Outside he climbed behind the wheel of his hot rod and sat there, making no motion to start the motor. He was thinking.
Mark Smythe had said that he overheard two of his fellow class-men discussing the theory, one of them remarking that, "It would be funny if we were here just because we were descended from a long line of people who believed this was the only place."
Could that be the key?
Take gravitation, for instance. If it were something that some vital part of you had to believe, and that vital part didn't believe, would the entire person go flying off into space?
What about inanimate matter? Did it have to believe too? And what about other forms of life?
Or was everything except human beings just part of the props?
He shook his head. That didn't seem like quite the right track. He took another.
The human mind builds up a picture of the outside universe through its senses. Sometimes its ideas are wrong. Right or wrong, inside everyone's mind is a universe, derived from the outside universe.
What if the outside universe were derived from something? Derived from what? The real, logically necessary universe? That could be. At least it seemed to have some value as a starting point.
He tried to reason from that point. Frustration grew in him. He wished he were older, had his university education behind him. There were so many things he couldn't begin to deal with.