of The Worlds of If, by Stanley G. Weinbaum. The Ideal, by Stanley G. Weinbaum. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Greg Marguerite. The Ideal, by Stanley G. Weinbaum. This, said the Franciscan, is my automaton, who at the proper time will speak, answer whatsoever question I may ask, and reveal all secret knowledge to me. He smiled as he laid his hand affectionately on the iron skull that topped the pedestal. The youth gazed open mouth, first at the head, and then at the friar. But it's iron, he whispered. The head is iron good father. Iron without, skill within, my son, said Roger Bacon. It will speak at the proper time and in its own manner, for so have I made it. A clever man can twist the devil's arts to God's ends, thereby cheating the fiend. There sounds Vespers. Plenta gratia ave vergo. But it did not speak. Long hours, long weeks, the Dr. Morabolus watched his creation. But iron lips were silent, and the iron eyes were dull. And no voice but the great man's own sounded in his monkish cell. Nor was there ever an answer to all the questions that he asked. Until one day, when he sat surveying his work, composing a letter to Duns Scotus in distant Cologne, one day, Time is, said the image, and smiled benignly. The friar looked up. Time is indeed, he echoed. Time it is that you give utterance, and to some assertion less obvious than time is. For of course time is, else there were nothing at all without time. Time was, rumbled the image, still smiling, but sternly at the statue of Draco. Indeed, time was, said the monk. Time was, is, and will be. For time is that medium in which events occur. Matter exists in space. But events? The image smiled no longer. Time is past. It roared in tones deep as the cathedral bell outside, and burst into ten thousand pieces. There, said old Haskell Van Mander-Pootz, shutting the book, is my classical authority in this experiment. The story, overlaid as it is with medieval myth and legend, proves that Roger Bacon himself attempted the experiment, and failed. He shook a long finger at me. Yet do not get the impression, Dixon, that friar Bacon was not a great man. He was, extremely great. In fact, he lighted the torch that his namesake Francis Bacon took up four centuries later. And that now, Van Mander-Pootz, rekindles. I stared in silence. Indeed, resumed the professor. Roger Bacon might almost be called a 13th-century Van Mander-Pootz, or Van Mander-Pootz a 21st-century Roger Bacon, his opus magus opus minus and opus tertium. What, I interrupted impatiently, has all this to do with that? I indicated the clumsy metal robot standing in the corner of the laboratory. Don't interrupt, snapped Van Mander-Pootz. I'll—at this point I fell out of my chair. The massive metal had ejaculated something like a grasp, and had lunged a single pace forward towards the window, arms upraised. What the devil I sputtered is the thing dropped its arms and returned stolidly to its place. A car must have passed in the alley, said Van Mander-Pootz indifferently. Now, as I was saying, Roger Bacon—I ceased to listen—when Van Mander-Pootz is determined to finish a statement, interruptions are worse than futile. As an ex-student of his, I know. So I permitted my thoughts to drift to certain personal problems of my own. Particularly Tips Alva, who was the most pressing problem at the moment. Yes, I mean Tips Alva, the vision dancer, the little blonde imp who entertains on the Yerba Mate hour for that Brazilian company. Chorus Girls dancers and television stars are a weakness of mine. Maybe it indicates that there's a latent artistic soul in me. Maybe. I'm Dixon Wells. You know, scion of the N. J. Wells Corporation. Engineer's extraordinary. I'm supposed to be an engineer myself. I say supposed, because in the seven years since my graduation, my father hasn't given me much opportunity to prove it. He has a strong sense of value of time, and I'm cursed with the unenviable quality of being late to anything and for everything. He even asserts that the occasional designs I submit are late Jacobean, but that isn't fair. They're post-Romanesque. Old N. J. also objects to my penchant for ladies of the stage and vision screens and periodically threatens to cut my allowance, though that's supposed to be a salary. It's inconvenient to be so dependent, and sometimes I regret that unfortunate market crash of 2009 that wiped out my own money. Although it did keep me from marrying Whimsy White and Van Manderpootz through his subjunctivizer, succeeded in proving that that would have been a catastrophe. But it turned out nearly as much of a disaster anyway as far as my feelings were concerned. It took me months to forget Joanna Caldwell and her silvery eyes. Just another instance when I was a little late. Van Manderpootz himself is my old physics professor, head of the department of newer physics at NYU, and a genius, but a bit eccentric. Judge for yourself. And that's the thesis, he said, suddenly interrupting my thoughts. A? Oh, of course. But what's that grinning robot got to do with it? He purpled. I've just told you, he roared. Idiot. Imbecile. To dream while Van Manderpootz talks. Get out. Get out! I got. It was late anyway, so late that I overslept more than usual in the morning and suffered more than the usual lecture on promptness from my father at the office. Van Manderpootz had forgotten his anger by the next time I dropped by for an evening. The robot still stood in the corner near the window and I lost no time asking its purpose. It's just a toy I had some of the students construct, he explained. There's a screen of photoelectric cells behind the right eye so connected that when a certain pattern is thrown on them it activates the mechanism. The things plugged into the light circuit, but it really ought to run on gasoline. Why? Well, the pattern it's set for is the shape of an automobile. See here. He picked up a card from his desk and cut in the outlines of a streamlined car like those of that year. Since only one eye is used, he continued, the thing can't tell the difference between a full-sized vehicle at a distance and this small outline nearby. It has no sense of perspective. He held the bit of cardboard before the eye of the mechanism. Instantly came its roar, a grasp, and it leapt forward a single pace, arms upraised. Van Manderpootz withdrew the card and again the thing relapsed solidly into its place. What the devil, I exclaimed, what's it for? Does Van Manderpootz ever do work without reason back of it? I'd use it as a demonstration in my seminar. To demonstrate what? The power of reason, said Van Manderpootz solemnly. How and why ought it to work on gasoline instead of electric power? One question at a time, Dixon. You have missed the grandeur of Van Manderpootz's concept. See here. This creature, imperfect as it is, represents the predatory machine. It is the mechanical parallel of the tiger, lurking in its jungle to leap on living prey. This monster's jungle is the city. Its prey is the unwary machine that follows the trails called streets. Understand? No. Well, picture this automaton, not as it is, but as Van Manderpootz could make it if he wished. It lurks gigantic in the shadows of buildings. It creeps stealthily through the dark alleys. It skulks on deserted streets, with its gasoline engine purring quietly. Then an unsuspecting automobile flashes its image on the screen behind its eyes. It leaps, it seizes its prey, swinging it in steel arms to its steel jaws, through the metal throat of its victim-crashed steel teeth, the blood of its prey. The gasoline, that is, is drained into its stomach, or its gas tank, with renewed strength it flings away the husk and prowls on to seek other prey. It is the machine carnivore, the tiger of mechanics. I suppose I stared dumbly. It occurred to me suddenly that the brain of the great Van Manderpootz was cracking. What the—I guessed. That, he said blandly, is but a concept. I have many other uses for the toy. I can prove anything with it—anything I wish. You can. Then prove something. Name your proposition, Dixon. I hesitated non-plus. Come, he said impatiently. Look here. I will prove that Anarchy is the ideal government, or that Heaven and Hell are the same place, or that— Prove that, I said, about Heaven and Hell. Easily. First we will endow my robot with intelligence. I add a mechanical memory by means of the old Cushman-delayed valve. I add a mathematical sense with any of the calculating machines. I give it a voice and a vocabulary with the magnetic impulse wire phonograph. Now the point I make is this. Granted, an intelligent machine, does it not follow that every other machine constructed like it must have the identical qualities? Would not each robot, given the same insides, have exactly the same character? No, I snapped. Human beings can't make two machines exactly alike. There'd be tiny differences. One would react quicker than the other, or one would prefer fox-air-splitters as prey while others reacted more vigorously to Karnakars. In other words, they'd have individuality. I grinned in triumph. My point exactly observed Van Manderpootz. You admit, then, that this individuality is the result of imperfect workmanship. If our means of manufacture were perfect, all robots would be identical, and this individuality would not exist. Is that true? I suppose so. Then I argue that our own individuality is due to our falling short of perfection. All of us, even Van Manderpootz, are individuals only because we are not perfect. Were we perfect, each of us would be exactly like everyone else. True? Yes. But heaven, by definition, is a place where all is perfect. Therefore, in heaven, everybody is exactly like everybody else, and therefore, everybody is thoroughly and completely bored. There is no torture like boredom, Dixon. And, well, have I proved my point? I was floored. But about anarchy, then, I stammered. Simple. Very simple for Van Manderpootz. See here. With a perfect nation, that is, one whose individuals are all exactly alike, which I have just proven to constitute perfection. With a perfect nation, I