John Norman Read Online Free PDF

ripples of light across the cubicle. These beads, and leapings, and threads increased. But the light was not the phenomenon, but its accompaniment. It was no more than the footprint of a summoned force, an impression, not the force, marking its passage. It was a crushed leaf, a snapped branch in its path, that was all, not the beast, not the power, but the sign, the sign of the beast, the power, the force which Herjellsen called P.
    P was present.
    In the cubicle was P.
    Hamilton was terrified. She was a little girl crying in the night.
    “Do not be afraid,” said William. He was tense.
    “It is tomorrow!” cried Hamilton suddenly.
    “No,” said Gunther. “No. It is like the light. It will pass. It is a subsidiary effect, meaningless.”
    Hamilton shuddered. William held her arm.
    “It is tomorrow,” said Hamilton. “I know it is tomorrow.”
    “It is a disordering of your sense,” said William. “Part of your mind senses the presence of P.”
    “It is today, too,” wept Hamilton.
    “Do not be frightened,” said William. “This is similar to a temporary drug-induced schizophrenia. It is irrelevant to the experiment, the substance of the work”
    William’s eyes were closed. He smiled. “I now have the consciousness of an afternoon, when I was six, in London, on a holiday. It is real.”
    “It is a memory,” whispered Hamilton.
    “No,” said William. “It is not like a memory. It is real, and it is now.”
    “It cannot exist at the same time as now,” whispered Hamilton. “This is a different time.”
    “Two times exist now,” said William. “Each is real. Both are real.”
    “No,” said Hamilton.
    Hamilton shook her head. Herjellsen sat silent, his head beneath the steel hood, his heavy fists clenched. He was leaning forward, tense in the wooden chair. His shoulders were hunched. The toes of his heavy shoes pressed at the boards of the floor, the black, rubber heels lifted. His body, powerful, muscular, squat, seemed then like a rock, but a rock that might contain a bomb, a cart of granite that might explode. His large head was bent, his eyes closed. He was alone under the steel hood, with the coils and receptors, with the darkness, with the tension, the straining of that large, unusual, maddened brain.
    Hamilton knew that the brain emitted waves. These could be empirically verified.
    They were real.
    “The reality and the power is one,” Herjellsen had claimed.
    “Why then,” had asked William, “do you not think you might touch the reality with electricity, or magnetism, or even the blow of your fist?”
    “They are crudely intraphenomenal,” had said Herjellsen. “They are relative to the perceptual mode.”
    “I do not understand,” had said William.
    “They are the furniture of the room,” had said Herjellsen. “They are not the key to the door.”
    But the waves of the brain were crudely physical.
    But, Hamilton recalled, Herjellsen had cried out that the simplistic dichotomy between the physical and the mental was an intellectual convenience, not corresponding to what must be the case. “The dichotomy is false,” had said Herjellsen. “If it were true, the mind could not move the body or the body affect the mind. If it were true, then I could not move my hand when I wish. If it were true, I could not feel pain when my body was injured.”
    “What then is true?” had asked William.
    “A more useful distinction, though itself ultimately dubious,” had said Herjellsen, “is that between the phenomenal and the nonphenomenal, that between the categories and sensibilities of experience and that which exceeds such categories and sensibilities, that which is other than they.”
    “Which is?” asked William.
    “The reality,” had said Herjellsen, “and the power.”
    “The distinction, you said,” commented William, “was ultimately dubious.”
    “I think so,” had responded Herjellsen, “because the phenomenal is itself a mode of the reality; it is a way in which