Superstition

14

What is it?” Joanna peered at the pale blue liquid in the metal container. It was warm, viscous, and odorless.

“Paraffin wax. Watch.”

Sam pulled back his sleeve and dipped his hand in it up to the wrist. When he withdrew it, it was evenly coated with what looked like a tight-fitting, partially transparent glove. “It dries almost immediately and comes off easily,” he said, pulling a strip from the back of his hand. “And look, you can see every mark of the skin, even tiny hairs, perfectly imprinted.”

“This is very interesting. I assume there's a point.”

They were in a back room of the lab that housed some photographic developing equipment, a gas stove, and a few shelves of chemicals. He finished cleaning the stuff off his hand as he explained. “Sometime in the twenties there was a Polish banker called Franek Kluski, who discovered at the age of forty-five that he was a prodigiously gifted physical medium. According to people who were there, he held seances in which he produced mysterious creatures out of nowhere-human forms, semihuman, animal, semianimal. The only problem was that at the end of the seance they disappeared, so there was never any tangible proof that they'd been there, even though people had seen them and touched them. So one of the researchers investigating him came up with this idea of asking these spirits if they wouldn't mind dipping their hands into a bowl of paraffin wax, so that when they dematerialized they could leave the wax casts behind. Very obligingly, the spirits agreed-and at the end of every seance after that there'd be these empty wax casts lying on the floor. All the researchers had to do was fill them with plaster to get a perfect cast of…whatever it was that had been in the room.”

Joanna stared at him. “You have to be making this up.”

He made an open, noncommittal gesture with his now wax-free hand. “There's a set of plaster casts in Paris at the Institute Metapsychique. They call them ‘phantom hands,’ and they were reportedly created in the way I've just described.”

“I've got to see Roger's face when he hears this.”

Sam laughed. “I'd rather see it when someone dumps a wax cast in his lap and tells him to explain that away.”

“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “you were so right to want Roger in the group. As you said, if he buys into this, it's going to be very hard for the skeptics to dismiss it.”

“Believe me, it won't stop them from trying.”

“All the same, if he'll let me use his name, I'd like to do a special interview with him-once before we start, and again later if something happens.”

“Steady there-your interview technique is what got us on first name terms.”

“What's the matter? Jealous of an old professor?”

“Of that old professor, yes. He's been married four times, and I wouldn't put it past him to try a couple more before he's through.”

“ Four times?”

“He's a scientist-repeatability is the essence of any good experiment.”

“I think you just cured me of a dangerous crush.”

“Glad to hear it.” He pulled her to him and kissed her.

“Do you think they know?” she asked in a soft voice.

“Does who know what?”

“The others in the group. About us.”

He shrugged. “They've probably made an educated guess. Anyway, it's no secret-is it?”

“No.” She ran her hand through the thick hair on the back of his head and pulled his lips to hers once again. “Absolutely not.”

Inventing the ghost proved to be a slow process fraught with unanticipated pitfalls. Under Sam's guidance they applied what logic to it they could. The first question was should it be a male or female ghost? Roger suggested that tossing a coin might be the fairest and fastest solution. Everyone agreed, so Roger spun a quarter. The ghost was male.

The next question was what period should their ghost have lived in? Everyone waited for everyone else to make a suggestion, before Sam said why didn't they all give their opinions one at a time, starting on his left with Maggie. Somewhat diffidently, claiming she knew little history and would defer to those who did, she suggested mid-eighteenth-century Scotland, the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite uprising. There was a brief silence while everybody wondered whether to comment on that idea right away, or hear other suggestions. Sam suggested they carry on around the table with their own suggestions, then go around again for comments.

Riley suggested the Hermetic period in ancient Egypt. Drew picked Renaissance Florence. Barry picked the American War of Independence. Joanna picked the French empire under Napoleon. Roger said that anywhere in Europe, at any time in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries-the “Age of Reason”-would be fine with him. Pete Daniels said he would have picked Renaissance Italy, but since that had already gone he thought he'd “run classical Greece up the flagpole and see if anyone saluted.” Sam said he thought that was quite enough to be starting off with and he would be happy with whatever the group chose. He invited Maggie to start the round of comments.

