They'd Rather Be Right (2 page)

“Just answer all their questions, Joey,” his father was saying. “Be truthful.” He emphasized the word again, “Truthful, I said.”

“Sure, Pop,” Joey answered dutifully; knowing his father hoped he wouldn’t be truthful—and that his mother might die if he were. He wondered if he might hear the whisperings from the professors’ minds.

What if he couldn’t hear! How would he know how to answer them, if he couldn’t hear the whispers!

Maybe he couldn’t hear, wouldn’t know how to answer, and then his mother would die!

His face turned pale, and he felt as if he were numb; in a dull dead trance as they walked down the hall and into a study off one of the big classrooms.

“This here is my wife and my son, Dr. Martin,” his father was saying. Then to Joey’s mother: “Dr.

Martin is Dr. Ames’s assistant.”

The boy is very frightened. The thought came clearly and distinctly to Joey from the doctor’s mind.

“Not any more,” Joey said, and didn’t realize until it was done that he had exclaimed it aloud in his relief. He could hear!

“I beg your pardon, Joey?” Dr. Martin turned from greeting his mother and looked with quick penetration into Joey’s eyes. His own sharp blue eyes had exclamation points in them, accented by his raised blond brows in a round face.

“But of course he is
Dr. Ames’s assistant,” his father corrected him heartily, with an edge behind the
words. You little
fool, you’re starting in to demonstrate already.

That isn’t what the boy meant. Dr. Martin was rac-ing the thought through his mind. I had the thought that the boy was frightened, and he immediately said he wasn’t. All the pathological symptoms of fright disappeared instantly, too. Yes. Put into the matrix of the telepath, all the things Carter told us this morning about him would fit. I hadn’t considered that. And I know that old fool Ames would never consider it.

If there ever was a closed mind against ESP, he’s got it. Orthodox psychology?

“We will teach nothing here but orthodox psychology, Dr. Martin,” Ames had said. “It is the duty of some of us to insist a theory be proved through time and tradition.
We will
not rush down every
side
path, accepting theories as unsubstantial as the tobacco
smoke
which
subsidizes them.”

So much for ESP. Well, even Rhine says that the vast body of psychology, in spite of all the evidence, still will not accept the fact of ESP.

But if this kid were a telepath—a true telepath. If by any chance he were ... If his remark and the disappearance of the fear symptoms were not just coincidence!

But another Ames’s admonition dampened his elation. “Our founder, Jacob Steiffel, was a wise man. He
believed in progress, Martin, as do
I.
But progress
through conservative proof. Let others play the fool, our job is to preserve the bastions of scientific solid-ity!”

“Dr. Ames has not arrived yet,” he said suddenly to Joey’s parents .. “He’s been called to the office of the university president. But, in the meantime, leave the boy with me. There’s preliminary work to do, and I’m competent to do that.” He realized the implications of bitterness in his remark, and reassured himself that these people were not so subtle as to catch it.

“I got work to do anyhow,” Joey’s father said. His relief was apparent, that he would not be required to stand by, and he was using it to play the part of the ever faithful servant.

“Here’s a room where you may wait, Mrs. Carter,” Dr. Martin said to Joey’s mother. He opened a door and showed her in to a small waiting room. “There are magazines. Make yourself quite comfortable.

This may take an hour or so,”

“Thank you, Doctor.” It was the first time she had spoken, and her voice contained the awe and respect she felt. A thread of resentment, too. It wasn’t fair; some had so many advantages to get educated. Oth-ers—But the resentment was drowned out in the awe and respect. These were not just ordinary doctors. They
taught
doctors!

She sat tentatively on the edge of a wooden chair; the hardest one in the room. The worn red feather in her hat drooped, but her back remained straight.

Joey felt the doctor thinking, “Relax, woman! We’re not going to skin him alive!” But he merely closed the door. Joey could still see her sitting there, through the closed door; not relaxing, not reaching for a magazine. Her lips were pulled tight against her teeth to keep her prayer from showing. “Dear God, oh, dear God—”

Dr. Martin came back over from closing the door, and led Joey to a chair near the bookcase.

