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Just Think of It by Subroto Mukerji

The Laundromat was crowded, and the man behind Ben in the queue
looked at his watch impatiently and shifted his weight to his other leg. “Chill, Mister,”
said Ben in a friendly tone, “I think I’m about finished.” Just then, the machine switched
itself off with a loud ‘ping’ and the tumbler slowed to a stop. “Well I’ll be ...!” swore Ben
under his breath, startled. The countdown timer had said there were fifteen seconds still
to go.
“Rigged!” he concluded. Shorter cycles meant higher turnover...‘Ha Ha!
Sorry for the pun, but it’s true! The less the number of turns, the more turns at the
machines, sort of like the velocity of circulation of money! Still, it was uncanny, the way
the washing machine had stopped just as soon as he’d said that he thought he was
through.
He was still thinking about it as he reached home, even when he went
back to the Sunday paper for a second leisurely read. A catchy heading caught his
eye...‘Crackpot Inventor Cracks Jackpot’. He read on. Apparently, one Jacob Turnstile,
who once claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine, had won a lottery with
his last ten dollars. When interviewed, all Turnstile would say was that he had gotten sick
and tired of being poor trying to make the world rich, and had shifted focus to himself.
He thought he deserved some compensation for his efforts.
Ben smiled to himself. ‘Perpetual motion, forsooth! Next we’ll hear of
someone who’s discovered a way of materializing things out of thin air: kind of like
‘thought of power = power of thought!’ he thought. He quit thinking about it as he
switched on the TV and watched the Dodgers. He didn’t think they had a hope in hell: the
Yankees were on a roll. ‘C’mon, you guys!’ he yelled, ‘they’ll massacre you if you don’t
get your act together.’
The Dodgers lost pathetically, just they way he’d thought they would. It
set him thinking. He had thought, then he’d said: both with supreme conviction. And lo!
It had come to pass...just like that! It had happened! It had become reality! Naah! Sheer
coincidence!
His eye came to rest on another caption: ‘Thoughts move matter’.
Scientists trying to come up with an improved version of a polygraph had discovered that
activity in the brain was electrical. The human brain, when engaged in ‘mental
activity’—which was just jargon for ‘thinking’—produced electrical energy that
deflected the needle of a measuring instrument. If you chose to see it another way,
thought Ben, Thought moves Matter. It was worth thinking about.
Ben read up on ‘Matter’. He went past the High School definitions, past
descriptions of the atomic world, and ran full tilt into Quantum Mechanics. And here he
had to unlearn all that he’d learned earlier. For the world of subatomic particles was an
unpredictable and paradoxical one, he discovered. Subatomic particles had no discernible
rules; they shot through a window that was opened for them in a screen, but if two
windows were opened, and one was shut after the particles had been ‘fired’, they
invariably went through the open window instead of colliding with the one that had shut
while they were on the way!
They only displayed a ‘tendency’ to exist, because there was no known
way of pinning one down in definite terms. After all, it wasn’t a beetle or a slug: it was an
infinitesimally-tiny packet of energy that was traveling at speeds undreamt of, with some
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going even faster than light! Outside the blackboard diagrams, it was one way of
explaining how it was possible for one of them to travel back and forth in space-time, in
perfect accord with the Theory of Relativity.
If anyone tried to measure its velocity, it was impossible to chart its
position. And if its position was determined, its velocity was indeterminate!
Observations, too, varied from observer to observer, no matter the measuring apparatus
used in the experiments, so that it suggested that personal factors influenced whatever
observations were recorded. There seemed to be so much subjectivity involved in the
whole process that it almost appeared as if it was simply what the scientist ‘thought’ was
going on...and nothing more! One Sir James Jeans, in a moment of sheer desperation or
lucid insight—the choice of deciding which state of mind he was operating from was
open to individual interpretation—had even gone so far as to say that the whole universe
looked more like a great thought than a great machine!
That could only mean one thing: these tiny particles could somehow think!
Moreover, they communicated with each other in ways unimaginable...otherwise it was
hard to explain how the experience of a particle at one location was often simultaneously
replicated in another particle in another part of the universe! Superluminal connectivity,
it was called. It supported the mystic belief that everything existed simultaneously...and
everything was inter-connected. Perhaps all of it was nothing but a Single Entity, thought
Ben, inspired as never before.
He was hooked. If the whole universe was nothing but a Thought...why,
then, the mystics were right on! The whole thing was an illusion, a fantasy world
populated by ‘separate’ entities that believed they existed within disparate spaces and
time zones. The world of discernible, audible, and palpable phenomena was nothing but
an interpretation of sensory inputs as perceived by our sense organs...none of which were
sensitive enough to pierce the façade. It was all a gigantic hoax, a continuous steam of
phenomena with a tendency to exist, beamed down as a thought-perception by someone
else... Who was All There Was. Physics and metaphysics converged in Ben.
The poor brain—handicapped by the time lag that was inevitable between
the occurrence of physical phenomena and the receipt of electrical signals from the
sensors in the ears, eyes, skin nose, and tongue—was always out of step with Reality! It
presented the results of its processing (based on previous experience, which itself
appeared to be erroneous) for acceptance by the conscious mind—which unquestioningly
noted a reality that didn’t really exist!
If one accepted that so-called ‘observable’ phenomena were mere
fabrications of the mind—inasmuch as they had very little to do with the actual state of
affairs at the moment of ‘observation’—then the inescapable conclusion was that all
observed phenomena were merely thought creations! In other words, thought Ben, we see
what we think we see!
Taking this reasoning a step further, Ben realised, shocked, that it was
possible that we see what we wish to see...whatever predominates in our thoughts gets
materialized! That accounted for the variety of individual tastes that everyone from
couturiers to caterers, well...catered to. Things of mass consumption were acceptable to
mass-produced, unimaginative minds that thought along near-identical channels. Things
of rare taste were appreciated by the few who had the gray matter to imagine...i.e., think
differently!
No wonder they shunned products that appealed to the lowest common
denominator, for their refined sensibilities craved exposure to things at a higher level.
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They lived faster, thought faster, earned faster, learned faster...in the fast lane of life
which existed, logically, at higher frequencies of vibration!
So that was why the thoughts of different people (who functioned at
individual levels of vibration), deflected the needle of a measuring instrument by
different amounts! And why people on the same ‘wave-length’ frequently anticipated
each other’s thoughts...telepathy!
Everything was in constant vibration (or oscillation, if you will), thought
Ben. Why, the whole universe and all that was in it obeyed this law. Everything was in
constant motion, even a rock. Looked at closely enough—at the subatomic level—the
rock was nothing but a mass of swirling particles that appeared to move along certain
paths in constant and violent agitation—particles, moreover, that had only a ‘tendency’ to
exist. Ben wondered whether an influx of energy could disrupt that tendency...destroying
the rock’s tenuous tendency to exist in its present form. If a charge of dynamite could do
that, why not a powerful thought?
He was agog with curiosity now: the Dodgers had faded away into another
reality he didn’t trust very much any more. Pursuing his line of thought, Ben came to the
conclusion that thought, being energy operating at different levels of vibration, produced
what was discernible to our senses as ‘matter’, whose individual manifestations vibrated
at particular frequencies in keeping with their ‘densities’. The ‘denser’ something was
felt to be, the slower was the rate of vibration of its component subatomic particles...and
vice-versa.
‘For a college dropout, I’m not doing too bad a job of dissecting my
reality and deciding what, in my opinion, makes it tick,’ thought Ben to himself, well
aware now that he functioned within an illusion. He wondered whether he should use his
new-found enlightenment and see whether he could influence—if not actually create—
matter. Then he shelved the idea. Life was complicated enough as it was, he thought,
without messing around with reality and matter, things that were best left alone.
And so, at the hour of his greatest trial, Ben backed away from the edge of
the abyss. But destiny will not be denied. He had been chosen...and he would be put to
test.

