Transmigration (4 page)

 

 

It was very easy to talk to Anita. She was completely uncritical, and
interested without false flattery. He told her about Judy and about
Sheila, the girl who had been pushed in the water, but did not mention
his discovery that the youth was Gerry Baudaker.

 

 

"Some girls are like that," Anita said. "She wants her boy friend to
bully her. He's only half to blame, because if he wasn't the type to
knock her about she'd find somebody else who was. You heard her daring
him. It's worse for him than for her, really . . . he's being encouraged
to become a sadist."

 

 

Several times she commented like that, easily and naturally, but never
tried to straighten him out with a few short, pungent clichés.

 

 

Then he came, unprompted, to the episode of the earlier ESP tests eighteen
months ago. He had been caught in a random survey. Baudaker was not the
director of the study, but a mere underling. It was on the side that he
ran tests on Fletcher and became excited over the results.

 

 

Fletcher paused as he realized that having come this far he must explain
why he had previously refused to cooperate in any more tests and had
walked out of the building. He returned only when he felt death upon him,
urged on by what he considered "graveyard curiosity."

 

 

"It wasn't Baudaker's fault," he said.

 

 

"Of course not," she said, smiling.

 

 

"I just didn't want to be a freak, that's all."

 

 

She nodded.

 

 

"Tell me," he said abruptly, "have you ever been in love?"

 

 

She accepted the blunt change of subject calmly. "I've thought I was. But
I'm like you in one way. It would take me a long time to fall in love."

 

 

There was something different about the silence that followed. When two
people were talking freely, a reply could be apparently irrelevant and
yet not an evasion. But what Anita had said was an evasion.

 

 

Tacitly admitting this, she substituted the apparent irrelevance which
was not an evasion. "Remember I said that if a girl had a date and her
secret heart-throb called, she'd break any promise to go with him? Well,
I did that once, not so long ago. The fellow who called me . . . as a
matter of fact he's through there, but I won't tell you his name unless
you insist. We went out. And he couldn't have been more honest. What
he wanted, all he wanted, was to jump into bed with me as quickly as
possible."

 

 

"Was it all you expected?" said Fletcher harshly.

 

 

"Now you're trying to annoy me, but you can't. I'm not a prig or a prude,
at least I don't think so. If I had been in love, I suppose . . . Anyway,
perhaps the answer to your question is that I've never been in love."

 

 

There was a long pause. The easy flow of conversation had hit a rock.

 

 

Fletcher sighed. "Right," he said. "I'm ready."

 

 

"The tests?"

 

 

"What else?"

 

 

She nearly made a mischievous retort, but stopped herself. This was
a very sensitive man. He interested her, but of course there was an
impossible gulf between them and there was little point in pretending
it ever would or could be crossed. He clearly didn't believe her idea
was going to work, and perhaps he was right.

 

 

John Fletcher suffered from something worse than self-pity; he didn't
consider himself worth his own pity.

 

 

 

 

They were all back in the big lab. Fletcher found himself covertly
examining each of the four men students in turn, wondering which was
Anita's heart-throb. But the lights were dim again and the earlier
atmosphere of anonymity had returned. Even Anita had put on her white coat
and practically disappeared, he suspected deliberately, into the shadows.

 

 

"All right, tell me," said Fletcher. "Am I a mind-reader, a fortune-teller,
a medium or what?"

 

 

Baudaker had sheafs of paper in his hand. "Whatever you are," he said in
a tone of suppressed excitement, "you're unique, Mr. Fletcher. Nothing
like this has ever been recorded before."

 

 

"Well, what did I do?"

 

 

"No matter how the tests were done," said Baudaker triumphantly, "
you
never named a single card correctly
."

 

 

"What!" Fletcher shouted.

 

 

"Not one. Do you know what that means?"

 

 

"It means we've all been wasting our time."

 

 

"Oh, not at all, Mr. Fletcher. Quite the reverse. You understand the
mathematics of these tests? There are twenty-five cards, five each
of five symbols. If pure chance operated, ,the average score must be
five. Of course, in an individual case the number might be two or it
might be eight, but over the piece the result must be five."

 

 

"That's obvious. But . . . "

 

 

"So a figure of nil is just as significant as a figure of twenty-five. To
avoid a pure chance score of five, you had to know what every card was --
or to be more accurately what every card was not."

 

 

Fletcher frowned. He had not thought himself a mind-reader and had never
liked the idea of being a mental freak. Yet he had expected something to
come of this experiment. Had he really thought about it, he reflected,
he might have predicted exactly this -- a significant result, but a
totally negative one. Indeed, what else could have been expected?

 

 

"Now I must ask you something," said Baudaker. "I'd have liked to ask
you before, but the very question would have told you something I didn't
want you to know. Were your answers consciously negative? Did you know
the symbol was, say, a circle, and pick something else?"

 

 

"Of course not," said Fletcher irritably. "You told me to tell you what
I saw, and if I didn't see anything, guessblindly. That's what I did."

 

 

"Oh, but not blindly," said Baudaker happily. "Anything but blindly. This
series,of tests proves beyond any doubt that you are both a telepath and a
clairvoyant. The scale of the tests was such that no random error . . . "

 

 

"But to be wrong every time -- what's the point of that? Why have me
make umpteen thousand guesses to prove I've got the world's greatest
failure rate, which I knew already?"

