INTERVENTION

by May, Julian; Dikty, Ted

  Not caring who overheard his dark thoughts, Colonel Sergei Arkhipov walked along Lenin Prospect to the Arman Café. He had only forty-five minutes to grab a bite to eat, and then he would have to go out to the Alma-Ata KGB HQ and liaise with the locals prior to the General Secretary's arrival at the air terminal. His opposite number had issued a supper invitation that Sergei had declined. He wanted to coddle his stomach in peace.

  He peered into the café. There was a waiting line, of course, and many of the persons standing there wore the red and green delegate badges of the Sixth Congress on Metapsychology. Sergei pushed past them, ready to flash his KGB card, confident of being shown immediately to an empty table.

  And so he was. But as he settled down with the menu he was astounded to see another man approach his table, grinning in a cocksure fashion, and pull out a chair.

  Sergei opened his mouth to put the upstart in his place. It was a dapper little fellow, obviously a foreigner, whose badge read: J. SMITH—SIMON FRASER UNIV.—VANCOUVER CANADA. His two upper incisors were comically large, like those of a squirrel.

  Sergei closed his mouth. He had to. J. Smith's coercion had taken control of him as though he were a wooden marionette.

  "Hey there, Sergei! How you doing, old hoss?" The Fabulous Finster snapped his fingers and a waitress rushed over with another menu before he even drew his chair up to the table. "Been a few years since we pub-crawled in Edinburgh, eh? We've got a whole lotta catching up to do... By the way, you heard the sad news from Tashkent? The Grand Mufti of Central Asia was assassinated. Terrible thing. The poor old guy's head burst into flame just as he was going into the Barak-Khana Mosque and the whole goddam city's gone ape. They think some perverted metapsychic operant musta been responsible. I couldn't get out fast enough this afternoon, I'll tell you. I was lucky to get a plane ... Well! Enough of that. What d'you say we order, eh?"

  "Yes. Certainly." Sergei heard the voice coming from far away. Surely, he thought, it could not be his own.

  ***

  Dr. Pyotr Sakhvadze regarded the enormous silver platter and its contents with undisguised consternation.

  "But this is a great honor for you!" the mâitre d' insisted. His Kazakh mustachios bristled and he was slightly miffed. It was obvious that the kitchen staff of the big hotel had gone to considerable trouble to produce the special tribute. "You are the aksakal, the Whitebeard of the Feast! You must carve the dish and distribute it to the other guests, who have ordered this traditional delicacy in celebration of your eighty-third birthday. Bon appétit!"

  He placed the carving tools in front of Pyotr and withdrew, full of dignity. Most of the others at the table—his grandchildren, his daughter Tamara and her colleagues the Kizims, and the three foreign guests—were applauding and laughing. Telepathic jests crackled in the aether so energetically that Pyotr could almost (but not quite) understand them.

  On the platter, the braised whole lamb's head seemed to stare at him with an air of jaunty mockery. One ear was up and the other down. Quail eggs stuffed with ripe olives formed its eyes, and it had a peeled ruby pomegranate in its mouth and a collar of lacy gold paper. The head perched upon a steaming bed of besbarmak, the famous Kazakh lamb and noodle stew. Pyotr, as designated aksakal, was not only expected to serve this outlandish culinary triumph, but he was also obliged to accompany each portion of head-meat with a suitable witticism.

  "We operants only think we've got troubles," Pyotr said to the lamb's head. "You, in your position, you know you've got troubles."

  Everybody laughed and radiated sympathy except for his oldest grandson Valéry, whom Pyotr had teased mercilessly last week for mooning over a young woman who would have nothing to do with him. Now innocence poured from Valya's mind like watered honey, but his close-set Polish blue eyes had a suspicious gleam. So! He was the one responsible for this, was he?

  Pyotr cleared his throat and continued. "I am only a decrepit psychiatrist, not a faciocephalic surgeon. If I were to serve this head, I fear I would do it so slowly that we would be here all evening and miss the distinguished speakers who will honor us with their presence later in the Palace of Culture. And so it is with pleasure—to say nothing of relief—that I delegate the carving of this pièce de résistance to the founder of the feast, Valéry Yurievich, whose idea it was to honor me in this unusual way. It is the custom, I know, for the aksakal to cut off and present to a favored guest that anatomical portion of meat most appropriate to his nature. But alas, I cannot give my dear grandson the part he deserves. The chef has cooked for us the wrong end of the sheep."

