Assignment in Eternity

  “So far you haven’t mentioned anything close to home. If you are going to allow that much latitude, my Grandfather Stonebender had much more wonderful experiences.”

  “I’m coming to them. Don’t forget Valdez.”

  “What’s this about Ben’s grandfather?” asked Joan.

  “Joan, don’t ever boast about anything in Ben’s presence. You’ll find that his Grandfather Stonebender did it faster, easier, and better.”

  A look of more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger shone out of Coburn’s pale blue eyes. “Why, Phil, I’m surprised at you. If I weren’t a Stonebender myself, and tolerant, I’d be inclined to resent that remark. But your apology is accepted.”

  “Well, to bring matters closer home, besides Valdez, there was a man in my home town, Springfield, Missouri, who had a clock in his head.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he knew the exact time without looking at a clock. If your watch disagreed with him, your watch was wrong. Besides that, he was a lightning calculator—knew the answer instantly to the most complicated problems in arithmetic you cared to put to him. In other ways he was feeble-minded.” Ben nodded. “It’s a common phenomenon—idiot savants.”

  “But giving it a name doesn’t explain it. Besides which, while a number of the people with erratic talents are feeble-minded not all of them are. I believe that by far the greater percent of them are not, but that we rarely hear of them because the intelligent ones are smart enough to know that they would be annoyed by the crowd, possibly persecuted, if they let the rest of us suspect that they were different.”

  Ben nodded again. “You got something there, Phil. Go ahead.”

  “There have been a lot of these people with impossible talents who were not subnormal in other ways and who were right close to home. Boris Sidis, for example—”

  “He was that child prodigy, wasn’t he? I thought he played out?”

  “Maybe. Personally, I think he grew cagy and decided not to let the other monkeys know that he was different. In any case he had a lot of remarkable talents, in intensity, if not in kind. He must have been able to read a page of print just by glancing at it, and he undoubtedly had complete memory. Speaking of complete memory, how about Blind Tom, the negro pianist who could play any piece of music he had ever heard once? Nearer home, there was this boy right here in Los Angeles County not so very many years ago who could play ping-pong blindfolded, or anything else, for which normal people require eyes. I checked him myself, and he could do it. And there was the ‘Instantaneous Echo.’ ”

  “You never told me about him, Phil,” commented Joan. “What could he do?”

  “He could talk along with you, using your words and intonations, in any language whether he knew the language or not. And he would keep pace with you so accurately that anyone listening wouldn’t be able to tell the two of you apart. He could imitate your speech and words as immediately, as accurately, and as effortlessly as your shadow follows the movements of your body.”

  “Pretty fancy, what? And rather difficult to explain by behaviorist theory. Ever run across any cases of levitation, Phil?”

  “Not of human beings. However I have seen a local medium—a nice kid, non-professional, used to live next door to me—make articles of furniture in my own house rise up off the floor and float. I was cold sober. It either happened or I was hypnotized; have it your own way. Speaking of levitating, you know the story they tell about Nijinsky?”

  “Which one?”

  “About him floating. There are thousands of people here and in Europe (unless they died in the Collapse) who testify that in Le Spectre de la Rose he used to leap up into the air, pause for a while, then come down when he got ready. Call it mass hallucination—I didn’t see it.”

  “Occam’s Razor again,” said Joan.

  “So?”

  “Mass hallucination is harder to explain than one man floating in the air for a few seconds. Mass hallucination not proved—mustn’t infer it to get rid of a troublesome fact. It’s comparable to the “There ain’t no sech animal’ of the yokel who saw the rhinoceros for the first time.”

  “Maybe so. Any other sort of trick stuff you want to hear about, Ben? I got a million of ’em.”

  “How about forerunners, and telepathy?”

