INTERVENTION

by May, Julian; Dikty, Ted

  The children stared at him blankly. Their minds shared subliminal comments that were as incomprehensible to Pyotr as the twittering of bats.

  "Don't you see?" the old man said desperately. "My terrible headache was part of it, and I saw colored auras around the rocks as well. The important point is, I've had this type of experience before just prior to earthquakes, but I never realized its significance. Now I'm positive! Yes! It must be some new kind of psychic power—different from the telepathy or psychokinesis or out-of-body travel that your parents study at the Bioenergetics Institute. We must go home at once and tell them about it! It will be a wonderful surprise, and now perhaps they won't feel I'm such a useless burden—"

  "You aren't a burden, Grandfather," Valery said, but his smile was remote.

  "Do we have to go home?" Ilya's mouth turned down at the corners. "You said we'd stay until eighteen hours. I want to skate some more. I didn't feel any earthquake."

  Valery gave him a poke.

  Anna threw her arms around Pyotr's legs and peeped up at him. "I know you have the soul, Dedushka. Never mind what they think."

  A coldness crept over Pyotr. The colorful whirl of skaters was growing shadowy as dusk fell, and the music now seemed harsh. All of a sudden the great banks of stadium floodlights flashed on, nearly blinding him with their reflection off the ice. Could he have imagined the entire episode? Was it only the wish-fulfillment of a septuagenarian fool? Or—more ominously—might he have suffered a small stroke? (The symptoms were suggestive, even to a rusty psychiatrist like himself.)

  "There was a small earthquake," he said firmly. It was real, my children! Believe me don't shut me out read it in my memories accept my mind-opening accept me...

  They stood in a row looking at him, opaque—even the dear little Anna—seeming to weigh him among themselves. He tried to relax. He tried with all his heart to love them and not fear them, this new generation for whom he had suffered so much, whose freedom he had championed at the cost of his own liberty and professional advancement. It had been rather easy to do when the truly alien young minds were yet unborn, when there were only Tamara and Yuri (then called Jerzy) and a handful of other frightened, gifted ones in danger of exploitation by the military and the GRU fanatics under Kolinsky. Pyotr had demanded that they be treated as Soviet citizens, not guinea pigs; and through his international professional contacts he had publicized some of the dubious directions that psychic research was taking in his country during the late 1960s and '70s. He had sounded warnings—and he had been silenced. But things changed for the better.

  The children stared. Anna smiled first, and then Valery, and finally Ilya, who said:

  "Yes, let's go home and tell Mama and Papa."

  "Zamechatel'no!" Pyotr whispered, lowering his head so they would not see his tears. Then they all trooped down to the cloakroom.

  ***

  When they arrived at the big apartment in the new university quarter of Alma-Ata, the children ran down the hall ahead of Pyotr and burst into the kitchen where Tamara and Yuri were preparing dinner together, as was their custom when Yuri did not feel too exhausted after work. The unmistakable aroma of homemade kielbasa permeated the room, and Tamara was just lifting kachapuri, delectable Georgian cheese tarts, from the oven. With a great deal of shouting and jumping up and down, the children announced their grandfather's claim to a new psychic power. Anna still maintained that she had felt the tremor and experienced the terrestrial aura effect "just like Dedushka."

  "Oh, I don't think she did," the old man protested. "Perhaps it was all my imagination after all." He wilted under the barrage of juvenile protest and lifted his hands helplessly. "Now I scarcely know myself whether or not it really happened."

  Yuri untied his apron after covering the simmering kettle of sausage and cabbage. "Come along with me, Papa. We'll leave these Red Indians for Tamara to pacify and find something to steady your nerves."

  They went into the young biophysicist's cozy, messy little study and closed the door. Pyotr sank into an overstuffed lounge chair while his son-in-law poured brandy into a large glass from a leather-bound bottle.

  "Not so much, Yuri! You mustn't waste it on a deluded old fool."

