Breakthrough, p.4
Breakthrough, page 4
The penny dropped with a dull thud. ‘Good Lord!’ I murmured. ‘You mean she knew you were going to do it? That you had to do it in fact, because she had to get that result?’
‘Which came first, the hen or the egg?’ said Dumps with a shrug.
‘But that’s impossible!’ I protested. ’Fantastic!’
‘Not really more fantastic than the dream of Lady Q,’ said Dumps. ‘It’s just that this has taken place under laboratory conditions, and consequently we’re in a better position to assess the mathematical probability of its ever having happened at all. Even if we approach it from the other end and allow her to have exerted some absolutely extraordinary psychokinetic influence over the circuits of the selector, we’re still faced with something which the word “phenomenal” was hardly designed to fit.’
A thought occurred to me. ‘But she couldn’t have got that last result through me,’ I pointed out. ‘I scored nothing. How do you explain that one?’
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Dumps. ‘I can’t explain any of it. But granted what she’s apparently shown herself capable of already, I don’t think your own low score necessarily rules out her having obtained her information through you. For all we know, she might have been using part of your mind quite independent of your own cooperation—maybe that part you used on your first test.’
‘And maybe we’ve all gone mad,’ I muttered.
‘Yeah,’ said Dumps ruefully, ‘we can’t afford to rule anything out.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked.
He sighed. ’Tell her what’s happened I guess. Persuade her to cooperate.’
‘You mean she doesn’t know! ’
‘That’s my guess. Oh, she’s probably feeling a bit uneasy, but I doubt she knows what she’s done. Still she did shoot off in a bit of a hurry, didn’t she?’
‘Maybe she had a date,’ I suggested. ‘Good-looking girls like her often do.’
He nodded, thumbed back his cuff and looked at his watch. ‘Holy Moses!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s just off eleven 1 Why didn’t you say something, Betty?’
Miss Aston unhooked her coat from behind the door. ‘Do you want me to lock up, Doctor?’
‘No, you skid along home. I’m sorry I kept you hanging about. Don’t you bother to get in early tomorrow.’
She smiled. ‘Confidentially I wasn’t intending to,’ she said. ‘Good night.’
‘Good night,’ we chorused.
‘Great girl, Betty,’ observed Dumps absently as her footsteps faded in the distance. He heaved himself off the table, took two steps towards the door, then paused, turned and came back. ‘You know what, Haverill?’ he said. ‘I’ve got the damnedest feeling I’m going to wake up in the morning and find all this is some sort of crazy dream.’
‘And if you don’t?’
‘But it can’t have happened,’ he asserted doggedly. ‘God-damit, Haverill, I tell you it can’t I ’
“ ’Truth ’” I said, “‘can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.’ William Blake. Unquote.’
Dumps nodded. ’Oh, sure, he’d have managed it all right.’ He seized his nose and tugged it sharply. ‘How does it go?—
‘God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in realms of Day!
‘A human form such as Miss Bernstein’s?’ I queried ironically.
Dumps treated me to a long, sombre stare. ‘Could be, Haverill,’ he said softly. ‘Could be.’
FIVE
In the days that followed I kept a sharp lookout for Dumps in the S.C.R., but it wasn’t until the middle of the next week that I saw him again. He was in the company of a pale, plump young man who was dressed in a suit of such dark material and such severity of cut that I at first took him for a clergyman. I didn’t want to butt in on a private conversation, but I was understandably curious to know if there had been any further developments regarding Miss Bernstein, so I hovered around in the middle distance, casting an occasional glance in their direction, and was finally rewarded by catching Dumps’ eye. He raised his arm in an immediate salute, said something to his companion and led him forward.
‘Hi there, Haverill,’ he greeted me. ‘I’d like you to meet Peter Klorner. Pete—Mr. Haverill.’
We shook hands.
‘Pete’s the electronics whizz kid I was telling you about,’ said Dumps. ‘The Psi department is now up to full strength.’
We chatted for a minute or two in a desultory way about the expansion of the University, and then I asked Dumps if he’d succeeded in getting to the bottom of the Bernstein affair.