repeat, laws and governments are utterly superfluous. If everybody reacts to stimuli in the same way, laws are quite useless, obviously. If, for instance, a certain event occurred that might lead to a declaration of war, why, everybody in such a nation would vote for war at the same instant. Therefore, government is unnecessary, and therefore, anarchy is the ideal government, since it is the proper government for a perfect race. He paused. I shall now prove that anarchy is not the ideal government. Never mind, I begged. Who am I to argue with Van Manderpootz? But is that the whole purpose of this dizzy robot just a basis for logic? The mechanism replied with its usual rasp as it leapt towards some vagrant car beyond the window. Isn't that enough, growled Van Manderpootz? However, his voice dropped. I have even a greater destiny in mind, my boy. Van Manderpootz has solved the riddle of the universe. He paused impressively. Well, why don't you say something? Uh, I guess it's, uh, marvelous. Not for Van Manderpootz, he said, modestly. But what is it? A. Oh, he frowned. Well, I'll tell you, Dixon. You won't understand, but I'll tell you. He coughed. As far back as the early 20th century, he resumed, Einstein proved that energy is particular. Matter is also particular. And now Van Manderpootz adds that space and time are discreet. He glared at me. Energy and matter are particular, I murmured. And space and time are discreet, how very moral of them. Imbecile, he blazed, to pun on the words of Van Manderpootz. You know very well that I mean particular and discreet in the physical sense. Matter is composed of particles, therefore it is particular. The particles of matter are called electrons, protons and neutrons, and those of energy, quanta. I now add two others. The particles of space, I call spacions, and those of time, cronons. And what in the devil I asked are particles of space and time? Just what I said, snapped Van Manderpootz, exactly as the particles of matter are the smallest pieces of matter that can exist, just as there is no such thing as half an electron or for that matter half a quantum, so the cronon is the smallest possible fragment of time, and the spacion the smallest possible bit of space. Neither time nor space is continuous, each is composed of these infinitely tiny fragments. Well, how long is a cronon in time, and how big is a spacion in space? Van Manderpootz has even measured that. A cronon is the length of time it takes one quantum of energy to push one electron from one electronic orbit to the next. There can obviously be no shorter interval of time, since an electron is the smallest unit of matter, and the quantum the smallest unit of energy, and a spacion is the exact volume of a proton, since nothing smaller exists. That is obviously the smallest unit of space. Well, look here I argued then what's in between these particles of space and time, if time moves as you say in jerks of one cronon each, what's between the jerks? Ah, said the great Van Manderpootz, now we come to the heart of the matter. In between the particles of space and time must obviously be something that is neither space, time, matter, nor energy. A hundred years ago shapely anticipated Van Manderpootz in a vague way when he announced his Cosmoplasma, the great underlying matrix in which time and space in the universe are embedded. Now Van Manderpootz announces the ultimate unit, the universal particle, the focus in which matter, energy, time and space meet, the unit from which electrons, protons, neutrons, quanta, spacions and cronons are all constructed. The riddle of the universe is solved by what I have chosen to name the Cosmon. His blue eyes bore it into me. Magnificent, I said feebly knowing that some such word was expected. But what good is it? What good is it he roared? It provides, or will provide once I work out a few details, the means of turning energy into time or space into matter or time into space or he sputtered into silence. Fool, he muttered, to think that you studied under the tutelage of Van Manderpootz. I blush. I actually blush. One couldn't have told if he were blushing. His face was always rubicund enough. Colossal, I said hastily, what a mind! That mollified him. But that's not all, he proceeded. Van Manderpootz never stopped short of perfection. I now announce the unit particle of thought, the Psycon. This was a little too much. I simply stared. Well, may you be dumbfounded, said Van Manderpootz. I presume you are aware, by hearsay at least, of the existence of thought. The Psycon, the unit of thought, is one electron plus one proton, which are bound so as to form one neutron embedded in one Cosmon occupying a volume of one spaceon driven by one quantum for a period of one cronon. Very obvious, very simple. Oh, very I echoed. Even I can see that equals one Psycon. He beamed. Excellent, excellent. And what I asked, will you do with the Psycons? Ah, he rumbled. Now we go even past the heart of the matter and return to Isaac here. He jammed a thumb toward the robot. Here I will create Roger Bacon's mechanical head. In the skull of this clumsy creature will rest such intelligence as not even Van Manderpootz. I should say as only Van Manderpootz can conceive. It remains merely to construct my idealizator. Your idealizator? Of course. Have I not just proven that thoughts are as real as matter, energy, time, or space? Have I not just demonstrated that one can be transformed through the Cosmon into any other? My idealizator is the means of transforming Psycons to quanta, just as for instance a crook's tube or x-ray tube transforms matter to electrons. I will make your thoughts visible, and not your thoughts as they are in that dumb brain of yours, but in ideal form. Do you see? The Psycons of your mind are the same as those from any other mind, just as all electrons are identical, whether from gold or iron. Yes, your Psycons, his voice quavered, are identical with those from the mind of Van Manderpootz. He paused, shaken. Actually, I gasped. Actually. Fewer in number, of course, but identical. Therefore, my idealizator shows your thought, released from the impress of your personality. It shows it ideal. Well, I was late to the office again. A week later, I thought of Van Manderpootz. Tips was on tour somewhere, and I didn't dare take anyone else out because I'd tried it once before and she'd heard about it. So with nothing to do, I finally dropped around to the professor's quarter, found him missing, and eventually located him in his laboratory at the physics building. He was puttering around the table that had once held that damned subjunctivizer of his, but now it supported an indescribable mess of tubes and tangled wires, and as its most striking feature, a circular plain mirror etched with a grating of delicately scratched lines. Good evening, Dixon, he rumbled. I echoed his greeting. What's that, I asked. My idealizator, a rough model, much too clumsy to fit into Isaac's iron skull. I'm just finishing it to try it out. He turned glittering blue eyes on me. How fortunate that you're here. It will save the world a terrible risk. A risk? Yes. It is obvious that too long an exposure to the device will extract too many psychons and leave the subject's mind in a sort of moronic condition. I was about to accept the risk, but I see now that it would be woefully unfair to the world to endanger the mind of Van Manderpootz. But you are at hand, and will do very well. Oh, no, I won't. Come, come, he said frowning. The danger is negligible. In fact, I doubt whether the device will be able to extract any psychons from your mind. At any rate, you will be perfectly safe for a period of at least half an hour. I, with a vastly more productive mind, could doubtless stand the strain indefinitely. But my responsibility to the world is too great to chance it until I have tested the machine on someone else. You should be proud of the honor. Well, I'm not. But my protest was feeble, and after all, despite his overbearing mannerisms, I knew Van Manderpootz liked me, and I was positive he would not have exposed me to any real danger. In the end I found myself seated before the table facing the etched mirror. Put your face against the barrel, said Van Manderpootz, indicating a stove pipe like tube. That's merely to cut off extraneous sights, so that you can see only the mirror. Go ahead, I tell you it's no more than the barrel of a telescope or microscope. I complied. Now what? I asked. What do you see? My own face in the mirror. Of course. Now I start the reflector rotating. There was a faint whirr in the mirror was spinning smoothly, still with only a slightly blurred image of myself. Listen now, continued Van Manderpootz, here is what you are to do. You will think of a generic noun—house, for instance. If you think of house, you will see not an individual house, but your ideal house—the house of all your dreams and desires. If you think of a horse, you will see what your mind conceives as the perfect horse—such a horse as dreams and longing create. Do you understand? Have you chosen a topic? Yes. After all, I was only twenty-eight. The noun I had chosen was girl. Good! said the professor. I turn on the current. There was a blue radiance behind the mirror. My own face still stared back at me from the spinning surface, but something was forming behind it, building up, growing. I blinked. When I focused my eyes again, it was—she was—there. Lord, I can't begin to describe her. I don't even know if I saw her clearly the first time. It was like looking into another world and seeing the embodiment of all longings, dreams, aspirations, and ideals. It was so poignant a sensation that it crossed the borderline into pain. It was, well, exquisite torture or agonized delight. It was at once unbearable and irresistible. But I gazed. I had to. There was a haunting familiarity about the impossibly beautiful features. I had seen the face, somewhere, some time, in dreams. No. I realized suddenly what was the source of that familiarity. This was no living woman, but a synthesis. Her nose was the tiny impudent one