Fenwick looked at him steadily. "Human creativeness can be mined only by flotation methods. It's in low-grade ore. Process a million stupid notions and find a pin point of genius. Turn over enormous wastes of human thought and recover a golden principle. But turn your back on these mountains of low-grade material and you shut out the wealth of creative thought that is buried in them. More than that, by high-grading only where rich veins have appeared in the past, you're mining lodes that have played out."
"An ingenious analogy," said Baker, recovering with a smile now. "But it's hardly an accurate or applicable one. The human mind is not a piece of precious metal found in a mountain of ore. Rather, it's an intricate device capable of producing computations of unbelievable complexity. And we know how such devices that are superior in function are produced, and we know what their characteristics are. We also know that such a device does not 'play out'. If it is superior in function, it can remain so for a long time."
"High-grading," said Fenwick. "And the vein is played out. You'll never find the thing you're looking for until you develop means of processing low-grade material."
Baker watched Fenwick across the desk. He was weary of the whole thing. He certainly had no need to prove himself to this man. He had simply tried to do Fenwick a favor, and Fenwick had thrown it right back in his face. Yet there was a temptation to go on, to prove to Fenwick the difference between their two worlds. Fenwick belonged to a world compounded of inevitable failure. The temptation to show him, to try again to lift him out of it was born of a kind of pity for Fenwick.
Baker's own life had arrowed decisively, without waver, to a goal that was as correct as the tolerances of human error could make it. He often permitted himself the pride of considering his mind somewhat as a computer that had been programmed through a magnificent gene inheritance to drive irresistibly toward the precise goals he had reached. But Fenwick—Fenwick was still fumbling around in a morass of uncertainty. After years of erratic starts and stops he was now confusedly trying to make something out of that miserable little institution called Clearwater College.
It wasn't particularly friendship that urged Baker to show Fenwick. Their friendship was of a breed that Baker had never quite been able to define to his own satisfaction. It seemed to him there was a sort of deadly fascination in associating with a man who walked so blindly, who was so profoundly incapable of understanding his own blindness and peril.
"I'm going to show you," Baker said abruptly, "exactly what it would mean if we were to do as you suggest. I'll show you what it would be like to give attention to every halfwit and crackpot that comes begging for a handout." He switched the intercom and spoke into it. "Doris, please bring in the Ellerbee file. Yes—the crackpot section."
He switched off. "Doris has her own quaint but quite accurate way of cataloguing our various applications," he explained.
In a moment the secretary entered and placed the file on the desk. "There's a new letter in there," she said. "Dr. Pehrson initialed it. He said you didn't want to be bothered any more with this case."