INTERVENTION

by May, Julian; Dikty, Ted

  Agent Rasmussen, holding her arm, said, "It's going to be okay, Mrs. Baumgartner. The Chief Justice is just coming up to the platform. You're going to make it."

  The huge white-marble chamber was chilly even though it was packed with people—members of Congress, White House staffers, influential Republicans, and personal friends and relatives of the First Couple. Outside a blizzard was raging, and so the inauguration was being held indoors for the first time since 1985. The blizzard had delayed the First Lady's dash from Reagan Jetport. She had landed in Washington only a half hour earlier after flying from the bedside of her two-year-old granddaughter, Amanda Denton.

  The Marine Band finished playing as Agent Rasmussen and the First Lady reached the platform. She composed herself, took a deep breath, and smiled radiantly at her husband. His returning smile echoed relief. The child was going to be all right.

  She was dimly aware of people standing close by—the Vice President and his wife; the Senate Majority Leader, Benjamin T. Scrope; the Speaker of the House, Elijah Scraggs Benson; and there was the Party Chairman, Jason Cassidy, and beside him their old friend and long-time supporter, Kieran O'Connor, with his daughter Shannon and his son-in-law Congressman Tremblay. Shannon Tremblay's eyes were wide with concern. Had she heard about little Amanda's crisis? Nell Baumgartner gave the young woman what she hoped was a reassuring wink. An instant later she forgot Shannon as a Bible was placed in her hands—the one she would hold while the President took his Oath of Office.

  The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court stepped forward, her face solemn. The President placed his left hand upon the book, which was opened to Psalm 8, the prayer he had recited years ago when he first set foot on the Moon. He raised his right hand.

  "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

  Then the band was playing, and he was moving to the lectern where he would deliver the Inaugural Address, and she only had seconds to tell him, and she thought, Should U And it seemed that a voice was warning her to forbear, to let it be... but she knew what was in the speech Lloyd was about to deliver and she could not let him go ahead without knowing—

  The music was drawing to a close. Swiftly, she stepped up to him and touched his sleeve. He turned.

  "Little Amanda is all right, Lloyd," she whispered. "The neurologists at Johns Hopkins say it isn't epilepsy at all. Lloyd—our granddaughter is going to be a metapsychic operant. It was the spontaneous breakthrough from latency that caused the convulsions."

  The President said only, "They're certain?" And Nell nodded, then stepped back.

  The music stopped. All eyes in the Rotunda were on the President. He folded the sheets of paper he had just moments before placed in front of the microphones, and put them into his inside breast pocket. "My friends," he began, "the Inaugural Address I had prepared no longer seems appropriate. In order for you to understand why, I'm going to share with you some very startling news that my wife Nell has just brought to me..."

  He paused, passing his hand across his forehead, and there were murmurs of amazement from the audience. But then he straightened and spoke resolutely for ten minutes, and at the end there was a shocked silence, and then subdued applause with a rising undercurrent of voices that the Marine Band finally drowned out with "Hail to the Chief."

  Shannon O'Connor Tremblay said: Well Daddy?

  And her father replied: It will be up to Gerry and he damn well better not let us down.

  17

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

  HALLOWEEN 2007.

  I have a zapshot here before me to jog my memories of that day. It shows three cunning little devils—my great-nephews Philip, Maurice, and Severin, aged ten, eight, and four at the time—costumed as imps for the holiday, in a blatant piece of typecasting, by their long-suffering nanny Ayeesha.

  Thanks to Ghostly confidences, I knew at the time that the boys would grow up to be Founding Magnates of the Concilium. Thanks to Ghostly compassion, I did not know that one of them would perish in the Metapsychic Rebellion of 2083, fighting to extricate the human race from the Galactic Milieu... But that is another story that must wait to be told. I will write now of events that led to the Intervention, and my own peculiar role as a bit player in them...

