Well, it was. After a few moments I was able to give my full attention to the phenomena of the att.i.tudinizor, and queer phenomena they were, too. I scarcely know how to describe the sensation of looking at the world through the filter of another"s mind. It is almost an indescribable experience, but so, in the ultimate a.n.a.lysis, is any other experience.
What I saw first was a kaleidoscopic array of colors and shapes, but the amazing, astounding, inconceivable thing about the scene was that there was no single color I could recognize! The eyes of van Manderpootz, or perhaps his brain, interpreted color in a fashion utterly alien to the way in which my own functioned, and the resultant spectrum was so bizarre that there is simply no way of describing any single tint in words. To say, as I did to the professor, that his conception of red looked to me like a shade between purple and green conveys absolutely no meaning, and the only way a third person could appreciate the meaning would be to examine my point of view through an att.i.tudinizor while I was examining that of van Manderpootz. Thus he could apprehend my conception of van Manderpootz"s reaction to the color red.
And shapes! It took me several minutes to identify the weird, angular, twisted, distorted appearance in the center of the room as the plain laboratory table. The room itself, aside from its queer form, looked smaller, perhaps because van Manderpootz is somewhat larger than I.
But by far the strangest part of his point of view had nothing to do with the outlook upon the physical world, but with the more fundamental elements--with his att.i.tudes. Most of his thoughts, on that first occasion, were beyond me, because I had not yet learned to interpret the personal symbolism in which he thought. But I did understand his att.i.tudes. There was Carter, for instance, toiling away out in the large laboratory; I saw at once what a plodding, unintelligent drudge he seemed to van Manderpootz. And there was Miss Fitch; I confess that she had always seemed unattractive to me, but my impression of her was Venus herself beside that of the professor! She hardly seemed human to him and I am sure that he never thought of her as a woman, but merely as a piece of convenient but unimportant laboratory equipment.
At this point I caught a glimpse of myself through the eyes of van Manderpootz. Ouch! Perhaps I"m not a genius, but I"m dead certain that I"m not the grinning ape I appeared to be in his eyes. And perhaps I"m not exactly the handsomest man in the world either, but if I thought I looked like that--! And then, to cap the climax, I apprehended van Manderpootz"s conception of himself!
"That"s enough!" I yelled. "I won"t stay around here just to be insulted. I"m through!"
I tore the att.i.tudinizor from my head and tossed it to the table, feeling suddenly a little foolish at the sight of the grin on the face of the professor.
"That is hardly the spirit which has led science to its great achievements, Dixon," he observed amiably. "Suppose you describe the nature of the insults, and if possible, something about the workings of the att.i.tudinizor as well. After all, that is what you were supposed to be observing."
I flushed, grumbled a little, and complied. Van Manderpootz listened with great interest to my description of the difference in our physical worlds, especially the variations in our perceptions of form and color.
"What a field for an artist!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed at last. "Unfortunately, it is a field that must remain forever untapped, because even though an artist examined a thousand viewpoints and learned innumerable new colors, his pigments would continue to impress his audience with the same old colors each of them had always known." He sighed thoughtfully, and then proceeded. "However, the device is apparently quite safe to use. I shall therefore try it briefly, bringing to the investigation a calm, scientific mind which refuses to be troubled by the trifles that seem to bother you."
He donned the att.i.tudinizor, and I must confess that he stood the shock of the first trial somewhat better than I did. After a surprised "Oof!" he settled down to a complacent a.n.a.lysis of my point of view, while I sat somewhat self-consciously under his calm appraisal. Calm, that is, for about three minutes.
Suddenly he leaped to his feet, tearing the device from a face whose normal ruddiness had deepened to a choleric angry color. "Get out!" he roared. "So that"s the way van Manderpootz looks to you! Moron! Idiot! Imbecile! Get out!"
It was a week or ten days later that I happened to be pa.s.sing the University on my way from somewhere to somewhere else, and I fell to wondering whether the professor had yet forgiven me. There was a light in the window of his laboratory over in the Physics Building, so I dropped in, making my way past the desk where Carter labored, and the corner where Miss Fitch sat in dull primness at her endless task of transcribing lecture notes.
Van Manderpootz greeted me cordially enough, but with a curious a.s.sumption of melancholy in his manner. "Ah, Dixon," he began, "I am glad to see you. Since our last meeting, I have learned much of the stupidity of the world, and it appears to me now that you are actually one of the more intelligent contemporary minds."
This from van Manderpootz! "Why--thank you," I said.
