Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 100: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

98 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION her than any feeling I’ve got of frus- tration. If I quit here, and got into a place where I could work, really work, it would mean leaving this town. Marion wouldn’t go. She’s a big frog in a little puddle here. And still tied to her parents—and I’m tied to Marion. If anybody needs psych help, I do. I wish I had the courage— Joey, as frequently with adults, could not comprehend all the words and sentences, but the somatic inde- cision and despair washed over him, making him gasp for breath. Martin went over to a desk, with sudden resolution, and from far back in a drawer, he pulled out a thin deck of cards. “We're going to play a little game first, Joey,” he said heartily, as he sat down at his desk and pulled a sheet of paper toward him. “There are twenty-five cards here. Five of them have a circle, five a star, a wavy line, a cross, a rectangle. Do you know what a rectangle is, Joey?” Joey didn’t, but the vision of a square leaped into his mind. “Yes, sir,” Joey said. “It’s a sort of square.” “That’s right,” Martin said ap- provingly, making a mental note that the boy shouldn’t have known the word, and did. “Now I’m going to look at a card, one at a time, and then you guess what kind of an image there is on it. Pll write down what the card really shows, and what you say it is, and then we’ll see how many you get right.” Too short a time! Too short a time! But maybe long enough to be signifi- cant. If I should just get a trace. All right, suppose you do? The question was ironic in his mind. He picked up the first card and looked at it, holding it carefully so that Joey would have no chance to see the face of it. A circle leaped with startling clarity into Joey’s mind. And the circle con- tained the image of Joey’s mother, sitting on the edge of her chair in the other room, praying over and over, “Don't let them find anything wrong with him. Don’t let them find—” “Square,” Joey said promptly. He felt the tinge of disappointment in Martin’s mind as he recorded the true and the false. Not a perfect telepath, anyway. “All right, Joey,” Martin responded verbally. “Next card.” “Did I get that one right?” Joey asked brightly. “[’m not supposed to tell you,” Martin answered. “Not until the end of the game.” Well, the boy showed normal curiosity. Didn’t seem to show too much anxiety, which sometimes damped down the ESP factor. He picked up the next card. Joey saw it contained a cross. “Star,”’ he said positively. **Next card,”’ Martin said. It was in the nineteenth card that Joey sensed a new thought in Martin’s mind. There was a rising excitement. Not one of them had been correct. Rhine says a negative result can be as revealing as a positive one. He should get every fifth card correctly. Five out of the twenty-five, to hit the law of averages. Martin picked up the twen- tieth card and looked at it. It was a wavy line. | | “Wavy line,” Joey answered. He felt the disappointment again in Mar- tin’s mind, this time because he had broken the long run of incorrectness. The twenty-first card was a star. “Star,” Joey said. And the next three were equally correct. Joey had called five out of the twenty-five correctly, as the law of averages required. The pattern was a bit strange. What would the laws of chance say to a pattern such as this? Try it again. ““Let’s try it again,” he suggested. *“You were supposed to tell me how connicloooks.c© in