Doctor Who_ Psi-Ence Fiction - Chris Boucher [83]
What was striking, however, was how high the general average was. It was as though almost every student in the university was showing some small sign of paranormal powers. These results tended to confirm the Doctor's worst fears. A multiverse disruption, a major one, was developing in the area, creating the parapsychological energy that was feeding back into it.
Either the phenomenon had multiple focus points or it was already vast.
After that first screening, however, none of the subsequent tests showed similar results. Much to his relief, there were no more generally raised levels of psi ability. The next intake of students tested normal. Either the field effect of the disruption, multiverse overlap or whatever it turned out to be was unusually variable and had been particularly strong when the first tests had been done, or something else had been involved. Either way, it suggested that the disruption was not vast after all.
Barry Hitchins didn't appear to have been bothered by this strange discrepancy in his preliminary test findings and the Doctor was obliged to revise his previously high opinion of the Kellerfield Research Fellow's scientific methods. It seemed he had found six promising research subjects, and once he had found them, nothing else was of any concern to him.
The Doctor had then turned his attention to the monitoring videotapes. As he began working his way through the early cassettes he could see why Barry Hitchins had been enthusiastic about the students he had found. The initial experiments did seem to bear out some of their early promise. The Doctor could see that two of the girls, Chloe Pennick and Joan Cox, were showing particularly strong potential in telepathy and remote viewing. One of the boys, Josh Randall, showed some aptitude too. All three of them would have been the obvious candidates for more intense study.
Oddly, Hitchins did not seem to have realised that the two girls, and to a lesser extent the boy, were the special ones in his group. He had pressed on with his routine series of experiments, testing each of the students in each theoretical discipline on a strictly rotational basis. It was only after the Doctor had watched a long series of these carefully structured trials that he thought he understood Hitchins' problem. He was testing for something he did not think could possibly exist. As a result, he was overlooking evidence and missing the developing possibilities.
And then for some reason the possibilities stopped developing. Gradually, the students' paranormal talents appeared to disappear. Dr Hitchins'
experiments were proving what he designed them to prove. They were establishing to his satisfaction that there was no such thing as telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis, precognition or any of the other powers the mind might develop to directly affect the world outside itself.
The Doctor was beginning to think that the evidence of parapsychological activity here was so insignificant that it was not a warning of disaster after all. Whatever it was that was happening in that wood, and perhaps in this laboratory, the Kellerfield Research Fellow's work had nothing to do with it.
It was possible that there had been a temporary multiverse overlap, a self-adjusting space-time loop anomaly, a self-cancelling temporal inversion.
The disruption could already be over.
He pushed the next two cassettes in the series into machines, and adjusted the playback so that the time codes were the same on each screen before simultaneously releasing the freeze-frames on both of them. In his new mood of optimism the Doctor found this rather basic technology reassuring.
It suggested the funding for the project was limited. Limited funding meant limited interest. Limited interest meant limited effects in the first place.
He had been panicking unnecessarily.
'Mr Bun the Baker,' Josh Randall said, staring out of the screen. 'I'm right aren't I? I can see it