the invariantive approach to physics.”
The girl shook her head. “The nervous system is too complicated for writing theoretical equations about it. Empirical equations are the best we can do.”
“They aren’t good enough, Sarah. You can predict results with them, inside the limits of their accuracy. But you can’t extrapolate them very well, and they won’t stack up together into a single integrated structure. And when you’re investigating a new field, they no longer apply. We need a broad mathematical theory, covering all hypothetically possible neural arrangements. It would let us predict not only results, but also predict patterns of possible order.”
“Seems to me the possible patterns are infinite.”
“No, Sarah. They’re limited by the nature of the building blocks—neurons, synaptic connections, and, so forth. With limited materials, you have structural limitations. You don’t build skyscrapers out of modeling clay. And there is only a finite number of ways you can build atoms out of electrons, protons and neutrons. Similarly, brains are confined to the limitations of the things they’re made of. We need a broad theory for defining the limits.”
“Why?”
“Because…” He paused. Lisa felt his urge to explain his urgency, felt him suppress it, felt for a moment his loneliness in the awareness of his uniqueness and the way it isolated him from humanity.
“You must be doing new work,” the girl offered, “if you feel the lack of such a theoretical approach. I just can’t imagine an invariantive approach to psychology—or an all defining set of laws for it, either. Why do you need such a psychological ‘Relativity’?”
He hesitated, frowning down at his plate, watching a fly crawl around its rim. “I’m interested in—in the quantitative aspects of nerve impulses. I—I suspect that there is such a thing as neural resonance.”
She laughed politely and shook her head. “I’ll stick to my empirical data-gathering, thank you.”
I had felt him thinking:
Lisa gasped and sat bolt upright. Her shock revealed her presence to him, and he dropped his fork with a clatter.
She wrenched herself free of him abruptly. She angrily stalked about the house, slamming doors and muttering her rage. The nerve! The maddening, presumptuous, ill-mannered, self-centered, overly educated boor!
Arrange for some children indeed! An impossible situation!
As her anger gathered momentum, she contacted him again—like a snake striking. Thought was thunder out of a dark cloud.
He was outdoors, striding across the campus alone. She saw the gray buildings, immersed in twilight, felt the wind on his face, hated him. He was thinking nothing, letting himself follow her angry flow of thought. When she finished, his thoughts began like the passionate pleading of a poem.
He was imagining a human race with telepathic abilities, in near-perfect communication with one another. So many of the world’s troubles could be traced to imperfect communication of ideas, to misunderstandings.
Then he thought briefly of Sarah—the nondescript laboratory girl he had taken to dinner—and Lisa realized he was in love with Sarah. There were sadness and resentment here. He couldn’t have Sarah now, not if he were to be certain of perpetuating the mutant characteristic. The Waverly woman ought to be good for three or four children yet, before she reached middle age.
Lisa stood transfixed by shock. Then he was thinking directly to her.
“
He had left the campus and was walking up the street—toward her neighborhood. He was walking with the briskness of purpose. He was coming to her house.
But this time he followed, clung to her thoughts, would not let her go. It was like two flashlight beams playing over a wall, one trying to escape, the other following its frantic circle of brightness.
She staggered, groped her way toward the hall, which was confused with a superimposed image of a sidewalk and a street. A phantom automobile came out of the hall wall, drove through her and vanished. Double exposures. He stared at a street light and it blinded her. At last she found the phone, but he was laughing at her.
He was deliberately filling her mind with confusion. She fumbled at the directory, trying to find the police, but he thought a confused jumble of numbers and symbols, and they scampered across the page, blurring the lines.
She whimpered and groped at the phone-dial, trying to get the operator, but he was doing something with his fingertips, and she couldn’t get the feel of the dial.
On her third try, it finally worked.
“Information,” said a pleasant impersonal voice.
She had to get the police! She had to say
He was jamming her speech centers with gibberish, and she blurted nonsense syllables into the mouthpiece.
“You’ll have to speak more distinctly, madam. I can’t understand you.”
“Poress, Policer…”
“The police? Just a moment.”
A series of jumbled sounds and visions clouded her mind. Then a masculine voice rumbled, “Desk, Sergeant Harris.”
She found a clear path through the confusion and gasped, “Three-oh-oh-three Willow Drive—’mergency come quick—man going to—”
“Three-oh-oh-three Willow. Check. We’ll have a car right over there.”
She hung up quickly—or tried to—but she couldn’t find the cradle. Then her vision cleared, and she screamed. She wasn’t in the hall at all!
The telephone was an eggbeater!
His voice came through her trapped panic.
He was still ten blocks away. She had a few minutes in which to escape. She bolted for the door. A black shadow-shape loomed up in the twilight, flung its arms wide, and emitted an apelike roar.