of Whimsy White at her loveliest moment. Her lips were the perfect bow of Tips Alva. Her silvery eyes and dusky velvet hair were those of Joan Caldwell. But the aggregate, the sum total, the face in the mirror—that was none of these. It was a face impossibly, incredibly, outrageously beautiful. Only her face and throat were visible, and the features were cool, expressionless, as still as a carving. I wondered suddenly if she could smile, and with the thought she did. If she had been beautiful before, now her beauty flamed to such a pitch that it was, well, insolent. It wasn't a front to be so lovely. It was insulting. I felt a wild surge of anger that the image before me should flaunt such beauty and yet be non-existent. It was deception, cheating, fraud, and a promise that could never be fulfilled. Anger died in the depths of that fascination. I wondered what the rest of her was like, and instantly she moved gracefully back until her full figure was visible. I must be a prude at heart, because she wasn't wearing the usual kurras and shorts of that year, but an iridescent four-paneled costume that all but concealed her dainty knees. But her form was slim and erect as a column of cigarette smoke and still air, and I knew that she could dance like a fragment of mist on wooder. And with that thought, she did move, dropping in a low curtsy and looking up with the faintest possible flush, crimsoning the curve of her throat. Yes, I must be a prude at heart. Despite tips Alva and whimsy White and the rest, my ideal was modest. It was unbelievable that the mirror was simply giving back my thoughts. She seemed as real as myself, and, after all, I guess she was as real as myself. No more, no less, because she was part of my own mind. And at this point, I realized that Van Manderpootz was shaking me and bellowing, Your time's up! Come out of it! Your half hour's up! He must have switched off the current. The image faded, and I took my face from the tube, dropping it on my arms. Oh, I groaned. How do you feel, he snapped. Feel? All right. Physically, I looked up. Concern flickered in his blue eyes. What's the cube root of 4913, he cracked sharply. I've always been quick at figures. It's, uh, Seventeen, I returned, dully. Why the devil? You're all right mentally, he announced. Now, why were you sitting there like a dummy for half an hour? My idealizator must have worked as is only natural for a Van Manderpootz creation. But what were you thinking of? I thought—I thought of girl, I groaned. He snorted. You would, you idiot. House or horse wasn't good enough. You had to pick something with emotional connotations. Well, you can start right in forgetting her, because she doesn't exist. I couldn't give up hope as easily as that. But can't you—can't you—I didn't even know what I meant to ask. Van Manderpootz, he announced, is a mathematician, not a magician. Do you expect me to materialize an ideal for you? When I had no reply but a groan, he continued. Now I think it's safe enough to try the device myself. I shall take—let's see—the thought man. I shall see what the superman looks like, since the ideal of Van Manderpootz can be nothing less than superman. He seated himself. Turn that switch, he said. Now! I did. The tubes glowed into a low blue light. I watched, dullly, disinterestingly. Nothing held any attraction for me after that image of the ideal. Ha! said Van Manderpootz suddenly. Turn it on, I say. I see nothing but my own reflection. I stared. Then burst into a hollow laugh. The mirror was spinning. The banks of tubes were glowing. The device was operating. Van Manderpootz raised his face, a little redder than usual. I laughed half hysterically. After all, he said, huffily, one might have a lower ideal of man than Van Manderpootz. I see nothing nearly so humorous as your situation. The laughter died. I went miserably home, spent half the remainder of the night in morose contemplation, smoked nearly two packs of cigarettes, and didn't get into the office at all the next day. Tips Alva got back to town for a weekend broadcast, but I didn't even bother to see her. Just phoned her and told her I was sick. I guess my face lent credibility to the story, for she was dullly sympathetic, and her face in the phone screen was quite anxious. Even at that, I couldn't keep my eyes away from her lips. Because, except for a bit too lustrous makeup, they were the lips of the ideal. But they weren't enough. They just weren't enough. Old Ange began to worry again. I couldn't sleep late of mornings anymore, and after missing that one day I kept getting down earlier and earlier until one morning I was only ten minutes late. He called me in at once. Look here, Dixon, he said. Have you been to a doctor recently? I'm not sick, I said listlessly. Then for heaven's sake, marry the girl. I don't care what chorus she kicks in. Marry her and act like a human being again. I can't. Oh, she's already married, eh? Well, I couldn't tell him she didn't exist. I couldn't say I was in love with a vision, a dream, an ideal. He thought I was a little crazy anyway. So I just muttered, yeah, and didn't argue when he said gruffly, then you'll get over it. Take a vacation. Take two vacations. You might as well for all the good you are around here. I didn't leave New York. I lacked the energy. I just mooned around the city for a while, avoiding my friends and dreaming of the impossible beauty of the face in the mirror. And by and by the longing to see that vision of perfection once more began to become overpowering. I don't suppose anyone except me can understand the lore of that memory. The face, you see, had been my ideal, my concept of perfection. One sees beautiful women here and there in the world, one falls in love, but always no matter how great their beauty or how deep one's love, they fall short in some degree of the secret vision of the ideal. But not the mirrored face. She was my ideal, and therefore whatever imperfections she might have had in the minds of others, in my eyes, she had none. None that is, say, for the terrible one of being only an ideal and therefore unattainable. But that is a fault inherent in all perfection. It was a matter of days before I yielded. Common sense told me it was futile, but foolhardy, to gaze again on the vision of perfect desirability. I fought against the hunger, but I fought hopelessly, and was not at all surprised to find myself one evening wrapping on Van Manderpootz's door in the university club. He wasn't there. I'd been hoping he wouldn't be, since it gave me an excuse to seek him in his laboratory in the physics building, to which I would have dragged him anyway. There I found him, writing some sort of notations on the table that held the idealisator. Hello, Dixon, he said. Did it ever occur to you that the ideal university cannot exist? Naturally, not since it must be composed of perfect students and perfect educators, in which case the former could have nothing to learn, and the latter therefore nothing to teach. What interest had I in the perfect university and its inability to exist? My whole being was desolate over the nonexistence of another ideal. Professor, I said tensely. May I use that thing of yours again? I want to see something. My voice must have disclosed the situation, for Van Manderpootz looked up sharply. So, he snapped. So you disregard my advice. Forget her, I said. Forget her, because she doesn't exist. But I can't. Once more, Professor. Only once more. He shrugged. His blue metallic eyes were a little softer than usual. After all, for some inconceivable reason, he likes me. Well, Dixon, he said. You're of age and supposed to be of mature intelligence. I tell you that this is a very stupid request, and Van Manderpootz always knows what he's talking about. If you want to stupefy yourself with the opium of impossible dreams, go ahead. This is the last chance you'll have, for tomorrow the idealisator of Van Manderpootz goes into the bacon-head of Isaac there. I shall shift the oscillators so that the psychons, instead of becoming light-quanta, emerge as an electron flow, a current which will actuate Isaac's vocal apparatus and come out as speech. He paused musingly. Van Manderpootz will hear the voice of the ideal. Of course, Isaac can return only what psychons he receives from the brain of the operator, but just as the image in the mirror, the thoughts will have lost their human impress, and the words will be those of an ideal. He perceived that I wasn't listening, I suppose. Go ahead, imbecile, he grunted. I did. The glory that I hungered after flame slowly into being, incredible in loveliness, and somehow, unbelievably, even more beautiful than on that other occasion. I know why now. Long afterwards, Van Manderpootz explained that the very fact that I had seen an ideal once before had altered my ideal, raised it to a higher level. With that face among my memories, my concept of perfection was different than it had been. So I gazed and hungered. Reddly and instantly the being in the mirror responded to my thoughts with smile and movement. When I thought of love, her eyes blazed with such tenderness that it seemed as if I—I—Dixon Wells were part of those pairs who had made the great romances of the world. Eloise and Abelard, Tristramanus, Solda, Ocasin and Nicolet, it was like the thrust of a dagger to feel Van Manderpootz shaking me to hear his gruff voice calling, out of it, out of it, times up. I groaned and dropped my face on my hands. The Professor had been right, of course. This insane repetition had only intensified an unfulfillable longing and had made a bad mess ten times as bad. Then I heard him muttering behind me. Strange, he murmured. In fact, fantastic! Oedipus! Oedipus of the magazine covers and billboards! I looked dolly around. He was standing behind me, squinting, apparently, into the spinning mirror behind the end of the black tube. Huh! I grunted wearily. That face, he said, very queer. You must have seen her features on a hundred magazines, on a thousand billboards, on countless vision broadcasts. The Oedipus complex, in a curious form. A. You