He solved it with a sideslip down final approach: the airplane banked to the left all the way down final approach, that unnatural tilt holding the machine straight despite the crosswind as the left main wheel touched the runway. Only then the right wheel touched gently down, finally the nosewheel.
He fueled the airplane, called a ride to the motel all in a whirl of understanding, a storm-trance.
He checked in, took his room key, walked past a rack of paperbacks. Buy this book, something suggested.
I've already got a book. The shadow of his old self, asking reasons for every smallest choice.
Buy it anyway, the blue one. He did, happily wondering why.
In his room, he pounded gently on the wall. “It is so . . . simple!”
Supercharged, indeed. So this is how the world works! He could do magic.
“Hallo Gwendolyn Hallock!” he said aloud.
He felt her smile, heard her voice in his mind: Just keeping my promise.
“Hallo Blacksmyth the Great!”
Have we ever seen each other, before this evening?
“Yes we have,” cried the pilot softly, “Yes, Sam Black, we have!”
Open the book anywhere.
The pilot picked the paperback from where he had tossed it on the counterpane, opened it at random, eager, trusting. The words which met his eye were science, dense as black bread to the starving:
We are focus-points of consciousness, enormously creative. When we enter the self-constructed hologrammatic arena we call spacetime, we begin at once to generate creativity particles, imajons, in violent continuous pyrotechnic deluge.
Imajons have no charge of their own but are strongly polarized through our attitudes and by the force of our choice and desire into clouds of conceptons, a family of high-energy particles which may be positive, negative, or neutral.
Attitude, choice, desire, thought Jamie Forbes. Of course! Aware or not, conscious or not, that's what determines which suggestions I accept. They affect these little strings, these thought-particles this guy is calling . . . what? He read back a sentence: imajons.
Some common positive conceptons are exhilarons, excytons, rhapsodons, jovions. Common negative conceptons include gloomons, tormentons, tribulons, miserons.
What I'm feeling right now, he thought, must be them excytons.
Infinite numbers of conceptons are created in nonstop eruption, a thundering cascade of creativity pouring from every center of personal consciousness. They mushroom into concepton clouds, which can be neutral or strongly charged—buoyant, weightless, or leaden, depending upon the nature of their dominant particles.
Every nanosecond, an uncountable number of concepton clouds build to critical mass, then transform in quantum bursts to high-energy probability waves radiating at tachyon speeds through an eternal reservoir of supersaturated alternate events.
For a second the page disappeared and he saw the fireworks in his mind, movies from microscopes in orbit.
Depending on their charge and nature, the probability waves crystallize certain of these potential events to match the mental polarity of their creating consciousness into holographic appearance.
That's how I got to fly airplanes. Mental polarity. Visualizing. My own autosuggestion triggering thought-particles into . . . into what does he call them? Into probability waves. This guy doesn't know it, but he's describing how it works, everyday hypnotism, suggestion, the Law of Attraction!
The materialized events become that mind's experience, freighted with all the aspects of physical structure necessary to make them real and learningful to the creating consciousness. This autonomic process is the fountain from which springs every object and event in the theatre of spacetime.
Every object? Of course, from our consent and visualization. Every event? What are events but objects in proximity, acting together?
The persuasion of the imajon hypothesis lies in its capacity for personal confirmation. The hypothesis predicts that as we focus our conscious intention on the positive and life-affirming, as we fasten our thoughts on these values, we polarize masses of positive conceptons, realize beneficial probability waves, bring useful alternate events to us that otherwise would not have appeared to exist.
That's no hypothesis, he thought, it works. Sure enough, he thought. Real laws, you can prov
e them yourself.
The reverse is true in the production of negative events, as is the mediocre in-between. Through default or intention, unaware or by design, we not only choose but create the visible outer conditions that are most resonant to our inner state of being.