 

 

"There were scores of possibilities we wanted to investigate. For
instance, were your answers displaced? In a famous experiment along
these lines, the subject's answers were found to be without significance
until someone thought of checking them against the next card each time. A
figure of about 11.5 was established then, highly significant."

 

 

"Well, were my answers displaced?"

 

 

"I think we have succeeded in proving that they were not. All such checks
we have made have given random figures while the result of comparing your
answers directly is of extraordinary interest."

 

 

"Not to me," said Fletcher. "I'm going home now."

 

 

"Wait. I've been talking only about the tests done in here, before the
tests with Miss Somerset."

 

 

"Well?"

 

 

"There the picture changes dramatically. Here is a list of the figures."

 

 

Fletcher looked at it. It read:

 

 

Raw scores Percentage
0 0
0 0
0 0
0 0
1 4
6 24
9 36
14 56
24 96
23 92
19 76
24 96
-- --
3 12
1 4
0 0
0 0
0 0
0 0

 

 

The rest were zeros.

 

 

"Well?" he said: "What does that mean?"

 

 

"We can only guess. Remember, these are observations, Mr. Fletcher. They
prove nothing."

 

 

"I thought you just said . . . "

 

 

"They prove nothing in the sense that if you release a stone fifty
times and it falls to the ground, that doesn't prove it will fall the
fifty-first time. But anyone who sees the stone drop fifty times will
believe, unscientifically, that the stone will fall the next time."

 

 

Fletcher's headache had returned, he was tired and suddenly very hungry.
There were plenty of sandwiches left, but he wanted to get out of the
laboratory.

 

 

The results excited Baudaker, but to him they were of no interest, except
for that spurt in the tests with Anita which showed their minds had
touched for a few minutes. Vaguely he recalled the moment. The first few
tests had been like all the others, and then suddenly he ceased even to
hear himself answering. He had put it down to tiredness and pulled himself
together. That, presumably, was when he had returned to his true form.

 

 

"Goodbye," he said abruptly.

 

 

"Mr. Fletcher . . . "

 

 

The little man was frantic. He tugged at Fletcher's arm. There was so
much more to be said, so much more to be done. The students, including
Anita, remained in the background, as they had promised to do.

 

 

"You'll come back?"

 

 

"No. You'll never see me again.'

 

 

Fletcher was telling him the literal truth. Baudaker never did see
him again.

 

 

Fletcher shook off Baudaker's arm and walked out.

 

 

Outside, the sun was already bright. Blinking in the glare, he was not
aware of Anita until she reached out to touch his arm.

 

 

He drew his arm back. They had not touched each other and he felt it
important that they never should.

 

 

"John," she said quietly.

 

 

"Don't talk about it," he muttered.

 

 

"Of course not, if you don't want to. What are you going to do now?"

 

 

"Get something to eat."

 

 

"I'll come with you."

 

 

"No."

 

 

"All right, kiss me goodbye."

 

 

"No!"

 

 

"I'm not easy to kiss. I don't do it like shaking hands. But I want to
kiss you. There's something . . . something good about you."

 

 

He thought he had misheard the word. It made no sense to him. Although
he had never done anything particularly evil, he had certainly never
done anything, said anything or thought anything to justify what she
had just said. It was a remark totally without meaning.

 

 

"Kiss me," she said quietly, without coquetry. "Please."

 

 

"Anita," he said with sudden desperation, "stay away from me."

 

 

Unexpectedly, she seemed to understand at once.

 

 

"That's what you want?"

 

 

"That's what I want."

 

 

She held out her hand to him. "Goodbye, John," she said.

 

 

He fled from her.

 

 

 

 

Fletcher had coffee and a fruit pie in a snack bar. He had thought himself
ravenous, but discovered he didn't want to eat. He was light-headed after
his sleepless night and the hours of concentration. Whatever the results,
the tests had taken something out of him.

 

 

Light-headed already, no longer hungry, not particularly sleepy, he
suddenly felt a strong desire for alcohol. This surprised him very
much; he rarely drank. He hated all strong drink and could not get it
down. When he did have a drink it was usually an iced lager on a hot day,
or a stout late at night with bread and cheese, one of his extra snacks.

 

 

Now he wanted beer, lots of it, and the bars were not open yet.

 

 

He glanced for confirmation at the clock over the snack-bar counter and
saw to his amazement that it was eleven o'clock. Somewhere, somehow,
he had lost several hours.

 

 

There was a bar next door, deserted save for a red-faced barman
dispiritedly polishing glasses.

 

 

"Pint of bitters," said Fletcher.

 

 

The barman drew the beer and settled on his elbows opposite him. "Going
to be warm again," he said.

 

 

"Yes."

 

 

Fletcher drank the pint of beer in one draught, a thing he had never
done before, and ordered another. This he dispatched in the same way.

 

 

The barman's eyes widened. "You all right, mate?"

 

 

"Yes, why?"

 

 

"You're white and shaking a bit, like. You haven't been in an accident
or anything?"

 

 

Since the barman volunteered this as a logical explanation for his manner,
Fletcher recklessly accepted it.

 

 

"Yes, that's it. I wasn't in an accident, but I saw one."

 

 

"Where, in the street?"

 

 

"No, over at the new block of flats." Improvising wildly, he said:
"Where they're knocking down the old tenements. Great chunk of masonry
fell on a kid."

 

 

"What was the kid doing there?"

 

 

"Oh, you know kids. He could only have been about four. Not at school
yet . . . "