for us?”
Gradually, almost hesitantly, the pointer moved back to the center of the board, described a circle as though getting its bearings, then headed for the letter “A.” It barely paused before looping out again, all of them leaning and swaying to follow it, moving in unison like some kind of precision dancing team. It went to “D” and back to “A,” then across to “M,” after which it came to rest once again in the center of the board.
“He's not going to spell out his last name,” Joanna heard herself saying. As though in response, the pointer started to move again and all of them with it. “W-Y-A-T-T.”
“I'm telling you, somebody's pushing it!” Barry's voice was high with incredulity.
“If that's what you think, try it,” Sam told him. “Ask it a question to which only you know the answer, then try and push it to spell it out.”
Maggie had removed her finger, but Sam said quickly, “No, Maggie. Everybody keep your finger there. Don't resist Barry, just try to follow him. Okay, ask it a question.”
Barry frowned a moment, then asked, “What's my cousin Matthew's middle name?”
The pointer didn't even get to the first letter. It was obvious that Barry was pushing, and equally obvious that the others were not resisting; yet he couldn't even get it to move in a straight line. He conceded with a grudging, “Okay, I guess I'm wrong.”
“Let's carry on,” Sam said. “Does anybody have a question they want to ask Adam?”
Roger said he did. “I'd like to know whether Adam thinks he's real, or knows that he's just a projection of our thoughts?”
The pointer didn't move. “Which is it, Adam?” Sam said. “Are you real or not?”
Once again the movement began. “I-A-M-A-D-A-M-W-Y-A-T-T.”
“‘I am Adam Wyatt,’” Roger repeated. “Well, that's nicely inconclusive.”
“If we're not pushing it, which we're not, is there any reason why this thing couldn't move by itself?” Joanna asked.
“Psychokinesis? Let's try,” Sam replied.
They all removed their fingers.
“All right, Adam,” Sam said, “can you move the pointer by yourself without our touching it?”
It seemed an age as they sat motionless, watching, though in fact it was barely a minute.
“Maybe it's a little soon for that,” Sam said finally. “Back to the old method.”
They all replaced their fingers on the pointer's felt top.
“Anybody else got a question?” Sam asked.
Pete said, “Why don't we ask him why he can't move this thing by himself?”
With a swiftness that startled them, the pointer started moving around the board until it spelled out “I CANNOT.”
“ Why not?” Barry repeated.
This time there was no response. The thing remained as dead as it had been when they weren't touching it.
“According to the theory, if I understand it correctly,” Ward Riley said after a while, “what we're learning now is that we don't believe in Adam enough to give him a life of his own. Isn't that so, Sam?”
“According to the theory, that's right,” Sam said.
“Why don't we ask him if he can do anything to prove that he's real?” Drew said.
With a suddenness that made them all recoil in shock, a sound came from the table that was unlike anything they had heard before. It was a sharp rap, but more like a detonation than a knock, something that came from within the fibers of the wood itself rather than from the collision of two hard surfaces.
Joanna had felt the vibration run up her arm. She could see that the others had too.
“I think that's him,” Sam said. There was a note of quiet triumph in his voice.
Joanna's heart was beating fast.
18
On reflection, Joanna decided to say nothing to her editor about what she had initially regarded as a breakthrough. A single rap, even though captured on tape, as was the reaction of the group on video, was far from conclusive proof that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. So she diligently started to research her story on the UN delegates in New York, while remaining privately convinced that she would soon be back on the Adam story full time.
She had seen her parents only once since their evening with Sam. On their last visit to the city he had been in Chicago taking part in some weekend-long symposium, and since then Bob and Elizabeth Cross had been in Europe. They were spending three months between London, Paris, and Rome. Her father had managed to swing it with the company as part work, part vacation: a kind of dry run for retirement, he called it. They had traveled increasingly in recent years. Her father's job with the airline provided them with almost unlimited free travel and offered major discounts at some of the world's best hotels. As her mother said, it was the best part of growing old-being no longer too poor or too busy to travel, and still young enough to enjoy it. Of course grandchildren would be nice, but she didn't want Joanna to feel any pressure on the subject.
A couple of nights after the first rap, and before the excitement had quite worn off, Joanna stopped by the lab around six to pick up Sam. They had planned to catch an off-off-Broadway theater group, then have dinner at a new Thai restaurant they'd heard about. When she got there, he and Pete had something to show her that they were very excited about. A friend of Pete's in the engineering department had analyzed the table rap that they'd gotten on tape. It had proved to be as radically different from any ordinary kind of knock as it had sounded. She pored over graphs and printouts that meant little to her aside from the obvious differences that Pete pointed to.
“In an ordinary rap,” he said, “if I hit the same table with my knuckles or a hammer or any hard object, the sound starts with maximum amplitude and dies away. This rap, on the other hand, builds up gradually and ends with maximum amplitude. It's exactly the opposite of normal.”
“They found the same thing in Ontario with the ‘Philip’ experiment,” Sam added triumphantly. “We're on our way.”
The theater show was interesting enough to keep them in their seats until the end, and the restaurant was worth waiting for. It was way up on the West Side, so they decided to spend the night at Sam's place. On the cab ride back he fell silent and she sensed a change in his mood. He was unaware of her watching him as he gazed out into the passing night. It was one of those moments of distraction she had learned to accept in him. It couldn't have lasted more than a minute, but when he turned to her it was with the look of somebody waking from sleep to find a loved one watching over them. He took her hand.
“Well…?” she said softly.
He shrugged. “Just the usual question. What does it all add up to? And if it doesn't add up to anything, why is it there?”
“I thought science didn't ask why. Just how.”
“I know. But as Roger likes to point out, his end of it has built the microchip and the Teflon frying pan, while we're no closer to understanding the paranormal than William James was in 1910. He wrote something that I've never had to memorize, because ever since I read it I haven't been able to get it out of my head.”
He paused a moment, his gaze going out again to the Manhattan night.
“‘I confess,’” he began quoting softly, “‘that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits, are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they also can never be susceptible to full corroboration.’”
“Good quote. I'll use it in the article.”
“You can add,” he said, with some of the usual vigor returning to his voice, “that it didn't stop him trying.”
She increased the pressure of her hand on his. “Can I tell you something?” she said.
