“So I gathered from your letter. But why have you approached us if not for the purpose of having your faculty scientifically measured?”
Arnold strove for patience. “We don’t want you to measure. We want you simply to observe.”
Mr. Mercer regarded his fingernails. “But so do hundreds, my dear fellow. This is research on the fringe of human knowledge. That being so, we encounter many people whose minds are—shall we say?—also on the fringe.” He held up his hands before Arnold’s protest became vocal. “Of course, I’m not implying that you or this lady here fall into that category. But there has to be a system, you understand.”
“I understand perfectly well when it comes to cranks. I realize that they can take up your time to no use. But no system is necessary for what we’ve come to prove. We can demonstrate our ability in half the time it would take to fill that form in.”
Mr. Mercer smiled indulgently.
“Demonstrate? But to whose satisfaction? To yours? But presumably you are quite satisfied. No sir, this foundation has been in existence for some six years. We have devised the most scrupulous tests to verify claims. All data proffered has to be checked against a growing corpus of experience. Believe me, that’s not easy. We have to remove every random factor. That is why we have to establish the identity of all tested persons. And that is why we have to have a form. The replies alone winnow out half the claimants. You must understand that because our tests are exhaustive, they are therefore costly. Of course, we don’t begrudge that.” He twittered. “That’s what we’re here for. And if we turn up a factor over the random level of point five per cent, we’re happy. Of course, even that happens very rarely.”
“Point five?” Arnold’s annoyance was mounting. “What’s your best percentage to date?”
“That, Mr. Ash, is Foundation data. Let’s say it’s rather more than point five.”
“Well, I don’t know the mathematics by which you calculate your results. But say we could demonstrate a hundred per cent communication?”
Mr. Mercer looked politely amused. “We don’t refer to it as communication. There is no such thing. We call it a concentration of probability. As for a hundred per cent…!” He uttered a strangled laugh.
Claire spoke now, in a level tone. “But surely your approach, Mr. Mercer, is not scientific. It’s biased from the start.”
“Only towards scientific method, if you wish to call that bias,” Mercer said frigidly. “But it’s entirely up to you. Either fill in the form or not. But, in the latter case, kindly do not waste the Foundation’s valuable time any further.”
“You can stuff your form,” Arnold told him angrily. “Come on, Claire.”
Going down in the elevator, Arnold fumed.
“I’m sorry I blew up like that. Especially so crudely.”
Claire smiled. “That’s all right. I’m glad you did. It saved me being inelegant about it.”
“Thank you. But, God, all that blather about scientific method! You know, he’d hate to find somebody with hundred per cent communication. He’d never sleep again for worry if he ever thought it was remotely possible. Oh, but of course—” he imitated Mercer’s fluting voice—“we don’t refer to it as communication. What did he call it? A concentration of possibility? A nicely turned phrase at that. I can just see that bird at annual meetings. ‘Well, Mercer, what results this year? Any improvement on point seven five?’ ‘Yes sir, indeed sir, we actually passed the barrier, one point one this time.’ ”
He laughed.
“If we proved our claim, Mr. Mercer and his whole precious foundation would be out of a job. Not if—when.”
He gloated at the prospect.
As they passed out into the street, Claire stopped and said, “You know—I don’t know whether it was because I was getting too annoyed to notice—but I didn’t get an empathy reaction from either of them in there.”
“That’s funny. Neither did I. Front men! I’ve met people like that before, holding down jobs that don’t really exist. Not so much holding them down, as covering up.” He laughed. “Perhaps they really are front men. Hollow people, with faces worked by wires from machinery inside.”
The next approach Arnold tried was a press meeting. He had an invitation cyclostyled and sent it to every paper and news agency that had an office in London.
None of the newspapers or newscasters turned up. They left it to the agencies. The agencies left it to the smallest of their company who sent an apprentice reporter.
But he was a keen crew-cut youngster. He listened and watched intently as Arnold and Claire went through a simple but convincing routine. At Arnold’s request, the young man chose a book at random from their shelves, opened it and looked over Claire’s shoulder while she silently read a passage which he picked. Arnold repeated it aloud.
The young man was certainly impressed. He took copious notes, then asked for the demonstration to be repeated. They complied.
“The great point,” Arnold told him, “is that this power can be passed on. It can be taught to people. Will you be sure and make that point clear?”
“Certainly, Mr. Ash. Just one point… how much do you intend charging?”
“Why, nothing. It’s free.” He had second thoughts. He had already recognized that he would have to make some charge.
Already it was costing him time and money. “No, just say that it’s free for the time being. Say, to the first twenty people who apply.”
“Certainly, Mr. Ash. I’ve got that.”
On an impulse, Arnold said, “How about you, for a start? Then you can know that you haven’t been imagining this.” He nudged the youngster in the ribs. “You know what they say in the newspaper world—verify your facts.”
The young man edged away nervously.
“Well—er—no. It’s very kind of you. But—”
“But what? It wouldn’t take very long.”
“It’s all right, I believe you. I’ve seen what you can do and—” he smiled earnestly—“I believe you are willing to teach it. But, news work is my career. It’s all I’m interested in.”
“I don’t get you.”
