INTERVENTION

by May, Julian; Dikty, Ted

  DENIS!

  Simultaneous with the farspoken hail came a terrific neural ignition, part orgasm and part high-voltage shock. My body convulsed and I fell heavily to the floor.

  [Images: Full-color 3-D Denis face stunned. Air Force helicopter open door blades windmill tearing fog fabric colored runway lights yellow Toyota Land Cruiser.]

  ???GoodGodUncleRogi??? What'sWRONG?

  ...sorry ... trying hard get your attention...

  ! You almost blasted me off my feet whatinhell you upto I suppose Glenn told you WhiteHouse summons...!!!...HOW DID YOU DO THAT?

  [Image drenched in sheepishness.] Outspiral chakra Leonardo's X with cyclotronic kundalini embellishment ... worked a little better than expected...

  Fuckingidiot! Don't you know that could be dangerous?

  Yes.

  Acute anxiety. Dammit bon sang d'imbécile you leave thatstuff alone until we go over it together I really mean what I say!

  Yesyesyes but had to reach you had to...[image].

  Concern. EdinburghDemo provoked fear? Explain.

  [Concatenated images.]

  Uncle Rogi ... what you need I can't do at a distance. But you must believe me when I tell you it will be all right. [Airman beckons inside chopper Denis nods ducks blades scurries into aircraft door shuts airman orders seat belt signals pilot upup&away.]

  Denis ... what President want?

  You can probably guess: my analysis assessment Scottelecast. Legit? Practicable solution armsrace? Howmany EEops potential US/USSR/ Scotland/Elsewhere? When online? Anychance Russ have jump on us already emplace their Psi-Eye?

  Psi-Eye!

  Prexyname ever the GreatSalesman. Fortunately can tell him Russ EEprogram controlled by Tamara [kiss!] she deceived Politburo re her project readiness so not emplaced. Russ EEops all peaceniks group purged of GRU/KGB/opportunist/fanatic heads last decade. Now Russ operants tend antiestablishment because "elitist phenom operancy" remains suspect under Marxist dogmatism. Tamara will see to honest observer team setup. There will be no war.

  That was never my worry. Too selfish...

  Then?

  [Projected image: Screaming figure waving camera disappears beneath bodycrush hauled up handcuffed dragged away.] Pandora's box ruin chaos anarchy and worse OUR EXPOSURE OURS DENIS!

  Difficult days yes there will have to be economic summits global cooperation in many other psychaffected areas—

  You don't understand yet what I've driving at! We will be pawns manipulated hated the coercers willbe offered power over others—

  This won't happen. Do you think we haven't anticipated such a thing? It was dealt with in the longrange plan that had to be scrapped but we will preserve our freedom and dignity. President wants set up MetaBrainTrust. Public. Plan for best use other operant faculties besides EE goodofcountry goodofworld. Guess who invited to be chairman?

  ! You had to write that goddam book.

  Relax. My forte research not administration. I'll decline with humblethanks let Brawley of Stanford or The Astronaut sit in Washington metahotseat.

  How can you not listen when 900-lb canary sings?

  Laughter. Now you know why I had no photo on bookjacket Metapsychology. All President has to do is take look at me [image] would YOU entrust Third Millennium diplomacy to halfbaked egghead twerp?...I'm safe plan propose myself special advisor sortof GrandYoungMan metapsychology.

  Denis ... are you going to tell him that you're operant?

  Yes. I'm sorry Uncle Rogi ... for your sake. But soonerorlater we have to come out with it.

  Despair. Later. Much later.

  Yes ... I argued JamieMacGregor pleaded caution wanted postpone until operants numerous more organized for selfpreservation and my training normals—› operancy proved feasible. But MacGregor cited increasing peril global war ... and another factor. He said: We are all members humanrace survive or perish together no Homosapiens vs Homosuperior only Homoterrestris. Earth Man.

  Resignation. Bitterness. Still terrible gamble Godsake nobody seriously believes Russ planning launch WorldWarlll—

  That was not deciding factor. I told you there was something else. Someone tried to kill Jamie in April. He was afraid his whole group endangered so decided to go to ground do demo soonest. His attacker not KGB/GRU/CIA/XXX. He was another powerful operant.