  "Drink. Then we'll find out what you've been up to." Gawrys sat down at his desk and shoved aside dog-eared publications and stacks of correspondence. He formed his thin fingers into a steeple and studied the bluish nails, his pallid features in repose and his hair falling lankly over his high forehead. He took none of the brandy.

  "What we really ought to do," Pyotr mumbled, his face in the glass, "is check with the university to see whether or not there was a small earthquake at about four-thirty this afternoon."

  "Tamara is attending to it."

  "Oh. Of course." Even after living with them for more than two weeks, he never ceased to be amazed by the domestic interaction of practicing telepaths. Pyotr took a hefty swig of the brandy. It was Georgian, not Kazakh, mellow and earthy. Pyotr sighed. "It really did happen, you know."

  "A psychic response to seismic activity is not unknown to science," Yuri remarked. "Other persons have described similar experiences."

  "Then it may be that I am a genuine extrasensor?" The old man half rose from his chair in his eagerness.

  Yuri Gawrys lifted his eyes. They were dark blue, like the lapis lazuli stones Pyotr remembered inset in the silver knife-scabbard of Seliac Eshba, the patriarch of Verkhnyaya Bzyb. "Would you like to tell me about the other times you sensed impending earthquakes?"

  "It happened twice before. The first was in 1966, before I got into trouble fending the jackals off from Tamara. There was a conference on mental health in Tashkent, in April."

  "Yes ... a great quake devastated the city then."

  "When I arrived at the airport I began to suffer the same kind of headache, the same vision of ghostly luminosity playing about the earth's surface. And when the first shock occurred, my symptoms vanished. But there was so much confusion in the aftermath—our hotel was damaged, you see—that I never made the connection. Then last year in Ulan-Ude there was a rather small tremor. I read about it the next day in the newspaper and wondered a bit, but at the time I was distracted. It was December, when you suffered your second heart attack, and—"

  "Yes, Papa, yes." Yuri made an impatient gesture. "You are very lucky to be a sturdy Georgian rather than a Polack with an unfortunate history of cardiac insufficiency. And there is so much work yet to be done ... especially now, when we are about to enter into a new, positive phase of psychic research at the university."

  Pyotr's jaw dropped. "But the KGB-sponsored programs of bioenergetic weaponry! Surely you will remain locked into them indefinitely—"

  "Andropov is dying," said Yuri. "He will not last another month. And when he goes, so will the KGB's stranglehold on our work. He was the one, together with Fleet Admiral Gorshkov, who originally saw aggressive potential in psychic faculties. While Andropov headed the KGB, he took a personal interest in the guidance of psychic research in the Soviet Union. You know, of course, that Secretary Brezhnev was himself treated by a psychic healer, and was completely in accord with Andropov's mind-war schemes."

  Pyotr nodded.

  "When Andropov finally took over as Party Secretary he was already deathly ill. His grip on us slowly loosened. The awful days of summer 1979, when Simonov and others of his perverted ilk violated the American President's mind during the SALT II signings in Vienna, will not soon come again." Yuri Gawrys's smile was terrible. "We have weeded our mental garden at Kazakh State University's Institute of Bioenergetics. The job was a long one, but it is complete. The last poisonous growth was uprooted only last December. By me, personally."

  "Radi Boga! Your heart attack—"

  "We all have a certain price to pay, Pyotr Sergeyevich. You have paid yours and I, mine. For the soul."

  "What will happen when Andropov goes?" asked the psychiatrist.

  "There will be a holding action by the old guard, a caretak
er put in place while young Gorbachev and Romanov fight their duel. Whichever wins, we will be safe. They are both well-educated technocrats who have no patience with ... the unconventional. They will forcibly retire Admiral Gorshkov and we shall probably find that our funding is drastically reduced. It is laser and particle-beam research that will get the rubles now."

  "But—" Pyotr hesitated.

  "Shall I read your thought?" Yuri inquired, smiling gently now. "This cutback will actually benefit us. The essential work—the gathering together of the psychically gifted here at the Institute—has already been done. We may deplore that these young people were taken from their families, as Tamara and I were, but in the larger view it is all for the best. Now that our minds are linked, we will always remain in contact with one another. The garden, Papa! The garden will grow."

