Breakthrough

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

The ability to distinguish reality from fantasy is supposedly the root of sanity. But if a man lives in two worlds, and both are real, what then? Is he mad, or sane? One person, or two? And if one of his worlds should begin to grow dim, a shadow world, could one say he was in danger of going sane?

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 177

Sample

Hindsight is God’s gift to the historian. Viewed down the vista of a decade, it is obvious that my meeting with Doctor Dumpkenhoffer was a nodal point in my life, though at the time it seemed no more significant than any other casual encounter. It took place in the summer of ’sixty-four, that far-off annus mirabilis when Hampton finally ousted Sussex as the most “with it” university in the United Kingdom, and the Vice-Chancellor was able to announce with touching pride that we had no fewer than ninety applications for every available place. Strange to think how in those days we fancied ourselves as the Telfords and Brunels of a twentieth-century Educational Revolution. Our very catchwords took on a spurious industrial ring as we babbled of “forging links between cultures,” “building bridges,” “constructing flyovers” and, above all, of “making Education real.” I suspect that I was not alone in being less than a hundred per cent sure what it was all about, but along with the rest I undoubtedly experienced a most exhilarating sense of being in the vanguard of some pretty tremendous surge forward. And, above all, we were news! So much so that, on occasion, the visiting journalists and dignitaries must have outnumbered the academic staff several times over. Smooth young men with their fingers on the triggers of tape-recorders were for ever buttonholing us and soliciting our opinions on Harold Wilson or topless dresses or even, sometimes, on education. We knew it couldn’t last, but we certainly made the most of it while it did.

The courses over which we presided were as variegated as a vegetarian salad. In those early days no student was permitted to specialize in his chosen subject, but was presented with a list of “Allied Studies,” from which he was obliged to select two others as side dishes to his main meal. It was all part of the “link-forging,” and was designed to make education more “real,” but since very few of the staff had any profundity of knowledge outside their own chosen beat, such links as were forged tended to snap under the stress of examinations, and by the early ’seventies the Allied Studies had dropped away, to be replaced by the relevant “Historical Surveys” which still—though in a distinctly vestigial form—survive today.

Nevertheless, the Studies did achieve a quite remarkable range in a very short time, and one was constantly coming across new faces in the Senior Common Room whose owners eventually turned out to be “Cybernetics” or “Marine Ecology” or “Early Russian Literature.” Some of them looked just forlorn; others had eyes bright with purpose; others again looked frankly shifty, as though they knew they were living on borrowed time and were simply wondering how long it would be before they were found out.

The first time I heard Dumpkenhoffer’s American accent in the S.C.R. I assumed, not unnaturally, that he was yet another morsel of this higher educational flotsam. I glanced up, gave him a casual nod and granted his request to share my coffee table.

He dragged up a chair, sat down and then proffered his hand. “Dumpkenhoffer,” he announced cheerily. “Psychology, Parapsychology and Psi Effects—inter alia.”

“Haverill,” I responded, returning his handshake. “English Literature. Are you Allied Studies?”

“Nope. Pure Research. Liverhome Fellowship.”

He was the first “Pure Research” I’d met face to face, though I’d glimpsed one or two flitting round the half-completed laboratory wing. I regarded him with renewed interest. He was about my own height—five foot sixish—and I assessed his age at just the wrong side of forty. His face was deeply tanned and, though he was wearing a jacket and tie, he somehow gave the impression that it was actually an open-necked shirt. His eyes were large and brown and he was wearing spectacles of a curiously old-fashioned design—round-lensed, gold-rimmed, with elastic metal sidepieces. His dark, curly hair was going thin on top, but, as if to compensate for this, he had allowed it to bush out at the sides so that his ears were bedded down snugly in it like a pair of pink, hibernating dormice.

“How’m I doing?” he enquired amiably.

I felt myself beginning to blush and murmured some sort of apology, but he persisted: “‘With my inward eye ’tis an old man grey, With my outward, a thistle across my way.’ You know it, I guess?”

