But that wasn’t until nearly the end of the summer after they explained Project Lebensraum.
About a week before our contract was to run out they gathered us twins together to talk to us. There had been hundreds that first day, dozens the second day, but just enough to crowd a big conference room by the end of summer. The redheads were among the survivors but Pat and I did not sit by them even though there was room; they still maintained their icicle attitude and were self-centered as oysters. The rest of us were all old friends by now.
A Mr. Howard was introduced as representing the Foundation. He ladled out the usual guff about being happy to meet us and appreciating the honor and so forth. Pat said to me. “Hang onto your wallet, Tom. This bloke is selling something.” Now that we knew what we were doing Pat and I talked in the presence of other people even more than we used to. We no longer bothered to whisper since we had had proved to us that we weren’t hearing the whispers. But we did subvocalize the words silently, as it helped in being understood. Early in the summer we had tried to do without words and read minds directly but it did not work. Oh, I could latch on to Pat, but the silly, incoherent rumbling that went on his mind in place of thought was confusing and annoying, as senseless as finding yourself inside another person’s dream. So I learned not to listen unless he “spoke” to me and he did the same. When we did, we used words and sentences like anybody else. There was none of this fantastic, impossible popular nonsense about instantly grasping the contents of another person’s mind; we simply “talked.”
One thing that had bothered me was why Pat’s telepathic “voice” sounded like his real one. It had not worried me when I did not know what we were doing, but once I realized that these “sounds” weren’t sounds, it bothered me. I began to wonder if I was all there and for a week I could not “hear” him-psychosomatic telepathic-deafness Dr. Arnault called it.
She got me straightened out by explaining what hearing is. You don’t hear with your ears, you hear with your brain; you don’t see with your eyes, you see with your brain. When you touch something, the sensation is not in your finger, it is inside your head. The ears and eyes and fingers are just data collectors; it is the brain that abstracts order out of a chaos of data and gives it meaning. “A new baby does not really see,” she said. “Watch the eyes of one and you can see that it doesn’t. Its eyes work but its brain has not yet learned to see. But once the brain has acquired the habits of abstracting as ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing,’ the habit persists. How would you expect to ‘hear’ what your twin says to you telepathically? As little tinkling bells or dancing lights? Not at all. You expect words, your brain ‘hears’ words; it is a process it is used to and knows how to handle.”
I no longer worried about it, I could hear Pat’s voice clearer than I could hear the voice of the speaker addressing us. No doubt there were fifty other conversations around us, but I heard no one but Pat and it was obvious that the speaker could not hear anybody (and that he did not know much about telepathy) for he went on:
“Possibly a lot of you wonderful people-” (This with a sickening smile) “-are reading my mind right now. I hope not, or if you are I hope you will bear with me until I have said my say.”
“What did I tell you?” Pat put in. “Don’t sign anything until l check it.”
(“Shut up,”). I told him. (“I want to listen.”) His voice used to sound like a whisper; now it tended to drown out real sounds. “
Mr. Howard went on, “Perhaps you have wondered why the Long Range Foundation has sponsored this research. The Foundation is always interested in anything which will add to human knowledge. But there is a much more important reason, a supremely important reason … and a grand purpose to which you yourselves can be supremely important.”