Heinlein, Robert A Assignment in Eternity

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as it does to speak it.
Korzybsld's monumental work went fallow during
the communist interregnum; DOS Kapitcd is a childish
piece of work, when analyzed by semantics, so the
politburo suppressed semantics and replaced it by
ersatz under me same name, as Lysenkoism replaced
the science of genetics.
Having Speedtalk to help him leam more Speedtalk,
Joe learned very rapidly. The Renshawing had con-
tinued; he was now able to grasp a gestalt or configu-
ration in many senses at once, grasp it, remember it,
reason about it with great speed.
Living time is not calendar time; a man's life is the
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thought that flows through his brain. Any man capa-
ble of learning Speedtalk had an association time at
least three times as fast as an ordinary man. Speedtalk
itself enabled him to manipulate symbols approxi-
mately seven times as fast as English symbols could
be manipulated. Seven times three is twenty-one; a
new man had an effective life time of at least sixteen
hundred years, reckoned in flow of ideas.
They had time to become encyclopedic synthe-
sists, something denied any ordinary man by the
straitjacket of his sort of time.
When Joe had learned to talk. to read and write
and cipher, Gail turned him over to others for his
real education. But before she checked him out she
played him several dirty tricks.
For three days she forbade him to eat. When it
was evident that he could think and keep his temper
despite low blood-sugar count, despite hunger re-
flex. she added sleeplessness and pain intense, long,
continued, and varied pain. She tried subtly to goad
him into irrational action; he remained bedrock steady,
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76 Robert A. Heinlein
his mind clicking away at any assigned task as depend-
ably as an electronic computer.
"Who's not a superman?" she asked at the end of
their last session.
"Yes, teacher."
"Come here, lug." She grabbed him by the ears,
kissed him soundly. "So long." He did not see her
again for many weeks.
His tutor in E.S,P. was an ineffectual-looking lit-
tle man who had taken the protective coloration of
the name Weems. Joe was not very good at produc-
ing E.S.P. phenomena. Clairvoyance he did not
appear to have. He was better at precognition, but
he did not improve with practice. He was best at
telekinesis; he could have made a soft living with
dice. But, as Kettle Belly had pointed out, from
affecting the roll of dice to moving tons of freight was
quite a gap and one possibly not worth bridging.
"It may have other uses, however," Weems had
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said softly, lapsing into English. "Consider what might
be done if one could influence the probability that a
neutron would reach a particular nucleus or change
the statistical probability in a mass."
Gilead let it ride; it was an outrageous thought.
At telepathy he was erratic to exasperation. He
called the Rhine cards once without a miss, then had
poor scores for three weeks. More highly structured
communication seemed quite beyond him, until one
day without apparent cause but during an attempt to
call the cards by telepathy, he found himself hooked
in with Weems for all of ten seconds time enough
for a thousand words by Speedtalk standards.
it comes out us speech!
why not? thought is speech.
how do we do it?
if ice knew it would not be so unreliable, as it is,
some can do it by volition, some by accident, and
some never seem to be able to do it. we do know this:
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GULF 77
while thought may not be of the physical world in
any fashion we can now define and manipulate, it is
similar to events in continuum in its quantal nature.
You are now studying the extension of the quantum
concept to all features of the continuum, you know
the chronon, the mensum, and the viton, as quanta,
as weU as the action units of quanta such as the
photon. The continuum has not only structure but
texture in all its features. The least unit of thought
we term the psychon.
define it. put salt on its tail.
some day, some day. I can tell you this; the
fastest possible rate of thought is one psychon per
chronon; this is a basic, universal constant.
how close do we come to that?
less than sixty-to-the-minus-third-power of the
possibility. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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