had any belief whatsoever in the supernatural. She said that she supposed she had as much belief as any of them present; certainly, the material she had read describing previous experiments of the kind they were embarking on was pretty convincing, but she wouldn't really know for sure what she thought until she saw with her own eyes the table they were sitting around move or, better still, float in the air.
Roger smiled and said that such an occurrence would pretty much take care of his misgivings too. After that the session broke up into a series of casual chats over coffee. Sam moved happily among his little group, obviously satisfied that the atmosphere he had hoped to create was evolving successfully. When he felt that they had accomplished as much as could be expected on this first occasion, he unobtrusively brought the proceedings to a close. They were to meet again in three days.
“At which time,” he said, “we'll start to invent our ghost. And then, to paraphrase Bette Davis, fasten your seat belts-because with any luck, we'll be in for a bumpy ride.”
14
What is it?” Joanna peered at the pale blue liquid in the metal container. It was warm, viscous, and odorless.
“Paraffin wax. Watch.”
Sam pulled back his sleeve and dipped his hand in it up to the wrist. When he withdrew it, it was evenly coated with what looked like a tight-fitting, partially transparent glove. “It dries almost immediately and comes off easily,” he said, pulling a strip from the back of his hand. “And look, you can see every mark of the skin, even tiny hairs, perfectly imprinted.”
“This is very interesting. I assume there's a point.”
They were in a back room of the lab that housed some photographic developing equipment, a gas stove, and a few shelves of chemicals. He finished cleaning the stuff off his hand as he explained. “Sometime in the twenties there was a Polish banker called Franek Kluski, who discovered at the age of forty-five that he was a prodigiously gifted physical medium. According to people who were there, he held seances in which he produced mysterious creatures out of nowhere-human forms, semihuman, animal, semianimal. The only problem was that at the end of the seance they disappeared, so there was never any tangible proof that they'd been there, even though people had seen them and touched them. So one of the researchers investigating him came up with this idea of asking these spirits if they wouldn't mind dipping their hands into a bowl of paraffin wax, so that when they dematerialized they could leave the wax casts behind. Very obligingly, the spirits agreed-and at the end of every seance after that there'd be these empty wax casts lying on the floor. All the researchers had to do was fill them with plaster to get a perfect cast of…whatever it was that had been in the room.”
Joanna stared at him. “You have to be making this up.”
He made an open, noncommittal gesture with his now wax-free hand. “There's a set of plaster casts in Paris at the Institute Metapsychique. They call them ‘phantom hands,’ and they were reportedly created in the way I've just described.”
“I've got to see Roger's face when he hears this.”
Sam laughed. “I'd rather see it when someone dumps a wax cast in his lap and tells him to explain that away.”
“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “you were so right to want Roger in the group. As you said, if he buys into this, it's going to be very hard for the skeptics to dismiss it.”
“Believe me, it won't stop them from trying.”
“All the same, if he'll let me use his name, I'd like to do a special interview with him-once before we start, and again later if something happens.”
“Steady there-your interview technique is what got us on first name terms.”
“What's the matter? Jealous of an old professor?”
“Of that old professor, yes. He's been married four times, and I wouldn't put it past him to try a couple more before he's through.”
“ Four times?”
“He's a scientist-repeatability is the essence of any good experiment.”
“I think you just cured me of a dangerous crush.”
“Glad to hear it.” He pulled her to him and kissed her.
“Do you think they know?” she asked in a soft voice.
“Does who know what?”
“The others in the group. About us.”
He shrugged. “They've probably made an educated guess. Anyway, it's no secret-is it?”
“No.” She ran her hand through the thick hair on the back of his head and pulled his lips to hers once again. “Absolutely not.”
Inventing the ghost proved to be a slow process fraught with unanticipated pitfalls. Under Sam's guidance they applied what logic to it they could. The first question was should it be a male or female ghost? Roger suggested that tossing a coin might be the fairest and fastest solution. Everyone agreed, so Roger spun a quarter. The ghost was male.
The next question was what period should their ghost have lived in? Everyone waited for everyone else to make a suggestion, before Sam said why didn't they all give their opinions one at a time, starting on his left with Maggie. Somewhat diffidently, claiming she knew little history and would defer to those who did, she suggested mid-eighteenth-century Scotland, the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite uprising. There was a brief silence while everybody wondered whether to comment on that idea right away, or hear other suggestions. Sam suggested they carry on around the table with their own suggestions, then go around again for comments.
Riley suggested the Hermetic period in ancient Egypt. Drew picked Renaissance Florence. Barry picked the American War of Independence. Joanna picked the French empire under Napoleon. Roger said that anywhere in Europe, at any time in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries-the “Age of Reason”-would be fine with him. Pete Daniels said he would have picked Renaissance Italy, but since that had already gone he thought he'd “run classical Greece up the flagpole and see if anyone saluted.” Sam said he thought that was quite enough to be starting off with and he would be happy with whatever the group chose. He invited Maggie to start the round of comments.
“It seems to me,” she began hesitantly, as though apologizing for stating the obvious, “that it would be a help if we invented someone whose language we all spoke. And I have to admit that French, Italian, Ancient Egyptian, and Greek are a bit, well, double Dutch to me.”
“It's a good point,” Roger said at once. “There's no point in complicating things unnecessarily. I suggest, if we all agree, that we choose an English-speaking ghost.”
Everyone agreed, after which the discussion grew freer. Sam invited those who had chosen “foreign” ghosts to make new choices in their native tongue. Drew opted for Victorian England; Roger said the ghost could, of course, be an English-speaking traveler anywhere in the world; Riley suggested the Russian Revolution, where it was a matter of historical fact that there had been several English-speaking observers; using the same excuse, Joanna stuck with the French empire.
Going around the table again, Maggie endorsed France-“the auld alliance,” in any period-as a second choice. Drew said she hadn't read enough history to be able to imagine any particular period in much detail, but it might be interesting to pick a time when something was happening other than war and bloodshed. She liked Roger's idea of the Age of Enlightenment, when cultures were flourishing and new ideas exploding everywhere.
Barry said that the elements of war and cultural evolution had always overlapped throughout history, and the American Revolution was a perfect example. He was sticking with that.
Joanna suggested that, as several revolutions had been proposed so far, perhaps it might be an idea to go in that direction. Riley conceded that the Age of Enlightenment was perhaps a more attractive choice than the Soviet Experiment, by which time reason had grown overconfident of its ability to solve everything, thereby provoking disaster. During the French and American Revolutions, however, things were still more finely balanced.
Roger agreed. It was, he said, a time when people believed in the scientific process but didn't take its
