The Collected Stories

by Earl

  Warren Tearle shrank back a little as the last two words were delivered with an almost explosive inflection.

  “Now,” said Oberton, clearing his throat, “the idea of the test is this. The deck I hold has 25 cards, 5 of each of those common symbols I’ve shown you.

  By the inexorable law of chance, over a sufficient number of trials, the average result of guessing the symbols is exactly one out of five, or 5 out of 25. You understand?”

  “Yes,” asserted Tearle. He was becoming deeply interested.

  “But—if there is some strange property of the mind that allows a glimpse now and then of a card through mysterious channels, the average will be more than 5 out of 25. And these results have been achieved. Most people, apparently with weak psychic ability, run very little above five. But others will consistently average around 6 and 7. Exceptional subjects have even averaged 9 and 10, which is twice as much as the law of chance will allow.” Oberton began shuffling the deck carefully.

  “To win the five dollars, you have to make an average score of 8 in five trials. There are two types of tests—telepathic and clairvoyant. In telepathic, you would name the symbols as I hold up the cards in front of me, concentrating on what I see. There you would be reading my mind, so to speak. The clairvoyant test you would carry out alone. The deck is simply placed face down and you would attempt to name the symbols in order from the top card down.”

  “Like—like seeing through the cards?” gasped Tearle.

  “In a way,” smiled Oberton. “You have your choice.”

  Tearle sat further toward the edge of his chair. “PM try it,” he said suddenly. “The clairvoyant, I mean.”

  The scientist nodded and placed the deck, face down, directly before him.

  “You may take as long as you wish to name the symbols. However, when you get a strong impression of knowing what one is, don’t hesitate in calling it out. This psychic perception is almost an instinct—it doesn’t come right out and hit you on the nose. Now start. I’ll take down the record.”

  Warren Tearle felt utterly foolish for a moment, staring down at a deck of cards. How could one see through them and name them! It was ridiculous. But it was too late now to back out, and besides, if he was lucky, he might win the five dollars.

  The five-dollar inducement had ensnared Warren Tearle for the simple reason that he needed five dollars. Long orphaned, out of a job, and somewhat bitter toward life, he could not pass by an opportunity to win some money, no matter how crazy the thing sounded. He had barely heard of telepathy in his grim struggle with life.

  If Tearle was doubtful about his ability to see through a pack of cards, Oberton had equal misgivings. He reflected that his visitor looked no more psychic than a mudturtle.

  Tearle was vaguely aware of someone coughing impatiently. It must be the professor. Tearle felt his eyes blur from his concentrated stare at the deck. What could that first card be? How was he to know when to say it? How did this queer clairvoyance work? A stab of panic went through him. He’d even forgotten what the symbols were! He could only remember one—the star. Well, he might as well say it—

  “Star,” said Tearle, hesitantly.

  That broke the ice. He began calling the symbols regularly. He gained speed as he went along. Some subtle intuition seemed to guide him.

  When the five tests had been made, Oberton, already excited, took the average. “Fifteen!” he announced. “Three times chance!” He stuffed his pipe, breaking three matches before he got it lit. Then he smoked jerkily. All the while he stared at Tearle so hard that he felt uncomfortable.

  “Pardon me,” said Tearle timidly at last, arising. “But if you will give me my—the five dollars I won, I’ll leave now, I guess.”

  “What!” Oberton almost roared.

  “Didn’t I win it?” gasped Tearle.

  Oberton took him by the arm and gently forced him back into the chair as though he were a fragile China piece.

  “Tearle,” he said earnestly, “do you realize that you are—for lack of a better term—an outstanding psychic? You have truly amazing telepathic powers. I’m going to study them; I’m going to find out how it works, if I can. You’re going to become my collaborator in research. Five dollars? Young man, I’ll get you a $1000 a year grant from the university!”

  CHAPTER II

  A Menial Guinea Pig

  FROM that day on, there was a quality of confusion in all things, for Warren Tearle. It was more like a vivid dream than real life. Events developed swiftly and incredibly, as though he had been marked by destiny. . . .

