The Gist Hunter Read Online Free PDF

the Thim
    My lecture to the assembled savants of the Delve at Five City on the world known as Pierce having been well received, I was conducted to a reception in the First Undermaster's rooms where a buffet of local seafruits and a very presentable aperitif wine stood waiting.
    As Old Earth's foremost freelance discriminator, with an earned reputation for unraveling complex mysteries, I had been invited to lecture on systems of asymmetric logic. I had published a small monograph on the subject the year before. The paper had been reprinted and passed along through various worlds of The Spray, like a blown leaf bouncing down a cobbled street, and the fellows of the Delve were not the only academics sufficiently stimulated to request an elaboration of my views. But they were the only ones to couple their invitation to a first-class ticket on a starship of the Green Orb line. I was happy to accept.
    Halfway through my first glass of the wine, which grew more interesting with each sip, my perfunctory conversation with the Dean of the faculty of applied metaphysics was interrupted by a wizened old scholar, his back as bent as a point of punctuation, who advanced an argument.
    The Dean introduced him as a professor emeritus while rolling his eyes and making other gestures that indicated I should prepare for a tedious encounter.
    "Surely the great Henghis Hapthorn," the old fellow said, in a voice that creaked like unoiled leather, "will not deny that in an infinity of space and time any event that can happen, however remote its probability, will happen."
    "I do not bother to deny it," I said. "I simply dismiss it as irrelevant."
    "But you have said yourself that when all the impossible answers to a question have been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the true answer."
    "Indeed," I said.
    The old man's gimlet gaze bored into me. "Yet in your discussion of the Case of the Winged Dagger, you discounted the possibility that the victim's false suicide note might have been produced by his pet rodent randomly striking the controls of his scriptamanet as it pursued moths about his study."
    "I did," I agreed.
    "Even though the person accused in the matter offered just that supposition when the case was adjudicated."
    "The defense would have held more cogency if she had not been discovered still holding the stiletto that had pierced the victim's heart," I said.
    "Ahah!" said my interlocutor. "So you also dismiss her contention that explosive gases propelled the weapon out of his chest and across the room and that she merely caught the instrument to prevent it from injuring her?"
    "I do."
    "Even though the victim had dined heartily on bombard beans, well known to generate copious quantities of methane."
    "Indeed," I said, "the constant side effects of his diet were advanced by the procurator's office as a partial motive for his murder. Still, although beans are colloquially associated with offering benefits to the heart, they are not known to charge that organ with propulsive gases."
    "Yet, in an infinite universe it could happen, and therefore it did happen."
    "Yes," I said, "but across an unbounded expanse of space and time, it most likely happened long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away."
    At that point the Dean spilled a bowl of gelatinous dip onto the old fellow's shoes, prompting him to withdraw. My reading of the Dean's expression told me that the spillage had not been an instance of purely random chance.
    "I, too, have a question," said another voice. Had its owner been a character in popular fiction, it would have been called bluff and hearty .
    I turned to see a bluff-and-hearty-looking man of middle years dressed in what passed for conservative garments on Pierce—voluminous trousers sewn in a patchwork of glittering metallic fabrics, a sleeveless waistcoat of rough homespun and overstuffed hat and shoes. My inventorying of his attire distracted me for a moment from a close inspection of his face, so he was