To my surprise, he looked rather embarrassed. ‘I guess I overestimated my powers of persuasion,’ he said and gave a rueful chuckle.
‘She wouldn’t play?’
’That’s about it.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Well, not much. Just that she felt she couldn’t spare the time.’
‘You told her what she’d done?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And-?’
He shrugged. ‘She gave me an old-fashioned look and said she was sorry if she’d messed things up. Messed things up!
I ask you.’
’Frankly I thought you were being a shade optimistic/ I said. ‘She certainly seemed pretty adamant when I spoke to her. Have you come to any conclusion about her results?’
Dumps shook his head.
‘And there the matter rests?’
‘I guess so. Hell, I can’t force her to play ball, can I?’
I looked across at Peter Klorner and wondered if Dumps had told him about Miss Bernstein. ‘Are you a parapsychologist too?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m a technologist.’
‘Blessed are the technologists,’ I said, ’for they shall inherit the earth.’
Klorner permitted himself a tiny smile, but said nothing. It struck me that he was the first person I’d ever met who had completely black eyes. They were like twin bullet holes —or was it gun barrels?
Dumps said: ‘Miss Bernstein asked after you, by the way/
‘Did she indeed? I wonder why?’
‘I guess Lambert or Conolly must have told her you’d got some pretty startling results on that first test.’
I grinned. ’That result was the cradle and the grave of my paranormal reputation. Are you still going on with the tests?’
‘Sure we are—they’re our bread and butter. As a matter of fact, Betty’s running through a bunch right now.’ He turned to his companion. ’Time we were getting back, Pete.’
Klorner nodded and muttered something improbable about ‘sine-wave frequency generators’.
‘It’s on our way,’ said Dumps. ‘See you around, Haverill.’ He put his hand on Klorner’s arm and was about to escort him from the room when, apparently, he remembered something and turned back. ‘If you should by any chance happen to bump into Miss Bernstein,’ he said, ‘see if you can’t manage to talk her round. Maybe she’ll listen to you.’
‘Why to me?’ I said. ’As far as she’s concerned I’m just another guinea-pig. Besides, there’s not much chance of our paths crossing.’
‘Compared to some things I could mention, that chance would rank as odds on,’ he replied with a grin, and was out of earshot before I could ask him just what he thought he was implying.
After they had gone I settled back in a corner and lit a cigarette. The conversation I’d just had struck me as, in some way, off-key, but I couldn’t be quite sure why. It wasn’t that Dumps had been evasive exactly, but rather that he’d gone out of his way to minimize what had happened. I went back in my mind step by step through the catechism I’d put to him and decided that what bothered me wasn’t that he hadn’t answered my questions but that he hadn’t volunteered any possible explanation. I suppose I’d expected him to have been spending the intervening days working out some more or less logical hypothesis which would tie up at least one or two of the trailing ends, whereas all he appeared to have done was shrug his shoulders and turn his back on the whole affair. Or had he? The more I chewed over the interview, the less satisfactory it seemed. Even making allowances for Klorner’s inhibiting presence, Dumps had surely been non-committal to the point of caginess. I wished I knew what Miss Bernstein had said to him, for, though I trusted Dumps, I couldn’t entirely swallow his account of their interview. But short of subjecting him to third degree, there didn’t seem any likely way of satisfying my curiosity, so in the end, however reluctantly, I, too, was forced to shrug my shoulders and let the matter slide.
SIX
That meeting with Dumps gradually began to seem as final as the patter of a falling rocket stick. A further week went by without my once setting eyes on him; that week became a fortnight and the fortnight a month. The fact that I was at this time in the throes of a rather intense ‘affair’ might have had something to do with it—my evenings, to say nothing of my nights, were pretty fully occupied—but I was no stranger to the S.C.R., and I’ll swear that Dumps never so much as showed his nose inside it. The Hampton University Parapsychological Research Department and its dynamic principal seemed to have swung light out of my orbit, and had it not been for my catching sight of an occasional note pinned to the J.C.R. bill board informing guinea-pigs of the results of their E.S.P. tests, I might well have grown to believe that I’d dreamed up the whole thing. Admittedly there was nothing to stop me dropping in at Brankfield House and paying my respects in person, but something—maybe it was shyness—prevented me from doing this. As for Miss Bernstein, she seemed to have vanished clean off the face of the campus. I never caught so much as a glimpse of her and, in the end, I began to wonder whether I’d even recognize her if we did meet.
