At the end of the lecture, only one pair of hands was heard clapping, those of John D. John junior. Blood, slumped in his chair, said in a somnolent voice:
‘In my salad days, as an undergrad much in demand, I did some slumming – listened to lectures in biology. In those days it was fashionable to warn students against the heresy of anthropomorphism, of attributing human thoughts and feelings to animals. Now Burch is preaching to us the opposite heresy – that we should not attribute to man thoughts and feelings which are not demonstrable in his rats. As my favourite writer said somewhere: the pundits of Burch’s school have replaced the anthropomorphic view of the rat with a ratomorphic view of man. I am surprised they are not growing whiskers.’
‘The rudeness of Dr Blood,’ said Burch with commendable restraint, ‘indicates that in his early youth he was exposed to a schedule of negative reinforcers.’
‘But I liked the stick and disliked carrots,’ said Blood. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘Human nature is unfathomable,’ giggled Wyndham. Burch shrugged in silence and there, to everybody’s relief, the discussion came to an end.
2
During the lunch break, the newly installed air-raid siren had a trial run. Its purpose seemed questionable to the natives of Schneedorf, who did not believe that anybody would be interested in dropping a bomb on their village – except for the people in the rival skiing resort of Schneeberg, on the other side of the valley, who spoke a different, abominable dialect, but fortunately possessed no bombs. Besides, the village of Schneedorf had its powerful church bells, whose message, when there was a fire, could be heard in the remotest farm; and each farmstead had its own picturesque belfry, which could be reactivated should the church-bells go kaputt. But the government in its wisdom had ordered that every hamlet should be equipped with a siren; and there it was, installed in the fire-brigade’s tower out of the tax-payers’ money. Nevertheless, it was a special occasion; the members of the voluntary fire-brigade had turned out in their becoming uniforms, and so had the Herr Pfarrer, the Burgomaster, the Kongresshaus-Gustav, and some other VIPs. The Burgomaster was the village blacksmith, a moronic giant; but as he was the last of his profession in the whole district, they had elected him as a tourist attraction.
The siren sounded eerie in the Höhenluft, and the small group of people in the square listened to it glumly. When it was over, the loudspeaker of the Hotel Post blared out a sentimental song with the refrain Auf Wiedersehn to a busload of departing tourists. They were the last of the lot. The square suddenly felt empty. The villagers, accustomed to the despised crowd of strangers which normally filled it at this hour, felt left to themselves and did not like it.
Niko and Claire, out on a stroll, walked up to Gustav and inquired about the latest news on the radio. ‘Very bad news,’ Gustav said cheerfully. ‘The tourist season is kaputt.’ In his privileged position he looked down with contempt at the bed-and-breakfast providers. ‘And in Asia?’ Claire asked. Gustav shrugged. ‘Also very bad. They are shooting.’
The Soloviefs installed themselves at a table on the empty terrace of the Hotel Post and ordered a bottle of wine and two pairs of Würstl. The mustard looked like liquid gold in the sun. It was the first time they were playing truant from a meal at the Kongresshaus.
‘I won’t try to cheer you up,’ said Claire. ‘This morning was a disaster.’
‘The conference is kaputt,’ said Niko.
‘There is still Tony and Valenti to come,’ said Claire. ‘And the general discussion.’
‘It will be the usual Blind Man’s Buff. What surprises me is that I don’t care.’
‘I am all for not caring,’ said Claire, lifting her glass. ‘Here’s to Burch’s rats.’
Suddenly they felt as if on a holiday. The natives called it Galgenhumor.
3
Tony’s lecture, too, was a disappointment. His innocence combined with impertinence, may have charmed Harriet and Blood, but did not go down well with most of the others.
Before he had even started to speak, Burch had raised his hand and demanded to be informed by Tony what his Order – Burch confessed never to have heard of it – was ‘up to’.
