“Quite a variety, some verified, some mere rumor, a little of it carefully checked under laboratory conditions, like Valdez. Of course, you’ve heard of all the stunts attributed to Yoga.
Very little of it has been duplicated in the Western Hemisphere, which counts against it, nevertheless a lot of odd stuff in India has been reported by competent, cool- minded observers— telepathy, accurate soothsaying, clairvoyance, fire walking, and so forth.”
“Why do you include fire walking in metapsychics?”
“On the chance that the mind can control the body and other material objects in some esoteric fashion.”
“Hmm.”
“Is the idea any more marvelous than the fact that you can cause your hand to scratch your head? We haven’t any more idea of the actual workings of volition on matter in one case than in the other. Take the Tierra del Fuegans. They slept on the ground, naked, even in zero weather.
Now the body can’t make any such adjustment in its economy. It hasn’t the machinery; any physiologist will tell you so. A naked human being caught outdoors in zero weather must exercise, or die. But the Tierra del Fuegans didn’t know about metabolic rates and such. They just slept—nice, and warm, and cozy.”
“So far you haven’t mentioned anything close to home. If you are going to allow that much latitude, my Grandfather Stonebender had much more wonderful experiences.”
“I’m coming to them. Don’t forget Valdez.”
“What’s this about Ben’s grandfather?” asked Joan.
“Joan, don’t ever boast about anything in Ben’s presence. You’ll find that his Grandfather Stonebender did it faster, easier, and better.”
A look of more- in-sorrow-than-in-anger shone out of Coburn’s pale blue eyes. “Why, Phil, I’m surprised at you. If I weren’t a Stonebender myself, and tolerant, I’d be inclined to resent that remark. But your apology is accepted.”
“Well, to bring matters closer home, besides Valdez, there was a man in my home town, Springfield, Missouri, who had a clock in his head.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he knew the exact time without looking at a clock. If your watch disagreed with him, your watch was wrong. Besides that, he was a lightning calculator—knew the answer instantly to the most complicated problems in arithmetic you cared to put to him. In other ways he was feeble- minded.”
Ben nodded. “It’s a common phenomenon—idiots savant.”.”But giving it a name doesn’t explain it. Besides which, while a number of the people with erratic talents are feeble- minded, not all of them are. I believe that by far the greater per cent of them are not, but that we rarely hear of them because the intelligent ones are smart enough to know that they would be annoyed by the crowd, possibly persecuted, if they let the rest of us suspect that they were different.”
Ben nodded again. “You got something there, Phil. Go ahead.”
“There have been a lot of these people with impossible talents who were not subnormal in other ways and who were right close to home. Boris Sidis, for example—”
“He was that child prodigy, wasn’t he? I thought he played out?”
“Maybe. Personally, I think he grew cagy and decided not to let the other monkeys know that he was different. In any case he had a lot of remarkable talents, in intensity, if not in kind. He must have been able to read a page of print just by glancing at it, and he undoubtedly had complete memory. Speaking of complete memory, how about Blind Tom, the negro pianist who could play any piece of music he had ever heard once? Nearer home, there was this boy right here in Los Angeles County not so very many years ago who could play ping-pong blindfolded, or anything else, for which normal people require eyes. I checked him myself, and he could do it. And there was the Instantaneous Echo.”
“You never told me about him, Phil,” commented Joan. “What could he do?”
“He could talk along with you, using your words and intonations, in any language whether he knew the language or not. And he would keep pace with you so accurately that anyone listening wouldn’t be able to tell the two of you apart. He could imitate your speech and words as immediately, as accurately, and as effortlessly as your shadow follows the movements of your body.”