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CHAPTER THREE

Frightened of the future

The next day Rachel was sitting in her office. She was thinking about the woman at the party. She looked through some books on palmistry.

She had a lot of books. She couldn’t find any information about life lines before the two world wars. Maybe the woman was right. She stood up, and went to the door.

‘Mark,’ she called, ‘Mark, can you come into my office for a minute?’

Mark was one of the computer programmers. He worked with Mervyn on the palmistry program. He came in, and sat down. Rachel told him about the woman at the party.

‘Mark,’ she said, ‘can we do a statistical analysis of all the palmistry photographs?’

Mark looked surprised, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we can do that. It’s easy. But why? What are you looking for?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve got an idea. Maybe it’s a silly idea, but I want to compare all the photographs. Maybe we can find something in all of them. Something about the future.’

‘You mean . you mean a lot of short life lines?’

‘I hope not,’ said Rachel. ‘But it’s interesting, isn’t it? I want you to compare different towns and cities. Compare them with each other, and compare them with the country areas. I want statistics for different areas of the country.

We’ve got all this information in the computer. Why don’t we use it? You can do it, can’t you?’

‘Does Mervyn know about this?’ said Mark.

‘Not yet,’ said Rachel. ‘I probably won’t tell him either.’

‘You’re right,’ said Mark. ‘Mervyn won’t like it. He won’t like it at all. He’s frightened of the future. Did you know that? He’s never done his own horoscope on the computer. I wanted to do it when we were writing the program. We needed to try the program, but he didn’t want his horoscope, and he didn’t want a photograph of his hand, either. He was afraid.’

They both laughed.