Page:Fantastic v08n11 1959-11.djvu/50

fancy that the same molecular flock, cooped up so long in the Folly, will eventually become bored and frantic and panicky (part of my mind thinks like a pagan infant's) and in their desperation begin to behave irregularly. Some men have suggested that light ages in its passage through space, you know, so why might not molecules go mad from long imprisonment?

I jest, yet from all this you can understand, Di, why younger, sounder, more professional physicists would laugh or shake their heads if I told them of Geller's Folly. I am waiting, on my knees as it were, for an improbability that is for all human purposes an impossibility. To them I must present a ridiculous spectacle. But those younger men, with their easier, more sophisticated, eclectic philosophies, do not comprehend the deep passions of a devoted materialist like myself. Scorning the lie of spirit, believing only in matter, in molecules and other particles, I have a far more fierce and patient desire than they do to understand all that matter is capable of, to know matters' rare and whimsical as well as its everyday behavior. When one of the younger men embraces the Christian faith, especially in its Catholic form, I am tempted to suggest: (again I trust I do not shock you) "Let us subject to chemical analysis this host you consume at mass to learn if there is indeed protoplasm in the transubstantiated wafer and hemoglobin in the wine"—a suggestion which, if I made it, would get me called a blockhead or worse. As I say, they simply no longer understand the true materialist temper.

It is for a related reason that I keep the Folly so carefully under lock and key—a circumstance that I imagine had been puzzling you, Di. Once in an unwise burst of enthusiasm I told my students about the Folly. Instead of receiving the information with bored incomprehension or kindly indulgence, a mischevious cruelty seized them. Attempts were made by doctoring the tape to hoax me into thinking I had achieved fabulous results. Since then I have taken stern precautions and I have told no one about the Folly, no one, at all, except . . .

Oh, let me hold the door for you. Thank you. Ah, the night is refreshingly chill—I see traces of snow in the shadows—and for once Chicago's air seems smog-free, though