What came at Laurel’s call were voices and seeming fragments of personality, mostly old people who seemed to have lost their memories; they gave names which no one present had ever heard, and they gave no reason for being there, or anywhere. When Laurel came out of the trance she was embarrassed; but Dr. Rhine said it was a common experience with him—for some reason he did not appear to be stimulating to the “spirits.” Like Lanny, he hadn’t been able to decide what they were; he was holding his mind open—something every scientist has to learn to do, in spite of the discomfort it involves. Forse que si, forse que no, as they sing in the opera.
But there were other things that the group at Duke had proved beyond any reasonable doubt. One was that some minds had the power to reach into other minds and take things out of them; distance made no difference whatever—one mind might be in North Carolina and the other in South Africa. Another was the power of some minds to see things that were hidden from the eyes—the gift called clairvoyance. Another was the power called psychometry, the power of some minds to get impressions of personality by touching objects which had belonged to that person. Yet another power Dr. Rhine had refrained from mentioning for a long time, because it was so difficult of belief and so likely to damage his credit—the power of foreseeing the future. But what could an honest scientist say when in his laboratory, not once but hundreds of thousands of times, men and women had shown that they could foretell what was going to be the order of a pack of cards which had yet to be shuffled? They couldn’t get it all right, but they could get enough right to make the chances against its happening by accident millions and even billions to one.
So you went on in this unusual kind of laboratory, getting results that you hesitated for years to make known to your deans and prexies and academic colleagues. Could the human mind influence the motion of material objects without touching them? Could you, for example, cause dice to fall in a particular way that you desired? Try it and see; and, lo and behold, you could! The Negroes who had bent over crap games, whispering intensely, “Come seven, come eleven!”—they had been a joke to the educated world, but they had been right. Nor was it that the dice were loaded or that the Negroes were skilled in throwing them. Dr. Rhine’s dice were shaken and thrown by a machine, hundreds at a time, and the man who did the willing never touched them; he called what he was “willing,” and he got the results to such an extent that the chances against it were astronomical. Verily, as Hamlet had said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
VI
On that Thursday evening Lanny had promised to tell over the radio the story of how his second wife, Trudi, had been kidnaped by secret agents of the Nazis in Paris—this more than two years before the outbreak of the war. They had taken her to a château which was the home of a member of the German Embassy staff, Graf von Herzenberg, the father of Oskar. Lanny had managed to get access to the place and tried to save her, but in vain. This made an exciting story, and at the same time it threw a strong light on the problem of maintaining peace in a world where unscrupulous men could gain power by defying all those moral sentiments upon which our civilization has been based.
Then it was Dr. Rhine’s turn, and he took his place at the microphone and told the Peace Program about the work of his laboratory. He had devised a deck of cards, “ESP cards,” he called them, five each of five different kinds, a circle, a cross, a rectangle, a star, and three wavy lines. He told how he shuffled the cards and then set them face-down on a table before one of his students. Without touching the pack the student would undertake to call “down through,” that is, to tell what the first card is, then the second, and so on. Rhine would write down the calls, and when all twenty-five had been made and recorded, the cards would be turned up and compared with the record.
The experimenter told an exciting story of a young divinity student who had come in by accident. Rhine had shuffled the cards and laid them face-down on the table; with the idea of discovering the effect of stimulation, he had offered to bet the student a hundred dollars that he couldn’t call the top card. The student had called it correctly, and under the stimulation of repeated bets he had stood there, without stopping to take off his overcoat. This time Rhine had returned the card to the deck and shuffled again after each test, and the student had called twenty-five cards without a single error. “The chances against such a thing happening by accident,” said Rhine, “are over two hundred ninety-eight quadrillions to one—that is, they require eighteen figures to express them. Yet the thing has happened five times under test conditions. When you have seen it once with your own eyes you can never thereafter doubt that the thing we call ‘ESP,’ extra-sensory perception, is a reality and a challenge to the thinking world. When the ancient Greeks observed that if you rubbed a piece of amber with a cloth it attracted light objects such as a feather, they were not especially interested; they didn’t consider the possibility of an unknown natural force, and if you had told them that it was the same force that made the thunderbolts of Zeus, they would have accused you of impiety and made you drink hemlock. If you had told them that the dynamo and the radio were to come out of that force they would have been just as skeptical as the old-line psychologists are of our demonstrations.”
VII
The speaker’s subject was the possible effects of parapsychology upon world peace; and on that he said:
“If we can push our inquiries far enough to discover how to develop conscious control over ESP capacities we can take all the secrecy and surprise out of warfare and expose all plots and criminal schemes that are hatched by warmakers anywhere around the globe. Putting this on a scientific basis and broadcasting the information obtained back to a country would truly revolutionize internal as well as international relations. Every military man I have questioned on the matter has agreed that, given one hundred per cent intelligence on the one side, we could be practically certain of preventing a war; and, given one hundred per cent intelligence all around, the people of neither side would support a war if they had the choice. The best point of all would be that, given one hundred per cent intelligence of what its leaders are up to, no people would support a dictatorship.
