Transmigration

by J. T. McIntosh

  She laughed, an infectious crow of high spirits. "Of course I'm not. Really, I'm a bit of a drag. I can't dance, can't swim, don't like pop music, hate alcohol, drink and drugs, and I haven't a steady boy friend."

  "Why are you telling me all this?"

  "We've been doing completely impersonal experiments up to now. I bet you never saw me until five minutes ago?"

  "Well, I saw you, but . . . "

  She nodded. "That was according to plan. What I want to do now is entirely my own idea. Mr. Baudaker agrees it should be tried, but he didn't put me up to it."

  She stretched herself out and put both bare arms up to her head, caricaturing a screen vamp. "Do you think I could persuade an enemy general to tell me about the secret plans?" she said. "Please say yes."

  "I don't know anything about enemy generals," he said, and cursed his own crass awkwardness.

  "Can't you see me driving men mad, while I conceal secret documents in my camisole? Oh, well. But at least tell me I'm not repulsive, before I burst into tears."

  He could have told her that whatever she had in mind, it wasn't going to work. His self-consciousness, caution and uneasiness with women would ensure that. The more attractive they were, the worse it was. But he didn't want to tell her. That would be still more embarrassing. Being a psychology student, she would at once probe, ask searching questions and force him to talk about the one thing which, above all others, he didn't want to discusa.

  "You're a charming girl," he said awkwardly. "And I like your voice very much."

  "Just my voice?" she said with pretended disappointment. "I thought I had rather nice legs." She pulled her dress up to her hips. "And I wore a dress with a belt because I have a rather neat waist and I like people to know it."

  She laughed at his consternation. "No, don't let the reference to Mata Hafi fool you," she said. "I'm not trying to vamp you . . . at least, if I am, that's only a small part of the exercise. As I said, we've done impersonal tests so far. Now I've told you a little about myself, and I'll tell you any more you want to know. I want you to tell me about yourself. Then, when we're not strangers any more, we'll do some tests similar to those we've done already, and see if the results come out differently."

  He saw the idea, which was not difficult, and no doubt it made sense. But she had invited honesty.

  "It won't work," he said.

  "Why not?"

  "Well, it's pretense. It's unreal."

  "What's unreal about it?"

  He wished he had not started this. "Forget it."

  "You're scared of me," she said in wonder.

  "Oh, nonsense."

  "Searled to death. I'm not blind."

  "Not scared . . . "

  "Then what? Are you a misogynist?"

  "No."

  "Homosexual?"

  "No!" he said, revolted.

  "Impotent?"

  He choked.

  "All right, I'll withdraw the question," said Anita. "But if you don't hate women, and you've nothing against me personally, what's behind this? Why are you so sure my idea won't work?"

  He hesitated, feeling a sudden urge to tell her of the tumor. But that, he knew, was an irrelevance; if he introduced the subject, it would be as a red herring. Instead he told the truth.

  "Failure!" he burst out suddenly and bitterly. "That's all I've ever achieved in life. I don't know if failure with women is the most important . . . maybe it is. Some psychologists say so. The worst of it is, I've no possible excuse I'm not ugly even now . . . "

  "No," she agreed, leaning forward to inspect him. "A girl could go for that face. I could. I like the lean and hungry look."

  "And when I was younger I was strong and better looking. So as for girls, I told you I'm not a misogynist, not a pervert, not impotent. I'm sensitive, of course, and shy, but not cripplingly so. I think it's life that has made me nervous with you. Not anything that was in me at birth. As for that . . . "

  He stopped, not sure he wanted to tell her he didn't know where or exactly when he was born and who his parents were. She might pounce on that as though it explained everything. Almost certainly she would. But she'd be wrong. That was another irrelevancy.

  So Anita stuck to the subject, unaware it had nearly been changed. "You never had any success with girls?" she said sympathetically. "They always let you down?"

  "I'm not blaming them . . . "

  "Why not? Maybe that's the trouble, that you didn't blame them. You were too serious, and they let you down. In that way, women are totally unscrupulous. They go with a man, but if they see somebody they fancy more, they ditch the first sucker without a qualm. They say 'I hope we'll always be friends,' but the poor blighter doesn't want to be friends, he wants all or nothing, so it's nothing. If a girl has a date with somebody else and her heart-throb calls her, she'll drop the first sucker like a hot potato!"

