“You’re the boss.”
She had to admit, even before they began the serious testing (if such things as die-casting and random number generators could be called serious), that there was a feeling of heavy expectation in the air. Sarah seemed to sense her change of mood, as soon as they rejoined the others. Now she tugged at Jess’s hand, and whispered in her ear, “I don’t like it here.”
“Do you want to leave?”
“Do you?”
“Not just yet. Are you scared?”
“I don’t like tests. I don’t want anything bad to happen!”
“Then we’ll just make sure it doesn’t.”
“I had a dream last night,” Sarah said. “I was in a big room and I was really mad. And I was hurting people.”
“Recording,” Gee said, bent close to a nearby glowing screen. A machine nearby started spitting out jagged lines on paper. “I’m getting betas. She’s ready to roll.”
“All right,” Patrick said. He was standing in front of a bank of electrical devices with quivering needles and gauges. “Blood pressure slightly elevated, within normal parameters. Heartbeat coming down. Let go of her hand, Sarah, that’s right, you can hold Connor. We won’t bite you. I’m detecting slight magnetic or electrical field. Overheads, Gee.”
Gee turned a dimmer switch. The narrow room was transformed with a soothing wash of pink light.
“Can you tell me any more about your dream?”
“There were people coming after me and I was running, I was looking for my mother but I couldn’t find her, and I hid in a big room and they were going to catch me.… I was doing things. I couldn’t stop.”
“I had a dream like that too. My brother was in it. But then I woke up and I realized it was just a dream. And dreams can’t hurt you.”
“But I was so mad!”
“We all get angry sometimes. But anger is something you can control.”
“I don’t like tests,” she said again. Her fingers clutched at Jess’s wrist. “No needles?”
“No, honey,” Jess said. “I promise.”
Patrick had returned with a set of headphones to the chair where Sarah sat, and he picked up a pair of halved Ping-Pong balls and began to tape them carefully over her eyes. They had lined the tabletop with pillows in order to make her more comfortable, and now he helped her climb up on them and lie down. “This is called the Ganzfeld approach,” he said, into the strange pink light. “It’s simply a way of allowing the mind to concentrate by reducing the amount of sensory stimuli. We’ll turn on some music, and all I want you to do is relax, and try not to think about anything.”
To Jess, he said, “I was thinking about the contents of that file. The people who put that together were aware that something unusual was going on with her. You don’t take those kinds of tests, you don’t record that kind of data without a reason. Gee, tweak the frequencies, will you? I’m getting some feedback.”
“It’s not me,” Gee said. “Everything peachy here. Sure it isn’t coming from your head?”
“Very amusing,” Patrick said. “Pay attention, please.” To Jess, he said, “So what else is our good hospital director hiding from you? That would be my question. If I were asking the questions, I mean.”
“I guess it’s lucky for him you’re not.”
Patrick left the room briefly and touched a button on a CD player. They were surrounded by gentle piano and strings. “Sarah, you’re going to feel sleepy, you’re going to feel like you’re floating. I’m going to put these headphones on you to make that easier. Jess, why don’t you take a seat? Gee, what are we reading?”
Chopin rolled and swelled within the basement chambers. Sarah lay on her back with her eyes closed, holding Connor while Patrick and Gee tended to the machines, conversed quietly, and took notes. Finally Jess pulled Patrick aside. “This isn’t working.”
“We’re getting normal readings.”
“That’s just what I mean. Whenever something happened, something unusual, Sarah was in an extremely agitated state. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere by hypnotizing her.”
“So you want to piss her off?” Gee said, coming over. “I could give it a shot.”
“We’re going to start running her through a series of escalating steps. This is just to allow her to reach an alpha plateau….”
“I dunno, though. She might melt my brain or something,” Gee was saying. “Maybe I’ll pass.”
“Hush,” Patrick said. “Why don’t you check her readings, Gee? You’re the best at it.” When Gee had turned back to the bank of machines, and a second printer buzzed into life, he said softly, “He knows this isn’t a joke. It’s just his way of blowing off steam.”
“I’m sure.”
“Really,” Patrick said. “If he hadn’t come here, he’d be working on his Ph.D. at Duke. We’re lucky to have him. But he’s never been much of a people person, an only child and all that. His parents were both physicists and they were gone a lot. I don’t think he had much of a social life.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Patrick turned to a small monitor where an animated flipping coin played out across the screen. “This is a random number generator, fully automatic data recording. It uses radioactive decay times to provide electronic spikes at several thousand times a second. Heads is one, tails is zero. The computer chooses randomly, with the chance of one or zero being equal over time.
“We’re going to ask her to influence the pattern. I’d expect hits in the range of fifty-three to fifty-five percent over time, if things go well.”
“That doesn’t seem terribly significant.”
“The odds against it are billions to one. Now, I’d have done a blood test but I’m afraid I’d frighten her. Do you know what she’s been given in the past to control her mood?”
“Sodium amytal, mostly.”
“Sodium amytal, hmmm. Rhine used that exact drug to practically eliminate psi effects during his tests at Duke. Your director knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“We’re getting alphas, but they’re slipping,” Gee said. “You better hurry. She’s gonna fall asleep.”
Patrick took a deep breath. “I want you to get her up and bring her out here. Gently, now, you can take off the Ping-Pong balls and blood pressure monitor but don’t loosen the contacts, they’ll reach. Don’t make her nervous.”
They sat down facing the random number generator and Patrick refastened the blood pressure cuff, Sarah trailing wires from her skull. She was still clutching Connor, but her eyes kept closing and she seemed deeply relaxed, as if in a trance. Patrick explained to her that the coin flipping across the screen was a computer image that corresponded to the numbers one and zero, and that she must try to make the image come up heads. She must try to think of the number one, or the image on the coin. His voice was slow and deep and soothing. Jess could not tell whether Sarah heard him or not.
They sat back and all watched the screen. The coin would bounce, flip, then bounce, flip again; after a while it seemed that tails was coming up more frequently. Two in a row. Three. Six.
Finally a long, straight line of tails had flashed across the screen. Sarah frowned. She sat up a bit straighter in her chair and stared at the flipping coin.
“I’m getting betas,” Gee said. “No, wait, hold on, something’s happening here—we’ve got alphas with very high peaks—it’s like Mt. Everest over here.”
“She’s fighting herself,” Patrick said, voice quiet and tight with excitement. “You see that, Gee? It’s a reverse pattern.”
“I see it,” Gee said. His voice had lost all traces of sarcasm as he collected a steady stream of spitting paper printout. “You gotta look at these betas, I’ve never…”
“It happens sometimes,” Patrick was saying, almost to himself, “people fight their own minds and do the opposite. If she’s afraid of what she might do, if she’s trying not to make it happen—”