Robert Heinlein: Time For The Stars

Pat did not answer right away, which wasn't like him. At last he said, "Tom, are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure!"

He sighed. "I hate to say this, because I know what you will say. But what are you supposed to do when none of your theories fits?"

"Huh? Is this a quiz? You throw 'em away and try a new one. Basic methodology, freshman year."

"Okay, just slip this on for size, don't mind the pattern: Tom, my boy, brace yourself-we're mind readers."

I tried it and did not like it. "Pat, just because you can't explain everything is no reason to talk like the fat old women who go to fortune tellers. We're muddled, I admit, whether it was drugs or hypnosis. But we couldn't have been reading each other's minds or we would have been doing it years ago. We would have noticed."

"Not necessarily. There's never anything much going on in your mind, so why should I notice?"

"But it stands to reason—"

"What's the natural log of two?"

"'Point six nine three one' is what you said, though I've got very little use for four-place tables. What's that got to do with it?"

"I used four-place because she gave it to me that way. Do you remember what she said just before I gave you that number?"

"Huh? Who?"

"Mabel. Dr. Mabel Lichtenstein. What did she say?"

"Nobody said anything."

"Tom, my senile symbiote, she told me what to do, to wit, read the numbers to you. She told me this in a clear, penetrating soprano. You didn't hear her?"

"No."

"Then you weren't in the same room. You weren't within earshot, even though I was prepared to swear that they had shoved you in right by me. I knew you were there. But you weren't. So it was telepathy."

I was confused. I didn't feel telepathic; I merely felt hungry.

"Me, too, on both counts," Pat agreed. "So let's stop at Berkeley Station end get a sandwich."

I followed him off the strips, feeling not quite as hungry and even more confused. Pat had answered a remark I hadnot made.

Even though I was told to take my time and tell everything, it can't be done. I haven't had time to add to this for days, but even if I didn't have to work I still could not "tell all," because it takes more than a day to write down what happens in one day. The harder you try the farther behind you get. So I'm going to quit trying and just hit the high spots.

Anyhow everybody knows the general outline of Project Lebensraum.

We did not say anything to Mum and Dad about that first day. You can't expose parents to that sort of thing; they get jittery and start issuing edicts. We just told them the tests would run a second day and that nobody had told us what the results were.

Dr. Arnault seemed unsurprised when we told her we knew the score, even when I blurted out that we thought we had been faking but apparently weren't. She just nodded and said that it had been necessary to encourage us to think that everything was commonplace, even if there had to be a little fibbing on both sides. "I had the advantage of having your personality analyses to guide me," she added. "Sometimes in psychology you have to go roundabout to arrive at the truth.

"We'll try a more direct way today," she went on. "We'll put you two back to back but close enough together that you unquestionably can hear each other. But I am going to use a sound screen to cut you off partly or completely from time to time without your knowing it."

It was a lot harder the second time. Naturally we tried and naturally we flubbed. But Dr. Arnault was patient and so was Dr. Lichtenstein—Pat's "Dr. Mabel." She preferred to be called Dr. Mabel; she was short and pudgy and younger than Dr. Arnault and about as cute as a female can be and still look like a sofa pillow. It wasn't until later that we found out she was boss of the research team and world famous. "Giggly little fat girl"—was an act she used to put ordinary people, meaning Pat and myself, at their ease.

I guess this proves you should ignore the package and read the fine print.

So she giggled and Dr. Arnault looked serious and we could not tell whether we were reading minds or not. I could hear Tom's whispers—they told us to go ahead and whisper—and he could hear mine and sometimes they would fade. I was sure we weren't getting anything, not telepathy I mean, for it was just the way Pat and I used to whisper answers back and forth in school without getting caught.

Finally Dr. Mabel giggled sheepishly and said, "I guess that's enough for today. Don't you think so, Doctor?"

Dr. Arnault agreed and Pat and I sat up and faced each other. I said, "I suppose yesterday was a fluke. I guess we disappointed you."

Dr. Mabel looked like a startled kitten. Dr. Arnault answered soberly, "I don't know what you expected, Tom, but for the past hour you and your brother have been cut off from hearing each other during every test run."

"But I did hear him."

"You certainly did. But not with your ears. We've been recording each side of the sound barrier. Perhaps we should play back part of it."

Dr. Mabel giggled. "That's a good idea." So they did. It started out with all four voices while they told us what they wanted, then there were just my whispers and Pat's, reading lines back and forth from The Comedy of Errors. They must have had parabolic mikes focused on us for our whispers sounded like a wind storm.

Pat's whispers gradually faded out. But mine kept fight on going... answering a dead silence.

We signed a research contract with the Foundation and Dad countersigned it, after an argument. He thought mind-reading was folderol and we did not dispute him, since the clincher was that money was scarce as always and it was a better-paying job than any summer job we could get, fat enough to insure that we could start college even if our scholarships didn't come through.

But before the summer was over they let us in on the connection between "Genetics Investigations" and "Project Lebensraum." That was a horse of another color—a very dark black, from our parents' standpoint.

Long before that time Pat and I could telepath as easily as we could talk and just as accurately, without special nursing and at any distance. We must have been doing it for years without knowing it—in fact Dr. Arnault made a surprise recording of our prison-yard whispering (when we weren't trying to telepath, just our ordinary private conversation) and proved that neither one of us could understand our recorded whispers when we were keeping it down low to keep other people from hearing.

She told us that it was theoretically possible that everyone was potentially telepathic, but that it had proved difficult to demonstrate it except with identical twins—and then only with about ten per cent. "We don't know why, but think of an analogy with tuned radio circuits."

"Brain waves?" I asked.

"Don't push the analogy too far. It can't be the brain waves we detect with an encephalograph equipment or we would have been selling commercial telepathic equipment long since. And the human brain is not a radio. But whatever it is, two persons from the same egg stand an enormously better chance of being 'tuned in' than two non-twins do. I can't read your mind and you can't read mine and perhaps we never will. There have been only a few cases in all the history of psychology of people who appeared to be able to "tune in" on just anyone, and most of those aren't well documented."

Pat grinned and winked at Dr. Mabel. "So we are a couple of freaks."

She looked wide-eyed and started to answer but Dr. Arnault beat her to it. "Not at all, Pat. In you it is normal. But we do have teams in the project who are not identical twins. Some husbands and wives, a few fraternal siblings, even some pairs who were brought together by the research itself. They are the 'freaks.' If we could find out how they do it, we. might be able to set up conditions to let anyone do it."