The Carnelian Cube

Twenty-One:

Perhaps it was the tension of the royal interviews; but for whatever reason Finch could not, as he emerged from the bus, recall the details of his abode, and found himself rather inexplicably hoping that it would not be filled with shining chrome and scientific gadgets. He might have spared himself the worry. The place was a monument of bachelor comfort, with only the disconnected machine in which he had been harnessed when he woke up, the "Somnometer" he supposed, as a reminiscence that it had been the scene of an experiment.

There were high bookshelves, the lines of volumes impressive by the absence of uniform "sets," except in one corner, where a double row of big brown tomes drew his attention. Examination gave him a shock—all copies of the same book, and the book was "The Experimental Interpretation of History," by Arthur Cleveland Finch. He picked up a copy.

... But, of course! As his eye ran along the lines, he could recall having written a paragraph there and thought rather well of it, having wished here he could express the matter more clearly, wondering why an honestly-done piece of work like this did not sell better. There were too many too narrow-minded people, capable of good work themselves but lacking the breadth of vision which acquaintance with other aspects of culture gives, even within the boundaries of their special fields. Even Thera, now that he thought of it, had probably never read the book through. She had been full of bright questions when it came out, but all about the few paragraphs in which dreams were mentioned, her own specialty, for which she had probably searched the index. A drop of that poetic imagination so rigidly eschewed because it involved a priori assumptions would ...

The idea struck him that it might be amusing to make up a rhymed list of the Assyrian kings like that one of English monarchs which has long served as a mnenomic for school boys. But that would require alcohol and his stomach was cold with the sour fermentation of ancient Assyria. He put the book back and let his feet guide him to the bathroom where, sure enough, the medicine cabinet held a bottle marked as whiskey and tabbed with a meticulous chemical analysis of the contents. He had settled himself and was already grinning with satisfaction over his progress when something went bzzzzp!

Finch glanced up at the source of the sound, a shadow-box over the door, and saw a thin line of orange light grow in curls and swoops that resolved themselves into the word "Chase" in longhand. The signature box, he remembered, repeating what one's caller wrote with a stylus on a steel plate at the door. But what did the psychologist want at this hour of night? He half-automatically punched the button on the hanging cord by his chair.

Dr. Chase came in with his usual bounding step, head thrown back as though he were starting out on a marathon walk, almost incredibly hearty. "Hail, pale Herodotus of the imagined past," he declaimed. "How wags thy world?"

"I sat in on a rather hectic conference between Shalmanesar and his mother, Hilprecht has a new theory, and I'm offering you a drink," said Finch, doing his best to play up.

"No—oh, well a homeopathic dose—about one c.c." He sipped, mulled and swallowed. "Ohio barley, 96 proof," he pronounced and reached for the bottle. "Ah, correct! Hilprecht always has a new theory. We on the project board were rather hoping you'd outshine him; that's why we placed him as your junior. What have you been developing?"

Finch drank and smiled. "Nothing much yet but a rhyme for remembering the Kings of Assyria. But the show isn't over yet; I'd rather wait for the fall of Troy before writing my Iliad."

"Curb that poetic tendency, my boy," said Chase, shaking his finger. "It will get you into trouble; leads to scientific inaccuracy for the sake of structure. Science generalizes on what it has, then uses additional data to magnify the generalizations while an approximation of truth is asymptotically approached. But what's the rhyme? Verse often has some educational value for its mnenomic effect."

"Oh, well, you remember the one about the English Kings:

"Here, here," interrupted Chase, "don't revise the classics. It was 'William the Norman.' "

"But weren't you the one who was complaining about the lack of scientific accuracy in verse? I give you that he was more clearly a bastard than a Norman."

"Touche," laughed Chase. "All right, go ahead with your Assyrians."

Finch blinked and began:

Finch finished with a beam and a sensation, under the liberating influence of Ohio barley, that the room was rocking slightly on unseen gimbals. Chase laughed. "The terminal couplet limps a trifle, but I should think With a little revision, the educational department might use that."

"What kind of revision?" demanded Finch, the suspicious pride of has authorship waking up.

"The use of such words as 'iniquitous,' 'haughty' and 'turbulent' is hardly scientific, is it? That's the trouble with verse: I should really have said that it sacrifices precision to emotionalism instead of structure." His face went serious and he swashed the last of his drink around in the glass. "As a matter of fact, that's one of the things I came over to you to talk to you about tonight. You know, Dr. Finch, we on the project board think pretty well of you; you've done some excellent work. But one or two of the board members think they detect a certain willingness on your part to set aside the scientific approach for the emotional ... as in this matter of Miss Bow's part in the re-enactment."

