people to go out and help others to be freed beings. His problem was writing it up and teaching it. He felt folks had to
I stared at him. He got to his feet then, took a ruled pad from a big old-fashioned desk, and drew a quick diagram, then brought it over and, kneeling, showed it to Tuuli and me, pointing with his pencil and explaining.
To me it was just marks on paper, and I got to feeling weirder and weirder. It was a little like when I was thirteen and climbed this big willow tree on a cutbank on the Hemlock River, at the edge of town. Bobby Latvala had spiked pieces of one-by-four on the trunk for a ladder, and you could jump off branches into the water. The highest branch you could get out on to jump was fifty-three feet above the river, measured by Jimmy Dobrik's mother's clothesline. The first time I went out on it to jump, it felt like my knees were made of water—as if I was going to faint and fall off. Physically that's a little like I felt when Vic was explaining his diagram—like I was going to faint and fall a long way. Nothing was coming through mentally at all.
'Vic,' Tory said, 'I think that's a little steep for Martti.' That did come through, and I was aware of her eyes on me. 'Martti,' she told me, 'get up and walk around the room. Look at things. Touch them.' I did, and felt better right away. Then we all refilled our coffee cups and I got a couple more chocolate-chip cookies, and they asked Tuuli about what it was like growing up in Lapland.
After a little, I brought the conversation back to Ray Christman, more or less. 'So all this information and theory you developed—what good does it do? If Christman got it wrong and you're not doing anything with it yourself?'
'It doesn't have to do good. The bottom line is, we had fun doing it, Tory and the boys and me. Especially me. And Ray had fun with it in his own way. Beyond that, he gave half a million people enough of it that it's making a useful difference in their lives and their environments. And it's percolating into the overall body of the New Age movement, with all its interests and information, its mythologies and misinformation from a lot of different directions.
'Folks need a new paradigm, you see. One they can relate life to. Even before Arne Haugen introduced his geogravitic power converter, things were changing so fast in people's lives that a lot of them were having trouble coping. Then along came the GPC, and the incomplete theory that Haugen based it on, and all of a sudden, science had the breakthrough it needed to start simplifying a lot of things, and integrating them into new and more powerful conceptual models. And engineers had a whole new information set to play with. Play and build with. And boy have they ever!'
He paused to dunk and eat another cookie. I matched him; I'd forgotten all about calories.
'So things got to changing faster than ever,' he went on, 'and people are having more and more trouble with the changes. They feel like the world's getting away from them.'
I nodded. 'That's why the government passes laws to slow things down, some things.'
I thought of the agricultural preservation acts that restrict the use of food factories in the United States and a lot of other countries. The geogravitic power converter changed agriculture as drastically as it did transportation. Desalinized seawater was nearly as cheap as river water now, and pumping it long distances over mountains is economical too. Though to call the machinery 'pumps' is stretching the term; they just create localized energy fields where uphill is downhill. And there was storm control that grew out of the same theories, and the advances in molecular engineering. Along with genetic engineering, they'd changed farming so drastically my dad wouldn't have recognized it, and he'd been dead less than twenty years.
But it was still farming. People still lived on the land and worked the soil, even if a lot of it was under clear- tents that covered acres of ground. The unrestricted development of food factories would wipe out most of it, something a whole lot of people weren't ready to face yet.
That's the kind of thing I meant when I mentioned government restrictions.
'Right,' Vic said, 'the government does hold back some changes. But even so, they're coming faster than ever, and a whole lot of people feel anxious. Some get to be activists for some cause, trying to increase their control of things. Some take drugs, trying to relieve their anxieties. Others look for deeper meaning in consciousness clubs, dream networks, or just life itself. Or join churches or cults. A religious cult, if it's not a con, is just a church outside of what folks are used to.'
He stopped to eat another cookie, chewing and sipping thoughtfully. 'More of them might join cults, except they've learned not to trust 'em. So there's getting to be a lot of New Age eclectics, borrowing from this belief and that philosophy and these other sets of practices—puttin' them together in a system that makes sense to them. People leave groups like Leif's and Ray's, and take with them what they learned there, and gradually it spreads.
'Leif borrowed a lot from psychiatry and psychology—culled it, tested it, and unified it. And added his own ideas. Some of them, especially dealing with application, have worked their way into psychology and psychiatry in a sort of reverse flow. You can find quite a few psychiatrists now, and clinical psychologists, who'll treat you with what amounts to Noetics One, which are the levels that bite best. Especially when they're not loaded up with Leif Haller's cosmology and megalomania. Even his cosmology can be beneficial; it can break older false realities, and give you food for thought.'
I interrupted. 'You're talking about Noeties. What about Gnostic procedures?'
'They've barely begun to influence psychology and psychiatry. They're less familiar seeming.'
Tuuli broke in then, and what she said startled hell out of me. Shook me! 'I want to— I want to realize my potential as a psychic,' she said. 'I know there's more. I can feel it. Will you be my guru? You or Tory?'
She hadn't asked me about it or even warned me. As if she was independent, unmarried. Vic wasn't grinning now. 'We're not in the guru business, Tuuli,' he answered softly. 'If we were, we'd sure like to have you, but we're not. Tell you what though. Before you folks head back to L.A., we've got something to give you. Each of you.'
He turned his attention back to me then, and after a few thoughtful seconds picked up more or less where he'd left off. 'The big breakthrough in philosophy won't come from people like Tory and me. Not directly. It'll come from the scientific establishment.'
I stared at him.
'Physics and math. It started long before Arne Haugen, but he shifted it up a few gears. And it's changing a lot more than the way we travel, and power our factories, and raise our crops. Physics has been turned on its head, and it's growing a new cosmology. Now we've got theoretical constructs like the omega matrix and the Meissner- Ikeda Lattice. Interest in hypernumbers theory is getting to be respectable; it's spread beyond the Institute. And Ali Hasad's
