She gave up on any attempt to maintain a refined atmosphere and hauled out her own water supply, indicating to the Exec that she should also feel free to imbibe. "No, most of my work here has been administrative. I have gone abroad during the past five orbits monitoring the Metapsychic Congresses... Montréal last year after they decided not to risk Moscow; Paris, Beijing, Edinburgh—all large cities. And before that I attended the session held in a quaint rural hostelry in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Bizarre!...I presume, Captain, from your reference to mosquitoes, that you yourself have visited Siberia." She shuddered. The insects were insanely fond of Simbiari body fluids.
"I went down once, not long after the martyrdom. One of my academy mates crewed on the Risstimi. What a sight it was! The burnt trees just beneath the blast zone were standing upright, but all around them was this vast elliptical area of trunks smashed flat and radiating outward. Not a single Earthling was harmed. But if the crew of the Risstimi hadn't hung on to the failed control system mentally, the ship would have continued right across the continent and impacted on Saint Petersburg, where nearly two million people lived at the time."
"Truth!" exclaimed the Exec. "I didn't know there were that many."
"I wonder if this damn planet will ever appreciate what we've done?" the Captain mused. "Not just what the Risstimi crew did, but all the rest of it. Sixty thousand years of watching and guiding and cosseting, all the while praying that the silly clots wouldn't botch it."
Magnate Adassti had a grim little smile on her emerald lips. "If Intervention does take place and we undertake the proctorship, we'll make sure the Earthlings are properly grateful. Shaping up minds as barbarous as these for full Concilium participation is going to require heroic psychocorrectional measures. After what they've put us through—"
"Captain," said the Exec. "We have a wing of MiGs zeroing in on us from Krasnoyarsk."
"It's about time," the Magnate snapped.
The officer hesitated, then blurted out, "Farsense Monitoring reports that the Soviets think we may be a Chinese secret weapon."
"Chinese?" blared the Captain. "Chinese! Can't the flaming idiots recognize a flight of UFOs when they see one?"
Magnate Lashi Ala Adassti dripped green heedlessly over the shiny instrumentation console as she swallowed great gulps of charged water. "Up the Cosmic All!" she blasphemed. "The nincompoops!"
"So much for that brilliant Lylmik ploy," the Captain told her. "Your orders, Magnate?"
"Get us back into orbit and invisible. We'll be hearing from the Supervisory Body soon enough."
21
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
THE FLIGHT OF flying saucers detected over Siberia made a very minor news splash. The videotape of the event—which was sold to Western news agencies for an enormous sum by the Soviet government—was exquisitely detailed, so much so that it was deemed a masterpiece of special effects by the ciné wizards of Industrial Light and Magic. NASA analysts said that no spacecraft propulsion system known to science could account for the movement of the alleged saucers. They simply defied Newton's Laws of Motion. These adverse judgments, coupled with the suspicious date of the sighting, on the anniversary of the Tunguska meteorite fall, led most authorities to dismiss the tape as a hoax.
Over the next couple of years there were other saucer reports from different parts of the world—none quite so spectacular as the Siberian affair, but nevertheless impressive in the aggregate. Alas! The world was so preoccupied with mundane troubles that the notion of extraterrestrial visitors caused no excitement at all. So the saucers were back again? Big deal. So was the rain in Spain, the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, and Killer Smog in London and Tokyo.
Feeling very low one dreary November evening in 2008 (I had just finished composing a long and querulous videogram to Ume, who had moved back to Sapporo the previous summer), I sat in my apartment above the bookshop, reading and drinking. The book was an old favorite, a peerless historical novel by H. F. M. Prescott called The Man on a Donkey. The booze was Laphroaig, a lovely dusky malt that Jamie MacGregor had brought over on his last visit. Sleet rapped at the storm windows, the fire was low in the Franklin stove, and my stockinged feet rested on the warm shaggy belly of my cat Marcel, who was asleep on the claw-shredded ottoman.