  All that day, my bookshop had been under siege by poltergeists, for by then Hanover crawled with the offspring of operant metapsychics. Every Halloween, in the old American tradition, local merchants endured an endless stream of costumed youngsters extorting treats, the donation of which was supposed to render one immune from tricks. In my youth, trick-or-treat escapades were tame: soaped windows, upset trash cans, demounted garden gates, toilet-paper festoons on shrubs and—in the case of notorious neighborhood ogres—walks and porches defiled with smashed jack-o'-lanterns and rotten eggs. In the new Age of the Mind, however, Halloween had become the one day in the year when operant youngsters could release their inhibitions more or less with impunity. Reined in by parental coercion the rest of the time, the kids tended to go bananas once they put on their costumes and set out to pillage and plunder. By unwritten law the deviltry was restricted to those under the age of twelve, and no property was to be destroyed or rendered so befouled or bollixed as to require expensive repairs. Aside from that, the sky was the limit.

  My bookshop, as I have mentioned, primarily suffered the onslaught of poltergeists. The books on the shelves would dance and tumble to the floor; the window displays (of expendable volumes) were in a perpetual state of manic frenzy; the little customer reading area in the front right-hand part of the store had chairs and ashtrays dancing and rag rugs curling and writhing on the floor. Poor Marcel LaPlume, my huge Maine Coon cat, had retreated to the basement storage room after being harassed one time too many by hailstorms of Cat Chow levitated from his dish and mind-generated static charges that set his fur crackling. I had a big bowl of Snickers candy bars as tribute to the invaders, but as often as not the operant children would thank me for the treat—then pull off the trick anyhow on their way out of the shop.

  Another unwritten rule was that the depredations should cease by 2,200 hours. My shop was not ordinarily open so late on weekdays, but only a madman would have closed up early on Halloween and left the premises unguarded. That year, as the evening of pranks came to a close, I wondered why I had not yet been visited by Denis and Lucille's children. As it drew on toward quarter to ten, I concluded that they were saving me until last, and had planned some particularly gross piece of mischief for poor old Uncle Rogi.

  My farsense tingled. I looked up from the catalog I had been perusing and caught a glimpse of disappearing horns and red grease-painted small faces outside. My deep-vision identified the lurkers and I braced myself.

  The door opened by itself and the chime rang eerily. Three telepathic voices sang:

  Did you ever think, as a hearse goes by,

  That you might be the next to die?

  They wrap you up in a long white sheet,

  And bury you down about six feet deep!

  Giggles, instantly squelched, came from the mind of four-year-old Sewy. The songsters paused... and I saw coming in the door and inching along the polished floorboards a flood of white, slimy little things—hundreds of them—glistening as they looped and squirmed into my shop. And the inevitable chorus of the old children's song:

  The worms crawl in! The worms crawl out!

  The worms play pinochle in your mouth!

  Your body turns a mossy green,

  And pus runs out like thick ice cream!

  The three juvenile devils, shepherding their obscene cohort, came bounding in, squealing and laughing.

  Trick or treat Uncle Rogi!

  The books danced a fandango. The drawer of my antique cash register flew open with a jangling crash and the bills and loose change fountained up, then rained down into the midst of the wrig
gling maggoty mass on the floor.

  "Call them off!" I bellowed.

  Promise to teach us dirty French!

  "Jamais!"

  The worms crawl in the worms crawl out...

  "That does it," I intoned ominously. "There's only one way to deal with this situation." I reached into my trouser pocket. "Beware! Beware, all you alien invaders! Beware the power of the Great Carbuncle!"

  I held up my key chain, with its dangling fob of a red-glass marble caught in a little metal cage. Using an old trick of creativity that had long delighted the children, I made the thing glow. At the same time, I smote the three young minds with my adult coercion, freezing them in the midst of their capers and cutting off the PK motive-power of the lolloping larvae.

  The boys screamed. Their tongues protruded and their eyes bugged out of their grotesquely painted faces, and one after another they fell to the floor—at a safe distance from the now motionless mélange of icky lucre and nameless white things.

  I waved the Great Carbuncle over the lot of them in a coup de grâce, then laughed and canceled the coercion. The boys jumped up shrieking with mirth and I told them to wait while I loaded my still-video camera with a fresh floppy disk. They posed, grimacing, while I took their zapshot.