Tony was glad to comply. The Copertinian Order, he explained, derived its name from St Joseph of Copertino, a wayward saint who lived in the seventeenth century and performed extraordinary feats of levitation at about the same time as Isaac Newton proclaimed the law of universal gravity. When his case for canonization came up before the Congregation of Rites, the part of the Devil’s Advocate was played by Cardinal Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV, known as the Philosopher King. Lambertini was a notoriously sceptical expert on miracles, and looked with a jaundiced eye at the reports of Copertino’s alleged aviatory achievements; but the eye-witness accounts finally convinced him, and it was Lambertini himself, when he became Pope, who published the decree of beatification. Among the many eye-witnesses were the Spanish Ambassador to the Papal Court and his wife. When they passed through Assisi, where Copertino lived at the time, they expressed a desire to converse with him, and the Father Guardian sent word to his cell. But no sooner did the saint enter the church where the illustrious guests were assembled, than his eyes became fixed on a statue of the Virgin standing in a niche high above the altar, and ‘he at once flew about a dozen paces above the heads of those present to the feet of the statue. After paying homage there for a short space and uttering his customary shrill cry, he flew back again to his cell, leaving the Ambassador, his wife and the large retinue which attended them speechless with astonishment.’
‘And that,’ commented Tony, ‘might be called rather an understatement.’
‘Do you believe in that poppycock?’ rasped Burch.
‘I have been quoting the eye-witness accounts without drawing conclusions. We are held to that,’ Tony said smugly.
As for the activities of the Order, he could only describe them in traditional terminology as being of a contemplative kind, making, however, extensive use of scientific method and electronic apparatus. These enabled the Brothers to take a short-cut to those substrata of the mind which otherwise are not easily attainable – ‘unless’, Tony smiled engagingly, ‘you are willing to spend ten years in a Zen monastery or a Himalayan cave’. It was common knowledge, he continued, that the conscious mind had little control over the emotions, and no awareness of the activities of its own nervous system. Several decades ago, a clumsy and unreliable gadget, vulgarly called a lie-detector, provided a first step towards such an awareness. It recorded delicate changes in the electrical activity of the skin, induced by emotive reactions such as anger, fear and excitement, in response to certain words or situations – fleeting reactions of which the subject himself was unaware. Towards the end of the 1960s, new, more refined gadgets were invented, which enabled the user to be his own inquisitor and detect his own lies in the service of self-deception. These handy little machines transformed the changes in electric skin resistance into changes of pitch in a musical tone emitted by a loudspeaker. By listening to that tone, the subject obtained intimate information about the activities of his autonomic nervous system, and thus of the tensions and anxieties at the back of his mind. This information-feedback system, by making the person instantly aware of processes in the depths of the unconscious, at the same time enabled him to bring them to some extent under voluntary control. He could learn, in a short time, to relax his blood-pressure, to alter his pulse-rate, even his gastric secretion, and enter the contemplative state…
‘Whatever that may mean,’ remarked Burch.
‘It means,’ said John D. John, mollified by the term ‘feedback’, ‘that mysticism can be cyberneticized.’
‘I would not talk of mysticism – not at this stage,’ said Tony. ‘It is merely the first step. But it shows that mind can perhaps one day gain complete control of the machine which is his body.’
‘Let’s get to the next step,’ said Harriet, ‘without Cartesian speculations.’
&
nbsp; ‘You all know about it,’ said Tony, ‘but perhaps you regarded it as just another toy, while we have used it for our own devious purposes. So the next step was the control of our own brain-waves. The new gadgets which came on the market in the early ’seventies enabled a person to be aware of the alpha waves which his brain emits. Among the various types of brain-waves, the slow alpha rhythm, with frequencies around ten cycles per second, has long been known to be indicative of a state of mental relaxation. When the subject engages in intense mental activity such as an arithmetical calculation, the alpha rhythm is replaced by small, fast, irregular waves; when the problem is solved, it reappears. Yogis, Zen masters and other contemplatives have been found to produce a much higher than average amount of alpha waves. The new toys operate on the principle of the electro-encephalograph with an added twist – they are tuned exclusively to alpha waves, which are heard as a series of bip-bips from a loudspeaker. After a few hours’ training people can learn to increase their alpha activity …’
‘And enter the contemplative state?’ Burch quoted sarcastically.