  "That's it exactly!" said Fletcher eagerly. "That's how it always was. But I still can't say the girls were always to blame. It was me. Often they'd be quite attracted to me, and let me see it. But something was always wrong. I couldn't say the right things."

  "There are no right or wrong things to say," said Anita gently. "You just say the first thing that comes into your head."

  He told her a lot more, briefly touching on his insecure childhood in a way that warned her not to probe, the way he did the right thing at the wrong time and never at the right time, his awkward personal relationships with men as well as women, the fact that he had never had a real friend. "That must be my fault," he said, and if she had disagreed with him he would have suspected her of insincerity. She did not.

  It was very easy to talk to Anita. She was completely uncritical, and interested without false flattery. He told her about Judy and about Sheila, the girl who had been pushed in the water, but did not mention his discovery that the youth was Gerry Baudaker.

  "Some girls are like that," Anita said. "She wants her boy friend to bully her. He's only half to blame, because if he wasn't the type to knock her about she'd find somebody else who was. You heard her daring him. It's worse for him than for her, really . . . he's being encouraged to become a sadist."

  Several times she commented like that, easily and naturally, but never tried to straighten him out with a few short, pungent clichés.

  Then he came, unprompted, to the episode of the earlier ESP tests eighteen months ago. He had been caught in a random survey. Baudaker was not the director of the study, but a mere underling. It was on the side that he ran tests on Fletcher and became excited over the results.

  Fletcher paused as he realized that having come this far he must explain why he had previously refused to cooperate in any more tests and had walked out of the building. He returned only when he felt death upon him, urged on by what he considered "graveyard curiosity."

  "It wasn't Baudaker's fault," he said.

  "Of course not," she said, smiling.

  "I just didn't want to be a freak, that's all."

  She nodded.

  "Tell me," he said abruptly, "have you ever been in love?"

  She accepted the blunt change of subject calmly. "I've thought I was. But I'm like you in one way. It would take me a long time to fall in love."

  There was something different about the silence that followed. When two people were talking freely, a reply could be apparently irrelevant and yet not an evasion. But what Anita had said was an evasion.

  Tacitly admitting this, she substituted the apparent irrelevance which was not an evasion. "Remember I said that if a girl had a date and her secret heart-throb called, she'd break any promise to go with him? Well, I did that once, not so long ago. The fellow who called me . . . as a matter of fact he's through there, but I won't tell you his name unless you insist. We went out. And he couldn't have been more honest. What he wanted, all he wanted, was to jump into bed with me as quickly as possible."

  "Was it all you expected?" said Fletcher harshly.

  "Now you're trying to annoy me, but you can't
. I'm not a prig or a prude, at least I don't think so. If I had been in love, I suppose . . . Anyway, perhaps the answer to your question is that I've never been in love."

  There was a long pause. The easy flow of conversation had hit a rock.

  Fletcher sighed. "Right," he said. "I'm ready."

  "The tests?"

  "What else?"

  She nearly made a mischievous retort, but stopped herself. This was a very sensitive man. He interested her, but of course there was an impossible gulf between them and there was little point in pretending it ever would or could be crossed. He clearly didn't believe her idea was going to work, and perhaps he was right.

  John Fletcher suffered from something worse than self-pity; he didn't consider himself worth his own pity.

  They were all back in the big lab. Fletcher found himself covertly examining each of the four men students in turn, wondering which was Anita's heart-throb. But the lights were dim again and the earlier atmosphere of anonymity had returned. Even Anita had put on her white coat and practically disappeared, he suspected deliberately, into the shadows.

  "All right, tell me," said Fletcher. "Am I a mind-reader, a fortune-teller, a medium or what?"

  Baudaker had sheafs of paper in his hand. "Whatever you are," he said in a tone of suppressed excitement, "you're unique, Mr. Fletcher. Nothing like this has ever been recorded before."

  "Well, what did I do?"

  "No matter how the tests were done," said Baudaker triumphantly, "you never named a single card correctly."

  "What!" Fletcher shouted.

  "Not one. Do you know what that means?"

  "It means we've all been wasting our time."

