INTERVENTION (12 page)

If the findings are as important as they seem to workers in this field, we shall need no great concern over future recognition by the academic world, by the larger bodies of the sciences, and by other institutions that matter. Rather, the urgent needs today have to do with holding on to the firm beginning psi research has made. This research science needs to operate for the present mainly in the freer terrain of the independent institute or center, or with such semiautonomous attachments as may be found in hospitals, clinics, engineering schools, smaller colleges, and industrial research laboratories. In time its own roots will make the attachments that are right, and proper, and lasting. Such growth is slow, but it can be assisted by careful effort and understanding and by recognition of its significance.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

A
FTER THE WEDDING
of Don and Sunny I was miserable for months. I toyed with the notion of moving out of town and went so far as to peruse the "Help Wanted" column in the Manchester and Portland newspapers. But by Christmas the entire family knew that Sunny was pregnant, and I presume that my subconscious was in thrall to the Ghost and its great expectations for the unborn—and so I stayed.

Since that night on the bridge, Don and I had erected virtually impregnable mental bulwarks against one another. Our social relationship was affable on the surface, but mind-to-mind communication was now nonexistent. I avoided Don and Sunny as much as I decently could. It wasn't difficult, since they had moved into a circle that included mostly young married couples like themselves. I saw them during holiday gettogethers and at the funeral of Tante Lorraine late in March. They seemed to be happy.

I continued at my job in the purchasing department of the mill and Don worked in shipping, some distance away in another building. I feel certain that he was doing as I was during those days: trying to live as much like a "normal" as possible. I no longer used psychokinesis, and I confined my coercive manipulations to feather-light nudges of the office manager, a dour Yankee named Galusha Pratt, who looked upon me as hard-working, ingratiating, and deserving of advancement when the right spot came along.

During my leisure hours I practiced cross-country skiing and went hiking in the mountains, and I continued to read whatever books I could find that dealt seriously with paranormal mental activity. My researches were still on the impoverished side, however, and would remain so until the 1970s, when the legitimate science establishment finally began to concede that "mind" might be more than an enigma best left to philosophers and theologians.

***

The child was bom on 17 May 1967, some seven and a half months after his parents' wedding. He was a small baby with an oversized head and the charitable consensus was that he was premature. My first sight of him was eleven days later, when I drove him to church for the baptism. He looked pink, adequately fleshed, and not at all unfinished. Sunny's sister Linda and I renounced Satan and all his works on behalf of the infant, and then Father Racine trickled cold water over the hairless, swollen little skull and baptized him Denis Rogatien.

Little blue eyes with shocked, dilated pupils flew wide open. The baby sucked air and let it out in a wail.

And his mind clutched at me.

What I did was instinctive. I projected: [Comfort.]

He protested:
!!!
[cold] + [wet] = [discomfort]
CRY!

I said: [
D
i
s
c
o
m
f
o
r
t
.]
C
R
Y
. [Reassurance.]

He was dubious: ? !!
CRY!

I amplified: Soon MOTHERyou soon youMOTHER. [Comfort.]

He was figuring it out: [HeartbeatwarmsecuregraspmilksuckLOVE] = MOTHER? Cry ...

I said: [Affirmation.] MotherGOOD.
C
R
Y
. [Comfort + reassurance.]

He said: Love YOU. [Acceptance trust peace.]

Then he went back to sleep, leaving me reeling.

***

It amazed me when the baby demonstrated telepathic ability at such an early age; but I didn't realize just what
else
was amazing until I thought the thing over lying in bed that night, and did a crude replay of the incident. There in the church, distracted by the ceremony and the relatives standing around, I had not been consciously aware of the feedback taking place between my mind and the infant's. But the replay made it clear—and explained why I still felt an uncanny closeness to that small mind asleep in its crib on the other side of town.

