Complications and Other Stories, page 9
Fay was still beaming. “And it casts doubt, therefore, on the status of so-called precognitive Talents. If the event that a precog foresees doesn’t happen because the people forewarned take steps to avert it, how can we claim that he really is seeing the future? Now, as I understand it, the orthodox answer is that the future isn’t fixed, and that precognitives can only see possible futures. But your paper proposes a different interpretation, doesn’t it?”
“It points out that another interpretation is theoretically possible,” Simon said, warily. “You see, there are a lot of Talents that aren’t under conscious control—paranormal abilities that can’t just be summoned up at will, but break out in moments of extreme stress. Talents of that kind are more like emotions than instruments of the will—they’re not really things that the paranorms consciously do. That’s one of the reasons why there are so few really powerful and effective paranorms, and so many who are...well, unreliable. What my paper suggests is that some paranorms whose Talents are classified by testers as precognitive are really powerful but undisciplined psychokinetics. The events that they seem to foresee are, in fact, events that they subconsciously intend to cause. When they predict that a fly on the window will shortly drop dead in mid-flight, they’re really anticipating an action that their own psychokinetically-talented subconscious mind will carry out—their foreknowledge may be no more paranormal than my foreknowledge when I say that I’m going to get a rolled-up newspaper and swat the fly.”
“Precisely,” said Lewis Fay. “A very clever idea, if I may say so.”
“It’s only speculation,” said Simon, “and I don’t quite see....” Then he stopped, because all of a sudden he did see why Family Provident might be interested in his paper. He cursed himself for not having seen it before. After a moment’s pause, while he and Mr. Fay watched one another carefully, he said: “You mentioned a test case.”
“That’s right,” said Fay, cheerfully. “Did you see the evening paper last night?”
“No,” Simon admitted. “I usually pick one up on the way home, but it was raining, and I couldn’t be bothered getting out of the car.”
“Of course,” said Lewis Fay, as though it were obvious. “And I see that you take The Guardian, so you would also have missed the item in this morning’s tabloids. There was a death on a building-site in the city centre yesterday. A crane was moving a concrete pile. The chains broke and the pile fell. Nobody was underneath it, but the toppling pile smashed a stack of tiles and sent the shards hurtling in all directions. One of them struck the head of an architect named Thomas Hemdean. It fractured his skull and caused a hemorrhage. He was dead on arrival at the hospital.”
“And who predicted it?” asked Simon, his voice hardly above a whisper.
“Nicholas Hemdean—the man’s eight-year-old son. He begged his father not to go to work, apparently having described exactly what would happen, in front of four witnesses: his mother, his twelve-year-old sister, a neighbor and the neighbor’s twelve-year-old daughter. It was in the local paper last night, and some of the tabloids picked it up for this morning’s editions. Apparently the boy had been tested by the DPR at his mother’s request, but the evidence for his Talent was considered inadequate. One or two of the papers have suggested that the Department’s failure to identify the Talent might have caused the father to disbelieve the prediction—and thus, indirectly, have contributed to his death, but I don’t know how far they’ll be prepared to take that line of argument. Anyway, you and I know how it really happened, don’t we?”
Simon felt suddenly rather sick. “Your company insured this man’s life?” he said.
“That’s correct,” agreed Mr. Fay.
“And you stand to pay out a lot of money if the death was accidental—because of double indemnity?”
“Indeed.”
“But like all insurance companies, you have an exclusion clause in your policies, which means that you don’t have to pay out at all if someone dies as a result of assignable paranormal action. It then becomes the task of the beneficiary to sue the person responsible for the amount that the policy would have realized.”
“It’s a necessary precaution, given the kind of world we live in,” said Fay, spreading his arms wide. “And the matter of intention is, of course, irrelevant to the matter of responsibility.”
Simon could now see the whole pattern, in all its horrific detail. “You want me to write a report,” he said, haltingly, “and, if necessary, to give evidence in court, to say that this man’s death was caused, unconsciously, by his own son.”
