Page 136 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Quantum Reticulator

His pinched features slid smoothly on well-traveled tracks to
annoyance. He was a short thin man, so I kept my distance in order
not to intimidate him physically. Thinning hair and a slight stoop
completed the picture.
“Yes, I recall your importunities. Well, you’re here, so you might
as well come in—but I have no truck with mysticism and magic.
You’ll find nothing in my work to get excited about. I told you that
already.”
As discouraging as this sounded, it did not deter me. He hadn’t
corrected my calling him “professor,” despite his ejection from his
last academic position several years earlier. And I had crossed the
threshold, a small step but more than half-way to success, as any
door-to-door salesman will attest. It would have been useless to
present myself as having any official connection with a university: his
name was mud in the physics community, thanks to his insistence on
a theory universally ridiculed by his former peers. So my ad hoc
identity had to be a little less mainstream; at any rate, he would have
quickly seen through any scientific credentials I could have forged for
the occasion. But his ire was not just directed at me.
“Damn fool judge!” he spat, brandishing a court document in my
direction. Not referring to me, I was fairly certain. I cocked my head
interrogatively.
“On top of that idiotic motorcycle cop giving me a ticket! They
never expect anyone to fight back, but I showed them. If they
weren’t so hidebound in legalese they would have seen my point and
dismissed the charges. There goes my rent money for next month!”
I felt he needed to get this immediate frustration off his chest
before we could discuss his longer-range plans. “Oh,” said I, the soul
of solicitude, “what happened?”
He stopped mid-fuss-and-fume to compose his thoughts. “It’s
quite elementary, really. If the laws of man are physically—or
logically—unsupportable, the citizenry should not be penalized for
failing to do what cannot be done: in this case, failing to stop
completely at a stop sign. One does not need Zeno’s Paradox to
show that the movement of a pendulum, such as the body of an
automobile rocking back and forth against its chassis, does not cease.

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