Noise Level

V

Berk had no idea what time Mart went to bed that night. In the morning he found him in the same position working furiously, and had the impression Mart had not retired at all. He observed he'd changed clothes, at least.

'The fish are calling,' said Berk.

Mart glanced up. 'Give me another half hour. Look, the fish can wait. I've got to get back to the office as soon as possible. There's something here I want to keep on with.'

Berk grinned agreeably. 'Go to it, boy. I'll get the car packed. You say when.'

In town he went directly to his own office without seeing anyone. There, he continued the work begun the night before. As he proceeded, some of his initial enthusiasm waned. It would be two or three days before he would be ready to invite inspection. One of his manipulations several pages back turned out to be in error. He retraced slowly through the maze.

A little after three there came a knock. He looked up in irritation as Dykstra walked in.

'Dr Nagle! I'm glad you're in. I tried and couldn't find you yesterday.'

'I took a day off for fishing. Can I help you?'

Dykstra slid into the chair on the other side of the desk with an almost furtive motion. Mart frowned.

'I have something of extreme importance to discuss regarding the project,' said Dykstra. He leaned forward confidentially, his eyes squinting a little behind the owlish glasses.

'Do you realize,' he said, 'that this entire project is a fraud?'

'Fraud! What are you talking about?'

'I have been over the Dunning house, so called, with a fine-toothed comb. I proved to you in our last seminar that the postulate of equivalence denied the possibility of any such device as this Dunning is supposed to have invented. Now, I can assure you that Dunning never existed! We are the victims of a base fraud.'

He clapped the palms of his hands upon the top of the desk in triumphal finality and leaned back.

'I don't understand,' murmured Mart.

'You shall. Go over that laboratory. There is no consistency. Examine the shelves of reagents. Ask what possible chemical endeavour could be carried out with such a random selection of materials. The electronics section is as hodgepodge as the corner television shop. The computers have never been used in the room they are in. And that library — it is obvious what an intellectual packrat's nest that is!

'No, Dr Nagle, for some inconceivable reason we are the victims of a base fraud. Anti-gravity! Do you suppose that anyone here actually thought they could make us believe it?

'Now, what I want to know is why we have been sent on this fool's errand when the nation needs the talents of each one of us so badly?'

Mart felt a faint sickness in the pit of his stomach. 'I'll admit there are strange things about this presentation. If what you say should be true, how can the eyewitness accounts be explained?'

'Perjury!' snapped Dykstra.

'I can hardly imagine a member of the JCS involved in such. I am sorry, but I do not share your opinion. As a matter of fact, I have done a good deal of work towards our goal.

'As of this moment, I am prepared to say definitely that the postulate of equivalence is not going to hold.'

Red-faced, Dykstra stood up. 'I'm extremely sorry you hold such views, Dr Nagle. I had always believed you a young man of great promise. Perhaps you shall yet be when proper light is thrown upon this abominable fraud perpetrated upon us. Good day!'

Mart didn't bother to rise as Dykstra stomped out of the door. The visit bothered him. Absurd as the accusations were, they threatened the foundation upon which he worked. If he could not be sure that Dunning's device had performed as described he was subject to the buffeting of all his prior assurance that anti-gravity was nonsense.

But the JCS involved in a reasonless and silly fraud as Dykstra proposed-!

He turned back to his sheets of computations with almost frantic energy. When it was almost time that most of them would be leaving he reached for the phone and called Jennings. The man was an able mathematician and could work this through if anyone could. It was not as far along as Mart would have liked it, but he had to know if he were at the entrance to a blind alley.

'Can you come over for a moment?' he said. 'I've got something I'd like to show you.'

In a few moments Jennings appeared. As he came in the door he gave Mart the momentary impression of an old-time country preacher ruffled with righteous indignation at the sins of his congregation.

He blurted out before Mart had a chance to speak. 'Did you see Dykstra this afternoon running around with some cock and bull story about the project being a fraud?'