‘And enter the contemplative state,’ Tony repeated.
‘Why not swallow some LSD and forget about the gadgets?’
‘Because we are aiming in the opposite direction. We are not interested in taking trips.’
‘Then what are you interested in?’
‘The sources of the Nile,’ Tony said amiably.
Blood chuckled. ‘Well roared,’ he said.
‘Riddles are for kids,’ said Burch. ‘When are we getting to levitation?’
‘So far we have only got to Omdurman,’ said Tony. ‘A kind of pseudo-levitation, demonstrated in the late ’sixties by Dr Valenti’s colleague, Grey Walter, in Bristol. Two electrodes are attached to a young student’s skull. In front of him is a television screen. When he presses a button, an exciting scene appears on it. Before he presses the button, his brain emits the characteristic “intention wave”, a surge in electrical activity of some twenty micro-volts. The electrodes transmit this wave to an amplifier, which activates a current, which switches on the exciting picture – a fraction of a second before the student has pressed the button. He soon discovers that there is no need to press the button at all – it is enough for him to will the picture, and it appears. Then he learns to switch off the picture by another act of will… I think this gets us a step further to the sources of the Nile. Walter reported that two of his adult experimental subjects became so excited by the discovery that they had the power to control the pictures on the screen by mere thinking and willing, that they wet their pants…’
Von Halder ruffled his mane to indicate protest, then lifted his hand. ‘So where does the magic come in? The electrodes are connected to the circuit, and it’s all mechanical.’
‘Quite so,’ said Niko, ‘except for the act of willing, which produces the intention wave. From there on it’s all mechanical. Before that it isn’t.’
‘You see what I am driving at,’ said Tony. ‘You may regard the experiment as a stunt. Or as a metaphor. The wires deputize for the nerves, and the switch for the muscles, which in the normal course of events execute the act of will. But in the normal course of events we just take it for granted that the will can activate nerves and muscles, and thus we are unaware of the magic. Walter’s mechanized metaphor drives it home. No wonder the subjects wet their pants. They are suddenly confronted with the naked mystery – the power of mind over matter.’
‘So I shall be impressed,’ said Halder, ‘when you will operate that television set without electrodes and wires on your skull.’
‘Something like that is indeed the next step in our little games,’ Tony said apologetically. ‘I should have explained that we do not regard contemplation as an end in itself. Rather we regard the contemplative state as the most favourable condition for our purpose, which is to tap the powers of mind at their source. We started where we think that Rhine and the bulk of researchers in parapsychology went wrong. They were leaning over backward to prove how modern and statistical their methods were, and became bogged down in dreary pedantry. They spent thousands of hours on rigorously controlled card-guessing and dice-throwing experiments – it’s a miracle they did not die of boredom. Nevertheless, the odds against chance they produced were astronomical, and statistical evidence showed conclusively that telepathy and psychokinesis are facts, whether we like it or not…’
Burch shrugged expressively, while Halder threw his hands up to heaven. But Solovief intervened before the storm could break over Tony’s head.
‘I have seen the statistics,’ he said quietly, ‘and agree that they constitute prima facie evidence. I wouldn’t mind the fact that they contradict the so-called laws of nature as we know them; Relativity and Quantum theory did the same – they contradicted the laws of nature as Newton knew them. But I do mind that the phenomena, though undeniably real, are so damned capricious and unpredictable.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said Halder.
‘An experiment,’ said Burch, ‘which is not repeatable at will is not a scientific experiment.’
‘But Professor,’ Tony said, blushing, ‘if you were asked to make love to a beautiful lady on the village square with the whole fire-brigade watching, the experiment would probably fail.’
‘You trying to be funny?’ snapped Burch amidst suppressed giggles.
‘I am trying to answer Professor Solovief’s objection. The psi factor – or the sixth sense as it used to be called – must have its source in the deep substrata of the mind, beyond voluntary control – like sex. On this one issue even Freud and Jung agreed. The problem is to get down to that source. And that is where the relaxing apparatus and the alpha waves come in.’
