Superstition

by David Ambrose

  Yet what Sam and his assistant, Pete Daniels, were witnessing was a consistent and dramatic violation of that law. The little pudding-container robot was literally huddling in one corner of the floor. Each time the REG switched it to a new tack that looked like taking it away, the next few switches would inexorably bring it back to the same area.

  Sam and Pete exchanged a look, neither concealing his excitement from the other. Both knew that this was a historic moment: a repeatable demonstration, under laboratory conditions, of something utterly inexplicable.

  “Okay, let's move the cage,” Sam said.

  There was an anxious twittering from the fifteen seven-day-old chicks as their world swung up into the air and came to rest two yards from where it had been. It took only a few moments for them to reorient themselves and begin calling for the featureless moving object that they had been conditioned to regard as “mom,” and which was now farther away from them than they found comfortable.

  Pete came back from the next room with a printout from the computer. He handed it to Sam in silence. The numbers spoke for themselves.

  “That's almost three times,” Sam said, doing a quick bit of mental arithmetic. “The goddamn thing spent three times longer hanging around the cage when the chicks were in it than when it was empty.”

  “In-fucking-credible.”

  “But true.”

  They both turned as the chirping of the little birds grew more agitated. The tychoscope was making a turn of almost three hundred and sixty degrees. Sam caught Pete's eye, each of them knowing the thought that had shot through the other's head, followed by a jolt of self-reproach at such a cockeyed notion. It was absurd to think, as they both instinctively though briefly had, in terms of the tychoscope actively searching for its brood. It was a mindless machine without even the pretensions to ratiocinative thought of the simplest computer program. Any kind of program was an ordered process, and the whole point of the process by which the little robot's movements were controlled was that it lacked all order.

  The only possible force causing the machine to move as it had been moving for the past twenty minutes was the will of the tiny caged chicks to keep it near to them. Like most baby birds, they had adopted as their mother the first moving object they had come in contact with on hatching from the egg. After their birth they had spent one hour every day for six days in the presence of the robot as it meandered on its random path. Today was the first time they had been caged and therefore unable to follow the machine in their accustomed way.

  So, instead, they were making it come to them.

  An hour later Pete brought in another cage of chicks to replace the first. The only difference was that these chicks had never seen the tychoscope before and therefore had no attachment to it. To establish this Sam did a twenty-minute control run during which the robot, as the computer printout confirmed, followed its normal random path while the chicks in their cage paid it no attention.

  “Okay, Pete, pull the blinds, will you?” Sam said as soon as he had satisfied himself about the result. The lab became pitch dark, and the twittering of the chicks grew agitated.

  “See what I mean?” Sam said. “They hate the dark during waking hours. It throws them into a panic.”

  The noise that the chicks were making certainly bore him out. They subsided somewhat as a small flame leapt from Pete's lighter, which he touched to a candle. He attached the candle to a clip on top of the tychoscope, which had remained stationary on the far side of the floor since the end of the previous run.

  When the candle was in place-the only source of illumination in the room-Sam pressed the switch on his remote. The tychoscope began to move.

  The chicks clamored for the light to come to them…

  “I'll never eat one of those things again,” Pete murmured as they analyzed the data after several runs. “The little buggers are magicians.”

  Sam smiled. “Then you'd better become a vegetarian,” he said, “because anything more awake than a carrot could pull off what you just saw. And some people have theories about carrots.”

  “You want to run a test with a basket of vegetables?”

  “Nah-people would think we were nuts.”

  “They already do.”

  “Yeah, well,” Sam shrugged, “maybe we are.”

  Pete shot a covert glance in his boss's direction. Sometimes he didn't understand Sam. By rights he should have been ecstatic at the results they were getting, but a sudden despondency seemed to have settled on him, as though everything they were doing was a waste of time.

  “What's up?” he asked. “You found a flaw in the procedure, or what?”

  “There's no flaw.” Sam's voice was flat.

  “So why the long face?”

  There was a flash of annoyance in Sam's look that warned the younger man to back off and not push the question further. But Pete wasn't in this job because he liked being told what to do or what to think. He respected Sam, liked him, and admired what he was doing; because of that he wanted to be taken into his confidence.

  “Don't look at me like that,” he said, aware of a slightly whining note of protest in his voice that he disliked. “If there's something on your mind, I'd like to know.”

  Sam sighed. It was a form of apology. “It's nothing to do with the experiment.”

  “Then what's the problem?”

  “The problem is figuring out what, if anything, it all adds up to.”

  3

  Joanna had appeared on television only once before. It had been an afternoon talk show following a series of articles she had written about junk diet treatments and the doctors who pushed them. She'd found the experience surprisingly painless. The trick, she realized, was not to perform; it was more effective to underplay than overplay, because the cameras captured everything. Keep your sentences short and the thoughts behind them clear.