could see her? Of course, he grunted. Didn't I say a dozen times that the psychons are transmuted to perfectly ordinary quanta of visible light? If you could see her, why not I? But what about billboards and all? That face, said the Professor slowly, is somewhat idealized, of course, and certain details are wrong. Her eyes aren't that pallid, silver-blue you imagined, they're green, sea-green, emerald-colored. What the devil, I asked Horsley, are you talking about? About the face in the mirror. It happens to be, Dixon, a close approximation of the features of Delisle de Agrion, the dragonfly. You mean she's real? She exists? She lives? She— Wait a moment, Dixon. She's real enough, but in accordance with your habit, you're a little late. About twenty-five years too late, I should say. She must now be somewhere in the fifties. Let's see. Fifty-three, I think. But during your very early childhood you must have seen her face pictured everywhere, Delisle de Agrion, the dragonfly. I could only gulp, that blow was devastating. You see, continued Venmandraputs, one's ideals are implanted very early. That's why you continually fall in love with girls who possess one or another feature that reminds you of her. Her hair, her nose, her mouth, her eyes—very simple, but rather curious. Curious, I blazed. Curious, you say. Every time I look into one of your damned contraptions, I find myself in love with a myth—a girl who's dead, or married, or unreal, or turned into an old woman. Curious, eh? Damned funny, isn't it? Just a moment, said the Professor placidly. It happens, Dixon, that she has a daughter. What's more, Denise resembles her mother, and what's still more, she's arriving in New York next week to study American letters at the university here. She writes, you see. That was too much for immediate comprehension. How—how do you know, I gasped? It was one of the few times I've seen the colossal blandness of van Manderpootz ruffled. He read into trifle and said slowly, It also happens, Dixon, that many years ago in Amsterdam, Haskell van Manderpootz and Lylde Agriand were very friendly. More than friendly, I might say. But for the fact that two such powerful personalities as the dragonfly and van Manderpootz were always at odds, he frowned. I was almost her second husband. She had seven. I believe Denise is the daughter of her third. Why—why is she coming here? Because, he said with dignity, van Manderpootz is here, and I am still a friend of Delisle. He turned and bent over the complex device on the table. Hand me that wrench, he ordered. Tonight I dismantle this, and tomorrow start reconstructing it for Isaac's head. But when, the following week, I rushed eagerly back to van Manderpootz's laboratory. The idealizator was still in place. The professor greeted me with a humorous twist to what was visible of his bearded mouth. Yes, it's still here, he said, gesturing at the device. I've decided to build an entirely new one for Isaac, and besides, this one has afforded me considerable amusement. Furthermore, in the words of Oscar Wilde, who am I to tamper with the work of genius? After all, the mechanism is the product of the great van Manderpootz. He was deliberately tantalizing me. He knew that I hadn't come to hear him discourse on Isaac, or even on the incomparable van Manderpootz. Then he smiled and softened, and turned to the little inner office adjacent to the room where Isaac stood in metal austerity. Denise, he called, come here. I don't know exactly what I expected, but I do know that the breath left me as the girl entered. She wasn't exactly my image of the ideal, of course. She was perhaps the merest trifle slimmer in her eyes. Well, they must have been much like those of L'Ile d'Agrion, for they were the clearest emerald I've ever seen. They were impudently direct eyes, and I could imagine why van Manderpootz and the dragonfly might have been forever quarreling. That was easy to imagine, looking into the eyes of the dragonfly's daughter. Nor was Denise apparently quite as femininely modest as my image of perfection. She wore the extremely unconcealing costume of the day, which covered, I suppose, about as much of her as one of the one-piece swimsuits of the middle years of the twentieth century. She gave an impression not so much of fleeting grace as to life-ness and supple strength, an air of independence, frankness, and, I say it again, impudence. Well, she said coolly as van Manderpootz presented me. So you're the scion of the N. J. Wells Corporation. Every now and then your escapades enliven the Paris Sunday supplements. Wasn't it you who snared a million dollars in the market so you could ask whimsy white? I flushed. That was greatly exaggerated, I said hastily. And anyway, I lost it before we—before I—not before you made somewhat of a fool of yourself, I believe, she finished sweetly. Well, that's the sort she was. If she hadn't been so infernally lovely, if she hadn't looked so much like the face in the mirror, I'd have flared up, said, Please do have met you and never have seen her again. But I couldn't get angry. Not when she had the dusky hair, the perfect lips, the saucy nose of the being, who, to me, was the ideal. So I did see her again, and several times again. In fact, I suppose I occupied most of her time between the few literary courses she was taking. And little by little I began to see that in other respects besides the physical she was not so far from my ideal. Beneath her impudence was honesty and frankness, and, despite herself, sweetness. So that even allowing for the head start I'd had, I fell in love pretty hastily. And what's more, I knew she was beginning to reciprocate. That was the situation when I called for her one noon and took her over to Van Manderpootz's laboratory. We were to lunch with him at the University Club, but we found him occupied in directing some experiment in the big laboratory beyond his personal one, untangling some sort of mess that his staff had blundered into. So Denise and I wandered back into the smaller room, perfectly content to be alone together. I simply couldn't feel hungry in her presence. Just talking to her was enough of a substitute for food. I'm going to be a good writer, she was seeing musingly. Someday, Dick, I'm going to be famous. Well, everyone knows how correct that prediction was, I agreed with her instantly. She smiled. You're nice, Dick. She said, very nice. Very? Very, she said emphatically. Then her green eyes strayed over to the table that held the idealizator. What cracked-brained contraption of Uncle Haskell's is that, she asked. I explained rather inaccurately. I'm afraid but no ordinary engineer can follow the ramifications of a Van Manderpootz conception. Nevertheless, Denise caught the gist of it, and her eyes glowed emerald fire. It's fascinating, she exclaimed. She rose and moved over to the table. I'm going to try it. Not without the professor you won't. It might be dangerous. But that was the wrong thing to say. The green eyes glowed brighter as she cast me a whimsical glance. But I am, she said. Dick, I'm going to see my ideal man, she laughed softly. I was panicky. Suppose her ideal turned out tall and dark and powerful instead of short and sandy hair and a bit, well, chubby as I am. No, I said immediately. I won't let you. She laughed again. I suppose she read my consternation, for she said softly, Don't be silly, Dick. She sat down, placed her face against the opening of the barrel, and commanded, Turn it on. I couldn't refuse her. I set the mirror whirling, then switched on the bank of tubes. Then immediately I stepped behind her, squinting into what was visible of the flashing mirror, where a face was forming slowly, vaguely. I thrilled. Surely the hair of the image was sandy. I even fancied now that I could trace a resemblance to my own features. Perhaps Denise sensed something similar, for she suddenly withdrew her eyes from the tube and looked up with a faintly embarrassed flush. A thing most unusual for her. Ideals are dull, she said. I want a real thrill. Do you know what I'm going to see? I'm going to visualize the ideal horror. That's what I'll do. I'm going to see absolute horror. Oh, no, you're not, I gasped. That's a terribly dangerous idea. Off in the other room I heard the voice of Van Manderpootz. Dixon! Dangerous! Bosh! Denise retorted. I'm a writer, Dick. All this means to me is material. It's just experience, and I want it. Van Manderpootz again. Dixon! Dixon! Come here! I said, Listen, Denise. I'll be right back. Don't try anything until I'm here, please. I dashed into the big laboratory. Van Manderpootz was facing a cowled group of assistants, quite apparently in extreme awe of the great man. Ha! Dixon, he rasped. Tell these fools what an emric valve is and why it won't operate in a free electron stream. Let them see that even an ordinary engineer knows that much. Well, an ordinary engineer doesn't, but it happened that I did. Not that I'm particularly exceptional as an engineer, but I did happen to know that because a year or two before I'd done some work on the big tidal turbines up in Maine, where they have to use emric valves to guard against electrical leakage from the tremendous potentials in their condensers. So I started explaining, and Van Manderpootz kept interpolating sarcasms about his staff, and when I finally finished I suppose I'd been there a half an hour, and then I remembered Denise. I left Van Manderpootz staring as I rushed back, and sure enough there was the girl with her face pressed against the barrel and her hands gripping the table edge. Her features were hidden, of course, but there was something about her strained position, her white knuckles. Denise, I yelled. Are you all right? Denise! She didn't move. I stuck my face in between the mirror and the end of the barrel and peered up the tube at her visage, and what I saw left me all but stunned. Have you ever seen stark, mad, infinite terror on a human face? That was what I saw in Denise's inexpressible, unbearable horror. Worse than the fear of death could ever be. Her green eyes were widened so that the