Authors: David Lubar

B005N8ZFUO EBOK (12 page)

BOOK: B005N8ZFUO EBOK

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

THE EDGEVIEW EXPRESS

DATED THE PREVIOUS MONDAY

PICK A CARD, ANY CARD

T
orchie’s eyes lit up. Okay—maybe that was a bad choice of words. But I could tell he was excited. “Wow, a harmonica,” he said, taking the gift. “I’ve always wanted one. You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. My sister gave it to me last April for my birthday. think it was her idea of a joke. I never learned to play it. I just threw it in my bag when I packed. Guess I threw it in for you.” It was the perfect gift for him. As far as I could tell, it was pretty much fireproof except for the little reeds on the inside of each hole. And they tended to get pretty spitty, so they’d be safe as soon as he started playing.

“But you didn’t even know me back then.”

I was about to say,
Maybe I’m psychic
, but I caught myself. It wasn’t a good time for that kind of joke.

Torchie blew into the harmonica, producing a batch of random notes, then pulled it away from his mouth and smiled. “Great. Did you recognize that?”

“Give me a clue.”

“It was
‘Oh Susannah
,’” he said.

“Right. Yeah. Now I recognize it. Good job.” I got the sinking feeling I’d just created a monster.

“Too bad I can’t play and sing at the same time. That would be cool.”

“Yeah. Too bad.”

Torchie spent the next hour or so happily making noises with the
harmonica. Some of the notes even sort of resembled songs if you didn’t listen too closely. At least he wasn’t angry with me anymore.

The next day, at breakfast, it seemed as if an invisible signal had been sent to the other kids. Maybe it was the sight of Torchie and me standing together in line. Anyhow, Cheater and Flinch and Lucky once again recognized my existence. Except for a layer of coolness that I knew would eventually melt, everything was headed back the way it had been before.

Almost everything.

As I sat down with them, I snuck a guilty look at Trash, alone at his table. Maybe he expected me to sit with him. He glanced toward me. I thought about asking him to join us. But I’d just patched things up with the others. I didn’t think it was the right time. I felt like a rat. I’d used him when I needed company, and now I was abandoning him. Maybe that should be my nickname. Martin the Rat.

As rotten as I felt about Trash, the rottenness was diluted by relief. I was back from exile.

Even though I’d decided to keep my mouth shut, I still kept my eyes open for anything unusual. But by Monday, when I went to Mr. Briggs’s class, I hadn’t found any new suspects to add to my list. Maybe his lecture on scientific methods had made me look at things more carefully. If you want to see something badly enough, you’re going to see it even if it isn’t there.

“All right, class,” Mr. Briggs said once we’d all gotten comfortable. “Let’s hear your ideas for experiments.”

Bloodbath spoke out. “I figured I could decide to hit someone. If he stayed in the room, we’d know he didn’t read my mind.” He chuckled. Then he smashed one fist onto the floor.

“Very interesting,” Mr. Briggs said, “but I don’t know how scientific that would be.”

The class discussed ideas. A couple of the kids had heard about Zenner cards, though they didn’t know them by that name. I did, because of the reading I’d done. A standard set has five different symbols;
a square, a star, wavy lines, and a couple of other things. There are five of each, so a deck has twenty-five cards. One person looks at a card, and the other person tries to read his mind and say what the card is or guess the card before anyone sees it.

The rest of the class leaped on the idea of the cards. Even though I knew more about the subject than anyone in the room, I kept my mouth shut. I really wanted to stay out of it. And I didn’t want to give Mr. Briggs the satisfaction of thinking he’d gotten me involved.

“Okay,” Mr. Briggs said when the discussion started to die down. “We all seem to like the cards, but we still need to design the experiment. How should we do it?”

“We have to switch around,” Flinch said. “So we get as many combinations of kids as possible.”

“Great,” Mr. Briggs said. “The more pairs we test, the more data we gather. It would take a long time if we ran every possible pairing. So we can’t do that. But we can run tests for a day or two and see how many we can get done. But first, we have to make the cards. I’ll bring in some supplies tomorrow and we can pitch in to assemble the decks. Then we can run tests on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday, we can examine our results.”

He walked back to the blackboard and picked up where he’d left off on the regular lesson. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to tell that most of the kids were excited about the experiment. Cheater, who was chattering away with Flinch, seemed as excited as everyone else. I guess he was sure the test would prove he didn’t have any special talents.

