Dr. Mabel looked like a startled kitten. Dr. Arnault answered soberly, “I don’t know what you expected, Tom, but for the past hour you and your brother have been cut off from hearing each other during every test run.”
“But I did hear him.”
“You certainly did. But not with your ears. We’ve been recording each side of the sound barrier. Perhaps we should play back part of it.”
Dr. Mabel giggled. “That’s a good idea.” So they did. It started out with all four voices while they told us what they wanted, then there were just my whispers and Pat’s, reading lines back and forth from The Comedy of Errors. They must have had parabolic mikes focused on us for our whispers sounded like a windstorm.
Pat’s whispers gradually faded out. But mine kept right on going…answering a dead silence.
We signed a research contract with the Foundation and Dad countersigned it, after an argument. He thought mind-reading was folderol and we did not dispute him, since the clincher was that money was scarce as always and it was a better-paying job than any summer job we could get, fat enough to insure that we could start college even if our scholarships didn’t come through.
But before the summer was over they let us in on the connection between “Genetics Investigations” and “Project Lebensraum.” That was a horse of another color-a very dark black, from our parents’ standpoint.
Long before that time Pat and I could telepath as easily as we could talk and just as accurately, without special nursing and at any distance. We must have been doing it for years without knowing it-in fact Dr. Arnault made a surprise recording of our prison-yard whispering (when we weren’t trying to telepath, just our ordinary private conversation) and proved that neither one of us could understand our recorded whispers when we were keeping it down low to keep other people from hearing.
She told us that it was theoretically possible that everyone was potentially telepathic, but that it had proved difficult to demonstrate it except with identical twins-and then only with about ten per cent. “We don’t know why, but think of an analogy with tuned radio circuits.”
“Brain waves?” I asked.
“Don’t push the analogy too far. It can’t be the brain waves we detect with an encephalograph equipment or we would have been selling commercial telepathic equipment long since. And the human brain is not a radio. But whatever it is, two persons from the same egg stand an enormously better chance of being ‘tuned in’ than two non-twins do. I can’t read your mind and you can’t read mine and perhaps we never will. There have been only a few cases in all the history of psychology of people who appeared to be able to ‘tune in’ on just anyone, and most of those aren’t well documented.”
Pat grinned and winked at Dr. Mabel. “So we are a couple of freaks.”
She looked wide-eyed and started to answer but Dr. Arnault beat her to it. “Not at all, Pat. In you it is normal. But we do have teams in the project who are not identical twins. Some husbands and wives, a few fraternal siblings, even some pairs who were brought together by the research itself. They are the ‘freaks.’ If we could find out how they do it, we. might be able to set up conditions to let anyone do it.”
Dr. Mabel shivered. “What a terrible thought! There is too little privacy now.”
I repeated this to Maudie (with Pat’s interruptions and corrections) because the news services had found out what was going on in “Genetics Investigations” and naturally we “mind readers” came in for a lot of silly publicity and just as naturally, under Hedda Staley’s mush-headed prodding, Maudie began to wonder if a girl had any privacy? She had, of course; I could not have read her mind with a search warrant, nor could Pat. She would have believed our simple statement if Hedda had not harped on it. She nearly managed to bust us up with Maudie, but we jettisoned her instead and we had threesome dates with Maudie until Pat was sent away.