The doorbell rang. It was after 2300. Reluctantly, I sent my farsight down into the street entryway, where I saw Denis. Setting the Prescott aside with a sigh, I extracted my feet from their cozy shelter and padded over to the buzzer.
Come up, I told my nephew. Is anything wrong?
Yes and no. I just want to talk to you if you don't mind.
I am not quite blotto.
I'll redact you sober.
You do and I'll sic Marcel on you...
I opened the hall door and he came in, dripping.
"I walked from the lab," he said, taking off his raincoat. "What a rotten night."
I got another tumbler, splashed in Scotch, and held it out to him. Denis rarely indulges, but it didn't take telepathy to know what he needed. He flopped down on the sofa, took a belt, and sighed.
"The President called me earlier today."
"He should be feeling pretty high," I opined. "The landslide victory to end all landslides. He's got his third term—and probably a fourth and fifth if he wants them—"
"Uncle Rogi, do you remember when I was a kid, and just learning to do long-distance scanning? We didn't call it EE then. It was just mind-traveling."
"Sure, I remember. You'd drag me along. Only way I ever got very far out of Coos County, mentally speaking."
"What we were doing was a farsensory metaconcert, a mind-meld. I didn't know that, either. You know, it's a funny thing. I've never been able to go metaconcert with anyone except you and Lucille. Glenn says I'm too wary, too jealous of my mental autonomy to be a team thinker. Lucille thinks I may just be afraid to trust... Whatever it is, it's there. And I want to excurse tonight with a partner—someone who will magnify my own sight. Luce is out. Now that she's pregnant again I want to keep her as tranquil as possible."
The implication was dire. "And this EE's likely to be anything but, eh?"
"I tripped out myself earlier this evening, right after the President's call. He told me that the Secretary of Defense had the wind up over something his Psi-Eye people had spied. He asked me to check it out."
I poured myself another finger of Scotch and downed it before Denis could stop me. "What happened? A nuke on the Kremlin?"
"It's in China... whatever it is. I couldn't get any more of a handle on it than the Washington pEEps. That's why I need you. Minimal though your solitary output is, when it's yoked with mine I should experience a magnification up to threefold through synergistic augmentation."
"Your humble servant," I muttered. Minimal!
Denis dragged the ottoman over to the couch, displacing Marcel, who hissed bitterly at the imposition and slunk off to the kitchen. "Sit here beside me. We can put our feet up and it'll be nearly as good as the barber-chairs at the lab. I suppose I should have asked you to come down there, but—"
"You knew I wouldn't, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference where we do it."
"No. It doesn't."
The body contact was unfamiliar and disquieting. Good God, was I afraid of him? His mind was utterly silent. Wide open. Waiting. I closed my eyes and still saw the living room through mind-sight, but I made no move toward him. I turned the kitchen wall transparent and saw the cat opening the breadbox to steal an English muffin. I had forgotten to fill his food dish. I kept on going out through the house wall and saw the oddly unshadowed streets slick with freezing rain and cars going up and down Main Street with tires and wiper blades crunching.
Denis said: Come.
I said: All right all right it's just been a hell of a long time since you were in my skull and you were only a kid then and now tu es un gros bonnet the Biggest Mindshot of the lot and I do want to help you but what you ask of me ah Denis a Franco father c
annot stand naked before his son—
No no it won't be like that metaconcert among adults isn't that kind of merging please don't worry. This will not be like your experiences with Ume or Elaine those were an altogether different type of mental intercourse believe me trust me I am only Denis the same little Denis et tu es mon vrai père! Ça va Uncle Rogi?
Ça va ça va mais allez-y doucement dammit!
He took me away...
