The Lost Perception by Daniel F. Galouye Page A

though its inhabitants all have eyes. Let’s take the case of Mr. X. He’s gotten along on four senses. But he turns a corner and somebody throws a hundred-candlepower beam in his face. What do you suppose happens?”
    “I… I don’t know,” Helen said. “I suppose it frightens him.”
    “It scares living hell out of him! Unless be can learn to close his eyes and keep them shut against this strange, roaring, burning silence, he’ll go insane, die of terror or kill himself.”
    Gregson gripped the bedstead. “Really, Bill—we’re not interested in your attempt to explain the plague. We’re just determined to see you get the proper attention.”
    “That’s right, Bill,” Helen said earnestly.
    “But I’m going to be all right! I just want more time to experiment. Don’t you understand? I can explain so many things now!”
    Helen shook her head. “You’re only rationalizing. Now that you’ve gotten the Screamies, you’re trying to convince yourself they aren’t all that bad.”
    Forsythe snorted. “Don’t drag out your psychiatric couch for me, young lady. What’s the main symptom of a Screamie seizure, besides intense pain?”
    When there was no answer, he supplied his own: “Hallucinations. And isn’t it odd that, sooner or later, you begin imagining those hallucinations are grotesque, twisted representations of the things about you?”
    “Bill,” Gregson pleaded, “let me call the isolation institute.”
    “Don’t you understand?” the other went on, undiscouraged. “That’s the way it would have to be if you were bumping heads with a new form of perception? At first you wouldn’t recognize your surroundings as perceived through a new sense. Take a congenitally blind person who suddenly starts seeing. He’d have to learn to identify a waterfall by the way it looks, rather than by the way it sounds.”
    Gregson could see there was no hope of quietening him now.
    “Greg!” the other said tensely. “I can even tell you what the sixth sense will be Eke! Look at your hands. You can see a wealth of detail—lines and creases, hair, coloration, the whorls of your fingertips. That’s infinitely more than you would perceive through feeling the hand, or ‘listening’ to it with a bat’s sonar system.
    “Now, can’t you imagine how much more refined a perception our sixth sense would permit? It would be as superior to seeing as seeing is to hearing or feeling. We’d be aware of infinitesimal detail, of special relationships between things, perhaps even of cosmic and microcosmic principles that we can’t begin to understand now.”
    Gregson looked down at his hands finally. But not because Forsythe had asked him to.
    Rather, it was an expression of sympathetic understanding. For now he knew that Bill desperately wanted the Screamies to be a new means of perception, because he needed something to compensate for his insufferable blindness.
    “Think what it would mean in terms of communication,” the old man entreated. “Merely by exchanging glances, you and Helen know a lot about what each other is thinking. When we can interpret sixth-sense impressions, we might ‘see’ deep into one another’s thoughts!”
    He evoked only an impatient sigh from Helen.
    But he continued, almost desperately, “It would be like seeing into the future! If a sighted person in a world of the blind sees robbers lying in ambush ahead, he can ‘predict’ he’ll be waylaid when he reaches the spot!”
    In the ensuing silence, he called out hopefully, “Greg?”
    “Over here, Bill,” Gregson said compassionately after a while.
    “You said that woman in London accurately predicted your seizure. Doesn’t that suggest anything at all—that she might have been using some of her sixth-sense powers without even realizing it?”
    Gregson knew then that Forsythe had built his whole case on that one coincidence. “Bill, you’ve got a head start toward being the one in every thousand who survives the