As it turned out, the one absolute thing the experiment proved was that I couldn’t see into the future.

TESTING, TESTING …

T
uesday afternoon, Mr. Briggs dumped a bagful of playing cards on the classroom floor. “Pair up. Take twenty-five cards.” He passed out sheets of paper with the five symbols printed on them. I guess he’d designed the pages on the computer. He also passed out glue and those blunt scissors—the kind people give little kids so they won’t hurt themselves or someone else. “Get to work,” he said.

We started making the decks, gluing the symbols onto the faces of the playing cards. There was a square, a star, a plus sign, a minus sign, and wavy lines.

“Why can’t we just use the pieces of paper?” Torchie asked.

“Anyone?” Mr. Briggs asked the class.

“The backs have to be identical,” Flinch said.

“Right.” Mr. Briggs nodded. “If there are any differences in the shape of the cards, the test results aren’t valid.”

We made up all the cards we needed by the end of class. The next day, we started the tests. Before we began, Mr. Briggs gave us some instructions. “The tester has to keep score. Get out a piece of paper. Every time the subject makes a guess, write either
H
for a hit or
M
for a miss, but don’t let the other person see the card, even after he’s guessed. That information could be used to help make the next guess. When you finish the test, count up the hits and misses. I wrote a program to keep track of the scores. Go to the computer, select
the name of the sender and receiver, and enter how many hits you recorded.” He paused for a moment. I guess he was waiting to see if there were questions. Nobody said anything. “Okay, pair up and let’s get started.”

For the first test, I was paired with Lucky. I got six right. Lucky got five right—that was about what I expected. There were five different symbols, so each guess had one chance in five of being right. With twenty-five cards, a person who was just guessing blindly would be right about five times. A person might beat the odds and guess right six or seven times—maybe even eight—but only someone who could read minds would get a high score like fifteen or twenty.

“Pick another partner,” Mr. Briggs said after everyone had finished the first pair of experiments.

I found myself with one of the runts. I got five hits. So did he. Right on the average for each of us. On the last round of the day, as everyone scrambled for partners, I took too long making up my mind. There was only one person left. Cheater looked at me from across the room. I’d avoided him so far. I just didn’t want to be part of the proof. That way, he couldn’t blame me. But now I had no choice.

“I’ll go first,” he said. “You be the tester.” He seemed happy we were working together and eager to get started.

I reached for the top card. It took me two tries to get a grip on it. I stared at the figure on the face of the card.
Square
, I thought, trying to imagine a giant square.

“Star,” Cheater guessed.

I wrote
M
on the pad to record the miss and picked up the next card. It was a cross.

“Wavy lines,” Cheater guessed.

That’s how it went. As each card slid off the deck, I felt a little more of my confidence drain away. Cheater missed every single one. At first I was disappointed. But as I entered the score in the computer, I felt a bit relieved, too. Maybe it all had been my imagination. Maybe it was time to forget the whole thing.

I got seven right when Cheater tested me, “Hey, it looks like you’re the mind reader,” he said, grinning.

I held back a nasty reply. He was just trying to be friendly.

That was the last test we had time for that period. We ran another three sets on Thursday. By then, everyone was talking about the experiment.

“I got eight, once,” Torchie said. “But another time, I just got three.”

“It balances out,” I told him. “If you ran one test, just about anything could happen. One test doesn’t mean much at all. If you ran ten tests, you’d probably come close to the average. But if you ran a thousand tests, you’d get even closer.” I wanted to explain more about averages, but I stopped when I noticed his eyes start to glaze over.

My own words lingered in my mind.
One test doesn’t mean much at all
. I wondered whether my one test with Cheater was a fluke. Maybe he’d scored higher with other people. I’d find out soon enough.

The next day, everyone seemed eager to hear the results. “Well, class,” Mr. Briggs said, “we have some interesting numbers.” He had the computer keyboard in his lap. “First, let’s see if anyone scored higher than we expected, since that’s the whole point of our investigation. I’ll pull up a list of subjects who averaged better than five hits on their tests.”

We all crowded around the monitor. A bunch of names scrolled up. I could feel a wave of excitement pass through the room. Nobody—except for me—had ever expected any sort of special results. And I definitely hadn’t expected more than one mind reader to show up in the class.

“Now let’s check the specific details,” Mr. Briggs said. He hit a few more keys. The screen changed. “We seem to have two groups that had high scores. Robert, Justin, and Trevor all did better than average. I’ll put up their results and see what you think.”

