Breakthrough - Richard Cowper, page 2
Dumps laughed. ‘And have you preying on my mind for months? Have a heart.’
She smiled in spite of herself. ‘I suppose I could come in this evening,’ she said. ‘But only for an hour. Would that do?’
’Fine,’ he said. ‘About eight?’
‘All right,’ she nodded. ‘Will it be the same sort of thing?’
’That would be telling, wouldn’t it?’ said Dumps with a chuckle.
The girl didn’t rise to the bait. She simply shrugged, directed a barely perceptible nod in my direction, turned on her heel and ran off after the others. Dumps watched her for a moment and kneaded his nose thoughtfully. He glanced down at the entry in his notebook, frowned and shook his head.
‘Has she been cheating?’ I asked.
’Of course.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘She got a result that is virtually impossible un/ess she cheated. By the laws of chance your results are bound to fall within a certain range—anything above or below that is statistically significant. She got so many wrong her score was well below anything permissible. Short of scrapping the whole law of mathematical probability, I’ve got no option but to assume she’s pulled a fast one. What beats me is how she did it.’
I nodded. ‘And how far would you have to stretch your law of probability until it could accommodate her result?’
’Too far for comfort,’ he said gloomily. ‘What she’s just done is roughly equivalent to winning the pools with a pin.’
‘Has it happened to you before? People trying to hoodwink you, I mean?’
’Oddly enough, to me it never has. The scientific mumbo-jumbo tends to discourage it, and besides we try to inculcate virtual automatism in these tests—relax; don’t think; just let it write itself.’
‘She didn’t look as if she’d tried to pull a fast one,’ I said.
‘No, she didn’t, did she?’ he agreed, closing the notebook with a snap and thrusting it back into his pocket. ’There’s an explanation somewhere—there always is—but I’m damned if I can see what it is.’
‘Maybe she read your mind,’ I grinned.
He appeared to take my light-hearted suggestion quite seriously even as he rejected it. ’That wouldn’t have helped. I didn’t even know the order myself. We’re testing for telecognition not telepathy. I simply used the random selector with an open-ended pack and then fed the results into the checker.’
‘What’s an open-ended pack?’
‘A pack of twenty-five cards with five different symbols but no predetermined number of any one symbol. They’re turned up one at a time inside the machine, while the symbol is automatically registered on a tape and a numbered light flashed in the testing room. The subject has a prepared card in front of him with columns for each symbol. As the light flashes he marks whatever symbol he thinks the machine’s turned up and then moves down to the next line. We do four packs at each sitting of about an hour. The scoring is simply a question of feeding the cards into the checker along with the tape.’
‘It sounds pretty well foolproof,’ I agreed. ‘Short of your machines getting together with your subject.’
Dumps grinned and led the way into the house. ’Even my imagination’s not flexible enough to accommodate that possibility. I’d rather stretch the laws.’
We ascended the three Mights of stairs and arrived, slightly out of breath, at the Parapsychological Research Laboratory—in other words, the attics. Dumps put his hand on the doorknob and was about to turn it when the door was suddenly wrenched open from inside and a young woman, with a sheaf of cards clasped to her bosom, all but cannoned into him. Behind her upswept spectacles her pale blue eyes were bright with excitement. ’Oh, Doctor Dumpkenhoffer,’ she gasped, ‘I was just coming to look for you. It’s happened again! ’
‘What has?’ enquired Dumps with commendable phlegm.
‘A virtual negative on the open-ended! ’
‘Well, well,’ said Dumps, taking the cards she thrust out at him and walking past her into the room. ‘Don’t tell me who—let me guess.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ’that Miss Bernstein.’
‘Have you checked for pre-cog-nit ion?’
She nodded emphatically. ‘Nothing at all of any significance.’
‘Rum,’ said Dumps. ’Extremely rum. Let’s try it again, all the same. By the way, this is Mr. Haverill. Haverill—Miss Aston.’
She and I exchanged nods, and then we both followed the Doctor through the testing room, which was set out with desks and chairs, and into the room beyond. It was obviously in use as an office, for there was a desk with a typewriter, a couple of large, metal filing cabinets and sundry other items of equipment, including a duplicator and a gunmetal grey machine with a series of buttons and lights dotted over its stomach. Dumps walked over to this, tapped the handful of cards he was holding and selected the four top ones. Then he adjusted a couple of dials in the front of the cabinet, ».set a pointer and clicked down a switch. The machine started to purr like a hungry tom cat. ‘Moment of truth, number two,’ muttered Dumps as he posted the cards into a slit on the top of the box and pressed yet another button.
The note of the machine rose a fraction and was joined 18 by a faint pizzicato clickety-click. This lasted for perhaps five seconds, then there was a muffled chunk and it began again. In half a minute it was all over. The cards flapped out into a wire basket at the base of the cabinet and Dumps tore off the three-inch tongue of paper which was protruding from a slit among the switches. The machine continued to purr softly to itself until Miss Aston switched it off and retrieved the cards.
We both stood waiting for Dumps to make his pronouncement, but he looked completely baffled. Finally, he screwed the strip of paper up into a ball and threw it towards the waste-paper basket. ‘How about post-cognition?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t checked that yet,’ said Miss Aston. ‘Shall I do it now?’
‘It’s worth a try,’ said Dumps gloomily. ‘You never know. How were the others? Lambert?’
’The list’s there on your desk,’ she said, clicking the dials of the machine. ‘Do you want me to do all four cards?’
’One’ll be enough,’ said Dumps. ‘More than enough.’ He picked up the sheet of paper and ran his eye down the column. ‘Lambert seems worth persisting with,’ he said, ‘and so does Conolly—just. The rest can vamoose back to their Higher Education.’
He took a pipe from his pocket and began to fill it slowly, pausing every so often to check whether it was correctly packed. He appeared to have forgotten my existence. The checking machine played a little electronic fugue to itself and winked a ruby eye at regular intervals. Finally, Dumps began to pat himself absently.
’There’s a box of matches on the shelf up there,’ I said.
‘Huh? Oh, thanks, Haverill.’ He reached up and helped himself, struck a match and puffed a miniature Stromboli into the lancing beams of sunlight. ‘Sorry,’ he grunted, ’that Bernstein kid’s got me up a gum tree.’ He turned his head. ‘Betty, can you be here at eight this evening? I’ve got her coming in again.’
Miss Aston gave a faint wail of distress. ’Oh, Doctor
Dumpkenhoffer, not this evening! I just can’t! Couldn’t she make it tomorrow?’
’Oh, I’ll fix something,’ Dumps assured her genially. ‘It’s only that four eyes are sharper than two.’ His gaze rested meditatively on me for a moment. I looked pensive. His eyebrows lifted a fraction and stayed up.
‘Would I be of any use?’ I offered.
‘I wouldn’t dream of burdening you,’ chuckled Dumps, who was certainly dreaming of nothing else. ‘I’ll manage all right.’
I had a sudden, charming and vivid vision of Miss Bernstein’s upturned face. ‘But I’d be most interested,’ I said.
‘You would?’ He sounded unconvinced.
‘Profoundly,’ I affirmed. ‘After all, it isn’t every day I get the chance to see a mathematical law being stretched to breaking point.’
’That’s great,’ said Dumps. ‘We’ll make it a date. How’s Charlie coping, Betty?’
Miss Aston consulted a dial. ’One more to go,’ she announced.
No sooner had she spoken than there was a chunk and the card dropped out into the basket. She tore off the long ribbon of paper, scanned it rapidly and then handed it to Dumps with a shake of her head. He gave it an even more perfunctory glance and then discarded it. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said with surprising cheerfulness. ‘All stones upturned; all avenues explored. Where do we go from here?’
Miss Aston shrugged and lit herself a cigarette. Dumps prodded the glowing ash in his pipe with the knob of a silver pencil. I leant my elbows on the windowsill and gazed out across the sunlit park. ‘Having eliminated the possible, we are left only with the impossible,’ said Dumps.
‘What about the cheating?’ I asked.
‘I rank that with the impossible,’ he said. ‘Dammit she couldn’t have faked it.’
I laughed. ‘Well, maybe she was a week in advance.’
There was a sudden silence in the room caused by a simultaneous catching of breath by Dumps and Miss Aston.
I felt like the man whose careless footstep is about to start an avalanche, and I turned to find the two of them looking at each other with what Keats has described once and for all as ‘a wild surmise’. I knew, almost better than they knew themselves, just what they were thinking and, simply because I wasn’t conditioned as they were to thinking within their own empirical limits, I was able to say, ‘Well, why not?’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Miss Aston.
‘You certainly don’t know what you’re implying,’ said Dumps.
I grinned. ‘What have you got to lose? Go ahead and play this week’s tape against last week’s cards. In the interests of the law of probability.’
‘My friend, this is an institution for scientific investigation,’ said Dumps severely, ‘not a looney-bin.’
’Then you’ll have the satisfaction of proving I’m a lunatic,’ I said.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Miss Aston primly.
‘So’s acupuncture,’ I retorted. ‘But it works. Besides, I’m the seventh child of a seventh child. I have intuitions.’
They looked at one another and then they looked away. ’Oh, go ahead,’ said Dumps with a groan. ‘If it’ll make him happy.’
Miss Aston wrenched open a filing cabinet as if she suddenly hated it and snatched out a folder. Dumps gazed morosely out of the window and puffed clouds of blue smoke into the air. I suddenly knew I was making a fool of myself and wished I’d learnt to keep my big mouth shut. ’Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’m an idiot.’ But, even as I said the words, it struck me that in fact they both wanted to do it: I was a heaven-sent release from the iron shackles of their scientific discipline, as well as being a convenient emergency exit by which they’d escape when it miscarried.
Miss Aston gave me a disdainful sneer, slapped down the four cards, riffled through them swiftly and then prodded the buttons on the machine so viciously I all but winced. With the machine purring and the cards poised over the slot 21 she turned again to Dumps. He made no sign that he was even aware of what was going on, so she simply shrugged, slotted the cards home, stabbed the final button and yawned artificially.
I watched the little paper tongue protruding inch by derisory inch. Clickety-click, went the machine, clickety-click: pic-nik: hic-quick! And then chunk! Thirty seconds. I stepped across and tore off the paper ribbon. The string of figures meant nothing at all to me. ‘Would you like me to decipher it?’ enquired Miss Aston with acid sweetness.
I shrugged. ‘It hardly seems worth it,’ I said and made as if to flip it into the waste-paper basket.
She twitched it from my fingers, glanced at it and then, as though it were the face of the Gorgon itself, paled and went rigid.
My heart lurched. ‘What’s up?’
She looked up slowly from the paper and her eyes were wide with shock. ‘Doctor Dumpkenhoffer,’ she whispered. ‘Look at this.’
Dumps swivelled round. ‘Go ahead, Betty. Let’s have it.’
Miss Aston moistened her dry lips, swallowed and said huskily, ’Twenty-two; twenty-one; nineteen; twenty-three!’
Dumps, who had begun to move towards her, stopped in his tracks. It was almost as though each figure were a separate physical blow. He stood still for a few seconds, absorbing their full force, then he came on again and pulled the paper from her nerveless fingers. His gaze moved slowly down the list of digits, pausing here and there, then he handed the strip back to her and wearily shook his head. ‘Why must it happen to me?’ he groaned. ‘What have I done?’
‘Will someone please tell me what’s happened?’ I begged.
Dumps eyed me ruminatively. ‘It appears you were right, my friend—but too right. In 1941 Shackleton and Soal averaged eight right out of twenty-five guesses—that’s three over the chance expectation of five—with a ten-second precognition. Our little Miss Bernstein appears to have scored no less than eighty-five right out of a hundred, which is an average of roughly sixteen above chance and at a precognition range of—Goddammit—seven days’. And we weren’t even using an intermediary!’
‘Sixteen’s pretty high, is it?’
‘High? It’s—it’s witchcraft. Rhine’s best ever result was about ten, using a closed pack, an intermediary and no precognition. I tell you, Haverill, this can’t have happened! ’ ‘Yet, apparently, it has.’
