Superstition

20

Two things got Joanna off the hook with her editor. The first was a video of the table slamming around the room of its own accord. The second was Roger Fullerton's offer to let his name be used in her article.

“One of the world's leading physicists endorsing a spook hunt? That's historic! I won't ask how you did it, but congratulations.”

He winked. She wished he hadn't. Taylor Freestone did not have the gift of casual intimacy, though he liked to believe it was one of his many social graces.

“Forget the UN. I'll put somebody else on the Kennedys. You're back on this full time.”

She walked to the restaurant where she was meeting Sam and Roger for lunch. Roger's offer to let his name be used had surprised her as much as it had delighted Sam. “I still think it's all a waste of time and probably a complete dead end,” he'd said, typically enough. “But there's obviously something going on, and I don't mind standing up and saying so.”

The rest of the group, aside from Pete and Sam himself, still chose to remain anonymous. Barry didn't think it would do much for his plumbing sales to be thought of as something out of the ordinary. Joanna told him he reminded her of her mother. He laughed and said he would try to take it as a compliment. Drew went along with Barry. Maggie shrank from the idea of any invasion of her privacy. Ward Riley, too, preferred not to be named.

Sam and Roger stood up as she approached. It was the same restaurant and the same table at which she and Sam had first lunched together after the incident with Ellie Ray outside the television studio. She marveled for a second at how far in the past all that seemed now. They could see that she was pleased about something, and she told them about her editor's decision. Roger, whose treat lunch was, ordered a bottle of champagne.

“Here's to you both,” he said, raising his glass. “I'm willing to admit, Sam, that you've proven your point. My only question now is what exactly is your point?”

Joanna pressed the start button on her tape recorder, which she had set down on one corner of the table. The real purpose of this lunch, apart from general sociability and an enjoyment of one another's company, was to provide further background for what she was writing.

“ My question,” Sam said, “is whether what we have seen is a violation of local causality or not.”

Attuned as he was by now to the slightest interrogatory twitch of Joanna's eyebrow, he leaned forward and picked up a metal pepper shaker, moving it a few inches on the white tablecloth. “That is local causality. If, however, I'd moved my hand through the air, and somebody else's pepper shaker on another table, or even in a different restaurant, had moved…that would be nonlocal causality.”

“Or at least,” Roger demurred, “it would appear to be.”

“Local causality is a central plank of our concept of reality,” Sam continued. “On a commonsense level it's obvious that nothing moves unless you push it.”

“But we've seen that it does,” Joanna said.

Roger held up a cautioning finger. “Ah, but have we? If there were some invisible force that emanated from our minds and pushed things around in the way that that table was pushed around the other day, then local causality would be restored. Unfortunately there is absolutely no evidence that such a force exists.”

“But we saw that it exists,” Joanna protested. “Surely it could be electromagnetism or ‘mindwaves,’ or some function of the nervous system. Or something — ‘psi,’” she added as a last desperate suggestion, and saw Roger's mouth turn down with disapproval. “I know,” she said, “you're allergic to that word.”

“Unexplained phenomena do not suddenly become explained just by sticking a meaningless label on them.”

“At least we've gotten you to accept that unexplained phenomena exist,” Sam remarked with a chuckle, proffering his glass as the waiter returned to refill their champagne and distribute menus.

“I've never doubted that such things exist,” Roger responded imperturbably. “Lightning was unexplained until man discovered electricity.” He opened his menu with a deft flick of his fingers, like a conjuror producing something out of thin air. Conversation was suspended for some minutes while they ordered.

“I want to go back to what you were saying about nonlocality,” Joanna said. “The general impression that people like me have, nonscientific laymen, is that quantum physics has been coming up with stuff since the turn of the century that makes nonsense of all our commonsense ideas of cause and effect.”

“That's true only up to a point,” Roger said. “I've always thought there should be some law against the kind of psychobabbling New Age half-wits who invoke quantum physics as justification for any and all of their grab bag of muddled theories…”

He stopped as Sam began mischievously winding an invisible handle in the air.

