Parapsychology -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Telepathy -- Fiction
I am sure he went up there to jump immediately. But he had been there
an hour, now. Perhaps, I thought, he was trying to figure, in a last
desperate moment, where his experiment had failed. Trying to find in
the mysterious, senseless chaos of embryonic human thought, a reason
why he should not die....
The police got me through the crowd, inside the building and into an
elevator. I ran down the hall of the thirtieth floor to the room where
policemen were working with ropes and steel hooks. I heard one of them
say, "We can't reach him. It's no use."
I stuck my head out the window, called Marsten's name. But the wind
tore the words away, sent them in the opposite direction. He didn't
turn his head. I could barely make out his features, dead white and
void of expression.
"Don't jump, for God's sake!" I called over and over. "Professor,
_you were right! The experiment was a success! Listen to me! It was a
success!_"
I could see the uplifted faces down below, a blanket, a net they had
stretched down there, both looking no bigger than a checker square.
Marsten didn't seem to hear me, but I kept yelling, trying to make him
hear. I fought the wind, and whatever barrier there was between Marsten
and myself. But he didn't turn, didn't seem to hear me, seemed unaware
of me, of anything that went on around him.
I shouted the explanation to him of what I'd suddenly realized:
In these ESP tests the receiving impressions are the symbols on the
various cards in a deck. Basically, the tests in ESP experiments all
come down to one thing--the participants try, without seeing the
cards, to identify the symbols on each card in a deck as they draw them
from the pack.
In reviewing the results of these tests, it often happens that
participants, extra-ordinarily gifted with what is called 'psychic
ability,' have long runs of picking exact cards. But these runs are
sometimes on the cards--_before the one that is being turned, or on the
one after the one turned_.
In other words, if cards A-B-C-D-E-F-G have been turned, many times the
participant will call B when C is turned, C when D is turned, E when F
is turned, and so forth. There are various theories for the cause of
this factor. It is a factor that comes up time and again. Marsten knew
that. But in that intense moment he must have overlooked it. It hadn't
occurred to any of the others there, either. We were all too close to
the forest to see the trees....
And I screamed at the Professor against the wind and the morning:
S-D-K-D-O-A-S-G-X form an acrostic, and they are all one letter in the
alphabet _before_ the letters that spell out T-E-L-E-P-A-T-H-Y! Except
in the letter A, for Adler. There could not be a letter before A in the
alphabet. So, there was no displacement factor on Adler's card.
"Marsten, listen to me! Can you hear? Can't you understand? The
_displacement factor, Marsten_! The _Displacement Factor_--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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