Read Ebook: Twee Edellieden van Verona by Shakespeare William Burgersdijk L A J Leendert Alexander Johannes Translator

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Ebook has 819 lines and 25181 words, and 17 pages

He had a point there. Security troopers were under direct control of the President and came and went as they pleased. The satellite stations gave them general directives and the President directed the stations. Fred Williams grinned at the thought of Spinner, or whatever his name was, calling the President to call a satellite station to call these cops to come and get him. He would have been shocked and frightened if anyone had told him this was almost exactly what had happened.

They shot into the garage of an ordinary Federal police station, a large tiled vault smelling of hoses, soap and water. The troopers took him upstairs, along wax-polished corridors, through swinging doors and out of the muttered voices, footsteps, paper rattling and telephone tinkle of the station, into the smooth silence of a surgery. That fellow Spinner was waiting in a white doctor's coat.

"They pick you up too?" Fred Williams said.

The Security troopers hoisted him into a dentist's chair, saluted the other man and went away.

"You can leave any time you wish, Fred. If you do, though, I'll have you brought back. I'm Dr. Howard Sprinnell."

"Funny, I thought your name was Cloud Spinner or something," Fred confessed.

"That's very interesting." The doctor leaned forward across his desk. "What made you think that?"

"I just remembered it that way, that's all."

"Ah. You have an unusual mind, Fred. No, I mean it. And just to show you this is not fooling, I have a call here for you from the President."

"From Jake?"

"From President Jackson, yes."

Dr. Sprinnell pressed a green button on the video control on his desk. The wall panel lit and President Jackson's familiar face looked at Fred Williams.

"Mr. Williams," said the President. "The nation has called you to an unusual task. On your complete cooperation and absolute discretion in not mentioning to anyone--to anyone at all--what you may now learn depend matters of the utmost consequence to us all. I wish you good luck and Godspeed."

The panel went dark and the doctor switched off.

"That was Jake himself," Fred Williams said. "Talking to me."

Like the many thousand million in the System, Fred referred to the President familiarly as Jake, but he never thought he would get to talk to him, or be talked to personally.

"What did he want to talk to me for?" Fred asked, dazed.

"That's what I want to show you," said Dr. Sprinnell. "You understood what the President said about keeping this entirely confidential?"

"Hell, no one would believe it if I said I'd been talking to the President, anyway."

"That's what we figure," said the doctor, smiling slightly. He picked up a pack of cards and flipped five of them onto the desk, a circle, a cross, two wavy lines, a rectangle and a star. "These are Zener cards, Fred. Ever see them before?"

No, but they didn't look like much. This was cockeyed, the whole situation--having the President call him so that he and a quack could play cards.

"It will be clearer in a little while," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said. "But first we must run this little check. Please point to one of these cards every minute when I say 'now.'"

Fred shifted himself in the high chair and pointed to one of the five cards obediently every minute. After twenty minutes, the doctor increased the rate. He noted every selection.

"Last lap now, Fred."

He was sick of this, but it was better than sitting in the apartment with Elsie. Fred pointed to a card for the last time.

"And now," the doctor said, standing up and feeding his notations into a machine in the corner of the room, "we have here the results."

He pulled a tape from the machine as it purred out, and showed it to Fred. It was a score of some sort.

"In another room," Dr. Howard Sprinnell explained, "we have a synchronized telepath trying to influence your selections of these cards. If you have psi qualities, Fred, these results will show how high they are. If you have none, then your chances of picking the right card are one in five. That goes for picking the card ahead of the right one, or behind it, or two ahead and so on. In other words, if the cards had been selected here by a machine instead of you, we would expect twenty per cent of the answers to be right, by sheer chance--or statistical probability, to put it more accurately."

"So how did I do? Am I a mind-reader? That would make me laugh."

The doctor glanced at the result tape he was holding.

"You have the results we want," he said. "Otherwise I would not tell you this. You would be thanked, given a reward, made a fuss of by some civil servant of prominence and sent home in style."

He looked up at Fred in the dentist's chair.

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."

"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."

"Yes, Doc."

No, he didn't, and it seemed to be just what Elsie was always complaining about. He lacked this and lacked that. And now he couldn't even do what a machine did.

"Okay, Doc," Fred said tiredly. "So I'm dumber than a machine. That figures."

"If you talk like that, you are," snapped Doctor Howard Sprinnell. "You have the highest negative Psi rating in the Solar System. No clairvoyance, no telepathy, no induced hallucinations, no precognitions, no telekinesis, no psi-screens, no interference of any kind. When we send you out into--well, never mind, Fred. The main point at present is that you are a very, very rare observer."

"That's fine," Fred said. "Look, Doc, I feel beat."

"You're meant to. Hell, man, I've been tiring you for two hours now. And what's more, I'll give you a little warning in advance. We aren't going to let you eat for three days either. You're going to be so tired that your body is going to loosen its grip. Don't worry, you won't die. Ten people have done this before you and they're all right. You'll meet them all soon. Now just hold still."

Dr. Howard Sprinnell slipped a hypo needle swiftly into Fred's neck, withdrew it and dabbed with a piece of surgical wool.

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