  “Well, telepathy is positively proved, though still unexplained, by Dr. Rhine’s experiments. Of course a lot of people had observed it before then, with such frequency as to make questioning it unreasonable. Mark Twain, for example. He wrote about it fifty years before Rhine, with documentation and circumstantial detail. He wasn’t a scientist, but he had hard common sense and shouldn’t have been ignored. Upton Sinclair, too. Forerunners are a little harder. Everyone has heard dozens of stories of hunches that came true, but they are hard to follow up in most cases. You might try J.W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time for a scientific record under controlled conditions of forerunners in dreams.”

  “Where does all this get you, Phil? You aren’t just collecting believe-it-or-nots?”

  “No, but I had to assemble a pile of data—you ought to look over my notebooks—before I could formulate a working hypothesis. I have one now.”

  “Well?”

  “You gave it to me—by operating on Valdez. I had begun to suspect some time ago that these people with odd and apparently impossible mental and physical abilities were no different from the rest of us in any sense of abnormality, but that they had stumbled on potentialities inherent in all of us. Tell me, when you had Valdez’ cranium open did you notice anything abnormal in its appearance?”

  “No. Aside from the wound, it presented no special features.”

  “Very well. Yet when you excised that damaged portion, he no longer possessed his strange clairvoyant power. You took that chunk of his brain out of an uncharted area—no known function. Now it is a primary datum of psychology and physiology that large areas of the brain have no known function. It doesn’t seem reasonable that the most highly developed and highly specialized part of the body should have large areas with no function; it is more reasonable to assume that the functions are unknown. And yet men have had large pieces of their cortices cut out without any apparent loss in their mental powers—as long as the areas controlling the normal functions of the body were left untouched.

  “Now in this one case, Valdez, we have established a direct connection between an uncharted area of the brain and an odd talent, to wit, clairvoyance. My working hypothesis comes directly from that: All normal people are potentially able to exercise all (or possibly most) of the odd talents we have referred to—telepathy, clairvoyance, special mathematical ability, special control over the body and its functions, and so forth. The potential ability to do these things is lodged in the unassigned areas of the brain.”

  Coburn pursed his lips. “Mmm—I don’t know. If we all have these wonderful abilities, which isn’t proved, how is it that we don’t seem able to use them?”

  “I haven’t proved anything—yet. This is a working hypothesis. But let me give you an analogy. These abilities aren’t like sight, hearing, and touch which we can’t avoid using from birth; they are more like the ability to talk, which has its own special centers in the brain from birth, but which has to be trained into being. Do you think a child raised exclusively by deaf-mutes would ever learn to talk? Of course not. To outward appearance he would be a deaf-mute.”

  “I give up,” conceded Coburn. “You set up a hypothesis and made it plausible. But how are you going to check it? I don’t see any place to get hold of it. It’s a very pretty speculation, but without a working procedure, it’s just fantasy.”

  Huxley rolled over and stared unhappily up through the branches. “That’s the rub. I’ve lost my best wild talent case. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “But, Phil,” protested Joan. “You want normal subjects, and then try to develop special abilities in them. I think it’s wonderful. When do we start?”

  “When do we start what?”
br />   “On me, of course. Take that ability to do lightning calculations, for example. If you could develop that in me, you’d be a magician. I got bogged down in first year algebra. I don’t know the multiplication tables even now!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  “EVERY MAN HIS OWN GENIUS”

  “SHALL WE GET BUSY?” asked Phil.

  “Oh, let’s not,” Joan objected. “Let’s drink our coffee in peace and let dinner settle. We haven’t seen Ben for two weeks. I want to hear what he’s been doing up in San Francisco.”

  “Thanks, darling,” the doctor answered, “but I’d much rather hear about the Mad Scientist and his Trilby.”

  “Trilby, hell,” Huxley protested, “She’s as independent as a hog on ice. However, we’ve got something to show you this time, Doc.”

  “Really? That’s good. What?”

  “Well, as you know, we didn’t make much progress for the first couple of months. It was all up hill. Joan developed a fair telepathic ability, but it was erratic and unreliable. As for mathematical ability, she had learned her multiplication tables, but as for being a lightning calculator, she was a washout.”