  The old man sipped his brandy, unable to respond. After a few minutes the door opened and Tamara came in, buxom and radiant, her bright auburn hair struggling out of its confining chignon.

  "I have spoken to Akhmet Ismailov at the Geophysical Observatory. At precisely eighteen-twenty-eight hours there was a minor earth tremor measuring two point four on the Richter Scale. Its epicenter was about thirty kilometers south of Medeo, in the Zailiyskiy Ala-Tau."

  "Ah!" cried Pyotr. "I am one of you! I ami"

  Tamara kissed the top of his head, where a few sand-colored hairs still grew. "Of course you are. You would be even if your head were stuffed with sawdust, instead of wise old brains that may be very valuable to our work."

  "You really think that I can help you, daughter? You aren't simply humoring me?"

  Tamara laughed. "Alma-Ata is in a zone of seismic instability. We have minor tremors often, and an occasional large one. Our buildings are specially engineered for safety. If you live here with us, Papa, your extrasense may get more of a workout than you would like. You may end up wishing that you were back in Ulan-Ude, shrinking Mongolian nut-cases! ... Now please wash up for dinner."

  When Pyotr had gone out, Tamara said to her husband, "The faculty is of a certain theoretical interest, and it will help Papa to adjust to us. He was afraid, you know."

  Yuri got up from his chair. "I told him—obliquely, but he understood—about our Black Frost."

  "Was that wise?"

  "He had to know that our group is trustworthy, and that we are not without means of self-defense. I spoke only of my own role in the terminations."

  "There must be no more of them! We must find other ways!"

  "Hush." He took both her hands and pressed them to his cool lips. "We will find other ways. But above all, we must survive, my darling. Otherwise, the plan will not succeed and it will all have been for nothing."

  "The soul," she whispered. "The poor soul of our people. Why must it have this terrible dark side? But it has always been so. We progress only through violence, never through reasoning and love."

  "The normals of our nation will have to be taught to love us. It will not be an easy lesson. The plan that we have worked so hard on promises a way, but it cannot be put into force for many years yet. I do not have those years. It will be up to you to be strong. To defend all your mind-children from those who would destroy or pervert them. This Alma-Ata group must survive and link up with the others in other nations, with the World Soul, Tamara. Until then, the children must endure in a wilderness, defended by a valiant mother." He looked down at her, full of pity. She was twenty-six.

  "I will try to find peaceful ways," she said. "If they fail, then I will do as you have taught me."

  6

  EXCERPTS FROM!

  ADDRESS GIVEN BY YASUHIRO NAKASONE,

  PRIME MINISTER OF JAPAN, AT THE

  GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS

  UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK, EARTH

  23 OCTOBER 1985

  AT THE TIME the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco on 26 June 1945, Japan was waging a desperate and lonely war against over forty-odd Allied countries. Since the end of that war, Japan has profoundly regretted the ultranationalism and militarism it unleashed, and the untold suffering the war inflicted upon peoples around the world and, indeed, upon its own people.

  As the only people ever to have experienced the devastation of the atomic bomb, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese people have steadfastly called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy should be used exclusively for peaceful purposes; it must never again be employed as a means of destruction.

  We believe that all living things—humans, animals, trees, grasses—are essentially brothers and sisters, [and yet] our generation is recklessly destroying the natural environment which has evolved over the course of millions of years and is essential for our survival. Our soil, water, air, flora and fauna are being subjected to the most barbaric attacks since the earth was created. This folly can only be suicidal.

  Man is born by the grace of the great universe:

  Afar and above the dark and endless sky,

  the Milky Way runs

  toward the place I come from.

  7

  HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH

  19 SEPTEMBER 1987

  THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON was classic autumnal Ivy League, with a clear blue sky above broad-leaved trees that were just beginning to ignite in their fall colors. Lucille Cartier was glad to be back at Dartmouth, glad that Doctor Bill had agreed to resume counseling her, happiest of all that the damn dreams had gone away with her return to the campus, and that there was as yet no sign of subversive mental influence from Remillard's Coterie.