“All this will seem fantastic without some preparatory factual matter, but those of us who have seen a subject call down through a deck of twenty-five cards that is completely screened from sensory range do not find it a big jump for the imagination to take. We know that distance and barriers and time do not block this strangely penetrating ability to perceive both events and thoughts without the senses. We also know that sometimes it breaks through into consciousness and tells us that conscious control is a possibility, though it still eludes us in the laboratory.”
Dr. Rhine went on to discuss the impending war with Russia and the inevitable battle between democracy and the Communist dictatorship. Speaking as what he called a scientific idealist, he made an appeal that the democracies should put at least part of their weight behind an ideological war, a bloodless one, “which, by cutting the ideological ground from under the Communist state philosophy, would bring about progress and perhaps revolution from within.”
Said he, “Russian state philosophy is materialistic in the extreme. Even Russian scientists have to hew to the line that makes man a machine and nothing but. This is the only philosophy suited to the ruthless dictatorship, the denial of civil rights, the ignoring of the freedom of the individual, and other characteristics of the Communist state. The answer to this is a new Renaissance. This materialism is supposedly based upon science. The answer to it is more science and better science. The best answer, if not the only one, is the investigations of the exceptional non-physical manifestations of the human mind that have come out of these parapsychological laboratories. It is true they are not yet widely recognized, but so is it always with new findings that contradict the current trend of thought. They are being fast confirmed and more widely recognized here and abroad. Given the means for more extensive
researches and repetition of experiments, the evidence could be made compelling, even to the scientists behind the iron curtain. And what better antidote to give the intellectual leadership outside the iron curtain over whom so much anxiety has been exercised by editors, congressional committees, and the like? Kill materialism for a man and you can’t make a Communist out of him, not of the Russian type.”
The speaker apologized for all this as “a blunt and bare presentation.” He was afraid that perhaps the subject was too abstract to handle; but he pointed out that the way you feel about a man depends upon what you think he is. “Emphasize the mere physical side of him as all that amounts to anything, and you have to take him on the basis of his color, his size, his physical appeal, which puts him in the cattle class. Emphasize, and enrich, and build up by discovery the side of the man concerned with his spiritual powers, his potentialities that still remain to be fully explored, and we get into things that command respect and interest, sympathy and fraternal feelings. Why not, then, put everything we have behind the search for these transcendent powers of the mind, these spiritual relationships man is capable of having with other men, transcending distance, and language, and color, and national boundaries? This kind of thinking it was that in our great religious leaders led us to the gospel of human brotherhood. Why not explore it, cultivate it, promote it if we like the product?”
That was the story; and how would it go with a radio audience? It was a religious appeal but without the label; and how many people were there in America willing or able to recognize religion when it came to them without clerical habiliments and symbols? The group sat in their small office and waited, as they always did after a broadcast; the telephones rang—they had been able to get eight of them now, in different parts of the building, and they had just enough people to answer: Lanny and Laurel, Rick and Nina, Freddi and Rahel, Gerald and the guest speaker.
They were kept there for an hour, for people who were told that the lines were busy tried again and again. Oh, yes, there were lots of people interested in the idea of a scientific religion; interested in trying to find out what made this strange universe work, and whether the soul of man was a bubble that could be burst, a candle that could be blown out—or did it have connection with an infinite Something that took an interest in it and could be appealed to, or at any rate submitted to? “O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul!”
32
Ave atque Vale
I
Alston called Lanny on the phone. “I went to see the President,” he said. “I told him all about you, and he was interested and promised to send for you. He said he hadn’t known that anybody had been with the Governor the night before his death. The proposed mission to Russia was news to him too. I think he’ll call you.”
“How did you find him?” Lanny asked.
“Very friendly, and evidently keen for his job. I stayed only five minutes. I knew he had a string of appointments. He asked if I’d like to have a position, and I told him I had a nice quiet one; I thought that sixteen years of high politics were enough for an elderly man. He answered that one year had been almost too much for him. He said it with a twinkle; he has a good sense of humor.”
“He’ll need it,” Lanny opined. “I’ll await his call.”
“I think he’ll remember it, but of course his mind is under siege all the time. If he doesn’t call in a week or two I’ll remind him.”
“Tell me what you told him about me.”
“Mainly about your dealings with the old Boss.” (A habit which had been deeply fixed in the mind of a “fixer,” not to name names over the phone.) “He had heard about your testimony abroad, so that got me off to a good start. I told him about your program, and he promised to listen to it. Make the next one good!”
