Superstition

by David Ambrose

  “If you're so keen on basic limiting principles like cause and effect, why don't you come and look at what I'm doing before you make up your mind about it?”

  “Because I know without looking that I can't disprove any of your claims, and that's why they don't interest me as a physicist and never will. The essence of any scientific theory is that it remains open to being proved false in the light of fresh evidence. The essence of any crackpot idea is that it cannot be proved either true or false in any circumstances.”

  “What if you sat in a room and watched a table move around, and even levitate, of its own accord-all in broad daylight?”

  “I would applaud an excellent conjuring trick.”

  “It's been done-morethan once. I'm going to repeat-note that word repeat-the experiment, and it is not a conjuring trick.”

  “Then I would echo the view of David Hume on miracles-that it is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work.”

  Joanna had been sitting like a spectator in the stands as the two men batted their argument back and forth across the room. She wanted to get the exchange on tape for use in writing her magazine piece, but hesitated to do so openly without the professor's agreement. So she had furtively slipped her hand into her bag and pressed the record button, hoping that the machine would pick up at least some of the exchange. She felt a moment of guilty unease as Fullerton suddenly looked her way.

  “What do you think of all this, Miss Cross? As a journalist?”

  “As a journalist, Professor, I'm not supposed to have a view. I just try to write about both sides of the argument.”

  It sounded a little mealymouthed, and was in fact untrue. But this was not an argument that she particularly wanted to find herself in the middle of.

  “But you must have some personal feelings,” Fullerton persisted. “Everybody does, one way or another.”

  “Well, I suppose I think, you know, maybe there are ‘more things in heaven and earth’…”

  She broke off the quotation without bothering to finish it.

  “But I can't give any good reason. Except my father, who's a very down-to-earth man, claims to have seen a flying saucer one time when he was a pilot in the navy.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sam interrupted, “I don't mean to be rude, but just for the record, UFOs and crop circles have nothing whatsoever to do with parapsychology.”

  Joanna gave him a look that, in the sweetest possible way, warned him not to patronize her. “Jung thought that UFOs were tulpas,” she said. “I researched the subject after you mentioned it the other day-thought-forms either created in the past but still manifest, or being created now by the collective unconscious.”

  Sam held up a hand. “I stand corrected. You're right.”

  Roger beamed his approval. “It's nice to know,” he said, “that somebody can make him acknowledge the error of his ways.”

  “I wish I could say the same about you, Roger,” Sam retorted, “but I can see you're determined not to join us in an experiment that might shake some of your rigid preconceptions.”

  “Not join you?” the old man said, eyebrows shooting up in mock astonishment. “If you imagine that I'm going to pass up the chance of holding hands around a table with this young lady for the next few weeks, not to mention watching you make a buffoon of yourself, then you're even dafter than I thought you were.”

  It had stopped raining when they walked back to the car. Every step of the way Sam was grinning from ear to ear.

  12

  Joanna's parents came in from Westchester County one weekend out of three. They stayed at the same small hotel behind the Plaza that they'd used for twenty years, and where they were gold star clients and got a preferential rate. Their usual routine was to take in a show, maybe catch a movie or an exhibition, and see their daughter.

  Elizabeth Cross was an attractive woman with a good figure and a flair for simple, stylish clothes. She looked a good deal younger than her fifty-six years, as did her husband, Bob, who would be sixty in the spring. Although of only medium height and balding now, he still had the trim physique and confident agility of a much younger man. Joanna was always proud to be seen with her parents. Normally the three of them would dine in some favorite restaurant. Tonight was no exception, aside from the fact that they were going to be four: Joanna had invited Sam to join them.

  To get the introductions over in as relaxed an atmosphere as possible, she had everybody over for a glass of champagne at her tiny apartment in Beekman Place. Sam, as Joanna had expected, was charming and amusing and completely at ease. She could tell that her father liked him at once, though her mother was less than at ease with his choice of profession.

  “Is it anything like that film Ghostbusters that's always on television?” she asked.

