AN INTERVIEW (AMATEUR SCIENCE FICTION)

Q: Is it numinousness, numinessence, or numinosity?

A: It's like luminous.

Q: You say numinosity?

A: I do.

Q: And when a thing is numinous it exudes an air of mystery, of sanctity?

A: Of energy. It appears charged.

Q: I see. And may I ask how you programmed the computer to recognize and measure the numinosity of these queer items, the "volatic piles" [1] for instance? A: Twenty of us toiled at it night and day for eleven months. Into the UNIVAC, known to us as Maud, we fed everything from arcana pertaining to Zahirs [2] to a catalogue of army-surplus equipage, from lavish colour-plates of fish lures to a tea-stained pamphlet on numismatics. 600 miles of magnetic tape we fed into her! Thank God Maud is a fast learner or we'd still be at it. One morning she was taken with a cadence we were feeding her of Gertrude Stein's: "a lightning cooky, a single wide open and exchanged box filled with the same little sac that shines." Her console went dark a moment, next thing we knew she was drawing up plans for the construction of Stein's sac and demonstrating by means of an elegant equation that once built, 69% of sac's numinosity would be attributable to the "potent triad" embodied in it, by which she meant its Familiarity, Diminution and Radiance. Despite the early hour we broke out champagne. What relief to know those eleven gruelling months hadn't been in vain!