INTERVENTION (13 page)

Sit down.

Her voice choked off and she turned into a statue, except for her widening eyes. Her face was a tragic mask, open-mouthed in silent screaming.

Sit down.

Somewhere the baby was howling like a wild thing, reacting to the emotion of his mother. Sunny's eyes implored me but I held her fast. Two tears rolled down her frozen cheeks. She let her eyelids close and volition evaporated. She sank slowly onto one of the chairs. Her head fell forward, veiled by the long blond hair, and she wept without making a sound.

Don't be afraid. Stay right there.

She wasn't hearing my precise telepathic words, of course, only their meaning filtered through the larger coercive impulse. I went and got Denis, wrapped him in a blanket, and handed him carefully to his mother. Then I freed her mind from the compulsion and projected reassurance at the baby.

C
R
Y
.[Tranquillity.] "It's okay, Denis. Maman's fine now."

His wails ceased abruptly. He hiccupped and sniffed.

I extended my hand to the child, pointing my index finger, and exerted the lightest invitation. The baby's eyes were still swimming but his tiny mouth curved in a smile. A bare doll-like arm came out from under the blanket, reached unerringly, and clasped the end of my finger in a firm grip. I said:

ROGI [touch] DENIS. I/Rogi—you/Denis. Rogi [love] Denis.

There was a sudden radiant concordance. Even Sunny must have sensed it for she gave a slight gasp. The baby cooed.

"Your name is Denis," I said.

The baby made a small sound.

"Denis," I repeated.

The little face shone. His mind said: DENIS! His voice uttered the same funny little noise.

"He's trying to say his name," I explained to Sunny, "but his vocal cords and tongue really aren't hooked up properly to his brain yet. But his mind knows that he's called Denis."

Sunny rocked the child without speaking. She was still weeping softly but the horror was gone, leaving only bewilderment and reproach. Oh, Sunny, I'm so sorry you were afraid, so sorry for my clumsiness...

"But I had to do it," I told her, no longer coercing but pleading for understanding. "I couldn't let you go on denying. It wouldn't be fair to Denis. You're going to have to be brave for his sake. He's a
responsibility.
He probably has all the special mental abilities that Don and I have—plus more. I think he has superior intelligence, too. If that giant brain of his has a chance to develop properly, he'll grow up to be a great man."

She was now entirely calm. The infant basked in self-satisfaction and yawned. She held him tightly against her breast. "What am I going to do, Rogi? Will—will they take him away from me?"

"Of course not! For God's sake, Sunny—when I said you could have him tested by scientists, I only meant that you could do it if you felt you had to. To prove he was—what I said. But nobody can force you to give Denis up for experiments. No way! Not in this country. If he was my son—"

She looked at me expectantly.

I was standing so close to her and the child that their combined aura enveloped me. There was relief and dependency emanating from her, and from the baby a strengthening variant of the harmonious bond I had felt earlier.

Denis I love} Rogi.

Oh, Denis, you can't! You're not mine. She's not mine. It's Don you have to imprint on. Your real father. Not me ...

She asked quietly, "What would you do if Denis was your son?"

I heard myself speaking dispassionately. "The people who run those ESP labs wouldn't have the faintest idea how to give this baby what he needs. They're only normals. They've only dealt with normals. Denis needs to be taught by others like himself. Only his father and I are able to mindspeak him, so Don will have to—will have to—"

DENIS/ROGI!

Mind to mind the bond was forging, whether I willed it or not. The child was catching me just as he had earlier caught his mother, as all babies form a linkage with their nearest and dearest.

Denis, no! Not me! (Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Attempted murder. Yes, we'd both been drinking. Yes, I was out of my mind for love of her. Yes, I'm sorry sorry sorry ... thank you. No, Don never even knew. It was all in my mind? No, I don't think so, but perhaps—perhaps—I don't know. Two months' fast and abstinence and a good act of contrition and it's over and gone and I'll never forget never...)

Sunny was saying, "Don help me teach the baby? Well, I suppose we could ask him. He loves Denis, of course, but he's terribly old-fashioned. I can't get him to change diapers or even give Denis his bottle. What would Don have to do?"

My heart sank. I might have known. The Family Ghost knew all along, of course. If it
was
a ghost.

"Well, Don would have to spend time with the baby. Talk to him, mind to mind. Show him mental pictures. Help him learn control of his faculties."

She made a dubious little moue. "I suppose I can try."

"This is important, Sunny! Listen. When Don and I were babies, Tante Lorraine hardly had time to give us the love and attention ordinary babies need—and God knows, she wasn't a telepath. So we grew up stunted."

Sunny opened her mouth to protest, but I held up my hand and rushed on.

"Stunted in our use of the ESP powers, I mean. Look. Have you ever read about feral children, ones raised by animals or locked away from human contact by criminal parents? When they get out at last into the normal world they're hardly human at all because they were deprived of a certain kind of education they needed when their young minds were most impressionable. Don and I seem to be normal men—but we're really cripples, too. We should have had somebody to teach us how to use our special mind-powers when we were tiny babies. All my psychology books say that the first three years of life are critical for mental development. That must hold true for special powers even more than for ordinary ones. Don and I discovered our powers accidentally and developed them in a haphazard way. We've never been comfortable with them. Don doesn't really understand them at all and I'm—I know a bit more about them than he does, but not enough."

"You would have to explain to Don what had to be done."

"Yes, of course. I'll work out some kind of general outline. Denis would need to interact with both of you. There'd be a lot of things you could do alone, Sunny—reading aloud to him, just talking to him. I have a book by Piaget, a famous French child psychologist, that I'll let you read. It gives the step-by-step progress of a baby's learning. Really fascinating."

