The Call-Girls (16 page)

‘Let's get to the next step,' said Harriet, ‘without Cartesian speculations.'

‘You all know about it,' said Tony, ‘but perhaps you regarded it as just another toy, while we have used it for our own devious purposes. So the next step was the control of our own brain-waves. The new gadgets which came on the market in the early 'seventies enabled a person to be aware of the alpha waves which his brain emits. Among the various types of brain-waves, the slow alpha rhythm, with frequencies around ten cycles per second, has long been known to be indicative of a state of mental relaxation. When the subject engages in intense mental activity such as an arithmetical calculation, the alpha rhythm is replaced by small, fast, irregular waves; when the problem is solved, it reappears. Yogis, Zen masters and other contemplatives have been found to produce a much higher than average amount of alpha waves. The new toys operate on the principle of the electro-encephalograph with an added twist – they are tuned exclusively to alpha waves, which are heard as a series of bip-bips from a loudspeaker. After a few hours' training people can learn to increase their alpha activity …'

‘And enter the contemplative state?' Burch quoted sarcastically.

‘And enter the contemplative state,' Tony repeated.

‘Why not swallow some LSD and forget about the gadgets?'

‘Because we are aiming in the opposite direction. We are not interested in taking trips.'

‘Then what are you interested in?'

‘The sources of the Nile,' Tony said amiably.

Blood chuckled. ‘Well roared,' he said.

‘Riddles are for kids,' said Burch. ‘When are we getting to levitation?'

‘So far we have only got to Omdurman,' said Tony. ‘A kind of pseudo-levitation, demonstrated in the late 'sixties by Dr Valenti's colleague, Grey Walter, in Bristol. Two electrodes are attached to a young student's skull. In front of him is a television screen. When he presses a button, an exciting scene appears on it. Before he presses the button, his brain emits the characteristic “intention wave”, a surge in electrical activity of some twenty micro-volts. The electrodes transmit this wave to an amplifier, which activates a current, which switches on the exciting picture – a fraction of a second
before
the student has pressed the button. He soon discovers that there is no need to press the button at all – it is enough for him to
will
the picture, and it appears. Then he learns to switch
off
the picture by another act of will… I think this gets us a step further to the sources of the Nile. Walter reported that two of his adult experimental subjects became so excited by the discovery that they had the power to control the pictures on the screen by mere thinking and willing, that they wet their pants…'

Von Halder ruffled his mane to indicate protest, then lifted his hand. ‘So where does the magic come in? The electrodes are connected to the circuit, and it's all mechanical.'

‘Quite so,' said Niko, ‘except for the act of willing, which produces the intention wave. From there on it's all mechanical. Before that it isn't.'

‘You see what I am driving at,' said Tony. ‘You may regard the experiment as a stunt. Or as a metaphor. The wires deputize for the nerves, and the switch for the muscles, which in the normal course of events execute the act of will. But in the normal course of events we just take it for granted that the will can activate nerves and muscles, and thus we are unaware of the magic. Walter's mechanized metaphor drives it home. No wonder the subjects wet their pants. They are suddenly confronted with the naked mystery – the power of mind over matter.'

‘So I shall be impressed,' said Halder, ‘when you will
operate that television set without electrodes and wires on your skull.'

‘Something like that is indeed the next step in our little games,' Tony said apologetically. ‘I should have explained that we do not regard contemplation as an end in itself. Rather we regard the contemplative state as the most favourable condition for our purpose, which is to tap the powers of mind at their source. We started where we think that Rhine and the bulk of researchers in parapsychology went wrong. They were leaning over backward to prove how modern and statistical their methods were, and became bogged down in dreary pedantry. They spent thousands of hours on rigorously controlled card-guessing and dice-throwing experiments – it's a miracle they did not die of boredom. Nevertheless, the odds against chance they produced were astronomical, and statistical evidence showed conclusively that telepathy and psychokinesis are facts, whether we like it or not…'

Burch shrugged expressively, while Halder threw his hands up to heaven. But Solovief intervened before the storm could break over Tony's head.

‘I have seen the statistics,' he said quietly, ‘and agree that they constitute
prima facie
evidence. I wouldn't mind the fact that they contradict the so-called laws of nature as we know them; Relativity and Quantum theory did the same – they contradicted the laws of nature as Newton knew them. But I do mind that the phenomena, though undeniably real, are so damned capricious and unpredictable.'

‘Hear, hear,' said Halder.

‘An experiment,' said Burch, ‘which is not repeatable at will is not a scientific experiment.'

‘But Professor,' Tony said, blushing, ‘if you were asked to make love to a beautiful lady on the village square with the whole fire-brigade watching, the experiment would probably fail.'

‘You trying to be funny?' snapped Burch amidst suppressed giggles.

‘I am trying to answer Professor Solovief's objection. The
psi factor – or the sixth sense as it used to be called – must have its source in the deep substrata of the mind, beyond voluntary control – like sex. On this one issue even Freud and Jung agreed. The problem is to get down to that source. And that is where the relaxing apparatus and the alpha waves come in.'

‘And how far have you got?' asked Wyndham.

‘We have got some pretty conclusive results,' Tony said, smiling innocently.

‘Conclusive of what?' Harriet wanted to know.

‘Demonstrate them,' said Burch. ‘Read my thoughts.'

‘That isn't difficult: “Poppycock”,' said Tony.

There was some hilarity.

‘Demonstrations are tricky,' Tony continued. ‘Heisenberg's voodoo on physics, the indeterminacy principle, applies to our field too: the observer interacts with the observed phenomenon, and the situation becomes blurred. We have an old dear, Brother Jonas, who, when the spirit moyes him and his alpha waves are right, can almost infallibly predict at which number the roulette ball will stop. Or perhaps he makes it stop at that number. He doesn't know and he doesn't care. But he couldn't do it in Monte Carlo – not yet. It's the fire-brigade again.'

‘Forgive me,' said Wyndham, ‘but if you are unable to demonstrate the results of your experiments, you cannot expect to convince people.'

‘Quite so. We do not expect it – not yet. For the time being we are just playing games. Like the juggler of Notre Dame, who performed his tricks in the empty cathedral to make the Virgin on the altar smile.'

‘As a matter of fact,' Niko said slowly, ‘I have seen some of the experiments of Tony's friends – in telepathy and also some physical phenomena – and I believe they have got something. This belief is shared by some of my hard-boiled colleagues, and also by some of Valenti's colleagues. Quite understandably, the Order is afraid of premature publicity. Incidentally, they are also afraid of the military muscling in. You must be aware that both NASA and the Soviet Academy
of Sciences are actively sponsoring research in these directions. And they usually know what they are up to.'

‘It just goes to show…' said Burch.

‘To show what?' asked Blood.

‘The power of ancient superstition.'

‘The most monumental superstition of our century,' drawled Blood, ‘is the type of science which treats man as a salivating Pavlov dog, or an overgrown Skinner rat, or a Crick-robot programmed by its genetic code. Your science is a methodical form of paranoia.'

‘So what is your alternative?' shouted Halder. ‘Astrology, Maharishi, hippy-trippy, hash and mish-mash!'

‘I have tried to explain,' Tony said, ‘that we have to undergo a rather severe training to protect us against credulity and the contemporary variety of
nostalgie de la boue
– wallowing in muddy mysticism. We are not attracted by the fog, but by the light. By groping towards the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us. We endeavour to make use of all that science can offer to get a glimpse at levels of reality which transcend science. The great scientists, from Pythagoras to Einstein, have always been aware of the fact – they even regarded it as a truism – that the scientific approach can only throw light on one, limited aspect of reality, leaving the rest in darkness – as the human eye can only perceive a small fraction of the spectrum of radiations which surround and penetrate us …'

At this point, young Tony really got going. He compared the sneers which greeted the pioneers of psi-research with the hollow laughter that reverberated through the history of science whenever a heretic tried to break new ground. He got away with his impudent sermon because he was surprisingly well grounded in the history of science – of which most scientists have only a foggy idea. He pointed out that, contrary to common belief, Canon Copernicus throughout his lifetime had been a darling of the Catholic clergy, but mortally afraid of his academic colleagues; that Galileo had been an intimate buddy of Pope Urban VIII – until he started meddling with theology – but was persecuted by the scientific
establishment of his time; and that when Kepler suggested that the tides were caused by the attraction of the moon, the same enlightened Galileo dismissed the idea as an occult fancy. And so on, through Harvey, Pasteur, Planck and Einstein…

‘All right, all right' Halder broke in. ‘So the genius, the pioneer, always has a tough time. But there always are a million cranks to one genius.'

‘Quite so,' said Tony. ‘But unfortunately, only posterity can tell whether the poor chap was a genius or a crank.'

‘And sometimes he is both,' Wyndham giggled. ‘Even, with due respect, our dear Nikolai seems today to be inclined …'

‘Your dear Nikolai,' Solovief said, unsmiling, ‘is not a Galileo, but he knows at least as much about physics as any undergraduate. And any hopeful undergrad will tell you that the motto of modern physics is, to quote the great Niels Bohr, “the madder the better”. I admit that some of the notions suggested by Tony's psi factor make one's hair stand on end. But they sound a little less preposterous in the light of the equally wild concepts of subatomic physics. Let me remind you, once more, that
we
don't turn a hair at the notion that an electron can be in two places at once, that it can race for a while backward in time, that space has holes in it, that mass can be negative and that the materialist's matter ultimately consists of vibrations emitted by non-existent strings. I am sometimes tempted to take at face value Eddington's epigram that the stuff of the world is mind-stuff; or Jean's offhand remark that the universe looks more like a thought than a machine. So why should your hair react differently when you listen to Tony and when you listen to me?'

‘You are a loss to poetry,' said Blood.

‘Forgive my stubbornness,' Wyndham piped up, ‘but even if you succeeded in convincing me that these puzzling phenomena are real, I can't for the life of me see their relevance to the strategy of survival, or the message that is supposed to emanate from this conference.'

Tony looked questioningly at Niko, who merely shrugged his massive shoulders. So Tony had to soldier on. ‘I haven't got even the beginnings of a precise answer to your precise question,' he said. ‘Assuming, hopefully, that we should succeed in stabilizing the phenomena and getting them under conscious control – the outcome of such a break-through would still be quite unpredictable. Instead of an answer, I can offer you only an analogy. The Greeks knew that when they rubbed a piece of
elektron,
that is, amber, with a silk cloth, it acquired the curious virtue of attracting flimsy objects. But they regarded this as a freak phenomenon which could not be fitted into the frame of orthodox Aristotelian physics and was therefore unworthy of attention. For the next two thousand years electricity was ignored. Only in the late eighteenth century did it gain admission into respectable scientific laboratories, and this eventually led to a revolution which transformed the world. But nobody at the time could have foreseen to what consequences it would lead. If Dr Wyndham's question had been put to Galvani or Volta, they would have been at a loss for an answer, and would probably have said that they were just playing games with frogs' legs and Leyden jars. Not in their wildest dreams could it have occurred to them that the freak phenomenon they were investigating would turn out to be the ultimate constituents of matter, and the source of all power and light…'

‘So you are dreaming, young man, that this psi factor will change the world and reveal the secret of the universe?' Halder's hair seemed to bristle with static electricity.

‘Dreams,' Tony said coyly, ‘are private property. However,' he continued, ‘one cannot
a priori
rule out the possibility that we live submerged in an ocean of psi forces – a sort of psycho-magnetic field – of which we are unaware, as we are unaware of electric fields. When we have come to grips with it, this might lead to a new Copernican revolution. It may not change the world, but it may change our outlook on the world. I thought you agreed that such a change was our most urgent need.'

‘Do you mean,' asked John D. John, ‘that it might lead to
the up-opening of new systems of communication channels? From the point of view of information theory this may be a welcome project so long as it is not counterproductive.'