  "Let's see it! Let's see it!" they shouted, and would have raced into the back room of the shop where the computer and video-printer were if I hadn't once again stopped them in their tracks.

  "Who," I demanded sternly, "is going to clean up this disgusting mess?"

  Little Severin grinned up at me winsomely. "It's only cut-up spaghetti, Uncle Rogi. Didn't it make great worms?"

  "Great," I sighed, wondering how many of my fellow merchants on Main Street had been similarly victimized.

  "Let's print the picture!" Philip said.

  "Do it quick, Uncle Rogi," Maury added. "Mom'11 kill us if we don't get home by twenty-two."

  I took a plastic sack and three pieces of cardboard out of my wrapping supplies. "First you take these, and scoop up the worms and the money. When you get home tonight I expect you to sort the money out, wash it, and bring every nickel of it back to me tomorrow after school."

  The telephone rang. Admonishing the imps to get cracking, I answered. It was Denis, not wanting to trust my telepathy.

  "We've had some bad news." Immediately he added, "Not any of the family. But I want you to come over to the house. This new development makes the damn Coercer Flap look like a practical joke."

  "The kids are here. I'll bring them." I hung up. "Leave that! Bas les pattes, kids, we're going home."

  Their minds caught my serious intent instantly and they changed from devils into obedient operant children. I turned off the shop lights and we hustled out and around the corner and down South Street a block and a half to the family home. There were only a few costumed children still abroad. We hurried past the library, where the collection of pumpkins carved by Hanover youngsters and displayed in the forecourt was a predictable shambles. I was surprised to see five cars parked in front of Denis and Lucille's place. As we tramped up the front steps the door opened and the nanny, Ayeesha Al-Joaly, who was strongly suboperant, shooed the children upstairs and indicated to me mentally that I should join the others in the living room.

  Most of the Coterie was there. Glenn and his wife Colette, Sally and Tater McAllister, and big Eric Boutin, who had taken over as Denis's chief PR person with the defection of Gerry Tremblay, were gathered around a bound atlas open on the coffee table, talking in low voices. Denis, Tukwila Barnes, and Mitch Losier were seated on dining-room chairs, side by side, with Lucille hovering behind them. All three were in a state of EE trance. The TV set on the wall had its audio turned off and the picture showed a murky aerial view of some city on a plain with a considerable mountain range in the background. Many of the city buildings were in flames and others, broken and devastated, poured out clouds of black smoke.

  "My God, what's happened?" I cried.

  Lucille hurried to me, her finger to her lips, mentally indicating the excorporeals who were obviously in the process of farsensing the disaster. She said:

  Alma-Ata. And other places as well. It looks as though full-scale civil war has broken out in Soviet Central Asia, abetted by outsiders. They targeted Alma-Ata especially because of the operant educational facility at the university.

  Tamara—?

  Safe! After the Congress in Montréal she and the three children and Pyotr stopped off on the way home to stay for a time with Jamie in Edinburgh... You knew that Tamara's middle son Ilya and Katie MacGregor announced their engagement last week?

  No.

  Well they did. And the pair made a trip to Islay to see Jamie's old grandmother who's 96 and they took their time because you know how grim things have been in Alma-Ata this year with the fighting so close by. They were to leave for home two days from now it's some kind of miracle that they escaped but the others the best of the Soviet academic operants the cream of the researchers oh Rogi the PEACEMAKERS so many of them concentrated there the top minds God the university area is a fire-storm Tucker is scanning the situation but we're afraid we're so afraid...

  What time is it in Alma-Ata?