Lanny thanked his old friend and then told about the séance; he knew that Alston didn’t take such matters seriously, but it would amuse him. What he said was, “If the Governor comes again, tell him we need him.”
Lanny answered, “I’ll ask him if he needs you. Maybe that will bring a reply that will convince you!”
II
Several days passed. The inevitable Thursday arrived, and the speaker was Dr. Goudsmit. He had taken up research duties in the Brookhaven National Laboratory halfway out on Long Island, and all he had to do was to get on a train which took him under the East River, through the rock foundation of Manhattan Island, to the Pennsylvania Station; he would change to a train that went under the wide Hudson River to Jersey. What a surprise to the Indians to whom the twenty-four dollars’ worth of trade goods had been paid, and also the Dutch payers, if anybody had told them by what route the tenth generation of their descendants would be traveling from Long Island to points west and south! Some of Goudsmit’s forefathers might have been among them, for he was a Dutchman.
A genial person, full of humor and anecdotes, he told his friends of the Peace Program that he had been a Hollander, a Hollander of the Jewish faith, since he had grown up in a religious family. In the more than twenty years he had lived in America, he had discovered that the Jews were occasionally considered something apart. In Washington it had happened by accident that he had got a look at the dossier which had been accumulated on him when he was being considered to head the Alsos mission. Very tactfully it had been stated there that “the prospect has some valuable assets and some liabilities.” There was a twinkle in the learned gentleman’s eyes as he repeated that last word.
However, that was all water past the dam now; the mission had been completed, and the doctor was writing a book about it. This evening, he said, he would confine himself to the subject of world peace and the danger of letting Germany become a bone of contention between East and West. Lanny would introduce him by telling about their shared adventures on the Alsos mission. Everybody was amused by the tale of how Lanny had made a prisoner of that elderly magnifico of Nazi science, Lenard, and also how an American art expert had become Bürgermeisterstellvertreter of the town of Urach in the Swabian Alps. Also there was the story of Urfeld on the Walchensee, and how they had captured the great Professor Heisenberg, and had fled from having to capture six hundred SS troops.
“You can say that I am carrying on a slightly acidulous correspondence with that esteemed colleague,” remarked Goudsmit. “He is back in Germany and has had time to revise his story. He has now decided that German physicists knew how to make a bomb and only lack of technical facilities defeated them. He also claims that they understood clearly the difference between a bomb and a chain-reaction pile. I have to state that he is mistaken, for I have inspected his own records and correspondence, and I know that his government gave him everything in the way of facilities that he asked for, but their scientists did not understand the bomb problems. They had made only a little progress toward building a chain-reacting uranium pile. They now admit they believed that it was such a difficult task that their American and British colleagues could not even venture to start on it during the war.”
Lanny mentioned that during the broadcast, and the eminent physicist went on to point to modern science as a model for the rest of the world in the advantages of co-operation and mutual aid. Progress had been made by scientists, not because they were better than other human beings; on the contrary, they possessed all the faults of common men and represented a wide variety of political opinions, temperaments, interests, and cultures. But each had learned that the success of his work depended heavily upon the work done by his colleagues elsewhere. Each knew that the pooling of knowledge was a necessity, and this state of affairs should serve as an example to the rest of the world. “If each of us could realize how his own life is affected by the fate of all other human beings, there could be a realistic approach to the problem of permanent world peace. That is a social lesson, fully as important as any other that scientists could ever have to teach.”
III
Time passed, and a telephone call came for Mr. Lanning Prescott Budd; a voice said, “This is
the President’s secretary. Could you make it convenient to dine at the White House at seven tomorrow?” Lanny answered, “With pleasure,” and the voice added, “Informal.” Lanny asked, “I would appreciate it if you would arrange for a hotel room for me.” The reply was, “You will be a guest at the White House overnight.”
He told Laurel about it, and she elected to go along for the drive. “Someday I’d like to meet Truman,” she said. “I like him because he is honest.”
“And because he doesn’t strut,” added Lanny. “I wish I could take you this time, but it’s his party.”
He called the Mayflower Hotel, asked for the manager, and explained his situation; he couldn’t ask the White House to arrange for his wife at the hotel, for it would appear that he was hinting for his wife to be invited to the White House. The manager said, “Certainly, Mr. Budd. We will have a room for her.” In Washington, all you had to do was to speak the magic words, “White House,” and they rolled out the red carpet for your feet.
The couple started early in the morning, so as to allow for flat tires. Highway I appeared to be as crowded as in wartime—the goods were still going to Europe and to the rest of the world; the people at home were clamoring for all the things they had done without for four or five years and wondering why they couldn’t get them all at once. This was the route by which goods traveled from New England and New York and Pennsylvania, all the way to the South.