Subspace Explorers by Smith E. E. Doc

Author:Smith, E. E. Doc [Smith, E. E. Doc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575122710
Google: 00qA8ZC7ciYC
Publisher: Canaveral Press
Published: 1965-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve - Higher Education

Andrew Adams had what was probably the finest mind of any strictly human being of his age. He had a voracious and insatiable appetite for knowledge; his brain was an unfilled and unfillable reservoir. He was without prejudice, inhibition, or bias. He could, and frequently did, toss a laboriously-developed theory or hypothesis of his own down the drain in favor of someone else’s anyone else’s—that gave even slightly better predictions than did his own.

Being what he was, it was inevitable that when the Destons gave Adams his first real insight into telepathy and, through it, into the unimaginably vast and theretofore almost hermetically sealed universe of psionics, he dropped his old researches in favor of the new. He and his wife studied, more and ever more intensively, the possibilities and potentialities of the mind as the mind. Scholar-like, however, they needed to analyze and digest all the information available having any hearing upon the subject. Therefore, since there was no esoterica of that type in the Procyon’s library, they went back to Earth.

The Adams apartment was a fairly large one; five rooms on the sixteenth floor of Grantland Hall in Ann Arbor, overlooking the somewhat crowded but beautifully landscaped campus of the University of Michigan. Their living room was large—seventeen by twenty five feet—but it was the Adams, not the ordinary, concept of a living room. Almost everything in it was designed for books and tapes; everything in it was designed for study.

First, they went through their own library’s stores of philosophy, of metaphysics, of paraphysics, of occultism, of spiritualism, of voodooism, of scores of kinds of cultism and even more kinds of crackpotism, from Forteanism up—or down. They studied thousands of words to glean single phrases of truth. Or, more frequently, bits of something that could be developed into truth or into something having to do with truth. Then they exhausted the resources of the University’s immense library; after which they requested twenty two exceedingly rare tomes from the Crerar Library of Chicago. This was unusual, since scholars usually came to the Crerar instead of vice-versa, but Adams was Andrew Adams of the College; one of the very biggest of the Big Brains. Wherefore:

It can be arranged, Dr. Adams,” Crerar’s head librarian told him, as one bibliophile to another. “These are replicas, of course—most of the originals are in Rome—and not one of them has been consulted for over five years. I’m glad to have you study these volumes, if for no other reason than to show that they are not really dead wood.”

Thus it came finally about that Andrew and Stella Adams sat opposite each other, holding hands tightly across a small table, staring into each other’s eyes and thinking at and with each other in terms and symbols many of which cannot be put into words.

“But it has to be some development or other of Campbell’s Fourth Nume,” she insisted. “It simply can’t be anything else.”

“True,” he agreed. “However, Campbell had only a glimmering of a few of the—facets? Basics?—of that nume.

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