  He bowed and sat down to uproarious laughter and clapping. Valery had turned red to the tips of his ears.

  Tamara, who sat at the foot of the table, addressed her son. "I left the arrangements to you, and you play undergraduate pranks! Now how are we going to eat this monstrosity?"

  The American, Denis Remillard, sitting on Pyotr's right, had his strange compelling glance fixed on the swinging doors of the restaurant kitchen. He said gently, "Allow me." And then there was a miracle. The two sturdy waitresses who had brought the besbarmak in the first place came out again, pushing a serving cart loaded with side dishes. After distributing these, they transferred the silver platter to the cart and began to carve and fill the plates of the dinner party with the besbarmak, which turned out to be delicious. Besides the meat stew with its diamond-shaped noodles, there were bowls of fragrant broth with floating herbs, feather-light rounds of bread, spicy palov, pickled mushrooms, melon rind, and a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, scallions, and exotic green stuff. The wine, which Valéry had preselected with a good deal more seriousness, was a Château Latour that brought tears of rapture to Pyotr's eyes. He forgave his grandson, and Valéry led the birthday toast; and then Pyotr proposed a toast to Denis, and Denis proposed a toast to the Sixth Congress, and Tamara proposed a toast to the Seventh, which would be held the following year in Boston.

  "You must go with us there, Papa," Tamara said to Pyotr. "We will celebrate your birthday in the American style."

  "No feasts!" Pyotr pleaded.

  "If you came up to New Hampshire, " said Denis, "we could cook you a traditional ham and baked-bean supper with pumpkin pie and whipped cream."

  The old man leaned toward the American. Being unable to converse telepathically on the intimate mode, he simply whispered. "I think it would be a great improvement over this boiled lamb's head. I am a Georgian, you see, and our cuisine is celebrated throughout the Soviet Union. My grandchildren have been barbarized by their residence in this way station of Marco Polo... My dear Professor, I am so grateful to you for salvaging the dinner. None of the others would have had the mind-power to coerce the waitresses over such a distance."

  "You must call me Denis. And it was my pleasure. But I think that any one of your grandchildren, had they thought of it, would have been able to do as I did."

  Valery, Ilya, and Anna protested: Oh NO Professor!

  Pyotr did not hear, but the expressions on the young faces were eloquent enough. "It's true. They are growing up to be mental bullies, all three, too clever by half. They are—are—oy! I don't know the English word for what they are!"

  "Whippersnappers," Denis offered.

  Pyotr was delighted. "Yes! They think the world will leap as they snap their marvelous mental whips. You must take care, Denis, that your own new baby son does not grow up so disrespectful of his short-brained elders."

  "We attempted a simple form of ethical guidance even before the baby was born," Denis said seriously. "I'll be describing the new prenatal educational techniques that my wife Lucille and I devised for Philip in a paper I'm delivering tomorrow."

  There were expressions of interest from the other academics around the table. Urgyen Bhotia said, "I find it fascinating that you would include ethics in your prenatal curriculum. Newborns are, of course, completely self-centered. And the infant human is egotistical in its evaluation of right and wrong."

  "When the infant is a normal, that's
acceptable," Denis said. "It may even be acceptable for the weaker operants. But"—he shrugged—"Lucille and I weren't sure just how strong-minded our offspring would be. You may have—er—read the article in Nature."

  Alla and Mukar Kizim, who were friends and close associates of Tamara at the university, exchanged meaningful looks. "It is a matter that perplexed us as well," Alia admitted. "We have held off having children, wishing to give their young minds the best possible guidance both before and after birth. But I think we also were somewhat fearful of not being able to control them. There have been instances among our colleagues..."

  "In America, too," Denis said.

  "I don't think we've had much trouble in Scotland," said Jamie MacGregor. "Even normal Celtic parents are coercers from the word go. You hardly find a spoiled brat among us." He hesitated, then added, "There are crazies, though. And I have a paper on that."

