Hazard (24 page)

After dinner they all helped clear the table and then returned to the porch with mugs of tea and ginger cookies. They sat on the edge with their legs over, facing the night. Below them in the grass Baldy was suddenly alert for no apparent reason. He barked twice and wandered away.

Keven said: “Animals are very telepathic, aren't they?”

“Some seem to be,” said Kersh.

“Especially dogs,” Julie said.

“And horses,” said Keven, wondering how those two outsiders had done that afternoon at Aqueduct.

“Quite a few telepathic experiments have been done with dogs,” Kersh said. “The other day I read a paper by a Russian scientist named Bekherev. He put a thousand identical sticks of wood in a room, just scattered them around. Each stick was numbered. From a separate room he telepathically commanded a dog to go in and retrieve a particular, numbered stick. I don't remember the exact results but about ten times out of every hundred tries the dog retrieved the right stick.”

“I'd like to try that with Haz sometime,” Keven said, entertained by the thought.

“You'd be fetching the sticks,” Kersh told her, reminding her of her receiver's role.

“I suppose,” she said vaguely. It was the first time that night Hazard had been mentioned. They'd been avoiding the subject for her sake and now she'd done it to herself, making her feel a sharp longing for him. To pull out of it she told them, “This afternoon on the train I sat beside a very fat and nosey woman who wanted to know my life history. When she asked what I did for a living I told her I was a telepathist. Just to see what her reaction would be. She told me she had a niece who also works for the telephone company.”

That got a laugh.

“I'm always doing battle with the infidels,” said Julie.

“Infidels?” Keven was amused.

“She tries to make a believer out of everyone,” Kersh said. “Next thing she'll be on the street shaking a tambourine and handing out leaflets.”

“I've converted a few,” Julie said.

“Including me,” Kersh said.

“You were easy. Your mind was wide open.”

“Half open.”

“Well, that's half more than most people.”

“I think people experience telepathy every day and don't realize it,” Keven said.

Julie also thought that. “They prefer to call it something else like willpower or intuition.”

“Or plain old coincidence, like two people getting the same thought at the same time. That's happened to everyone.”

“Especially to people who are intimately involved,” Kersh said.

“Why is that?” Keven asked.

“I don't know for sure, but it's a piece of recurring evidence. The area of the brain that controls emotional behavior is the same area that has most to do with telepathic abilities.”

“You mean love might have something to do with telepathy?” Keven asked.

“Let's just say it seems to help.”

“What gripes the hell out of me,” said Julie, “is the way people claim to be believers just because its fashionable. Scratch the surface and they're really as skeptical as ever.”

“Can't entirely blame them for that,” Kersh said. “If anyone's to blame it's the scientists.”

“Not all scientists,” Julie said, and gave Kersh a possessive hug.

“No, but it's their fault for not making people more aware of how far science has gone. The average person sees and judges things according to the so-called laws of nature, disbelieving anything that doesn't apply. Such as telepathy. Actually, compared to some recent developments in the exact sciences, telepathy seems almost ordinary. For instance, we know now about negative mass—particles of antimatter that correspond to every known particle of matter in the universe. A sort of duplicate of everything.”

Keven imagined another Keven somewhere.

“What do you think happens when an antiparticle meets its counterpart?” Kersh asked.

“They fall in love,” Julie guessed.

“Quite the contrary. They annihilate one another.”

“Figures,” Keven said.

“We also have time flowing backward and things called neutrinos that we know travel faster than the speed of light, which until only a few years ago was
known
to be impossible.”

“What are they called?”

“Neutrinos.”

Keven said it sounded like an Italian restaurant.

Kersh laughed. “And they're just about as predictable. Neutrinos are particles of matter that come from space and have no respect at all for any of our rules. They pass right through solid mass as though it wasn't there. Right at this moment billions of neutrinos are shooting through our bodies and going on their way into and all the way through the earth. Although the neutrino is matter, obviously it exists in an entirely different dimension.”

“That's really far out,” said Julie.

“But why,” Keven said, “when scientists are involved with such fantastic things are they so set against telepathy?”

“Some of them are coming around, especially the physicists. They're getting closer to it.”

From somewhere out in the dark, Baldy's bark punctuated the moment.

Kersh asked Julie and Keven if they were chilled. The night air was dewy and cool, but they didn't want to go inside yet. Kersh went in to get sweaters. He also put the London Symphony on the stereo, Vaughn Williams' Number Six in E minor. When he came back to the porch he sat with his back against a post and Julie snuggled into the cave of his arms.

“Someday,” Julie said, “telepathy will be a regular way of communicating. People will use words only when they want to. The greedy, old telephone company, Western Union, and the post office will all be out of business and movies will be silent again.”

“And a receiver will have to marry a sender,” Kersh said.

“Not necessarily,” Kevin said. “By then probably everyone will be going both ways.”

“That seems to be the tendency,” Julie commented.

“Anyway,” said Keven, “in the future people will look back on now as the blabbering dark age.”

Kersh said he doubted that. “Chances are people may be even more talkative.”

“You mean with their minds.”

“With their mouths,” Kersh said.

“But that's ridiculous,” said Keven. “Why should they talk even more when they're telepathic?”

“You're assuming—as most people do—that telephathy is a new kind of human ability that will be refined and developed along with interplanetary weekend excursions and humanoid sex partners.”

“Isn't it?”

“I don't think so,” Kersh said.

Julie reacted as though Kersh had committed blasphemy. In all their many discussions she'd never heard him say such a thing.

“Rather than an ability we're developing, telepathy may be something from our evolutionary past.”

“You mean we used to be better at it?” Keven asked.

“Possibly. Anyway, there's quite a bit of evidence in favor of such a theory.”

Julie and Keven needed convincing.

Kersh smiled and asked if they wanted the deluxe or economy lecture.

“You can stop when we start to yawn,” Julie told him.

Kersh took a moment to decide where to begin. “At best,” he said, “we can only speculate about how the human brain originated. We've very little to go on besides a record of fossils and there are still a lot of gaps. But by using comparative anatomy, embryology, and a few other related disciplines we can piece together a fairly accurate picture. It's believed that man's earliest ancestors were tiny organisms that lived in the waters of the Cambrian Seas some five hundred million years ago. We call these creatures primordial chordates. They occupied the warm surface areas of the seas, and the sunlight hit on their backs. Apparently, as a reaction, they developed a strip of sensory cells called neurons. Even now in the human embryo the first sign of development of a nervous system is the same such strip of tissue.”

Julie patted her stomach and said it was her Cambrian Sea.

“At first this strip of nerve tissue was dangerously exposed. So, for protection it rolled itself into a more rigid, tubular shape and sank into the body of the organism. Then for even more protection it was encased in a bony substance and became the spinal cord and column.”

“What does all this have to do with telepathy?” Julie asked.

“I'm getting to it.”

“Well, get, my love,” she said, snuggling.

“Next in evolutionary order came the forming of the brain. At first it was merely a swelling at the front end of the spinal cord. No more than a tiny nodule, then another and another. These three nodules would eventually be the stem on which the advanced brain would grow. But for a long period in our evolution those three earliest chambers were a sensory unit in themselves. They were our primordial brain.”

“Are we still in the water?” Keven asked.

“Probably in and out,” Kersh told her. “The question is, what functions did this old brain perform? We can determine that more or less from what we know subsequently developed from its three chambers. The forward chamber gave rise to our reasoning mechanisms, the cerebrum. Over the rear chamber was superimposed the cerebellum, which controls the body's automatic and voluntary physical activities. And from the mid-chamber came what's known as the tectum. For an interim period in our evolution the tectum was a highly developed visual and auditory center, but now neuroscientists say it apparently has no significant function at all.

“Keeping those evolvements in mind, it's reasonable to suggest that the primordial brain possessed to some extent corresponding or at least related abilities. And during this primordial time there must have been some refinements, changes, evolution within evolution. Before we had eyes, no doubt we had a sense of vision and the same applies to all our other senses as well.”

“I'm beginning to see what you're getting at,” Julie said.

So was Keven.

“Good. Well, these intermediate abilities must have been around throughout the transitional period when the old brain was giving way to the new brain. That transformation, remember, took many millions of years and before it was anywhere near complete we were already comparatively advanced creatures.”

“We didn't have any eyes?” Keven asked incredulously.

“At a certain stage, no, not for a long while.”

“How did we see to get around?”

“We sensed,” replied Kersh. “Even today blind people learn to depend on a remnant of that ability, especially the congenitally blind who've never experienced sight. In primordial times we also had the advantage of built-in distance receptors that made us extremely sensitive to vibrations.”

“We still do,” said Julie.

“To a very limited degree.”

“Maybe that explains why we get spontaneous good or bad vibes from various people,” Julie said.

“What about talking?” Keven asked. “I suppose we weren't able to talk yet back in those days.”

“No, a spoken language came much later.”

“But we did communicate.”

“No doubt,” Kersh said. “At first only the most primary things like hunger and danger.”

“And sex?”

“Maybe”—Kersh grinned—“although that seems to have always had a language all its own.”

“And no trouble expressing itself,” Julie said.

“So, as early creatures we communicated telepathically?”

“Yes,” Kersh said. “Of course, there's no way of knowing how complex the messages were that we transmitted to one another, and actually that's not so vital. More important is the long-term exclusive dependency we had on that method of communication. Millions of years. And even after the development of the new brain, when man's reasoning power became more advanced, this telepathic ability didn't just suddenly stop. We must have gone on using it for millions of years more—until it became secondary, gradually gave way to other abilities we learned to rely on.”

After a moment of silent reflection, Julie said, rather forlornly, “So today what we have of telepathy are only the leftovers.”

Kersh nodded. “It's still there in our brains, the residual of it. Some people have more than others.”

“All that makes me is a sort of throwback,” said Keven, deflated.

“You're still very special,” Kersh told her fondly.

“And I'm still dubious,” said Julie with renewed determination. “You said yourself this was only your theory.”

“Not mine alone, darling. Many other scientists have hit on the same premise. Freud, for one.”

“You sound pretty sure about it,” Keven said.

“Actually, you've been convincing me.”

“Me?”

“You and your overactive tectum.”

“I didn't think it showed,” Keven said.

“But it does,” Kersh told her. “As much as you've disliked being wired up to the computer during our exercises, it has paid off. The electronic depth probes have indicated a remarkable amount of energy coming from your tectum, that mid-brain area that I told you about. But it's not sustained activity. It comes only at certain peak times during each test. But it happens repeatedly and, according to wave measurements, always in the same pattern of phases. For a brief time just before the peak, the rest of your brain becomes dormant, as though bowing out to the tectum and its function. Afterward, for an equally brief phase there is the usual dormancy. A parenthesis. Evidently it's during the peak, those few intense seconds, that your telepathic perception is at work.”

Baldy interrupted, came like a fluffy ghost out of the night with his legs and underside wet from an adventure in tall grass.

Coincidentally the London Symphony played its last, long note.

“And that, children, is it for tonight,” Kersh said. “My hip's gone to sleep and the rest of me wants to.”