Mart nodded.

'Why Keyes ever let an old fool like him in here — Dyk has been a fine man. But he's shot his wad. I called Keyes at once.'

'I guess all of us have had natural suspicions like Dykstra's,' said Mart, 'but not enough to go completely overboard as he has.'

'I've talked to several of the others. They are upset, some of them. I tried to lift them out of it. But what is it you've got? Anything that looks like an answer?'

Mart slid the sheets across the desk. 'The postulate of equivalence is out. I'm pretty sure of that. I've been computing the possible field of motion circulating through curved space. It turns out to be an eight-dimensional thing, but it makes sense. I'd like you to look it over.'

Jennings' eyebrows raised. 'Very good. Of course, it's not easy for me to accept the renunciation of the postulate of equivalence, you understand. That has been around for forty-five years now.'

'We may find something to fit in its place.'

'You have no other copy of this?'

Mart shrugged. 'I can do it again.'

'I'll take good care of them.' Jennings put the papers in an inside pocket. 'But suppose you do demonstrate the possibility of such a flow? Where do we go from there? Have you any idea?'

'Some,' said Mart. 'I watched a whirlpool yesterday. Ever watch what happens to sticks when they are thrown into one? They go towards each other. That's gravity.'

Jennings frowned. 'Now wait a minute, Mart-'

Mart laughed. 'Don't get me wrong. Consider this flow. I don't know what properties it might have. It would have to take place through four of the dimensions involved. But when we get through, we'll develop the expression for the curl of such a flow through material substance.

'Suppose such a curl exists. Whirlpools appear. It's crude analogy. Your mind can't get hold of it. We need the math. But perhaps we can show that the curl is in such a direction as to cause a reduction of spatial displacement between masses causing the curl. Could that make sense?'

Jennings had been sitting very still. Now he smiled and spread his hands on the desk top. 'It could. The curl of an eight-dimensional flow would be fairly complex. But if it develops all right, what then?'

'Then we build a device to streamline matter through this flow, so that curl will not develop.'

Jennings sat back in his chair as if suddenly limp. 'Holy smoke, you've got it all figured out! But wait a minute, that would simply nullify gravity. How about anti-gravity?'

Mart shrugged. 'We find a way to introduce a reverse curl vector.'

'That does it, boy, that does it.'

Mart laughed and walked to the door with him. 'Yeah, I know how the thing sounds, but, look — I'm really not kidding. If this gravitational flow expression works out, the rest of it could follow. It could, Jennings.'

Jennings faced him with all amusement gone out of his face. 'I'm not laughing, Mart,' he said, 'not at you, anyway. If we get the answer to this whole thing it's going to be something like that. It's just that everything we've postulated up to now has so completely blocked any thinking of this kind that a man has to be prepared to consider himself slightly rocky to even talk about it.'

It was a day later when Berk called him. 'Hey, Mart, why didn't you let us know right away about Dykstra? If Jennings hadn't called, we might have got to him too late.'

'What do you mean?'

'This story he's been giving about the project's being a fraud. I hope you weren't bothered by it.'

'Not much. Are you going to kick him off the project?'

'That follows, naturally. He's in a rest home now. His mind was so congealed that be couldn't accept the reality of Dunning's work. He flipped his lid in a mild sort of way. He'll be all right in a few weeks and can go back to teaching.'

'I'm sorry about it. We almost have the answer he was afraid to face, I believe.'

Impatiently, Mart threw his thesis open to the whole seminar that day. It was a bit hard to take for some who had been inclined somewhat in Dykstra's direction, but the maths was clean enough to appeal to all of them. They pitched in almost as a solid unit to try to obtain a formulation convertible to metal and electrons and fields.

Jennings was the one who carried it all the way. He rushed into Mart's office three days later without knocking and slapped some sheets on the desk.

'You were right, Mart,' he exclaimed. 'Your field does show curl in the presence of material substance. We're on our way to Dunning's flying belt!'

