Poltergeist phenomena.
Ah yes. It might be advisable to get slightly soused tonight. But Thomas was a physicist. He did not quail or get slightly panicky at the idea of the unknown, even though the unknown was known to have tossed a slab of marble—appropriately, a tombstone—several hundred feet through a caretaker's shed.
To be sure, it was slightly running against the grain to sit there in the broad daylight and read about things that according to all physics from Archimedes to Einstein claimed impossible, racial superstition, and old wives' tales. It was very disquieting to read of stones—dead, inert, lifeless, immobile bits of granite—that took off from Mother Earth with no visible means of support, to go whizzing through the thin daylight air at speeds that raised bruises, cut nicks in trees, and shattered windows. It bothered the sense of propriety. It was not right. It was like seeing Lake Louise in violent flame, or watching Niagara go tumbling up from the whirling pools to the ledge that flanked Goat Island. It was crushing chrome-vanadium test-bars between your fingers just after removal from a tensile strength machine that failed to fracture them at fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. It was watching phosphorus lying inert in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.
It was all wrong.
And yet, thought the physicist, what must the Ancient One have thought when he considered the act of fire melting hard metal? They did strange things, in those days. They invented phlogiston, and spent centuries trying to isolate it. Galileo and his telescope, looking through it to Jupiter, must have been startled at the concept as well as the sight of a planetary system in operation.
Science knew that the poltergeist was a problem—but like the man who does not care to go crazy because of the insoluble problem, science shrugged, admitted that it was stumped—intelligently enough, under the circumstances—and then remarked that after finding the next decimal place, it would, perhaps, take a look into the natural phenomena of things that were thrown by nothing.
Until that date, it could look the other way and claim that small boys were throwing stones.
Little boys that they could not see.
Little green men—