“You don’t have to prove it,” said Fay, agreeably. “You only have to establish that it’s possible. We don’t necessarily expect to get off scot free—we’d be quite happy to settle for a compromise. And you’ll get a percentage of any money you save us. At the moment we stand to pay out a hundred and twenty K. We think there’s a good chance you can at least save us from the double indemnity. You might also save your department—perhaps yourself, if you were the one who tested the boy—from some bad publicity.”
One per cent of sixty thousand pounds, Simon knew, was six hundred pounds—not much more than a fortnight’s wages. But Fay had already pointed out that one case would create a vital precedent. The price that was being put on Simon’s soul was by no means meager. How many deaths, he wondered, were predicted by precogs? How many more were claimed to have been predicted by liars and lucky guessers? How many cases a year could Family Provident call into question? Hundreds? Thousands?
“But it’s his eight-year-old son,” said Simon, weakly. “You want me to put the blame for this man’s death on his own child.”
“On the child’s unconscious desires,” Fay was quick to stress. “Well-documented desires, at that. Didn’t Freud say that all boys are unconsciously jealous of their fathers, because they see them as rivals for their mothers’ love? Didn’t he call that effect after Oedipus, too? Quite appropriate really, don’t you think?”
Simon simply stared at his visitor, rendered speechless by the nauseous enormity of it all. Lewis Fay stood up, and placed a business card on the desk. “That’s my number,” he said. “Think it over and give me a ring. I understand your reservations, of course, and only you can decide where your own interests and your Department’s interests lie. I’ll be in all day should you wish to contact me. Please don’t bother to get up—I can find my own way out.”
Even as Lewis Fay turned to go to the door, Simon’s telephone began to ring. He picked it up. “There’s a call for you,” said Marcia, in a breathlessly respectful tone which he had never heard her use before, even when talking to the Division Head. “It’s a man from the Sun. Shall I put him through?” She could hardly have sounded more surprised had it been a man from the sun.
“No,” said Simon, quickly. “I can’t talk to reporters now. Tell him that I’m tied up. And that goes for Carol too. If they keep trying, tell them we’ll be available for comment later.”
Considering that her remarkable propensity for saying no to callers was the nearest thing to a Talent Marcia had, she sounded surprisingly resentful when she said: “Oh, very well then.”
Simon left the phone off the hook, just in case.
* * * * * * *
Simon tried to call up the record of Nicholas Hemdean’s testing on the computer, but the system was down and he had to go instead to the huge filing cabinet where the scoring-cards were kept. Here he discovered that Nicholas Hemdean had been tested five months earlier by Carol Cloxeter, his one and only assistant.
That made him feel slightly better—not because it might enable him to pass the buck if the Department were to come under fire, but because it explained why he had no memory of the case.
The handwritten notes on the card registered Nicholas as an alleged Dreamer—not only the commonest kind of precog but also the easiest to misidentify—and observed that most of the supposed evidence for the child’s talent was not only anecdotal but retrospective; which was to say that the child had mostly claimed to have foreseen the relevant events after they had happened. Tests with Zener cards and dice had given scores no better than average, and the child had been unable to issue any sufficiently-specific predictions to warrant further investigation. Simon knew that there must be several hundred more-or-less identical cards in the file.
He carried the card to Carol’s office and showed it to her.
“Can you remember this boy?” he asked.
She looked at the card, furrowing her brow in concentration. Then she looked up and nodded. She had lovely grey eyes, perfectly set off by her large-lensed spectacles, and a very sweet smile. Simon had been half in love with her for two years; unfortunately, she was happily married to one Edward Cloxeter, Consultant Ergonomicist.
“Vaguely,” she said. “Very shy boy. Handsome mother, distinctly upmarket—not the usual type at all.”
The mothers most ardently desirous of discovering Talent in their offspring tended to be dissatisfied members of the working class. Middle-class parents usually preferred their kids to be normal—by which they meant polite, articulate and high-achieving.
