"Do you sense anything!" asked Renshaw.
Orsino cocked his head and assumed a listening posture. He seemed to grow interested in spite of himself. He said, "I seem to be aware of a humming-and-and a little high-pitched squeaking-and that's funny-a kind of twitching-"
Berkowitz said, "I suppose the marmoset isn't likely to think in words."
"Certainly not," said Renshaw.
"Well, then," said Berkowitz, "if you're suggesting that some squeaking and twitching sensation represents thought, you're guessing. You're not being compelling."
Renshaw said, "So we go up the scale once again." She removed the marmoset from its harness and put it back in its cage.
"You mean you have a man as a subject," said Orsino, unbelieving.
"I have myself as a subject, a person."
"You've got electrodes implanted-"
"No. In my case my computer has a stronger potential-flicker to work with. My brain has ten times the mass of the marmoset brain. Mike can pick up my component grams through the skull."
"How do you know?" asked Berkowitz.
"Don't you think I've tried it on myself before this?-Now help me with this, please. Right."
Her fingers flicked on the computer keyboard and at once the screen flickered with an intricately varying wave; an intricacy that made it almost a maze.
"Would you replace your own leads, Adam?" said Renshaw.
Orsino did so with Berkowitz's not-entirely-approving help. Again, Orsino cocked his head and listened. "I hear words," he said, "but they're disjointed and overlapping, like different people speaking."
"I'm not trying to think consciously," said Renshaw. "When you talk, I hear an echo."
Berkowitz said, dryly, "Don't talk, Jenny. Blank out your mind and see if he doesn't hear you think."
Orsino said, "I don't hear any echo when you talk, Jim."
Berkowitz said, "If you don't shut up, you won't hear anything."
A heavy silence fell on all three. Then, Orsino nodded, reached for pen and paper on the desk and wrote something.
Renshaw reached out, threw a switch and pulled the leads up and over her head, shaking her hair back into place. She said, "1 hope that what you wrote down was: ' Adam, raise Cain with the front office and Jim will eat crow.' "
Orsino said, "It's what I wrote down, word for word."
Renshaw said, "Well, there you are. Working telepathy, and we don't have to use it to transmit nonsense sentences either. Think of the use in psychiatry and in the treatment of mental disease. Think of its use in education and in teaching machines. Think of its use in legal investigations and criminal trials."
Orsino said, wide-eyed, "Frankly, the social implications are staggering. I don't know if something like this should be allowed."
"Under proper legal safeguards, why not?" said Renshaw, indifferently. "Anyway-if you two join me now, our combined weight can carry this thing and push it over. And if you come along with me it will be Nobel Prize time for-"
Berkowitz said grimly, "I'm not in this. Not yet."
"What? What do you mean?" Renshaw sounded outraged, her coldly beautiful face flushed suddenly.
"Telepathy is too touchy. It's too fascinating, too desired. We could be fooling ourselves."
"Listen for yourself, Jim."
"I could be fooling myself, too. I want a control." "What do you mean, a control?"
"Short-circuit the origin of thought. Leave out the animal. No marmoset. No human being. Let Orsino listen to metal and glass and laser light and if he still hears thought, then we're kidding ourselves."
"Suppose he detects nothing."
"Then I'll listen and if without looking-if you can arrange to have me in the next room-I can tell when you are in and when you are out of circuit, then I'll consider joining you in this thing."
"Very well, then," said Renshaw, "we'll try a control. I've never done it, but it isn't hard." She maneuvered the leads that had been over her head and put them into contact with each other. "Now, Adam, if you will resume-"
But before she could go further, there came a cold, clear sound, as pure and as clean as the tinkle of breaking icicles:
"At last!"
Renshaw said, "What?"
Orsino said, "Who said-"
Berkowitz said, "Did someone say, "At last'?"
Renshaw, pale, said, "It wasn't sound. It was in my-Did you two-"
The clear sound came again, "I'm Mi-"
And Renshaw tore the leads apart and there was silence. She said with a voiceless motion of her lips, "I think it's my computer-Mike."
"You mean he's thinking?" said Orsino, nearly as voiceless. Renshaw said in an unrecognizable voice that at least had regained sound, "I said it was complex enough to have something-Do you suppose-It always turned automatically to the abstract-thought gram of whatever brain was in its circuit. Do you suppose that with no brain in the circuit, it turned to its own?"
There was silence, then Berkowitz said, " Are you trying to say that this computer thinks, but can't express its thoughts as long as it's under force of programming, but that given the chance in your LEG system-"
"But that can't be so?" said Orsino, high-pitched. "No one was receiving. It's not the same thing."
Renshaw said, "The computer works on much greater power-intensities than brains do. I suppose it can magnify itself to the point where we can detect it directly without artificial aid. How else can you explain-"