“I’ve met Cynthia Brutran. It doesn’t take a mind reader to know she’s a killer,” I say.
Sharp hears the bitterness in my voice. “Has she hurt anyone close to you?” he asks.
I think of Jeff Stephens, the boyfriend of Lisa Fetch, a member of our small group who is teaching math back in Truman, Missouri, and waiting for the IIC to make her disappear. Jeff Stephens was the first victim of Brutran that I knew. I also think of my own dead body, out there somewhere, maybe in the hands of Brutran and her monsters. To be frank, I think about it every few minutes.
“Yes,” I say.
Sharp digests the news slowly. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Do you apologize because you’re to blame?” Seymour asks.
Sharp doesn’t appreciate the question. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, young man.”
Seymour realizes he’s overreached and looks to me for help. I hold up my hand by way of apology. Sharp’s anger is real and I don’t want to lose him before we can begin.
“It was Brutran who stole your life’s work,” I say.
The insight startles Sharp out of his anger. This is how to get the truth out of him. Shake him up, make him realize he doesn’t have all the answers. Like many intellectuals, particularly the elderly kind, he suffers from arrogance. That’s why he invited us so quickly into his home. He wants us to hear his story.
“What makes you say that?” he asks.
“I’ve felt the sting of her Array,” I reply.
Sharp sucks in a breath. For him, just hearing the word is like a slap in the face. My guess is correct. Brutran and pals must have used whatever they learned from their teacher to smash him down.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats.
My tone is sympathetic. “The woman has made us both suffer. Isn’t that enough for you to share your story with us? That’s why we’re here, to listen to what you know. And based on what you said a minute ago, I think you have been waiting for us.”
Each of my remarks is carefully designed to save us an hour and cut right through his armor. It doesn’t matter that Sharp probably knows that. I believe I’ve sized him up correctly. Especially when he sits back in his chair and smiles at me. He’s been waiting to tell his story before he dies.
“Now you could have been a reporter,” he says to me.
I act hurt. “I hope I don’t come across as cold.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was simply acknowledging that you’re shrewd enough to succeed in the business.” He pauses and scans the rest of us. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Seymour says. “Take us back to Berkeley. How did you manage to create a graduate program focused on paranormal abilities?”
Sharp sighs and reaches for a spoon, which he uses to drop a hefty dose of sugar in his iced tea. He stirs it slowly and I can tell his mind is traveling back to another era.
“That was forty years ago,” he begins. “The UC system was much more liberal then. Particularly when it came to Berkeley. The school wasn’t stuck in the free love of the hippie days but at the same time it had never really lost that flavor. And I was the perfect candidate to explore the weird and wonderful. I don’t know how thoroughly you have researched my past. I have a PhD in psychology and I was in fact the head of the psychology department at Berkeley. But I also have an equally prestigious degree in anatomy and physiology. It was an early goal of mine to be a psychiatrist. But the allure of pure research kept me in an academic world.”
“What sparked your interest in ESP?” Seymour asks.
“The need to know. The most basic desire of all. I had read about the research Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University had conducted on psychic phenomena, back in the thirties and forties. When I came across his work, I couldn’t understand why other scientists hadn’t followed up on his findings. Of course there was a stigma attached to such research. Many of my colleagues failed to see it as real science—whatever that’s supposed to mean. But to me there was no question Dr. Rhine, with the help of his wife, had established that ESP definitely existed.” Sharp pauses. “Are any of you familiar with his work?”
“I am,” I say. “He developed the standard deck of ESP cards psychic researchers use to this day. They consist of five symbols: a circle, a cross, wavy lines, a square, and a star. He wanted to keep the symbols simple. He felt that would make them easier to transmit from one person’s mind to another. I know he used a large body of statistical analysis to back up his claims that ESP existed. He would go through thousands of people to detect the tiniest statistical variance.”
Sharp nods his head in appreciation of my summary. “You bring up the main strength and the main weakness of his research. With the five different shapes, a test subject should be able to guess what card another person is staring at twenty percent of the time—by chance. But Dr. Rhine showed that certain individuals exceeded that average. They’d guess the correct card thirty percent of the time.”