The room had grown very still, and outside somewhere a train whistled. Finch was suddenly cold sober, with a feeling that something was gripping him around the chest. "What is the status of that?" he managed to ask, .keeping his voice even with an effort.

"Very promising. Thoroughly successful in the psychological, hyper-receptivity for languages. As the time when she must enter the set in your General Zilidu's procession was so very near, we waived the bio-chemical, and she went over to Indoctrination this afternoon."

The pressure had closed in on his chest. "Without leaving any word for me!" was wrung from him.

Chase looked up, and his pleasant, high-spirited face was frozen. "Dr. Finch. As I said before, we value your talents rather highly. But it is hardly fair to any group of scientists you are associated with to subject them to the strain of dealing with emotionalisms. You will pardon my saying it, but you are behaving like an adolescent ..."

"The pile of heads. Impale him. My God!" "My dear man, what in the world are you talking about?"

Bzzzzp! went the indicator over the door and the pencil of light scrawled "W. Beaure—" with the rest of the letters piled together for lack of space on the signature plate. Finch pressed the button, and for the moment there was that armed truce of silence which the approach of a third party always imposes on a quarrel between two men.

Washington Beauregard said: "Greetings, Dr. Finch," then his big eyes rolled as he saw the psychologist. He added slowly: "Good evening, Dr. Chase."

"Hello," said Chase, getting up and offering a hand.

"You're Longstreet, aren't you?—no, excuse me, Beauregard."

"That is my cognymic," said the astrologer, with immense dignity. "Dr. Finch, I inferventiously completed those horoscopes, and they excruciated me so I tarried not in bringing them. No sir."

The thought flashed through Finch's mind that he might have preferred some other method of bringing the matter up before the psychologist, but he said: "What did you find?"

"The ingraduation of favorable omens for you and Miss Bow. Mars is in Scorpio; Saturn is in conjunction with Venus and in quartile with the Sun. Saturn is the lord of your ascendancy. The inclination of the celestial is you and Miss Bow should instantaneously get married, and it would even be better if you forgot all about this-here project."

Chase's eyebrows shot up. "Let's see that chart a minute, will you?" he said. "It was my impression the staff astrologers checked Dr. Finch's horoscope before the project was undertaken ... Look here, you said Mars was in Scorpio; according to this chart you've drawn it's in Saggitarius."

"No sir. The doctrination of astrology eliminates your contention. This is one of those printed forms that goes by signs instead of constellations. Me, sir, I am a constel-lationist, like the Babylonian founders of the science. That means that Mars is in Scorpio, which is the joy of the lesser infortune. Miss Bow is a Mercury, which is hostile to Mars—"

"Yes, yes. I know there are differences of detail in practice, but I'm trying to get at your general principle. Aren't the signs and the constellations congruent?"

Beauregard laughed louder than he needed to. "Dr. Chase, you do not comprehendify the background of scientific astrology, indeed you do not. The signs and the constellations were congruential in the historical days of the foundations. But no more, no more. The equinoxes, they pro-cess—"

"Precess," said Chase and Finch, absent-mindedly and together.

"I beg your pardon for the misalinguology. The equinoxes defined a precession, and whereinheretofore the sun had entered Taurus at the vernal equinox, he presently arrived in Aries at that time. At the time of illustrious Hipparchus astrological scientification agreed that the sun's vernal equinoctial position should deliniate the first point of Aries. Well, that did not do much to change the mind of the sun; it just went right along precessing, and as we stand today, the constellations are thirty degrees off phase, in a purely astronomical sense, absolutely astronomical, so that it does not de-validify astrological calculations."

Chase put the tips of his fingers together and looked at Beauregard through narrowed lids. "Isn't that tantamount to saying that all the astrologers except your school—I -assume it is a school—are subject to a thirty-degree error in their fundamental assumptions?"

"I don't say nothing about nobody else. I make my calculations and I git paid. It just seems to me if you're a-goin' to applicate a leonine influence to Leo, it's a lot more reasonable to hang it on the constellation Leo, 'stead of the sign Leo that's just an imagined place marked off in the sky."

Chase favored the astrologer with a stare so concentrated the latter shifted his feet. "I don't agree," he said. "In the first place, that's sloppy a priori reasoning. More reasonable with regard to what criteria? If you mean that it satisfies your personal sense of logic better, then you're talking a kind of home-made religion. And you need something more than that if you're going to contradict the whole development of modern astrology, which states its principles, not on any absolute basis, but because they check with the observed facts."