  "Oh, not at all, Mr. Fletcher. Quite the reverse. You understand the mathematics of these tests? There are twenty-five cards, five each of five symbols. If pure chance operated, ,the average score must be five. Of course, in an individual case the number might be two or it might be eight, but over the piece the result must be five."

  "That's obvious. But . . . "

  "So a figure of nil is just as significant as a figure of twenty-five. To avoid a pure chance score of five, you had to know what every card was -- or to be more accurately what every card was not."

  Fletcher frowned. He had not thought himself a mind-reader and had never liked the idea of being a mental freak. Yet he had expected something to come of this experiment. Had he really thought about it, he reflected, he might have predicted exactly this -- a significant result, but a totally negative one. Indeed, what else could have been expected?

  "Now I must ask you something," said Baudaker. "I'd have liked to ask you before, but the very question would have told you something I didn't want you to know. Were your answers consciously negative? Did you know the symbol was, say, a circle, and pick something else?"

  "Of course not," said Fletcher irritably. "You told me to tell you what I saw, and if I didn't see anything, guessblindly. That's what I did."

  "Oh, but not blindly," said Baudaker happily. "Anything but blindly. This series,of tests proves beyond any doubt that you are both a telepath and a clairvoyant. The scale of the tests was such that no random error . . . "

  "But to be wrong every time -- what's the point of that? Why have me make umpteen thousand guesses to prove I've got the world's greatest failure rate, which I knew already?"

  "There were scores of possibilities we wanted to investigate. For instance, were your answers displaced? In a famous experiment along these lines, the subject's answers were found to be without significance until someone thought of checking them against the next card each time. A figure of about 11.5 was established then, highly significant."

  "Well, were my answers displaced?"

  "I think we have succeeded in proving that they were not. All such checks we have made have given random figures while the result of comparing your answers directly is of extraordinary interest."

  "Not to me," said Fletcher. "I'm going home now."

  "Wait. I've been talking only about the tests done in here, before the tests with Miss Somerset."

  "Well?"

  "There the picture changes dramatically. Here is a list of the figures."

  Fletcher looked at it. It read:

  Raw scores Percentage 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 4 6 24 9 36 14 56 24 96 23 92 19 76 24 96 -- -- 3 12 1 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

  The rest were zeros.

  "Well?" he said: "What does that mean?"

  "We can only guess. Remember, these are observations, Mr. Fletcher. They prove nothing."

  "I thought you just said . . . "

  "They prove nothing in the sense that if you release a stone fifty times and it falls to the ground, that doesn't prove it will fall the fifty-first time. But anyone who sees the stone drop fifty times will believe, unscientifically, that the stone will fall the next time."

  Fletcher's headache had returned, he was tired and suddenly very hungry. There were plenty of sandwiches left, but he wanted to get out of the laboratory.

  The results excited Baudaker, but to him they were of no interest, except for that spurt in the tests with Anita which showed their minds had touched for a few minutes. Vaguely he recalled the moment. The first few tests had been like all the others, and then suddenly he ceased even to hear himself answering. He had put it down to tiredness and pulled himself together. That, presumably, was when he had returned to his true form.

  "Goodbye," he said abruptly.

  "Mr. Fletcher . . . "

  The little man was frantic. He tugged at Fletcher's arm. There was so much more to be said, so much more to be done. The students, including Anita, remained in the background, as they had promised to do.

  "You'll come back?"

  "No. You'll never see me again.'

  Fletcher was telling him the literal truth. Baudaker never did see him again.

  Fletcher shook off Baudaker's arm and walked out.

  Outside, the sun was already bright. Blinking in the glare, he was not aware of Anita until she reached out to touch his arm.

  He drew his arm back. They had not touched each other and he felt it important that they never should.

  "John," she said quietly.

  "Don't talk about it," he muttered.

  "Of course not, if you don't want to. What are you going to do now?"

  "Get something to eat."

  "I'll come with you."

  "No."

  "All right, kiss me goodbye."

  "No!"

  "I'm not easy to kiss. I don't do it like shaking hands. But I want to kiss you. There's something . . . something good about you."

  He thought he had misheard the word. It made no sense to him. Although he had never done anything particularly evil, he had certainly never done anything, said anything or thought anything to justify what she had just said. It was a remark totally without meaning.

  "Kiss me," she said quietly, without coquetry. "Please."