They'd Rather Be Right Read Free Page A

what the card really shows, and what you say it is, and then we’ll see how many you get right.”
    Too short a time! Too short a time! But maybe long enough to be significant. If I should just get a trace. All right, suppose you do? The question was ironic in his mind. He picked up the first card and looked at it, holding it carefully so that Joey would have no chance to see the face of it.
    A circle leaped with startling clarity into Joey’s mind. And the circle contained the image of Joey’s mother, sitting on the edge of her chair in the other room, praying over and over, “Don’t let them find anything wrong with him. Don’t let them find—”
    “Square,” Joey said promptly. He felt the tinge of disappointment in Martin’s mind as he recorded the true and the false. Not a perfect telepath, anyway.
    “All right, Joey,” Martin responded verbally. “Next card.”
    “Did I get that one right?” Joey asked brightly.
    “I’m not supposed to tell you,” Martin answered. “Not until the end of the game.” Well, the boy showed normal curiosity. Didn’t seem to show too much anxiety, which sometimes damped down the ESP factor. He picked up the next card. Joey saw it contained a cross.
    “Star,” he said positively.
    “Next card,” Martin said.
    It was in the nineteenth card that Joey sensed a new thought in Martin’s mind. There was a rising excitement. Not one of them had been correct. Rhine says a negative result can be as revealing as a positive one. He should get every fifth card correctly. Five out of the twenty-five to hit the law of averages. Martin picked up the twentieth card and looked at it. It was a wavy line.
    “Wavy line,” Joey answered. He felt the disappointment again in Martin’s mind, this time because he had broken the long run of incorrectness.
    The twenty-first card was a star.
    “Star,” Joey said.
    And the next three were equally correct. Joey had called five out of the twenty-five correctly, as the law of averages required. The pattern was a bit strange. What would the laws of chance say to a pattern such as this? Try it again.
    “Let’s try it again,” he suggested.
    “You were supposed to tell me how I did at the end of the game,” Joey prompted.
    “You were correct on five of them, Joey,” Martin said, noncommittally.
    “Is that pretty good?” Joey asked anxiously.
    “Average,” Martin said, and threw him a quick look. Wasn’t that eagerness to please just a bit over-done? “Just average. Let’s try it again.”
     
    This time Joey did not make the mistake of waiting until the end of the deck before he called correct cards. The doctor had said every fifth card should be called correctly. Joey did not understand statistical language. Dutifully, he called every fifth card correctly. Four wrong, one right. And again, the rising excitement near the twentieth card. Again, what are the laws of chance that the boy would call four wrong, one right, again and again, in perfect order?
    Joey promptly called two of them right together. And felt Martin’s disappointment. The pattern had been broken again. And then a rise of excitement, carefully suppressed.
    “Let’s run them again,” Martin said. And he whispered strongly to himself. “This time he must call every other one of them right, in order to pass as just an average boy.”
    Joey was bewildered. There seemed to be a double thought in Martin’s mind, a tenseness he could not understand. He wavered, and then doubtfully, doubting he was doing the right thing, he began to call every other card correctly.
    Halfway through the deck Martin laid the cards down. Joey caught the flash of undisguised elation in his mind, and sank back into his own chair in despair. He had done it wrong.
    “O.K., Joey,” Martin said quietly. There was a smile of tender bitterness around his lips. “I don’t know what the idea is. You’ve got your reasons, and they must be pretty terrible ones. Do you think you could talk to me?