"And now," the doctor said, standing up and feeding his notations into a machine in the corner of the room, "we have here the results."
He pulled a tape from the machine as it purred out, and showed it to Fred. It was a score of some sort.
"In another room," Dr. Howard Sprinnell explained, "we have a synchronized telepath trying to influence your selections of these cards. If you have psi qualities, Fred, these results will show how high they are. If you have none, then your chances of picking the right card are one in five. That goes for picking the card ahead of the right one, or behind it, or two ahead and so on. In other words, if the cards had been selected here by a machine instead of you, we would expect twenty per cent of the answers to be right, by sheer chance—or statistical probability, to put it more accurately."
"So how did I do? Am I a mind-reader? That would make me laugh."
The doctor glanced at the result tape he was holding.
"You have the results we want," he said. "Otherwise I would not tell you this. You would be thanked, given a reward, made a fuss of by some civil servant of prominence and sent home in style."
He looked up at Fred in the dentist's chair.
"Do you remember that contest in the Sunday News?"
Fred Williams remembered it. Every week there had been a puzzle picture to identify. The contest had lasted nearly a year. He remembered particularly that each week there had been a cut of the room in which entries were to be judged, a large editorial office, just above the puzzle picture. Just a room. He had wondered why they bothered to put it in.