Doctor Who_ Psi-Ence Fiction - Chris Boucher [10]
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. He could never escape the nagging feeling that he was somehow being manipulated. He set the bank of video recorders running, put his headphones on and prepared to give Tommy the light signal that would cue the first card turn.
'Mr Bun the Baker,' Josh said solemnly, staring into the camera. 'I'm right aren't I? I can see it as clear as day'
After the first rush of guilty panic had subsided it had struck Barry as unlikely that an anonymous note in the internal mail would have come directly from the funder. His initial idea that it was a sour joke seemed more probable but he felt it was still a timely reminder, a wake-up call, even what he had once heard referred to as 'an updated reality check'.