Then, such is the way of these things, the whole weird episode began to fade in my memory. From being the strangest thing that had ever happened to me, it gradually diminished into ‘something rather odd’ which could be hauled out, dusted and offered round for inspection whenever the postprandial conversation happened to veer in that direction. As far as I remember, no one offered an explanation which satisfied me; in fact, the general response was either to suggest obliquely that I was laying it on a bit thick or for one or other of my listeners promptly to cap it with: ‘Did I ever tell you about what happened to me when
I was on this exchange course in Jamestown—’ No doubt in the end I’d simply have buried it altogether had not something occurred which for ever ensured that this was not to happen.
One evening, a few days before the end of term, a party of us drove down into Hampton with the express intention of whooping it up. We treated ourselves to an extravagant dinner in The Madeira, drank the best part of a bottle of wine apiece and then rolled out to see what the town had to offer us by way of diversion. There were six of us in the party—three of either sex—the night was fine, and when someone suggested the pier it met with unanimous approval. We had arrived at that pleasant giggly state when anything that can possibly be classed as a joke is given the old-fashioned ‘Worker’s Playtime’ reception by the rest of the party. We piled into the car, roared up the Prom, and parked as close to the pier as it was possible to get without actually breaking the law. Then we sailed through the turnstile and made a dodgy beeline for ’The Palace of Fun’. The place was pretty well packed to the seams—it was the height of the summer season—and amplifiers were blasting out pop music so loudly we could hardly hear ourselves speak. What with that, the wine inside me, the crowd and the swirling lights, I felt as though I was riding a surfboard on the crest of an enormous wave which could never break.
We stocked up with pennies at the change desk and started cranking the machines. ‘What The Butler Saw’, ‘Window Cleaners’, Her Big Surprise’—we tried the lot, and then one of us caught sight of some complex gambling device, and we forced our way through the crowd to see what the fuss was about. The principle was not very difficult to grasp. There were half a dozen cabinets placed under a big glass screen. Behind this screen a light wandered about and eventually came to rest under one of a series of five coloured globes. Meanwhile a big clock, set in the face of the screen, was registering the odds that would be paid out on that particular go. You pushed in your penny, selected a coloured button from the row in front of you, pushed it and, if you’d selected the colour the light stopped at, you got your money back at the rate of odds indicated by the hand of the clock.
The girl I was with gave a whoop of excitement, dived for the nearest vacant place, thrust in her penny and stabbed the button of her choice. The light danced over the screen, hesitated and came to rest under the green globe. The pointer swung to 6. She clapped her hands and the pennies rattled out into the tray. She then proceeded to lose them all again, one after the other. ‘Come on, Jimmy,’ she called to me. ‘You have a go.’
The space beside her became vacant, and I stepped forward. Two other members of our party had found places along the row. ’O.K.,’ I said. ‘Here goes.’ I thrust my penny home, selected the red button and pushed it. The light jumped, darted here and there, and came to rest on the yellow. I felt a curious heady tenseness which, considering the amount at stake, was a somewhat disproportionate sensation. My next choice was the blue, and again I lost. ‘My lucky night, obviously,’ I said and pushed home a third penny.
I was just about to press the red button again when some whim prompted me to go back to the blue. I pushed it firmly. The light zoomed in a circle, the pointer spun and before it had come to rest I knew I’d won. The pennies cascaded down the chute and I scooped them up.
I tried again, making no conscious effort to choose a particular colour, but simply letting it select itself through me. Again I won.
‘Lucky old you,’ said my friend. ‘I’ll follow you next time.’
I hardly heard her. Balanced so finely on the wave-crest, I was scarcely aware of what I was doing. I won again. And again. And again. My pockets were soon bulging with coins. I dimly sensed that a crowd had gathered round and that every time I won a sort of faint ‘Ah’ of envy or astonishment rose like an exhalation around me.