"It is true. For some days I have sat at the window overlooking the street there, and have observed the viewpoints of the pa.s.sers-by. Would you believe"--his voice lowered--"would you believe that only seven and four-tenths percent are even aware of the existence of van Manderpootz? And doubtless many of the few that are, come from among the students in the neighborhood. I knew that the average level of intelligence was low, but it had not occurred to me that it was as low as that."
"After all," I said consolingly, "you must remember that the achievements of van Manderpootz are such as to attract the attention of the intelligent few rather than of the many."
"A very silly paradox!" he snapped. "On the basis of that theory, since the higher one goes in the scale of intelligence, the fewer individuals one finds, the greatest achievement of all is one that n.o.body has heard of. By that test you would be greater than van Manderpootz, an obvious reductio ad absurdum."
He glared his reproof that I should even have thought of the point, then something in the outer laboratory caught his ever-observant eye.
"Carter!" he roared. "Is that a syn.o.basical interphasometer in the positronic flow? Fool! What sort of measurements do you expect to make when your measuring instrument itself is part of the experiment? Take it out and start over!"
He rushed away toward the unfortunate technician. I settled idly back in my chair and stared about the small laboratory, whose walls had seen so many marvels. The latest, the att.i.tudinizor, lay carelessly on the table, dropped there by the professor after his a.n.a.lysis of the ma.s.s viewpoint of the pedestrians in the street below.
I picked up the device and fell to examining its construction. Of course this was utterly beyond me, for no ordinary engineer can hope to grasp the intricacies of a van Manderpootz concept. So, after a puzzled but admiring survey of its infinitely delicate wires and grids and lenses, I made the obvious move. I put it on.
My first thought was the street, but since the evening was well along, the walk below the window was deserted. Back in my chair again, I sat musing idly when a faint sound that was not the rumbling of the professor"s voice attracted my attention. I identified it shortly as the buzzing of a heavy fly, b.u.t.ting its head stupidly against the pane of gla.s.s that separated the small laboratory from the large room beyond. I wondered casually what the viewpoint of a fly was like, and ended by flashing the light on the creature.
For some moments I saw nothing other than I had been seeing right along from my own personal point of view, because, as van Manderpootz explained later, the psychons from the miserable brain of a fly are too few to produce any but the vaguest of impressions. But gradually I became aware of a picture, a queer and indescribable scene.
Flies are color-blind. That was my first impression, for the world was a dull panorama of greys and whites and blacks. Flies are extremely nearsighted; when I had finally identified the scene as the interior of the familiar room, I discovered that it seemed enormous to the insect, whose vision did not extend more than six feet, though it did take in almost a complete sphere, so that the creature could see practically in all directions at once. But perhaps the most astonishing thing, though I did not think of it until later, was that the compound eye of the insect, did not convey to it the impression of a vast number of separate pictures, such as the eye produces when a microphotograph is taken through it. The fly sees one picture just as we do; in the same way as our brain rights the upside-down image cast on our retina, the fly"s brain reduces the compound image to one. And beyond these impressions were a wild hodge-podge of smell-sensations, and a strange desire to burst through the invisible gla.s.s barrier into the brighter light beyond. But I had no time to a.n.a.lyze these sensations, for suddenly there was a flash of something infinitely clearer than the dim cerebrations of a fly.
For half a minute or longer I was unable to guess what that momentary flash had been. I knew that I had seen something incredibly lovely, that I had tapped a viewpoint that looked upon something whose very presence caused ecstasy, but whose viewpoint it was, or what that flicker of beauty had been, were questions beyond my ability to answer.
I slipped off the att.i.tudinizor and sat staring perplexedly at the buzzing fly on the pane of gla.s.s. Out in the other room van Manderpootz continued his harangue to the repentant Carter, and off in a corner invisible from my position I could hear the rustle of papers as Miss Fitch transcribed endless notes. I puzzled vainly over the problem of what had happened, and then the solution dawned on me.
The fly must have buzzed between me and one of the occupants of the outer laboratory. I had been following its flight with the faintly visible beam of the att.i.tudinizor"s light, and that beam must have flickered momentarily on the head of one of the three beyond the gla.s.s. But which? Van Manderpootz himself? It must have been either the professor or Carter, since the secretary was quite beyond range of the light.
It seemed improbable that the cold and brilliant mind of van Manderpootz could be the agency of the sort of emotional ecstasy I had sensed. It must therefore, have been the head of the mild and inoffensive little Carter that the beam had tapped. With a feeling of curiosity I slipped the device back on my own head and sent the beam sweeping dimly into the larger room.
