Card Trick by John Berryman (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📕

I made a farce of trying to get some work done in the lab. After letting the third test tube slip through my fingers and shatter on the lab bench, I gave it up. How would you have acted if you had gotten that kind of news? That first gut-twisting admission that you really may be a snake! Then sharp awareness of what it means. A guillotine couldn't cut you off more sharply from Normal humanity. But the spirit struggles and refuses to accept it. You can't be a snake!

"Take action!" I said aloud, getting a worried look from my lab assistant, busy mopping up my last shattered culture. "Don't spin around like this. Do something!"

I did the only thing I could think of, and dialed Shari at her laboratory. She refused to accept the call at first. Finally she tore herself away from a "delicate experiment" long enough to look at me angrily in the screen.

"We don't have anything to say to each other," she said coldly. "There are delicate experiments—"

"Can you test me for psi powers?" I interrupted.

"Whatever for?"

"To settle whether I have any," I snapped. "It's important to me."

"Not necessary," she said. "Do you think I'd be successful in the psi field if I weren't sensitive to this sort of thing? Don't worry, Tex. You're a Normal."

"Thanks," I said. "So you've told me. Now prove it to my satisfaction."

"We shut up shop at five o'clock," she said. "I'll be here for about an hour after that. My dinner date isn't until seven."

"Bet he doesn't gamble," I said, trying to win a little sympathy.

"You bet he doesn't" she sniffed.

Shari's laboratory was nothing more than a large windowless office that could be cut into two sound-proof parts with a movable partition. She had a whopper desk with full controls and other evidences of academic pelf. On a table against the short wall was her apparatus—if that's what you call decks of cards, a roulette wheel, a set of Rhine ESP cards, several dice and, so help me, a crystal ball.

Shari stood up behind her desk when I came in. It was something of a shock to find that her colorful peasant getup was antiseptically sheathed in a white laboratory coat. She was sure dressed for dirtier work than she would ever have to do in that lab.

Her first look at me was one of surprise, but it softened to one of concern, which might have been cheering on some other occasion. "What has happened, Tex?" she asked.

"Nothing," I said, keeping calm. "Not a thing."

"Outside of seeing a ghost, eh?" she said. "Stop grinding your teeth like that. You'll give me the creeps. Sit down. Sit down! Do you hear me? Relax!"

I guess I found the chair across from her at the desk. "Do I have psi powers?" I asked her. "Either TK or PC? Test me, Shari."

"What happened?" she insisted.

I shook my head. "I'd rather not talk about it—not until I know the result of your test," I said.

Shari thought about it for a while, tapping her desk with an irritated finger, and finally got a set of cards from the lab table against the wall. She shuffled them slowly on her desk blotter. "Cards are your strong point," she observed. "If you have any psi powers, they're most likely to show up with cards. I take it you will do your utmost to be right?"

"Who would double-cross himself?" I said tightly.

"Most people," Shari said. "When it comes to psi. But we'll assume, for a starter, that you are on the level." She stacked the cards in her hand. "We'll keep it simple," Shari suggested. "I'll deal the cards one at a time. All you have to do is tell me whether the next card will be red or black. Fair?"

"Sure," I said. "Deal!"

She was a lousy dealer. Or maybe it was because it was a one-handed operation. She was scoring my hits and misses with the little counter in her other hand.

She ran the deck ten times for me. I got thirty-eight right on my best attempt and thirty-seven wrong on my worst. In total, of five hundred and twenty chances, I was right on two hundred and seventy-three, or fifty-two point two per cent of the time, according to Shari's slide rule.

"Oh, no," I said dismally. "I do have a little edge on the cards!"

"As a statistician, you'll make a great biochemist," Shari said, putting the deck away. "That would only be true if I hadn't let you see your hits and misses as each deal proceeded. You made succeeding guesses in the knowledge of what had already been dealt. Actually, your score was below average for trained observers without psi powers." She heaved a sigh, which somehow seemed to be of relief. "And now, you crazy cowpoke," she said, "tell me what this is all about."

"I'm not a psi?" I demanded.

"Not if you were really trying," she said. "Were you?"

"You think I want to be a psi?" I demanded. I told her all that had happened the night before from the time Lefty had accused me of being a snake until he had let me out of the brownstone house and warned me against gambling.

Guess how Shari reacted. A big nothing!

"Well?" I asked, as she sat silent with her elbows on the edge of her desk and her chin propped up on her knuckles.

"You're really quite naive, aren't you, Tex?" she asked me. "Let me give you an objective statement of what happened to you last night."

She counted these things off on her fingers: "You won some money at poker. A gambler said you used TK to win. He took your winnings, and then some, away from you as the price of silence. He warned you not to gamble any more. He claimed he was part of an organization of psi personalities. Is that a fair statement?"

"Except for one thing," I said. "He used his psi powers on me in a pretty dramatic fashion."

"Try Occam's razor," she suggested.

She was getting insulting. "All right," I growled, feeling my face get red. "Prefer the simpler explanation, if you can find one. I was prodded in the back, both in the alley and in the office at the brownstone house. Something hit me in the gut and tripped me up. I had a heart seizure. What's simpler than TK in accounting for the fact this was done without a soul around?"

"I suppose I shouldn't be critical of you," she said. "It's not your field and you haven't been exposed to the lengths to which charlatans go, just to prove they are supermen. The simpler explanation is that there was someone else in the alley, carefully dressed in dull black to stay invisible in the darkness. The second prodding of a gun in your spine was pure suggestion—you'd been so well-sold by that time you were ready to believe anything."

"And my heart attack?"

"I can think of ten poisons that would give you the symptoms," Shari said. "And don't tell me you let nothing pass your lips!" she burst out hotly as I started to speak. "I suppose you've never had a spray hypodermic? You'd never have felt it. Don't you see why they went to all this trouble?"

"Honestly," I said. "I can't. I'm simply not that important to anyone in the world."

"You're not," she said dryly. "But your eight thousand dollars was. I'd say if people can steal that much money and convince the victim he shouldn't go to the police, it was worth their while. You're not very likely to advertise the claim that you're a psi, are you?"

"No," I admitted.

"And," she said wearily, standing up. "There's always the angle that they'll con you by letting you into their imaginary 'Lodge' and extract some kind of dues out of you in return for keeping quiet about your so-called psi powers when you gamble. That would serve you right," she concluded.