The other looked awkward. “Well, I mean I’m not interested in performing in public.”
“Performing? What do you think we’ve been showing you, then?”
The young man covered his dismay by an ill-fitting blandness. “Why, an act, of course. And it’s a very good act. Your patter’s good, too. I mean, about being able to transmit and receive telepathically.”
Arnold looked at Claire and shook his head sadly.
Next day they scanned the London dailies from front page to back, then threw them away. They hadn’t really expected to find anything.
After that, Arnold tried everything he could think of that lay within their resources. He left Claire to get on with her painting, disturbing her only if it could not be avoided, consulting her on the feasibility of some line of action or another. She was trying desperately hard to carry on with her work as if nothing had happened.
As the weeks went by, Arnold began to wonder if anything had happened. He circularized all research bodies in the country which had anything at all to do with the human mind. He found that there was a surprisingly large number.
But the number of replies was depressingly small—nil. Apart, that was, from a few formal acknowledgments of receipt which reminded him too painfully of the rejection slips of his writing days. He tried a few classified ads in the big papers. That flushed only begging letters, circular letters—and a hefty poundage of literature from bodies espousing all kinds of wild causes. They evidently considered that anybody who could make the claim he had was right in their country. In desperation he chose the most apparently sober from among them and found himself one evening on the doorstep of a dingy house in Shepherds Bush, the headquarters of the Zodiac Society.
CHAPTER TEN
A woman in a turban answered the door. She welcomed him in fervently. The place was large—doors had been fo
lded back between the front and rear rooms, making a space the size of a small hall. It was crowded with people, their conversations adding up to a babel.
The hospitality was cordial, but non-alcoholic. The woman who had admitted him passed him on to a stringy woman in a shaggy sack who thrust a cup at him. He took it automatically.
“Jasmine tea,” the stringy woman explained. “Very good for the psychic centres.”
Arnold nodded, smiling weakly. He took one taste and, as soon as the woman turned away to greet another newcomer, he lost it behind a squatting four-foot-high Buddha.
He turned and saw eyes squinting at him. He wondered if his act of sacrilege had been observed, especially when the owner of the eyes—a huge man with a yellow skull who might easily have doubled for the Buddha—came clumping over towards him.
But the man’s first words showed that he hadn’t noticed.
“First time here?” he asked in a basso profundo. His words were carefully, but clumsily, enunciated, as if his sheer size made it difficult to speak.
Arnold nodded.
“Thought I hadn’t seen you before. The word is spreading. But slowly. People go around in blinkers, abusing their immortal powers, poisoning themselves with drugs—”
Arnold had started to grope in his pocket for a cigarette. He hastily abandoned the idea.
“—closing their minds to the other minds in the universe. You know the words of the christian prophet—” strange, Arnold thought, how a voice, even such a lumbering voice as this, could convey lower case—“ ‘There are sheep not of this fold.’ How many people believed? How many people recognized the proof that my people existed. Even now—”
“I don’t quite follow you,” Arnold murmured. Surely he didn’t mean—He found the conjunction of this giant with sheep so incongruous that he had to struggle to stop himself from laughing out loud.
“That’s why I was sent,” the big man growled. “The gravity on the planet that I come from is only half that of Earth. That’s why we grow to this size. But our minds are more attuned to the true currents of the psychic world.”
Arnold suddenly found it pitiful. He could picture the brain in this hulk, as lost in sheer immensity as a dinosaur’s, weaving an elaborate myth to justify itself, as unreal as the revenge fantasies of a dwarf. He found some excuse to duck out from the giant’s company and found himself in proximity to somebody relatively sane. It was like coming out into the air from a noisy bar. And he was, he realized, getting slightly tipsy on the chaotic emanations from this crowd. Ordinary crowds, he had found, didn’t bother him. But these people seemed to throw off a fevered energy from their off-centre minds.
The man he found himself talking to now was lean and grey, with sunken cheeks and glittering eyes. He looked like a typical school-teacher, and he spoke with a schoolmaster’s dry precision.
“Of course, I don’t subscribe to the beliefs of this group. It’s too diffuse, for one thing, so that they get all kinds of creeds here. But I find the atmosphere—ah, what should I say?—receptive. My own research is into the scientific basis of the Bible, with particular reference to Genesis. Do you know, sir, that in ancient Babylonia they divined events from the different kinds of monsters born to the royal house? Tablets were dug up many years ago giving whole tables of different deformities and their meaning. Now, I’m not concerned with any theory of divining future events thereby. Ancient people used all kinds of things for that—from shadows to entrails.
“What I am interested in divining is what really happened in history. The point about this is that there were so many different deformities born as to need whole tables of them—lion-headed, two-headed, limbless, four-armed, etcetera, etcetera. Now, think just a moment. What does that point to?”
Excessive inbreeding in the royal house of ancient Babylonia, Arnold thought, but didn’t voice it. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Why, to a high level of what modern-day science calls mutation.”