  "Children are very precious to our people," Tamara said. "It is always so in lands where nature is cruel and young life is vulnerable. It has been said by some psychologists that we have been too kind... that our children grow up lacking in initiative and inner strength because they were coddled. And when they become adults, and find how harsh life is, they either strike back and become cruel themselves or else bend dumbly to the yoke."

  "Each nation," Urgyen said, "has its own strength and weakness. The roots of both are in the relationship of parents and children. I think Denis's talk of ethical training for the infant mind will be among the most significant to be delivered at this Congress. It will be my pleasure to lead a symposium on operant-nonoperant moral relationships. In light of the Tashkent tragedy, the subject is appropriate."

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally, Annushka Gawrys said impulsively, "It couldn't have been one of us who did that awful thing! It's not possible!"

  Jamie MacGregor said, "Lassie, I'm sorry. But it is possible. My dear friend Nigel Weinberg has had to retire from active metapsychic work just because it's possible."

  "It could have been a provocateur," Tamara said. She switched to mental speech, even though it would exclude her father: Our internal politics... you visitors see only the bright new face of the Soviet Union the Secretary's sweeping changes in the economy the unrestricted flow of information the new pride taken by workers inspired by Otkro-veyinost'... but there is a faction in the Kremlin bitterly opposing the Secretary as a traitor to Marxist-Leninist ideology and they are allied with senior militarists who resent their drastic budget cuts and diminished power ... Marshal Kumylzhensky aspires to head the Politburo himself and has deep hatred for Kirill Pazukhin Chairman KGB and General Secretary it is suspected that some of the Islamic rioting was fomented by agents Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye so as to discredit the Twentieth Directorate assassination of Grand Mufti would fit in with such a scheme...

  Urgyen Bhotia was incredulous: This Marshal would toy with civil war just to bring down a political enemy? He would cause the death of thousands of citizens merely to consolidate his power in Moscow?

  Mukar Kizim said: It is only non-Slavic people the blackarses like us who die.

  Jamie MacGregor asked: What'll stop this fool Marshal?

  Tamara said: He is 73 years old... But his lackey Vadim Terekhov head of the GRU is only 56 and a Politburo aspirant. The consensus is that the General Secretary himself a man loved and respected by almost all the proletariat is the greatest bulwark against the militarists and diehard Marxist ideologues.

  Denis Remillard said: I hope he has good bodyguards... especially tonight.

  Tamara said: Tonight the nine of us the strongest minds I am able to trust utterly will guard him.

  ***

  The General Secretary was showing signs of winding down now. He had set aside his notes to address the Congress delegates less formally, and Finster whispered, "It won't be long now. I hope those TV cameras stay on close-up for the big finale. We want this to be the zap seen round the world."

  Colonel Sergei Arkhipov was incapable of vocal response. He was a skull-prisoner, no longer in control of his own body and knowing he would soon die. Nevertheless he watched the Killer Squirrel's professional modus operandi with fascinated detachment through the windows of his own eye sockets; and from time to time he even asked mental questions, which his captor answered quite frankly.

  At supper, the Squirrel had given a brief account of his life—the creepy child, the third-rate entertainer and drug addict, the obscene "redemption" through bonding to the American megalomaniac, the progression from psychic spy to blackmailing suborner to specialist in wet affairs... It appealed to Sergei's mordant Russian sense of humor that the Squirrel's master, the archcapitalist exploiter O'Connor, should be the great enemy of metapsychic globalism. And in Moscow the zealous Marxist ideologue Kumylzhensky shared the identical viewpoint! If this crucial mission of the Killer Squirrel succeeded, both O'Connor and Kumylzhensky would win. Everyone else would lose. Oh, it was rich.

  Four other KGB agents stood there in the wings of stage right with Sergei and Fabian Finster, and all including the Squirrel wore on their lapels the golden shield with stylized sword and red star, surmounted by the black IV of the Ninth Directorate. It was the insignia of the unit assigned to the security of top Party leaders. To any casual observer backstage in the Lenin Palace of Culture, the men—including the rather undersized one in the flashy double-breasted glen plaid—were part of the General Secretary's bodyguard.

