The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales by H. F. Heard

Author:H. F. Heard [Heard, H. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Collections, General
ISBN: 9781434473707
Google: hl8G-pQiFlAC
Amazon: 1434473708
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2007-08-31T22:00:00+00:00

THE SWAP

“Let’s try!”

“What nonsense!”

“Well, if it’s nonsense, no harm’s done by trying. Besides, it takes only a few minutes anyhow.”

“It’s too silly—all this Indian pretense.”

“But it isn’t Yoga; it’s Sufi. And it’s quite plain and experimental. If it doesn’t work, we’ll know it in five or ten minutes; that isn’t much time to lose.”

“And if it does?”

“Oh, you own it might!”

“I don’t own anything—I mean, I don’t allow anything. It’s you who want to make this absurd experiment. All I ask is: If such a grotesque thing should actually happen, does your mumbo-jumbo tell you how to un-mumbo-jumbo again?”

“Yes, all you have to do is to repeat the process from the other end, or side, and there you are, back again.”

Jones, who was urging the experiment, was a large, enthusiastic man. He had asked Mather, a smaller, more accurate colleague, to come around. He was always asking Mather around. Mather usually came, usually punctured the blister of speculation which had risen in Jones’s easily inflamed mind. They generally parted with the mutual feeling of having wasted time and the mutual, if not spoken, resolve not to meet again. But they did. Perhaps, in some odd way, they needed each other. More and more those we have thought to be enemies have, at least in natural history, proved to be widely reciprocating partners; those we took to be obvious parasites and victim-hosts, closer inspection has shown to be symbiots—partners who interchange essential services.

Mather was a fairly conservative psychologist. Jones held a newly invented chair of Historical Anthropology. The crank businessman who had founded their small college had insisted that, among the standard conventional faculties, there should be this odd study. That he had chosen also to endow this professorship with one thousand dollars a year more than the endowment of any of the other chairs didn’t make the position of Jones, his appointee, any easier.

But Jones was not the kind of man to care. His ebullient indifference to his conservative colleagues’ envy-tinged disapproval he called “the anthropological outlook.”

“We’re all savages,” he used to announce airily at the high table, “all, mentally, guinea pigs to be tested and studied, unless we’re anthropologists.” Then he would add what he called the anthropological approach: “And, of course, the anthropologist himself is only a rarer form of savage than another anthropologist, and so on ad infinitum.”

“Then you have no datum of objectivity,” Wilkins, the philosopher, would challenge.

“Well, there can’t be—unless you could really get inside someone else.”

“That wouldn’t be enough,” cut in Mather. “It would, to be precise, be going only halfway. To complete the process and bring it to an adequate conclusion, from the premise you have postulated, you would have not only to get inside someone else; simultaneously he would have to get inside you. Then each would have to return and compare notes.”

“Yes,” said Jones agreeably, “yes, that, at last, would be real experimental anthropology.”

His mind floated off in speculation. The rest of the high-table discussion fell to its normal level: the food presented, the football prospects, and the local gossip.

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