“Why did she bring him in at all?” asked Simon, guardedly.
Carol shrugged. “If he’d had a toothache she’d have taken him to the dentists, and would have been equally relieved to be told that he didn’t need a filling. She just wanted professional reassurance that there was nothing to worry about. Why? Has something happened?”
“You didn’t see the evening paper?”
“No. We do take it but it’s Eddie’s really.”
Simon sighed. It didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened. Mr.s. Hemdean had taken Little Nicholas home and told her husband that there was nothing to worry about, and that the boy’s dreams would go away in time if they ignored them—like an imaginary playmate or acne. The father had probably been glad to go to work after the child begged him not to, just to prove once and for all that the dreams were nothing to be afraid of. He told Carol what had happened to Thomas Hemdean, but left Lewis Fay out of it for the time being.
“We’d better get the papers and see how much of a problem we have,” he said. “Then we’d better go see Mr.s. Hemdean and find out what really happened.”
“Am I in trouble?” asked Carol, anxiously.
“Of course not,” said Simon, wishing that he sounded more convincing. “You did everything right. The papers will probably drop it. They enjoy putting the boot into the DPR, but this isn’t in the same league as a juicy story about some wacky Temp fouling things up.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, though her anxiety was obviously unquieted. “I’ll get my coat.”
* * * * * * *
Simon drove to a local newsagent, where he managed to buy a copy of the previous evening’s paper as well as the morning tabloids. The evening paper’s coverage was headlined LOCAL ARCHITECT KILLED IN FREAK ACCIDENT, and it presented a relatively sober account of the facts beneath a photograph of the dead man; it only mentioned Nicholas’s pleas in the last paragraph and his testing by the DPR as an afterthought. The reporter, who was probably some novice fresh out of college, had obviously thought the information irrelevant—as, indeed, it probably was.
The Sun, not untypically, had turned it all around, even though it had relegated the story to the desultory wilderness of page six. “NORMAL” BOY PREDICTS FATHER’S DEATH was the headline, and the photograph accompanying the piece was a snapshot of Nicholas, apparently two or three years out of date. Nicholas was blond, thin-faced and unsmiling, somehow rather furtive; he looked completely unlike his dark-haired, chubby and seemingly self-satisfied father.
While Simon drove on towards the suburb where the Hemdeans lived, Carol read the two articles.
“It’ll be a storm in a teacup,” she predicted, with more hope than certainty. “Everyone knows how many supposed Dreamers come forward for testing, and how few of them have a hit rate worth scoring.”
Simon noted how carefully she had phrased the claim. Like most scientists engaged in Paranormal Studies Carol had a pet theory, which she promoted in her published papers. Carol’s theory was that everybody was Talented, and that intelligent life would be quite impossible without Talent; her solution of the age-old mind-body problem was that the mind was a paranormal phenomenon and that its conscious control of the body was a species of psychokinesis. In her view, classifiable Talent was only different in degree, not in kind, from everyday mental activity; anybody and everybody might therefore have the occasional precognitive insight, in a dream or any other way, and those who got to be certified Paranormals were simply those who had exceptionally accurate insights with exceptional regularity.
“It might be a bigger storm than you think,” Simon told her, dolefully—and went on to tell her about Lewis Fay’s proposition.
She was disgusted. “Family Provident,” she said, as though it were an off-color phrase. “What a ghoul! You’re not thinking of doing it, are you?”
“I’ve already published the paper,” Simon pointed out, glumly. “He was quite right—it simply hadn’t occurred to me to think about possible practical implications. I suppose it could be given in evidence whether I agree to play ball or not. I might be summoned to testify even if I refuse the consultancy—and if I try to recant, I’ll look like a complete fool. And after all, it is conceivable that my interpretation of the precognitive paradox is the correct one.”