I am not much of a head. I use telepathy without a qualm, of course, and do everyday things such as deep-scanning letters before opening them and tracking potentially light-fingered customers around the shop and anticipating the moves of idiot drivers. But the larger faculties I use grudgingly (except with the ladies!) and there is almost always a sense of uneasiness after the fact, as if I had indulged a secret vice. Excorporeal excursion is ordinarily very difficult for me. I can "call" over fairly long distances, but to "see"—much less use other ultrasenses—is an exhausting piece of work when it is not completely impossible. I had braced myself for the joint trip with Denis, expecting the usual exertion. But what a difference! I hardly know what to compare that mind-flight to. There are certain dreams, where one does not really fly but rather takes giant steps, one after the other, each one covering the proverbial seven leagues. Long ago, when I had eavesdropped on the mind of little Denis as he slowly scanned New Hampshire for other operants, I had seen on the eerie mindscape the jewel-like clusters of "light" that mark the positions of living human brains—the latents glowing dimly, the operants blazing like tiny stars. There was something of this effect as Denis and I loped westward across the continent, each heroic bound covering a greater distance and attaining a greater height than the last, until at the Pacific Coast we soared up without pausing and described a vast arc above the mindless dark of the northern ocean. But was it mindless? There were none of the starlike concentrations, but there was something else: an intricate whispering coming not from below but from all around me, as if millions upon millions of infinitesimal voices were carrying on conversations—or even singing, since the sensation had a rhythmic pulsation to it, a tempo that was ever changing and yet somehow orchestrated...
It is the vital field of the world, Denis said. Life and Mind interacting. The biosphere forms a latticework that is entire but the noösphere the World Mind permeates it only imperfectly as yet and so the field is sensed by our minds only as a whisper.
I asked: When this World Mind finishes weaving itself together what will there be?
And my nephew said: A song.
We came to Japan and touched its shimmering arc. But there was no time for me to seek Ume, although I thought of it; and a moment later we were decelerating over China, flying low above the great Yangzi River basin, one of the most populous regions of the world. It was full daytime there, of course—and the minds blazed. The perception was overwhelming to me and I lost all sense of direction and differentiation; but Denis bore me onward, his goal now in view, and in another instant we were poised above the metropolis of Wuhan and ready to get down to business.
Denis said: Now we must do the real metaconcert Uncle Rogi. The flight was only a peripheral linkage a kind of piggyback ride. What I want you to do now primarily is relax. We are going to fuse our wills so that we have a single purpose. That's what metaconcert is. ONE WILL one vector for the channeled faculty in this case the close inspection of a thing inside a small laboratory in a modest building of the university. When I ask it you must help me to penetrate using all the strength you have. Do you understand?
Yes.
You may feel yourself fainting don't be concerned I'll hold you the vision will be mine even if you fail but hold out as best you can for as long as you can.
Yes.
Now.
It seemed that the sun rose. What had been drab was fully colored and what had been merely bright now became supersaturated with a brilliance that would be intolerable to physical eyes. At that time there were some six million people living in close proximity in the Wuhan tri-city area, and about ten thousand of them had some degree of operancy. Naturally most of these were concentrated in the university district, which lay east of the Yangzi near a small lake. We seemed to plummet out of the sky. Abruptly the mind-constellation effect was gone and we were there, wafting along a modernistic concourse where crowds of students and academics streamed in and out of buildings, rode bicycles, or lounged about under leafless trees soaking up a bit of late-autumn sunshine.
Denis knew where to go. We passed through the white-stone outer wall of a smallish structure, entered offices where people worked at computer terminals or shuffled papers, much as they do in any university, and then we reached the lab. There were three men and two women inside, and from the paraphernalia I knew at once that it was a metapsychology establishment. The so-called barber-chair, with its apparatus for measuring the brain activity of a "performing" operant, was virtually identical to similar devices at Dartmouth. Around the chair on the bare concrete floor was a ring about three meters in diameter, studded with little gadgets all wired together, the whole attached by several heavy cables to a bank of equipment racks. Some of the front panels were demounted and electronic guts hung out, which the scientists tinkered with.
Denis said: When I was here earlier I examined this stuff and recorded the gross details of the circuitry. Now I want to try microscrutiny. Hang onto your hat Uncle Rogi. I'll try to be as quick as I can...
