Shadow of a Broken Man

office.

James was a young man with lean features and long hair tied back with a leather thong. He wore a gossamer Indian chambray shirt, tie-dyed jeans, and worn cowboy boots. He was obviously a man who cared little about his surroundings: there was barely enough room in the office for his desk amidst a litter of magazines, books, and abstract sculpture.

James skipped around from behind his desk and shook my hand enthusiastically. 'Dr. Frederickson, it's a real pleasure to meet you.'

'I appreciate your agreeing to see me on such short notice.'

'I need distractions,' he said with a deprecating gesture.

'It allows the subconscious to surface and do its work. What's a Yankee like you doing down here in the cotton patches?'

I laughed. 'Do I detect a Bronx accent?'

James smiled and nodded. 'Fordham Road; born and raised.' There was a spontaneous warmth about the man that I liked.

'One of my graduate students wants to do a doctoral dissertation on possible uses of parapsychology in forensic medicine,' I lied. 'Since I'm his adviser, I thought I'd better find out what he's talking about. I just happened to be in the neighborhood and I thought I'd take a chance that somebody might be willing to talk to me.'

'I'm glad you did,' James said sincerely. 'Are you interested in any particular area of parapsychology?'

I finessed the question by taking out my note pad and drawing a replica of the paper I'd found inside the book on parapsychology. When I finished, I handed it to him and asked, 'Have you ever seen a sheet of paper like this?'

'Sure,' James said, leaning across his desk and opening a drawer. He withdrew a thick blue pad, which he handed to me. The sheets in the pad were the same: circles, squares, triangles, and parallelograms. 'Is this what you mean?'

'It sure is. What are they used for?'

'They're score sheets. We use them to test for telepathy. Would you like to take a stab at it?'

I nodded.

James went back into his desk and came up with a deck of what looked like oversized playing cards. He spread them face up on the desk. Each card had a symbol-a circle, square, triangle, or parallelogram-corresponding to one of the columns on the score sheet.

He put the cards back together, tore a score sheet from the blue pad, and sat down behind his desk. He picked up a couple of large books off the floor and set them on edge between us so that I couldn't see his hands. 'We usually use a more sophisticated procedure,' he said, shuffling the cards, 'but I think this will serve our purpose.

'I'm going to turn over these cards one by one and concentrate on whichever one I'm looking at,' he continued. 'You try to open your mind to mine, try to get a picture in your mind of which symbol is on the card in front of me. When I rap on the desk, you call out what symbol you think it is. Got it?'

'Got it.'

James finished shuffling the cards, then abruptly snapped one face up and rapped on the desk.

The only thing I could think of was Kaznakov.

'Quickly,' James said with a note of authority. 'Don't try to think about it. Just give me your first impression; let your subconscious do the work.'

'Parallelogram.'

He checked one of the boxes on the sheet, flipped another card, knocked.

'Triangle.'

Knock.

'Triangle.'

Knock.

'Square.'

It took him twenty minutes to go through the deck. Then he pushed the books aside and spent another minute or so tallying the check marks in the boxes on the sheet. He finished and tapped the paper with the eraser end of his pencil.

'How'd I do?'

'About twenty-five percent. That's average for a random selection. Chance. With four symbols to choose from, the average person would get one out of four right.'

'You mean I'm not a telepath?'

He smiled. 'I'm afraid not. Welcome to the club.'

'Are there people who score better than chance?'

'Oh, God, yes. Since we began testing for it in the past few years, people with latent telepathic skills have been crawling out of the woodwork. It really is amazing. We've got three students here who can consistently score between thirty and forty-five percent. That's pretty damn good.'

'On symbols,' I said. 'What about reading other people's thoughts?'

He shrugged. 'There are twins in Minneapolis who are apparently able to communicate with each other through dreams. But picking up thought transference-and proving that it's taking place-is pretty esoteric. We use this test because it lends itself to hard statistical analysis.'

'What about a hundred percent on the cards? Is there anyone around who can manage that?'

He looked pained as he reached back and tugged at the thong on his hair. 'Nobody scores a hundred percent. Maybe men did ten thousand years ago-there's reason to suspect that early man may have been telepathic. Or maybe someone will a few thousand years from now. But not today. A score of thirty percent is considered statistically significant. About a year ago we had a young girl who scored fifty-five-but she never got above thirty after that. Fifty- five percent is the record. We're trying to develop training programs.'

'How does it work?' I asked.

'The training programs?'

'Telepathy.'

He chuckled amiably. 'If we knew that, we'd be home free. Actually, it's all quite a mystery. You see the effects, but not the cause. We've found that most people tested do best on their first try, assuming they have the ability to begin with. They don't know how they do it. A thought- a picture of one of those symbols-comes into their minds and they report it. A great deal seems to depend on their mood.'

'You mean that on a given day one of these people might be able to read my mind?'

'Well, yes and no. 'Reading your mind' is putting it a bit too melodramatically. They might pick up a mood-or sometimes a word, or a strand of thought-better than other people.'

'It all sounds pretty imprecise.'

'Oh, it is,' James said. 'Strictly hit-and-miss when you get beyond the technique we use here.'

'But you must have some theory about the mental processes involved.'

'You see,' James said carefully, staring at the wall behind me, 'the 'mind,' as we call it, is much more than just a mere biochemical function of the brain. The brain gives off electrical impulses-much like a radio or television transmitter, to use an overworked analogy. There is energy emanated, and we can measure that energy with an electroencephalograph. Now, as far as telepathy is concerned, it seems that some people have a 'talent,' if you will, for picking up and decoding this energy. The astonishing thing is that a few of these people can pick up these 'signals' from great distances, almost instantaneously. So thoughts are not completely analogous to radio waves.'

I decided it was time to break into his lengthy explanation and threw a curve. 'Dr. James, have you ever heard of Victor Rafferty?'

He tugged at his hair band again. 'Rafferty… Rafferty … Architect?' 'Right.'

'Died a few years back in an automobile accident. No, he survived that. He finally died in a laboratory accident, something like that. Why do you ask?'

'Was Rafferty ever tested here?'

'No. Not that I know of-and I'd know. Why?'