Author: Virtual Scott
Title: Lloyd's Angel
Part: 2 of 18
Summary: Lloyd discovers he has the ability to influence others with his mind;
can he think with his head instead of his cock as he struggles to control
his gift and come to terms with its ethical implications?
Keywords: mc nosex

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.