anything that demanded hard work, patience, and diligence —were coming
increasingly, it seemed, to be regarded among younger people as out of style,
strictly for nurds. And as fast as they were trained and gained some experience,
the ones who did manage to turn themselves into something worthwhile tended to
leave for more lucrative and challenging opportunities overseas. The peoples of
such places as Japan, China, India, and Africa had lived too close to reality
for too long to be deluded by notions of “finding themselves,” whatever that
meant, or searches for mystical bliss. Having “found” the twenty-first century,
they were rapidly abandoning their trust in the magic and superstitions that had
solved nothing, and were busy erecting in their place the solid foundations of
advanced, industrialized, high-technology civilization.
Conlon wasn’t really sure where the degeneration had started either —in the
latter half of the twentieth century, he suspected from what he had read. In
earlier times, it appeared, the American system had worked fine as a means of
stimulating productivity and creativity, and of raising the living standards of
a whole nation for the first time in history. But habits of thought had failed
to change as quickly as technology. When the spread of automation made it
possible for virtually all of life’s basic needs to be met with a fraction of
the available capacity, new, artificial needs had to be created to keep the
machines and the workforce busy.
With the Third World looking after its own, a major portion of the West’s
ingenuity and effort came to be expended on manufacturing new appetites for
trivia and consumer junk in its own domestic markets. Unfortunately, left to
themselves, rational, educated, and discerning people tended not to make very
good consumers; therefore no great attempt had been made to create a rational,
educated, and discerning population. The mass media that could have been an
instrument of genuine mass education had become instead an instrument of mass
manipulation which delivered uncritical audiences to advertisers, and the school
system had degenerated to little more than a preprocessing which cultivated the
kind of banality that moved products. Nevertheless, despite the plethora of
conspiracy theories in vogue among intellectuals, academics, and political
activists, Conlon didn’t believe that cabals of tycoons plotting secretly in
boardrooms had planned it all; things had simply evolved, a little at a time,
through the selective reinforcement of whatever happened to be good for profits.
The call tone from his desk terminal interrupted his thoughts, and Conlon tapped
the unit’s touchpad to accept. The face that appeared on the screen was of a man
approaching fifty or so, with a high forehead left by a receding hairline,
rugged features setting off a full beard that was starting to show streaks of
gray, and bright, penetrating eyes that held an elusive, mirthful twinkle. It
was Gerold Massey, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of
Maryland and one of Conlon’s long-standing friends. Massey was also an
accomplished stage magician who took a special interest in exposing fraudulent
claims of paranormal powers. It was Conlon’s familiarity with Massey’s work that
had prompted him to mention the subject to Allan Brady earlier.
“Hello, Walter,” Massey said. “My computer tells me you’ve been calling. What
gives?”
“Hi, Gerry. Yes, since yesterday. Where’ve you been?”
“Florida—Tallahassee.”
“Oh? What’s happening there?”
“Some research that Vernon and I are working on.” Vernon Price was Massey’s
assistant, magical understudy, and general partner in crime. “We’re presenting
Vernon in an ESP routine to classes of students around the country. Some are
told beforehand that it’s just a conjuring act, and some are told it’s the real
thing. The object is to get a measure of how strong preconceived beliefs are in
influencing people’s interpretations of what they see, and how much difference
what they’re told at the rational level makes.” Massey’s specialty was the study
of why people believed what they believed.
“Sounds interesting.”
“It is, but I doubt if you were calling to ask me about it,” Massey replied.
“True. Look, I’d like to get together with you and talk sometime soon. It’s
about a NASO project we’ve got coming up, but I really don’t want to go into the