David Ambrose - Superstition

“This is Ellie Ray. How can I help you?”

“Sergeant Dan Miller, New Hampshire State Police. As I told the young man I was speaking to, I have to speak to Mrs. Anderson in person.”

“I'm afraid Mrs. Anderson is in a…in a religious service right now. But I'm a very good friend of hers. If there's any way I can be of help to you or to her, I'd be very happy.”

She heard him hesitate, then decide.

“Well,” he began, obviously not relishing the task he had to perform, “I'm afraid I have some tragic news. I'm calling from the county morgue. Mrs. Anderson's husband was fatally injured in a traffic accident two hours ago…”

At first Joanna tried to tell herself it was a joke. Or she had misheard. Every instinct strove to deny that what she thought was happening could really be happening. Like the victim of some sudden catastrophe, she was paralyzed by disbelief.

It started when Ellie took back the microphone from the young man who'd been struggling to keep the show going for the last five minutes. “Listen,” she'd said to Murray with a new urgency in her voice, “I've just had the police on the phone. Something's come up. It's that Anderson woman…I'm getting her bio up…first name Eileen, comes from Springfield…has some problem with a twin sister who died when they were kids…Now listen to me, Murray, her husband just got killed on the interstate…Now this is what we're going to do…”

Joanna slipped a hand under her wig as though her earpiece might be somehow malfunctioning. She refused to believe what she was hearing. They could not possibly be about to do this awful thing. Not even these people could be as heartless as that.

Ellie's voice buzzed on in her ear.

“It's got to bring Joyce Pardoe back into play. Once this gets into the newsletters, she's sure to improve on that last offer. We could even get an auction going between her and the Thomases…”

Joanna was only vaguely aware that her mouth was hanging open as she listened to this woman cold-bloodedly planning to boost the sale of her real estate by exploiting a tragic bereavement. Even then she couldn't believe that Murray would go for this. She watched him sitting imperturbably, finishing off a rambling answer to a question from some man near the front, betraying nothing of the callousness and greed being poured into his ear. Surely he would just ignore his wife's words and carry on. He wouldn't go for this. He couldn't.

“The husband's name is Jeffrey Dean…Jeffrey Dean Anderson…Salesman-that's all I've got, nothing about what he sells…Two kids, teenagers, Shirley and Richard…”

Murray signaled for the next question. Merle had an object for him, a brooch or clip or something of the sort. She started across the stage and Murray held out his hands for it as he always did.

He froze without warning. His whole body remained rigid for some seconds; then he inhaled a shuddering breath and slumped back in his chair as though unconscious.

People were on their feet in alarm, thinking he was ill. Merle hurried toward him, but quickly realized that all was well as he pulled himself forward and stood up. He raised his arms theatrically, and the audience watched, puzzled, as he placed his fingers on his temples in an attitude of intense and painful concentration. His breathing remained heavy for some moments more. Then, still blindfolded, he spoke.

“Jeffrey…Jeffrey Dean Anderson,” he intoned, “is speaking to me now as I stand before you…Eileen, he has a message for Eileen…he says she's here…he has a message for you, Eileen, and the children…Shirley, Richard…He wants you to know that he loves you, all of you, and he doesn't want you to be sad…he has simply…crossed over…”

People ran to help the thin, drawn-looking woman who had collapsed in the aisle.

Outside, Joanna ran through the slim, tall silver birches until she had to stop, doubled over, retching from disgust and nausea.

Afterward she walked briskly to the ludicrously named Clouds Wing, one of the two hotel blocks on the compound-wooden built, plain and overpriced. There she paused only to pick up the few possessions she'd brought with her, and to check again that she had the whole episode securely on tape.

Then she picked up her car keys and hurried to the parking lot.

Sam Towne was watching an upturned plastic pudding container crawl crablike back and forth across the smooth surface of the laboratory floor.

The technical name for the device was a tychoscope, derived from the Greek tukhe, meaning “chance,” and skopion, meaning “to examine.” The prototype had been invented by a Frenchman, Pierre Janin, in the late seventies. It rested on two wheels set parallel to each other and a fixed pivot leg, enabling it to move in a straight line either forward or backward, or rotate clockwise or counterclockwise.

All these movements were radio controlled by a random event generator (REG) in the next room. An REG was essentially no more than an electronic coin-tossing machine, its circuitry governed by some unpredictable physical process such as radioactive decay or thermal electron motion. A computer, programmed to sample this process at preset intervals, generated arbitrary series of numbers or movements accordingly.

The tychoscope's next move, in consequence, was always anybody's guess. Statistically there was a known probability that it would make any one of the possible moves open to it, just as a coin, every time it is tossed, has a 50/50 chance of coming down heads or tails. Over ten, a hundred, or a thousand tosses it will come down approximately half the time heads and half tails. That is the law of probability.

Yet what Sam and his assistant, Pete Daniels, were witnessing was a consistent and dramatic violation of that law. The little pudding-container robot was literally huddling in one corner of the floor. Each time the REG switched it to a new tack that looked like taking it away, the next few switches would inexorably bring it back to the same area.

Sam and Pete exchanged a look, neither concealing his excitement from the other. Both knew that this was a historic moment: a repeatable demonstration, under laboratory conditions, of something utterly inexplicable.

“Okay, let's move the cage,” Sam said.

There was an anxious twittering from the fifteen seven-day-old chicks as their world swung up into the air and came to rest two yards from where it had been. It took only a few moments for them to reorient themselves and begin calling for the featureless moving object that they had been conditioned to regard as “mom,” and which was now farther away from them than they found comfortable.

Pete came back from the next room with a printout from the computer. He handed it to Sam in silence. The numbers spoke for themselves.

“That's almost three times,” Sam said, doing a quick bit of mental arithmetic. “The goddamn thing spent three times longer hanging around the cage when the chicks were in it than when it was empty.”

“In-fucking-credible.”

“But true.”

They both turned as the chirping of the little birds grew more agitated. The tychoscope was making a turn of almost three hundred and sixty degrees. Sam caught Pete's eye, each of them knowing the thought that had shot through the other's head, followed by a jolt of self-reproach at such a cockeyed notion. It was absurd to think, as they both instinctively though briefly had, in terms of the tychoscope actively searching for its brood. It was a mindless machine without even the pretensions to ratiocinative thought of the simplest computer program. Any kind of program was an ordered process, and the whole point of the process by which the little robot's movements were controlled was that it lacked all order.