  Sam smiled. It was question he was familiar with.

  “Nothing so dramatic,” he said. “I only wish it were. But we're just scientists investigating hard-to-categorize phenomena.”

  “Something like The X-Files?” her father suggested.

  “A little, I guess, in some ways. Except we have nothing to do with the government.”

  “But this thing about creating a ghost,” Joanna's mother persisted. “It sounds positively morbid.”

  During the cab ride to the restaurant, which was in the sixties between Lexington and Third, Sam explained in as much detail as he could what the experiment was designed to achieve. Joanna could see that her mother wasn't much reassured, but her father was fascinated.

  “So let me see if I've got this right,” he said, after they'd been seated at their table and placed their orders. “Telepathy is communication mind to mind, while clairvoyance is seeing some place or event, as opposed to the contents of another mind.”

  “Correct,” Sam said, “although there's obviously some overlap. Seeing at a distance often involves seeing what somebody else is seeing.”

  “Precognition,” Joanna's father went on, ticking the subjects off on his fingers, “speaks for itself, though why these people who can do it don't just get rich at the racetrack I don't understand.”

  “Well, sometimes people do predict a winner,” Sam demurred. “It just isn't reliable enough to beat the odds consistently.”

  “And finally there's psychokinesis, which means mind over matter-moving solid objects by thought alone.”

  “And maybe creating solid objects,” Joanna added. “Or at least solid-looking.”

  “Well, I think it all sounds very strange, and I'd rather have nothing to do with it,” Joanna's mother said. “Call me superstitious if you like, but I think there are some things in this life that we should just leave alone.”

  “Elizabeth, if we all took that attitude, we'd still be living in caves,” Joanna's father said. “Today's technology is yesterday's magic. People were burned at the stake for ideas that led to Teflon and television. Hey, Sam, did Joanna ever tell you that I saw a flying saucer one time?”

  “Oh, Bob!” Elizabeth said reproachfully, as though he'd made some social faux pas in polite company.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact she did, Mr. Cross.”

  Elizabeth got on with her dinner as her husband told the story that she'd heard too many times. She had always felt that some unspoken stigma attached to any claim to have seen UFOs, ghosts, or anything else sufficiently out of the ordinary. It was something that set you apart from other people, and she dearly wished that her husband would not talk so freely of his experience.

  “I was flying an F-14 off the Nimitz in the west Atlantic. I came out of some high cloud around twenty thousand feet-and there it was. It was about three miles east, just hovering there, a silver disk shape, no windows, no lights as far as I could see. But solid. I reported in. They said they had nothing on their screens. I turned to investigate, and as I approached, it just kind of shot off like it was on a wire or something. It didn't accelerate the way any regu
lar craft would. It just went straight from zero to bat out of hell. Disappeared in two, three seconds-just like it hadn't been there. But to my dying day, I'll know what I saw.”

  They talked around the subject for a while, but Joanna was conscious of Sam's subtly steering the conversation toward other topics in deference to her mother's unease.

  Later, when Elizabeth left the table to go to the women's room, Joanna went with her. She watched her mother as she reapplied her makeup in the mirror. There was something clipped and too brisk in her movements, as though she wanted to communicate that she was unhappy but didn't want to say it.

  “You okay, Mom?” Joanna ventured cautiously.

  “Yes, of course, darling. Why?”

  “I just thought you were a little quiet.” The comment drew no response, so she continued, “Are you still having that dream that you told me about on the phone?”

  “Dream? Oh, that-no, I haven't had it since we talked.”

  “That's good.” Joanna checked her hair in the mirror, turned, flicked an end. “I didn't much care for that idea of being locked out in the rain all night.”

  Another silence as her mother snapped her compact shut and took out a lipstick. “If you're waiting to hear what I think of Sam,” she said after a moment, “I think he's very nice.”

  “Nothing was further from my mind,” Joanna said airily. Then added, “But…?”

