Free Alien Accounts by John Sladek Page B

short of staff, I acted as observer. The principle was interesting enough, bur the laborious details meant nothing – except that I was cutting back on my real work, the Library of Paranormal Experiences. Real work, cataloguing letters from the real world, outside the Country of the Blind.
    Still, our experiment might pry open a few eyelids. It worked like this: A rat coming to our maze ‘cold’ would take, on average, fourteen seconds or more to negotiate its blind alleys and find the bait. On a second trial it would be quicker, and so on. After twenty trials or so, the time could be got dawn to two seconds flat.
    Pure behaviourism, thus far. But Smith had given it a twist:
    Ariadne was a rat which had run the maze many times. It hardly ever took her more than two seconds. We put her into a cage suspended a few inches above the maze while other rats did the running.
    The cage was painted matte black with a double wire-gauze bottom, and the white maze was brightly illuminated with flood-lamps. This made it possible for Ariadne to watch what happened below without being visible. She could see the food pellet and the way through to it, and she was hungry enough to really want to try. We hoped she would communicate a bit of her urgency and purpose to any rat trying to thread the maze.
    The idea was to put through twenty rats who had never seen the maze before, giving them one run each. For ten of them, Ariadne would be upstairs, sending down telepathic directions to speed them through –we hoped. The other ten were our control group; she was not in the cage for them.
    To isolate possible ESP, we had to eliminate every other difference between the test rats and the controls. They were not to sense the presence or absence of Ariadne by any normal means. This meant not only the black cage of invisibility but other devices developed by the ingenious Corcoran to hide her sound, her scent, even her body-heat from those below.
    So far the control rats were behaving as expected, running the maze in about fourteen seconds. But the test rats, clever little lads and lasses, were doing it in eight seconds. To which Smith said, ‘Statistically significant’, and Corcoran said, ‘Flabbergasting!’
    I simply shrugged. Why waste time trying to prove the existence of ESP to other scientists, when the evidence was all about us? Why not instead try finding out more about ESP, more about all psychic phenomena?
    So I was bored, while Smith and Corcoran were excited – and increasingly on edge. As we prepared to lock up for the night, Corcoran started worrying.
    ‘When I was filling the water dishes, I noticed a draught,’ he said. ‘Ihope there’s no temperature difference between the cages.’
    Smith raised an eyebrow. ‘You worry too much, Gorky. If it really matters, put a draught-excluder on the door.’
    ‘I suppose it doesn’t really matter. It’s just that – and another thing. Did you know there’s a wall mirror behind the bank of cages? What did they design this lab for? Budgies?’
    ‘I’d like to lock up and go.’ I said. Smith said the same thing, by taking out a pocket calculator and stabbing at its buttons. We stood about with our coats on for some time. Even when Corcoran finally joined us, he was muttering about needing a strip of felt for the door.
    ‘What you need is a drink,’ I said.
    What Corcoran really needed, I now can see, was to let go his death-grip on the material world. He worked too closely with
things
, making and mending, and along the way he lost contact with
people
. For example he spent far too much time ruling out mazes on white cardboard and cutting them out with razor blades. That led to one of his more unpleasant confrontations with Beddoes.
    He told Beddoes: ‘I’ve made this little model of the Great Pyramid in cardboard. Did you know that if you use a razor blade each day, but keep it under the model pyramid at night, it
never
loses its edge?’
    Anyone with sense would never have