Rather to her surprise, even at Oxford, where a certain degree of intellect was supposed to be taken for granted, there had been a Psi Society made up entirely of students who believed that they were psychic. Jones had previously been inclined to regard such tendencies as the prerogative of the less cerebrally gifted. Indeed, she’d always avoided the term psychic in almost any context, and had considered the bad press levelled at psi over the years to be totally justified. Obviously Connie Pike and Paul Ruders were having to fight against that. Jones’s own initial attitude to the project was proof enough. And yet, in spite of her innate prejudice against everything RECAP and the REG experiment was about, she felt herself being drawn in.
‘But why?’ she asked suddenly. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it? Why did I get these results? Why, if I were in this room with my mother, or my husband, if I had one, would I probably get even more significant results, according to what you have told me today? Why?’
Jones raised her arms and placed the fingertips of both hands against her temples, as if willing her brain to tell her what was going on inside her head. Inside her mind.
‘We don’t know why, Sandy.’
Connie produced a packet of cigarettes. Jones watched silently as she removed one and lit up. As an afterthought she held the packet out towards Jones inquiringly.
Jones declined. Apart from the obvious more serious consequences, cigarettes made your breath smell and discoloured your teeth.
‘If we knew why, then we would have solved the secret of consciousness. And that, Sandy, as I am sure you know, is arguably the last great mystery of mankind.’
Jones nodded.
‘Thing is,’ she responded, ‘you are compiling evidence put together under laboratory conditions. That’s valid and inspiring scientific exploration, Connie. But it is just so hard for someone like me, for most people, I think, to accept that the power of the mind could possibly affect a machine like this. I mean, I’m a person who has never accepted psi at all...’
Connie took a long pull on her cigarette. The little room was filling with smoke. Jones was not surprised that she so blatantly ignored the university’s no smoking rule — she assumed that Connie Pike would ignore any rules that didn’t suit her.
‘Sometimes I think the terminology is wrong,’ Connie replied. ‘Certainly the way we look at things, the way we see what’s around us, is highly suspect. The lay person, but probably most of all the scientist, has an attitude all too often governed by the times we live in, by a pragmatic materialistic society, and by the dictates of a regimented kind of thinking that is imposed upon us from birth. Let me turn it around for you.
‘Do you really think that man is on this earth merely as a visitor whose presence has absolutely no effect on the world he meanders through?’
‘Well no, of course not,’ responded Jones. ‘Most of us leave a mark of some kind, good or bad, and many of us, particularly scientists, medical practitioners, creative people too, architects, designers, writers, artists, can change the world significantly.’
‘Yes, but you are still looking through eyes with limited sight. You are seeing only the material, the tangible. Only what you can reach out and touch. Take that a stage further, Sandy. Move on to what you can feel. Take our traditional way of thinking to the other extreme. Turn it around, a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Embrace ancient and traditional concepts, cultures and beliefs from other eras. Recognize that within you, somewhere, the memories of lost skills remain, skills which it might not be impossible for you to retrieve by the simple inexplicable power of your own mind.
‘Try to imagine that it is possible for every single experience that you have in your life time to be created by your own consciousness. Can you even begin to get your head around that, Sandy?’
‘Probably not. It’s a quantum leap, isn’t it, Connie.’
‘It certainly is. But most of us can probably cope with the in-between ground. “We are both onlookers and actors in the great drama of existence.”’
‘Neils Bohr,’ said Jones.
‘You’ve read him?’
‘Of course. I am a physicist. Read a bit of Shakespeare too. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”’
‘If you like. But Sandy, do you see that if you take those two diverse perspectives and explore the ground in between, if you accept that consciousness involves at least some mixture of the passive and the active, and if you then do what we are doing here, which is to record and collate all of this in an approved mathematical manner, then at the very least, Sandy Jones, we are embarking on probably the most thrilling, and most significant scientific journey of discovery of our age.’
Connie’s eyes were not shining any more. They were blazing. Jones had the feeling she had said all this before many times. It did not make her outburst any less genuine nor any less passionate.
‘Wow!’ she said.
Connie laughed abruptly.
‘Sorry. I get a bit carried away at times.’
‘You’re allowed,’ said Jones.
She was going to say more when the door to the lab opened and in walked a big, bumbling sort of man, probably not a lot older than Connie but with thinning white hair. He had a straggly white beard, and was wearing an untidy tweed jacket and baggy grey flannels. He was surely everybody’s idea of an absent-minded professor. Under one arm he carried a Yorkshire terrier puppy, with which he seemed to be engaged in conversation.
‘Now, you’re going to sit in your basket like a good girl, Lulu, aren’t you? Aren’t you, honey? And when you want a wee you’re going to tell me, Lulu. Like I’ve taught you.’
With that the big man placed the small dog in a basket, surrounded by more newspaper, which stood in one corner of the room.
He then turned towards Connie and Jones as if noticing their presence for the first time.
‘Good afternoon, Connie, and who’s your new friend?’
Connie introduced Jones.
‘And this, Sandy, is Professor Paul Ruders, the director of RECAP,’ she said.
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,’ said Jones.
‘Good show. Good show.’
‘Sandy’s been operating the REG today,’ continued Connie.
‘Good show. Good show.’
Paul Ruders smiled benignly and disappeared into an office next to Connie’s. The Yorkshire terrier puppy followed at once. Ruders either didn’t notice or was used to being disobeyed by the creature. He simply closed the door, shutting himself in with the little dog.
‘Don’t be misled by appearances,’ Connie instructed. ‘Paul is the brains behind RECAP. He’s quite brilliant.’
Brilliant or deluded? Jones wasn’t sure. But against her better judgement she found that she wanted to know more. She turned again to study the REG, that Heath Robinson wooden box with its range of dials and switches. Maybe it did hold the key to man’s most extraordinary secret. She had no intention of allowing herself to become too fanciful — but she realized suddenly that she did want to continue to explore the possibilities. To take a further part in Connie’s scientific journey, and at least discover just how much the parameters of her own mind could be expanded.
‘So how many more sessions would I need to do here before my data became valid?’ Jones asked.
‘We’d need to complete a series, and the length of the series should be set now, at the start of the experiment,’ replied Connie. ‘A series typically consists of 2500 or 5000 trials in blocks of fifty or one hundred runs. And a full series usually takes an operator anything between two and six weeks. I’m afraid it does call for quite a major commitment, particularly when you consider that almost all of our operators, like you, have their own heavy workloads away from RECAP. But we have found that only series on this scale produce the absolute minimum base of data from which consequential systematic trends can be reliably extracted.’