Fred Williams remembered it. Every week there had been a puzzle picture
to identify. The contest had lasted nearly a year. He remembered
particularly that each week there had been a cut of the room in which
entries were to be judged, a large editorial office, just above the
puzzle picture. Just a room. He had wondered why they bothered to put
it in.
"There was a picture of a room in the paper," said the doctor, "where
each week, without any possibility of fraud or anyone seeing it except
the judges, the solution to the puzzle was hung up on the wall in
the middle of the picture shown in the paper. The puzzles themselves
were meaningless. We wanted to see how many people wrote in the
right solution just from seeing the picture of the empty room. The
right solution, of course, was the one hanging in that room at that
time, which no one could see, and which was selected an hour before
publication of the paper each week by random selection in a dictionary."
"So what did I get, a consolation prize?" asked Fred.
"In a way," the doctor smiled. "But not for coming near winning. The
top twenty winners were highly gifted people we recruited into the
Psi faculties of Duke, Harvard, Oxford, Paris and elsewhere. They
scored consistently throughout the year with a better than probability
deviation."
"Huh?"
"They got a lot more right than they could by chance alone. But your
results were even more interesting to us. You got the same result here,
just now, on the Zener cards."
"I'm still in the running?"
"Fred, quite seriously, you are the best candidate we've ever met.
Hence the special treatment. In the history of the System Government,
there have only been ten other people with results similar to yours."
"Is that so? Well, I suppose you know what you're doing, Doc. But I
never had a premonition in my life."
Doctor Howard Sprinnell frowned. "I should _hope_ not. Almost everyone
has some psi capacities, but we're not interested in minor phenomena.
This is a government department, Fred. Here a thing has to work all the
time, whenever it's needed, wherever it's needed. A faculty professor
has off-days when he couldn't roll a die against chance. But you can't."
"Look, doc. I think you've got the wrong man. I'm Fred Williams.
Frederick L. Williams. Are you sure--"
"Look yourself," interrupted the doctor, leaning over to wave the tape
under Fred's nose. "Chance would give you twenty per cent right--one
out of five. Look at your result."
Fred took the tape and studied it. "You've read it wrong. This says
several million per cent."
"It says _zero_ per cent. _Nil._ Not _one_ answer right, Fred. The
millions are the probabilities of that deviation ... oh, never mind.
See the big black zero?"
"Yes, Doc."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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