Superstition

5

Taylor Freestone took himself and the job of editing Around Town very seriously indeed. Joanna watched as he crossed his elegantly tailored legs, placed his fingertips together, and leaned back thoughtfully in his suede-upholstered editorial chair.

“Might it not seem a little odd,” he asked, looking at her from beneath a delicately furrowed brow, “to have just done an expose of the whole business, then to be saying maybe there's something in it after all?”

“Two totally different things,” she shot back, knowing full well that he was going to agree, but only after they had completed this little ritual dance of petition and assent in deference to his authority. “Sam Towne's work is genuine research, and some of it's pretty mind bending. All we did with Camp Starburst was expose a scam, but we didn't say there was nothing to the paranormal.”

He thought a moment, alternately pursing and stretching his lips as though tasting a questionable wine. She hadn't told him about her encounter with Ellie Ray, though she had mentioned that Murray had died. The news made little impression on Taylor, who had a curious way of not connecting with the human reality behind any of the stories that he published. His life was bounded by the fashionable cocktail circuit of the Upper East Side, although the magazine he edited with such conspicuous success took its stories from wherever in the world they might occur. Taylor's skill, Joanna knew, was in sensing what the sort of people who bought his magazine had been talking about at their fashionable health clubs, or may have seen on public television recently, and now wanted to go into slightly more deeply. It was a skill she admired and which she knew was far from being as simple as it sounded. Nonetheless, the man's fey posturings irritated her unreasonably, and she had to force herself to remain still and silent until his deliberations were over.

“Do a little groundwork,” he said eventually. “Sketch something up for me next week. We'll see where we go from there.”

The apparatus was attached to the wall of a small room in the lab. It resembled a huge pinball machine-which in a sense, Sam said, it was.

“There are nine thousand of these polystyrene balls,” he said, pointing to a compartment at the top, “which are dropped one by one in the center of this first row of pegs. Watch…”

He turned the machine on. Balls starting dropping and bouncing down through about twenty rows of plastic pins, ending up in a row of collection bins at the bottom.

“The pins are set in a quincunx arrangement-like theater seats, where you're always looking between two heads in front of you instead of sitting directly behind somebody. You can see that, as the balls drop, each hits one pin in every row, bounces one way or the other, and hits another pin in the next. The further they drop, the more they tend to cascade out to one side or the other. But most of them, as you would expect, tend to stay more or less in the middle, with only a few bouncing all the way out to one side or the other. So you wind up with the balls distributed through these collection bins at the bottom in the form of a Gaussian curve…”

“Er…?”

“Bell curved-tapering equally on both sides towards a central summit. That's the normal pattern of random distribution. The point of the experiment is to try to influence the balls to fall more towards the right or more towards the left, so that you wind up with the summit of the pile off center, more towards one side or the other.”

“And you do this just by thinking?”

“Sure. You sit here,” he indicated a sofa about eight feet from the display, “watching the balls drop through the system, and willing them to go in one direction or the other.”

“And it works?”

He smiled at the incredulity in her voice.

“Over several runs, the deviations from pure chance are millions to one against. So to that extent, we have to say it works.”

“But how?”

“We don't know-yet. Come on, I'll show you some more.”

They continued their tour of the lab, which was housed in a collection of semibasement rooms abandoned by the engineering faculty when they moved to better premises. Joanna was shown a kind of clockface with lights in place of numbers. The lights flashed on and off in a random pattern, and the point of the experiment was to try to “will” them into moving consistently clockwise or counterclockwise.

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.’”