Superstition

by David Ambrose

  “This sounds like the opening to The Twilight Zone.”

  He laughed. “You should know-from what you say you've just been there.”

  True, she thought. For a while she had been genuinely afraid. But it was over now, the memory fading with each moment that passed. She ordered a salad and the special fettuccine that Sam said she should trust him about. She even had a glass of Chianti, although she normally never drank at lunch. Today, she thought, she had an excuse.

  “The thing that really shook me up,” she said, putting her glass down after a first welcome sip, “was when she told me that her husband had died. Without that, I don't think she would have gotten to me.”

  “There's no way you can blame yourself for that man's death,” Sam told her firmly. “It's obvious that he must have had a heart condition already. Anything could have triggered it.”

  “I know,” she said, “but that's the rational me talking. And as you've just pointed out, there's an irrational me, too.”

  “Acknowledging its existence doesn't mean we have to give it the upper hand,” he said.

  As he spoke, he gave her a smile that was somehow so understanding and sympathetic that it took her by surprise.

  “I'll try,” was all she could think of in response. They were silent for a few moments as their lunch was served. She made noises about the excellent fettuccine and how right he'd been to recommend it, then she asked him to tell her something about his work. He gave a shrug as though wondering where to begin.

  “What would you like to know?”

  She thought a moment, then said, “There's one question I'd like to ask you as a scientist. It sounds kind of rude, but it isn't meant that way.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why do so many scientists that I've talked to think that any kind of investigation into the paranormal is a waste of time?”

  “Well,” he said, not remotely discomposed by the question, “there are two answers to that. One is that scientists, when they poke their noses outside their own narrow specialist field, are as prejudiced and dumb as anybody else-only worse, because they think they're so smart.”

  He forked some more pasta into his mouth and dabbed his lips with a linen napkin.

  “And the other?” she prompted.

  He smiled again, this time with a hint of resignation. “The other answer,” he said, “is that maybe they're right.”

  “Presumably, that's a view you don't share.”

  Again he gave a small shrug, as though not sure how to answer. “All I know is I've seen some pretty strange things. I'm not sure what they add up to or what conceptual framework they fit into, but I can't ignore them any more than I can explain them.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “I'm not talking ghosts and banshees and messages from beyond. I'm talking about anomalies. Things that just don't fit into anything we understand.”

  “Such as…?”

  He described to her the experiment in which the chickens were persuaded to adopt a machine as their mother. She laughed at first, then grew serious as she understood its significance.

  “We've had cats in boxes with a heat source controlled by the same kind of random event generator. The cats, of course, liked the warmth-and we found the heat source would be on significantly longer when there was a cat in the box than when there wasn't.”

  “If that's true, it's amazing.”

  “Oh, it's true.”

  “Can people do it too?”

  “Come to the lab sometime and try some of our tests. I promise we won't lock you in a box or anything.”

  “I'll talk to my editor. Maybe we should do something-kind of a ‘mind over matter’ piece.”

  She shivered suddenly and convulsively.

  “What is it?” he asked, concerned.

  “I don't know,” she said, genuinely puzzled. “When I said ‘mind over matter’ I suddenly had a picture of that horrible old woman and the way she looked at me.”

  He thought for a second that he was going to reach out and take her hand where it lay on the table, but then checked the impulse. “Remember what I told you,” he said, his eyes focused searchingly on hers. “Those people are clever. They plant a fear and hope you'll worry yourself sick over it. Don't let them scam you that way.”

  “I won't,” she said. “I'm fine, really. Thanks.”

  Over coffee she told him that she'd be seeing her editor that afternoon and would suggest writing something on scientific parapsychology. “I'll call you if he bites,” she said.

  Sam scribbled down his work number on a crumpled receipt culled from one of his pockets.

  “Call me anyway,” he said, handing it to her.

  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 summi
t 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.’”

  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 sens
e 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.”