  To the subordinate four, the Killer Squirrel was simply invisible. This was a most useful faculty for an assassin to have, but Finster had explained to Sergei that there were limitations. The mental exertion required to project the illusion increased with the cube of the distance from the operant's brain. Thus it was very easy to render oneself invisible (or psychically disguised) when close to a normal observer, but relatively difficult to manage when the observer was farther away. Finster was also limited by having to retain his coercive hold on Sergei himself. Effectively, this limited his invisibility radius to less than nine meters. Thus he could not simply walk out onto the palace stage and terminate the General Secretary without being detected. Nor could he fulfill the special purpose of his assignment by means of an ambush. It was O'Connor's plan to incite antioperant feeling by making the assassinations seem to be an operant conspiracy, and so Finster had to play a part.

  Sergei had been very surprised to learn that Finster was armed. He assumed that the longbrain would kill with astral fire, generated by mind-power alone. As all the world knew, this was the way that the Scottish operant had worked. But no. The Squirrel had explained that he was quite impotent in the conjuring up of mental fire. It was a knack, and his talents ran along other lines. Nor could he kill by cooking brains or stopping hearts, lethal aptitudes possessed by his master, O'Connor, among others. Finster explained that these killing methods, while tidy and much more efficient than psychocreative flaming, would not have the propaganda impact of the latter. So Finster intended to use an ingenious infernal device to simulate astral fire, and the General Secretary would—as the Grand Mufti before him—seem to die from the assault of an operant terrorist.

  Tell me something belkushka, Sergei asked now. Were you there in Edinburgh to kill Professor MacGregor?

  Yes, said Finster. But not at the press conference. By then it was too late, and I only went to provide a firsthand account of the affair to my principal. I tried to kill MacGregor six times during the months preceding his announcement. Each time I failed. He was being guarded.

  By his metapsychic compères?

  No... By somebody else. It was worrying. I never told the Boss about that bit.

  This Boss. Why do you serve him? Kill for him?

  Irony. I love him.

  Now do not balls about with me! Why?

  Why do you work for the KGB?

  At first I was patriotic. Then I enjoyed the power. Then I was stuck in the shit like everybody else. Then...[laughter] when we were transformed it was just a job. Just a
job...

  You don't enjoy it now that you're respectable cops?

  No.

  That's where we differ then Sergei. I've always liked my job! This assignment's the biggest kick yet.

  Belkushka. Little killer squirrel.

  Laughter.

  Out in the auditorium, the delegates were laughing, too. There was a smattering of applause for a particularly well-chosen piece of comic relief delivered by the General Secretary as he approached the end of his speech.

  Finster pinched off the KGB colonel's maundering thoughts and concentrated on the matter at hand. Behind the Commie leader, seated at a long table decorated with red bunting and bouquets of autumn flowers, were ten or a dozen people—high mucky-mucks of the Metapsychic Congress with a few odd spouses and older kids. One seat was empty. The head lady, after introducing the Comrade Secretary, had gone off into the left wings. She was a plump, auburn-haired woman with a distracted overcast to her well-guarded mind, but she did not project the dangerous vibes Finster had learned to beware of. Most of the others seated on the platform seemed similarly harmless: an old guru type, four assorted Russkies, Jamie MacGregor, a Russky couple, and three kids in their late teens or early twenties who had to be the offspring of Madame Chairperson. No threat in the lot, for all their vigilance. He'd take care of them with the mind-buster, his great projection of sensory confusion.

  The only potential joker in the pack sat at the far end of the table. Unlike the others, he was dressed formally in a dinner jacket and had a cold, uptight little smile on his face. Oh, yeah. Give Denis Remillard a guitar and a mike, take away the chromalloy bear-trap mind, and you'd have a young John Denver! Talk about a monster in wimp's clothing... Remillard would have to be handled. He was at extreme coercion range and probably uncoercible anyway. So stick to the mind-buster, but thicken it to max between Remillard and the podium. Then? Would the prof try a hit? He wasn't a known antiaggression freak like MacGregor or Madame Sakhvadze. Fact was, he almost never demonstrated his faculties in public, or even talked about them. Which was bad.