It did not at the time occur to me that such a procedure was quite as discreditable as eavesdropping, or even more dishonorable, if you come right down to it, because it meant the theft of far more personal information than one could ever convey by the spoken word. But all I considered at the moment was my own curiosity; I wanted to learn what sort of viewpoint could produce that strange, instantaneous flash of beauty. If the proceeding was unethical--well, Heaven knows I was punished for it.
So I turned the att.i.tudinizor on Carter. At the moment, he was listening respectfully to van Manderpootz, and I sensed clearly his respect for the great man, a respect that had in it a distinct element of fear. I could hear Carter"s impression of the booming voice of the professor, sounding somewhat like the modulated thunder of a G.o.d, which was not far from the little man"s actual opinion of his master. I perceived Carter"s opinion of himself, and his self-picture was an even more mouselike portrayal than my own impression of him. When, for an instant, he glanced my way, I sensed his impression of me, and while I"m sure that Dixon Wells is not the imbecile he appears to van Manderpootz, I"m equally sure that he"s not the debonair man of the world he seemed to Carter. All in all, Carter"s point of view seemed that of a timid, inoffensive, retiring, servile little man, and I wondered all the more what could have caused that vanished flash of beauty in a mind like his.
There was no trace of it now. His attention was completely taken up by the voice of van Manderpootz, who had pa.s.sed from a personal appraisal of Carter"s stupidity to a general lecture on the fallacies of the unified field theory as presented by his rivals Corveille and Shrimski. Carter was listening with an almost worshipful regard, and I could feel his surges of indignation against the villains who dared to disagree with the authority of van Manderpootz.
I sat there intent on the strange double vision of the att.i.tudinizor, which was in some respects like a Horsten psychomat--that is, one is able to see both through his own eyes and through the eyes of his subject. Thus I could see van Manderpootz and Carter quite clearly, but at the same time I could see or sense what Carter saw and sensed. Thus I perceived suddenly through my own eyes that the professor had ceased talking to Carter, and had turned at the approach of somebody as yet invisible to me, while at the same time, through Carter"s eyes, I saw that vision of ecstasy which had flashed for a moment in his mind. I saw--description is utterly impossible, but I saw a woman who, except possibly for the woman of the idealizator screen, was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen!
I say description is impossible. That is the literal truth, for her coloring, her expression, her figure, as seen through Carter"s eyes, were completely unlike anything expressible by words. I was fascinated, I could do nothing but watch, and I felt a wild surge of jealousy as I caught the adoration in the att.i.tude of the humble Carter. She was glorious, magnificent, indescribable. It was with an effort that I untangled myself from the web of fascination enough to catch Carter"s thought of her name. "Lisa," he was thinking. "Lisa."
What she said to van Manderpootz was in tones too low for me to hear, and apparently too low for Carter"s ears as well, else I should have heard her words through the att.i.tudinizor. But both of us heard van Manderpootz"s bellow in answer.
"I don"t care how the dictionary p.r.o.nounces the word!" he roared. "The way van Manderpootz p.r.o.nounces a word is right!"
The glorious Lisa turned silently and vanished. For a few moments I watched her through Carter"s eyes, but as she neared the laboratory door, he turned his attention again to van Manderpootz, and she was lost to my view.
And as I saw the professor close his dissertation and approach me, I slipped the att.i.tudinizor from my head and forced myself to a measure of calm.
"Who is she?" I demanded. "I"ve got to meet her!"
He looked blankly at me. "Who"s who?"
"Lisa! Who"s Lisa?"
There was not a flicker in the cool blue eyes of van Manderpootz. "I don"t know any Lisa," he said indifferently.
"But you were just talking to her! Right out there!"
Van Manderpootz stared curiously at me; then little by little a shrewd suspicion seemed to dawn in his broad, intelligent features. "Hah!" he said. "Have you, by any chance, been using the att.i.tudinizor?"
I nodded, chill apprehension gripping me.
"And is it also true that you chose to investigate the viewpoint of Carter out there?" At my nod, he stepped to the door that joined the two rooms, and closed it. When he faced me again, it was with features working into lines of amus.e.m.e.nt that suddenly found utterance in booming laughter. "Haw!" he roared. "Do you know who beautiful Lisa is? She"s Fitch!"
"Fitch? You"re mad! She"s glorious, and Fitch is plain and scrawny and ugly. Do you think I"m a fool?"
"You ask an embarra.s.sing question," chuckled the professor. "Listen to me, Dixon. The woman you saw was my secretary, Miss Fitch, seen through the eyes of Carter. Don"t you understand? The idiot Carter"s in love with her!"