  Daily he was put through telepathic tests by Professor Oberton. It quickly became obvious that Warren Tearle was a human being with astounding powers of non-sensory perception. Why he should be such, where most people were dull in the psychic sense, was not explainable. It was just a fact. But the science of parapsychology was a new science, the professor reflected. There were many things to learn.

  Professor Oberton thereafter spent more and more of his research time with Tearle. Pedantic and earnest, he was determined to run down the will-o-wisp of extra-sensory perception, now that he had the super-psychic Tearle to work with.

  As Warren Tearle daily associated with him and absorbed the background of the research, he became fascinated. His intellect, eager and quick, was more keen than even he himself had suspected, beneath his inferiority complex. The two men worked on with a common interest in the intangible mysteries of mind and its psychic range. Day after day they labored, striving to push back the frontiers that Rhine—the Einstein of psychology—had first invaded.

  Professor Oberton soon found the standard ESP cards too simple and un-illuminative, and began devising new ones. He tried a wide range of symbols, from a mere dot to a dodecahedron.

  Warren Tearle mastered them all within a few trials. It was a crowning achievement when he was able to name correctly 95 out of 100 different symbols, all given within three-second intervals. Only one thing dampened Oberton’s enthusiasms—he couldn’t arrive at any scientific explanation of how extra-sensory perception worked. No matter how often he asked Tearle just how he was able to perceive those hidden things, the young man would only shake his head helplessly.

  A MONTH after that day when Warren Tearle, a shabby, underfed figure, had first climbed the steps of the building, there was an air of tenseness in the parapsychology laboratory.

  Professor Oberton, Tearle, and Darce Henderson were together. Tearle was staring dreamily out of the window at several feeding pigeons, calling out symbols. Before him, on the desk, was a thick steel strong-box, securely closed. Within it reposed an invisible deck of cards.

  Tearle paused, puzzled, on the twelfth card. Professor Oberton and Darce Henderson looked at one another significantly.

  “Hand!” said Tearle finally. He closed his eyes a moment. “Left hand,” he stated.

  He stared out of the window. His voice became a little hoarser now and a slight dew of sweat glistened on his nose. He went on with a rush.

  “Flower—carnation. Insect—bee. The Gettysburg Address. Map of Europe—”

  After the 25th call, he raised his bewildered eyes. “I named them all,” he whispered. “And I named them right—I know!” He shivered slightly. “It’s uncanny!”

  He slumped forward suddenly, resting his head on his arms, trying to control a nervous hysteria that gripped him. Professor Oberton opened the steel box, grabbed up the cards, and checked them with the called list.

  “A perfect score—2 5 out of 2 5!” he cried. “And with a set of new imprinted objects he had never seen before!”

  Tearle sat up finally, in sheepish embarrassment. “Sorry I went to pieces, professor. But it was rather a ghastly sensation.”

  “What was?” barked the psychologist, leaning forward.

  “The—well, the easy way it suddenly came to me,” continued Tearle lamely. “Up to the 12th card, it was like before—the impressions coming slowly. When I got to the 12th—the hand—I found mys
elf straining, striving, as though I had to climb a barrier. Suddenly—it all cleared up! It was like putting on your glasses and reading small print that you couldn’t make out before. Or like”—he groped mentally for expression—“finding a dream real. I—I can’t explain it, professor.”

  Oberton tugged at his beard.

  “I suspect you have advanced into some new phase of extra-sensory perception,” he mused. “The fact that you not only named the hand, but knew it to be a left hand is significant. Is it mostly a sort of vision—a second sight? Think hard now, Tearle. Do you visualize images?”

  The young man shook his head. “It’s partly that, but much more of something else. It isn’t seeing, but knowing!”

  “Like a voice told you?” queried the scientist, though he had asked that question a hundred times before.

  “No,” said Tearle hesitantly. “More than just that. In a way, all the five senses are combined in one, it seems. When I came to the card with the hand, I seemed to feel it gripping mine. That was how I knew it was a left hand, because it fitted in my left hand, in a handshake. When I came to the flower, I smelled carnation as though it were in front of my nose. As I switched to the next card, a taste of honey was in my mouth. The Gettysburg Address seemed to be read out by some one in a sonorous voice. And yet in each case I simply knew what they were, too!”

  The professor threw out his hands helplessly. “It’s the old problem, trying to explain color to a blind man,” he sighed. “I’ve averaged as high as 9.7 myself, in the standard ESP tests, but it’s still a mystery to me.”

  He became enthusiastic again. “But let’s have some more tests. Try running through the deck of 100 different symbols.”

  Tearle settled himself back in his chair, stared out of the window, and began naming them. Darce’s eyes widened and her pencil flew busily as he rattled them off with the speed and assurance of a person reading from a list. The professor checked at the end.

  “All hundred correct!” he announced. “Now I’ll mix the pack of object-symbols with it. Try that.”

  Tearle found no difficulty in running off these 125 cards, though all the while they reposed invisibly within the steel box on the desk.

  “Psychic perception 100%—never before recorded!” muttered Professor Oberton, as though he didn’t want to believe it. “Try broadcast telepathy, now, with Darce as recipient.”

  With the deck before him, Tearle picked up card after card, concentrating on each as the girl, across the room, wrote down symbols one by one. Darce stared at the raw-boned young man in astonishment all the while. At the end she looked dazed.

  “That came over clear as a bell!” she exclaimed.

  “A voice?” queried the professor doggedly.

  “No, unless it was a voice that reverberated from one end of the universe to another!” said the girl meaninglessly. She was excited. “It’s more like a—an instinct of knowing. I can’t explain it, either, professor.”

  Professor Oberton was checking the last run. “Perfect score again! This is almost incredible! Now transmit to me.”

  The score was once more errorless.

  “Well, is it a voice, professor?” asked Darce sweetly.

  “No, it’s a—a rapport between the two minds, like—”

  “Like a seance?” laughed the girl.

  “All right, I can’t explain it either,” admitted the scientist, grinning. “But I’m determined to get at the root of telepathy and telesthesia. Heretofore, our experiments have been carefully controlled laboratory tests, but from now on I’m going to let my imagination lead me on—and see what comes of it!”

  His eyes glowed. Then he waved a hand. “That will be all for today, Tearle. You may go. Wait—how much change have I in my pocket?”

  “Forty-two cents,” said Tearle automatically, though the question was unexpected.

  The psychologist dug into his pocket, opened his fist, and displayed four dimes and two pennies. He sat down weakly. “Well, good night,” he said.

  Tearle followed Darce to the outer office. There was no one else in the room. Suddenly the girl turned to face him with a serious expression.

  “Whatever you do,” she said solemnly, “don’t let this—get you. Don’t let it go to your head, I mean. Or I don’t know exactly what I mean, but don’t get to feeling superior just because you have a wonderful gift of psychic perception.” There was a vague uneasiness in her tone.

  “Oh, no, of course not,” said Tearle slowly. “I understand what you mean.”

  “I’m glad you do,” said the girl. “Good night.”

  For a moment Tearle hesitated going. Almost every evening he did, with the thought of screwing up enough courage to ask Darce out to dinner, always to lack the courage to go through with it.

  But tonight a sort of recklessness imbued him. He turned in the doorway. “Miss Henderson,” he began, clearing his throat nervously, “I wonder if—that is—would you—”

  That was all the far he got as a burly form from the hall suddenly blundered into him, knocking him off his feet.

  “Sorry,” said the newcomer, one of the several college boys who were satellites to Darce’s queenly beauty. He picked Tearle off the floor and dusted him off hurriedly as though he were a rag doll.

  “Beg your pardon, for being in the doorway,” said Tearle meekly.

  The college boy grunted and turned to Darce eagerly. “So I did beat the other guys here, eh? Honey, how’s about you and me—”

  “Wait,” interrupted the girl. “Warren,” she called to the gangling, embarrassed figure once more heading for the hall. “What were you saying?”