whites showed around them. Her perfect lips were contorted, her whole face strained into a mask of sheer terror. I rushed for the switch, but in passing I caught a single glimpse of what showed in the mirror. Incredible, obscene, terror-laden, horrifying things. There just aren't words for them. There are no words. Denise didn't move as the tubes darkened. I raised her face from the barrel, and when she glimpsed me, she moved. She flung herself out of the chair in a way facing me with such mad terror that I halted. Denise, I cried. It's just dick. Look, Denise! But as I moved towards her, she uttered a choking scream. Her eyes dulled, her knees gave, and she fainted. Whatever she had seen must have been appalling to the utmost, for Denise was not the sort to faint. It was a week later that I sat facing Van Manderpootz in his little inner office. The gray metal figure of Isaac was missing, and the table that had held the idealizator was empty. Yes, said Van Manderpootz, I've dismantled it. One of Van Manderpootz's few mistakes was to leave it around where a pair of incompetence like you and Denise could get to it. It seems that I continually overestimate the intelligence of others. I suppose I tend to judge them by the brain of Van Manderpootz! I said nothing. I was thoroughly disheartened and depressed, and whatever the professor said about my lack of intelligence, I felt it justified. Hereafter, resumed Van Manderpootz, I shall credit nobody except myself with intelligence, and will doubtless be much more nearly correct. He waved a hand at Isaac's vacant corner, not even the bacon-head, he continued. I've abandoned that project because when you come right down to it, what need has the world of a mechanical brain when it already has that of Van Manderpootz? Professor, I burst out suddenly. Why won't they let me see Denise? I've been at the hospital every day, and they let me into her room just once, just once, and that time she went right into a fit of hysterics. Why? Is she—I gulped. She's recovering nicely, Dixon. Then why can't I see her? Well, said Van Manderpootz placidly, it's like this. You see, when you rushed into the laboratory there you made the mistake of pushing your face in front of the barrel. She saw your features right in the midst of all those horrors she had called up. Do you see? From then on your face was associated in her mind with the whole hell's brew in the mirror. She can't even look at you without seeing all of it again. Good God, I gasped! But she'll get over it, won't she? She'll forget that part of it. The young psychiatrist who attends her—a bright chat, by the way, with a number of my own ideas—believes she'll be quite over it in a couple of months, but personally, Dixon, I don't think she'll ever welcome the sight of your face, though I myself have seen uglier visages somewhere or other. I ignored that. Lord, I groaned. What a mess! I rose to depart, and then—then I knew what inspiration means. Listen, I said, spinning back. Listen, Professor, why can't you get her back here and let her visualize the ideally beautiful, and then I'll stick my face into that. Enthusiasm grew. I can't fail, I cried. At the worst it'll cancel that other memory. It's marvelous! But, as usual, said Van Manderpootz, a little late. Late? Why? You can put up your idealizator again. You'd do that much, wouldn't you? Van Manderpootz, he observed, is the very soul of generosity. I'd do it gladly, but it's still a little late, Dixon. You see, she married the bright young psychiatrist this noon. Well, I have a date with Tipsolva tonight, and I'm going to be late for it—just as late as I please, and then I'm going to do nothing but stare at her lips all evening. I am too modest, snapped the great Haskell Van Manderpootz pacing irritably about the limited area of his private laboratory glaring at me the while. That's the trouble. I undervalue my own achievements, and thereby permit petty imitators like Corviel to influence the committee and win the Morrell Prize. But, I said soothingly, you've won the Morrell Physics Award half a dozen times, Professor. They can't very well give it to you every year. Why not, since it's plain that I deserve it, bristled the Professor? Understand, Dixon, that I do not regret my modesty, even though it permits conceited fools like Corviel who have infinitely less reason than I for conceit to win awards that mean nothing save prizes for successful bragging. Bah! To grant an award for research along such obvious lines that I neglected to mention them, thinking that even a Morrell Judge would appreciate their obviousness. Research on the Psychon, eh? Who discovered the Psychon? Who but Van Manderpootz! Wasn't that what you got last year's award for, I asked consolingly? And, after all, isn't this modesty, this lack of jealousy on your part, a symbol of greatness of character? True, true, said the great Van Manderpootz, mollified, had such an affront been committed against a lesser man than myself he would doubtless have entered a bitter complaint against the judges, but not I. Anyway, I know from experience that it wouldn't do any good, and, besides, despite his greatness Van Manderpootz is as modest and shrinking as a violet. At this point he paused and his broad-red face tried to look violet-like. I suppressed a smile. I knew the eccentric genius of old from the days when I had been Dixon Wells' undergraduate student of engineering, and had taken a course in newer physics, that is, relativity, under the famous professor. For some unguessable reason he had taken a fancy to me, and as a result I had been involved in several of his experiments since graduation. There was the affair of the subjunctivizer, for instance, and also that of the idealizator. In the first of these episodes I had suffered the indignity of falling in love with a girl two weeks after she was apparently dead. And, in the second, the equal or greater indignity of falling in love with a girl who didn't exist, never had existed, and never would exist. In other words, with an ideal. Perhaps I'm a little susceptible to feminine charms, or rather perhaps I used to be, for since the disaster with the idealizator I have grimly relegated such follies to the past, much to the disgust of various vision entertainers, singers, dancers, and the like. So of late I had been spending my days very seriously, trying wholeheartedly, to get to the office on time just once, so that I could refer to it next time my father accused me of never getting anywhere on time. I hadn't succeeded yet, but fortunately the N.J. Wells Corporation was wealthy enough to survive even without the full-time services of Dixon Wells, or should I say even with them. Anyway, I'm sure my father preferred to have me late in the morning after an evening with Van Manderpootz than after one with Tip Salva or Whimsy White or one of the numerous others of the ladies of the vision screen. Even in the 21st century he retained a lot of old fashioned ideas. Van Manderpootz had ceased to remember that he was as modest and shrinking as a violet. It has just occurred to me he announced impressively that years have character, much as humans have. This year, 2015, will be remembered in history as a very stupid year, in which the Morrell Prize was given to a nincompoop. Last year on the other hand was a very intelligent year, a jewel in the crown of civilization. Not only was the Morrell Prize given to Van Manderpootz, but I announced my discreet field theory in that year, and the university unveiled Goghly's statue of me as well. Keyside. Yes, a very intelligent year. What do you think? It depends on how you look at it, I responded glumly. I didn't enjoy it so much what with Joanna Caldwell and Denise de Agriand and your infernal experiments. It's all in the point of view. The professor snorted. Infernal experiments, eh? Point of view. Of course it's all in the point of view. Even Einstein's simple little synthesis was enough to prove that. If the whole world could adopt an intelligent and admirable point of view, that of Van Manderpootz, for instance, all troubles would be over. If it were possible, he paused, and an expression of amazed wonder spread over his ruddy face. What's the matter, I asked? Matter? I am astonished. The astounding depths of genius on me. I am overwhelmed with admiration at the incalculable mysteries of a great mind. I don't get the drift. Dixon, he said impressively, you have been privileged to look upon an example of the workings of a genius. More than that, you have planted the seeds from which perhaps shall grow the towering tree of thought. Incredible as it seems, you, Dixon Wells, have given Van Manderpootz an idea. It is thus that genius seizes upon the small, the unimportant, the negligible, and turns it to its own grand purposes. I stand awestruck. But what—wait, said Van Manderpootz, still in rapt admiration of the majesty of his own mind, when the tree bears fruit you shall see it, until then be satisfied that you have played a part in its planting. It was perhaps a month before I saw Van Manderpootz again, but one bright spring evening his broad Rubicon face looked out of the phone screen at me. It's ready, he announced impressively. What is? The professor looked pained at the thought that I could have forgotten. The tree has borne fruit, he explained. If you wish to drop over to my quarters we'll proceed to the laboratory and try it out. I do not set a time so that it will be utterly impossible for you to be late. I ignored that last dig, but had a time been said I would doubtless have been even later than usual, for it was with some misgivings that I induced myself to go at all. I still remembered the unpleasantness of my last two experiences with the inventions of Van Manderpootz. However, at last we were seated in the small laboratory, while out in the larger one the professor's technical assistant Carter puttered over some device, and in the far corner his secretary, the plain and unattractive misfitch transcribed lecture notes, for Van Manderpootz abhorred the thought that his golden utterances might be