house, situated at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac on the north side of
Georgetown. Although lofty, spacious, and solidly built, it was an untidy and in
some ways inelegant heap of a house—a composition of after-thoughts, with walls
and gables projecting in all directions, roofs meeting at strange angles, and a
preposterous chateau-style turret adorning the upper part of one comer. The
interior was a warren of interconnecting rooms and passages, with cubbyholes and
stairways in unexpected places, old-fashioned sash windows, and lots of wood
carving and paneling. The part of the cellars not dedicated to storing the junk
that Massey had been accumulating through life contained a workshop-lab which he
used mainly for developing psychological testing equipment and perfecting new
magic props, while the floors above included, in addition to the usual living
space, an overflowing library, a computer room, and accommodations for his
regular flow of short-term guests, who varied from students temporarily out on
the street to fellow magicians and visiting professors from abroad.
Contrary to widespread belief, including that prevalent among many scientists,
scientific qualifications were largely irrelevant to assessing reliably the
claims of alleged miracle-workers, mind readers, psychics, and the like.
Scientists could be fooled by deliberate trickery or unconscious self-deception
as easily as the average layman and, sometimes, more easily if competence and
prestige earned in other fields were allowed to produce delusions of
infallibility. The world of natural phenomena that was properly the object of
the scientist’s expertise could be baffling at times, but it never resorted to
outright dishonesty and always yielded rational answers in the end. Theorems
were provable; calculations, checkable; observations, repeatable; and
assumptions, verifiable. Things in the natural world meant what they said. But
that was seldom the case in the world of human affairs, where illogic operated
freely and deception was the norm. To catch a thief one should set a thief; the
adage tells; and to catch a conjuror, set a conjuror. If the skills of the
physicist and the neurochemist were of little help in comprehending the
deviousness of human irrationality and the art of the professional deceiver,
those of the psychologist and the magician were; Gerold Massey happened to be
both, and he was engaged regularly by government and private organizations as a
consultant on and investigator of matters allegedly supernatural and paranormal.
That was how Massey and Walter Conlon had come to know each other. In 2015 a
“psychic” had claimed to travel over vast distances through the “astral plane”
and described the surface features of Uranus and Neptune in vivid detail. When
French probes finally arrived and sent back pictures contradicting his accounts,
his excuse had been that he had perhaps underestimated his powers and projected
himself to planets in some entirely different star system! The year 2017 had
seen another flap about bodies from a crashed alien spacecraft—this time hidden
in a secret base in Nevada. A year later some officials in Washington were
giving serious consideration to an offer from a California-based management
recruiting firm to screen NASO flight-crew applicants on the basis of a crank
numerology system involving computerized personal “psychometric aptitudinal
configurator charts.” And, inevitably, there was always someone pushing for NASO
to involve itself in the perennial UFO controversy. In fact Massey supposed that
Conlon wanted to talk about Senator Kerning and the whatever-it-was Church of
Oregon. But Massey was wrong. Conlon had involved him in some strange situations
over the years and occasionally sent him off to some out-of-the-way places. But
never anything like this. Conlon had never before wanted him to leave Earth
itself, and travel with a NASO mission across interplanetary space.
“The idea is to expand the pilot base at Meridian! Sinus into a mixed,
experimental community of about five hundred people to provide data on
extraterrestrial living for future space-colony design,” Conlon explained from a
leather armchair standing before a grandfather clock built to look like an
Egyptian sarcophagus. “One area that needs a lot more study is how such
conditions will affect the behavior and emotions of sizeable groups of people,
what kinds of stress are likely to be experienced, and so on, which means
there’ll be a number of psychologists going along. Officially you’d be filling