Superstition (6 page)

There were computers that produced random numbers that “subjects” were supposed to “will” upward or downward. There was a randomly controlled water fountain where the subject would attempt to vary the height of the jet; a pendulum where the swing responded to conscious though nonphysical intervention; and other ingenious devices on the same theme, including a television monitor on which two images interacted while a viewer concentrated on one of them until it dominated the whole screen to the exclusion of the other.

“Of course,” Sam told her, “you don't get results in just one session. That's why volunteers have to work over a period of weeks or months. It's the aggregate of small but persistent deviations from the norm that becomes significant—increasingly so the longer you continue.”

He introduced her to the four full-time members of his team who were present that morning. The youngest, his assistant, Pete Daniels; the oldest, Peggy O'Donovan, an experimental psychologist, who was the lab manager. She had thick gray hair pulled back from her face in a bun and wore a caftan of rich colors over an ample figure. Joanna was captivated by her smile and the aura of calmness that she exuded—something that must, Joanna felt, be invaluable in any crisis. The other two were Bryan Meade, an electrical engineer who designed and maintained the experimental equipment; and Jeff Dorrell, a theoretical physicist who designed and implemented the department's data processing.

Missing were the final two members of Sam's team; Tania Phillips and Brad Bucklehurst, a psychologist and physicist respectively, were out in the field running remote perception studies with a group of volunteers.

“One volunteer, the ‘agent,’ is stationed in some randomly selected location at a given time,” Sam explained. “Another volunteer, the ‘subject,’ is located somewhere far from that location and with no knowledge of it. The point is for the subject to guess what the agent is seeing.”

“And you're going to tell me they can, aren't you?”

Sam grinned. “Sometimes with amazing accuracy. And believe me, we've done this thousands of times. The weirdest part is that sometimes we have the subject guess what the agent is seeing even before the agent goes to the location—sometimes days before. And we still get results.”

Joanna felt a surge of irritation with the sheer improbability of what she was hearing. “But how…?”

He held up his hands before she could even get the question out. “I don't know. All I can tell you is it works. Though what ‘it’ is…” He gestured as though it was anybody's guess. “We call it ‘psi.’”

6

O
ver the next few days Joanna spent as much time at the lab as she felt she could without getting under everybody's feet and becoming a nuisance. They were a good-natured group and gave her all the help they could. Sam didn't hide the fact that funding was a problem for the kind of work they were doing. That was obvious to Joanna from the shabbiness of the premises. A little favorable publicity, Sam mentioned casually one day, would be a great help in going after fresh grants.

She tipped her head to one side and regarded him with amusement. “What makes you so sure it's going to be favorable?” she asked.

He was genuinely nonplussed for a second. It simply hadn't occurred to him that anyone could be other than impressed by his work. “I'm sorry,” he said hastily, “you're perfectly right. I shouldn't have made that assumption.”

Joanna felt suddenly sorry for teasing him. He was, she had decided, a very sweet man with no guile and an almost boyish enthusiasm for what he was doing. That slight naïveté combined with obvious intelligence and a rare breadth of learning made him undeniably attractive—something she was coming to realize with every hour spent in his company.

“It's okay,” she said, “I'm kidding. I'm fascinated by everything you've shown me. All we have to worry about is whether my editor will print it.”

A look of concern crossed his face. “You mean it isn't certain?”

She shook her head. “I need to find some hook for the story—something that'll make people sit up and say ‘I have to read this.’”

“But the implications of it all are fantastic. Machines controlled by thought processes. A direct interface between mind and computer. Some practical and usable degree of human telepathy…”

“I know—but it's all abstract and in the future. I need to show my editor something more than interesting theories and promising statistics. And I don't have it.”

They walked up the steps and across the concrete campus, heading for the street. Somewhere, incongruously, a piano was playing a Chopin waltz. Joanna assumed it was a recording or the radio, until the music faltered and the player repeated the phrase. Then they passed through a narrow passage and were hit by the noise of the city.

By the time they had settled at their now regular table at Mario's—paid for, Joanna insisted, by the magazine—the frown on Sam's face had lifted and she could see that he was bubbling with some new idea.

“There's something I've wanted to try for years,” he said after they'd ordered. “It's been done before, more than once, so I know it works. But if this isn't a ‘must read’ story, I don't know what is.”

“Tell me.”

“A group experiment, with you as one of the group. We're going to create a ghost.”

He watched her face for a response as he spoke. She returned his gaze, wondering how seriously to take him.

“Just so I know what I'm getting into,” she said with a note of caution in her voice, “would we be planning to create this ghost by, well, killing somebody? Or did you have another method in mind?”

“Nobody is going to be murdered,” he assured her with a laugh. “This will be a ghost of somebody who has never existed. We're going to make him up—or her.”

She looked at him for a while before speaking, taking time to absorb the idea.

“All right,” she said eventually, “tell me how we create a ghost.”

“First of all we have to define what we mean by ghost. What does the word ‘ghost’ convey to you?”

“Well, I suppose something from beyond the grave that drifts around moaning and goes bump in the night.”

“Returning to avenge murder, bring a warning, or just because it can't stop hanging around its favorite spots?”

“Something like that.”

His hand flicked dismissively. “I don't believe in that kind of ghost.”

“I never suspected that you did. What kind
do
you believe in?”

“Have you ever heard of
tulpas
…?”

“No.”

“It's a Tibetan word—means a ‘thought-form.’ You imagine something in the right way, and it becomes real.”

She felt her skeptic's eyebrow twitch again. “Now this I would have to see to believe.”

“That's the whole idea—you
will
see it.”

“Go on.”

