pity.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
Norstein explained his idea of feeding through Doris a train of totally bogus information that the paper could not resist publishing, to its own eventual discredit. “So I want you to go away and come back next week with some suitable taradiddle plausible enough to fool this reporter and his editor, but that we can show afterwards to be utter nonsense. Think you can do that?”
“No telling until I try.”
“Right. Get on with it.”
For a start, Jim had to establish what Marshall actually knew. When asked, Doris was only too eager to cooperate, but she was flustered and her memory vague. The only solid item in it was the phrase “Window on the soul” which had struck her as poetic, and the fact that the project involved studying Sandra’s reactions to what was going on. Doris had never found anything more substantial. That made things a lot easier than they might have been, and if anything actually true had slipped out, it could be put down to her confusion. Jim had in effect a blank sheet to work on.
He did have two constraints: the story must be credible enough to the unscientific public (a fairly undemanding condition) but on the other hand, either the supposed aim of the project or the methodology had to be demonstrably beyond the bounds of real possibility, so that whatever might be published about it could be shown up convincingly as rubbish. In any case, Jim had a vague but uneasy memory of a science fiction writer getting into hot water through inadvertently postulating some secret project uncomfortably close to an actual programme, and that gave a personal edge to the requirement.
Ideas did not come readily. The first, developing a lie-detection system, he himself dismissed out of hand on the grounds that the suspect need only keep his eyes shut to frustrate such a test: grounds for heightened suspicion, perhaps, but no more. For days he had no others, and the “next week” deadline looked sure to be missed until, in Norstein’s absence, he took a telephone call from a Dr. James Robertson who introduced himself as a member of the editorial panel of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. “It’s about that paper you submitted in June.”
“Oh, yes?”
“I’m afraid it’s a bit embarrassing. I’ve just had a quick glance through it, and come across the bit about a delay in data processing causing a feedback loop to go positive rather than negative. The thing is, electronic conduction is so enormously faster than neuronic that such a delay simply isn’t credible. Goodness knows what really caused the subject’s reaction, but I’d say it’s far more likely to have been something to do with a glitch in the electronics. It was a one-off event, I take it?”
“Oh yes, we couldn’t consider repeating the experiment.”
“Quite so. Well, I think it’s best to send the paper back informally to you for revision with nothing more about it in our records for the time being. Is that all right?”
“Yes, certainly. And thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome. And don’t worry too much about it – there’s enough real meat in the data to make a respectable publication, and off the record, it isn’t by any means the first time I’ve known an expert to come a cropper through straying outside his speciality.”
Once disconnected, Jim leaned back in the chair and wiped his brow. “Phew!” He was pretty sure of having done the right thing in accepting Robertson’s suggestion, but wondered how Norstein was going to take it. Then he realised: here was a genuine “beyond the bounds” hypothesis – could he work it into a plausible scenario to leak to the reporter?
Evidently not. Three hours’ pondering produced nothing viable, and although the ploy of putting a problem aside to let the answer creep up on him unawares had often proved successful on other occasions, this time it failed miserably: he probably couldn’t detach himself sufficiently, though maybe the answer simply didn’t exist at all. Time was running short, and he would have to try another tack. It was another hour before he remembered Norstein’s comment on Sandra’s “hallucination” that neurologists had dismissed as impossible the idea of reverse transmission along the optic nerve.
After that it was easy enough to cook up a fiction in which one part of the scheme was a study of conditions for such back-firing, another to detect consequent visible changes in the retina, a third to relate these images to brain activity, a fourth to interpret such activity as memories or plans of real events, and finally, perhaps, to present all this as evidence of criminal and particularly terrorist activity.
This he put as his suggestion to Norstein, who harrumphed a bit about using one of his own ideas as the basis but was more or less pacified by Jim’s pointing out that it was only the primitive version that he had already been forced to abandon. The big question would be whether even a local journalist could be persuaded to believe not only such a confection of codswallop, but that a not unusually bright cleaner could gain access to it.
Over the weekend Norstein realised that it wasn’t necessary to give him the whole story at once; if he swallowed the first instalment, that was enough, and any more would be a bonus. On the other hand, it didn’t look sensational enough for the paper to make a splash about it. In the end he compromised by setting out the framework for the supposed publication, with a rough draft of the first section and bullet points for the rest, and put the lot on a readily pocketable USB drive.
On the Monday evening, turning up for her cleaning stint, Doris found Norstein anxiously searching the floor around his desk. “Working late, sir?” she asked.
“Yes, I’ve been preparing a rather important paper. I was going to do some more work on it at home, but I can’t find the pen drive I’d copied it to. Must have dropped it somewhere, and I can’t stay any longer. I’m supposed to be picking my wife up in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll make a point of looking for it. What does it look like?”
“Like this,” showing her another specimen. “It’s a nuisance – I need to get at least a first draft finished by the weekend, and tonight and tomorrow are the only evenings I’ll have time for it.”
“Is it the only copy that you’ve lost?”
“No, thank goodness, the original’s on the computer itself.”
“Then couldn’t you copy it on to this one?”
“There isn’t enough space. Oh well, if it does turn up tonight, I should be just about able to finish the job tomorrow. Luckily what I’ve written so far isn’t particularly sensitive; I shouldn’t want the rest of it to get out prematurely. If you do find it, just drop it in this drawer, where I generally keep it. It won’t matter leaving it unlocked tonight.”
“Right you are, sir. Good night.”
Doris soon found the missing item in the angle between the desk leg and wall, and promptly called up Stan, explaining that she had what he was after but couldn’t do much with it, and why.
“Are you going to be there for another hour?”
“I should think so.”
“Right, I’ll be round there in about half an hour with a lap-top, and copy it on to that.’”
The next morning Stan took his prize to Fred Wilkins, who agreed that it looked very promising indeed but they needed to get hold of the full story, or as much of it as was put into usable form.
“Well, tomorrow evening it should be in that desk draw.”
“Presumably locked, from what you’ve been saying.”
“I suppose so.”
“Hmm. Now, we wouldn’t want to do any burgling, would we?”
“Perish the thought. We’ll just have to hope that it happens to be left open.”
“There’s always hope.”
Fortunately for Stan, an acquaintance recently returned from an enforced absence was adept at dealing with such things and, subject to suitable recompense which involved a certain amount of haggling, very willing to handle the matter of locks. By Thursday evening Fred had the complete story, as far as it was going, and Doris the wherewithal for her next mortgage repayment.
The subject clearly warranted a full-sc
ale editorial conference, which Fred called in strict confidence with Bernard, Stan, and Harry, the one other staff reporter, an older man thought to be getting a bit past it. Cautious by nature, he protested that getting a scoop like that looked too good to be true; had they done any checks on it?
“Be realistic. Who could we trust with a thing like this?”
“For that matter, who do we know that could give us a worthwhile opinion?”
The general view was no one on both counts, so the next question was whether to splash the whole story on one issue of the paper or in effect serialise it according to the plan in the leaked document, as would be less dramatic but might give a greater increase in overall sales.
Serialising was soon ruled out as the technicalities in the first three sections would interest hardly anyone. On the other hand, a big splash with no advance notice would reach only their habitual readers. The decision was therefore to have in one issue a headline such as “WHAT ARE THE BOFFINS UP TO?” over a text describing the general area and promising the substance the following week, which would give Stan and Fred time to make what they could of the rest.
In fact they were fully occupied for a couple of weeks with items of more general interest, in particular a serious multiple accident at a notoriously confusing road junction about which there had been complaints for years, and a carnival featuring as special guest an ephemerally popular