  “Me? Oh, nothing important,” stammered Tearle, over his shoulder, without stopping.

  A month later a scene took place that would have struck any unknowing observer as being a necromantic ritual.

  Warren Tearle sat twenty feet from a row of books, unable to see their titles. Professor Oberton stood near the books, peering at them. Darce Henderson wrote in shorthand, in a large notebook.

  “The fifteenth book, page 245,” said Oberton, at random.

  Face blank, Tearle began speaking after a short pause. Steadily, he gave out words, starting in the middle of a sentence and ending a few minutes later with an unfinished sentence. When he had signified the end, the psychologist took out the 15th book on the shelf, turned to page 245, and read its contents. Darce checked with her shorthand record.

  “Only ten words wrong,” she announced at the end. “Which is four better than his average in the other nine trials.”

  “And damn good in any man’s language!” cried the scientist jubilantly. “Now, Tearle, try reading the titles of books in my apartment, three miles from here! Physical dimensions have been proven to have no effect on psychic range. It should be just as easy for you to perceive them by clairvoyance as the books here.”

  “I’ll try,” said Tearle.

  For several minutes he made no further sound. Puzzedly, he now and then turned his head, as though adjusting some intangible inner focus. Suddenly his eyes lighted.

  “Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler,” he said. “First book in upper left corner of a glass-faced wall case near the bed. The second is Webster’s

  Collegiate Dictionary. The third is Daring Detective Stories by Hack Ryter, The fourth—”

  “That’s enough,” interrupted Oberton, after he had named ten. “Outside of the fact that you wonder what a scientist is doing with a detective-story book among his works”—he grinned briefly—“the test is perfect. Those titles are correct and in the proper order. Did you have any trouble extending your chairvoyance that far?”

  “Just a bit of—well, twisting around in my mind, before I found your place,” answered Tearle. He looked up with a faintly haunted stare in his eyes. “Does it mean that I can read any book anywhere—on earth?”

  “The range of clairvoyance is probably unlimited,” responded Oberton. “With suitable orientation, you could perhaps read the titl
es of books in an Indian Rajah’s library, twelve thousand miles away! It’s just a matter of practice and development.”

  Darce Henderson looked at the professor. “But that would be carrying matters too far,” she said half earnestly, half jokingly. “You might find yourself reading people’s diaries and exposing scandals!”

  Professor Oberton made a sudden decisive gesture.

  “Tearle,” he said, “we’ll now try straight telepathy. That is, Darce and I will alternately think of a symbol, without the use of the cards, or any tangible props. And you try to pick up our symbol-thoughts.”

  It was the first time they had worked without the cards in a telepathy test and Tearle missed the first half dozen calls. He was dealing now with pure mind, subtly removed in degree from cardcalling.

  He concentrated desperately on the next call. “Eight-pointed star?”

  Darce bobbed her blonde tresses. A faintly mocking smile came over her face at the picture of the lanky, awkward youth fidgeting in his seat, Warren Tearle’s eyes suddenly narrowed. Every time this lovely, haughty girl looked at him in that way, something inside of him seemed to snap. Anger, or something akin to it, always surged through him with the powerful beat of a lashing whip.

  He shifted his eyes to the scientist. “Six parallel lines,” he snapped.

  Oberton nodded, pleased.

  “Circle within a square!”

  Darce nodded, reluctantly.

  After a number of correct calls of symbols, a crafty look came into Oberton’s face. Tearle hesitated a moment and then said, “Chair?”

  The scientist started a little.

  “Automobile!” said Tearle to Darce, who had taken the professor’s cue. Thereafter, a wide variety of objects were named by Tearle as his psychic-ear heard them from the amazed two—anything from buttons to battleships.

  Sometime later the psychologist called a halt, gasping. “A hundred correct calls!” he exclaimed. “My boy, that is what fantasy writers would call mind-reading!”

  “It’s a little weird!” Darce Henderson shivered a little. “Perhaps even dangerous!” She looked from one to the other of the two men and then left the room hurriedly.