I jumped out of bed, turned on the lights, and rooted through my boxes of books until I found several on developmental psychology. They confirmed my suspicion. Not only was my nephew a telepath, but he was also a
precocious
telepath. His mind had displayed a synthesizing ability, an intellectual grasp far above that of normal newborn infants. He was hardly out of the womb, and yet he was thinking, drawing conclusions in a logical manner.

I knew what I was going to have to do. I spent the rest of the night thrashing and cursing the Family Ghost, and in the morning I called in sick at work. Then I walked to the little rented house on School Street to tell Sunny what kind of a brother-in-law she had, and what kind of a husband, and what kind of baby son.

It was a glorious day. Spring flowers bloomed in the little front yards and even dingy Berlin looked picturesque instead of shabby. She came to the door with the baby in her arms, an eighteen-year-old Madonna with long fair hair and an unsuspecting smile of welcome. We sat in the kitchen—bright yellow and white enamel, café curtains, Formica counters, and the scent of chocolate cake in the oven—and I told her how Don and I discovered we were telepaths.

I wanted to make the revelation as gentle as possible, so I did it in the form of a life history, starting with the incident of the bear in the raspberry patch. (I left out the Ghost.) I explained how my brother and I only gradually came to understand our singularity, how we experimented with mindspeech and image projection and deep-sight even before we started school. I demonstrated how easy it is to cheat on exams when farsight enables you to read a paper lying open ten feet away—behind you. I told her about psychokinesis and revealed the secret of how young O'Shaughnessy got stuffed into the basketball hoop. I discreetly moved a kitchen chair around the floor to demonstrate the PK faculty. (She only smiled.) I explained why Don and I had early decided to keep our abilities secret. I went into detail about
Odd John
and my fearful reaction to it. Some instinct warned me not to mention the coercive metafaculty to her—and of course I said nothing about my conviction that Don had used some mesmerizing power to win her away from me. Of the terrible events that took place on the eve of the wedding I spoke not at all.

My long recital took most of the morning. She listened to it almost without speaking but I could feel the tides of conflicting emotion sweeping over her—affection for me and fear for my sanity, disbelief coupled with profound unease, fascination overlaid by a growing dismay. As I talked, she made us lunch and fed the baby. When I finally finished and sat back exhausted in my chair, she smiled in her sweet way, laid her hand over mine, and said:

"Poor dear Rogi. You've been awfully troubled these past months, haven't you? And we hardly saw you, so we didn't know. But now we'll see—Don and I—that you get help."

Behind those dear blue eyes was a flat refusal to even consider the truth of what I had told her. Adamant denial. And worse than that was a new kind of fear. Of me.

God ... I'd bungled it. I projected meekness, nonthreat, pure love. Sunny, don't be afraid! Not of this thing. Not of me.

Very quietly I said, "I can't blame you for being skeptical, Sunny. Lord knows it took years for Don and me to come to terms with our special mind-powers. It's no wonder that the notion seems outrageous to you. Crazy. Frightening, even. But ... I'm the same old Rogi, and Don is still Don. The fact that we can talk without opening our mouths or move a thing around without touching it doesn't make us monsters."

As I said it, I knew I was lying.

She frowned, wanting to be fair. Early-afternoon sun streamed into the small kitchen. On the table were cups with dregs of cold tea, and plates with cake crumbs, and a bowl of fragrant lilacs making a barrier between us. She said, "I read once about some studies that were made at a college. Extrasensory perception experiments with flash cards."

I seized the opening eagerly. "Dr. Rhine, at Duke University! You see? It's respectable science. I have books I can show you—"

"But no one can read another person's mind! It's impossible!" Her panic stung me like a whip and there was outrage, too, at the possibility of mental violation. "I couldn't bear it if you knew my secret thoughts. If Don did!"

I summoned all sincerity. "We can't, Sunny. It's not like that. You normals—I mean, people like you—are closed books to telepaths. We can feel your strongest emotions and sometimes we receive images when you think about something very intensely. But we can't read your secret thoughts at all. Even with Don, I can only receive the farspeech he
wants
to transmit."