Given the nature of Carol Cloxeter’s pet theories, he couldn’t expect her to agree with his speculations, but he appealed for moral support regardless. He was not overly surprised when she simply sniffed and said: “Anything’s possible,” in a tone which suggested that one had to be very charitable to think so.
The Hemdeans lived in a large detached house surrounded by a six-foot wall. It was a very nice house—as one might expect of the home of an architect—with big wrought-iron gates; these were guarded by a uniformed constable, who was exchanging desultory remarks with a small group of idle bystanders, some of whom carried cameras. Simon guessed that the bystanders were bored newspapermen, who knew perfectly well that they would not be allowed through the gate, but were obliged to hang about anyhow. He couldn’t help wishing that he had a blanket to put over his head, but he took comfort from the fact that the reporters were few in number, and certainly did not have the air of men on a promising assignment. A shower of rain would probably send them hurrying of in search of something spicier, and the dour November sky was obligingly threatening.
When the Mini pulled in to the gateway the newspapermen became mildly curious and the flashbulbs began to pop. The annoyed policeman bent down to order Simon to go away, but he showed his identity card and said that it was imperative that he talk to Mr.s. Hemdean. The policeman—presumably a Sun reader—saw the logic of the situation instantly, and unfastened the gate to let the Mini through, closing it again very firmly afterwards. Simon parked the Mini behind the silver Volvo that stood outside the front door.
Mr.s. Hemdean answered the door herself. She looked at Simon with naked hostility, and perhaps a measure of distaste, but she recognized Carol and welcomed the revelation that they were not newshounds.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s you.” She grudgingly let them in, and took them into a sitting room. “Nicholas is in bed,” she said. “He’s very disturbed. I honestly don’t know how the papers got hold of the story about Nicholas being tested. One of the neighbors, I expect.”
Simon sat down gingerly on the sofa. Carol sat beside him and Mr.s. Hemdean lowered herself into an armchair. Mr.s. Hemdean looked distressed, but not in a grief-stricken way. She was, as Carol had said, a handsome woman, and though her handsomeness was mostly gloss and grooming it had not been significantly disturbed by tragedy; her hair and make-up were perfectly in place.
“Perhaps it was the neighbor who was with you yesterday morning?” Simon suggested. “I understand that there was someone else present when Nicholas tried to prevent his father going to work.”
“Oh no,” said Mr.s. Hemdean. “It couldn’t have been Alex. He came to collect Debbie. She and Patricia—that’s Alex’s daughter—go to school together. Alex and Tom take turns dropping them off. It’s quite a way, you see, and the girls daren’t go past the Comprehensive while they’re wearing their uniforms. Alex wouldn’t have spoken to the press.”
Simon had felt worried about the prospect of intruding upon a widow’s grief, but Mr.s. Hemdean was obviously not the kind of women to let her loss disturb her manners. He couldn’t help wondering whether the widow’s stern composure might be more severely dented when she found out that Mr. Fay was trying to figure out a way of weaseling out of the insurance company’s obligations to her.
“Can you tell us exactly what happened yesterday?” asked Simon, politely. “I know it’s a terrible time to bother you, and I really don’t want to cause you any further distress, but there’s a chance that those reporters outside might blow the matter up out of all proportion if the mood takes them. They’ve already asked for a statement from the Department, and I really do need to know the full facts.”
“I can’t remember, exactly,” said Mr.s. Hemdean, unhelpfully. “Nicholas can be so trying at times, and one gets quite used to ignoring him. It was just another piece of nonsense He didn’t say anything at breakfast, and he watched Tom get ready for work as usual. It wasn’t until Alex rang the bell and Debbie answered that he began to get excited—just when everything was at its most hectic. Tom was talking to Alex in the hall—just hello, how are you, that sort of thing—and Nicholas was suddenly tugging at his trouser-leg, telling him not to go.”
“Mr.s. Hemdean,” said Carol, gently. “It’s vital that we know exactly what Nicholas said...what words he used. We have to know how detailed this so-called precognition was.”