  “I didn't say ‘but’…”

  Joanna waited as her mother applied a touch of color to her mouth and pressed her lips together. “But, since you mention it, it does seem a rather strange choice of profession.”

  “He's a psychologist. What's strange about that?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. A psychologist is a doctor. That's not what he does.”

  “A psychologist is not necessarily a doctor. It's someone who studies some aspect of human psychology.”

  “Exactly- human.”

  “Mom, he's not weird. In fact he's one of the sanest and most intelligent men I've ever met.”

  “I'm sure he is. It's just that I find this whole thing you're getting into very-I don't know-uncomfortable.”

  “What whole thing?”

  “This whole world of weirdness. I wish you'd go back to writing those travel pieces you used to do. Or more of those reports on the environment.”

  “I'm a journalist,” Joanna objected stiffly. “I have to cover whatever the magazine wants.”

  “Well, the sooner you've covered this particular subject and moved on, the happier I'll be. I still feel a shiver down my spine every time I think about those horrible people you wrote about at that Camp whatever-it-was-called. It's better not to get involved.”

  “That was a scam that had to be exposed.”

  “So what's the difference between that and what Sam's doing?”

  “There's no comparison. This is scientifically based research.”

  “Then I'm probably wrong and we won't talk about it…”

  Elizabeth Cross gave her reflection one last check and started for the door. Joanna followed her out, catching up with her in the corridor.

  “Mother, that is your most irritating habit.”

  Elizabeth gave her a look of innocent surprise. “What is…?”

  “You know perfectly well-saying something provocative just as you walk out the door and before anyone can call you on it.”

  They had reached the stairs. Elizabeth Cross paused with one foot on the first step and turned to her daughter.

  “I wasn't aware that I had said anything provocative.”

  Joanna felt her lips twitch, and was immediately aware of her mother's amused reaction. That twitch had been a habit of Joanna's since she was a child, and she cursed herself for never having mastered it. It meant that she had put herself in the wrong-said too much or something she didn't mean-but would die before admitting it.

  “All I meant,” her mother said in a conciliatory tone, “was it's an unusual job, and it must take an unusual person to do it. That doesn't mean he isn't very nice, I already said he was. Now come along, or the poor man will be wondering what we're saying about him.”

  Joanna followed her mother through the leather-upholstered door at the top of the stairs and across the restaurant to their table. She felt a curious unease. Something in her mother's words, more particularly in the unspoken misgivings behind them that she couldn't quite identify, had brought back the image of Ellie Ray's face, twisted with black rage and pushed into hers that morning on Sixth Avenue.

  But the feeling passed as they sat down. For the rest of the evening they talked of shows to see and events to catch in the coming season.

  All the same, when the two couples said their good nights outside the restaurant before going their separate ways, Joanna sensed her mother's continued reserve. It both irritated and troubled her. She knew about her mother's instincts, and for most of her life had trusted them-often, as things turned out, with good reason. But this was different. This time her mother was simply mistaken. That was all there was to it.

  She slipped her arm through Sam's and enjoyed the feeling of their closeness. He dipped his face to hers and kissed her lightly on the mouth as they walked into the wintry, glistening Manhattan night.

  13

  The first meeting of the group was on a Tuesday evening, just after seven. They were in a basement room beneath Sam's main lab. Until now it had been used for storage-mainly junk that he'd been glad to throw out finally. High on one wall two small windows opened to ventilate the place, but a metal grille on the outside meant that they let in almost no light. Whenever the room was in use, even in bright daylight, the overhead strip lighting had to be kept on. It reflected with a clinical coldness off the white-painted brick walls from which the odor of fresh paint had not yet quite evaporated.

  In the center of the room was a square wooden table around which were eight straight-backed chairs. An old leather sofa was pushed against one wall, next to it was a card table on which stood a coffee machine and paper cups, and next to that was a small refrigerator containing cold drinks. Video cameras on tripods stood in adjacent corners, and four small microphones hung from the ceiling with cables leading to a bulky transformer and a power outlet on the wall.

