Dark Benediction

She called long distance and talked to her mother, then spoke to her children, asked them if they were ready to come home, but they wanted to stay another week. They begged, and her mother begged, and she reluctantly consented. It had been a mistake to call. Now the kids would be gone even longer.

She tried to call Frank in St. Louis, but the hotel clerk reported that he had just checked out. Lisa knew this meant he was on the road again.

“Maybe I ought to go join the kids at Mother’s,” she thought. But Frank had wanted her to stay home. He was expecting a registered letter from Chicago, and it was apparently important, and she had to take care of it.

“I’ll invite somebody over,” she thought. But the wives were home with their husbands, and it was a social mistake to invite a couple when her husband was gone. It always wound up with two women yammering at each other while the lone male sat and glowered in uneasy isolation, occasionally disagreeing with his wife, just to let her know he was there and he was annoyed and bored and why didn’t they go home? It was different if the business-widow called on a couple. Then the lone male could retire to some other part of the house to escape the yammering.

But she decided it wasn’t company she wanted; she wanted help. And there was no place to get it.

When she allowed her thoughts to drift toward Kenneth Grearly, it was almost like tuning in a radio station. He was eating early dinner in the University cafeteria with a bedraggled, bespectacled brunette from the laboratory. Lisa closed her eyes and let herself sift gingerly into his thoughts. His attention was on the conversation and on the food, and he failed to realize Lisa’s presence. That knowledge gave her courage.

He was eating Swiss steak and hashed brown potatoes, and the flavors formed perceptions in her mind. She heard the rattle of silverware, the low murmur of voices, and smelled the food. She marveled at it. The strange ability had apparently been brought into focus by learning what it was and how to use it.

“Our work has been too empirical,” he was saying. “We’ve studied phenomena, gathered data, looked for correlations. But that method has limitations. We should try to find a way to approach psychology from below. Like the invariantive approach to physics.”

The girl shook her head. “The nervous system is too complicated for writing theoretical equations about it. Empirical equations are the best we can do.”

“They aren’t good enough, Sarah. You can predict results with them, inside the limits of their accuracy. But you can’t extrapolate them very well, and they won’t stack up together into a single integrated structure. And when you’re investigating a new field, they no longer apply. We need a broad mathematical theory, covering all hypothetically possible neural arrangements. It would let us predict not only results, but also predict patterns of possible order.”

“Seems to me the possible patterns are infinite.”

“No, Sarah. They’re limited by the nature of the building blocks—neurons, synaptic connections, and, so forth. With limited materials, you have structural limitations. You don’t build skyscrapers out of modeling clay. And there is only a finite number of ways you can build atoms out of electrons, protons and neutrons. Similarly, brains are confined to the limitations of the things they’re made of. We need a broad theory for defining the limits.”

“Why?”

“Because…” He paused. Lisa felt his urge to explain his urgency, felt him suppress it, felt for a moment his loneliness in the awareness of his uniqueness and the way it isolated him from humanity.

“You must be doing new work,” the girl offered, “if you feel the lack of such a theoretical approach. I just can’t imagine an invariantive approach to psychology—or an all defining set of laws for it, either. Why do you need such a psychological ‘Relativity’?”

He hesitated, frowning down at his plate, watching a fly crawl around its rim. “I’m interested in—in the quantitative aspects of nerve impulses. I—I suspect that there is such a thing as neural resonance.”

She laughed politely and shook her head. “I’ll stick to my empirical data-gathering, thank you.”

I had felt him thinking: