Alien Accounts (10 page)

Dot and Frank are in bed when Al

No, Dot is at home. Al dies of heart failure in his office, slumping across the digital calendar. ‘A black and white picture!’ muttered Clem, as his heart begins to beat. ‘What do they take me for?’ Dot and Ernest are in the vibrating bed. Clem hears of a plan to widen the Panama Canal with atomic blasts. Dot and Ernest are vibrating when Al walks in with the electric carving knife in his hand. This carving knife could run as now on batteries. Alternatively, it could use house power, ultimately derived from a distant atomic pile.

Outside the window of the Faculty Lounge, between the great slabs of blind concrete that house University departments, there is a small square of empty green lawn. On the architect’s immaculate drawings, this is called ‘the Quad’, but no one here has ever called it anything, or made any use of it, either. Once ‘Corky’ Corcoran – but that comes later.

I was looking out of this window while Beddoes talked on andon. Out and down, from my privileged perspective, I could see the architect’s intention, an arrangement of little trees. I thought of
that
limerick, naturally, but it didn’t seem appropriate: It wasn’t the Quad, I wasn’t God, and all the little trees looked dead. Anyway, Beddoes was sure to quote it himself, sooner or later.

No, I thought – I suppose what I thought was: How stupid to plant those trees down there, where they can’t get any light. Even birds are afraid to descend to them, in the shadow of the Philosophy Department, or the Psychology Department, or whatever it is. I’d been here two years, and still couldn’t find my way about …

The rat’s pink nose turned the final corner, came up against a food pellet and stopped. Dr Smith took a reading from the electric timer.

‘Eight point two nine seconds,’ he announced. ‘Check this, will you, Latham?’

I read the figures and entered them on my clipboard. ‘It’s very good,’ I said. ‘Better than we’d hoped.’

‘Yes, even Beddoes will have trouble explaining this away. Though no doubt he’ll try. All yours, Gorky.’

Corcoran leaned over the maze, politely waiting for the rat to finish devouring its prize. Then he picked it up and stroked its belly with his thumbs. He crooned over it. ‘Clever lad. Clever little lad. Wait till Beddoes hears about you, eh?’The animal clung to his red beard.

Smith grinned. ‘That’s exactly why I insisted we take every possible precaution against mistakes. We must have strict records, with everything trebly-checked. Because, if
we
find it hard to believe, how do you suppose it’ll hit the rigid behaviouristic mind of Dr Beddoes?’

Taking the hint, Corcoran turned the rat over and read out its identification number. Smith and I both looked to be sure, then wrote it down, while he returned the animal to the bank of cages across the room.

‘Don’t forget Ariadne,’ said Smith.

I opened the black cage suspended above the maze and took her out: the large female rat who acted as our experimental ‘transmitter’. Though by now we all knew Ariadne by sight, we now read and recorded her number.

The entire fussy operation bored me. It was meant to be a test for ESP in animals. Dr Smith had planned it, Corcoran had designed the equipment, so of course they had reason to be excited: It was going well. Since our Paranormal Experience Research Group was, as always, short of staff, I acted as observer. The principle was interesting enough, bur the laborious details meant nothing – except that I was cutting back on my real work, the Library of Paranormal Experiences. Real work, cataloguing letters from the real world, outside the Country of the Blind.

Still, our experiment might pry open a few eyelids. It worked like this: A rat coming to our maze ‘cold’ would take, on average, fourteen seconds or more to negotiate its blind alleys and find the bait. On a second trial it would be quicker, and so on. After twenty trials or so, the time could be got dawn to two seconds flat.

Pure behaviourism, thus far. But Smith had given it a twist:

Ariadne was a rat which had run the maze many times. It hardly ever took her more than two seconds. We put her into a cage suspended a few inches above the maze while other rats did the running.

The cage was painted matte black with a double wire-gauze bottom, and the white maze was brightly illuminated with flood-lamps. This made it possible for Ariadne to watch what happened below without being visible. She could see the food pellet and the way through to it, and she was hungry enough to really want to try. We hoped she would communicate a bit of her urgency and purpose to any rat trying to thread the maze.

The idea was to put through twenty rats who had never seen the maze before, giving them one run each. For ten of them, Ariadne would be upstairs, sending down telepathic directions to speed them through –we hoped. The other ten were our control group; she was not in the cage for them.

To isolate possible ESP, we had to eliminate every other difference between the test rats and the controls. They were not to sense the presence or absence of Ariadne by any normal means. This meant not only the black cage of invisibility but other devices developed by the ingenious Corcoran to hide her sound, her scent, even her body-heat from those below.

So far the control rats were behaving as expected, running the maze in about fourteen seconds. But the test rats, clever little lads and lasses, were doing it in eight seconds. To which Smith said, ‘Statistically significant’, and Corcoran said, ‘Flabbergasting!’

I simply shrugged. Why waste time trying to prove the existence of ESP to other scientists, when the evidence was all about us? Why not instead try finding out more about ESP, more about all psychic phenomena?

So I was bored, while Smith and Corcoran were excited – and increasingly on edge. As we prepared to lock up for the night, Corcoran started worrying.

‘When I was filling the water dishes, I noticed a draught,’ he said. ‘I
hope there’s no temperature difference between the cages.’

Smith raised an eyebrow. ‘You worry too much, Gorky. If it really matters, put a draught-excluder on the door.’

‘I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s just that – and another thing. Did you know there’s a wall mirror behind the bank of cages? What did they design this lab for? Budgies?’

‘I’d like to lock up and go.’ I said. Smith said the same thing, by taking out a pocket calculator and stabbing at its buttons. We stood about with our coats on for some time. Even when Corcoran finally joined us, he was muttering about needing a strip of felt for the door.

‘What you need is a drink,’ I said.