  Joanna sat on the left of a married couple in their early forties who had been introduced to her as Drew and Barry Hearst. Barry was a heavyset man around forty with a dark beard trimmed short and a taste for open-necked Hawaiian shirts even in the middle of winter. He was a plumber, Joanna knew, running a successful business out of Queens and employing nearly thirty people. His wife, Drew, sat next to him, slim and fragile looking, but with a stillness that suggested a wiry strength and considerable determination.

  Next to Drew was Maggie McBride, a soft spoken, motherly woman in her sixties whose voice still carried a lilting trace of the Scottish Highlands where she had been born.

  On Maggie's right was an austere-looking man in his fifties who wore an expensive and well-cut business suit and introduced himself as Ward Riley. All that Joanna knew about him so far (the idea was that they should get to know each other better in the course of their twice-weekly sessions) was that he was a lawyer turned investment banker who had made a great deal of money and retired ten years ago. According to Sam he was a man full of fascinating contradictions: a successful businessman drawn to eastern mysticism and paranormal research; a lifelong bachelor and an intensely private man who funded, anonymously, a string of scholarships for young artists and musicians he would never meet, as well as sponsoring a small poetry magazine and occasionally contributing generously to Sam's research.

  The rest of the group comprised Sam; his assistant, Pete Daniels; Roger Fullerton; and Joanna herself. Sam inevitably acted as chairman of the proceedings, while making an effort to keep everything as informal as possible.

  “As you know,” he said in the course of his general introduction, “Joanna Cross is here to write about this whole thing for Around Town magaz
ine. By mutual agreement she isn't going to use any of your actual names or otherwise identify you in print-unless of course,” he added with a smile, “you want her to, in which case I'm sure she'll oblige. Obviously I too will be writing something, for one of the professional journals, but the same rules apply-no names without your permission.”

  After that he went around the table, inviting everyone in turn to say a few words about themselves. Maggie McBride was coaxed, reluctantly, into going first, but it quickly became obvious that her natural shyness covered a canny intelligence and a strong sense of who she was.

  Maggie had been born in Elgin, Scotland, from where she had emigrated with her parents to Vancouver, Canada, at the age of twelve. There she had met and married fellow Scot Joseph McBride. They had worked as cook and chauffeur to a wealthy businessman, eventually moving with him to New York. Maggie's interest in things psychic had been kindled by her employer's wife, who was a devout spiritualist. Maggie originally “played along,” as she put it, “as part of the job, but never really believed there was much to it.” She and Joe had two children, of whom they were deeply proud: a son, an industrial chemist, married with one child; and a daughter, unmarried, who was an investment analyst on Wall Street. When Joe died of cancer five years ago, Maggie had stayed on as housekeeper to her now elderly employers. A couple of years ago she had come across an appeal for volunteers in a copy of the Parapsychology Association newsletter and had applied out of curiosity. She had worked with Sam on some of the experiments that Joanna had seen demonstrated. Her results had been good within normal limits. She had never had any kind of psychic experience, and suspected that most such claims were phony, though she kept an open mind.

  Barry Hearst spoke for himself and Drew, but deferred to her unquestioningly whenever she corrected him on some point of emphasis or detail, which was not often. They came from the same part of Queens and had known each other since childhood. Both came from working-class families. As a teenager Drew had contemplated becoming a nun, while Barry had been constantly in trouble with the law. They were vague about how they had come to get married (Joanna suspected an accidental pregnancy), but the union had been beneficial to both. Barry had channeled his rebelliousness and was now, at the age of forty-one, the owner of a flourishing plumbing supplies business. His claims to be uneducated were flatly contradicted by Drew, who said that he had his nose in a book every spare minute and was widely read in history and philosophy. He also had, she added with barely disguised pride, a large collection of classical recordings and often whistled Mozart at work. Barry admitted, under pressure, that he supposed he was “something of a success story-at least in the neighborhood.”