Hal Annas

“ Fillmore said. "I've been working on it myself. Gave it nine seconds solid thought yesterday. If I hadn't been interrupted I might have got it. You're thinking about pure reasoning before the fact."
"Exactly. What are your conclusions?"
"It's possible. The square of nothing equals nothing. When you put nothing times nothing on paper it comes out minus infinity or infinity minus. Thus you have something. Take a mind without a fact and let it confront nothing. Almost at once it will raise nothing to the power of six. ”

“ Striding down the corridor on long thin legs, Art Fillmore mentally glanced over the news and his wide brow puckered. "Scientists to awaken twentieth century man," the mental beam proclaimed. "Dark age to yield untold volumes of ignorance." ”

“ Fillmore sighed. "She's almost perfect in that respect. Doesn't have to have her mind erased but once every six weeks. Nine power intelligence but she holds it back. That way she doesn't come anywhere near a nervous breakdown oftener than once in six weeks."
"Domestic type?"
"Definitely. Regular homebody. Never been out of the solar system. She's the kind that likes a quiet picnic on Mars and will settle for the moon when Mars is crowded. Besides, she's interested largely in warts and mice. Studies them all the time. Knows how to grow warts on anybody." ”

“ That's the reason my people live so long. Don't burn ourselves up in infancy thinking. But that doesn't mean you may not be right in teaching your children, when you have them tomorrow, everything right at the start. With a fourteen power intelligence, your people are by nature compelled to do a lot of thinking, and it's your duty, as a citizen, to begin early. Had any startling thoughts lately?"
Fillmore sighed. "Just the normal ones. Figured out a simple method, just before dozing off to sleep last night, to transfer this planet to an orbit about another sun. ”

“ Think what bliss could be achieved if the man could afford to go the maximum distance in one direction and send his wife twice that far in the other direction. I mean to say, happiness is next to the ultimate, and if they could be separated so far that no trace of one ever got back to the other—well, just think of it! ”

“ You're the only man in the nation with more than twelve power intelligence who isn't bald. If I didn't know you well I'd think you were effeminate. My wife got a mental glimpse of you once and said you were the handsomest man extant. It's those three strands of blond hair. Even the most beautiful woman in the world doesn't have more than six or seven. I'll bet you really projected those in a big way for Cynthia."
Fillmore felt the blood rising to his pale cheeks. ”

“ If there were only a constant, it would prove out that matter would become pure energy at the speed of the constant. But it does not, for it must achieve the speed of the variable, and that cannot be achieved without traveling at a million different speeds. ”

“ Not having any intelligence to burn them out, the people of those days could live as long as they wished. Or at least that's the way it's figured. Once in a while, about every two or three weeks, just as we erase our minds so we won't burn up too quick, those people would get together and begin killing one another. ”

“ Fillmore admitted. "Men have killed themselves for their wives, but that's nothing. They have given them planets, but that is nothing; they have showered them with stars, and that is very little because there are so many stars. But no man has ever given a woman, up until this time, a strand of his hair, largely because no man had any hair to give. ”

“ I can't afford anything better, not and save anything. I've got less than a billion put aside right now, hardly enough to invest in an enterprise outside the solar system. Poverty! How that secretary of mine lives so high on her pittance, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if she isn't consorting mentally with somebody on some planet on the edge of space. Not that I'm narrow-minded. A woman with looks like hers deserves the best, but allowing a man on the edge of space to think about her is going pretty far, and I'm a stickler for the convention. ”

“ They do not know that a billion miles per second is considered slow in some laboratories. They may know it but they ignore it. Backward! Stupid! Even the ancients were better informed. They conceived varying dimensions, which is a step in the right direction. Actually we know that there is only one dimension and that is the mental dimension with diverse corridors. But in order to learn that, we had to discover, some fifty thousand years ago, upward of two thousand different dimensions. Then we integrated them and found that they all emanated from the mind. ”

“ A sun is a sun and it would take thirty seconds solid thought to improve on it, and I don't know anybody capable of that much sustained thought, and there's not much point in transferring this planet, now that we know how to renew the sun whenever it cools too much. ”

“ And even if matter changed to pure energy it must necessarily change again when it breaks through the energy barrier. But those old slow pokes in the council insist that we go on traveling at less than the speed of light. ”

