Superstition

2

Sam Towne was watching an upturned plastic pudding container crawl crablike back and forth across the smooth surface of the laboratory floor.

The technical name for the device was a tychoscope, derived from the Greek tukhe, meaning “chance,” and skopion, meaning “to examine.” The prototype had been invented by a Frenchman, Pierre Janin, in the late seventies. It rested on two wheels set parallel to each other and a fixed pivot leg, enabling it to move in a straight line either forward or backward, or rotate clockwise or counterclockwise.

All these movements were radio controlled by a random event generator (REG) in the next room. An REG was essentially no more than an electronic coin-tossing machine, its circuitry governed by some unpredictable physical process such as radioactive decay or thermal electron motion. A computer, programmed to sample this process at preset intervals, generated arbitrary series of numbers or movements accordingly.

The tychoscope's next move, in consequence, was always anybody's guess. Statistically there was a known probability that it would make any one of the possible moves open to it, just as a coin, every time it is tossed, has a 50/50 chance of coming down heads or tails. Over ten, a hundred, or a thousand tosses it will come down approximately half the time heads and half tails. That is the law of probability.

Yet what Sam and his assistant, Pete Daniels, were witnessing was a consistent and dramatic violation of that law. The little pudding-container robot was literally huddling in one corner of the floor. Each time the REG switched it to a new tack that looked like taking it away, the next few switches would inexorably bring it back to the same area.

Sam and Pete exchanged a look, neither concealing his excitement from the other. Both knew that this was a historic moment: a repeatable demonstration, under laboratory conditions, of something utterly inexplicable.

“Okay, let's move the cage,” Sam said.

There was an anxious twittering from the fifteen seven-day-old chicks as their world swung up into the air and came to rest two yards from where it had been. It took only a few moments for them to reorient themselves and begin calling for the featureless moving object that they had been conditioned to regard as “mom,” and which was now farther away from them than they found comfortable.

Pete came back from the next room with a printout from the computer. He handed it to Sam in silence. The numbers spoke for themselves.

“That's almost three times,” Sam said, doing a quick bit of mental arithmetic. “The goddamn thing spent three times longer hanging around the cage when the chicks were in it than when it was empty.”

“In-fucking-credible.”

“But true.”

They both turned as the chirping of the little birds grew more agitated. The tychoscope was making a turn of almost three hundred and sixty degrees. Sam caught Pete's eye, each of them knowing the thought that had shot through the other's head, followed by a jolt of self-reproach at such a cockeyed notion. It was absurd to think, as they both instinctively though briefly had, in terms of the tychoscope actively searching for its brood. It was a mindless machine without even the pretensions to ratiocinative thought of the simplest computer program. Any kind of program was an ordered process, and the whole point of the process by which the little robot's movements were controlled was that it lacked all order.

The only possible force causing the machine to move as it had been moving for the past twenty minutes was the will of the tiny caged chicks to keep it near to them. Like most baby birds, they had adopted as their mother the first moving object they had come in contact with on hatching from the egg. After their birth they had spent one hour every day for six days in the presence of the robot as it meandered on its random path. Today was the first time they had been caged and therefore unable to follow the machine in their accustomed way.

So, instead, they were making it come to them.

An hour later Pete brought in another cage of chicks to replace the first. The only difference was that these chicks had never seen the tychoscope before and therefore had no attachment to it. To establish this Sam did a twenty-minute control run during which the robot, as the computer printout confirmed, followed its normal random path while the chicks in their cage paid it no attention.

“Okay, Pete, pull the blinds, will you?” Sam said as soon as he had satisfied himself about the result. The lab became pitch dark, and the twittering of the chicks grew agitated.

“See what I mean?” Sam said. “They hate the dark during waking hours. It throws them into a panic.”

The noise that the chicks were making certainly bore him out. They subsided somewhat as a small flame leapt from Pete's lighter, which he touched to a candle. He attached the candle to a clip on top of the tychoscope, which had remained stationary on the far side of the floor since the end of the previous run.

When the candle was in place-the only source of illumination in the room-Sam pressed the switch on his remote. The tychoscope began to move.

The chicks clamored for the light to come to them…

“I'll never eat one of those things again,” Pete murmured as they analyzed the data after several runs. “The little buggers are magicians.”

Sam smiled. “Then you'd better become a vegetarian,” he said, “because anything more awake than a carrot could pull off what you just saw. And some people have theories about carrots.”

“You want to run a test with a basket of vegetables?”

“Nah-people would think we were nuts.”

“They already do.”

“Yeah, well,” Sam shrugged, “maybe we are.”

Pete shot a covert glance in his boss's direction. Sometimes he didn't understand Sam. By rights he should have been ecstatic at the results they were getting, but a sudden despondency seemed to have settled on him, as though everything they were doing was a waste of time.

“What's up?” he asked. “You found a flaw in the procedure, or what?”

“There's no flaw.” Sam's voice was flat.

“So why the long face?”

There was a flash of annoyance in Sam's look that warned the younger man to back off and not push the question further. But Pete wasn't in this job because he liked being told what to do or what to think. He respected Sam, liked him, and admired what he was doing; because of that he wanted to be taken into his confidence.

“Don't look at me like that,” he said, aware of a slightly whining note of protest in his voice that he disliked. “If there's something on your mind, I'd like to know.”

Sam sighed. It was a form of apology. “It's nothing to do with the experiment.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“The problem is figuring out what, if anything, it all adds up to.”