“All right, all right, I know you've heard me before on the subject. All I'm saying is we should look at other explanations before jumping on a bandwagon that is already so full of crooks and phonies that there's very little room left on it anyway.”

“You know as well as I do, Roger,” Sam continued, “that Bell's Theorem leaves the door wide open to nonlocal causality.”

Roger sniffed disdainfully. “I know that a facile interpretation of Bell might. But as to what he actually said…”

Joanna was about to ask for an explanation, but instead let them fight it out uninterrupted, in the knowledge that she could play back her tape later and pose any questions she needed to.

Sam was arguing that certain experiments had proven that communication faster than the speed of light was a reality; Roger insisted that such a view was simply a misinterpretation of what had actually happened.

“The price you have to pay for a naive and simplistic interpretation of Bell,” he said, summing up and giving his adjectives the bite of an actor playing in a Coward revival, “is that the universe is woven together in a fabric that makes absolutely no sense in terms of anything we have so far discovered or even conceived. Once you've accepted that, you've opened the floodgates to every kind of nonsense from astrology to numerology and all the rest of it. Sheer intellectual anarchy.”

They paused for a moment as the waiter brought their appetizers. Sam forked up a mouthful of delicate, lobster-filled ravioli. “You know, Roger, any minute now you're going to start denying that that table actually moved the other day.”

“Sam, that's unfair,” Joanna protested. “Roger has volunteered to go public with this and put his credibility on the line.”

“Thank you, Joanna,” Roger said, beaming her his most winning smile.

“You're right. I'm sorry, Roger,” Sam conceded. “And I'm not saying that just because you're buying lunch-honest.”

Roger ignored the cheerfully backhanded apology. “I'm merely saying that our assumptions as to how this effect works must be as circumspect as our observation that it does.”

“The only assumption I'm working on,” Sam said, “is that the effect is a mental one and the source is ourselves. I take it we're agreed on that.”

“Demons or the dead would make a lot more sense than some of the ideas you've been hawking.”

“Roger, Joanna's getting this on tape. Now tell her you're not serious.”

Roger twirled a forkful of spaghetti and seafood, then held it suspended in the air as he delivered his final word on the subject. “On the contrary, I would give precedence to the impossible over the merely unintelligible every time.”

It was just after midnight when Joanna let herself into her apartment. She'd spent the evening with Sam but had taken a cab home because she wanted to make an early start on her story. She switched on the light, slipped out of her coat, and started to flip through the mail that she'd picked up from her box in the hallway. It was mostly the usual bills and circulars. There was an invitation to a wedding, which she'd been expecting for some time; a letter from a girlfriend working for a bank in Sydney, which she decided she would read in the morning; and a postcard from her parents in Paris.

She read the message, a hastily scribbled list of where they'd been and what they'd done, written by her mother and with a kiss from her father squeezed in at the bottom. Then she turned it over to look at the picture.

It was a reproduction of what must have been a large oil painting. She thought for a moment that she'd seen it before. It reminded her of some of the illustrations in the books she'd been researching on the French Revolution and looked as though it came from the same period. It had an artificially staged quality, the kind of formal portrait that captured some significant event in which its subject played a central role. She thought she recognized the languid figure in the uniform and cockaded hat, and sure enough, when she turned the card over and read the details printed in one corner, she saw that it was Lafayette taking his oath to the Constitution in Paris, 1790.

She turned the card again to study the picture in more detail. She knew now that she hadn't seen it before, but at the same time something in it tugged at her memory. She looked at Lafayette and at the carefully posed figures surrounding him. Some of them were classically idealized with an almost religious purity glowing from their faces; others were grotesque and clownlike, the exultant, celebrating mob.

Suddenly, with a shock that made her catch her breath, she saw what her mind must already have registered unconsciously but which her eyes only now brought into focus.

Standing on one side of the picture, almost as resplendently uniformed as Lafayette himself and waving his hat on the tip of his sword, was Adam Wyatt.