‘And how far have you got?’ asked Wyndham.
‘We have got some pretty conclusive results,’ Tony said, smiling innocently.
‘Conclusive of what?’ Harriet wanted to know.
‘Demonstrate them,’ said Burch. ‘Read my thoughts.’
‘That isn’t difficult: “Poppycock”,’ said Tony.
There was some hilarity.
‘Demonstrations are tricky,’ Tony continued. ‘Heisenberg’s voodoo on physics, the indeterminacy principle, applies to our field too: the observer interacts with the observed phenomenon, and the situation becomes blurred. We have an old dear, Brother Jonas, who, when the spirit moyes him and his alpha waves are right, can almost infallibly predict at which number the roulette ball will stop. Or perhaps he makes it stop at that number. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. But he couldn’t do it in Monte Carlo – not yet. It’s the fire-brigade again.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Wyndham, ‘but if you are unable to demonstrate the results of your experiments, you cannot expect to convince people.’
‘Quite so. We do not expect it – not yet. For the time being we are just playing games. Like the juggler of Notre Dame, who performed his tricks in the empty cathedral to make the Virgin on the altar smile.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Niko said slowly, ‘I have seen some of the experiments of Tony’s friends – in telepathy and also some physical phenomena – and I believe they have got something. This belief is shared by some of my hard-boiled colleagues, and also by some of Valenti’s colleagues. Quite understandably, the Order is afraid of premature publicity. Incidentally, they are also afraid of the military muscling in. You must be aware that both NASA and the Soviet Academy of Sciences are actively sponsoring research in these directions. And they usually know what they are up to.’
‘It just goes to show…’ said Burch.
‘To show what?’ asked Blood.
‘The power of ancient superstition.’
‘The most monumental superstition of our century,’ drawled Blood, ‘is the type of science which treats man as a salivating Pavlov dog, or an overgrown Skinner rat, or a Crick-robot programmed by its genetic code. Your science is a methodical form of paranoia.’
‘So what is your alternative?’ shouted Hald
er. ‘Astrology, Maharishi, hippy-trippy, hash and mish-mash!’
‘I have tried to explain,’ Tony said, ‘that we have to undergo a rather severe training to protect us against credulity and the contemporary variety of nostalgie de la boue – wallowing in muddy mysticism. We are not attracted by the fog, but by the light. By groping towards the light we are made to realize how deep the darkness is around us. We endeavour to make use of all that science can offer to get a glimpse at levels of reality which transcend science. The great scientists, from Pythagoras to Einstein, have always been aware of the fact – they even regarded it as a truism – that the scientific approach can only throw light on one, limited aspect of reality, leaving the rest in darkness – as the human eye can only perceive a small fraction of the spectrum of radiations which surround and penetrate us …’
At this point, young Tony really got going. He compared the sneers which greeted the pioneers of psi-research with the hollow laughter that reverberated through the history of science whenever a heretic tried to break new ground. He got away with his impudent sermon because he was surprisingly well grounded in the history of science – of which most scientists have only a foggy idea. He pointed out that, contrary to common belief, Canon Copernicus throughout his lifetime had been a darling of the Catholic clergy, but mortally afraid of his academic colleagues; that Galileo had been an intimate buddy of Pope Urban VIII – until he started meddling with theology – but was persecuted by the scientific establishment of his time; and that when Kepler suggested that the tides were caused by the attraction of the moon, the same enlightened Galileo dismissed the idea as an occult fancy. And so on, through Harvey, Pasteur, Planck and Einstein…
‘All right, all right’ Halder broke in. ‘So the genius, the pioneer, always has a tough time. But there always are a million cranks to one genius.’
‘Quite so,’ said Tony. ‘But unfortunately, only posterity can tell whether the poor chap was a genius or a crank.’
The Call-Girls: A Tragi-Comedy With Prologue and Epilogue Page 12