lost to posterity. On the table between the professor and myself lay a curious device, something that looked like a cross between a pair of nose-glasses and a miner's lamp. There it is, said Van Manderpootz proudly. There lies my attitudinizer, which may well become an epoch-making device. How? What does it do? I will explain. The germ of the idea traces back to that remark of yours about everything depending on the point of view. A very obvious statement, of course, but genius seizes on the obvious and draws from it the obscure. Thus the thoughts of even the simplest mind can suggest to the man of genius his sublime conceptions, as is evident from the fact that I got this idea from you. What idea? Be patient. There is much you must understand first. You must realize just how true is the statement that everything depends on the point of view. Einstein proved that motion, space, and time depend on the particular point of view of the observer, or, as he expressed it, on the scale of reference used. I go farther than that, infinitely farther. I propound the theory that the observer is the point of view. I go even beyond that. I maintain that the world itself is merely the point of view. Huh? Look here, preceded Van Manderpootz. It is obvious that the world I see is entirely different from the one in which you live. It is equally obvious that a strictly religious man occupies a different world than that of a materialist. The fortunate man lives in a happy world. The unfortunate man sees a world of misery. One man is happy with little. Another is miserable with much. Each sees the world from his own point of view, which is the same as saying that each lives in his own world. Therefore there are as many worlds as there are points of view. But I objected that theory is to disregard reality. Out of all the different points of view there must be one that is right, and all the rest are wrong. One would think so, agreed the professor. One would think that between the point of view of view, for instance, as contrasted with that of, say, Van Manderpootz, there would be small doubt as to which was correct. However, early in the twentieth century Heisenberg enunciated his principle of uncertainty, which proved beyond argument that a completely accurate scientific picture of the world is quite impossible, that the law of cause and effect is merely a phase of the law of chance, that no infallible predictions can ever be made, and that what science used to call natural laws are really only descriptions of the way in which the human mind perceives nature. In other words, the character of the world depends entirely on the mind observing it, or, to return to my earlier statement, the point of view. But no one can ever really understand another person's point of view, I said. It isn't fair to undermine the whole basis of science because you can't be sure that the color we both call red wouldn't look green to you if you could see it through my eyes. Ah, said Van Manderpootz triumphantly. So now we come to my attitudinizer. Suppose that it were possible for me to see through your eyes, or you through mine. Do you see what a boon such an ability would be to humanity? Not only from the standpoint of science, but also because it would obviate all troubles due to misunderstandings, and even more, shaking his finger, the professor recited oracularly, Oh, what some power they give to us to see ourselves as either see us. Van Manderpootz is that power, Dickson. Through my attitudinizer, one may at last adopt the viewpoint of another. The poet's point of more than two centuries ago is answered at last. How the devil do you see through somebody else's eyes? Very simply. You will recall the idealizator. Now it is obvious that when I peered over your shoulder and perceived in the mirror your conception of the ideal woman, I was, to a certain extent, adopting your point of view. In that case, the psychons given off by your mind were converted into quanta of visible light, which could be seen. In the case of my attitudinizer, the process is exactly reversed. One flashes the beam of this light on the subject whose point of view is desired. The visible light is reflected back with a certain accompaniment of psychons, which are here intensified to a degree which will permit them to be, so to speak, appreciated. Psychons? Have you already forgotten my discovery of the unit particle of thought? Must I explain again how the Cosmon's cronon-spacion psychons and all other particles are interchangeable? And that, he continued abstractly, leads to certain interesting speculations. Suppose I were to convert, say, a ton of material protons and electrons into spacions, that is, convert matter into space. I calculate that a ton of matter will produce approximately a cubic mile of space. Now the question is, where would we put it, since all the space we have is already occupied by space? Or if I manufactured an hour or two of time, it is obvious that we have no time to fit in an extra couple of hours since all of our time is already accounted for. Doubtless, it will take a certain amount of thought for even van Menderpoets to solve these problems. But at the moment, I'm curious to watch the workings of the attitudinizer. Suppose you put it on, Dixon. I? Haven't you tried it out yet? Of course not. In the first place, what has van Menderpoets to gain by studying the viewpoints of other people? The object of the device is to permit people to study nobler viewpoints than their own. And in the second place, I have asked myself whether it is fair to the world for van Menderpoets to be the first to try out a new and possibly untrustworthy device, and I reply, no. But I should try it out, eh? Well, every time I try out any of your inventions, I find myself in some kind of trouble. I'd be a fool to go around looking for more difficulty, wouldn't I? I assure you that my viewpoint will be much less apt to get you into trouble than your own, said van Menderpoets with dignity. There will be no question of your becoming involved in some impossible love affair as long as you stick to that. Nevertheless, despite the assurance of the great scientist, I was more than a little reluctant to don the device. Yet I was curious as well. It seemed a fascinating prospect to be able to look at the world through other eyes, as fascinating as visiting a new world, which it was, according to the professor. So after a few moments of hesitation, I picked up the instrument, slipped it over my head so that the eyeglasses were in the proper position, and looked inquiringly at van Menderpoets. You must turn it on, he said, reaching over and clicking a switch on the frame. Now flash the light to my face. That's the way. Just center the circle of light on my face. And now, what do you see? I didn't answer. What I saw was, for the moment, quite indescribable. I was completely dazed and bewildered, and it was only when some involuntary movement of my head at last flashed the light from the professor's face to the tabletop that a measure of sanity returned, which provides at least that tables do not possess any point of view. Oh, I gasped. Van Menderpoets beamed. Of course you are overwhelmed. One could hardly expect to adopt the view of van Menderpoets without some difficulties of adjustment. A second time will be easier. I reached up and switched off the light. A second time will not only be easier, but also impossible, I said grossly. I'm not going to experience another dizzy spell like that for anybody. But of course you will, Dixon. I am certain that the dizziness will be negligible on the second trial. Naturally the unexpected heights affected you, much as if you were to come without warning to the brink of a colossal precipice. But this time you will be prepared, and the effect will be much less. Well, it was. After a few moments I was able to give my full attention to the phenomenon of the attitudinizer, and queer phenomenon they were, too. I scarcely know how to describe the sensation of looking at the world through the filter of another's mind. It is almost an indescribable experience, but so in the ultimate analysis is any other experience. What I saw first was a kaleidoscopic array of colors and shapes. But the amazing, astounding, inconceivable thing about the scene was that there was no single color I could recognize. The eyes of van Manderpootz, or perhaps his brain, interpreted color in a fashion utterly alien to the way in which my own functioned, and the resultant spectrum was so bizarre that there is simply no way of describing any single tint in words. To say, as I did to the professor, that his conception of red looked to me like a shade between purple and green conveys absolutely no meaning, and the only way a third person could appreciate the meaning would be to examine my point of view through an attitudinizer while I was examining that of van Manderpootz. Thus he could apprehend my conception of van Manderpootz's reaction to the color red. And shapes, it took me several minutes to identify the weird, angular, twisted, distorted appearance in the center of the room as the plain laboratory table. The room itself, aside from its queer form, looked smaller. Perhaps because van Manderpootz is somewhat larger than I. But by far the strangest part of his point of view had nothing to do with the outlook upon the physical world, but with the more fundamental elements, with his attitudes. Most of his thoughts on that first occasion were beyond me, because I had not yet learned to interpret the personal symbolism in which he thought, but I did understand his attitudes. There was Carter, for instance, toiling away out in the large laboratory. I saw at once what a plotting, unintelligent drudge he seemed to van Manderpootz. And there was Miss Fitch. I confess that she had always seemed unattractive to me. But my impression of her was Venus herself beside that of the Professor. She hardly seemed human to him, and I am sure that he never thought of her as a woman, but merely as a piece of convenient but unimportant laboratory equipment. At this point I caught a