Lloyd's Angel Ch. 02

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Unexplained Phenomena.
2.2k words
4.3
43.1k
3

Part 2 of the 18 part series

Updated 06/11/2023
Created 06/24/2011
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Lloyd's Angel: Unexplained Phenomena

November 1961

It was ludicrous, but I couldn't tell Dr. Reynolds that. I might have been short-sighted enough to tell him anyway, but my mouth and brain were frozen in stunned surprise until the opportunity was past.

Finally I just picked up the notes and left without saying anything. I was convinced none of this would have happened if Dr. Needum hadn't been on sabbatical, but he was -- and my Ph.D. prospects were in Dr. Reynolds' hands for this academic year.

It was expected that Reynolds would have me doing his scutwork. It was, perhaps, bearable that he had me doing busywork for the benefit of his own graduate students; I could expect they might feel they owed me a favor in return some day. Accusing me of deliberately sabotaging one of his researcher's experiments was nearly unbearable; not least because the accusation was completely unfounded.

Now I was committed to spending the weekend before Thanksgiving, including my birthday, redoing some screw-up Master candidate's work so I could prove that I was innocent of malfeasance. What a farce. The worst part was that it was all statistics, which I hated. I'd seen math wizards who could make their slide rules fly, but I wasn't one of them.

I started after dinner, putting aside my own dissertation and research notes, and proceeded to cover my desk with neat stacks of paper. By the time I'd finished sorting, I'd remembered the experiment they described. It had been another deadly dull survey intended to measure attitudes across the student body; anybody with any excuse had contrived to be unavailable and Reynolds had started drafting the unwary -- like me -- to assist.

Reynolds' student, Alex, had claimed I had messed up my interviews and thrown off the entire study. More precisely, my data was skewed enough from the other interviewers' data that the uncertainty intervals became absurdly large. Removing my data reduced the population sufficiently that it was no longer possible to draw statistically significant inferences, even if the act of removing them didn't raise questions about the survey's methodology.

The survey was too simple to screw up. The interviewer showed the subject a pair of pictures, and recorded which was preferred. Then repeat about a hundred times. There were a lot of pictures, all carefully ordered and categorized so as to eliminate bias and allow conclusions to be based on the subject's demographic. It was deadly dull, but I knew I hadn't messed it up -- which meant the math claiming I did was wrong.

My problem was that by Saturday afternoon, it didn't look like the math was wrong after all. Sure, I'd done it five times and gotten three different answers, but I was beginning to think the accusation was correct -- or there was something subtly wrong with the experiment and nobody else had picked up on it. I changed tack and started looking for patterns in the data for my surveys.

I stumbled across it after dinner, and ended up awake well past midnight trying to confirm it. When I looked at my interviews in chronological order, I found the deviations were greatest with the first interviews of the day, and decreased until they became indistinguishable from the data collected by other interviewers. The other interesting quirk was that the deviations seemed to be generally in the same direction.

By Sunday afternoon, I had established a statistically significant trend existed; responses at the beginning of each day tended to converge, and responses at the end of each day tended to match the overall survey results. I also knew that I didn't know enough to take things any further. Since there was no way I was going to go to Reynolds and tell him that without knowing why, my obvious next step was to find Alex and talk to him.

I hurried through my own class Monday and let my students go a few minutes early so I could get across the quad before the end of the period. I'd never met him, but a glance at the schedule showed Alex was teaching a recitation section of Reynolds' Introduction to Psychology class; I figured it would be easy enough to intercept him at the end of the hour and introduce myself.

The students were already bolting from the classroom when I rounded the corner, so I let the mob pass before poking my head in the door. My first thought was that I'd missed Alex; the only person remaining in the room was a stunning blonde transferring some papers into a briefcase. I paused to admire the view for a moment, until it was clear she'd noticed me.

"Yes?" she prompted, obviously less taken with me than I with her. "Did you want something?"

"I was looking for Alex Sullivan; do you know where I can find him?"

The blonde barked a brief, unhappy laugh. "I'm Alexandra Sullivan -- what did you want?"

I walked a little further into the classroom. "I wanted to talk with you about your popular opinion survey." Her expression lightened, until I added, "My name is Lloyd Parker."

