Fifty Per Cent Prophet
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considered himself or theothers in the least bit crackpottish, in which he was just as much inerror as he was in his assumption of the Society's _raison d'etre_.
Ninety per cent of the members of the Society for Mystical andMetaphysical Research were just what you would expect them to be.Anyone who was "truly interested in the investigation of thesupranormal", as the ads in certain magazines put it, could pay fivedollars a year for membership, which, among other things, entitledhim to the Society's monthly magazine, _The Metaphysicist_, awell-printed, conservative-looking publication which containedarticles on everything from the latest flying saucer report to carefulmathematical evaluations of the statistical methods of the RhineFoundation. Within its broad field, the magazine was quite catholic inits editorial policy.
These members constituted a very effective screen for the real work ofthe society, work carried on by the "core" members, most of whomweren't even listed on the membership rolls. And yet, it was thisgroup of men and women who made the Society's title true.
Mr. Brian Taggert was a long way from being a crackpot. The big,dark-haired, dark-eyed, hawknosed man sat at his desk in his office onthe fifth floor of the Society's building and checked over the mail.Normally, his big wrestler's body was to be found quietly relaxed onthe couch that stood against a nearby wall. Not that he was in any wayaverse to action; he simply saw no virtue in purposeless action. Nordid he believe in the dictum of Miles Standish; if he wanted a thingdone, he sent the man most qualified to do it, whether that washimself or someone else.
When he came to the letter from Coney Island, New York, he read itquickly and then jabbed at a button on the intercom switchboard in hisdesktop. He said three syllables which would have been meaningless toanyone except the few who understood that sort of verbal shorthand,released the button, and closed his eyes, putting himself intelepathic contact with certain of the Society's agents in New York.
* * * * *
Across the river, in the Senate Office Building, a telephone rang inthe office of Senator Mikhail Kerotski, head of the Senate Committeeon Space Exploration. It was an unlisted, visionless phone, and thenumber was known only to a very few important officials in the UnitedStates Government, so the senator didn't bother to identify himself;he simply said: "Hello." He listened for a moment, said, "O.K., fine,"in a quiet voice, and cut the connection.
He sat behind his desk for a few minutes longer, a bearlike man with around, pale face and eyes circled with dark rings and heavy pouches,all of which had the effect of making him look like a rather sleepyspecimen of the giant panda. He finished the few papers he had beenworking on, stacked them together, rose, and went into the outeroffice, where he told his staff that he was going out for a shortwalk.
By the time he arrived at the brownstone building in Arlington and waspushing open the door of Brian Taggert's office, Taggert had receivedreports from New York and had started other chains of action. As soonas Senator Kerotski came in, Taggert pushed the letter across the desktoward him. "Check that."
Kerotski read the letter, and a look of relief came over his roundface. "Not the same typewriter or paper, but this is him, all right.What more do we know?"
"Plenty. Hold on, and I'll give you a complete rundown." He picked upthe telephone and began speaking in a low voice. It was anordinary-sounding conversation; even if the wire had been tapped, noone who was not a "core" member of the S.M.M.R. would have known thatthe conversation was about anything but an esoteric article to beprinted in _The Metaphysicist_--something about dowsing rods.
The core membership had one thing in common: _understanding_.
Consider plutonium. Imagine someone dropping milligram-sized pelletsof the metal into an ordinary Florence flask. (In an inert atmosphere,of course; there is no point in ruining a good analogy with sidereactions.) More than two and a half million of those little pelletscould be dropped into the flask without the operator having anythingmore to worry about than if he were dropping grains of lead or goldinto the container. But after the five millionth, dropping them in byhand would only be done by the ignorant, the stupid, or theindestructible. A qualitative change takes place.
So with understanding. As a human mind increases its ability tounderstand another human mind, it eventually reaches a critical point,and the mind itself changes. And, at that point, the Greek letter_psi_ ceases to be a symbol for the unknown.
