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react to it at all. Whether credit should redound to him or to another was
less than nothing to Toby.
And now he was talking about the new project that had hold of him and of
us all.
"The thing is to get a few nations accultured and thriving, and then to
give the inventive tilt to them. And then we will let them invent. As we are
looking for rapid invention, we will put a time limit on their inventiveness;
the time it takes a rifle bullet to go four kilometers. In fact, I'll put one
of the nations inside a rifle bullet here and shoot it off."
"What in the world for?" Francie Jack asked. She had always made an
effort to understand Big Toby, but she hadn't understood him any better than
had the rest of us.
"Toby, you have a bad case of anthropomorphism, of putting things into
human terms and analogies," Lucius Cockburn chided the big lout Toby. "Nations
that can only barely be guessed at with an electronic microscope are not true
nations."
"If they are made up of thousands of individuals of a kindred, and if
they are able to live, elect, and proclaim a destiny, then they are nations,"
Toby insisted. "What for, Francie? For a test and an experiment and an
opportunity. I will really be shooting at that mocking-bird singing so
imperfectly on that bough. But whether I miss or hit the bird, the rifle
bullet will still crash into that rock cliff four kilometers across the
valley, and it will destroy itself and the small nation that I will have put
inside it. It will do this unless the individuals of that nation shall wake to
consciousness, form local governments, expand to a limited -universal
government, develop science and technology, form groups of empowered geniuses
to apply that science and technology, learn to navigate the bullet, avoid
destruction against the cliff; and return it here in quest of their origin,
all within two and a half seconds of time. I have not set it an impossible
task. It is a short-aeon nation made up of miniaturized intelligences, and the
concept of delay would not be possible to it."
"The 'Reacting Jelly' does react amazingly fast sometimes," Paul
Kradzesh admitted, "and most times it does not react at all. We have the
package to perform miracles. We have the activator to go into the package. But
it performs irregularly and randomly. We must induce uniformity. And, Toby, it
is silly to refer to a supersmall glob as a nation."
"No, it is a sanity which in present company seems to be limited to
myself," Big Tobias Lamb said stubbornly. This harsh and clumsy man was held
in puzzled esteem by the scientific community. He was admitted, yes, and there
were even some persons who tried to like him. But did he conform to Elton
Cabot's dictum of the ideal scientist? --
'Serene, handsome with inner and outer perfection, into every field of
the mind, something of a poet, totally cultured, completely free of hokum,
very much of the philosopher, everything of the humanist.'
It seemed that most of those were things that Toby Lamb was not.
But Big Toby, physically powerful and exceptionally ugly, loutish and
impossible, completely ambiguous in his own group; he was a cult hero of
several other groups, though it puzzled us how those culties ever even heard
of him.
Toby made noises, it was too much to call it music. He made these sounds
on supposed reproductions of very ancient instruments, according to probably
faulty interpretations of ancient musical notations. He made these noises on
clanging iron 'harps' and on howling flutes. And persons of the 'rattling
rock' sort had intruded audio pickups into Toby's big studios and they had
turned his sounds into cult things. A clanging, always a clanging, that was
the 'Toby Sound'.
It was so typical of him that, in his loud talking, when he banged his
palms together for emphasis, he did not make the'clap' sound that other
persons make. He had a'clang'.
And Big Toby painted strong and grotesque pictures. Perhaps 'painted' is
the wrong word since it is not known how he achieved them; but he 'effected'
powerful and vulgar and disturbing pictures. He called them his 'Cainite Space
Ship' series. They were wrenching and a little bit distasteful, but they were
also funny.
"You are a mocker," Lucius Cockburn told Toby often.
"Oh certainly. There are all too few of us. What we want are mockers who
at the same time have total faith. I want that in the director of every
project and every public board and government. And I want it in the short-aeon
inventive realms and in the miniaturized intelligences that make them up. But
deliver us from the mocker who sings too sweetly."
Tobias Lamb had other activities which, in any other man, would seem to
contribute to Elton Cabot's dictum of the ideal scientist. Well yes, he
was'into every field of the mind'; in that much he conformed to it. But how
clumsily he was into many of those fields! He wrote several books. But his New
Physics for the Middle-School Children was not well accepted. It was forced
off the market. He seemed to be teaching physics by means of a hairy sort of
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