  Early morning. Everyone was on the commute in the streets students and teachers and all the university people the planes came from Peshawar in Pakistan over the high ranges Stealthed of course and Soviet Muslim sympathizers sabotaged phased-array radars in Pamirs and a key detector-satellite relay of course Moscow scrambled their interceptors but it was too late suicidal Muslim pilots screaming Din! Din! Din! certain they were on their way to Paradise—

  Tukwila Barnes, the Native American who was probably the most talented EE adept in the Coterie, opened his eyes and made a small moaning sound. Lucille turned away from me and rushed to help him. He was ashen and trembling and his black eyes spilled tears. He began to twitch and flail his arms involuntarily then, as though he were falling into some kind of epileptic fit. I strode over and helped Lucille hold him while Colette Roy gave him a shot of something. When the medication hit him he crumpled, but he was a lightweight and I caught him easily and carried him to one of the couches. Somebody brought an afghan to cover him and Colette propped his head with cushions. We all stood there waiting for him to pull out of it. When he did, there was no need for him to speak. From his shocked mind poured images of holocaust, broadcast at an awful psychic amplification. From elsewhere in the house I heard the little Remillard boys shriek out loud and the baby, two-year-old Anne, begin a panicky wailing.

  "Shit," whispered Glenn Dalembert. He knelt beside Tucker and placed a hand on his forehead. He was the most powerful coercer in the group aside from Denis, and as he took hold of the EE adept's mind the cataract of nightmare sensations chopped off.

  He said, "Got him. Colette, you and Lucille see to the kids."

  Slowly, Barnes responded to the sedative. His eyes calmed and when he finally said, "Okay," Glenn turned him loose. Sally Doyle proffered a glass of water. Tucker shook his head. "Not now... might barf... God, I don't see how any of them could have escaped."

  "Did they drop nukes?" Eric Boutin asked.

  Barnes shook his head. "Conventional high explosives—but top-of-the-line. Alma's not that big a city. Eleven planes got through and it was enough. The university is just gone."

  Nobody said anything. Nobody even seemed to be thinking anything.

  Finally, Glenn said to Tucker, "Just lie there. We're still waiting for Denis and Mitch to get back. Denis is overviewing and Mitch went to check out the Kremlin. Soviet news says that the whole goddam Central Asian region erupted in simultaneous armed revolt. They claim to be on top of things—but about twenty minutes ago CNN reported that there had been a big Iranian attack on the Soviet oil fields and refineries around Baku on the Caspian Sea."

  "Supported by a ground insurrection," said Denis.

  Everybody turned around.

  He had risen from his chair, and although his face was pinched and pale and
his eyes seemed to peer from deep inside his skull, he was in full control of both body and mind. He went to the fireplace, where a blaze had been kindled in honor of the holiday, and warmed his hands. Colorful gourds, pumpkins, and corn dollies were displayed on the mantel.

  "First I did a broad scan, roughly below the forty-fifth parallel," Denis said. He watched the leaping flames. "I tried to farsense massive stress emanations from among the normal populace. There seemed to be a dozen or more distinct foci between the Tien Shan and the Caspian: Alma-Ata, Frunze, Tashkent, Dushanbe... Let me see that atlas." He went to the coffee table and bent over the map, stabbing with his finger. "Here, here, here—all these cities east of Tashkent where the Uzbek revolt was concentrated. Up for grabs again." He turned to another page showing the Caspian region. "I did a closer scan in here, around Baku and up the west coast of the sea. This is the Azerbaidzhán Republic, a tough bunch of Turks with a history of resistance to Moscow rule. What evidently happened was that a flight of B-iDs from Tehran came in at near water-level and bombed hell out of Baku itself, its two big pipelines and the railroad and highway links to the west, and the other pipeline and refinery complex up the coast at Makhachkala. The local insurgents simultaneously set off blasts in just about every refinery, pumping station, and airfield from Makhachkala south to the Iranian border."

  "Christ," said Tater McAllister. "Coupled with the oil losses from the Uzbek fields, this new strike really puts the Soviets in deep shit."

  Denis said, "The Azerbaidzhán region will be very hard for Moscow to pacify using ground forces. They've already sent in paratroops and gunboats from the naval base at Astrakhan on the Volga, but the Uzbek revolt left the Red Army short of reliable infantry and armor units. This new flare-up may be more than Kumylzhensky can handle without heavy air-strikes against the insurgent cities—or even the tactical use of neutron bombs..."