Superstition

11

It started to rain as Sam parked his car. Huddling beneath the old umbrella that he had found in the trunk, they hurried down tree-lined walks between the neo-Georgian carved-stone buildings of the campus. On the second floor of one of them Sam knocked at a door, and a crisp voice called out, “Enter.”

“Spry” was the word that came to Joanna's mind to describe Roger Fullerton. He wore an immaculate three-piece suit in excellent tweed and sported a white mustache with a waxed twirl at the ends. The twinkle in his eye as they were introduced left her in no doubt why Sam had suggested that her influence with the old man might well exceed his own.

They settled into leather armchairs and someone brought in tea. The room was where Fullerton had taught and held discussion groups for over forty years. It bore the imprint of a long, distinguished life. Framed photographs of people she knew but couldn't quite place, some of them also featuring a young and good-looking Fullerton, hung casually at rakish angles on the paneled walls. Books and papers were scattered everywhere in what seemed like carefully ordered chaos. A computer sat on a table by a window with a stained glass pattern.

“So,” Fullerton said, shifting his gaze back to her face from her legs, where it had lingered for a moment with an appreciation so open and innocent as to be wholly inoffensive, “I gather the purpose of this visit is to persuade me to get involved in one of Sam's lunatic ‘experiments,’ as he likes to call them.”

There was a faintly English inflection in his speech that made Joanna think of Ray Milland or Cary Grant in some of the old movies she'd seen on late-night television. She glanced in Sam's direction, but he had his nose in his teacup and seemed oblivious of Roger's brusquely dismissive tone.

“I think he's more or less abandoned that ambition,” she said guardedly. “On the way over he said he'd probably have to settle for just another argument, but at least it keeps him in shape.”

Roger chuckled. “Well, I'll try not to let him down.”

Since their first conversation about him, Sam had filled her in on the background of his relationship with the older man. They had met when Sam used to go to his lectures and always asked questions at the end. The friendship they struck up had survived even when Sam abandoned physics for psychology-a nonsubject, in Fullerton's view, lacking clear parameters. But that disapproval was nothing compared to the outrage he had expressed when Sam became interested in parapsychology.

Within minutes of setting tea things aside and getting through the basic requirement of social niceties, the two men had picked up their ongoing quarrel like a game of chess played on and off whenever the opportunity arose. No piece had been moved since last time, and both knew exactly where they were.

“You're simply ignoring half of the thinking that's gone on in the last hundred years,” Sam was saying. “At the end of the nineteenth century there was an explosion of interest in psychic phenomena…”

“Foolish old women and nervous bachelors,” Roger interrupted scornfully, “holding hands in darkened rooms, waiting for a sign from Mother on the other side. Good God, you're not calling that science, are you?”

“Some of the best minds of their day were involved, here and in Europe-doctors, physicists, philosophers, people whose work in their own fields still stands today-”

“And it's that work for which they're remembered-not for dabbling in senseless mumbo jumbo that led nowhere.”

“On the contrary, they saw that something very interesting was happening, and they had the intellectual curiosity-and honesty-to try to find out what it was. You taught me that the essence of the scientific method is the willingness to place one's own ideas in jeopardy.”

“Which they did, quite rightly-and came up with nothing! As long as there is not a single repeatable experiment to prove the reality of ESP-”

“There are many repeatable experiments that prove beyond doubt the effect of consciousness-both human and animal-on random events. The statistics are there to be seen.”

“Statistical proof is a contradiction in terms.”

“The laws of physics are statistical.”

“Quantum events may be unpredictable, but they average out to give us laws which are consistent-enough so that we use them in everything from digital watches to space shuttles. Your so-called experiments add up to no more than a scattering of anomalies from which no coherent pattern emerges, and for which there appears to be no practical use. All you have is some vague unknown force called ‘psi’ which is supposed to account for whatever minor deviations from chance you've observed.”

“‘Psi,’ my dear, bigoted Roger, is no less definable than what you call the ‘observer effect’ in physics. Now are you going to tell me that that doesn't exist?”

“You can't extrapolate from the micro world to the macro.”

“You can't draw a line between them either. They're not two different things, just opposite ends of a spectrum.”

“At my end of which are the basic limiting principles of science, and at yours anything goes. So-called ‘psi’ abilities,” he spoke the word with deliberate scorn, “are supposed to operate as though space and time were meaningless. Forget the inverse square law, relativity, and thermodynamics-‘psi,’ which we can neither measure, predict, nor otherwise define, rules the universe. You're running a religious cult, not practicing science.”

“If you're so keen on basic limiting principles like cause and effect, why don't you come and look at what I'm doing before you make up your mind about it?”

“Because I know without looking that I can't disprove any of your claims, and that's why they don't interest me as a physicist and never will. The essence of any scientific theory is that it remains open to being proved false in the light of fresh evidence. The essence of any crackpot idea is that it cannot be proved either true or false in any circumstances.”

“What if you sat in a room and watched a table move around, and even levitate, of its own accord-all in broad daylight?”

“I would applaud an excellent conjuring trick.”

“It's been done-morethan once. I'm going to repeat-note that word repeat-the experiment, and it is not a conjuring trick.”

“Then I would echo the view of David Hume on miracles-that it is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work.”

Joanna had been sitting like a spectator in the stands as the two men batted their argument back and forth across the room. She wanted to get the exchange on tape for use in writing her magazine piece, but hesitated to do so openly without the professor's agreement. So she had furtively slipped her hand into her bag and pressed the record button, hoping that the machine would pick up at least some of the exchange. She felt a moment of guilty unease as Fullerton suddenly looked her way.

“What do you think of all this, Miss Cross? As a journalist?”

“As a journalist, Professor, I'm not supposed to have a view. I just try to write about both sides of the argument.”

It sounded a little mealymouthed, and was in fact untrue. But this was not an argument that she particularly wanted to find herself in the middle of.

“But you must have some personal feelings,” Fullerton persisted. “Everybody does, one way or another.”

“Well, I suppose I think, you know, maybe there are ‘more things in heaven and earth’…”

She broke off the quotation without bothering to finish it.

“But I can't give any good reason. Except my father, who's a very down-to-earth man, claims to have seen a flying saucer one time when he was a pilot in the navy.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam interrupted, “I don't mean to be rude, but just for the record, UFOs and crop circles have nothing whatsoever to do with parapsychology.”

Joanna gave him a look that, in the sweetest possible way, warned him not to patronize her. “Jung thought that UFOs were tulpas,” she said. “I researched the subject after you mentioned it the other day-thought-forms either created in the past but still manifest, or being created now by the collective unconscious.”

Sam held up a hand. “I stand corrected. You're right.”

Roger beamed his approval. “It's nice to know,” he said, “that somebody can make him acknowledge the error of his ways.”

“I wish I could say the same about you, Roger,” Sam retorted, “but I can see you're determined not to join us in an experiment that might shake some of your rigid preconceptions.”

“Not join you?” the old man said, eyebrows shooting up in mock astonishment. “If you imagine that I'm going to pass up the chance of holding hands around a table with this young lady for the next few weeks, not to mention watching you make a buffoon of yourself, then you're even dafter than I thought you were.”

It had stopped raining when they walked back to the car. Every step of the way Sam was grinning from ear to ear.