"There was a picture of a room in the paper," said the doctor, "where each week, without any possibility of fraud or anyone seeing it except the judges, the solution to the puzzle was hung up on the wall in the middle of the picture shown in the paper. The puzzles themselves were meaningless. We wanted to see how many people wrote in the right solution just from seeing the picture of the empty room. The right solution, of course, was the one hanging in that room at that time, which no one could see, and which was selected an hour before publication of the paper each week by random selection in a dictionary."
"So what did I get, a consolation prize?" asked Fred.
"In a way," the doctor smiled. "But not for coming near winning. The top twenty winners were highly gifted people we recruited into the Psi faculties of Duke, Harvard, Oxford, Paris and elsewhere. They scored consistently throughout the year with a better than probability deviation."
"Huh?"
"They got a lot more right than they could by chance alone. But your results were even more interesting to us. You got the same result here, just now, on the Zener cards."
"I'm still in the running?"
"Fred, quite seriously, you are the best candidate we've ever met. Hence the special treatment. In the history of the System Government, there have only been ten other people with results similar to yours."
"Is that so? Well, I suppose you know what you're doing, Doc. But I never had a premonition in my life."
Doctor Howard Sprinnell frowned. "I should hope not. Almost everyone has some psi capacities, but we're not interested in minor phenomena. This is a government department, Fred. Here a thing has to work all the time, whenever it's needed, wherever it's needed. A faculty professor has off-days when he couldn't roll a die against chance. But you can't."
"Look, doc. I think you've got the wrong man. I'm Fred Williams. Frederick L. Williams. Are you sure—"