It was all over the morning papers. Every television news channel was
airing live updates from NASA, every hour on the hour. It appeared that an amateur
astronomer called Shoemaker had been long been expecting something like this to
happen. For decades, he had been plotting the paths of large asteroids—those that passed
uncomfortably close to the Earth—and his charts made viewers gasp.
It appeared that many times in the recent past, several large chunks of rock
had narrowly missed the Earth. Shoemaker had plotted the swirling patterns which
represented the orbits of these asteroids in their too-close-for-comfort flybys of planet
Earth, and it was obvious to even the most optimistic observer that it was simply a matter
of time before one of these mile-long rocks, weighing trillions of tons, finally struck the
planet. And now it was coming true, almost as if Shoemaker’s revelations needed
concrete justification. A rock was on a collision course with Earth.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to Ben that this was one
heck of a powerful illusion. That meant that there was a colossal amount of energy in it.
The asteroid appeared to be immense, incredibly heavy, and traveling at fantastic speed
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straight for Earth. The last one around had wiped out the dinosaurs. If this one connected,
it would be the undoing of Man. It was passing closer and closer with every fly-past. It
couldn’t be more than six or seven months before it hit. There was only one thing to be
done, he thought...

“You think what? Look, mister, if Wally hadn’t sent you, and if the
storyline wasn’t so good, you’d be out on the pavement faster’n you c’n say ‘asteroid’.
As things stand, however, you’re in luck. What with all these digital effects, I think I can
make the movie and premiere it well within six months,” agreed the producer-director.
Thought was a prime mover, thought Ben happily.
Ben kept his inner turmoil to himself. Did it really matter what the
considerations were in deciding to make the movie? All he knew was that it had to hit the
theatres well before the rock hit the Earth.
The next five months were the most suspenseful months of Ben’s (and
Earth’s) life. Wally was making merry. He’d collected a packet for the storyline. As a
former studio hand of Isaiah F. Goldberg, he knew the movie mogul would buy it. It was
right up his alley, seeing he’d cut his teeth on musicals with historical backgrounds, then
anticipated (as well as honed) public taste by making action-packed romances with a
martial arts content. The time was ripe for science fiction that the common man could
relate to. Wally had raked it in. Twenty grand is a lot of vodka.
The movie opened to packed halls, picking up $85 million in the first two
weeks. The pre-release publicity blitz had millions queuing for tickets on opening day.
‘Barry Trotter and the Doggone Bone’ had been buried but good, and ‘Gone with the
Wind II’ had been blown away, too.

“Wally,” asked Ben, “do you have any idea that you are – effectively at
least – the saviour of the human race? You never did understand why it was so important
to get that movie made, did you?”
Wally shook his head. “Nope. And I don’t wanna unnerstand, either. All
that yap about mass-hypnosis, the massed thought-energy making that rock explode, just
because folks saw it happen in the movie and thought about it—believed it—sorry, Ben, I
don’t buy that. It goes clean overhead.”
Ben sighed, and began all over again.
“Look, Wally, thought is energy, right? And energy can make as well as
destroy matter, since Matter is nothing but Thought...see? No? OK, let’s look at it from
another angle. Tell me...what’s an ‘Atom Bomb’?”
Wally brightened up. “Four fingers of rye, three of vodka, and two of
rum,” he said confidently.
~*~