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done with you.
He broke off as an assistant entered the room quietly, carrying with him a
small stack of films.  Ah, Todd said,  Let s take a look.
Danny took a look, over Todd s shoulder.  Those don t look like any X-rays I
ever saw before, he said.
Todd chuckled.  They aren t, he said.  But we call them X-rays for
convenience, since this process hasn t got a standard name of its own yet.
Actually it s a development of tracer chemistry, an outgrowth of the
development of the fission bomb. We ve discovered that the element ekacesium
has an affinity for the subcortical Golgi bodies, just as iodine has an
affinity for the cells of the thyroid gland. So we give you a little
artificially-radioactive ekacesium you remember the shot we gave you and after
a while we put some X-ray plates against your head and waited to see what
would happen. The second shot, which shows up on these three plates on the
bottom of the stack, contained radio-silver; that s strictly cortical, homing
on your gray matter. We felt we couldn t afford to miss any bets.
He held the plates up to the viewer, one by one. Danny watched anxiously.
 There s some concentration here, Todd muttered.  More than I ve ever seen
before, that s certain already. Hard to tell how it s shaping up. But we ll
get it. Suppose you come back tomorrow, Danny. I ve got a little book-work to
do; you ve confronted me with a situation I didn t expect even my
grandchildren would have to cope with. Then we ll make a fresh attack.
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Danny could not repress his disappointment.  Do you think there s any hope?
he said.
 Hope? the parapsychologist exploded.  Great jumping grasshoppers, man, you
bring me the first chance we ve ever had to observe this What-Is-It we call
the psi faculties directly, and you ask me if there s any hope! Skin out of
here before I crown you and spoil the specimen.
Danny left, feeling a little better, his head still full of the squares,
stars, crosses, wavy lines and circles on Dr. Todd s test cards. The results
were exciting, yet discouragingly inconclusive; to Danny, who needed to
knownow, the inexorable working-out of scientific method seemed likely to be
fatally lengthy.
Well, that was to have been expected. It was hard to imagine any normal,
everyday agency, even one as unorthodox as the parapsychology labs, coming to
grips with the outlandish Unknowns that were invading Danny s head. He was
lucky that Dr. Todd had gotten even as far as he had. The man s confidence, at
least, was infectious enough to make Danny feel a little less despairing.
The Forteans were even less helpful, though friendly. The local branch of the
Fortean Society had only a post office box address. When he finally found
them, it was by way ofWho s Who. Their local leader turned out to be Cartier
Taylor, a popular author, a man who had written so many colorful and
occasionally acute thrillers that even Danny had heard of him. Indeed, the
Fortean group seemed to be crawling with writers of various calibres, most of
whom were more impressed by their Master s brilliant writing style than with
his disordered metaphysical theories.
Taylor, a slickly handsome man past middle age in the process of going to
seed, but with a gift for brilliantly bitter chatter which dazzled Danny into
complete inarticulateness, was more than willing to load Danny up with half a
hundred reports of wild talents of every conceivable kind. He had bins of
them, collected by assiduous Forteans all over the world, and filed under such
titles as  Pyrotics,  Poltergeists,  Rains of Frogs, and  Oil-Prones. But
nothing that he had to offer in the way of theories to account for such
reports seemed better than idiotic. Indeed, he seemed to have a special bias
toward the idiotic, and to be out to trap Danny into every possible concession
that  orthodox theories of the state of the universe were nonsense.
He viewed scientists-in-the-mass as a kind of priesthood, and scientific [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]