Doctor Who Psi Ence Fiction Chris Boucher

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.An invitation to come to the university to have the telepathy and spoon-bending tested under controlled conditions was readily accepted by the entertainer.Of course the invitation was never taken up, but by then she and Barry had already got plenty of valuable publicity.On another occasion he had investigated a poltergeist that was supposedly plaguing a suburban semi.The restless spirit was moving furniture, tossing ornaments about and slamming doors.Barry revealed it to be a fairly crude hoax.It turned out that the householder had planned the whole thing because he wanted to get on to daytimetelevision, and though he succeeded in this, Con men and those who expose them' was probably not the fifteen minutes of fame he'd had in mind.The episode did Barry Hitchins no harm however.Now known as'Ghostbuster Bazzer' he was well on his way to becoming a minor media celebrity.This further irritated his colleagues which, as far as he was concerned, was a major plus.Barry had calculated that it would only take one more reasonably high-profile opportunity to demonstrate his expertise in the field of the supernatural and he could make the jump to full media pundit, which would more than compensate for not being a full professor.He was in the process of devising such an opportunity - it involved a haunted vicarage and a particularly spectacular headless spook - when he received an unexpected and rather sinister note warning him that his funding was going to be at risk unless he paid more attention to researching the accepted areas of serious parapsychology.It's the usual card-reading,' he said.'Tommy you're reading and sending.Turn the cards on the light cue.You won't be getting any sort of cue, Josh.I want you to call out the cards when you think they've been turned.''Wait a minute.'Josh stopped and turned back to stare at him.'Wait a minute.Not only do I have to guess what the card is, I have to guess when it's turned over?''Problem?''Why the new variable?''A small extra pressure, nothing more.'The point being?''The point being,' Tommy interrupted, opening the thickly padded door to the number one capsule, 'he really doesn't trust us.He thinks we really might have a code or something.''And you think a "small extra pressure" would stop that?' Josh challenged.'Why not go the whole hog? Do you want me to drink a glass of water and recite the alphabet backwards while I'm waiting for the cards to be turned?Or would you prefer a gottle o' geer?'At first Barry thought it must be some sort of joke: what passed for wry humour among the more bitter of his academic associates.The accepted areas of serious parapsychology? Accepted by whom he wondered.And serious parapsychology? Surely the whole point was that parapsychology was not taken seriously by anyone who mattered.And then it had struck him in a shocking flash of the blindingly obvious.Presumably whoever it was who had endowed the research fellowship did take it seriously, and they mattered because presumably they were in a position, a very real position, to cut off his funding.And he realised how much he had come to rely on being Dr Barry Hitchins, the Kellerfield Research Fellow in Parapsychology.As a title 'Ghostbuster Bazzer' was never going to be an acceptable substitute.'Shall we just get into the capsules and put the headphones on?' he suggested patiently.'Prompting paranoid fantasies wasn't quite what I had in mind.'With a token show of reluctance the two students opened the designated units and climbed in.The four isolation capsules stood in a line along one wall of the laboratory.Apart from elaborately quarantined air filtration they were designed to be self-contained and virtually soundproof.They were lightproof, too, and their individual circuits, both electrical and electronic, were heavily shielded.Even though all the capsules werecompletely separated from each other, when two were in use as now, it was still standard operating procedure to have at least one empty one between the occupied units.While Tommy and Josh closed themselves into number one and number four, Barry took up his position in the small control and monitoring suite at the other end of the room.From here he could communicate with the capsules, and see and record everything that went on in them via multiple CCTV cameras that covered every possible angle and position.Research using people as experimental subjects was always difficult to frame satisfactorily, but a study involving them and elements of the supernatural made it almost impossible.Such work seemed to bring out the gullible and the deliberate cheats in more than average numbers.Barry recognised that, at its most innocent, this was because people wanted to believe and would lie to themselves to make it true.After lying to yourself, lying to someone like him was hardly lying at all.People saw what they expected to see and expected what they wanted to see.At its least innocent, his feeling was that the world was full of self-serving scumbags who wouldn't know the truth if it bit them in the arse, and he went to elaborate lengths to spot and eliminate their scumbaggery.As he powered up the cameras, set the capsule light levels and activated the mic in number four Barry was sure he had designed out all the chances to fake the results.He was sure, but he wasn't confident [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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