“That’s not very impressive,” Seymour says. “They were still wrong over two thirds of the time.”
“Yes!” Sharp says, excited enough to pound the kitchen table. “Congratulations, Seymour. You just summed up the problem with the entire parapsychology field. The results of Dr. Rhine’s research were real. No one with an open mind could study it and not acknowledge that ESP does exist in certain people. Statistics don’t lie. However, they don’t get people excited, either. I just made an extraordinary statement. I said a select group of people could telepathically read the cards correctly thirty percent of the time. And you responded exactly as most people do. You said, ‘So what. Big deal.’”
“I’m sorry, it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Seymour says.
“That’s where you’re wrong. If the deviation was as little as one percent of what it should be—as predicted by chance—then it would be important. Because no matter how weak the ability to read another person’s mind is, it still proves that ESP exists. And that seemingly small truth, if contemplated seriously, and viewed from every branch of science, should force us to rewrite every science book we have on this planet.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” Seymour says carefully.
Sharp waves a hand. “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Surely you can see I’ve had this argument a thousand times over the years. But I’m telling you the truth, and it explains why I devoted a large portion of my life to this field. Take for example physics. If ESP exists in human beings, then every law of physics that we have identified so far is suspect.”
“I don’t follow,” Seymour says.
“Our laws of physics cannot account for telepathy. Despite the advances in the field, the wild implications of string theory and black holes, we’ve still only identified four forces in the universe. Electromagnetic forces, gravity, and strong and weak nuclear forces. Ask any physicist and he’ll tell you that there are no other powers at work in this world. Yet ESP, even if it exists to only a slight degree, says that’s not true. There has to be another form of power in this universe that we cannot explain. I’d even go so far as to say that the existence of ESP supports the argument that we have a soul. Do you follow me?”
Seymour hesitates. “I see where you’re coming from.”
“That’s good enough for now. I know I’ve belabored this point but it’s important that you understand that I approached parapsychology from a purely scientific point of view. And I didn’t have to conduct much research to come to the same conclusion Dr. Rhine did. Let me state it in one clear concise sentence: ESP exists in certain people—perhaps in all people, to a degree—but it’s either a very weak force or a very dormant one.”
“I’d imagine such a conclusion would have depressed you,” Seymour says.
Sharp shakes his head. “On the contrary, I was delighted with what I’d discovered. Because it occurred to me that if I could assemble a large enough group of psychics, then I could use them the same way astronomers use groups of radio telescopes to boost the faintest signals given off by the most distant galaxies.”
“Oh God,” I whisper.
Sharp nods in satisfaction. “You see where I’m going. Astronomers call such groups of radio telescopes ‘arrays.’ No one telescope picks up much information. But when their data is fed through a computer and scanned for patterns, they prove to be remarkably accurate.”
“You created a psychic array,” I say, my blood turning cold, never mind that I drank two pints of warm blood this morning.
Sharp beams. “Yes.”
“Wait,” Seymour says. “I don’t get it. I don’t care how large a group you assembled, it should only be as strong as its strongest link. I mean, you must have gotten a bunch of answers that were all over the place. That must have happened when you applied your array to reading the ESP deck, didn’t it?”
“You’re jumping the gun, Seymour. We’re not all as bright as Teri obviously is. Let’s take it step by step. When dealing with a large group, all you need is a one percent deviation by chance to construct a workable array. Let me give you an example. I took a female student who knew nothing about my work and had her focus on the ESP cards one at a time. Usually there are twenty-five cards in a deck, five of each basic shape. I gave her twenty decks to work with. Enough to get a statistically sound average but not enough to exhaust her. At the same time I borrowed four hundred students from the school’s general population. Their job was to try to read the woman’s mind. To see what shape the woman was looking at. I stationed her in an isolated area and put my large group in an auditorium. They could see her via remote camera but she couldn’t see them. They knew when she picked up a fresh card. They knew how long she held it for. They were not allowed to talk to each other. I discouraged them from even looking at each other. I wanted them to focus on the woman and try to guess what shape she was seeing.”