“ Uranium, being useless except for fissionable purposes, is used for fertilizer in the mineral laboratories where iron is grown. Iron is no good for anything except food, and you can't put very much of it in ordinary food, and so it is dissolved into an iron vapor and freed in the atmosphere. Iron vapor gets heavier as it cools, and so it settles on top of the clouds and holds them close to the earth and keeps the warmth of the world from escaping. ”

“ But the theory that at the speed of light matter will change to pure energy was just as ridiculous as the theory that matter would disintegrate into sound waves at the speed of sound. They figure light travels at 186,000 miles per second. ”

“ You see, this chair has coils in it that convert heat into Zeta Rays by shortening the wave-length. I sit here for twenty-nine minutes each day, two days a month, and concentrate all my heat through the seat of my pants. It goes through the converter and comes out Zeta Rays in China. Zeta Rays are no good for anything except to convert ordinary rock into gold, so the Chinese pipe it to Russia. Gold, being soft, is good for nothing except to burn ceremoniously in accordance with the ancient religious rites, and so a lot of it is stolen and sold on the gray market to be converted into uranium. ”

“ Only the other day I spent six cents for twelve barrels of thousand-year-old whiskey. The world has been aiming at high wages and low prices for the past ten thousand years and we're still slaving and starving. ”

“ I want the boys to understand the simpler mathematics, such as the theory of relativity and why it is possible to add numerals until you get an answer of zero square. Of course, not everyone can square zero, and it may take ten or fifteen seconds just to teach them that, but I don't want them to grow up to be two or three hours old and still be ignorant. ”

“ It's Corson who's got his intelligence in his back side. Mine is in the soles of my feet, according to Meyer who knows about such things. But Konwell claims the intelligence flows through the bloodstream in all persons."
"Not all," Fillmore contradicted. "But Konwell is right. The brain is merely the antennae. The more blood it gets the more it can express. For instance, in order to concentrate to the full power of fourteen I have to stand on my head. But I can't hang around here all day. Get your secretary in and let me shake hands with her." ”

“ But light waves are always at right angle, different from sound waves, and we must come to the conclusion that light does not travel in a straight line, but in a series of curves. While its theoretical speed is 186,000 miles per second, its actual speed is many times that. ”

“ But he determined to stick to the conventions, because if he gave her any encouragement she might, he knew, try to get chummy with his mind, and that would lead to complications.
"Mr. Fillmore wants to shake hands with you," the bald man explained. "Then you pass it along to me."
"But why doesn't he shake hands with you?" she asked in high C.
The bald man shook his head. "You wouldn't understand about that. But it has something to do with the voltage. Men's voltage multiply, whereas a man and a woman's voltage merely add. If we shook hands we'd burn our brains out. ”

“ Spent four dollars on her in less than six years. Ten thousand separate items. But, of course, she never found anything like that imported by my secretary. I doubt if there's another in the solar system, and I know there isn't another woman able to afford twenty-five cents for a single dress. I wonder where she gets her money! Her salary here is only seven hundred dollars a day, two days a month. I'll bet she hasn't got a million dollars to her name saved up. Spends every last cent she earns, probably. Ninety cents a quarter she pays for that seventeen room apartment of hers. ”

“ The bald man and the woman watched the wall grow and then become a sphere. They could easily tell that it was more than six feet thick and harder than a diamond, for it would take every bit of that to restrain Fillmore's full voltage. ”

“ After all, you don't have but one real honeymoon, and in my opinion every man and woman should strive to make it as nearly perfect as possible. I think the government ought to subsidize that sort of thing. ”

“ Cynthia thinks she ought to learn about warts and I agree. If she learns to grow warts she'll have a first-class female education. I can't think of anything finer in our society. And Cynthia even plans to teach her all about mice. ”

“ Of course. I've got a two-inch brain expansion myself. Had to soak my skull in oil until it became malleable enough to allow for the normal brain growth. I've heard of some men having their brain taken out. ”

“ She isn't too bright. It takes her nearly half a second to calculate the distance in inches from here to Andromeda and return via Pegasus—that is, unless you give her a clue to the problem. She's a plain dumbbell but fantastically beautiful. Tall as you are and weighs less than sixty pounds. ”