  Joan jumped up, crossed between the men and the fireplace, and entered her tiny Pullman kitchen. “I’ve got to scrape these dishes and put them to soak before the ants get at ’em. Talk loud, so I can hear you.”

  “What can Joan do now, Phil?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. You wait and see. Joan! Where’s the card table?”

  “Back of the couch. No need to shout. I can hear plainly since I got my Foxy Grandma Streamlined Ear Trumpet.”

  “Okay, wench, I found it. Cards in the usual place?”

  “Yes, I’ll be with you in a moment.” She reappeared, whisking off a giddy kitchen apron, and sat down on the couch, hugging her knees. “The Great Gaga, the Ghoul of Hollywood is ready. Sees all, knows all, and tells a darnsight more. Fortunetelling, teethpulling, and refined entertainment for the entire family.”

  “Cut out the clowning. We’ll start out with a little straight telepathy. Throw everything else out of gear. Shuffle the cards, Ben.”

  Coburn did so. “Now what?”

  “Deal ’em off, one at a time, letting you and me see ’em, but not Joan. Call ’em off, kid.”

  Ben dealt them out slowly. Joan commenced to recite in a sing-song voice, “Seven of diamonds, jack of hearts, ace of hearts, three of spades, ten of diamonds, six of clubs, nine of spades, eight of clubs—”

  “Ben, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you look amazed.”

  “Right through the deck without a mistake. Grandfather Stonebender couldn’t have done better.”

  “That’s high praise, chum. Let’s try a variation. I’ll sit out this one. Don’t let me see them. I don’t know how it will work, as we never worked with anyone else. Try it.”

  A few minutes later Coburn put down the last card. “Perfect! Not a mistake.”

  Joan got up and came over to the table. “How come this deck has two tens of hearts in it?” She riffled through the deck, and pulled out one card. “Oh! You thought the seventh card was the ten of hearts; it was the ten of diamonds. See?”

  “I guess I did,” Ben admitted. “I’m sorry I threw you a curve. The light isn’t any too good.”

  “Joan prefers artistic lighting effects to saving her eyes,” explained Phil. “I’m glad it happened; it shows she was using telepathy, not clairvoyance. Now for a spot of mathematics. We’ll skip the usual stunts like cube roots, instantaneous addition, logarithms of hyperbolic functions, and stuff. Take my word for it; she can do ’em. You can try her later on those simple tricks. Here’s a little honey I shot in my own kitchen. It involves fast reading, complete memory, handling of unbelievable number of permutations and combinations, and mathematical investigation of alternatives. You play solitaire, Ben?”

  “Sure.”

  “I want you to shuffle the cards thoroughly, then lay out a Canfield solitaire, dealing from left to right, then play it out, three cards at a time, going through the deck again and again, until you are stuck and can’t go any farther.”

  “Okay. What’s the gag?”

  “After you have shuffled and cut, I want you to riffle the cards through once, holding them up so that Joan gets a quick glimpse of the index on each card. Then wait a moment.”

  Silently he did what he had been asked to do. Joan checked him. “You’ll have to do it again, Ben. I saw only fifty-one cards.”

  “Two of them must have stuck together. I’ll do it more carefully.” He repeated it.

  “Fifty-two that time. That’s fine.”

  “Are you ready, Joan?”

  “Yes, Phil. Take it down; hearts to the six, diamonds to the four, spades to the deuce, no clubs.”

  Coburn looked incredulous. “Do you mean that is the way this game is going to come out?”

  “Try it and see.”

  He dealt the cards out from left to right, then played the game out slowly. Joan stopped him at one point. “No, play the king of hearts’ stack into that space, rather than the king of spades. The king of spades play would have gotten the ace of clubs out, but three less hearts would play out if you did so.” Coburn made no comment, but did as she told him to do. Twice more she stopped him and indicated a different choice of alternatives.

