The Walking Shadow. Brian Stableford

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      Wishart’s underpants were sticking to his skin, making him feel dirty. He hated to feel dirty, but his flesh had sweated all summer and there’d never been a day when he’d felt really clean. It was a psychological quirk, he knew, but knowing it didn’t lessen the feeling, and he prayed for winter to come. He thought of Herdman sitting alone in the office above the west stand, casually washing his thoughts down the internal sewer that soaked up all the whisky without ever letting him get truly drunk. Wishart felt sticky, and stale, and lonely.

      In a sense, he was alone. He was a rock in the ocean of feeling that moved over him, dragged by the tide of Paul’s presence. He was untouched, his surface so hard as to be immune from erosion. Paul was talking directly to eighty thousand people, while a further six million looking in through TV were as far on the way to being spellbound as anyone could be watching a TV set, but he was talking right past Adam Wishart.

      Wishart wasn’t tuned in. He couldn’t afford to be converted. In the same way that people who handle dynamite couldn’t afford impetuousness, and people making tear gas lost the ability to cry, Wishart had long ago learned to kill the spontaneous reactions evoked within his head by music or rhetoric. All sound reverberated within his consciousness now like echoes in an empty drum.

      The halo effect was okay now, and Wishart settled himself to watch Paul’s face. In spite of the glare of the lights, Paul’s pupils were dilated for the benefit of the TV audience. People responded better to people whose pupils were dilated, because it constituted a subliminal signal of attraction. It meant, of course, that Paul was practically blind because of the dazzle, but that didn’t matter. He knew his script, not just because he had memorized it but because he felt it, deep down. His heart was in it, every time he spoke.

      Paul was talking now, as he always did, about the need for belief. He made people feel that need, and made them realize that it was the greatest need they had. Then he offered them something to believe in. It was a soft sell, a coaxing invitation. He never told them that what he offered them to believe was true, just that it would answer their need. That was good, because the reason virtually all these people had stopped believing in everything else was that they could no longer accept the truth of anything, or even the very notion of truth. Paul swept the whole problem of truth out of the way, dismissed it as irrelevant, and for that they were grateful, because truth had become their nightmare. Paul asked people to believe what he said not because it was true, but because it felt right, because it answered the need to believe.

      And they did.

      Wishart looked sideways at the make-up girl who sat beside him. Her own make-up was cracking and sweat was beginning to show, but her eyes were riveted to Paul’s gesturing hands high above. She was a long way from the mundane world of perspiration, cruising toward spiritual orgasm. The magic was working, as it was working on everyone. Three-dollars-and-a-half for the experience, fifteen for a video-cassette that would recall it again and again and let them relive it a hundred times, until, in the fullness of time, it decayed into mere noise and a pretty face and ridiculous gesticulations.

      All things, thought Wishart, must pass. It was a tenet of faith that he had always taken for granted. He had lived more than fifty years in the world and had never found cause to challenge it. He knew that Paul’s message, like all the others, would eventually fail to answer the undiminished need for belief, which would call for something new, and even more desperate, to fight the threat of the decay that seemed to have seized the whole human world.

      Wishart blinked away the sweat that had oozed into the corner of his right eye.

      Somewhere in mid-blink, he missed the event, which seemed to take no time at all.

      At one moment, there was the pure white of Paul’s costume, the artificial halo, the blond hair and the smooth flesh of the made-up face; then there was a blaze of light that dazzled, reflected from the face and hands that were suddenly mirror-bright.

      The arms, which had reached out but a moment before as if to embrace the vistas of the hopeful future, were frozen now as if time itself had been interrupted.

      Among the eighty thousand people who were physically present there were some who screamed and some who sighed. The TV viewers, inevitably, reacted more slowly.

      Where Paul Heisenberg had stood there was now a silver statue, dressed in the same white tunic, but reflecting from the surface that had once been bare flesh all the light that had been carefully directed to compose the glowing nimbus.

      The glow was even brighter now, and in the stillness which followed the abrupt interruption of the beautiful voice, there was a profundity that seemed terrible even to Adam Wishart.

      He knew, as they all did, that he had witnessed—or failed to witness in the unfortunate blink of an eye—a miracle.

      AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

      Science is knowledge, and what qualifies a statement as a scientific statement is contained within the process by which we have arrived at the conclusion that it is true. The credentials of a scientific statement are established by the method we have used in order to prove it. Basically, this method consists in the rigorous testing of the statement in competition with other statements that claim to describe or explain the relevant sensory evidence. All scientific knowledge is empirical (which is to say, based on sense-data) and systematic (which is to say, concerned with organizing such data by means of generalizations). Any statement whose truth cannot be established by reference to sensory data falls outside the scope of science.

      At one time, it was believed by the most enthusiastic champions of science that the answers to all conceivable problems lay within its scope. Science, it was said, would in the fullness of time reveal the grand plan of the universe and permit perfect understanding of the system of systems. It was recognized that people could devise questions that science could not hope to answer, but those questions were ruled out of court, as illegitimate and essentially meaningless. All that was not knowable was held to be nonsensical. Metaphysics, the speculative philosophical discipline that attempted to investigate what lies beyond the scope of scientific enquiry—the reality “behind” the perceived world—was deemed to be a barren and sterile pursuit. The questions of metaphysics, it was said, were questions that could not sensibly be asked, because they could not sensibly be answered.

      That era of confidence in science is now past. It is not that the character of science has changed, but that we have changed. Once, a majority of intelligent people could feel secure within the horizons of expanding scientific knowledge, but now we feel insecure. We have discovered that the system of systems offers us less self-satisfaction than it once did. We have discovered indeterminacy in the physical world and uncertainty within ourselves.

      We now feel that the limits placed by the philosophy of science on what we can know are narrower and more restrictive than we require. We have become uncomfortable within the world-view of modem science.

      It is by no means simple to find a cure for this discomfort, and the one thing that is certain is that more scientific knowledge cannot ease the situation in the least; the fault is in ourselves.

      It is in response to this gathering sense of insecurity that there has been in recent years an increasing interest in the speculative disciplines of metascience. It is, I think, more reasonable to talk of metascience than of metaphysics, firstly because the new metascience is quite unlike the classical metaphysics, and secondly because our new speculations are more concerned with reaching through and beyond the biological and the social sciences than with the shadowy area of first causes that lies beyond the physical sciences.

      There is, however, another СКАЧАТЬ