Thursday, 18 May. We went back to reaction testing in the lab with Lambertson today. That study is almost finished, as much as anything I work on is ever finished, which isn't very much. This test had two goals: to clock my stimulus-response pattern in comparison to normals, and to find out just exactly when I pick up any given thought-signal from the person I'm reading. It isn't a matter of developing speed. I'm already so fast to respond that it doesn't mean too much from anybody else's standpoint, and I certainly don't need any training there. But where along the line do I pick up a thought impulse? Do I catch it at its inception? Do I pick up the thought formulation, or just the final crystalized pattern? Lambertson thinks I'm with it right from the start, and that some training in those lines would be worth my time.
Of course, we didn't find out, not even with the ingenious little random-firing device that Dakin designed for the study. With this gadget, neither Lambertson nor I know what impulse the box is going to throw at him. He just throws a switch and it starts coming. He catches it, reacts, I catch it from him and react, and we compare reaction times. This afternoon it had us driving up a hill, and sent a ten-ton truck rolling down on us out of control. I had my flasher on two seconds before Lambertson did, of course, but our reaction times are standardized, so when we corrected for my extra speed, we knew that I must have caught the impulse about 0.07 seconds after he did.
Crude, of course, not nearly fast enough, and we can't reproduce on a stable basis. Lambertson says that's as close as we can get without cortical probes. And that's where I put my foot down. I may have a gold mine in this head of mine, but nobody is going to put burr-holes through my skull in order to tap it. Not for a while yet.
That's unfair, of course, because it sounds as if Lambertson were trying to force me into something, and he isn't. I've read him about that, and I know he wouldn't allow it. Let's learn everything else we can learn without it first, he says. Later, if you want to go along with it, maybe. But right now you're not competent to decide for yourself.
He may be right, but why not? Why does he keep acting as if I'm a child? Am I, really? With everything (and I mean everything) coming into my mind for the past twenty-three years, haven't I learned enough to make decisions for myself? Lambertson says of course everything has been coming in, it's just that I don't know what to do with it all. But somewhere along the line I have to reach a maturation point of some kind.
It scares me, sometimes, because I can't find an answer to it and the answer might be perfectly horrible. I don't know where it may end. What's worse, I don't know what point it has reached right now. How much difference is there between my mind and Lambertson's? I'm psi-high, and he isn't—granted. But is there more to it than that? People like Aarons think so. They think it's a difference between human function and something else.
And that scares me because it just isn't true. I'm as human as anybody else. But somehow it seems that I'm the one who has to prove it. I wonder if I ever will. That's why Dr. Custer has to help me. Everything hangs on that. I'm to go up to Boston next week, for final studies and testing.
If Dr. Custer can do something, what a difference that will make! Maybe then I could get out of this whole frightening mess, put it behind me and forget about it. With just the psi alone, I don't think I ever can.