  Jésus Christ.

  Man coerced Jamie into darkalley physique metarendered fuzzy aimed tubething at paralyzed Jamie apologetic implacability just then muscleman in duffelcoat came scared off assailant was not affected coercion nextday Jamie examined alley found needle later analyzed coated deadly poison ricin favorite assassins no other clue attacker ... or rescuer. Damn worrying.

  Operant crooks in Scotland! So NewHampshire doesn't have monopoly afterall. [Familiar image quickly erased.]

  Jamie says coercive ability assassin formidable. Disguising of appearance interesting jibes with my currentstudies creativity—

  The mysterious power to cloud men's minds. The Shadow knows!...Or are you too young to know that nonsense?

  I've heard classic radiotapes. But apparently attacker not really invisible or passerby might not have saved Jamie. Affair peculiar. If not metagovenmentagent (impossible we would know) then who?

  Wild card. Odd John had one. Psychometa.

  Jamie positive attacker sane.

  You intend tell President metavillains atlarge?

  Will mention possibility. But this minor compared to prospect end nucleardeterrent.

  MacGregor figure he's safe now?

  He thinks now Psi-Eye scheme revealed danger minimal. Actually SwissBankAgentfakephotographer had best motive for offing Jamie. Perhaps metassassin another of theirs. Governments not only ones with valuable secrets.

  Be sure you tell President that. Eventually we'll need bodyguards and they come expensive.

  Hogwash.

  Pauvre innocent! Go go carry out great mission pray Goodness triumphs ... Were other academiclights also summoned President?

  He said no. Maybe later.

  Hah. So that's wayofit. By time you return Dartmouth you famous inspiteofself President will see to it whetherornot you agree head BrainTrust.

  Humor. It was the book. Talking heads come&go but if you write book you are AUTHORity.

  Laughter. Easing.

  ...Uncle Rogi we're approaching Burlington International. Please try not to worry. When I get home you must let me try to help you. (Yes yes I know how could I not tu es mon père!) Other Remillards all over US&Canada will find selves in your position after I exit metacloset. Most of them will cheerfully admit they haven't a metafaculty to save their lives. You can too. But it would be best if you didn't conceal your powers. Best for you for all operants as well. We must hurry day when operancy commonplace as musical/artistic/intellectual talent similarly unthreat to normals—damn!—there I go we're just as normal as they are aren't we?

  Pour sûr. [?]

  Nonoperants will realize in time that they have nothing to fear from us.

  But they do.

  Oh Uncle Rogi.

  ... and we have even more to fear from them. We're outnumbered.

  Exasperation. If you spent some time with us at the lab you'd know we're finding ways to ... neutralize ... antagonists. Peaceful ways. You and your oneman stand! You don't have to face this alone can't you see the only way is through solidarity even nonoperants know a lonemind is doomed there must be two or three or more loving for Love to heal and initiate transcendence please please monpère don't shut us out—

  We'll discuss later. Smallthing compared momentous events demanding your attention. You must not be distracted.

  We are landing ... Please Uncle Rogi please join us. [Guile.] You will ease my mind.

  Will think over carefully. Bon voyage et bonne chance mon fils.

  ***

  I stood looking out the window. Outside; the morning mist was burning away and the streetlights had gone out. I was hungry, very nearly cheerful, but still perversely de
termined to best my inner demons in single combat. I would certainly have to find out just what self-defensive maneuvers Denis and his people had discovered, but as to joining with them—letting Denis into the secret parts of my mind—it was impossible. A Franco father cannot stand naked before his son.

  As I stared at the passing cars below and the students hurrying up Main Street toward their early classes a mundane thought stole into my skull. If the presidential favor did confer fresh notoriety upon my nephew, there would surely be a great new demand for copies of Metapsychology. If I called the jobbers in Boston with a rush order, I could get a leg up on the competition at the big Dartmouth Bookstore down the street. And when Denis returned, I might prevail on him to do a signing session. He had never autographed copies of his book before, but he might agree to help me out.

