Alien Accounts

by Sladek, John

  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 s
trange 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.

  The great majority of our letters, however, came from sane, sincere, reasonably intelligent people. Typically such a person has had some puzzling, even inexplicable experience: a true dream, a premonition, or meeting a friend by chance in a foreign city. He knows the contents of a telegram before opening it. He finds himself thinking of someone he hasn’t seen for years, and they ring him on the telephone. Ghostly visitations, déjà vu experiences … rarely easy to confirm, but all of it providing a background of evidence that something is going on.

  One letter, however, told a story both uncanny and evidential. I read it through twice, then ran down the hall and hammered on the door of Dr Smith’s little office.

  ‘Oh it’s you, is it? What’s up?’

  ‘Read this,’ I said. ‘Our experiment is nothing compared to this!’

  He looked at me and laughed. ‘You should see your face! You look as though you’d just had a psychic experience yourself, Latham.’

  ‘I almost feel I’ve had one, reading this. A letter from a Mr Durkell. He’s seen a village vanish – a complete Tudor town, with smoking chimneys, just fade out of sight!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I know it sounds insane, but there’s a second witness. What’s more, it seems to be connected with the disappearance of a third person. Wait till Beddoes tries blunting Ockham’s Razor on this!’

  While Smith read the letter through, I watched him: Dr Efraim Smith, a gaunt, ascetic-looking man of sixty-odd, with a mop of white hair and black, staring eyes. In Hollywood, he could have been cast in the role of an Old Testament prophet.

  His appearance, combined with the fact that he preferred writing his books by hand, seated at an old roll-top desk, made him a kind of local eccentric –it was that kind of locality. He had already attracted a few half-joking rumours:

  Was he a vegetarian? Was it true that he slept only four hours per night?

  In reality there was nothing fanatical or eccentric about him. He was a hard-headed practical research chemist, author of a well-known textbook on polymers. Ten years earlier, his brother had died. Dr Smith had consulted mediums, meeting with the usual mixture of disappointing vagueness and uncanny truth. He’d decided to turn his scientific scrutiny upon the entire field of psychic research – in his spare time. Passing interests have a way of becoming vocations, however: he now headed our Paranormal Experience Research Group. He handed the letter back. ‘Chilling detail,’ he said. ‘Will you be following it up?’

  ‘Of course. If even half of it can be corroborated, it’s just what we need. Imagine: A village that doesn’t exist, except –’

  ‘Except on Tuesdays!’ He shook his head. ‘Obviously not an hallucination, and too detailed for a mirage.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a sort of, well, rupture in the space-time fabric. Could he be looking at a village that exists in some other time or place? Or even some other universe running parallel to ours?’

  ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘After all, our concept of the space-time framework is very hazy indeed. There are a lot of unanswered questions, aren’t there? Black holes, for example. Some scientists suspect they are just such “ruptures” as you describe. If so, it may go some way towards explaining many really puzzling phenomena: a-causal events, such as Koestler’s coincidences, begin to make sense if we can discard the notion that causes come before effects in time. Of course it might also explain ESP. Why do we find “Two minds with but a single thought?” Simply this: Minds are not fettered to local time and place.’

  We talked for some time. The general theory sounded difficult, but I felt I could grasp it intuitively: Mind is not my mind or your mind or Smith’s mind, but a kind of energy ocean in which we, all thinking beings, are immersed.

  ‘I’d better start checking out the facts in this letter,’ I said, taking my leave. ‘By the way, until I’ve proved it, not a word to Beddoes?’

  We hadn’t meant to tell Beddoes much about our animal experiment, either, until the second series was completed. But one day, while we were only half-finished with the series, Beddoes’s smugness broke through even Smith’s usual reserves of calm.

  The conversation began innocently e
nough, when Corcoran mentioned Uri Geller.

  ‘Uri Geller?’ Beddoes asked. ‘Ah, you mean the Israeli paratrooper.’

  Corcoran asked if that was supposed to be a joke.

  ‘Not at all. I understand he was a paratrooper. Amazing. Don’t see how he did it.’

  Smith showed his teeth in a smile. ‘Very funny. The implication being that you do see how he managed, during one television performance, to make stopped watches start ticking all over Britain.’

  ‘I have an idea, yes. According to a New Zealand study, if you play about with any stopped watch, chances are it will start ticking. In fact, you have about a forty percent chance that it will keep going for a few days. No, it’s the parachute jumps that really astound me.’

  Corcoran winked at me. ‘Perhaps Dr Beddoes has psychic insights into how Uri does what he does with spoons. Perhaps we ought to study Dr Beddoes?’

  Beddoes tried imitating Uri Geller’s voice. ‘You want me for a subject? Me? But I tell you, I don’t know from where I get zis power. From God, maybe. Or my agent.’

  No one but Beddoes laughed. I said, ‘Why don’t you tell us, once, what you do believe in? If anything.’

  ‘Thought-communication,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a distinct possibility. Of course it’s tricky. One makes the right facial expressions, speech sounds and gestures, but it doesn’t always get across.’

  Smith said, ‘Get your laughs while you can, Beddoes.’ And he told him about our first series of experiments.

  ‘Ariadne?’ Beddoes asked. ‘Oh, I see. Leading them through the maze. Very good.’

  Smith grimaced. ‘I think you’ll have to concede that our results look good, as well. I’ve done a bit of statistical work on them, and I believe that we can rule out chance. The odds are over four hundred thousand to one against the notion that this happened by accident.’