glimpse of myself through the eyes of van Manderpootz. Ouch! Perhaps I am not a genius, but I am dead certain that I am not the grinning ape I appeared to be in his eyes. And perhaps I am not exactly the handsomest man in the world either, but if I thought I looked like that. And then to cap the climax I apprehended van Manderpootz's conception of himself. That's enough, I yelled. I won't stay around here just to be insulted. I am through. I tore the attitudinizer from my head and tossed it to the table, feeling suddenly a little foolish at the sight of the grin on the face of the Professor. That is hardly the spirit which has led science to its greatest achievement, Dixon, he observed amably. Suppose you describe the nature of the insults, and if possible something about the workings of the attitudinizer as well. After all, that is what you were supposed to be observing. I flushed, grumbled a little, and complained. Van Manderpootz listened with great interest to my description of the difference in our physical worlds, especially the variations in our perceptions of form and color. What a field for an artist he ejaculated at last. Unfortunately it is a field that must remain forever untapped, because even though an artist examined a thousand viewpoints and learned innumerable new colors, his pigments would continue to impress his audience with the same old colors each of them had always known. He sighed thoughtfully and then proceeded. However, the device is apparently quite safe to use. I shall therefore try it briefly. Bringing to the investigation a calm scientific mind which refuses to be troubled by the trifles that seem to bother you. He donned the attitudinizer, and I must confess that he stood the shock of the first trial somewhat better than I did. After a surprised oof, he settled down to a complacent analysis of my point of view, while I sat somewhat self-consciously under his calm appraisal. Calm, that is, for about three minutes. Suddenly he leapt to his feet, tearing the device from a face whose normal ruddiness had deepened to a choleric, angry color. Get out, he roared. So that's the way van Manderpootz looks to you. Moron, idiot, imbecile. Get out! It was a week or ten days later that I happened to be passing the university on my way from somewhere to somewhere else, and I fell to wondering whether the professor had yet forgiven me. There was a light in the window of his laboratory over in the physics building, so I dropped in, making my way past the desk where Carter labored and the corner where Ms. Fitch sat in dull primness at her endless task of transcribing lecture notes. Van Manderpootz greeted me cordially enough, but with a curious assumption of melancholy in his manner. Ah, Dixon, he began. I am glad to see you. Since our last meeting I have learned much of the stupidity of the world, and it appears to me now that you are actually one of the more intelligent contemporary minds. This from Van Manderpootz? Why, thank you, I said. It is true. For some days I have sat at the window overlooking the street there and have observed the view points of the passersby. Would you believe, his voice lowered, would you believe that only seven and four-tenths percent are even aware of the existence of Van Manderpootz? And doubtless many of the few that are come from among the students in the neighborhood. I knew that the average level of intelligence was low, but it had not occurred to me that it was as low as that. After all, I said consolingly, you must remember that the achievements of Van Manderpootz are such as to attract the attention of the intelligent few rather than of the many. A very silly paradox, he snapped. On the basis of that theory, since the higher one goes in the scale of intelligence, the fewer individuals one finds. The greatest achievement of all is one that nobody has heard of. By that test you would be greater than Van Manderpootz, an obvious reductio ad absurdum. He glared his reproof that I should even have thought of the point. Then something in the outer laboratory caught his ever-observant eye. Carter, he roared. Is that a Sino-Basical Interphasometer in the positronic flow? Fool! What sort of measurements do you expect to make when your measuring instrument itself is part of the experiment? Take it out and start over. He rushed away towards the unfortunate technician. I settled idly back in my chair and stared about the small laboratory whose walls had seen so many marvels. The latest, the attitudinizer, lay carelessly on the table, dropped thereby the professor after his analysis of the mass viewpoint of the pedestrians in the street below. I picked up the device and fell to examining its construction. Of course this was utterly beyond me, for no ordinary engineer can hope to grasp the intricacies of a Van Manderpootz concept. So, after a puzzled but admiring survey of its infinitely delicate wires and grids and lenses, I made the obvious move. I put it on. My first thought was the street, but since the evening was well along the walk below the window was deserted. Back in my chair again I sat musing idly when a faint sound that was not the rumbling of the professor's voice attracted my attention. I identified it shortly as the buzzing of a heavy fly butting his head stupidly against the pane of glass that separated the small laboratory from the large room beyond. I wondered casually what the viewpoint of a fly was like and ended by flashing the light on the creature. For some moments I saw nothing other than I had been seeing right along from my own personal point of view, because as Van Manderpootz explained later, the psychons from the miserable brain of the fly are too few to produce any but the vaguest of impressions. But gradually I became aware of a picture, a queer and indescribable scene. Flies are color blind. That was my first impression for the world was a dull panorama of grays and whites and blacks. Flies are extremely nearsighted. When I had finally identified the scene as the interior of the familiar room I discovered that it seemed enormous to the insect whose vision did not extend more than six feet, though it did take in almost a complete sphere so that the creature could see practically in all directions at once. But perhaps the most astonishing thing, though I did not think of it until later, was that the compound eye of the insect did not convey to it the impression of a vast number of separate pictures, such as the eye produces when a micro photograph is taken through it. The fly sees one picture just as we do, in the same way as our brain writes the upside down image cast on our retina. The fly's brain reduces the compound image to one, and beyond these impressions were a wild hodgepodge of smell sensations and a strange desire to burst through the invisible glass barrier into the brighter light beyond. But I had no time to analyze these sensations, for suddenly there was a flash of something infinitely clearer than the dim celebrations of a fly. For half a minute or longer I was unable to guess what that momentary flash had been. I knew that I had seen something incredibly lovely, that I had tapped a viewpoint that looked upon something whose very presence caused ecstasy, but whose viewpoint it was, or what that flicker of beauty had been, were questions beyond my ability to answer. I slipped off the attitudinizer and sat staring perplexedly at the buzzing fly on the pane of glass. Out in the other room, Van Manderpoots continued his harangue to the repentant Carter, and off in a corner, invisible from my position, I could hear the rustle of papers as Miss Fitch transcribed endless notes. I puzzled vainly over the problem of what had happened, and then the solution dawned on me. The fly must have buzzed between me and one of the occupants of the outer laboratory. I had been following its flight with the faintly visible beam of the attitudinizer's light, and that beam must have flickered momentarily on the head of one of the three beyond the glass. But which? Van Manderpoots himself? It must have been either the professor or Carter since the secretary was quite beyond range of the light. It seemed improbable that the cold and brilliant mind of Van Manderpoots could be the agency of the sort of emotional ecstasy I had sensed. It must therefore have been the head of the mild and inoffensive little Carter that the beam had tapped. With a feeling of curiosity, I slipped the device back on my own head, and sent the beam sweeping dimly into the larger room. It did not at the time occur to me that such a procedure was quite as discreditable as eavesdropping, or even more dishonorable if you come right down to it, because it meant the theft of far more personal information than one could ever convey by the spoken word. But all I considered at the moment was my own curiosity. I wanted to learn what sort of viewpoint could produce that strange instantaneous flash of beauty. If the proceeding was unethical, well, heaven knows I was punished for it. So I turned the attitudinizer on Carter. At the moment he was listening respectfully to Van Manderpoots, and I sensed clearly his respect for the great man, a respect that had in it a distinct element of fear. I could hear Carter's impression of the booming voice of the Professor, sounding somewhat like the modulated thunder of a god, which was not far from the little man's actual opinion of his master. I perceived Carter's opinion of himself, and his self-picture was an even more mouse-like portrayal than my own impression of him. When for an instant he glanced my way, I sensed his impression of me, and while I'm sure that Dixon Wells is not the imbecile he appears to Van Manderpoots, I'm equally sure that he's not the debonair man of the world he's seen to Carter. All in all, Carter's point of view seemed that of a timid, inoffensive, retiring, servile little man, and I wondered all the more what could have caused that vanished flash of beauty in a mind like his. There was no trace of it now. His attention was completely taken up by the voice of Van Manderpoots, who had passed from a