“Now, you just sit down there and relax, Joey. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re just going to visit a little, and ask you some questions.” But his mind was darting in and out around his desires. I’d better start in on routine IQ tests, leave the Rorschach for Ames. Now that it’s standard, he’ll use it. Leave word association for him, too. That’s his speed. Maybe I should give the multiphasic; no, better leave that for Ames. He’ll discredit it, but it’ll make him feel very modem and up-to-date to use it. I mustn’t forget I’m just the errand boy around here. I wish / could run the Rhine ESP deck on the boy, but if Ames came in and caught me at it—”

The office phone rang, and Martin picked it up hurriedly. It was the president’s office calling.

“Dr. Ames asked me to tell you he will be tied up for almost an hour,” the operator said disinterestedly. “The patient will just have to wait.”

“Thank you,” Martin said slowly. Joey felt his lift of spirit. I can run a few samples of the Rhine cards.

I just have to know. I wish I could get away from this place, into a school where there’s some latitude for research. I wish Marion weren’t so tied down here with her family and that little social group she lords it over. “My husband is assistant to the dean of psychology!” That’s much more important to her than any feeling I’ve got of frustration. If I quit here, and got into a place where I could work, really work, it would mean leaving this town. Marion wouldn’t go. She’s a big frog in a little puddle here. And still tied to her parents—and I’m tied to Marion. If anybody needs psych help, I do. I wish 1 had the courage—”

Joey, as frequently with adults, could not comprehend all the words and sentences, but the somatic indecision and despair washed over him, making him gasp for breath.

Martin went over to a desk, with sudden resolution, and from far back in a drawer he pulled out a thin deck of cards.

“We’re going to play a little game first, Joey,” he said heartily, as he sat down at his desk and pulled a sheet of paper toward him. “There are twenty-five cards here. Five of them have a circle, five a star, a wavy line, a cross, a rectangle. Do you know what a rectangle is, Joey?”

Joey didn’t, but the vision of a square leaped into his mind.

“Yes, sir,” Joey said. “It’s a sort of square.”

“That’s right,” Martin said approvingly, making a mental note that the boy shouldn’t have known the word, and did. “Now I’m going to look at a card, one at a time, and then you guess what kind of an image there is on it. I’ll write down what the card really shows, and what you say it is, and then we’ll see how many you get right.”

Too short a time! Too short a time! But maybe long enough to be significant. If I should just get a trace. All right, suppose you do? The question was ironic in his mind. He picked up the first card and looked at it, holding it carefully so that Joey would have no chance to
see the face of it.

A circle leaped with startling clarity into Joey’s mind. And the circle contained the image of Joey’s mother, sitting on the edge of her chair in the other room, praying over and over, “Don’t let them find anything wrong with him. Don’t let them find—”

“Square,” Joey said promptly. He felt the tinge of disappointment in Martin’s mind as he recorded the true and the false. Not a perfect telepath, anyway.

“All
right, Joey,”
Martin responded verbally.
“Next card.”

“Did I get that one right?” Joey asked brightly.

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” Martin answered. “Not until the end of the game.” Well, the boy showed normal curiosity. Didn’t seem to show too much anxiety, which sometimes damped down the ESP factor. He picked up the next card. Joey saw it contained a cross.

“Star,” he said positively.

“Next card,” Martin said.

It was in the nineteenth card that Joey sensed a new thought in Martin’s mind. There was a rising excitement. Not one of them had been correct. Rhine says a negative result can be as revealing as a positive one. He should get every fifth card correctly. Five out of the twenty-five to hit the law of averages. Martin picked up the twentieth card and looked at it. It was a wavy line.

“Wavy line,” Joey answered. He felt the disappointment again in Martin’s mind, this time because he had broken the long run of incorrectness.

The twenty-first card was a star.

“Star,” Joey said.

