The Great Implication

By STANLEY R. LEE
Illustrated by FINLAY
Pendelton outlined an experiment to test the existence of the God-idea. The question then became obviously: was the experiment Pendelton's idea—or God's?
Was there something contagious about ignorance? Pendelton wondered aloud that day. Was it inevitable, was it in the air the same as ideas were? He thought that might be the answer because what else could explain the fact that a couple of accomplished physicists were about to fall into a time-honored trap that was already gorged with old, rancid science fiction writers; and not only rancid, but crooked: they accepted pay for writing about a subject they knew nothing of and wasn't that stealing?
Pendelton wasn't actually trying to be obnoxious. In fact he liked to make good impressions. He smiled a lot, for instance. And he kept his hands in his pockets so he wouldn't point. He had a peculiar blunt-subtle mind, half of which could split hairs with a Jesuit while the other half couldn't distinguish between a pat on the back and a punch in the jaw.
He rolled right along, smiling and telling them they knew nothing about time travel. Nothing. They were babes in the temporal woods! Having a time machine under construction meant that they were in the possession of what he referred to as mathematical conceptuosity plus above average hardware skills. But that didn't necessarily raise them above the level of the science fiction writers when it came to applications. Or the editors. The readers too, for that matter, all blithely playing their cosy little after-the-fact parts in a fantastic world-wide conspiracy of ignorance.
Blackburn and Shaheen, of course, thought he was out of his mind. They'd only agreed to listen to him because he had a letter from the Humanities department head, that and a wild, intense expression on his face which made them think it would be easier to hear him out than throw him out, so they sat at their back-to-back desks glancing at each other occasionally while Pendelton rambled on about the Great Implication and how it was one day going to separate the logical men from the paradoxical boys—and after about twenty minutes of this they were actually listening to him.