Alien Accounts by John Sladek Page A

eagle, and you, Smith, are a bee-keeper. Is the universe trying to
spell
out significance into our meeting here?’
    I thought of an odd coincidence: That Corcoran had mentioned a mirror a few minutes before, while Beddoes now chose mirrors and animals for his illustrations. Mirror and animal cage …
    ‘All things are possible,’ I said.
    ‘But not of equal importance, Latham. If they were, we might profitably spend our time looking for messages in every bowl of alphabetsoup.’ He tapped his cigarette in the direction of the ashtray; flakes of ash floated to the carpet.
    Tidy little mind, messy little man. Beddoes the sower of ashes.
    The test series finished and, to my disappointment, Smith suggested waiting a week and then trying to replicate our excellent results. Corcoran busied himself at the drawing board, laying out new maze plans. Smith went back to his book,
New Horizons in Psi:
I went back to my cataloguing.
    Our Library of Paranormal Experiences consisted of some two thousand letters to be read, filed and, where practical, followed up. I was preparing cross-indices and also trying to keep up with the dozen or so new letters which arrived each week.
    Some of them were obviously of no use to us. Now and again we received a demented-sounding letter, often unintelligible and always pathetic: ‘I am the Holy Ghost my enemys wil soon learn to there distres that my rays of power cannot be gainsaid no cannot be gainsaid …’ These went into a dead file.
    Of course there were also a few practical jokes. One man described a supposed telepathic link with his twin brother. The story ran to several pages, becoming more and more incredible, and ending: ‘… and when they hanged him, I was the one who died!’ Ho ho and hum. Fortunately such letters were usually easy to spot from their feebly punning signatures: Vi. B. Rations, E. Espee, Uri Dipple
et al
. found their letters filed in my wastebasket. I was tempted to keep the joke letters and analyse them, to try finding out what makes people sneer at psychic phenomena. But I knew the answer already; it was as plain in the scrawl of poor Miss Rations as in the quips of Dr Beddoes. It was the fear of freedom.
    The great majority of our letters, however, came from sane, sincere, reasonably intelligent people. Typically such a person has had some puzzling, even inexplicable experience: a true dream, a premonition, or meeting a friend by chance in a foreign city. He knows the contents of a telegram before opening it. He finds himself thinking of someone he hasn’t seen for years, and they ring him on the telephone. Ghostly visitations, déjà vu experiences … rarely easy to confirm, but all of it providing a background of evidence that something is going on.
    One letter, however, told a story both uncanny and evidential. I read it through twice, then ran down the hall and hammered on the door of Dr Smith’s little office.
    ‘Oh it’s you, is it? What’s up?’
    ‘Read this,’ I said. ‘Our experiment is nothing compared to this!’
    He looked at me and laughed. ‘You should see your face! You look as though you’d just had a psychic experience yourself, Latham.’
    ‘I almost feel I’ve had one, reading this. A letter from a Mr Durkell. He’s seen a village vanish – a complete Tudor town, with smoking chimneys, just fade out of sight!’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘I know it sounds insane, but there’s a second witness. What’s more, it seems to be connected with the disappearance of a third person. Wait till Beddoes tries blunting Ockham’s Razor on this!’
    While Smith read the letter through, I watched him: Dr Efraim Smith, a gaunt, ascetic-looking man of sixty-odd, with a mop of white hair and black, staring eyes. In Hollywood, he could have been cast in the role of an Old Testament prophet.
    His appearance, combined with the fact that he preferred writing his books by hand, seated at an old roll-top desk, made him a kind of local eccentric –it was that