  Just as I was turning away from the window my eyes focused upon the glass itself. I swore mildly. Some damn kid with a BB-gun must have been taking pot shots at squirrels. There was a small hole neatly drilled in one of the upper panes. But it was a strange hole, lacking the typical halo crater produced by the impact of a missile, and there were no cracks radiating from it. It was about a quarter of an inch in diameter and the edges were not sharp, but smooth. Perplexed, I studied the tiny opening, which was above my eye level. Then I went to a drawer in the kitchen and got a tape measure.

  The hole was six feet two inches above the floor, my exact height in bare feet. I felt a blob of warmth begin to form again behind my ribs. Wondering, I touched the top of my head.

  Surely not. But on the other hand...

  Denis would no doubt be eager to test it. Should I agree? Why not, provided the rest of my mind was left inviolate? I chuckled at the thought of the consternation this "mind-zap" power would provoke among the academics. Nothing in any of my readings on parapsychology had prepared me for an effect such as this, nor had there been any mention of it in the lengthy catalog of higher mental phenomena in Denis's book. Not only was my zapping new, it was also fraught with possibility...

  How d'you like them apples, Donnie? Maybe you better rest in peace if you know what's good for you, mon frérot!

  I went to the telephone. It was after 8:30 and the book jobber in Boston would be open. I decided to triple the order I had originally decided upon. Denis would beef about the autograph session, but he'd cooperate.

  Now I was certain of it.

  20

  ALMA-ATA, KAZAKH SSR, EARTH

  24 OCTOBER 1991

  ANY OTHER GENERAL Secretary would have commanded her immediate presence in Moscow before a Star Chamber tribunal. It was a mark of this man's populist style, and his shrewdness in dealing with the often nonconformist scientific element, that he came to her. He dismissed his hovering aides, sat casually in front of her desk in the small corner office of the Institute for Bioenergetic Studies at Kazakh State University, and chatted about the weather.

  Tamara served him tea without hurrying. Afterward she did not resume her normal seat behind the desk but pulled up a side chair next to him. They could both look out the window and see the high Tien Shan's white rampart in the south. The day was brilliant, but the first storm of the season was forecast for tomorrow. He would decline the proferred hospitality of the Kazakh Party Secretary and fly back to Moscow tonight.

  "And tell the comrades of the Politburo your elucidation of the Edinburgh Demonstration," he concluded, sipping the tea. "Delicious."

  "I have prepared a précis of our work on excorporeal excursion." She smiled winsomely, a plump, dark-eyed woman whose shining red hair was worn in a tidy knot, and indicated a sealed portfolio on the desk. "It also contains recommendations for the speedy establishment of a corps of psychic observers. I will be honored to cooperate in its deployment, of course."

  He eyed her over the rim of the tea glass. "Of course. I daresay we couldn't do without you..."

  She shrugged. "I know my people and their capabilities. This EE business is often more of an art than a science. You understand that the operants will require congenial working conditions in order to do their work properly. They are loyal Soviet citizens—you have my word of honor on it—but fully committed to peace."

  The General Secretary sighed. "This is going to be difficult."

  "For us," she said, "it has been difficult for twenty-five years."

  The General Secretary finished his tea and took up the portfolio. Unsealing it, he leafed through the papers. After a few minutes of silence, he said, "You were not at all surprised to see me come here, Comrade Doctor."

  "I confess that I was curious about the reaction of the Politburo to the Edinburgh Demonstration, as were all of my people. We did not think you would panic, but we had to be sure."

  "Radi Boga! You spied on us!"

  "And on the American President and his advisers, and on the leaders of the People's Republic of China, and on the Pope."

  "The Pope?" The General Secretary was taken aback. "What did he do?"

  "He wept, Mikhail Semyonovich."

  "And so did Comrade Dankov of the KGB," the Secretary muttered. "You will be interested to know—if you don't already—that the ever-vigilant comrades on Dzerzhinsky Square were foreskinned to a marked degree at your personal participation in the Edinburgh Demonstration. Dankov demanded the immediate liquidation of you and your entire cadre of wizards. It seems you have deceived your KGB sponsors rather spectacularly."

  "It was a matter of survival..."

  "As you know, Dankov was made to see reason. There was greater difficulty with the Defense Council. Marshal Kumylzhensky pushed for a pre-emptive nuclear strike. This is still a serious option if we do not have a competent EE inspection team to balance that in the West."

