David Ambrose: Superstition

“Wait a minute-are you saying that superstition is a rational thing?”

“Absolutely.”

She looked at him slightly sideways and with the faintest narrowing of her eyes. “Could you just run that by me again?”

He shifted his weight a little and leaned forward. “Opposites define each other-black/white, vice/virtue, order/disorder, and so on-including rationality and irrationality. One can't exist without the other. And somewhere in the middle there's a gray area where you can't be sure which is which-a no-man's-land where anything can happen.”

“This sounds like the opening to The Twilight Zone.”

He laughed. “You should know-from what you say you've just been there.”

True, she thought. For a while she had been genuinely afraid. But it was over now, the memory fading with each moment that passed. She ordered a salad and the special fettuccine that Sam said she should trust him about. She even had a glass of Chianti, although she normally never drank at lunch. Today, she thought, she had an excuse.

“The thing that really shook me up,” she said, putting her glass down after a first welcome sip, “was when she told me that her husband had died. Without that, I don't think she would have gotten to me.”

“There's no way you can blame yourself for that man's death,” Sam told her firmly. “It's obvious that he must have had a heart condition already. Anything could have triggered it.”

“I know,” she said, “but that's the rational me talking. And as you've just pointed out, there's an irrational me, too.”

“Acknowledging its existence doesn't mean we have to give it the upper hand,” he said.

As he spoke, he gave her a smile that was somehow so understanding and sympathetic that it took her by surprise.

“I'll try,” was all she could think of in response. They were silent for a few moments as their lunch was served. She made noises about the excellent fettuccine and how right he'd been to recommend it, then she asked him to tell her something about his work. He gave a shrug as though wondering where to begin.

“What would you like to know?”

She thought a moment, then said, “There's one question I'd like to ask you as a scientist. It sounds kind of rude, but it isn't meant that way.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why do so many scientists that I've talked to think that any kind of investigation into the paranormal is a waste of time?”

“Well,” he said, not remotely discomposed by the question, “there are two answers to that. One is that scientists, when they poke their noses outside their own narrow specialist field, are as prejudiced and dumb as anybody else-only worse, because they think they're so smart.”

He forked some more pasta into his mouth and dabbed his lips with a linen napkin.

“And the other?” she prompted.

He smiled again, this time with a hint of resignation. “The other answer,” he said, “is that maybe they're right.”

“Presumably, that's a view you don't share.”

Again he gave a small shrug, as though not sure how to answer. “All I know is I've seen some pretty strange things. I'm not sure what they add up to or what conceptual framework they fit into, but I can't ignore them any more than I can explain them.”

“Give me an example.”

“I'm not talking ghosts and banshees and messages from beyond. I'm talking about anomalies. Things that just don't fit into anything we understand.”

“Such as…?”

He described to her the experiment in which the chickens were persuaded to adopt a machine as their mother. She laughed at first, then grew serious as she understood its significance.

“We've had cats in boxes with a heat source controlled by the same kind of random event generator. The cats, of course, liked the warmth-and we found the heat source would be on significantly longer when there was a cat in the box than when there wasn't.”

“If that's true, it's amazing.”

“Oh, it's true.”

“Can people do it too?”

“Come to the lab sometime and try some of our tests. I promise we won't lock you in a box or anything.”

“I'll talk to my editor. Maybe we should do something-kind of a ‘mind over matter’ piece.”

She shivered suddenly and convulsively.

“What is it?” he asked, concerned.

“I don't know,” she said, genuinely puzzled. “When I said ‘mind over matter’ I suddenly had a picture of that horrible old woman and the way she looked at me.”

He thought for a second that he was going to reach out and take her hand where it lay on the table, but then checked the impulse. “Remember what I told you,” he said, his eyes focused searchingly on hers. “Those people are clever. They plant a fear and hope you'll worry yourself sick over it. Don't let them scam you that way.”

“I won't,” she said. “I'm fine, really. Thanks.”

Over coffee she told him that she'd be seeing her editor that afternoon and would suggest writing something on scientific parapsychology. “I'll call you if he bites,” she said.

Sam scribbled down his work number on a crumpled receipt culled from one of his pockets.

“Call me anyway,” he said, handing it to her.

Taylor Freestone took himself and the job of editing Around Town very seriously indeed. Joanna watched as he crossed his elegantly tailored legs, placed his fingertips together, and leaned back thoughtfully in his suede-upholstered editorial chair.

“Might it not seem a little odd,” he asked, looking at her from beneath a delicately furrowed brow, “to have just done an expose of the whole business, then to be saying maybe there's something in it after all?”

“Two totally different things,” she shot back, knowing full well that he was going to agree, but only after they had completed this little ritual dance of petition and assent in deference to his authority. “Sam Towne's work is genuine research, and some of it's pretty mind bending. All we did with Camp Starburst was expose a scam, but we didn't say there was nothing to the paranormal.”

He thought a moment, alternately pursing and stretching his lips as though tasting a questionable wine. She hadn't told him about her encounter with Ellie Ray, though she had mentioned that Murray had died. The news made little impression on Taylor, who had a curious way of not connecting with the human reality behind any of the stories that he published. His life was bounded by the fashionable cocktail circuit of the Upper East Side, although the magazine he edited with such conspicuous success took its stories from wherever in the world they might occur. Taylor's skill, Joanna knew, was in sensing what the sort of people who bought his magazine had been talking about at their fashionable health clubs, or may have seen on public television recently, and now wanted to go into slightly more deeply. It was a skill she admired and which she knew was far from being as simple as it sounded. Nonetheless, the man's fey posturings irritated her unreasonably, and she had to force herself to remain still and silent until his deliberations were over.

“Do a little groundwork,” he said eventually. “Sketch something up for me next week. We'll see where we go from there.”

The apparatus was attached to the wall of a small room in the lab. It resembled a huge pinball machine-which in a sense, Sam said, it was.

“There are nine thousand of these polystyrene balls,” he said, pointing to a compartment at the top, “which are dropped one by one in the center of this first row of pegs. Watch…”

He turned the machine on. Balls starting dropping and bouncing down through about twenty rows of plastic pins, ending up in a row of collection bins at the bottom.