But when it came, Mart was dismayed. The entire group worked in a thirty-six hour seminar to whip the work into final shape. The result was that an anti-gravity machine could be built. But it would be the size of a hundred-ton cyclotron!

Mart told Keyes what they had. 'It's a far cry from Dunning's flying belt,' he said. 'We'll continue trying to boil it down if you want us to, or we can submit a practical design that will work now in the shape we've got it in.'

Keyes glanced at the sketches Mart had prepared. 'It isn't exactly what we'd expected, but I think we'd better build it. The important thing right now is to get a practical anti-gravity machine functioning. Refinements can come later. The shops are yours. How long will it take?'

'It depends on what you wish to put into it in the way of men and machines. With a round-the-clock crew I believe the model could be ready in about three weeks.'

'It's yours,' said Keyes. 'Build it.'

It was actually over four weeks before the first demonstration was scheduled in the big machine shop protected by the triple security seal that had shrouded the whole project.

Those in attendance were the ones present at the first conference plus a few of the workmen who had helped build the massive device.

The demonstration was simple, almost anti-climactic after the hectic seminars they had sweated out the past weeks. Mart stepped to the switchboard that seemed diminutive under the high, steel-arched ceiling of the shop. He threw the main power switches and then adjusted slowly a number of dials.

Almost imperceptibly, and without wavering, the enormous disc-like mass rose in the centre of the shop. It hovered without visible support three feet above the floor.

The disc was thirty feet in diameter and three feet thick. Its tonnage was evident in the long crack in the concrete floor beneath the I-beams laid temporarily to support it.

Dr Keyes reached out a hand to touch the mass. He pushed with all his might. Mart smiled and shook his head. 'It'll move if you push long enough and hard enough. But it has almost the inertia of a small battleship. A far cry, as I said, from Dunning's flying belt. But we'll keep trying.'

'It's a monumental achievement,' said Keyes, 'and I congratulate you all.'

While they watched. Mart touched the controls again and slowly lowered the mass to the I-beam supports. He cut the power.

'I would like all of you to return to the conference room at this time,' Keyes said. 'There, we have some additional data to give you.'

Mart fell in step beside Berk on the way out. 'What's up now?' he said. 'Are they going to pin tin medals on us?'

'Better than that,' said Berk. 'You'll see.'

Once more they found themselves seated almost as they had been that eventful day weeks ago. Keyes took his usual position at the head.

'There is no need of telling any of you gentlemen what this achievement means to our country and for all mankind. Anti-gravity will revolutionize the military and peacetime transport of the world — and in time will take man to the stars.

'Now — I have someone I would like to introduce to you.'

He stepped aside and beckoned through the doorway to the next room behind him. Someone came through in response. Then Keyes stood aside.

A startled gasp went through the audience. Before them stood Leon Dunning.

He smiled at the group a little wryly. 'I see you know me, gentlemen. I hope none of you will bear me any hard feelings or consider me the repulsive character I have been painted. The script called for it. An unpleasant young jerk, is the way it was described, I believe.'

Jennings was on his feet. 'What is the meaning of this, Dr Keyes? I think we are entitled to an explanation!'

'Indeed you are, Dr Jennings. And you shall have one.' Keyes replaced Dunning, who took a seat. 'To a considerable extent, our friend, Professor Dykstra, was correct. The original data given you at the beginning of this project was a hoax.'

A wave of startled cries and protests arose from the assembly. Keyes raised a hand. 'Just a moment, please. Hear me out. I said that the initial data was a hoax. There was no Leon Dunning, inventor of anti-gravity devices. We put on a show, and faked a film. There was no anti-gravity.

'Today, there is an anti-gravity machine in existence. I want you to consider very carefully, gentlemen, just where the hoax in this matter truly lies.' He paused for a moment, looking into the eyes of each of them, then stepped aside. 'Our chief psychologist, Dr Kenneth Berkeley, will give you the remainder of the story.'

