—
The popular press usually credits Dr. Staley with coming up with the Lifeline Experiment idea on his own, but the original suggestion actually came from the Reverend Ron Brady in mid-January of 1994. Brady, a good friend of Dan's, was driving us back to San Francisco from a seminar on bioethics at USC and the conversation, almost inevitably, turned to the subject of abortion.
"You realize last week's decision makes the third time the Supreme Courts reversed itself in the last twenty years," Brady commented. "I think that must be some kind of record."
"I wasn't keeping score, myself," Dan replied, stretching his legs as far as the seat permitted. It had been a hard weekend for him, I knew; though it had been over two years at that point since the National Academy of Sciences had officially certified his telepathic ability, there were still a few die-hard skeptics around determined to prove he was a fraud. From the number of handshakes I'd seen him wince over I gathered most of the doubters must have converged on USC for the weekend, and he was only now beginning to relax.
"It's crazy." Brady shook his head. "The legality of something like that shouldn't change every time a new administration sets up shop in Washington. It makes for emotional and legal chaos all around and gives the impression that there are no absolute standards of morality at all."
Dan shrugged. "You know me, Ron. I believe in letting people do what they like in this life, on the theory that whatever they do wrong will catch up with them in the next."
Brady smiled lopsidedly. "The laissez-faire moralist. But don't we have an obligation to help our fellow men minimize the problems they'll have in the next life? That seems to me a perfectly good rationale for the inclusion of morality in law."
Dan reached a hand back over the seat toward me. "Iris: a devastating quotation to put this fellow in his place, if you please."
I made no move to take his hand. "I'm sorry, Dr. Staley," I said primly, "but it would be unethical for me to help you in your arguments. Especially against a man of the cloth."
He chuckled, threw me a wink, and withdrew his hand. "Seriously, though, I don't see how you can expect anything but political flip-flopping when you have an issue that's so long on emotion and so short on real scientific fact. A human fetus is alive, certainly; but so are mosquitoes and inflamed tonsils. When a fetus becomes a human being and entitled to society's protection is something we may never know."
"True." Brady glanced at Dan. "Maybe you ought to try contacting a fetus telepathically someday; see if you can figure it out."
"Sure," Dan deadpanned. "I could go in claiming to be womb service or something."
Brady came back with a pun of his own, and the conversation shifted to the topic of microcurrent therapy for certain brain disorders, where it remained for the rest of the drive. But even though Dan didn't say anything about it for four months, it is clear in retrospect that Brady's not-quite-serious comment had taken root in his imagination. Even for somebody as phlegmatic as Dan, the possibility that he could take a swing at such a persistent controversy must have been an intriguing idea, especially after the weekend he'd just gone through. Unfortunately, it also is abundantly clear that he started things in motion without any real understanding of what he was getting himself into.
—
It was just before five o'clock on May 23, and I was preparing to go home when Dan called me into his office. "Iris, didn't I meet a couple of professors in the Child Development Department of Cal State Hayward down at USC last January? What were their names?"
"Dr. Eliot Jordan and Dr. Pamela Halladay," I supplied promptly. "Do you want the conversation, too?"
He pursed his lips, then nodded. "I'd better. I'm pretty foggy on what they were like."
I sat down next to him and took his hand in mine. Even now there are many people who don't realize that Dan's telepathy required some form of physical contact with his subject. They envision him tapping into the secrets of government or industry from his San Mateo home. In reality a moderately thick shirt would block his reception completely.
The conversation hadn't been very long to begin with, and playing it back took only a few seconds. When I'd finished, Dan let go and frowned off into space for a moment, while I played the conversation back again for myself, wondering what he was looking for. "They both seemed pretty reasonable people to you, didn't they?" he asked, breaking into my thoughts. "Competent scientists, honest, no particular axes at the grindstone?"
"I suppose so." I shrugged. "It might help if you told me what you had in mind."
He grinned. "I'll show you. What's the phone number over there?"
I gave him the college's number, and within a few minutes he'd been routed to the proper department. "Of course I remember you, Dr. Staley," Dr. Jordan said after Dan had identified himself and mentioned their brief USC meeting. Even coming out of a tiny phone speaker grille, his voice sounded as full and hearty as it had in person. "It would be very hard to forget meeting such a distinguished person as yourself. What can I do for you?"
"How would you like to help me with an experiment that might possibly put the lid on the abortion debate once and for all?"
There was a long moment of silence. "That sounds very interesting," Jordan said, somewhat cautiously. "Would you care to explain?"
Dan leaned his chair back a notch and began to stroke his cheek idly with the end of his pencil. "It seems to me, Doctor, that the issue boils down to the question of when, exactly, the fetus becomes a human being. I believe that, with a little bit of practice, I might be able to telepathically follow a fetus through its entire development. With luck, I may be able to pin down that magic moment. At worst, I may be able to show that a fetus isn't human during the entire first month or trimester or whatever. Either way, an experiment like that should inject some new scientific facts into the issue."
"Yes," Jordan said slowly, "depending on whether your findings would be considered 'scientific' by any given group, of course." He paused. "I agree that it's at least worth some discussion. Can you come to Hayward any time this week to talk about it?"
"How about tomorrow afternoon?"
"Tomorrow's Tuesday... yes, my last class is over at two."
"Good. I'll see you about two, then. Good-bye."
"Good-bye."
Dan hung up the phone and looked at me. "Does that answer your question?"
It took me a moment to find my voice. "Dan, you're crazy. How exactly do you propose to read a fetus's mind without climbing into the embryonic sac with it?"
"Via the mothers nervous system, of course. There must be neural pathways through the placenta and umbilical cord I can use to reach the fetus's brain."
"With the mother blasting away and drowning out whatever the fetus may be putting out?"
"Well, yes, I suppose that might be a problem," he admitted.
"And, even if you do manage to touch the baby's mind, are you even going to know it?" I persisted. "This isn't going to be like the colic studies you did with Sam Sheeler, you know—those babies were at least being exposed to a normal range of stimuli. What on Earth has a fetus got to think about?" He grinned suddenly. "I said it might take some practice." He stood up. "Look, there's no sense dithering over these questions now. We'll go see Jordan tomorrow and hash it all out then. Okay?"