Page 145 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Quantum Reticulator

“No, no!” His legs jerked spasmodically and he threw his hands in
front of his eyes. “A nuclear attack!”
After that he said nothing coherent. He lay, twitching and
moaning, until an ambulance arrived and took him to the emergency
room of a nearby hospital. The trial was over. The Randolph Prize
money went to Simeon Gibbons in trust, to pay for his care at a
psychiatric nursing home. The diagnosis was acute schizophrenia and
dissociative identity disorder: the patient could not maintain a single
personality and distrusted all of the others temporarily displaced from
his awareness. The prognosis was hopeless. He was the one and only
certified—and certifiable—clairvoyant.
All of the combinations he had recited were among the five
thousand possibilities; oddly, the sequence projected on the screen
was not one of them. It must have made little impression on him
compared to the effect of what he was apparently receiving from the
Great Beyond. Given the careful preparation against any possibility
of tampering, the committee was forced to agree that Gibbons had
met—and exceeded—the requirements for demonstrating
clairvoyance. Was it a supernatural power or simply new science? A
debate raged in the press for months, with some journalists repeating
the dictum issued by a famous science fiction writer: any sufficiently
advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. That, of
course, was the crux of the agreement Psychometrics Research had
made with Simeon Gibbons—and ultimately irrelevant: nobody
wanted to repeat the experiment, given its outcome for the
experimenter. And the quantum reticulator was damaged beyond
repair; it couldn’t easily be reverse-engineered by the same people
who had denied Gibbons a hearing in the first place. His papers were
a pig’s breakfast of crossed-out equations and smudgy diagrams.
It was easier in the end to leave him as an example of what
happens when mankind overreaches and delves into properties of
nature best left alone. That was the final analysis in the popular mind:
a freak occurrence. I was not so certain. In my opinion Gibbons’
performance represented either the greatest con job ever to go
terribly wrong or the most tragic outcome in history of a desperate
gamble to prove a scientific theory right. If he had indeed broken the
light-speed barrier and received images from the “forbidden zone” of
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