Berk got to his feet and moved to the front as if reluctant to do what had to be done.

'If any of you are angry,' he said, 'I am the person to whom it should be directed. Project Levitation was the direct result of my proposal.

'Do not think, however, that I am apologizing. I object to the term hoax, or fraud, which Professor Dykstra called it. How can we call it a hoax when out of it has come a thing with potentialities that cannot be grasped by any of us at this time?'

'But why, man, why?' Jennings exploded impatiently. 'Why this hocus-pocus, this nonsense, this irrelevance about astrology, levitation, and mysticism! Why wasn't it set up as a straightforward project. We aren't a bunch of high school kids to be tricked into something we don't want to do!'

'Suppose you give me the answer to that?' said Berk. 'How would you have responded to a letter from Dr Keyes inviting you to take part in a project to build an anti-gravity machine? How many of you would have remained in your safe and sane universities where crackpots are not allowed to spend the people's money as they are in Government institutions?

'We are thankful we had no more than one Professor Dykstra on the project. He refused to accept the data we provided and his goal became to prove anti-gravity impossible. How many of you would have come with the same goal if our little make-believe had not spurred you on?

'Dykstra could not face the data in a rational manner. As a result he suffered a nervous breakdown, which was, of course,the result of a long chain of previous incidents.

'On the other hand, those of you who could accept the data we handed you were able to knock out the pre-conceptions about anti-gravity and achieve that which you had considered impossible.

'Essentially, this was a project in psychology, not physics. We could have chosen something besides anti-gravity. The results, I predict, would have been the same. I have observed many scientists at work in the laboratory and library. I have studied the educational preconceptions they bring to their work. Before a problem is tackled, a decision is already made as to whether it is possible or impossible. In so many cases, as exemplified by Professor Dykstra, the interest in the problem is only to the extent of proving the decision correct.

'If you will forgive me for using you for guinea pigs in my project, I submit to you that I have given a far more powerful technique for scientific investigation than you have ever possessed before. The technique of the conviction that any desired answer can be found. You have not been hoaxed at all. You have been shown a new and powerful scientific method.

'If you could and did lick a problem previously impossible to you, in a matter of weeks, how many more of your own research problems are just waiting for this new approach?'

There was a good deal more said at the meeting. Some of it was highly confused. Berk's explanation was not understood at all by several of them.

It would take a long time for it to sink in thoroughly, even for him, Mart thought. There was just a trace of anger within him that he found hard to put down. But he chuckled at the smooth way in which Berk had engineered the project. He'd bet the psychologist had had some uneasy moments because of Dykstra!

There was a sort of stunned feeling in his mind as he began to recognize the absolute truth of what Berk had demonstrated. He saw it reflected in the faces of some of the others, a sort of blank, why-didn't-somebody-tell-me-this-before look.

It was finally agreed they would meet again the next day to thresh out their reactions to what had been done.

As soon as they were able to break away, Berk took Mart's arm. 'I almost forgot to tell you, you are invited to dinner tonight.'

'That had better not be a hoax,' said Mart.

After dinner, the two of them went out into the patio with which Berk struggled to give his city lot the dignity of an estate. They sat down on a garden seat and watched the moon come up through the neighbour's television antenna.

'I want the rest of it,' said Mart. -

'The rest of what?'

'Don't be coy. The rest of the guys are going to get it out of you in the morning, but I want it first.'

Berk was silent for a while; then he started speaking. He lit a pipe and got it going well. 'Jennings almost had it in that speech about the floodgates of the mind which you mentioned. You and I almost had it back there when we were trying to solve the problems of the Universe in school.

'It boils down to the thing you asked me up in the mountains: what is the process of thinking? Where does original thought come from?

'Consider the abstruse equations you cooked up in a matter of days on the gravitational flow around the curvature of space. Why didn't you do it ten years ago? Why didn't somebody else do it a long time ago? Why you, and nobody else?