I shook my head. “Blake?” I hazarded.

“Who else? Outside your period, huh?”

“Actually he’s right in it,” I said, “but I haven’t exactly got everything he wrote at my fingertips.”

“Great stuff, Haverill,” he assured me. “The greatest. We’re just trailing along in the dust he raised.”

“Oh, yes?”

He made a miniature lunge at me with his coffee spoon. “Vision, my friend! We’ve forgotten how to see! We see with not through the eye. It’s time to retrace our steps and find out what went wrong, and when and where it went wrong. When we’ve done that, then maybe we’ll be able to talk about progress and really mean something. Just take a peek around you”—he stirred the air with his spoon—”the holy groves of Academe: everyone busy as hell, but to what purpose?”

“Well,” I hesitated. “Well …”

He shrugged. “It’s no skin off my nose. I’m just bumming around on the sidelines. You go ahead and tell me.”

Since the question he was asking was, almost word for word, one I’d been posed the week before by some eager young beaver from The Observer, I couldn’t pretend I was unprepared, but, frankly, the line about “seeking a twentieth-century relationship between life as it’s lived and education as it’s taught” seemed horribly suspect when I considered it afresh. It is all very well to sound off about “life” and “culture” and the rest of it when you are confident that no one is actually going to ask you to define your terms, but Doctor Dumpkenhoffer didn’t strike me as the kind of person who was likely to let anyone glide out gracefully on a toboggan of fashionable clichés. Yet to ask any minion in the lower echelons of a corporate enterprise just what he thinks it’s all about is to risk either a lie or a rude answer.

I was at Hampton because I’d got a good degree and had published a study of the Romantics which, by a fluke of the times, had been singled out as “trend-setting” and therefore given an unjustified share of critical notice. Apart from one or two of my own students who hoped to ingratiate themselves with me, I’d never come across anyone who’d actually read the book. I’d felt appropriately flattered when I’d been offered an assistant lectureship and had so far done little to justify my election. Twice I had been moved to disagree publicly with my own professor, and in doing this had, oddly enough, earned his favour because I enabled him to maintain the fiction of “departmental aliveness” which was his personal contribution to the myth-jargon of Hampton. But as to any genuine sense of the “purpose” that Dumpkenhoffer was demanding, that I could only pretend to. In fact, if any one thing more than any other distinguished me from my colleagues it must surely have been my singular lack of ambition—not just in the worldly sense but in any sense whatsoever.

All this passed in rapid review before my mind’s eye as I tried to frame some satisfactory answer to his question. In the end I grinned sheepishly. “You couldn’t have asked a worse person,” I confided. “In me you behold the one-hundred-per-cent genuine lineaments of gratified desire.”

“Bully for you!” he chuckled. “I thought you looked a bit of a fish out of water. Haven’t they got wise to you yet?”

“Once you’re in you’re in,” I told him. “At least I hope so.”

He nodded. “That’s the way it is, I guess. Sit tight and let out a ‘Rah-rah’ from time to time and you’re home and dry. No minority can afford to question its own membership until it’s established. By that time, with any luck, you’ll have become a local institution.”

I grinned. “Now will you tell me something? What in heaven’s name is ‘Psi’?”

Dumpkenhoffer squeezed his stubby nose between thumb and forefinger as though it were a blob of plasticine. “Fringe phenomena?” he offered me tentatively.

I shook my head.

“Psychokinesis? Paranormal manifestations? Poltergeists——”

“Stop!” I cried. “I’m with you! Professor Duke? Rhine University? Right?”

“Wrong,” he said. “Professor Rhine: Duke University. But you’re on the right track.”

“Telepathy,” I prattled on. “Clairvoyance? All that caper?”

“Please,” he protested. “‘Caper’ suggests an outmoded scepticism. You mustn’t let the mask slip too soon, or you’ll be getting the bum’s rush.”

“But I believe in it!” I asserted. “I always have.”