Partial truth. It was very difficult to decipher the innermost thoughts of normals; but often enough they were vaguely readable, especially when highlighted by strong feelings. And then many persons "subvocalized"—mumbled silently to themselves—when they weren't talking out loud. We could pick up this kind of stuff rather easily. The problem was to sort it, to make sense of the conceptual-emotional hash that floated like pond-scum at the vestibule of an undisciplined mind, confusing and concealing the inner thoughts. Most of the time, you instinctively shut all that mental static out to keep from being driven crazy.

I said, "You never have to worry that I'd spy on you and Don through his mind, either. We put up mind-screens automatically now to shut one another out. It's a trick we learned years ago. I'd never pry into your life with him, Sunny. Never..."

She flushed, and I knew I'd seen through to at least one of her great fears. She was a conventional, modest young wife and I loved her for it.

"These so-called superpowers," I said, "aren't really any more unusual than being able to play the piano well, or paint beautiful pictures. They're just something we were bom with, something we can't help. You've read about people who seem to predict the future. And—and water-dowsers! My God, that's an old New England thing that nobody around these parts thinks twice about, but it must seem like black magic to people who aren't used to it. I think there may be lots of other telepaths, too, and psychokinetics, but they're afraid to admit having the powers because of the way normals would react."

(But if there were others, why hadn't we been able to contact them? And why hadn't researchers like Rhine found them—instead of the unreliable and ambiguously talented "psychics" who participated in his experiments?)

Sunny said, "I
want
to believe you, Rogi."

"There was a particular reason why I came here today. It wasn't just to unburden my own mind. I'd never have intruded on you for my own sake. Not even for Don's. But now there's Denis."

She sat there frozen with fresh disbelief. "Denis?"

"Yesterday at the christening I felt a wonderful thing. The baby's mind communicated with me. No—don't look shocked. It was marvelous! He was startled by the water poured on him and I reached out telepathically without thinking, used the kind of mental soothing Don and I used to share when we were little kids. And Denis responded. He did more than that! There was—a kind of creative flash, something very special. At first I only transmitted formless feelings to him, trying to calm him and make him stop crying. He grabbed at the comfort but it wasn't enough, so I let my mind say, 'Soon you're going to be back with your mother, and everything will be all right.' Only I said it in the kind of mental shorthand that Don and I sometimes use, not projecting real words, just the concept of mother and baby together and happy. And do you know what Denis did? He made a connection in his mind between his own notion of mother and the image I projected! It's what psychologists call a mental synthesis, a putting together. But ... a baby as young as Denis shouldn't have been able to do that yet. He's too young. In another month or two, yes. But not yet."

She said coldly, "My baby did nothing of the kind."

"But he did, Sunny. I'm certain of it."

"You're imagining things. It's ridiculous."

"Look," I said reasonably. "You go get Denis and I'll try to show you. He's not even asleep in there. He's listening—"

"No!" She radiated a fierce, protective maternal aura. "My baby's normal! There's nothing wrong with him!"

"He's more than normal, Sunny. Don't you see? He's probably some kind of ESP genius! If you really want proof, you could probably have him tested at one of the colleges or hospitals that are doing—"

"No, no,
no!
He's just an ordinary baby!" She jumped to her feet and the fear came pouring from her like a cataract of ice. "How can you say these things to me, Rogi? You're sick! Sick with jealousy because I married Don and had his child. Oh, go away! Leave us alone!"

Exasperated, I began to shout at her. "You can't hide your head in the sand! You know I'm not crazy and you know that what I've told you is the truth! Your own mind gives you away!"

"No!" she screamed.

I gestured. The vase of lilacs on the table rose two feet in the air. I sent it soaring across the kitchen to the bowl of the sink and let it fall with a crash. In another room, the baby let out a terrible cry. Sunny came at me like a tigress with her hands clenched into fists and her eyes blazing.

"You freak! You bastard! Get out of my house!"

I had never in my life touched her with my coercion, but there was nothing else to do.