Tim was shaking his head. “I don’t believe it.”
“As Luke has said, the statistics—”
“Statistics can prove anything. Nobody can see the future. If you and your associates really believe that, you’re not an organization, you’re a cult.”
“I had a auntie who could see the future,” Annie said suddenly. “She made her boys stay away one night when they wanted to go out to a juke joint, and there was a propane explosion. Twenty people got burnt up like mice in a chimbly, but her boys were safe at home.” She paused, then added, as an afterthought, “She also knew Truman was going to get elected president, and nobody believed that shit.”
“Did she know about Trump?” Kalisha asked.
“Oh, she was long dead before that big city dumbshit turned up,” Annie said, and when Kalisha held up an open palm, Annie slapped it smartly.
Smith ignored the interruption. “The world is still here, Tim. That’s not a statistic, it’s a fact. Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics. Why is that? Because we have protected it, and now that protection is gone. That’s what Luke Ellis did, and what you participated in.”
Tim looked at Luke. “Are you buying this?”
“No,” Luke said. “And neither is he, at least not completely.”
Although Tim didn’t know it, Luke was thinking of the girl who’d asked him about the SAT math problem, the one having to do with Aaron’s hotel room rate. She’d gotten the answer wrong, and this was the same thing, only on a much grander scale; a bad answer derived from a faulty equation.
“I’m sure you’d like to believe that,” Smith said.
“Annie’s right,” Luke said. “There really are people who have precognitive flashes, and her aunt may have been one of them. Despite what this guy says, and may actually believe, they’re not even that rare. You may even have had one or two yourself, Tim, but you probably call them something else. Instinct, maybe.”
“Or hunches,” Nicky said. “On the TV programs, cops are always getting hunches.”
“TV shows are not life,” Tim said, but he was also thinking of something from the past: suddenly deciding, for no real reason, to get off an airplane and hitchhike north instead.
“Which is too bad,” Kalisha said. “I love Riverdale.”
“The word flash is used over and over in the stories about these things,” Luke said, “because that seems to be what it is, something like a lightning-strike. I believe in it, and I believe there may be people who can harness it.”
Smith raised his hands in a there-you-have-it gesture. “Exactly what I’m saying.” Only saying came out thaying. His lisp had resurfaced. Tim found this interesting.
“Only there’s something he’s not telling you,” Luke said. “Probably because he doesn’t like to tell himself. None of them do. The way our generals didn’t like to tell themselves there was no way to win the Vietnam War, even after it became apparent.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Smith said.
“You do,” Kalisha said.
“He does,” Nicky said.
“You better own up, mister,” Orphan Annie said. “These chirrun are reading your mind. Tickles, don’t it?”
Luke turned to Tim. “Once I was sure it had to be precognition driving this, and I got access to a real computer—”
“One you didn’t need tokens to use is what he means,” Kalisha put in.
Luke poked her. “Shut up a minute, will you?”
Nicky grinned. “Watch out, Sha, Lukey’s gettin mad.”
She laughed. Smith did not. His control over this conversation had been lost with the arrival of Luke and his friends, and his expression—tight mouth, drawn-together brows—said that he wasn’t used to it.
“Once I got access to a real computer,” Luke resumed, “I did a Bernoulli distribution. Do you know what that is, Mr. Smith?”
The blond man shook his head.
“He does, though,” Kalisha said. Her eyes were merry.
“Right,” Nicky agreed. “And doesn’t like it. The Whatzis distribution is not his friend.”
“The Bernoulli is an accurate way of expressing probability,” Luke said. “It’s based on the idea that there are two possible outcomes to certain empiric events, like coin flips or the winners of football games. The outcomes can be expressed as p for positive result and n for negative result. I won’t bore you with the details, but you end up with a boolean-valued outcome that clearly expresses the difference between random and non-random events.”
“Yeah, don’t bore us with the easy stuff,” Nicky said, “just cut to the chase.”
“Coin flips are random. Football scores appear random if you take a small sample, but if you take a bigger one, it becomes clear that they’re not, because other factors come into play. Then it becomes a probability situation, and if the probability of A is greater than the probability of B, then in most cases, A will happen. You know that if you’ve ever bet on a sporting event, right?”
“Sure,” Tim said. “You can find the odds and the likely point-spread in the daily paper.”
Luke nodded. “It’s pretty simple, really, and when you apply Bernoulli to precognition statistics, an interesting trend emerges. Annie, how soon was the fire after your aunt had her brainwave about keeping her sons home?”
“That very night,” Annie said.
Luke looked pleased. “Which makes it a perfect example. The Bernoulli distribution I ran shows that precognitive flashes—or visions, if you like that word better—tend to be most accurate when the predicted event is only hours away. When the time between the prediction and the event predicted becomes longer, the probability of the prediction coming true begins to decline. Once it becomes a matter of weeks, it pretty much falls off the table and p becomes n.”
He turned his attention to the blond man.
“You know this, and the people you work with know it. They’ve known it for years. For decades, in fact. They must have. Any math wonk with a computer can run a Bernoulli distribution. It might not have been clear when you started this thing in the late forties or early fifties, but by the eighties you had to know. Probably by the sixties.”
Smith shook his head. “You’re very bright, Luke, but you’re still just a child, and children indulge in magical thinking—they bend the truth until it conforms to what they wish were true. Do you think we haven’t run tests to prove the precognitive capabilities of our group?”
His lisp was growing steadily worse.
“We run new tests every time we add a new precog. They’re tasked with predicting a series of random events such as the late arrivals of certain planes… news events such as the death of Tom Petty… the Brexit vote… vehicles passing through certain intersections, even. This is a record of successes—recorded successes—going back almost three quarters of a century!”