“No, it can’t. The mind is a machine; just as much a machine as one of your automatic pilots or one of my computers. The troubles are that it is almost infinitely more complex and that we do not understand its basic principles—the fundamental laws upon which it operates. We may never understand them . . . the mind may very well be so tied in with the life-principle—or soul; call it whatever you please—as to be knowable only to God.”
“I’m glad you said that, Joan. I’m not formally religious, I suppose, but I do believe in a First Cause.”
“One must, who knows as much about the Macrocosmic All as you do. But it’s too early in the morning for very much of that sort of thing. What are you doing to that chart besides doodling all over it?”
“Those aren’t doodles, woman!” he protested. “They’re equations. In shorthand.”
“Equations, I apologize. Doctor Cloud, elucidate.”
“Doctor Janowick, I can’t. This is where you came in. I had just pursued an elusive wisp of thought into what turned out to be a cul de sac. I whammed my head against a solid concrete wall.” His light mood vanished as he went on:
“In spite of what everybody has always believed, I’ve proved that loose atomic vortices are not accidental. They’re deliberate, every one of them, and. . . .”
“Yes, I heard you tell Phil so,” she interrupted. “I wanted to start screaming about your hypothesis then, and it’s taken superhuman self-control to keep me from screaming about it ever since. That kind of math, though, of course is ’way over my head. . . . For a long time I expected Phil to call up and blast you to a cinder, but he didn’t . . . you may be—must be, I suppose—right.”
“I am right,” Cloud said, quietly. “Unless all the mathematics I know is basically, fundamentally fallacious, they’ve got to be deliberate; they simply can’t be accidental. On the other hand, except for a few we know about which don’t change the general picture in the least, I can’t see any more than you can how they can possibly be deliberate, either.”
“Are you trying to set up a paradox?”