“Oh, come,” said Hodge, “that’s a specialized—”
“No it isn’t,” said Penfield. “He’s perfectly right. Gunpowder destroyed the feudal system, and produced the atmosphere in which your steam engine became possible. And remember that all the older civilizations, even in the East, were subject to periodic setbacks by barbarian invasions. Gunpowder provided civilized man with a technique no barbarian could imitate, and helped him over the difficult spots.”
McCall said; “All the metal-working techniques and most of chemistry depend on the use of explosives—basically. Imagine digging out all the ores we need by hand.”
“All right, then,” said Hodge, “have your fun. Let’s imagine a world like this one, in which gunpowder has never been invented. What are you going to have it look like?”
“I don’t know,” said McCall, “but I think Penfield’s wrong about one point. About the feudal system, I mean. It was pretty shaky toward the end, and the cannon that battered down the castles only hurried up the process. There might be a lot more pieces of the feudal system hanging around without gunpowder, but the thing would be pretty well shot.”
“Now, look here,” said Hodge. “You’ve overlooked something else. If you’re going to eliminate gunpowder and everything that came out of it, you’ll have to replace it with something. After all, a large part of the time and attention of our so-called civilization have been spent in working out the results of the gunpowder and steam engine inventions, If you take those away, you’ll have a vacuum, which I’m told, nature abhors. There would have to be a corresponding development in some other field, going ’way beyond where we are.”
Penfield drank and nodded. “That’s fair,” he said. “A development along some line we’ve neglected because we have been too busy with mechanics. Why couldn’t it be in the region of ESP, or psychology or psychiatry—science of the mind?”
“But the psychologists are just operating on the ordinary principles of physical science,” said McCall. “Observing, verifying from a number of examples, and then attempting to predict. I don’t see how another race would have gone farther by being ignorant of these principles or overlooking them.”
“You’re being insular,” said Penfield. “I don’t mean that in another world they would have turned psychology into an exact science in our terms. It might be something altogether different. Your principles of science are developed along the lines of arithmetic. The reason they haven’t worked very well in dealing with the human mind may be because they aren’t applicable at all. There may be quite a different line of approach. Think it over for a moment. It might even be along the line of magic, witchcraft.”
“I like that,” said McCall. “You want to make a difference by substituting something phoney for something real.”