I don't care so very much about that," said Beauregard. "All I gotta know in my business is unless I'm right proportionably lots of the time, pretty soon I haven't got no business."

"I daresay," said the psychologist, rubbing his chin but maintaining his scrutiny, "though it depends upon the type of client you cater to. And the type of reading they ask for."

Finch said: "I am the type of client he caters to, and if you'll pardon my saying so, your remark sounded rather like an insinuation against both of us."

Chase's face remained pleasant. But he said: "I'm afraid I can't withdraw it in view of the position you're taking. If there is an accusation, it is made by the psychological facts of the case and not by me as a person." He turned to Beauregard and looked him up and down with the cold eye of an art critic gazing at an imperfect statue. "Aren't you an MN 1313 type?" he demanded.

The negro went a purplish dusky hue. "You can't go drafting me for no reconstruction!" he cried, his voice going almost to a break on the high note. "I'm engrossed in work of public service. I ain't goin' to have my tongue cut out like them others!"

"The Board has held that exemption from experimental work is granted only in cases where the exempted public service is performed scientifically, without regard to personal considerations. I'm afraid the matter has gone beyond me. I should be failing my own duty, did I not submit the facts of what seems to me an attempt to prostitute the science of astrology."

The liquor he had drunk came flooding redly back to Finch's face. "Science of astrology!" he almost shouted. "Why not the science of divination or palmistry? Good God, are you trying to make me believe you treat that damned charlatanism as a body of systemized knowledge responding to general laws?"

"I think so—yes." Chase cocked his head on one side.

"As long as its steps follow logically from the primary assumptions. Everything depends on those. Surely, you're not ignorant of the fact that in these days of relativity, only one of the Aristotelian axioms stands up—the one of identity, that a thing cannot be both itself and something else."

Something like a glow irradiated the downcast countenance of Washington Beauregard. "Yes, sir," he said emphatically. "Aristotle is the foundationist of astrology in its scientified aspect, just like he is the other departments. Dr. Chase, sir, I'm sorry I was embalmed in the miseries of this here—"

"But look here," protested Finch, "that isn't right. Astrology has variables that depend on the individual; it isn't exact and—"

The psychologist threw back his head and laughed. "From a historian, above all a reconstruction historian, that's a jewel. You make this elaborate set-up on the other side of the river and fill it with people to represent historical characters. But how do you know the right psychological types have been chosen? You never saw the original characters. It's all your assumption."

"We have the evidence of what happened to go on, and you yourself deduce the psychological patterns."

"Nonsense." Chase reached for the bottle. "We have only the evidence of what you say—or you assume— happened. You can't even write history from the documents in the old style without reading into it your personal picture of events. How do you know it's correct? How do you even know that your senses are reporting to you the correct impressions? Assumption again."

Finch pulled an ear-lobe. "You're defying the validity of all science," he said.

"Not at all. I'm only saying it's relative to the observer and that the observer must obey certain rules in order to correlate his work with others. I might add that the rules are designed precisely to eliminate such displays of emotionalism and subjectivity as you have been giving over this matter of Miss Bow."

"Who makes the rules?" demanded Finch. "Your damned scientific board! Do you think you're eliminating the personal factor that way? You scientists are about as objective and impersonal as a medieval Pope, handing down a ruling that he's infallible. Yes, and you enforce your ideas through a batch of hedge-priests, too. Here's one of them." He swept a hand at Beauregard. "I wish I were out of the whole dirty business."

Chase stood up. "I'm afraid we had better go, Beauregard," he said. "Hope you'll feel better in the morning, Finch. After all, you can hardly get out of it—except into a better and more perfect world."

The door closed behind him, and the recollection came flooding in on Finch. Another and a better world— doomed to wander forever through this cycle of dreamed unpalatable existences? ... But there was no Tiridat here, no one who in the least resembled that personage who had been the key to his other escapes from impossible situations. Nor was he, now that he thought of it, sure that he wanted to escape this one... . Thera. He had thought there was something slightly shocking, almost indecent, about a man raising the middle forties falling into the desperate love that excludes .all other responsibility—when it happened to Edward VIII, King of England. Now here he was, himself, and to make it perfect she was very likely a dream-girl in more than one sense of the word, a pure figment of his imagination. Ridiculous, and Chase was right. But no, ridiculous or not, the touch •f her hand had sent that long thrill tingling up his spine, he was bound to her till death did them part—or the re-enactment of the fall of King Shalmanesar, with types supplied by Dr. Theophilus Chase.

"Damn all," said Arthur Finch aloud, and poured himself another drink.