  The game played out exactly as she had predicted.

  Coburn ran his hand through his hair and stared at the cards. “Joan,” he said meekly, “does your head ever ache?”

  “Not from doing that stuff. It doesn’t seem to be an effort at all.”

  “You know,” put in Phil, seriously, “there isn’t any real reason why it should be a strain. So far as we know, thinking requires no expenditure of energy at all. A person ought to be able to think straight and accurately with no effort. I’ve a notion that it is faulty thinking that makes headaches.”

  “But how in the devil does she do it, Phil? It makes my head ache just to try to imagine the size of that problem, if it were worked out long hand by conventional mathematics.”

  “I don’t know how she does it. Neither does she.”

  “Then how did she learn to do it?”

  “We’ll take that up later. First, I want to show you our piece de resistance.”

  “I can’t take much more. I’m groggy now.”

  “You’ll like this.”

  “Wait a minute, Phil. I want to try one of my own. How fast can Joan read?”

  “As fast as she can see.”

  “Hmm—” The doctor hauled a sheaf of typewritten pages out of his inside coat pocket. “I’ve got the second draft of a paper I’ve been working on. Let’s try Joan on a page of it. Okay, Joan?”

  He separated an inner page from the rest and handed it to her. She glanced at it and handed it back at once. He looked puzzled and said:

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Check me as I read back.” She started in a rapid singsong, “‘page four—now according to Cunningham, fifth edition, page 547: Another strand of fibres, videlicet, the fasciculus spinocerebellaris (posterior), prolonged upwards in the lateral furniculus of the medulla spinallis, gradually leaves this portion of the medulla oblongata. This tract lies on the surface, and is—’”

  “That’s enough, Joan, hold it. God knows how you did it, but you read and memorized that page of technical junk in a split second.” He grinned slyly. “But your pronunciation was a bit spotty. Grandfather Stonebender’s would have been perfect.”

  “What can you expect? I don’t know what half of the words mean.”

  “Joan, how did you learn to do all this stuff?”

  “Truthfully, Doctor, I don’t know. It’s something like learning to ride a bicycle—you take one spill after another, then one day you get on and just ride away, easy as you please. And in a week you are riding without handlebars and trying stunts. It’s been like that—I knew what I wanted to do, and one day I could. Come on, Phil
’s getting impatient.”

  Ben maintained a puzzled silence and permitted Phil to lead him to a little desk in the corner. “Joan, can we use any drawer? OK. Ben, pick out a drawer in this desk, remove any articles you wish, add anything you wish. Then, without looking into the drawer, stir up the contents and remove a few articles and drop them into another drawer. I want to eliminate the possibility of telepathy.”

  “Phil, don’t worry about my housekeeping. My large staff of secretaries will be only too happy to straighten out that desk after you get through playing with it.”

  “Don’t stand in the way of science, little one. Besides,” he added, glancing into a drawer, “this desk obviously hasn’t been straightened for at least six months. A little more stirring up won’t hurt it.”

  “Humph! What can you expect when I spend all my time learning parlor tricks for you? Besides, I know where everything is.”

  “That’s just what I am afraid of, and why I want Ben to introduce a little more of the random element—if possible. Go ahead, Ben.”

  When the doctor had complied and closed the drawer, Phil continued, “Better use pencil and paper on this one, Joan. First list everything you see in the drawer, then draw a little sketch to show approximate locations and arrangement.”

  “OK.” She sat down at the desk and commenced to write rapidly: one large black leather handbag, six-inch ruler—

  Ben stopped her. “Wait a minute. This is all wrong. I would have noticed anything as big as a handbag.”

  She wrinkled her brow. “Which drawer did you say?”

  “The second on the right.”

  “I thought you said the top drawer.”

  “Well, perhaps I did.”

  She started again: brass paper knife, six assorted pencils and a red pencil, thirteen rubber bands, pearl-handled penknife . . .