"Oh f**king BULLSHIT! " Harold just about screams.
"Not at all," Glen sez calmly. "That was Staunton's theory, and the computer bore him out. In cases where planes or trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61 percent capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they don't, the vehicles are running at 76 per cent capacity. That's a difference of 15 percent over a large computer run, and that sort of across-the-board deviation is significant. Staunton points out that, statistically speaking, a 3 percent deviation would be food for thought, and he's right. It's an anomaly the size of Texas. Staunton's deduction was that people know which planes and trains are going to crash... that they are unconsciously predicting the future.
"Your Aunt Sally gets a bad stomachache just before Flight 61 takes off from Chicago bound for San Diego. And when the plane crashes in the Nevada desert, everyone says, 'Oh Aunt Sally, that bellyache was really the grace of God.' But until James Staunton came along, no one had realized that there were really thirty people with bellyaches... or headaches... or just that funny feeling you get in your legs when your body is trying to tell your head that something is getting ready to go way off-course."
"I just can't believe that," Harold sez, shaking his head rather woefully.
"Well, you know," Glen said, "about a week after I finished the Staunton article for the first time, a Majestic Airlines jet crashed at Logan Airport. It killed everyone on board. Well, I called the Majestic office at Logan after things had settled down a bit. I told them I was a reporter from the Manchester Union-Leader - a small lie in a good cause. I said we were getting a sidebar on airline crashes together and asked if they could tell me how many no-shows there were on that flight. The man sounded kind of surprised, because he said the airline personnel had been talking about that. The number was sixteen. Sixteen no-shows. I asked him what the average was on 747 flights from Denver to Boston, and he said it was three."
"Three," Perion sez in a marveling kind of way.
"Right. But the guy went further. He said they'd also had fifteen cancelations, and the average number is eight. So, although the headlines after the fact screamed LOGAN AIR CRASH KILLS 94, it could just as well have read 31 AVOID DEATH IN LOGAN AIRPORT DISASTER."
Well... there was a lot more talk about psychic stuff, but it wandered pretty far afield from the subject of our dreams and whether or not they come from the Big Righteous in the sky. One thing that did come up (this was after Harold had wandered away in utter disgust) was Stu asking Glen, "If we're all so psychic, then how come we don't know when a loved one has just died or that our house just blew away in a tornado, or something?"
"There are cases of exactly that sort of thing," Glen said, "but I will admit they are nowhere near as common... or as easy to prove with the aid of a computer. It's an interesting point. I have a theory - "
(Doesn't he always, diary?)
" - that has to do with evolution. You know, once men - or their progenitors - had tails and hair all over their bodies, and much sharper senses than they do now. Why don't we have them anymore? Quick, Stu! This is your chance to go to the head of the class, mortarboard and all."
"Why, for the same reason people don't wear goggles and dusters when they drive anymore, I guess. Sometimes you outgrow a thing. It gets to a point where you don't need it anymore."
"Exactly. And what is the point of having a psychic sense that's useless in any practical way? What earthly good would it do you to be working in your office and suddenly know that your wife had been killed in a car-smash coming back from the market? Someone is going to call you on, the telephone and tell you, right? That sense may have atrophied long ago, if we ever had it. It may have gone the way, of our tails and our pelts.
"What interests me about these dreams," he went on, "is that they seem to presage some future struggle. We seem to be getting cloudy pictures of a protagonist... and an antagonist. An adversary, if you like. If that's so, it may be like looking at a plane on which we're scheduled to fly... and getting a bellyache. We're being given the means to help shape our own futures, perhaps. A kind of fourth-dimensional free will: the chance to choose in advance of events."
"But we don't know what the dreams mean," I said.