She nodded, holding the child close. The little boy's eyes were fixed on me and there seemed to be an air of puzzlement about him. I realized then that I had erected a mental barrier against his persistent reaching out. He was rooting against the obstruction like a puppy trying to dig under a wall.

No child no.

ROGI!

He forced himself on me. I tried to break eye contact with him and found that I could not. There was a strength and determination in him that was formidable, for all his immaturity, and I felt myself weakening. Babies! They have ways to insure their survival that even the normals are aware of. Mental ways. Why else do we think a helpless, noisy, smelly, demanding, inconvenient little travesty of a human being is almost irresistibly adorable?

No!

ROGImyROGI. [Love.]

My mental armor was dissolving. And then Denis smiled at me, and the trap closed.

Sunny said, "We musn't let any outsiders know the truth about Denis for a long time. Not until he's old enough to protect himself from people who might exploit him. We'll teach him to be cautious—and to be
good.
" She cuddled his head against her cheek. "Strange little superbaby. How will I ever keep up with him? I wonder how Mama Einstein managed?"

"Little Alfred was a disappointing child," I told her. "He didn't even speak until he was four."

I went to the sink and began to gather up the broken pieces of the lilac vase. It was quite a mess.

***

Don came home from work that evening and found Sunny and me sitting with the baby on the front porch. While she made supper, he and I had our first telepathic interchange in more than a year. I told him what I had done, and why.

At first he laughed, and then he was enraged when I told him it was his moral duty to undertake the special education of his son. We got into a shouting match in the living room and Sunny came running to put herself between us. Then she proceeded to beat down every objection Don could think of, all the while radiating such passionate devotion to him and to Denis that I was astounded. It was plain even to a fool like me that coercion was not the force that bound Don and Sunny—nor had it ever been.

As she finished telling him of the plans she and I had worked out for the first course of instruction, Don lifted his powerful arms in a re-signed shrug. "All right! You win! I think it's a mistake to treat the kid special—but what the hell. I'll mindspeak him the way you want. But don't expect me to turn into a goddam kindergarten teacher, okay?"

Sunny flung herself against him joyously and kissed him long and hard. When he broke away from her he looked over her head and gave me a sardonic grin.

"This business of working with the kid in the evenings. The flash cards and all that crap. I'd be lousy at it. Tell you what, Rogi. You help Sunny and me teach the kid. It's just the kind of thing you'd be good at—and the whole damn thing is your idea, after all. How about it?"

"What a wonderful idea," Sunny said warmly. "Say you will, Rogi."

From the bedroom came another plea: a formless mental one.

It was hopeless. The Family Ghost had won. I said, "All right."

"Well, that's settled," Don said. "What's for supper, sweetheart?"

EXCERPTS FROM:

FINAL REPORT OF THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS

CONDUCTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF
COLORADO UNDER CONTRACT TO THE
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE

9
JANUARY
1969

T
HE IDEA THAT
some UFOs
may
be spacecraft sent to Earth from another civilization, residing on another planet of the solar system, or on a planet associated with a more distant star than the Sun, is called the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). Some few persons profess to hold a stronger level of belief in the
actuality
of UFOs being visitors from outer space, controlled by intelligent beings, rather than merely of the
possibility,
not yet fully established as an observational fact. We shall call this level of belief ETA, for extraterrestrial actuality....

Direct, convincing, and unequivocal evidence of the truth of ETA would be the greatest single scientific discovery in the history of mankind. Going beyond its interest for science, it would undoubtedly have consequences of surpassing significance for every phase of human life. Some persons who have written speculatively on this subject profess to believe that the supposed extraterrestrial visitors come with beneficent motives, to help humanity clean up the terrible mess that it has made. Others say they believe that the visitors are hostile. Whether their coming would be favorable or unfavorable to mankind, it is almost certain that they would make great changes in the conditions of human existence....

The question of ETA would be settled in a few minutes if a flying saucer were to land on the lawn of a hotel where a convention of the American Physical Society was in progress, and its occupants were to emerge and present a special paper to the assembled physicists, revealing where they came from, and the technology of how their craft operated. Searching questions from the audience would follow.

In saying that thus far no convincing evidence exists for the truth of ETA, no prediction is made about the future. If evidence appears soon after this report is published, that will not alter the truth of the statement that we do not now have such evidence. If new evidence appears later, this report can be appropriately revised in a second printing....

Whether there is intelligent life elsewhere |ILE) in the Universe is a question that has received a great deal of serious speculative attention in recent years.... Thus far we have no observational evidence whatsoever on the question, so therefore it remains open.... The ILE question has some relation to the ETH or ETA for UFOs as discussed in the preceding section. Clearly, if ETH is true, then ILE must also be true because some UFOs have then to come from some unearthly civilization. Conversely, if we could know conclusively that ILE does not exist, then ETH could not be true. But even if ILE exists, it does not follow that the ETH is true.

For it could be true that the ILE, though existent, might not have reached a stage of development in which the beings have the mechanical capacity or the desire to visit the Earth's surface.... We have no right to assume that in life-communities everywhere there is a steady evolution in the directions of both greater intelligence and greater technological competence. Human beings now know enough to destroy all life on Earth, and they may lack the intelligence to work out social controls to keep themselves from doing so. If other civilizations have the same limitation, then it might be that they develop to the point where they destroy themselves utterly before they have developed the technology needed to enable them to make long space voyages.

Another possibility is that the growth of intelligence precedes the growth of technology in such a way that by the time a society would be technically capable of interstellar space travel, it would have reached a level of intelligence at which it had not the slightest interest in interstellar travel. We must not assume that we are capable of imagining now the scope and extent of future technological development of our own or any other civilization, and so we must guard against assuming that we have any capacity to imagine what a more advanced society would regard as intelligent conduct.