By now everyone in the row was following my lead, and it simply became a question of what to do with all the pennies. Within minutes my pockets were crammed to overflowing.
The girl was giggling hysterically and trying to shovel coins into her diminutive evening bag, when I felt fingers gripping my elbow and a voice rasped in my ear, ‘’Ow about lettin’ someone else ’ave a go, eh, tosh?’
‘Yellow,’ I gasped drunkenly, and even as the attendant prised me away from the machine the light homed in under the yellow globe and the pointer stopped at 24—the jackpot.
My legs felt like bits of rubber tubing. I staggered back against a nearby pin-table and clung to it to prevent myself from falling flat on my face. The attendant who had detached me from the machine regarded me curiously. ‘’Ad a run er luck, eh, tosh?’
’Here, Jimmy. Catch,’ said my friend and, helpless with laughter, she tipped two handfuls of coins at my feet.
‘Christ,’ I muttered. ‘What happened?’
My companions gathered round, loaded to the Plimsoll lines with pennies, and the attendant, presumably satisfied that the orgy was over, moved away.
‘Do you feel all right, Jimmy?’
‘My arm aches like hell,’ I groaned, ‘and my head’s splitting. Has anyone got an aspirin?’
No one had, but a grinning bystander informed us that there was a kiosk still open further up the pier, so we cashed our loot and staggered out in search of it.
Alone among the party, I did not feel elated by what had happened; in fact, I felt as queasy as if I’d just come around from an operation in which the top of my skull had been sawn off and my brains replaced by jangling bedsprings. Furthermore, my right arm was smarting as though it had been rubbed with stinging nettles.
We bought a packet of aspirin, went into the bar at the end of the pier, ordered a round of drinks and sat down. The others struck up raucously: ’The man who broke the b-b-bank at Monte Carlo,’ until I told them sourly to turn it up. I was dimly aware that something extraordinary had happened. The others, naturally enough, put it down cheerfully to a splendid run of luck, but, even though I was no mathematician, my brief acquaintance with Dumps had taught me enough respect for the laws of mathematical probability for me to realize that what I had done was well beyond any acceptable limits of chance.
I fished an envelope from my inner pocket, shook out two pennies that were skulking inside it and tried to estimate roughly just how many times I’d won. The drawback here was that I had simply no idea how long I’d been playing the machine. Then someone suggested we could get some idea by estimating the average odds returned and dividing a fourth part of our total winnings by this amount. After considerable fumbling and fiddling we arrived at a figure somewhere between fifty and sixty. The result looked so improbable that everyone burst out laughing. Reluctantly I admitted defeat, pushed the envelope back into my pocket and tried to will myself back into the party mood.
I must have succeeded better than I expected, for my memory of the next hour or two is very hazy indeed. I was dropped off at my lodgings around midnight, let myself in with some difficulty and was halfway up the stairs on my way to bed when I caught sight of a solitary letter tucked in behind the ribboned lattice of the post board in the hall. I was by no means sure it was for me, and had already decided that, whatever it was, it could wait till the morning when, seemingly of their own volition, I found my feet retracing their steps.
It was for me all right. There was no address, just the words ‘Mr. Haverill’ scrawled in unfamiliar handwriting across the face of the envelope. Not even an initial. I thrust my thumb under the tab, ripped it open and drew out the single sheet of notepaper. Before I’d focused on the first word of the message the automatic light in the hall clicked itself off. Swearing softly, I fumbled my way across to the door and felt for the switch. I found it at last, pressed it firmly down and read: 7 called round to see you, but you were out. Can you meet me in the Library Annexe after breakfast tomorrow? It’s very important. I’ll be there at p. Please come. Rachel Bernstein.’ I turned the paper over, but there was nothing else. The clock in my landlady’s parlour chimed the quarter after midnight. I looked vaguely around as if I were hoping to see someone to ask what this was all about, but the house was thick with silence. Once more I thumbed the automatic switch and then slowly climbed the stairs to my room.
