“What’s Ruth’s favourite colour?” asked Benny.
“RED.”
“Is that right, Ruth?” The recorder looked up from her notebook.
“Yes, it is. But Benny knows that, and he’s in the circle.”
“I didn’t know,” retorted Benny.
“You darn well ought to — I’ve told you enough times.”
“Subconscious memory,” murmured Rupert. “That often happens. But can we have some more intelligent questions, please? Now that this has started so well, I don’t want It to peter out.”
Curiously enough, the very triviality of the phenomenon was beginning to impress George. He was sure that there was no supernormal explanation; as Rupert had said, the plate was simply responding to their unconscious muscular movements. But this fact in itself was surprising and impressive: he would never have believed that such precise, swift replies could have been obtained. Once he tried to see if he could influence the board by making it spell out his own name. He got the “G", but that was all: the rest was nonsense. It was virtually impossible, he decided, for one person to take control without the remainder of the circle knowing it.
After half an hour, Ruth had taken down more than a dozen messages, some of them quite long ones. There were occasional spelling mistakes and curiosities of grammar, but they were few. Whatever the explanation, George was now convinced that he was not contributing consciously to the results. Several times, as a word was being spelt out, he had anticipated the next letter and hence the meaning of the message. And on each occasion the plate had gone in a quite unexpected direction and spelt something totally different. Sometimes, indeed — since there was no pause to indicate the end of one word and the beginning of the next — the entire message was meaningless until it was complete and Ruth had read it back.
The whole experience gave George an uncanny impression of being in contact with some purposeful, independent mind. And yet there was no conclusive proof one way or the other. The replies were so trivial, so ambiguous. What, for example, could one make of: