Runaway

the call,” he said, raising his eyebrows, half smiling at himself. “Seriously. I did. I heard the call to get out of the box. Out of the got-to-do-something-big box. Out of the ego box. I’ve been lucky all along. Even lucky that I got struck down with TB. Kept me out of college, where I’d have clogged my head up with a lot of nonsense. And it would have kept me from being drafted if the war had come along sooner.”
    “You couldn’t have been drafted anyway once you were a married man,” said Nancy.
    (She had been in a cynical enough mood, once, to wonder out loud to Wilf whether that could have been the reason for the marriage.
    “Other people’s reasons aren’t a great concern of mine,” Wilf had said. He said there was not going to be a war, anyway. And there hadn’t been, for another decade.)
    “Well, yes,” said Ollie. “But actually that wasn’t a thoroughly legal arrangement. I was ahead of my time, Nancy. But it always slips my mind that I wasn’t really married. Maybe because Tessa was a very deep and serious sort of woman. If you were with her you were with her. No easygoing sort of thing with Tessa.”
    “So,” said Nancy, as lightly as she could manage. “So. You and Tessa.”
    “It was the Crash stymied everything,” Ollie said.
    What he meant by this, he went on to say, was that most of the interest, and consequently the funding, had dried up. The funding for the investigations. There was a change in thinking, with the scientific community turning away from what they must have judged to be frivolity. Some experiments were still going on for a while, but in a half-arsed way, he said, and even the people who had seemed the most interested, the most committed—people who had contacted him, said Ollie, it wasn’t as if he had contacted them—those people were the first to be out of reach, to fail to answer your letters or get in touch, until they finally sent you a note by their secretaries to say the whole deal was off. He and Tessa were treated like dirt by these people, like annoyances and opportunists, once the wind had changed.
    “Academics,” he said. “After all we went through, putting ourselves at their disposal. I have no use for them.”
    “I’d have thought you were dealing mostly with doctors.”
    “Doctors. Career builders. Academics.”
    To move him out of this byway of old injuries and ill temper, Nancy asked about the experiments.
    Most of them had involved cards. Not ordinary cards but special ESP cards, with their own symbols. A cross, a circle, a star, wavy lines, a square. They would have one card of each symbol faceup on the table, the rest of the deck shuffled and held facedown. Tessa was supposed to say which symbol in front of her would match the symbol on the top card of the deck. That was the open matching test. The blind matching test was the same, except the five key cards were facedown as well. Other tests increasing in difficulty. Sometimes dice were used, or coins. Sometimes nothing but an image in the mind. Series of mind images, nothing written down. Subject and examiner in the same room, or in separate rooms, or a quarter of a mile apart.
    Then the success rate Tessa got was measured against the results you would get from pure chance. Law of probability, which he believed was twenty percent.
    Nothing in the room but a chair and a table and a light. Like an interrogation room. Tessa would emerge from there wrung out. The symbols bothered her for hours, wherever she looked. Headaches began.
    And the results were inconclusive. All kinds of objections were coming up, not about Tessa but about whether the tests were flawed. It was said that people have preferences. When they flip a coin, for instance, more people will guess heads than tails. They just will. All that. And added to it what he had said previously, about the climate then, the intellectual climate, putting such investigations into the realm of frivolity.
    Darkness was falling. The CLOSED sign was put up on the restaurant door. Ollie had trouble reading the bill. It turned out that the reason he had come down to Vancouver, the medical problem, had to do with his eyes. Nancy laughed, and took the bill from him, and paid.
    “Of course—aren’t I a rich widow?”
    Then, because they were not through with their conversation—nowhere near through, as Nancy saw it—they went up the street to a Denny’s, to drink coffee.
    “Maybe you’d rather someplace fancier?” Ollie said.