Page:Fantastic Universe (1956-10; vol. 8, no. 3).djvu/80

108 effects, but of the thing itself we know nothing."

Graut was thin and spare. He had a high nose and deeply recessed eyes under ragged white brows. A clever face, seamed with the tiny ruts of a half century of scientific thinking, yet retaining its lines of human philosophy. There was humor in the twist of his taut lips, and a gleam of irony in the caverned blue eyes. One might very well say, meeting his direct look for the first time; that here was a man who had resolved in his own understanding, and in perfect personal conformity, the alleged differences between religion and science. He raised a hand now to tug gently the neat little bunch of white hair on his chin.

He said, answering the silence: "So many things we do not know. Truth is not alone at the bottom of the well. She has knowledge for company. Eh, Walstab? What has the metaphysician to say?" Doctor Walstab—short and thickset, with the eyes and brow of the born dreamer—said bluntly, "It is not my province. I will, however, go so far as to say that everything so far goes to show that the mental and physical worlds are complementary. Gravity plays a part even in the supernatural, that unknown essence at the back of the mind which we speak of as the arcana, or secret place."

"Conscience?" the man on his left queried. He was young and spruce, and spoke in a clipped but friendly voice. He wore the etheric-silver uniform of Ace Commander attached to the Flash Squadron of the Terra Cosmarctic Exploration Division, and bore the gold-lettered insignia C.E.D. on his right cuff.

"If you like, Peters. I was thinking of it under the text-book name of Impulse of the Psyche—that flow-in behind the conscious which impinges from outside the normally understood."

"I don't get you."

Professor Graut put in gently: "What Walstab means, I think—and I agree with him—is that there is a larger consciousness which can only be comprehended in the life to come, but which in moments of stress in human affairs does occasionally attempt to influence personal decisions."

The Commander laughed.

"I'm afraid. Professor, I have no belief in human survival. Religion! Heaven and hell, and all the rest of it! You'd think, if there were any real clues we'd have found at least one of them by this time, now that we're free to explore Space. Life everywhere Life, even though it's in quite different forms to ourselves, oh, yes; in cases, intelligent, highly intelligent life forms, but still in the same old three-dimensional pattern. It seems like the mould on a cheese, merely a phase of cosmic evolution. And when that phase is left behind in the evolutionary race, life will go with it into the discard."