’Apparently it has,’ he repeated dully.
‘But why’re you both so upset about it? It seems to me you ought to be dancing around on the rooftops.’
‘Shock, I guess,’ he said ruefully. ’To you, no doubt, it’s just a piece of fantastic luck, like doing a hole in one right in front of the clubhouse, but to us it’s, well, frankly, frightening—and, in a way, useless too.’
‘I don’t follow.’
’Imagine publishing that result as it stands! I’d be ruined. Hell, I can’t believe it myself! Repeat that experiment successfully a hundred times—a thousand!—and I’d still be branded as a charlatan. Repeat—’ He broke off, his tongue tripped by his racing thoughts, and swung round on Miss Aston. ’Today’s test,’ he grunted. ‘Where is it?’ ’Today’s? Why, over there on the filing cabinet.’
Dumps scooped up the pile of cards and dealt off the four from the top. Then he flung down the rest of the pile, picked up the four and slapped them against his open palm. ‘Betty,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to be here at eight. Stand him up; tell him you’ve fallen for me; tell him anything—only be here.’
‘All right, Doctor.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
Dumps grinned. ‘Persist in my folly. Forfeit my scientific reputation. Play it by ear.’
‘Shall I come?’
‘By all means. And we’ll get Lambert and Conolly along too. Can you get hold of them, Betty?’
‘I can try,’ said Miss Aston.
‘Splendid.’ Dumps marched over to the desk where the typewriter stood, pulled open a drawer and took out a thick manilla envelope. He slipped the four cards inside, licked the tab thoroughly and pounded it down with his fist. Then he produced a sealing-wax candle, lit it and plopped blobs of red wax along the join. ‘Here, come and mark this in some way, Haverill. You too, Betty.’
I licked my thumb and pressed down on the largest blob. Betty squashed a ring into another. Dumps blew out the candle and, seemingly satisfied, unlocked the second filing cabinet, dropped the sealed envelope inside and then locked it up again and pocketed the key. ‘It wouldn’t satisfy Price of Minnesota,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘but I guess it’s good enough for me. Now how about some lunch?’
THREE
All that afternoon I was troubled by a niggling sense of unease, localized in the pit of my stomach. More than once I found myself recalling the upturned face of Miss Bernstein and finally, in an attempt to banish it, I wandered into the Registrar’s office and looked her up in the faculty lists. Rather to my surprise I discovered that she was a second-year Geography student and that her Allied Studies were Anthropology and Music. Strictly informally I asked if I might take a look at her record card, offering as my excuse the fiction that she’d been enquiring into the possibility of swapping over from Music to Nineteenth-century English Literature. Her dossier was handed to me without a murmur, and from it I gleaned that she was nineteen years old; that her home was in Norwich; that she’d got well above average ‘A’-level results at the local High School; and that her grade in the first-year exams had been Alpha minus. It was something, I suppose, but not much. I handed back the file, thanked the secretary and drifted out.
My next call was at the psychology section of the library. I ran my eye along the shelves and even opened one or two volumes with titles like E.S.P. Today and New Frontiers of the Mind, but the style was either impossibly turgid or the mathematics was beyond me, so in the end I gave it up as a bad job and went down to the beach and had a swim.
At a quarter to eight I set out for Brankfield House. When I reached the bridge I heard a patter of footsteps and turned to find, just behind me, the girl who was the cause of my journey. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘We meet again.’
’Oh, you’re in on it too, are you?’ she responded listlessly. ‘Purely as a spectator,’ I assured her. ‘What I know about Parapsychology wouldn’t cover a sixpence.’
‘I nearly didn’t come,’ she said. ‘Honestly it’s about the most boring way of spending an hour anyone’s ever thought up. But then if I hadn’t come the Prof, would have been certain I’d cheated last time.’
I had half a mind to tell her what we’d discovered, but luckily thought better of it. ‘Science moves in a mysterious way, its wonders to perform,’ I said cheerfully.
‘Science? Hooey!’ she retorted. ‘What’s scientific about sitting down and ticking off lists of stars and squiggles on a bit of cardboard?’