And the next three were equally correct. Joey had called five out of the twenty-five correctly, as the law of averages required. The pattern was a bit strange. What would the laws of chance say to a pattern such as this? Try it again.

“Let’s try it again,” he suggested.

“You were supposed to tell me how I did at the end of the game,” Joey prompted.

“You were correct on five of them, Joey,” Martin said, noncommittally.

“Is that pretty good?” Joey asked anxiously.

“Average,” Martin said, and threw him a quick look. Wasn’t that eagerness to please just a bit over-done? “Just average. Let’s try it again.”

This time Joey did not make the mistake of waiting until the end of the deck before he called correct cards. The doctor had said every fifth card should be called correctly. Joey did not understand statistical language. Dutifully, he called every fifth card correctly. Four wrong, one right. And again, the rising excitement near the twentieth card. Again, what are the laws of chance that the boy would call four wrong, one right, again and again, in perfect order?

Joey promptly called two of them right together. And felt Martin’s disappointment. The pattern had been broken again. And then a rise of excitement, carefully suppressed.

“Let’s run them again,” Martin said. And he whispered
strongly
to
himself.
“This
time he must
call
every other one of them right, in order to pass as just an average boy.”

Joey was bewildered. There seemed to be a double thought in Martin’s mind, a tenseness he could not understand. He wavered, and then doubtfully, doubting he was doing the right thing, he began to call every other card correctly.

Halfway through the deck Martin laid the cards down. Joey caught the flash of undisguised elation in his mind, and sank back into his own chair in despair. He had done it wrong.

“O.K., Joey,” Martin said quietly. There was a smile of tender bitterness around his lips. “I don’t know what the idea is. You’ve got your reasons, and they must be pretty terrible ones. Do you think you could talk to me? Tell me about it?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Dr. Martin,” Joey lied. Perhaps if he didn’t admit anything “In trying to avoid a pattern, Joey, you made one. Just as soon as I realized you were setting up an unusual pattern, you immediately changed it. Every time. But that, too, is a pattern.” And then he asked, quite dryly, “Or am I talking over your head?”

“Yes, sir,” Joey
said. “I
guess you are.” But he
had learned. The whole concept of patterned response as against random response leaped from Martin’s mind into his. “Maybe if I tried it again?” he asked hopefully. At all costs he must get the idea out of Martin’s mind that there was anything exceptional about him. This time, and forever afterwards, he knew he could avoid any kind of a pattern.

Just one more chance.

“I don’t blame you, Joey,” Martin answered sadly. “If you’ve looked into my mind, well, I don’t blame you. Here we are. You’re a telepath and afraid to reveal it. I’m a psychologist, supposed to be, and I’m afraid to investigate it. A couple of fellows who caught the tiger by the tail, aren’t we, Joey?

Looks as if we’d better kind of protect one another, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” Joey answered and tried to hold back the tears of relief. “You won’t even tell my mother?

What about my father?” He already knew that Martin didn’t dare tell Ames.

“I won’t tell anybody, Joey,” Martin answered sadly. “I’ve got to hang onto my job. And in this wise and mighty institution we believe only in orthodox psychology. What you have, Joey, simply doesn’t ex-ist. Dr. Ames says so, and Dr. Ames is always right. No, Joey,” he sighed, “I’m not likely to tell anybody.”

“Maybe he’ll trick me like you did,” Joey said doubtfully, but without resentment. “Maybe with that ink-blot thing, or that ‘yes’ and ‘no’ pile of little cards.”

Martin glanced at him quickly.

“You’re quite perfect at it, aren’t you?” He framed it a question and made it a statement. “You go beyond the words to the actual thought image itself. No, Joey, in that case I don’t think he will. I think you can keep ahead of him.”

“I don’t know,” Joey said doubtfully. “It’s all so new. So many new things to think about all at once.”

“I’ll try to be in the room with you and him,”

Martin promised. “I’ll think of the normal answer each time. He won’t look very deep. He never does. He already knows all the answers.”