“It seems to me,” she began hesitantly, as though apologizing for stating the obvious, “that it would be a help if we invented someone whose language we all spoke. And I have to admit that French, Italian, Ancient Egyptian, and Greek are a bit, well, double Dutch to me.”

“It's a good point,” Roger said at once. “There's no point in complicating things unnecessarily. I suggest, if we all agree, that we choose an English-speaking ghost.”

Everyone agreed, after which the discussion grew freer. Sam invited those who had chosen “foreign” ghosts to make new choices in their native tongue. Drew opted for Victorian England; Roger said the ghost could, of course, be an English-speaking traveler anywhere in the world; Riley suggested the Russian Revolution, where it was a matter of historical fact that there had been several English-speaking observers; using the same excuse, Joanna stuck with the French empire.

Going around the table again, Maggie endorsed France-“the auld alliance,” in any period-as a second choice. Drew said she hadn't read enough history to be able to imagine any particular period in much detail, but it might be interesting to pick a time when something was happening other than war and bloodshed. She liked Roger's idea of the Age of Enlightenment, when cultures were flourishing and new ideas exploding everywhere.

Barry said that the elements of war and cultural evolution had always overlapped throughout history, and the American Revolution was a perfect example. He was sticking with that.

Joanna suggested that, as several revolutions had been proposed so far, perhaps it might be an idea to go in that direction. Riley conceded that the Age of Enlightenment was perhaps a more attractive choice than the Soviet Experiment, by which time reason had grown overconfident of its ability to solve everything, thereby provoking disaster. During the French and American Revolutions, however, things were still more finely balanced.

Roger agreed. It was, he said, a time when people believed in the scientific process but didn't take its products for granted as they did today. After all, the late twentieth century had televisions and refrigerators and rockets to the moon as proof that science worked. Two hundred years ago, its achievements weren't so obvious. They were ideas more than achievements: an approach, not an answer.

Sam said that if it came to a choice between the American and French Revolutions, then Maggie's point about language should probably be the deciding factor.

“English was spoken in Paris,” Drew said. “Jefferson was in Paris then. And Benjamin Franklin. And what about Lafayette?”

Roger admitted to being no military historian, an ignorance which Joanna doubted because she had seen him notice the brief look of unease on Maggie's face as she realized that she knew next to nothing about Lafayette. Roger, she surmised, was merely being gallant-and Wondered vaguely whether there was any truth in Sam's joke about him looking for a fifth wife.

Barry volunteered a brief sketch of Lafayette's life. Born into an immensely rich aristocratic French family in 1757, he had been a courtier of Louis XVI, but in 1777 had gone of his own accord to America to fight against the British in the American Revolution. He was appointed a major general, struck up a lasting friendship with George Washington, and distinguished himself at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania. In 1779 he returned to France and persuaded the government to send a six thousand?man expeditionary force to help the colonists. He was central to the Americans‚ decisive victory over the British at Yorktown in 1781. A hero now in both countries, he returned to France and there became leader of the liberal aristocrats, championing religious toleration and campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade. In 1789 he was one of the first leaders of the French Revolution, but found his essentially reformist instincts outstripped by the revolutionary zeal of Robespierre and others. After failing to save the monarchy, he fled to Austria in 1792. He returned to France under Napoleon in 1799, and lived more than another thirty years as a gentleman farmer and member of the Chamber of Deputies. His popularity in America had never dimmed, and when he paid a visit in 1824-25 he was received with wild adulation and given every conceivable honor.

“It's a good story,” Sam said, “but we can't use him because he's a real person.”

“But we could easily invent an American who went back to France with him,” Barry countered. “Some hero-worshiping kid from New England who gets idealistically involved in the Revolution and winds up on the guillotine.”

Murmurs of approval greeted the idea all around the table, the general feeling being summed up by Maggie McBride.

“I think that's a very good idea, I really do. An American in Paris. Very nice.”