Rick looked at his sister. "I will stipulate that a real ghost need not have any reason for his actions. But a person imitating a ghost would have had to turn off his light in order to go around the quarry, otherwise we would have seen that he made a detour. A ghost would presumably float right over the quarry."
"Ghosts do float," Barby agreed solemnly.
"Uh-uh. Since this one did not, and since it reappeared—or the light did—on the opposite side of the quarry, we believe there was a deliberate attempt to lead us into said quarry."
He paused and took a deep breath. "How am I doing, coach?"
Dr. Miller nodded approval. "Fine. See how easy it is to separate fact and conjecture?"
"So what do we conclude from this one event? We conclude it is reasonable to believe that a person, and not a spook, triggered the plane alarm and led us to the quarry. We speculate that the person did not know about the alarm and set it off by accident, probably while inspecting the plane, since we see nothing to be gained by sabotage. We speculate that the chase was to frighten us, not primarily to harm us, the reason being that we rushed the ghost during the ghost act and are therefore potentially dangerous. We reach this conclusion because the ghost picked a side of the quarry where we would land in the water, which is plenty deep by the way, and not on the rocks."
"Okay. Scotty, take over. I'm worn out from trying to be precise."
The scientist grinned. "Lack of practice, I'm afraid. If we all sought precision in our speech many of the world's misunderstandings could be avoided."
"I don't know what we can say," Scotty objected. "We have few facts. We have only some observations. We can try to interpret our observations, but we can't prove them. For instance, there is the fact that we were given a bath of something by the Blue Ghost that seemed to freeze our faces. There is the fact that the Frostola man bought a quantity of methyl chloride. There is the fact that methyl chloride could have produced the effect we felt. But how can we say that it's a fact that the Frostola man somehow doused us with chemical?"
"You can't," Jan Miller agreed.