The Link by Richard Matheson

repeats.
    She nods, looking unconvinced. Then she murmurs, “I just want to know.”
    He waits as she struggles for the words. At last, she must blurt them out, her voice breaking slightly. “Am I going crazy?”
    “No.” She looks surprised at the sharpness of his tone. He apologizes. “Sweetheart, no,” he says. “You aren’t going crazy. No one’s telling you that, are they?”
    She shakes her head. “It’s just what I’ve been thinking.”
    Worriedly, Robert drives into Manhattan, parking on the outskirts and cabbing to the ESPA offices. There he meets the Association head LEE EASTON and is given a brief tour of the facilities by Peter. Cathy is “in the field”, working with a subject at ESPA who is trying his luck at distance perception. She’ll be back soon.
    “How’s your wife?” inquires Robert.
    “Better now, thank you,” Peter says. “She had the tooth taken out this morning, poor dear.”
    During the tour, Robert learns that almost all of Cathy’s fee for her year at ESPA will be donated to their group in London. “Harry, of course, provides the bulk of her living expenses,” Peter says.
    He also learns that both she and Peter (along with those at ESPA) use as the premise of their work the assumption that all psi is caused by human “energy fields”, a kind of force envelope surrounding the human system which possesses an as yet unexplained interconnectedness with the fields of other systems both organic and inorganic.
    “The aura?” Robert asks.
    “If you will,” says Peter.
    As he shows the ESPA plant to Robert, he comments on the implications of this human energy field.
    “Consider how we all partake of it in our daily lives,” he says. “Who, for instance, handles your belongings, touches your food? Who sends out ‘bad vibes’ as opposed to ‘good’. Think of the incalculable fields of energy which saturate your average metropolis.
    “Think of slums. Jails. Hospitals. Restaurants. Theatres. Department stores. The streets themselves, teeming with God knows what floods of positive and negative energies.
    “Not only in the people. In the pavements we walk, the buildings we inhabit, the furniture we sit on, the vehicles we ride, the very clothes and jewelry we wear.
    “Consider, if you will,” he adds, “the psychiatric couch. All those patients ‘bleeding’ their ruptured energy fields into the upholstery where they remain to be soaked up by other patients.
Brr.”
    “Stop, I’m going back to Connecticut,” Robert protests, smiling.
    Peter points at him. “Indeed,” he says. “The woods. The trees. The streams. The meadows. Also energy fields. But fields of such beneficence. How does the old song go?
It’s so peaceful in the country. It’s so lovely and quiet; you really ought to try it
. God’s truth.”
    During this exchange, we see the following:
    A subject attempting to describe color slides viewed by another person in a closed-off room, the subject wearing headphones through which she listens to the sounds of ocean waves, her eyes covered by ping-pong ball halves; the “Ganzfeld” technique.
    Another subject working on a machine, attempting to choose a number from one to four, the correct number identifying the appropriate 35mm color transparency of a scene in New York City, the slide choice made automatically by a random target generator.
    Another subject trying to identify the transmission of taste; a hypnotized woman sitting front of a man who puts pepper in his mouth so that the hypnotized woman sneezes.
    Another subject working on a machine which indicates ten numbers with bulbs beside them. The subject runs his hand over the numbers while, in another room, the sender “tells” him which one to point at when the random selector lights up a number on the sender’s identical machine.
    Another subject tested telepathically, the blood supply of a finger measured with a Pthysmograph. As she picks up emotionally charged stimulus words given to her by