He grinned. “That’s even worse. What we want is the blank slate, not something that’s been scribbled all over by amateurs.”

“‘We?’ Have you got a department, then?”

“I was using the pronoun in the sense of ‘we Parapsychs.’ As a matter of fact, I do have an assistant and I’m getting an electronics whizz-kid some time this month. But, above all, I’ve got what every good ‘Para’ man dreams about—funds!” He glanced round then leant forward and whispered a figure in my ear.

I whistled. “Is that per annum?”

He nodded. “All tied up too. Safe from moth or grasping registrar. A full five-year research programme guaranteed right through. Whatley Carrington must be foaming in his grave.”

“What does it amount to so far? A laboratory?”

“An attic. Several attics. The whole of the top floor of the old house in fact.”

“You ought to find plenty of research material to hand,” I grinned. “Ghosts by the coffin load.”

“Ghosts! Schmosts!” he snorted. “Are you busy right now?”

“I’ve got nothing till two-thirty.”

He swigged off his coffee in a couple of gulps, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and pushed back his chair. “Come on, then,” he said, “I’ll give you the conducted tour.”

He led the way downstairs, ducked into a passage I’d never noticed before which ran along the back of the refectory and emerged among the heaps of gravel, stacks of bricks and itinerant cement-mixers that littered the site of what is now the Union building. “What form does your research take?” I asked. “Turning up packs of cards and that sort of thing?”

“Maybe a little,” he said. “People expect it and it’s a useful way of discovering suitable subjects, but between you and me, friend, it’s a godawful bore.”

I warmed to him all over again. “Frankly,” I said, “that’s exactly how it had struck me.”

“It’s the cart before the horse,” he agreed, “but the point is that even that way round the cart can still move—just. And it’s worked, you’ve got to admit that. My presence here is a living proof of it. Feed ’em statistics and when they’ve swallowed one load, feed ’em some more. And go on feeding them until in the end they either throw up or are choked into silence. God knows how many cards were turned up to get me this job, but it must have run into billions.”

“Turned up by you?”

“Some of them for sure, but the real spade work was done long before I began to take an interest. What’s more, we’ve learnt how to present our case. Over the past thirty years we’ve been carefully defusing all those explosive words like ‘clairvoyance’ by giving them nice safe antiseptic initials or, better still, freshly coined Greek labels. And we’ve gone ahead publishing solemn, dull articles in O.K.-sounding journals, until if you mention ‘E.S.P.’ today people just nod and admit there’s obviously something in it.”

“But where do you go from there?”

He glanced sideways at me as though wondering just how far it was prudent to go, and then he shrugged. “I guess you could say that my private aim is to make homo sapiens conscious of his own potentiality. There’s a Muslim proverb that says: ‘If a man knows, yet knows not that he knows; he’s asleep—wake him.’”

I nodded. “And if you succeed?”

“The sky’s the limit, my friend. After all, just consider what he’s managed to achieve, even though he is asleep. The untapped reservoir of human potential is practically unimaginable. Why, do you realize, Haverill, even the most gifted of us probably use less than ten per cent of our own intellectual equipment? There are whole areas of the human brain that are absolute terra incognita as far as function is concerned. Under hypnosis you can recall virtually everything that ever happened to you—everything—while under normal conditions the chances are you won’t even remember the name of the movie you saw last week. I tell you, friend, each one of us is born complete with mental equipment equivalent to a super-stereo hi-fi with V.H.F. combined; can you wonder we’re neurotic when all we can manage to get out of it is a badly off-key rendering of the latest pop number?”

By this time we had left the new buildings behind us, crossed the ornamental bridge over the stream and were approaching Brankfield House. As we stepped off the lawn on to the gravel a group of students emerged from the front door and made their way towards us. One or two of the faces were familiar to me, and I was automatically preparing a face to meet them with when Dumpkenhoffer waved his arm cheerily and called out, “How’d it go?”