"You!" I think if she'd had something heavier in her hand than paper, she would have thrown it. "Do you know what kind of mess you've caused?"

Holding up both hands in self-defense, I admitted, "Yes; Dr. Reynolds pointed it out to me last week, rather forcefully!"

I thought perhaps her stern expression wavered a little bit. "Do you know how many weeks this is going to set me back while I repeat those surveys? I was supposed to have the next draft of my thesis submitted before the holiday break!"

"Hey, I'm really sorry about that. I looked at the data all weekend, and I agree that something funny happened, but I honestly don't think I did anything and I don't know how to explain it. I was hoping maybe you would spot something I missed."

It looked like she wanted to refuse, but nobody I knew put in the effort it took for post-graduate work unless it really meant something to them. "Yeah, okay," Alexandra sighed. "I have office hours, but I think everybody is already thinking about Thanksgiving. Listening to you might be more entertaining than wondering how to salvage my study." She finished filling her briefcase and we headed out.

It turned out she had half of a small office on the third floor. It was, as she'd predicted, deserted. Unlike my basement lair on the other side of campus, it sported a window, but the folded towel stuffed along the bottom of the pane suggested this wasn't the best time of year to appreciate it.

Alexandra set her briefcase on the desk in one corner, leaned against the wall next to the radiator, and turned her blue eyes on me. "Go ahead, Lloyd -- impress me." Her crossed arms and body language suggested she wasn't expecting much.

In other circumstances, I might have been intimidated -- I didn't run across really attractive postgraduate coeds every day -- but my mind was already focused on the puzzle I'd turned up the previous afternoon. I plopped my own briefcase atop the bare table in the center of the office, extracted my quasi-legible notes, and started talking.

She lasted about five minutes before abandoning the radiator and trying to read my notes upside down. That lasted about a minute before she was standing beside me trying, with equal lack of success, to read my notes right side up. "Can you read these?" Alexandra asked in annoyance, before proceeding to barrage me with a stream of increasingly pointed questions.

We'd been alternating at the chalkboard and pacing back and forth arguing for some time when I finally noticed it was dark outside and my stomach was rumbling. "Hey, it's late; would you like to continue this over dinner?"

"Oh!" Alexandra had been pretty animated, but she visibly shut down as her sense of surroundings returned and she looked at the clock. "I'm sorry, Lloyd, but I don't think that would be appropriate."

"Maybe a cup of coffee, then?" I suggested, unwilling to let things go without making another try.

"Thank you, but no." I would have felt better if she'd shown at least a little regret.

I belatedly noticed she was wearing an engagement ring, although not a wedding band. Smooth move, Lloyd, I told myself in disgust. "Okay, well, thanks for listening," I told her, trying to smooth over the awkward spot. "Let me know if you figure out anything, will you?"

"Certainly," Alexandra said, a bit distantly.

Probably I'd never hear from her again, but hopefully at least I'd done enough to get off of Dr. Reynolds' shit list. "Good night," I told her, and walked out.

It was hard to get going on Monday morning. The roads hadn't been good Sunday, and although my ten-year-old Ford would probably live to run me into the ground, the tires were a little bald and I'd been sane enough to drive slowly. One of the perks of being an advanced student was the avoidance of early morning classes, but apparently nobody had told Dr. Reynolds that.

Another of his annoying qualities was a bizarre fondness for early morning status meetings, which this semester were every Monday and Friday. I told myself that I was lucky he'd let me skip the post-Thanksgiving meeting, but I was still in a bad mood when I stumped into his office.

I was surprised to see Alexandra waiting in his office, apparently for me.

"Now, Alex tells me you're willing to work with her to correct your little mishap, Lloyd," he said without anything in the way of a preamble. "Commendable, my boy, commendable."

That wasn't the way I remembered leaving things and I was trying to collect my wits enough to respond when Alexandra, who also wore a pained expression, spoke up. "Um, Dr. Reynolds, what I had meant to suggest was that Lloyd perhaps could assist with a follow-on study to determine the source of the error in the original."

"Well, of course!" Reynolds chuckled. "Of course he'll assist you; that's what collaboration is all about, right? I expect to hear details on your plan come Friday, now. Carry on!"

I hated morning people. I was really tempted to hate Alexandra, too; my own dissertation had just been sidetracked indefinitely and Reynolds effectively had put me in the role of an assistant to a researcher who was junior to me. However, it was hard to hate a girl as beautiful as Alexandra, and in all fairness, she didn't seem much happier about it than I.

"Your place or mine?" I asked as we stood in the hallway.

"Uugh!" she cursed a moment later after the double entrendre sank in. Alexandra turned away without another word and stalked toward the stairs.

Dr. Reynolds could still see me from his chair, so I hastily scampered after Alexandra, catching up with her as she started upward. Apparently, she preferred her office to mine.

"Just be quiet!" she snarled, before I even opened my mouth. "Do you know how hard it is to be a woman? Nobody takes you seriously! I use 'Alex' for a pen name so I can get published." She was stomping up the stairs rather noisily. "I've spent years trying to get men to treat me like somebody competent, and then this happens!"

Alexandra stopped abruptly and turned to face me. "You know what they're going to say about this..."

She was two steps above me; I forced my eyes up to her face. "What?"

"Oh, Alexandra just got her math wrong; it's so hard for her. Luckily she'll have Lloyd to help keep her from getting into trouble now!" She twitched as if she'd been planning to throw up her hands and discovered one of them burdened by her briefcase. "Aaaaah!"

I couldn't help it; I laughed in her face. "One of NASA's chimpanzees probably can do better math than I can! Besides," I continued, "how do you think I feel about this? I'm a doctoral candidate, for crying out loud; I should be conducting my own research, not assisting some... graduate study."

Visibly clenching her teeth, she replied, "Well, I guess we can agree that neither of us wants to be doing this."

Glumly nodding, I couldn't resist adding, "And Dr. Reynolds could care less what we think, so we're stuck doing it anyway."

Alexandra sighed in agreement and resumed her climb.

That conversation pretty much foreshadowed the short remainder of the semester. I became a fixture in Alexandra's office. Her officemate, Susan, silently procured an additional chair from somewhere, further cramping the already-tight space. After her initial stairwell explosion, Alexandra remained punctuously correct but distant. I dreaded those sessions, but the kibitzing Susan, who was rather more taken with my exalted status than was Alexandra, interjected enough humor to keep them bearable.

We wasted the rest of the month re-interviewing subjects, comparing results, and checking math, to no avail. Alexandra surveyed students I'd interviewed earlier in the semester, and, while there were some minor variations, got basically the same results I had. I repeated some of her interviews, with Alexandra watching me like a hawk, with the same lack of useful results. All of us got a lot better at statistics, but the numbers stubbornly insisted that "my" interviewees had noticeably different preferences than their peers, regardless of demographic. I left for Christmas wondering if pumping gas was such a bad living after all.

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diggypopdiggypopabout 12 years ago
An actual story...

...and one that doesn't spell everything out in the beginning, either. Only quibble I have is that the first chapter DOES over-explain, we don't need to know Angel and Angela are the same people out of the gate, for instance. If you ever publish this, I'd say leave as much mystery as possible in the early stages. But I understand the concern w/ confusing your readers, especially considering how most people read on the web.

Regardless, you have ME hooked.

VirtualScottVirtualScottover 12 years agoAuthor
You can't win... ;-)

This really is all one story, which is told using interleaved timelines (or flashbacks, if you prefer).

I posted the chapters separately only because the last time I posted a long story, I did it in one piece and got numerous negative comments telling me it was too long and I should have posted in parts.

My intent really is that you should start with chapter 1 and proceed in order all the way through chapter 18. (Not all of them have made it through approval as I write this.)

Apologies for the confusion,

-VS

SouthernPassion53SouthernPassion53over 12 years ago
An enigma, within a puzzle

Same title, same main character, but what in the hell is the connection? A paragraph at the beginning woulld have done wonders to tie the two together. As it is you have a prequel that hasn't been tied to the first chapter in any way at all.

AnonymousAnonymousover 12 years ago
Missed a bit!

This has come form the EMCSA website. There is a bit about reminiscing on how he discovered his ability.

I THINK that it is the same author, but I'm not sure....

AnonymousAnonymousover 12 years ago
ummm

we come into a different story already in progress or something?

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