  Today's show was for the same slot, taped in the morning for transmission that afternoon. Joanna's article about the sleazy tricks at Camp Starburst had provoked the furor she had hoped it would. Now she found herself sitting alongside a male “channeler,” a female astrologer, and the author of a book about the ghosts of famous people who, supposedly, still walked the earth. The fifth guest was a psychologist called Sam Towne who was, apparently, doing “scientific research” into the paranormal at Manhattan University.

  Joanna found the whole subject distasteful and the program pointless, but her editor had insisted that anything that hyped the magazine's profile, and incidentally hers, could only help circulation.

  “Are you saying,” one woman from the audience asked, “that it's all a lie, all religion and everything, and there's nothing after death?”

  “I'm saying,” Joanna replied, “that nobody knows what happens when we die, and anybody who claims to know for sure is a liar-and probably a crook as well.”

  “But what about religious belief?” the host of the show asked, moving through the audience with his microphone. “Are you saying that all religion belongs in the same category of fraud as what you've been writing about?”

  “No, of course I'm not. Religion is a different thing.”

  “Do you mind if I ask if you have any religious beliefs yourself?”

  “I was brought up in a Protestant family, I've never been a big churchgoer, but if you're asking whether I believe in God…I'd be hard pressed to say positively no.”

  “Can I say something here?” The interruption came from Sam Towne, the psychologist. The host asked him to go on.

  “Miss Cross was writing about people who claimed knowledge of the afterlife,” Towne said, “specific and detailed knowledge about people who had, as they like to put it, ‘passed over.’ Now we shouldn't confuse religious belief with that kind of knowledge, or indeed any kind of knowledge in the generally accepted sense. I know that I'm sitting in a television studio; so do you. There's no way we can disagree about that. But I may believe something about how I come to be here, how the studio comes to be here
, how the world in which it exists comes to be here-and you may believe something else. Both our belief systems may be consistent with the facts as we know them, but inconsistent with each other. The phony psychics that Miss Cross was writing about had nothing to do with either religious belief or knowledge. They were running a straightforward confidence trick to make easy money.”

  Predictably, the other three guests began protesting their agreement: the Camp Starburst affair had been a scandal, but an isolated incident; it should not be used as a brush to tar the whole psychic world.

  As Joanna listened, the low opinion she had formed of them during the past hour did not improve. She had to admit a sneaking regard for Sam Towne, however. When she'd heard there was going to be a spook hunter on the show, she'd imagined some dour eccentric who spent his weekends in haunted houses trying to video the ghost. He turned out to be in his mid to late thirties, with an easy manner and a sense of humor. It was obvious that he was intelligent, his mind darting quickly but always clearly between topics; she could see from the monitor screens that he came over well on television.

  The presenter gave Joanna the final word when he came to wind up the show. She confined herself to remarking that the psychic world may be one thing, but the multimillion-dollar industry it gave rise to was something of which people should be very suspicious indeed. The host signed off with a few words about the next day's show (incest-again), and a production assistant approached to unhook the guests‚ microphones.

  Joanna declined an offer of coffee in the hospitality room. She wouldn't have minded talking longer to Sam Towne, but the other three depressed her, coming as they obviously did from the same mold of parasitic hypocrites as Ellie and Murray Ray.

  As she stepped into the elevator and began the high-speed descent to the Sixth Avenue lobby, a wave of depression swept over her. What had been obvious from the questions asked was how much the public wanted to believe. She found something sad in their need to reach out for something beyond their daily lives. She understood the impulse, of course, even shared it to some extent. But it meant that people like the Rays would always flourish. She had stepped on a couple of ants, but the anthill was as busy as ever.

  The huddled figure on the low wall by the stunted evergreens had attracted barely a glance in the forty minutes she had been sitting there. Like a cat waiting for a mouse to emerge from its hole, Ellie Ray had not taken her eyes from the revolving door. The psychic mafia had done her this one last favor, even though outwardly they were obliged to disown her and join in the universal chorus of condemnation. She still had friends, and word had been passed along that Joanna Cross was in the building to record a TV show with some members of the profession.

  Although she had only ever seen Joanna Cross in the unflattering disguise that she had worn at Camp Starburst, Ellie had no trouble recognizing the smartly dressed, dark-haired young woman in the gray raglan coat who stepped briskly out onto the building's slightly raised forecourt.

  Joanna didn't notice the form that moved in the corner of her vision. Only when she reached the last of the four broad steps down to the sidewalk did she find her way blocked. The sight of Ellie Ray's face gazing up at her with stony hatred gave her a jolt. She knew that the woman had tried to get into the magazine offices, and had resigned herself to the fact that sooner or later an unpleasant confrontation was inevitable. Having it here and now, out in the open, was probably as good a way as any of getting it over with.

  “I've been looking for you.”

  Ellie sounded as though her jaw and throat were rigid with tension, strangling her words and at the same time giving them an abrasive edge.

  “I know,” Joanna replied. “I have nothing to say to you, so please get out of my way.”

  “Bitch!”

  Joanna moved to step around the diminutive figure, but felt a hand grip her arm like a steel claw.