I looked at the information. Each of the three had scored a perfect round of twenty-five hits. That was amazing. Then I noticed something else. Each had only done it once. And in every case, the tester was the
same—Avery Morrison, one of the runts.

“Squinty,” a couple of kids said, calling Avery by his nickname. They’d realized the pattern at the same time I did.

Everyone turned toward him. Squinty looked back, peering at us through his thick glasses. “What’s everyone staring at?”

Mr. Briggs handed him a deck of the test cards. “Hold one up, but don’t let me see.”

Avery held up a card, raising it close to his face. “No, not here,” Mr. Briggs said. “Let’s go over to where you usually sit. The light’s better over there.” He followed Squinty to a corner of the rug near a window. After they sat down, Mr. Briggs tilted his head a bit, as if searching for something, and then said, “Minus sign.”

“Yeah,” Squinty said. “You got it.”

“Square,” Mr. Briggs said for the second card.

“Wow. Right again,” Squinty told him.

“Another square.”

“Yup.”

“Star.”

“Holy smokes. You got another one.”

Mr. Briggs named a couple more cards before Squinty caught on. By then, the rest of us were laughing hard enough to split a gut. It was like watching a magic act. Robert, Justin, and Trevor, who each had done the same thing during the actual test, were laughing the hardest of all.

Finally, Mr. Briggs, who was laughing, too, said, “This is a great lesson. It shows one way an experiment can go wrong. In this case, nobody intended to cheat, but I suspect that the opportunity was just irresistible to the three of you who noticed the reflection in Avery’s glasses. Of course, the instant we saw perfect scores, we should have become suspicious.”

As Mr. Briggs said this, I heard Bloodbath say, “Damn.” Then Bloodbath started looking around like he was thinking about leaving the room.

Mr. Briggs, staring at Bloodbath, said, “So someone who wanted to
be
really
clever while cheating shouldn’t get perfect scores. It would be a lot better to miss a couple of times.” He went back to the computer and pulled up some more information. He didn’t say anything about the data—he just pointed to a column of numbers on the screen.

I think everyone understood what was going on right away. Bloodbath had gotten four perfect scores. But the tester in each case had been one of his buddies. They’d obviously cheated just for the sake of cheating. Maybe they thought it was a good joke. Maybe they were so used to cheating whenever they could that they’d just naturally done it during the test. But, as Mr. Briggs had pointed out, they hadn’t been clever enough.

“Now let’s throw out these cases and look at the rest of our results. Let’s see who did better than five right.” He tapped a few more keys. “As you can see, nobody managed to score six hits per test. The highest average was five-point-seven-six—roughly five and three-quarters. So, at least as far as this experiment is concerned, we have no real evidence of psychic ability.”

That was it, then. Scientific proof that I had been wrong.

I heard Cheater snicker. When he caught me looking at him, he said, “Sorry.” I guess he hadn’t meant to laugh at me. That was okay. I sort of deserved it.

“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Briggs said, “the average for the entire class, once we throw out the bad data, is just a bit better than four and a half hits. I suspect it would be a lot closer to five if we ran more tests. But we’ve done enough to learn a few things. And that, my friends, should always be the point of one of these exercises.”

The class spent the rest of the period discussing the test and the results. Mr. Briggs talked about ways to design a better experiment, and ways to prevent cheating. Apparently, that was a big problem. Sometimes people wanted to prove something so badly that they cheated when they ran a test.

In a way, I was relieved that we’d run an actual scientific test and it had shown no evidence that anyone could read minds. I could get on
with my life and stop driving myself crazy with wild ideas about that kind of stuff. As I left class, I shook my head, thinking about how stupid Bloodbath had been when he’d tried to get away with those perfect scores. It was funny how he’d given himself away by cheating too successfully. But that led me to another thought. It came to me so suddenly that I wanted to dash right back into the room.

Instead, I waited until Mr. Briggs left. The program was still up on the computer. Even better, the file with the results was open. I pulled down the menu and sent the data to the printer. It was the old kind that makes a lot of noise and spits out a single line at a time. I watched the pages as they inched out, revealing something I’d almost missed. My hand shook so badly I ripped the edge of the last sheet as I tore it from the printer.

There was no doubt about it. No mistake. I had definite proof. I wasn’t sure if I wanted it, but I had it.

The question was: What should I do with it?