  She bicycled to her shrink session, going the long way around Occom Pond and approaching the Mental Health Center via Maynard Street. She arrived with ten minutes to spare, dismounted in a shady spot by the main entrance, and took slow, deep breaths.

  I am not resisting therapy. It will help me. I need help and welcome it. I am glad to be here...

  She lifted her eyes, looked across Maynard, across the big Hitchcock Hospital parking lot, across busy College Street. And there it was, not five hundred feet away, an old gray saltbox building that hulked among spindly birches and dark evergreens like a haunted house out of a Stephen King novel, its windows blank-eyed and sinister.

  You won't put me off! I'm not afraid of you. To hell with you and your Coterie. I defy you!

  Recklessly, she hopped back on her bicycle and zoomed across the road to stand in the very forecourt of 45 College Street. There were only two cars parked beside the saltbox—Glenn Dalembert's old Mustang with the odd-colored door, and a spiffy new Lincoln with Massachusetts plates, no doubt belonging to some visitor.

  You see? I'm back. You couldn't scare me away. I don't need you and I won't let you harass me. You can't recruit me against my will like you did Donna Chan and Dane Gwaltney. I'll live my own life, thank you very much ... and I'll integrate my freak brain without surrendering to any mind-worm collective!

  The saltbox building was utterly still, without telepathic response. And then Lucille realized that she had been using his private wavelength, what the mind-worms called a "mental signature," perceptible to him alone. Obviously, he wasn't even here today. Her gesture of defiance was futile.

  Or was it? She felt quite a bit better inside! For good measure, she gave Dr. Denis Remillard's laboratory the finger, and then she rode her bicycle back to Maynard Street, parked it in the Mental Health Center rack, and went inside to keep her appointment.

  ***

  DR. SAMPSON: I'm very glad you decided to resume therapy, Lucille. I presume this means that you've decided to remain at Dartmouth rather than transfer to Rivier College for your senior year.

  LUCILLE: Yes. That idea turned out to be a mistake, Doctor Bill.

  SAMPSON: Would you like to tell me why you changed your mind?

  LUCILLE: We—you and I—didn't seem to be getting anywhere with the therapy last term. And I was miserable here anyway, worrying about Mom having to cope with Dad all by herself besides teaching at the high school. I tho
ught I'd solve that problem and help my own feelings of anxiety and guilt by simply going back home. I could day-hop to Rivier and complete my degree, and help Mom with Dad and the housework just like before. When I went back to Nashua for the summer break I felt pretty good for a few weeks ... but then the old shit started all over again.

  SAMPSON: The anxiety and insomnia?

  LUCILLE: [laughs] Don't I wish that was all!...Look, Doctor Bill, I've got a confession to make. I haven't been completely honest with you. I didn't tell you all my symptoms.

  SAMPSON: Why not?

  LUCILLE: I was afraid to. If the college found out, they'd want to bounce me.

  SAMPSON: [mildly] You know our relationship is confidential.

  LUCILLE: Even so ... it's so weird, you see. And it would interest—never mind. I didn't think I had to mention it because I hadn't had the thing for a long time. Not since I was thirteen, bucking the puberty blues.

  SAMPSON: Would you like to tell me about it now?

  LUCILLE: I've got to. It's back. Going home again, living with my parents this summer, triggered it. I didn't say anything to them—they would have been scared to death, like they were the other time. You're my only hope now, you see. I won't go to Remillard! I won't!

  SAMPSON: [nonplussed] Denis Remillard? Of the parapsychology lab?

  LUCILLE: It's his fault it's come back! Damn him and his meddling! If he had only let me alone—

  SAMPSON: [making a note on his pad] Lucille ... Stop for a moment and relax. Then let's try to concentrate on this mysterious symptom you neglected to mention.

  LUCILLE: All right. It goes back to when I was thirteen. The attacks of creepiness, nerves, anxiety—they really began then. And I also had nightmares. And then ... the house burned down. I did it.