The fact of the matter was that Roger didn't much care what Cornut was saying. His whole attention was taken up with his gift. As soon as he thought it was proper to do so, he excused himself and carried it to his room.
Roger was aware that it was very old and came from very far away; but that could have been something of last week's, from the city just below the horizon; he had little memory. What Roger thought principally about the flag was that it was a pretty colour.
He tacked it with magnetic grips to the wall of his room, stood back thoughtfully, removed the grips and replaced it closer to his bed. He stood there looking at it, because somehow it satisfied him to stand and look at it.
It was bright moonlight outside, but there was a fair wind sweeping across the long reach from Portugal. The waves were high; and the pneumatic hammer-hammer and the rattle-slam of the valves opening and closing pounded through the texas, one noise reinforcing the other. It made it hard for anyone to talk in the other room. (Cornut was growing more and more uneasy.) But it didn't bother Roger. Since the day his own crushed skull had minced a corner of his brain, nothing had really bothered Roger.
But he liked the flag. After ten minutes of staring at it, he took off the magnets that held it, folded it and put it under his pillow. Smiling with pleasure, he went back into the other room to say good night to his sister's new husband.
CHAPTER X
Master Carl lighted a do-not-disturb sign on his door and opened the folding screen that hid his little darkroom from the casual eyes of the student housekeepers. He was not ashamed of the hobby that made him operate a darkroom; it was simply none of their business. Carl was not ashamed of anything he did. His room attested to that; it bore the marks of all his interests.
Three boards held chess problems half worked out and forgotten, the pieces lifted, dusted and replaced by a dozen generations of student maids. On the cream-and-lilac walls were framed prints of Minoan scenes and inscriptions, the ten-year-old relics of his statistical examination into the grammar of Linear B. A carton that had once contained two dozen packs of Rhine cards (and still contained five unopened packs) showed the two years he had spent in demonstrating to his own satisfaction, once for all, that telepathy was not possible.
The proof rested on an analogy, but Master Carl had satisfied himself that the analogy was valid. If, he supposed, telepathic communication could be subsumed under the general equations of Unified Field Law, it had to fall into one of the two possible categories therein. It could be tunable, like the electromagnetic spectrum; or it could be purely quantitative, like the kinetogravitic realms. He eliminated the second possibility at once: it implied that every thought would be received by every person within range, and observation denied that on the face of it.
Telepathy, then, if it existed at all, had to be tunable. Carl then applied his analogy. Crystals identical in structure resonate at the same frequency. Humans identical in structure do exist: they are called identical twins. For two years Master Carl had spent most of his free time locating, persuading and testing pairs of identical twins. It took two years, and no more, because that was how long it took him to find three hundred and twenty-six pairs; and three hundred and twenty-six was the number the chi-square law gave as the minimum universe in which a statistical sampling could be regarded as conclusive. When the three hundred and twenty-sixth twin had failed to secure significantly more than chance correlation with the card symbols viewed by his sibling, Carl had closed out the experiment at once.
When the two-year job was ended Carl was not angry, but he was also not hopeful. It did not occur to him to go on to a three hundred and twenty-seventh set. He did, however, permit himself to turn at once to investigating other aspects of what had once been called psionics.
Precognition he eliminated on logical grounds; clairvoyance he pondered over for several months before deciding that, like the conjecture that flying saucers were of extraterrestrial origin, it offered too few opportunities for experimental verification to be an attractive study. Hexing he ruled out as necessarily involving either telepathy or clairvoyance. It was not the cases in which the sufferer knew he was hexed that offered a problem; simple suggestion could account for most of those; a man who saw the wax doll with the pins in it, or was told by the ju-ju man that his toenails were being roasted, might very easily sicken and die out of fear. But if the victim did not learn of his hex through physical means, he could learn only by either telepathy or clairvoyance; and Carl had eliminated them.
The traditional list of paranormal powers included only two other phenomena; fire-sending and telekinesis.
Carl elected to consider the first as only a subdivision of the second. Speeding the Brownian Movement of molecules (i.e. heating them) to the point of flame was surely no different in kind than gross manipulation of groups of molecules (i.e. moving material objects).
His first attempt at telekinesis involved a weary time of attempting to shift bits of matter, papers first, then balanced pins, hanging threads, finally grains of dust on a micro-balance. There was no result. Co-opting some help from Classical Physics, Carl then began a series of tests involving photographic film. It was, the drafted physicists assured him, the medium in which the least physical force produced the greatest measurable effect. A photon, a free electron, almost any particle containing energy could shift the unstable molecules in the film emulsion.
Carl worked with higher and higher speed emulsions, learning tricks to make the film still more sensitive - special developers, close temperature control, pre-exposing the film to 'soak up' part of the energy necessary to produce an image. With each new batch of film he then sat for hours, attempting to paint circles, crosses and stars on the emulsion with his mind, visualizing the molecules and willing the change-over. He scissored out stencils and held them over the wrapped filmpacks, considering it possible that the psionic 'radiation' might show only as a point source. He had one temporary, and illusive, success: a plate of particularly trigger-happy film, wrapped under his pillow all one night, developed the next morning into a ghostly, wavering 'X.' Master Florian of Photo-chemistry disillusioned him. Carl had only succeeded in so sensitizing the film that it reacted to the tiny infra-red produced by his own body heat.
Master Carl's project for this night involved pre-exposing a specially manufactured batch of X-ray film, by means of contact with a sheet of luminescent paper; the faint gamma radiation from the paper needed hours to affect the emulsion, but those hours had to be accurately timed.
To fill the space of those hours, Master Carl had another pleasant task. He sent a student courier to his office for the unfinished draft he had abstracted from Cornut's room. It was headed:
A Reconciliation
Of Certain Apparent Anomalies
In Wolgren's Distributive Law
Carl drew a stiff-backed chair up to his desk and began to read, enjoying himself very much.
Wolgren's Law, which had to do with the distribution of non-uniform elements in random populations, was purely a mathematician's rule. It did not deal with material objects; it did not even deal with numerical quantities as such. Yet Wolgren's Law had found applications in every sort of sampling technique known to man, from setting parameters for rejecting inferior batches of canned sardines to predicting election results. It was a general law, but the specific rules that could be drawn from it had proved themselves in nearly every practical test.