“Think of any haunting you ever hear about. It's always the same story. Things start with unexplained noises, footsteps, doors opening and closing, cold spots, even odd smells—a general sense of some kind of ‘presence.’ You may get an outbreak of poltergeist phenomena, and sooner or later people start seeing things—a vague form, some kind of drifting cloud, or even somebody as real looking as themselves crossing a room or peering in a window. All the usual spooky stuff.”

“None of which,” Joanna interrupted with a note of caution, “has ever happened to me personally.”

He shrugged. “Nor me. But the evidence that it does happen is overwhelming. By far the hardest thing to swallow is the kind of explanation usually offered. Ghosts, when you think about it, are a pretty corny idea. If you dig back far enough into the history of any house, you'll find that something unpleasant once happened to somebody in it. Even if it's a new house, you'll probably find there used to be another house on the same site. You'll always find an explanation for a haunting if you look hard enough—the same way you'll see faces in a fire or passing clouds if you watch long enough.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I'm saying why are ghosts so repetitive and unoriginal? They're always doing the same thing and dressed the same way, no matter how often they're seen and how many people see them. They're more like a snapshot or a memory than an actual event. And a memory is something that's stored in the brain. And that's where I think ghosts come from: from the brains of the people who see them.”

“Hallucinations?”

“Of a kind.”

“How many kinds are there?”

“Well, there's the kind that only one person sees, and there's the kind that a bunch of people see together telepathically.”

“Assuming that telepathy is a fact.”

He accepted her point with a wry glance. “There are medical reasons to suspect that it is.”

“Such as?”

“There's a standard clinical procedure for measuring the brain's physical response to some stimulus such as a light shone in the eye or a tuning fork held to the ear. It's a matter of recorded fact that a thought projected at another person is capable of producing that same physical response.”

She looked at him awhile, her face unable to hide the misgivings she felt. “I guess I have to take it on trust that you're not bullshitting me. After all, I can always check.”

He laughed. “Go ahead, check. Telepathy's more commonplace than most people realize, but I'm not going to get into a fight over it, because you'll believe what you want to believe. We all do. All I'm saying is that telepathy is the most likely reason why ghosts are sometimes seen, heard, or sensed by several people at once. And the experiment I'm suggesting will provide evidence of that.”

“You say this experiment has already been done?”

“More than once. And it's time someone created another ghost and looked into the implications a little further.”

They did so for the rest of lunch, by which time Joanna knew that she had what she was looking for. It took less than twenty minutes to type up her notes for Taylor Freestone and take them into his office that afternoon. He held the few pages limply in his hand as though the effort tired him, then dropped them as he finished reading.

“Go for it,” he said languidly.

Joanna walked out with a sense of triumph. “Go for it” was as close as Taylor Freestone ever came to foaming at the mouth with enthusiasm.

7

L
ooking back, she saw that her elation at Taylor Freestone's reaction was more than just professional. She now had an opportunity to go on seeing Sam without the formalities of dating and all that that involved. She was surprised when she realized how much she wanted to go on seeing him. Thinking about it, she had to admit that he was certainly one of the more interesting men she'd met, and he wore well the longer she spent with him. She came to see very quickly that he wasn't just an act, a piece of cleverly polished performance art, sustainable for an evening or two, until the routine became stale and repetition set in. What made Sam interesting was his interest in everything. When he spoke it was a process of discovery—as much for him as for his listener. He never taught or lectured. Even when speaking of things with which he was familiar, he would put them together in new ways and find patterns that he hadn't noticed before. He was, on the whole, exhilarating company. And he made her laugh often.

There's a weakness somewhere, she found herself thinking one day when she got home. There always is, there has to be. In the end it'll show, something obvious that I should have seen all along.

Then she stopped herself, ashamed of the distrustful nature that such a thought revealed. That wasn't, she knew, the way she really was.

Nearing thirty, Joanna had behind her a love life that she liked to call “mature”—which she defined as having more good memories than bad, her only regrets being not things she'd done but some of the things she hadn't. She wasn't yet consciously thinking of any kind of permanent relationship. She'd tried that once—a live-in affair that had lasted three years, until he'd met somebody else. They had parted without bitterness. She came to realize very quickly that she had liked Richard more than she had loved him, and had secretly rejoiced to have her freedom back.

That had been eighteen months ago. Since then she had been alone, except for a brief but romantic liaison with a French diplomat at the UN who turned out to be rather more married than he'd led her to believe. For the past six months she'd missed him more than she'd cared to admit, so her interest in Sam brought her, at the very least, the assurance that she was over Jean-Pierre.

Yet she knew no more about Sam now than she had after their first lunch together. She had no idea whether he'd ever been married or whether he was still married, though there was no evidence of any family life either in his conversation or in the odds and ends, postcards and snapshots, scattered about his untidy office. She had broached the question obliquely once by asking him whether he had any children, but had received only a simple “No” in reply. On one occasion he'd let slip that he'd been at Princeton, but she knew nothing about his family or even where he'd been born.

The idea crossed her mind that she could always formally interview him and find out everything she wanted to know. After all, if she was writing a story about his work she would have to write something about the man. But she dismissed the possibility at once, annoyed to find herself in such a state of mind that she would even consider such devious strategies.

She hadn't been prepared for this at all.

The phone rang just after seven and brought her groggily out of a deep sleep. It was her mother, full of apologies for calling so early but making the excuse that she'd tried three times in the last two days and always got her machine. She hadn't left a message because there wasn't anything special. She just wanted to talk.

Joanna could tell that something was wrong. Or at least that there was something on her mother's mind. She asked her what it was.

There was a hesitation at the other end of the line, followed by an uncharacteristic awkwardness in her mother's voice as she said, “Darling, I know it's silly, but I've had the most terrible dream about you three nights running. Are you all right?”