  "We have sixty-eight EE adepts, most with global faculties. It is an adequate number. The combined EE adepts of the West number more than eighty—over thirty in Britain, perhaps forty-five in the USA. There are also scattered groups of neutralist percipients in other countries. Their numbers will grow, as will our own."

  The little office was becoming chilly with the close of day, but the General Secretary's balding head had a gleam of sweat. "The militarist lunatics were voted down resoundingly for now. The Politburo knows that the present euphoric mood of our people would never countenance a first strike—no more than it would allow the psychics to be harmed. The people demand—demand!—that MacGregor's proposal be implemented."

  "There was dancing in the streets of Alma-Ata," Tamara said.

  "And in Moscow. And everywhere throughout the Soviet Union! By allowing them to view that telecast—and we are investigating that, too!—we have indeed opened the door to a new age. But that age may not be golden, as you and your idealistic associates hope, Tamara Petrovna. You know that I have been striving for years now to upgrade our faltering economy, to instill a new spirit of industry and progress into our people, to control military adventurism, to fight the ingrained corruption, the laziness, the despair infecting our youth ... And now, suddenly, there is this! Our enemies all around us will be thwarted in aggression by the psychic observers. The people will expect drastic disarmament initiatives. They will believe that reductions in our huge defense budget will bring about improved domestic conditions. For a while, they will wait patiently for this to come about. Perhaps they will wait as long as a decade, distracted by our travels to Mars and other wonders. But then..."

  "I read your subvocal thoughts, Comrade General Secretary. We are not a unified nation. Discipline and right order have up until now been preserved among our disparate ethnic elements primarily through the Great Russian bureaucracy, and the people's determination to stand fast and defend the Motherland against the common enemy."

  Smoothly, he took up the skein of his own thoughts again. "But without that enemy to distract us, the masses will look more critically at the kind of life they live—at the inefficiencies of our system, at the often unjust decrees of the central power structure, at our economy based upon obsolete philosophic principles
that falls further and further behind the other industrialized nations of the world ... Look into your crystal ball, Tamara Petrovna, you and your psychic colleagues with your shining dream of peace for the future! Will we have that peace in the Soviet Union? Will we be able to adapt fast enough to avoid catastrophe?"

  She turned her face away abruptly, lips tightening. "I don't know. Sometimes I do see the future. And far away ... years from now ... there is a great change, a time of expanding horizons, when our people will help to colonize the stars as we now seek to colonize Mars ... But the near future? I do not see that, Comrade General Secretary. Thank God I do not. The job of guiding our nation through the last perilous years of this twentieth century is yours, not mine—and I also thank God for that. Now take the portfolio with the details of the psychic-oversight scheme, and do what you must."

  "While you watch," he said.

  She rose from her chair, turning her back on him, and looked out at the gleaming mountains. "While the world watches."

  21

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  THE SPECIFICS OF the EE monitoring plan were promptly delivered to both Washington and Moscow, and a Summit was scheduled. The much-battered Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was dusted off, updated, and promised to an exultant world as a Christmas present.

  In the United States, the emplacement of Psi-Eye was considered a fait accompli by the general public—and the White House did nothing to discourage the impression, nor did the Soviets. Most people were happy to believe that vigilant American EE adepts (inevitably dubbed pEEps) had settled in on the job immediately following the Scottish telecast. There were "Big Brother Is Watching You" jokes and voyeuristic editorial cartoons, however, and a tentative panic on Wall Street that was quashed by the President in a brilliant personal appeal. Some nay-sayers recalled the madman who had tried to shoot MacGregor with a camera-gun, whose identity was released to the press by the British only after a question had been raised in Parliament. By and large, however, the United States reacted with happy exuberance to the Psi-Eye scheme. It was seen as a virtually foolproof reprieve from nuclear doomsday. The identities (and the numbers) of the pEEps were kept secret, of course; but everyone knew that they were en garde night and day, keeping a mind's eye out for potential Kremlin button-pushers—at the same time that their noble Russian opposite numbers scrutinized the U.S. Joint Chiefs sulking impotently in the Pentagon war-room.