personal appraisal of Carter's stupidity to a general lecture on the fallacies of the unified field theory as presented by his rivals Corvio and Shrymsky. Carter was listening with an almost worshipful regard, and I could feel his surges of indignation against the villains who dared to disagree with the authority of Van Manderpoots. I sat there intent on the strange double vision of the attitudinizer, which was in some respects like a horse in psychomat. That is, one is able to see both through his own eyes and through the eyes of his subject. Thus I could see Van Manderpoots and Carter quite clearly, but at the same time I could see or sense what Carter saw and sensed. Thus I perceived suddenly through my own eyes that the professor had ceased talking to Carter, and had turned at the approach of somebody as yet invisible to me. While at the same time through Carter's eyes I saw that vision of ecstasy which had flashed for a moment in his mind. I saw description is utterly impossible, but I saw a woman who, except possibly for the woman of the idealizator's screen, was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. I say description is impossible. That is the literal truth for her coloring, her expression, her figure as seen through Carter's eyes were completely unlike anything expressible by words. I was fascinated. I could do nothing but watch, and I felt a wild surge of jealousy as I caught the adoration in the attitude of the humble Carter. She was glorious, magnificent, indescribable. It was with an effort that I untangled myself from the web of fascination enough to catch Carter's thought of her name. Lisa, he was thinking. Lisa. What she said to Van Manderpootz was in tones too low for me to hear, and apparently too low for Carter's ears as well, else I should have heard her words through the attitudinizer. But both of us heard Van Manderpootz's bellow in the answer. I don't care how the dictionary pronounces the word, he roared. The way Van Manderpootz pronounces a word is right. The glorious Lisa turned silently and vanished. For a few moments I watched her through Carter's eyes, but as she neared the laboratory door he turned his attention again to Van Manderpootz, and she was lost to my view. And as I saw the Professor close his dissertation and approached me, I slipped the attitudinizer from my head and forced myself to a measure of calm. Who is she I demanded? I've got to meet her. He looked blankly at me. Who's who? Lisa! Who's Lisa? There was not a flicker in the cool blue eyes of Van Manderpootz. I don't know any Lisa, he said indifferently, but you were just talking to her right out there. Van Manderpootz stared curiously at me, then little by little a shrewd suspicion seemed to dawn in his broad intelligent features. Ha! he said. Have you by any chance been using the attitudinizer? I nodded, chill apprehension gripping me. And is it also true that you chose to investigate the viewpoint of Carter out there? At my nod he stepped to the door that joined the two rooms and closed it. When he faced me again it was with features working into lines of amusement that suddenly found utterance and booming laughter. Ha! he roared. Do you know who beautiful Lisa is? She is Fitch. Fitch! You're mad. She's glorious and Fitch is plain and scrawny and ugly. Do you think I'm a fool? You ask an embarrassing question, chuckled the professor. Listen to me, Dixon. The woman you saw was my secretary, Miss Fitch, seen through the eyes of Carter. Don't you understand? The idiot Carter's in love with her. I suppose I walked the upper levels half the night, oblivious alike of the narrow strip of stars that showed between the towering walls of twenty-first century New York and the intermittent roar of traffic from the freight levels. Certainly this was the worst predicament of those into which the fiendish contraptions of the great van Manderpootz had thrust me. In love with a point of view, in love with a woman who had no existence apart from the be glamored eyes of Carter, it wasn't Lisa Fitch I loved. Indeed, I rather hated her angular ugliness. What I had fallen in love with was the way she looked to Carter, for there is nothing in the world quite as beautiful as a lover's conception of his sweetheart. This predicament was far worse than my former ones. When I had fallen in love with a girl already dead, I could console myself with the thought of what might have been. When I had fallen in love with my own ideal, well, at least she was mine, even if I couldn't have her. But to fall in love with another man's conception, the only way that conception could even continue to exist was for Carter to remain in love with Lisa Fitch, which rather effectually left me outside the picture altogether. She was absolutely unattainable to me. For heaven knows I didn't want the real Lisa Fitch, real meaning, of course, the one who was real to me. I suppose in the end Carter's Lisa Fitch was as real as the skinny scarecrow my eyes saw. She was unattainable. Or was she? Suddenly an echo of a long-forgotten psychology course recurred to me. Attitudes are habits. Viewpoints are attitudes. Therefore viewpoints are habits. And habits can be learned. There was the solution. All I had to do was to learn or to acquire by practice the viewpoint of Carter. What I had to do was literally to put myself in his place to look at things in his way to see his viewpoint. For once I learned to do that, I could see in Lisa Fitch the very things he saw, and the vision would become reality to me, as well as to him. I planned carefully. I did not care to face the sarcasm of the great Van Manderpootz. Therefore I would work in secret. I would visit his laboratory at such times as he had classes or lectures, and I would use the attitudinizer to study the viewpoint of Carter, and to, as it were, practice this viewpoint. Thus I would have the means at hands of testing my progress. For all I had to do was glance at Miss Fitch without the attitudinizer. As soon as I began to perceive her in what Carter saw, I would know that success was imminent. Those next two weeks were a strange interval of time. I haunted the laboratory of Van Manderpootz at odd hours, having learned from the university office what periods he devoted to his courses. When one day I found the attitudinizer missing, I prevailed on Carter to show me where it was kept, and he influenced doubtless by my friendship for the man he practically worshipped indicated the place without question. But later I suspect that he began to doubt his wisdom in this, for I know he thought it very strange for me to sit for long periods staring at him. I caught all sorts of puzzled questions in his mind, though, as I have said, these were hard for me to decipher until I began to learn Carter's personal system of symbolism by which he thought. But at least one man was pleased. My father, who took my absences from the office and neglect of business as signs of good health and spirits, and congratulated me warmly on the improvement. But the experiment was beginning to work. I found myself sympathizing with Carter's viewpoint, and little by little the mad world in which he lived was becoming as logical as my own. I learned to recognize colors through his eyes. I learned to understand form and shape. Most fundamental of all, I learned his values, his attitudes, his tastes, and these last were a little inconvenient at times, for on the several occasions when I supplemented my daily calls with visits to van Mantrepoots in the evening, I found some difficulty in separating my own respectful regard for the great man from Carter's unreasoning worship, with the result that I was on the verge of blurting out the whole thing to him several times. And perhaps it was a guilty conscience, but I kept thinking that the shrewd blue eyes of the professor rested on me with a curiously suspicious expression all evening. The thing was approaching its culmination. Now and then when I looked at the angular ugliness of Miss Fitch, I began to catch glimpses of the same miraculous beauty that Carter found in her. Glimpses only, but harbingers of success. Each day I arrived at the laboratory with increasing eagerness, for each day brought me nearer to the achievement I sought. That is, my eagerness increased until one day I arrived to find neither Carter nor Miss Fitch present, but van Mantrepoots, who should have been delivering a lecture on indeterminism, very much in evidence. Uh, hello, I said weekly. Oomph! he responded, glaring at me. So Carter was right. I see. Dixon, the abysmal stupidity of the human race continually astounds me with new evidence of its astronomical depth, but I believe this escapade of yours plums the utter most regions of imbecility. My, uh, escapade? Do you think you can escape the piercing eye of van Mantrepoots? As soon as Carter told me you had been here in my absence, my mind leaped nimbly to the truth. But Carter's information was not even necessary, for half an eye was enough to detect the change in your attitude on these last few evening visits. So you've been trying to adopt Carter's viewpoint, eh? No doubt with the idea of ultimately depriving him of the charming Miss Fitch. Wuh, why, listen to me, Dixon. We will disregard the ethics of the thing and look at it from a purely rational viewpoint. If a rational viewpoint is possible to anybody but van Mantrepoots, don't you realize that in order to attain Carter's attitude towards Fitch, you would have to adopt his entire viewpoint? Not he, added tersely, that I think his point of view is greatly inferior to yours, but I happen to prefer the viewpoint of a donkey to that of a mouse. Your particular brand of stupidity is more agreeable to me than Carter's timid, weak, and subservient nature, and some day you will thank me for this. Was his impression of Fitch worth the sacrifice of your own personality? I—I don't know. Well, whether or not it was, van Mantrepoots has decided the matter in the wisest way, for it's too late now, Dixon. I have given them both a month's leave, and sent them away. On a honeymoon, they left this morning.