What Corcoran really needed, I now can see, was to let go his death-grip on the material world. He worked too closely with
things
, making and mending, and along the way he lost contact with
people
. For example he spent far too much time ruling out mazes on white cardboard and cutting them out with razor blades. That led to one of his more unpleasant confrontations with Beddoes.

He told Beddoes: ‘I’ve made this little model of the Great Pyramid in cardboard. Did you know that if you use a razor blade each day, but keep it under the model pyramid at night, it
never
loses its edge?’

Anyone with sense would never have put it that way to Beddoes, a creature who swam in a private sea of scepticism. Beddoes only said, ‘Indeed?’ but Corcoran couldn’t leave it there.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘What do you say to that?’

‘It sounds like good news for the manufacturers of cardboard model pyramids, bad news for manufacturers of razor blades. How do you account for it?’

Corcoran leapt at the chance. ‘Well, we know that metal edges are made of crystals. If they wear down, maybe they can be re-grown. We also know that crystals can be grown, given the proper magnetic fields –’

‘Cardboard being a great magnetizer?’ Beddoes said. ‘I see. Well, when I see a properly-conducted test that establishes this “truth”, I’ll. look into it. Meanwhile I might remind you of one razor which has not needed re-sharpening since the year 1350: Ockham’s Razor. That is the principle that one must not look for complex answers until one has failed to find any simple ones.’

I was to remember that conversation again.

Dr Harry Beddoes could easily have committed murder and escaped punishment, if only because he could not be picked out of an identity parade: He had no face. One might remember his heavy figure, his rumpled grey suit, eyes of some sort peering out through thick glasses, but nothing more. No – there’s no other word for it – no soul.

He could be found each evening at six o’clock, blending in to one corner of the Faculty Lounge. With his back to the great window, an ocean of pale green carpet stretching away before him, and an overflowing ashtray at his elbow, he was ready to hold court.

The Lounge was like the lounge in any airport: formica tables, chrome chairs and lines of perspective that leave no place for the eye to rest. Instead the eye would hunt and hunt, as though looking for one’s lost relative, but finally alighting only on a blemish in the corner.

We inevitably found ourselves drinking with Beddoes and suffering his little jibes. Smith said it was good for us, having as a kind of devil’s advocate a determined sceptic like Beddoes, who was always willing to test our theories, even to destruction.

That evening we talked of Arthur Koestler’s latest book on strange coincidences.

Dr Smith said, ‘Mind you, I’m not entirely convinced that all these cases are meaningful. But you’ll have to admit, some are most intriguing. Take the example of the man who flings himself in front of a London Underground train. It hits him but does not run over him. Because, at the same instant, some passenger has pulled the emergency handle. The train stops just in time.’

Beddoes’s eyes widened behind his thick glasses. ‘If only Koestler knew where to stop,’ he said.

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

Beddoes sighed. ‘Meaning that the story is a
rumour
, whose only source Koestler seems to have found is a hospital doctor. The doctor wasn’t himself at the accident. If we can’t get at the facts in a story, why stop at repeating it?’

I said, ‘I don’t follow. What else could he do?’

‘One might make it into an even more meaningful story. Say the passenger was a twin brother of the man who threw himself in front of the train. Or say that, the night before, the passenger had a premonition of disaster. He dreamed –’

‘Very amusing,’ Smith said. ‘You feel, then, that it’s a case of “Don’t confuse me with the facts”?’

Beddoes lit a cigarette and dropped the match on the floor. ‘I suppose facts can be confusing, if we’re speaking of coincidence. After all, is anything irrelevant? The most trivial events suddenly make “sense”, do they not? One man looks into the mirror while shaving and says, “Today I’ll grow a moustache.” A thousand miles away, a second man decides to shave off his moustache,
at the same instant
. Is it all part of the master plan? A law of conservation?’

I started to speak, but he went on:

‘Or suppose that I own a beagle, and Corcoran here owns an eagle, and you, Smith, are a bee-keeper. Is the universe trying to
spell
out significance into our meeting here?’

I thought of an odd coincidence: That Corcoran had mentioned a mirror a few minutes before, while Beddoes now chose mirrors and animals for his illustrations. Mirror and animal cage …

‘All things are possible,’ I said.

‘But not of equal importance, Latham. If they were, we might profitably spend our time looking for messages in every bowl of alphabet
soup.’ He tapped his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray; flakes of ash floated to the carpet.

Tidy little mind, messy little man. Beddoes the sower of ashes.

The test series finished and, to my disappointment, Smith suggested waiting a week and then trying to replicate our excellent results. Corcoran busied himself at the drawing board, laying out new maze plans. Smith went back to his book,
New Horizons in Psi:
I went back to my cataloguing.

Our Library of Paranormal Experiences consisted of some two thousand letters to be read, filed and, where practical, followed up. I was preparing cross-indices and also trying to keep up with the dozen or so new letters which arrived each week.

Some of them were obviously of no use to us. Now and again we received a demented-sounding letter, often unintelligible and always pathetic: ‘I am the Holy Ghost my enemys wil soon learn to there distres that my rays of power cannot be gainsaid no cannot be gainsaid …’ These went into a dead file.

Of course there were also a few practical jokes. One man described a supposed telepathic link with his twin brother. The story ran to several pages, becoming more and more incredible, and ending: ‘… and when they hanged him, I was the one who died!’ Ho ho and hum. Fortunately such letters were usually easy to spot from their feebly punning signatures: Vi. B. Rations, E. Espee, Uri Dipple
et al
. found their letters filed in my wastebasket. I was tempted to keep the joke letters and analyse them, to try finding out what makes people sneer at psychic phenomena. But I knew the answer already; it was as plain in the scrawl of poor Miss Rations as in the quips of Dr Beddoes. It was the fear of freedom.