  “Murray's dead.”

  Ellie spat the words out before Joanna could even try to pull free. She froze for an instant. The death of anyone you've known, no matter how slightly or under what circumstances, always has a certain impact. But the news of this death hit her hard, because she could see in Ellie's face what was coming next.

  “You killed him, and you're going to pay for it.”

  “I'm sorry to hear about your husband,” Joanna said, keeping her voice level, measuring her words, “but I can't accept that I had anything to do with-”

  “We lost everything because of you.” Ellie spoke as though Joanna hadn't even opened her mouth, dismissing her protest. “Six more months and we'd have been out of that place with a small fortune in the bank. Now it's unsellable, except for its real estate value-which is nil. You fucked us over good, young lady, and you're going to pay.”

  “Let me go!” Joanna tried to shake the little woman off, but the grip on her arm tightened so sharply that she gasped in pain.

  “When I'm ready. I'm stronger than you-and don't you forget it.”

  “If you don't stop this at once, I'll call the police and have you arrested.”

  The older woman's eyes bore up into hers with a feverish concentration. They were dark ringed, as though she hadn't slept in several days.

  “He started three nights ago, chest pains. I called an ambulance but he died before they reached the hospital. His last words were, ‘Fix her, Ellie. Fix that bitch.’ And I promised him I would.”

  Suddenly Joanna didn't want to struggle anymore, or even protest. It wasn't that she was afraid, just that she was transfixed by an awful, morbid fascination. She felt oddly passive in the face of it, the way you were supposed to feel in an accident when time slows down and stretches toward infinity. She knew she had to let the moment play out to its natural conclusion, accepting the torrent of abuse in the knowledge that it would then be over. Somehow she knew she wouldn't see this woman again.

  There was the twitch of a bitter smile at the corner of Ellie's mouth, almost as though she had read Joanna's thoughts.

  “Don't worry, you won't see me again. This moment is all I need. You're going to remember it. And before you die, you're going to wish you'd never been born.”

  She paused, enjoying the feel of having her victim hooked. “You think I'm a fake, do you? A phony. You'll find out.”

  Her face took on the rapturous look of a fanatic entering the hallowed presence of the supreme power.

  “It's done,” she whispered. “There's only the nightmare now.”

  Joanna shivered. It was a silly, empty threat uttered by an angry and bitter old woman. But the moment had been charged with such emotion that a cocoon of silence seemed to have descended on the two of them, isolating them in a strange and loathsome intimacy. The people pushing past them on the side walk could have been a million miles away or on another planet.

  Then, abruptly, it was over. The circulation-blocking pressure on Joanna's arm was lifted, and the woman who had filled her field of vision for the past few moments was just a short and unimposing figure scurrying off amid the shoppers and office workers on their way to lunch.

  A shudder ran through Joanna, stronger than before, as though her body was shaking off the memory of the old woman's repugnant touch. She took a deep breath, and felt her heart beating fast. A delayed reaction of anger welled up in her.

  And fear. There was no denying the fear.

  She started walking north toward the park, telling herself that the exercise would calm her. But two blocks on she felt no better. The anger she now felt was less with the dreadful little woman who had buttonholed her and more with herself for being so easily shaken.

  “Miss Cross?”

  She jumped. The voice had come from just behind her as she waited to cross the street. She turned and saw Sam Towne.

  His smile immediately faded as he saw the look on her face.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, “I didn't mean to startle you.”

  “No, you…” she stammered, “it's all right, I…I…”

  “Is something
wrong?” he asked, concerned now.

  She didn't mean to tell him anything. It was too absurd, and she felt she would only make herself look foolish by talking about it. She would just say yes of course she was all right, perfectly all right. They would have a polite, brief conversation, and then part.

  But instead she heard herself saying, “Something really horrible just happened…”

  4

  They sat down and he looked across the table at her. His face still wore an expression of concern.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Thanks-I'm fine.”

  “What would you like? Water, wine, coffee?”

  “A little water to begin with.”

  Sam signaled the waiter. He had suggested they go somewhere, maybe have lunch if she had time. He told her that Mario's was one of his favorite haunts, then apologized for the unintended pun. She laughed, and it released some of the tension in her.

  “Seriously, don't feel bad about getting spooked,” he said. “Those people are professionals. They know exactly what buttons to push to trigger all your superstitions.”

  “But I'm not normally a superstitious person.”

  “Everybody's superstitious, even those who say they aren't. We're rational beings, so we have no choice.”

  One of her eyebrows twitched slightly, the way it always did when she reacted to something with skepticism.

  “Wait a minute-are you saying that superstition is a rational thing?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She looked at him slightly sideways and with the faintest narrowing of her eyes. “Could you just run that by me again?”

  He shifted his weight a little and leaned forward. “Opposites define each other-black/white, vice/virtue, order/disorder, and so on-including rationality and irrationality. One can't exist without the other. And somewhere in the middle there's a gray area where you can't be sure which is which-a no-man's-land where anything can happen.”