'I wanted you on the project especially, Mart, because I want you to give me a hand with this thing, if you will. It's a little more than I can handle. I don't know whether it's physics or psychology or some weird cross between the two.

'Anyway, here's where I started: you know communication theory. You know that any kind of data can be put in code form consisting of pulses. For example, a complex photograph codified in terms of half-tone dots. There are many possible methods of coding information into pulses. The code can use dot-dash, it can use time-separation between pulses, it can use pulse amplitude, a thousand different factors and combinations of factors. But any information can be expressed as a special sequence of pulses.

'One such sequence is: "Every body in the universe attracts every other body in the universe"; another, "The secret of immorality is-", and still another, "Gravity is itself the result of the action of — and it can be nullified by-'

'Any answer to any question can be expressed in terms of a special sequence of pulses, wherein some relationship between the pulses is a codified expression of the information.

'But, by definition, pure noise is a completely random sequence of pulses, containing pulses in all possible relationships.

'Therefore: any information-bearing message is a special sub-class of the class "noise". Pure noise, therefore, includes all possible messages, all possible information. Hence, pure noise, which is actually another term for pure probability, is omniscient!

'Now, that isn't just an exercise in scholastic logic. It is a recognition that all things can be learned, all things can be achieved.'

Mart stirred and blew a violent cloud of cigar smoke at the moon. 'Hold it!' he exclaimed. 'There's got to be some limit to the territory you take in.'

'Why? Is my logic wrong in regard to noise and information?'

'Gad, I don't know. It sounds good. It's right, of course, but exactly what does that have to do with the operation of the human mind and Project Levitation?'

'From a structural standpoint, I can't answer that question — yet. Functionally, it appears that there must be in the human mind a mechanism which is nothing but a pure noise generator, a producer of random impulses, pure omniscient noise.

'Somewhere else there must be another mechanism which is set to either filter the production of random noise or control its production so that only semantically meaningful forms are allowed to come through. Evidently, the filter is capable of being set at any level to filter out anything we choose to define as noise.

'So we go through the rough process of growing up, we go to school, and get educated, we get a red line setting on the noise filter which rejects all but a bare minimum of data presented by the external universe, and our internal creativeness as well.

'Facts in the world about us are rejected from then on when they don't fit. Creative imagination is whittled down. The filter takes care of it automatically once we give it a setting.'

'And your project here,' said Mart, 'the stuff on Babylonian mysticism, astrology, and the rest of that crud-'

'The whole pattern was set to be as noisy as possible,' said Berk. 'We didn't know how to produce anti-gravity, so we gave you a picture of a man who did, and made it as noisy as possible to loosen up your own noise filters on the subject. I offered you a dose of omniscient noise on the subject of anti-gravity, and the one inescapable conclusion that it had been done.

'Everyone of you had previously set your filters to reject the idea of anti-gravity. Nonsense! No use looking for that. Work on something useful.

'So I suggested to Keyes we assemble a bunch of you double-domes and slap you solidly with the fact that it ain't nonsense, it can be done, Bud. Give you some omniscient noise to listen to, loosen up your filters, and let the answer come through out of your own mental productiveness.

'It worked. It always will work. All you've got to do is get the lead out of your pants and the rocks out of your head, and the arbitrary noise filter settings corrected on a few of the other things you've always wanted to do — and you can find a proper answer to any problem you care to investigate!'

Mart glanced up at the moon spreading silver across the sky. 'Yeah — there's the stars,' he said. 'I've always wanted the stars. Now we've got anti-gravity-'

'And so you can go to the stars — if you want to.⁵

Mart shook his head. 'You and Dunning — first we've got it, then we haven't.

'You get us to produce anti-gravity. And it becomes a mere gimmick! Sure we could see the planets, maybe even go beyond the solar system before we die. But I guess I'm going to stay here and work with you. A paltry planet or two isn't so much, after all. If we could learn to utilize the maximum noise level of the human mind we could master the whole Universe!'