Superstition

6

Over 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 naivete 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.