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Gilead let it ride; it was an outrageous thought.
At telepathy he was erratic to exasperation. He called the Rhine cards once without a miss, then had
poor scores for three weeks. More highly structured communication seemed quite beyond him, until one
day without apparent cause but during an attempt to call the cards by telepathy, he found himself hooked
in with Weems for all of ten seconds-time enough for a thousand words by Speedtalk standards.
-it comes out us speech!
-why not? thought is speech.
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-how do we do it?
-if we knew it would not be so unreliable, as it is, some can do it by volition, some by accident, and
some never seem to be able to do it. we do know this: while thought may not be of the physical world in
any fashion we can now define and manipulate, it is similar to events in continuum in its quantal nature.
You are now studying the extension of the quantum concept to all features of the continuum, you know
the chronon, the mensum, and the viton, as quanta, as well as the action units of quanta such as the
photon. The continuum has not only structure but texture in all its features. The least unit of thought we
term the psychon.
-define it. put salt on its tail.
-some day, some day. I can tell you this; the fastest possible rate of thought is one psychon per
chronon; this is a basic, universal constant.
-how close do we come to that?
-less than sixty-to-the-minus-third-power of the possibility.
-! ! ! ! ! !
-better creatures than ourselves will follow us. We pick pebbles at a boundless ocean.
-what can we do to improve it?
-gather our pebbles with serene minds. Gilead paused for a long split second of thought.
-can psychons be destroyed?
-citons may be transferred, psychons are-
The connection was suddenly destroyed. "As I was saying," Weems went on quietly, "psychons are as
yet beyond our comprehension in many respects. Theory indicates that they may not be destroyed, that
thought, like action, is persistent. Whether or not such theory, if true, means that personal identity is also
persistent must remain an open question. See the daily papers-a few hundred years from now-or a few
hundred thousand." He stood up.
"I'm anxious to try tomorrow's session, Doc," Gilead-Greene almost bubbled. "Maybe-"
"I'm finished with you."
"But, Doctor Weems, that connection was clear as a phone hook-up. Perhaps tomorrow-"
"We have established that your talent is erratic. We have no way to train it to dependability. Time is
too short to waste, mine and yours." Lapsing suddenly into English, he added, "No."
Gilead left.
During his training in other fields Joe was exposed to many things best described as impressive
gadgets. There was an integrating pantograph, a factory-in-a- box, which the New Men planned to turn
over to ordinary men as soon as the social system was no longer dominated by economic wolves. It
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could and did reproduce almost any prototype placed on its stage, requiring thereto only materials and
power. Its power came from a little nucleonics motor the size of Joe's thumb; its theory played hob with
conventional notions of entropy. One put in "sausage"; one got out "pig."
Latent in it was the shape of an economic system as different from the current one as the assembly-
line economy differed from the family-shop system- and in such a system lay possibilities of human
freedom and dignity missing for centuries, if they had ever existed.
In the meantime New Men rarely bought more than one of anything-a pattern. Or they made a
pattern.
Another useful but hardly wonderful gadget was a dictaphone-typewriter-printing-press combination.
The machine's analysers recognized each of the thousand-odd phonetic symbols; there was a typebar for
each sound. It produced one or many copies. Much of Gilead's education came from pages printed by
this gadget, saving the precious time of others.
The arrangement, classification, and accessibility of knowledge remains in all ages the most pressing
problem. With the New Men, complete and organized memory licked most of the problem and rendered [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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