I suppose I walked the upper levels half the night, oblivious alike of the narrow strip of stars that showed between the towering walls of twenty-first century New York, and the intermittent roar of traffic from the freight levels. Certainly this was the worst predicament of all those into which the fiendish contraptions of the great van Manderpootz had thrust me.
In love with a point of view! In love with a woman who had no existence apart from the beglamoured eyes of Carter. It wasn"t Lisa Fitch I loved; indeed, I rather hated her angular ugliness. What I had fallen in love with was the way she looked to Carter, for there is nothing in the world quite as beautiful as a lover"s conception of his sweetheart.
This predicament was far worse than my former ones. When I had fallen in love with a girl already dead, I could console myself with the thought of what might have been. When I had fallen in love with my own ideal--well, at least she was mine, even if I couldn"t have her. But to fall in love with another man"s conception! The only way that conception could even continue to exist was for Carter to remain in love with Lisa Fitch, which rather effectually left me outside the picture altogether. She was absolutely unattainable to me, for Heaven knows I didn"t want the real Lisa Fitch--"real" meaning, of course, the one who was real to me. I suppose in the end Carter"s Lisa Fitch was as real as the skinny scarecrow my eyes saw.
She was unattainable--or was she? Suddenly an echo of a long-forgotten psychology course recurred to me. Att.i.tudes are habits. Viewpoints are att.i.tudes. Therefore viewpoints are habits. And habits can be learned!
There was the solution! All I had to do was to learn, or to acquire by practice, the viewpoint of Carter. What I had to do was literally to put myself in his place, to look at things in his way, to see his viewpoint. For once I learned to do that, I could see in Lisa Fitch the very things he saw, and the vision would become reality to me as well as to him.
I planned carefully. I did not care to face the sarcasm of the great van Manderpootz; therefore I would work in secret. I would visit his laboratory at such times as he had cla.s.ses or lectures, and I would use the att.i.tudinizor to study the viewpoint of Carter, and to, as it were, practice that viewpoint. Thus I would have the means at hand of testing my progress, for all I had to do was glance at Miss Fitch without the att.i.tudinizor. As soon as I began to perceive in her what Carter saw, I would know that success was imminent.
Those next two weeks were a strange interval of time. I haunted the laboratory of van Manderpootz at odd hours, having learned from the University office what periods he devoted to his courses. When one day I found the att.i.tudinizor missing, I prevailed on Carter to show me where it was kept, and he, influenced doubtless by my friendship for the man he practically worshipped, indicated the place without question. But later I suspect that he began to doubt his wisdom in this, for I know he thought it very strange for me to sit for long periods staring at him; I caught all sorts of puzzled questions in his mind, though as I have said, these were hard for me to decipher until I began to learn Carter"s personal system of symbolism by which he thought. But at least one man was pleased--my father, who took my absences from the office and neglect of business as signs of good health and spirits, and congratulated me warmly on the improvement.
But the experiment was beginning to work, I found myself sympathizing with Carter"s viewpoint, and little by little the mad world in which he lived was becoming as logical as my own. I learned to recognize colors through his eyes; I learned to understand form and shape; most fundamental of all, I learned his values, his att.i.tudes, his tastes. And these last were a little inconvenient at times, for on the several occasions when I supplemented my daily calls with visits to van Manderpootz in the evening, I found some difficulty in separating my own respectful regard for the great man from Carter"s unreasoning worship, with the result that I was on the verge of blurting out the whole thing to him several times. And perhaps it was a guilty conscience, but I kept thinking that the shrewd blue eyes of the professor rested on me with a curiously suspicious expression all evening.
The thing was approaching its culmination. Now and then, when I looked at the angular ugliness of Miss Fitch, I began to catch glimpses of the same miraculous beauty that Carter found in her--glimpses only, but harbingers of success. Each day I arrived at the laboratory with increasing eagerness, for each day brought me nearer to the achievement I sought. That is, my eagerness increased until one day I arrived to find neither Carter nor Miss Fitch present, but van Manderpootz, who should have been delivering a lecture on indeterminism, very much in evidence.
"Uh--h.e.l.lo," I said weakly.
"Umph!" he responded, glaring at me. "So Carter was right, I see. Dixon, the abysmal stupidity of the human race continually astounds me with new evidence of its astronomical depths, but I believe this escapade of yours plumbs the uttermost regions of imbecility."
"M-my escapade?"
"Do you think you can escape the piercing eye of van Manderpootz? As soon as Carter told me you had been here in my absence, my mind leaped nimbly to the truth. But Carter"s information was not even necessary, for half an eye was enough to detect the change in your att.i.tude on these last few evening visits. So you"ve been trying to adopt Carter"s viewpoint, eh? No doubt with the idea of ultimately depriving him of the charming Miss Fitch!"
"W-why--"
"Listen to me, Dixon. We will disregard the ethics of the thing and look at it from a purely rational viewpoint, if a rational viewpoint is possible to anybody but van Manderpootz. Don"t you realize that in order to attain Carter"s att.i.tude toward Fitch, you would have to adopt his entire viewpoint? Not," he added tersely, "that I think his point of view is greatly inferior to yours, but I happen to prefer the viewpoint of a donkey to that of a mouse. Your particular brand of stupidity is more agreeable to me than Carter"s timid, weak, and subservient nature, and some day you will thank me for this. Was his impression of Fitch worth the sacrifice of your own personality?"
"I--I don"t know."
"Well, whether it was or not, van Manderpootz has decided the matter in the wisest way. For it"s too late now, Dixon. I have given them both a month"s leave and sent them away--on a honeymoon. They left this morning."
ROBOTS OF THE WORLD! ARISE!.
By Mari Wolf
What would you do if your best robots--children of your own brain--walked up and said "We want union scale"?
The telephone wouldn"t stop ringing. Over and over it buzzed into my sleep-fogged brain, and I couldn"t shut it out. Finally, in self-defense I woke up, my hand groping for the receiver.
"h.e.l.lo. Who is it?"
"It"s me, Don. Jack Anderson, over at the factory. Can you come down right away?"
His voice was breathless, as if he"d been running hard. "What"s the matter now?" Why, I wondered, couldn"t the plant get along one morning without me? Seven o"clock--what a time to get up. Especially when I hadn"t been to bed until four.
"We got grief," Jack moaned. "None of the robots showed up, that"s what! Three hundred androids on special a.s.sembly this week--and not one of them here!"
By then I was awake, all right. With a government contract due on Sat.u.r.day we needed a full shift. The Army wouldn"t wait for its uranium; it wouldn"t take excuses. But if something had happened to the androids....
"Have you called Control yet?"
"Yeah. But they don"t know what"s happened. They don"t know where the androids are. n.o.body does. Three hundred Grade A, lead-shielded pile workers--missing!"
"I"ll be right down."
I hung up on Jack and looked around for my clothes. Funny, they weren"t laid out on the bed as usual. It wasn"t a bit like Rob O to be careless, either. He had always been an ideal valet, the best household model I"d ever owned.
"Rob!" I called, but he didn"t answer.
By rummaging through the closet I found a clean shirt and a pair of pants. I had to give up on the socks; apparently they were tucked away in the back of some drawer. As for where Rob kept the rest of my clothes, I"d never bothered to ask. He had his own housekeeping system and had always worked very well without human interference. That"s the best thing about these new household robots, I thought. They"re efficient, hard-working, trustworthy-- Trustworthy? Rob O was certainly not on duty. I pulled a shoe on over my bare foot and scowled. Rob was gone. And the androids at the factory were gone too....
My head was pounding, so I took the time out to brew a pot of coffee while I finished dressing--at least the coffee can was in plain view in the kitchen. The brew was black and hot and I suppose not very well made, but after two cups I felt better. The throb in my head settled down into a dull ache, and I felt a little more capable of thinking. Though I didn"t have any bright ideas on what had happened--not yet.
My breakfast drunk, I went up on the roof and opened the garage doors. The Copter was waiting for me, sleek and new; the latest model. I climbed in and took off, heading west toward the factory, ten minutes flight-time away.
It was a small plant, but it was all mine. It had been my baby right along--the Don Morrison Fissionables Inc. I"d designed the androids myself, plotted out the pile locations, set up the simplified reactors. And now it was making money. For men to work in a uranium plant you need yards of shielding, triple-checking, long cooling-off periods for some of the hotter products. But with lead-bodied, radio-remote controlled androids, it"s easier. And with androids like the new Morrison 5"s, that can reason--at least along atomic lines--well, I guess I was on my way to becoming a millionaire.
But this morning the plant was shut down. Jack and a half dozen other men--my human foremen and supervisors--were huddled in a worried bunch that broke up as soon as they saw me.
"I"m sure glad you"re here, Don," Jack said.
"Find out anything?"
"Yeah. Plenty. Our androids are busy, all right. They"re out in the city, every one of them. We"ve had a dozen police reports already."
"Police reports! What"s wrong?"
Jack shook his head. "It"s crazy. They"re swarming all over Carron City. They"re stopping robots in the streets--household Robs, commercial Droids, all of them. They just look at them, and then the others quit work and start off with them. The police sent for us to come and get ours."
"Why don"t the police do something about it?"