He zeroed in, and I felt as though my eyes were being torn out of my skull—but of course my physical eyes had nothing to do with the ultrasensory scan; the pain was somewhere in my nervous system where farsight impulses only partially belonging to the physical universe were being amplified in some terrible esoteric fashion by my nephew's supermind. The brightness was awful. In it detailed pictures of God knew what were flickering like flipped pages in an old-fashioned book. I saw them distorted, sometimes whole and then fragmented like jigsaw puzzles. They made no sense and the rapidity of the image-change was indescribably sickening. I think I was trying to scream. I know I yearned to let go of Denis, to stop the agony, but I'd promised. I'd promised...
It ended.
Somewhere, somehow I was weeping and racked with spasms. I knew that—and yet another part of my mind stood aside, upright and proud of itself for having successfully endured. The suffering faded and my farsight once again perceived the Chinese laboratory.
Denis said: That was very good. The test subject has arrived. I'm going to break concert for a moment and check her out.
The supernal vividness of the scene faded to a washed-out pastel. I saw that only one of the scientists in the room was an operant. His aura was a pale yellowish-green, like a firefly. And then the door opened and in came a young woman with an aura like a house afire, stuffing the last of a sweet rice cake into her mouth and licking her fingers. She wore a smart red leather jumpsuit and white boots with high heels, and greeted the scientific types in a bored fashion before plopping down in the barber-chair. One man hooked her up while the other researchers completed their equipment adjustment, closed the panels, and went out—leaving the operant alone.
Denis re-established the metaconcert. Once again every detail of the place was extravagantly clear and I noticed for the first time a parabolic dish hanging above the operant's head. It looked something like a lamp reflector with a complex doodad at the center.
In an adjacent control room, the crew was powering up. The operant leader gave a telepathic command and the test subject began to count steadily in declamatory farspeech. The brain-monitoring systems were all go.
On the count of ten a mirrored dome sprang into existence, hiding the woman in the chair from view. Simultaneously, her telepathic speech cut off. The dome was approximately hemispheric, shaped like the top half of an egg and apparently as slick as glass. It did not quite touch the hanging reflector, but the ring of small components on the floor had been swallowed.
Before I could express my astonishment, Denis s
aid: One more push Uncle Rogi. The best that you can do... through that mirror surface!
Our conjoined minds thrust out, and this time I did lose consciousness, after enduring only the briefest flash of mortal agony. When I recovered my senses, I found I was sitting on the sofa in my apartment in Hanover, my head throbbing like the legendary ill-used hamster in the classic dirty joke. I heard the sound of retching in the bathroom and water running in the sink. After a few minutes Denis came out, toweling his wet hair and looking like the living dead.
"Did we get through the goddam thing?" I whispered.
"No," said Denis.
"It was a mechanical mind-screen, wasn't it... The thing they said couldn't be made?"
"I never said it." Denis went slowly to the coat closet and dragged out his Burberry. I had never seen him look so terrible, so vitiated. His emotions were totally concealed.
"D'you realize they can stop Psi-Eye with a thing like that?" I nattered. "The Chinese can do anything they damn well please behind it and the EE monitors would never know! If you can't punch through it, then no meta on Earth can... Is there any way at all to open it up?"
"Destroy the generator," Denis said. "Aside from that—I don't know. We'll have to build our own and experiment." He opened the outer door. "Thank you again for your help, Uncle Rogi."
"But we're back to square one!" I cried. "The Chinese are paranoid about the Russians and vice versa. They'll start the arms race all over again or even pull a pre-emptive strike!"
"Good night," my nephew said. The door closed.
I spat one obscenity after him on the declamatory farspeech mode and damned if Marcel didn't stroll out of the kitchen and eye me with sardonic humor. He leaped to the gate-leg table where the half-full bottle of Laphroaig still stood, and cocked his great whiskers at it.
"Best idea I've heard all night," I told him; and I settled down to finish off the Scotch while the icy rain lashed the window and the cat took his place again at my feet.
INTERVENTION Page 61
