the table, thinking he’d really gone too far. But Kornbluth visibly perked up at the flattery. “I suppose.” He circled the room once more and finally departed.
Brendan closed the door behind him, and the two of them broke into stifled but irrepressible laughter. Finally Brendan got hold of himself.
“I’m telling you, we must be doing something right. Inspector Kornbluth is on the trail.”
The testing itself was amazing.
Each student volunteer was tested sitting at a table in front of a display stand of particle board, painted black, showing a row of the five cards with their different symbols: star, circle, square, two squiggly lines, and cross. Beneath each symbol was a built-in box big enough to hold a stack of envelopes. The test subject took one envelope-encased card at a time, held it, then placed the card in the box under the symbol he felt was inside it. A “run” was a set of twenty-five cards. Statistical chance would be five hits per run.
The students’ excitement was palpable in the tests: they wanted to do well. And Laurel was giddy with the sense of adventure and discovery. She felt her own mind opening and her senses reactivating. There was no predicting who was going to score what. A wistful and bookish girl tested well below chance, while the clowning, sweetly boneheaded center of the basketball team scored 20 percent above chance—in fact at the moment he was their high scorer, though nowhere in the range that they were looking for.
Their findings were bearing out what past studies had shown: extraverts scored significantly above chance, and introverts scored significantly below chance. If Laurel believed in ESP—and that was still a big if—she would have started to wonder if extraverts did better in social situations because they had that little extra edge of being able to read what people were really thinking, what they secretly wanted, and what one might say or do to put an unsuspecting person at ease—or manipulate them.
It occurred to Laurel that even if they never found their high scorers, the extraversion factor was enough to do a decent article, and her spirits lifted. In fact, watching the Zener card tests, she found herself holding her breath during a good run of hits. She wanted the student subjects to score high. And once in a while, like the gangly center, one did, but not anywhere near the level they were looking for to replicate the Folger Experiment.
Until Tyler.
Laurel ended up testing him herself through no plan of her own. She had been careful to assign Tyler’s card testing to Brendan. She was still furious with Tyler for having duped her with those phony stories of the haunted auditorium, although she had been careful never to let on to him that she knew he’d conned her.
But when she opened the door of the lab for her first test subject on Wednesday, he was standing there, smirking.
“Tyler,” she said, caught off-guard. “I have Paul Mayfield signed up for this slot.”
“We switched. Mayfield wasn’t up for coming in this early in the morning. Big night last night. Hope that’s okay,” he said innocently and sauntered past her into the room.
When she didn’t answer immediately, he turned to look at her. “Unless you don’t want to test me?” His voice went up questioningly in that uniquely Southern inflection.
She bit her tongue and indicated the big leather easy chair at the back of the room. When he was seated, with his usual indolent slouch, she took a position as far away from him in the room as possible. “We do this testing in the Ganzfeld, which means ‘empty field.’ Previous studies have shown that test subjects perform better when their minds and bodies are relaxed.”
Tyler smiled slyly. “It’s all about the performance, isn’t it?”
She ignored that, and showed him the sets of cards in their envelopes, explaining the sorting process. “After the relaxation preparation, you’ll be sorting these cards into the appropriate boxes in this display.” She indicated the board with the set of Zener cards posted above the boxes. “You hold each envelope for as long as you like and then put it in the box under the symbol you think it contains—that’s all there is to it. The CD I’m about to play is to relax you, put you in a receptive mood.”
Then she handed him the eye goggles. “Put these on, and you can either close your eyes or keep them open.” He smiled at the Ping-Pong goggles, but put them