The group shuffled to a halt. Some grinned, others shrugged, a few just looked blank. I exchanged formal nods with the ones I knew while my companion introduced them corporately as, “Some of my guinea pigs.”

“When are we likely to hear some results, sir?” asked a spindly, crew-cut type who owned one of the largest Adam’s apples I’d ever seen.

“Around four o’clock,” Dumpkenhoffer told him. “That is if Charlie hasn’t had a breakdown. I’ll have Miss Aston type a list and tack it up on the board. We’ll asterisk anyone who looks interesting. O.K.?”

They nodded and contrived to appear politely bored. One or two began to drift away in the direction from which we’d come. Dumpkenhoffer (who from now on, for reasons of brevity and not from any disrespect, I shall refer to as “Dumps”) called out to one of them: “Oh, Miss Bernstein, could I have a word with you? I promise I won’t keep you a moment.”

Rather reluctantly, I thought, the girl retraced her steps, while the Doctor gave a tacit signal of dismissal to the others. When she came up to him he took a notebook out of his pocket, riffled swiftly through its pages and then said, smiling at her, “I’ve got to hand it to you. How did you manage it?”

The girl, whom I suddenly realized was definitely pretty, regarded him blankly, though I thought she went a shade paler. “Manage what?” she said.

“Well, to fix it, of course.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

For a moment Dumps seemed put off his stroke, but he soon rallied. “I’m just interested to know,” he persisted blandly. “I thought I’d succeeded in devising a system which was proof against any subject’s ingenuity. But you’ve obviously found a way round it. I suppose you deserve my congratulations. O.K., Miss Bernstein, I’m giving you best. Now let me into the secret.”

The girl regarded him curiously. If she had lost any composure she’d certainly regained it while he was speaking. “Are you accusing me of cheating?” she asked coolly.

Dumps frowned distastefully at the word and then spread his palms in a gesture of resignation. “But your last week’s result was impossible,” he said. “No one can get that many wrong.”

“If that’s what I did, apparently they can,” she retorted. “I’m sorry.”

Dumps gave her a long, straight look, seemed about to say something crushing and then obviously thought better of it. He shook his head for a moment in perplexity, then smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve got me real worried. Are you prepared to undergo another grilling?”

The girl pursed up her lips, glanced swiftly at me and then back to him. “When?” she asked carefully.

“Whenever it suits you. Today? Tomorrow? You name your own time.”

“I’m awfully busy just now,” she fenced. “And next week we’re on field work. Look, wouldn’t it be better to scrub me out altogether, since I’m such a—an impossibility?”

Dumps laughed. “And have you preying on my mind for months? Have a heart.”

She smiled in spite of herself. “I suppose I could come in this evening,” she said. “But only for an hour. Would that do?”

“Fine,” he said. “About eight?”

“All right,” she nodded. “Will it be the same sort of thing?”

“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” said Dumps with a chuckle.

The girl didn’t rise to the bait. She simply shrugged, directed a barely perceptible nod in my direction, turned on her heel and ran off after the others. Dumps watched her for a moment and kneaded his nose thoughtfully. He glanced down at the entry in his notebook, frowned and shook his head.

“Has she been cheating?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“She got a result that is virtually impossible unless she cheated. By the laws of chance your results are bound to fall within a certain range—anything above or below that is statistically significant. She got so many wrong her score was well below anything permissible. Short of scrapping the whole law of mathematical probability, I’ve got no option but to assume she’s pulled a fast one. What beats me is how she did it.”

I nodded. “And how far would you have to stretch your law of probability until it could accommodate her result?”

“Too far for comfort,” he said gloomily. “What she’s just done is roughly equivalent to winning the pools with a pin.”

“Has it happened to you before? People trying to hoodwink you, I mean?”

“Oddly enough, to me it never has. The scientific mumbo-jumbo tends to discourage it, and besides we try to inculcate virtual automatism in these tests—relax; don’t think; just let it write itself.”

“She didn. . .