“Interesting,” Arnold said, and genuinely meant it. As he had told Claire, the occult had no significance for him. As far as he saw it, it was only a kind of wish-fulfilment. But he had respect for “odd” theories, though he had never met with one that had even begun to convince him. Even so, he had a feeling sometimes—it lay at the back of his wariness of analysis—that reality was elsewhere. That science—he thought of Mercer and the Schroder Foundation—sometimes shunned facts it couldn’t explain. A hundred years ago man had been totally unaware of the existence of radio waves. The idea of men communicating across the world without wires was lunacy. But a new dimension had been opened. He had felt there were other such unguessed dimensions waiting to be discovered. He had sometimes wondered whether that wasn’t a kind of wish-fulfilment, too—until the power.
“And what is that?” the other was saying triumphantly, “but another word for the Garden of Eden? Do you see the picture? An extremely fertile area, as it was then, a high level of radioactivity? A tremendous forcing ground for new species?”
“Indeed,” Arnold agreed.
This man had a questioning mind. And he had purpose, even if it was at a tangent. Could this be a man that he could explain himself to? Convince, induce to try?
“Do you believe in the possibility of telepathy?”
“Telepathy?” The man looked sadly on Arnold. “I don’t quite see the place of that in my theory.”
“No, I don’t mean in your theory. In my theory, if you like, only it’s not a theory. I can do it.”
“Really? It’s a thing I mean to investigate. I think it’s perfectly feasible.”
“You do?”
“Indeed. Those still small voices in the Bible, just what were they, eh? But first I have to complete my researches into Genesis. The work will be ready for the printer in six months. Of course, no publisher will look at anything so unorthodox. Cash, not truth, that’s their motto. So I will have to publish it myself, to bring the truth to those who really care. I can put you down for a copy, I do hope and trust?”
The man pulled out a pen and an order book.
Arnold sighed heavily.
“Certainly. Put me down as one who really cares. The name is Alfonso Ash, P.O. Box 99, St. Helena. Yes, I am a long way from home. I’m on leave from the St. Helena Sanitation Service. Gruelling work.”
And, giving it up, he wandered off and joined another knot of people.
They were actually talking about telepathy.
“Personally,” said one, a chubby, quite normal-looking young woman—Arnold could picture her having left a patient young husband in charge of a pram outside—“I subscribe to the theory of Steiner that telepathy, like all occult phenomena, is more difficult to achieve these days because of the denser ether. Now, according to Steiner, in Lemuria—”
“But, you’re forgetting, my dear,” said a thin-nosed man with lecherous eyes; he seemed to be ready to devour the speaker, “that we’re entering the Aquarian Age now, which is much more propitious. It isn’t a matter of the physical climate, but the psychical.”
“In any case, the seven steps of seership are necessary,” somebody else said. “If telepathy is harder to achieve, it is simply because concentration is harder to achieve in the modern world. The level of unbelief is so much higher than in past ages.”
Arnold was about to butt in to the effect that seven steps of seership weren’t needed at all, when a bell tinkled—to his relief; he would have hated disillusioning people like these.
The hubbub of voices died. The same stringy woman who had thrust the jasmine tea at him was visible over the heads of the crowd. She must have mounted a dais.
“Come now, friends and fellow-seekers after the truth—the truth that is one, yet manifold—we must begin the proceedings. And first, as always, a prayer. Tonight it is the turn of Pan, the great god of fecundity.” Arnold saw the thin-nosed man sneak a look at the plump young mother and lick his lips. “So, will you all bow your heads in thanksgiving…”
They all did, all except Arnold who, giving thanks—though not to Pan—that he was near the door, sidled out. The grey streets of Shepherds Bush would have seemed a desert normally, but now they were like an oasis of sanity. On a sudden impulse he called Vic.
“Arnold!” Vic greeted him. “Where have you been hiding yourself? I’ve been hunting all over. You leave your job, leave your flat. How’d you expect people to keep in touch?”
“Somebody could have given you my new address.”
“Well, you’re in touch now, so why am I complaining? Where are you speaking from?”
“From a phone booth in Shepherds Bush. Are you free right now?”
“Free as a bird. Shepherds Bush. My, you do get in some strange places. As the actress said to the archbishop. You know the Pestle and Mortar in Kings Road? Good. See you there in half an hour.”
They met at the door of the bar.
“Ah, my old soul-mate!” Vic rhapsodized, putting on an expression of ecstasy.
“For heaven’s sake,” Arnold said. “Please, no nonsense. I’ve had my fill of nonsense lately.”
Vic looked at him worriedly. “Boy, do we need a drink! So what are we doing outside the pub?”
They went in, ordered and took their drinks to a table.
“What’s wrong?” Vic asked, his usual levity dropping temporarily from him.
“I don’t know. Nothing. But nothing’s going right. For weeks I’ve been stuck with something that ought to be tremendous—and it turns out like this.” He gestured vaguely and despondently, as if to include the dark-brown bar, himself, Vic, all the ignoring world beyond.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Sitting here in a pub, confessing my failure to you, for one thing. It’s—it’s just like one of those dreams where things change in your hands. You think you’re carrying something rare and precious… you look at it again and it’s turned into a handful of rubbish.”
“You don’t mean—you’ve lost the power?”
“No, but I might just as well have. Since I last saw you I’ve got exactly nowhere.”
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