When understanding has passed the critical point, conversation as itis carried on by most human beings becomes unnecessarily redundant.Even in ordinary conversation, a single gesture--a shrug of theshoulders, a snap of the fingers, or a nose pinched between thumb andforefinger--can express an idea that would take many words and muchmore time. A single word--"slob," "nazi," "saint"--can be moredescriptive than the dozens of words required to define it. All thatis required is that the meanings of the symbols be understood.
The ability to manipulate symbols is the most powerful tool of thehuman mind; a mind which can manipulate them _effectively_ is, inevery sense of the word, truly human.
Even without telepathy, it was possible for two S.M.M.R. agents tocarry on a conversation above and around ordinary chit-chat. It tooklonger, naturally; when speaking without the chit-chat, it waspossible to convey in seconds information that would have takenseveral minutes to get over in ordinary conversation.
* * * * *
Senator Kerotski only listened to a small part of the phonediscussion. He knew most of the story.
In the past eight months, six anonymous letters had been received byvarious companies. As Taggert had once put it, in quotes, "We seem tohave an Abudah chest containing a patent Hag who comes out andprophesies disasters, with spring complete."
The Big Bend Power Reactor, near Marfa, Texas, had been warned thattheir stellarator would blow. The letter was dismissed as "crackpot,"and no precautions were taken. The explosion killed nine men and cutoff the power in the area for three hours, causing other accidents dueto lack of power.
The merchant submarine _Bandar-log_, plying her way between Ceylon andJapan, had ignored the warning sent to her owners and had never beenheard from again.
In the Republic of Yemen, an oil refinery caught fire and destroyedmillions of dollars worth of property in spite of the anonymous letterthat had foretold the disaster.
The Prince Charles Dam in Central Africa had broken and thousands haddrowned because those in charge had relegated a warning letter to thecylindrical file.
A mine cave-in in Canada had extinguished three lives because asimilar letter had been ignored.
By the time the fifth letter had been received, the S.M.M.R. hadreceived the information and had begun its investigation. As an _exofficio_ organ of the United States Government, it had ways and meansof getting hold of the originals of the letters which had beenreceived by the responsible persons in each of the disasters. All hadbeen sent by the same man; all had been typed on the same machine; allhad been mailed in New York.
When the sixth warning had come to the offices of Caribbean Trans-Air,the S.M.M.R., working through the FBI, had persuaded the company'sofficials to take the regularly scheduled aircraft off the run andsubstitute another while the regular ship was carefully inspected. Butit was the replacement ship that came to pieces in midair.
The anonymous predictor, whoever he was, was a man of no mean ability.
Then letter number seven had been received by the United StatesDepartment of Space. It predicted that a meteor would smash intoAmerica's Moonbase One, completely destroying it.
Finally, a non-anonymous letter had come to the S.M.M.R. requestingadmission to the society, enclosing the proper fee. The letter alsosaid that the writer was interested in literature on the subjects ofprescience, precognition, and/or prophecy, and would be interested incontacting anyone who had had experience with such phenomena.
Putting two and two together only yields four, no matter how oftenit's done, but two to the eighth power gives a nice, round two hund
redfifty-six, which is something one can sink one's teeth into.
Brian Taggert cut off the phone connection. "That's it, Mike," he saidto the senator. "We've got him."
Two of the Society's agents, both top-flight telepaths, had gone outto "Dr. Joachim's" place on Coney Island's Boardwalk, posing ascustomers--"clients" was the word Dr. Joachim preferred--and had donea thorough probing job.
"He's what might be called a perfectly sincere fraud," Taggertcontinued. "You know the type I'm sure."
The senator nodded silently. The woods were full of that kind ofthing. Complete, reliable control of any kind of psionic powerrequires understanding and sanity, but the ability lies dormant inmany minds that cannot control it, and it can and does burst fortherratically at times. Finding a physical analogy for the phenomenon