INTERVENTION (44 page)

"No thanks," said 1, not giving a flying fuck that I was thereby letting the side down. I would not accept operancy training. I would not let them measure my overall PsiQ. I would not even submit to a simple assay of my metafaculties. (Researchers now tended to classify the mind-powers under the headings of Ultrasenses, Coercivity, Psychokinesis, Creativity, and Healing—later broadened to Redaction.)

Maybe someday, I said, lying in my teeth. But not now.

The publicity splash generated by the publication of Denis's book finally petered out, to my relief, and the media abandoned Hanover to cover more newsworthy events such as the Mars Mission, the African plague, and the never-ending Middle Eastern terrorist attacks. The mysterious researches of my nephew became strictly stale potatoes, journalistically speaking—until the Edinburgh bombshell exploded late in October.

Denis knew it was coming. In spring, MacGregor had tried to enlist the cooperation of the Dartmouth group, in addition to that of the Stanford team, for his upcoming demonstration. Denis turned him down flat, and he tried hard to convince the Scot to postpone the press conference—or at least make the EE demonstration a private one for a select group of United Nations representatives. I only found out what was in the wind by accident, when Denis let anxiety over what he felt was a premature disclosure leak into the vestibule of his mind, where I picked it up—and was aghast. If MacGregor and his people came out into the open with a demonstration of their powers, linked to a patently political proposal, other metapsychics would also feel constrained to do so. Denis's group, beyond a doubt! They would acknowledge their operancy in support of the idealistic proposal of their fellow researchers, and when they did my own protective coloration would be destroyed.

MacGregor had confided to Denis his reasons for deciding to go ahead; but Denis did not at that time reveal those reasons to me. I only saw that my nephew had apparently caved in to the pressure exerted by his older colleague and had abandoned a carefully orchestrated scheme that would have revealed the existence of operant minds to the world only after a period of careful preparation.

Instead, it was to be: Voilà! Like us or lump us.

I was as furious with Denis as I was frightened for myself. We had a flaming row over the matter that led to our first serious estrangement. I cursed myself for ever coming to Hanover, where it was inevitable that I would be drawn into whatever ruckus attended Denis. My original reason for coming, Denis's fear that Victor might try to harm me, now seemed to be without foundation. I had seen Victor only at the Christmas and Easter family gatherings, and he had been distantly cordial. It looked as though the real danger to me, ironically enough, was going to be Denis himself! And I was trapped. All my money was invested in the bookshop and it was too late to set it up elsewhere. I would have to stay in Hanover.

However, I distanced myself from Denis and the other operants almost completely from April, when the Edinburgh matter came to a head, to October. Swaddled in midlife depression, I overworked, trying to distract myself and force my infant business into the black. I stayed open until midnight. I wrote reams of letters to specialty collectors proffering my wares and inquiring about rarities. I went to conventions of science-fiction and fantasy fans and peddled my stuff, making friends and contacts who would be invaluable in later years. I nearly managed to forget what I was. A mental freak? Not I, folks! I'm only a humble bookseller. But if you're into the occult, I might have just the title you're looking for...

It was Don who put an end to the charade.

Throughout the early fall, as my anxiety about the upcoming EE demonstration increased, I slept very badly. I would awake stiff with terror, my pajamas and pillow soaked with sweat, but unable for the life of me to remember the content of the nightmare. Then October came and the hills flagged their scarlet warning of approaching winter, and the petunias in the decorative tubs out on the sidewalks died with the first touch of frost. In the misty dawn, when I lay in bed in that odd state between sleep and full wakefulness, I began to feel again the familiar touch of my dead brother's mind. He had wanted so desperately to be free of me ... but now, without me, he was lost.

I tried to blot out my irrational fantasies in the time-honored family fashion, just as Don and even One' Louie had done before me. Sometimes the drinking helped. As a side effect I suffered a drastic "psi decline" (for few things are as detrimental to the metafaculties as over indulgence in alcohol), and this brought reproaches from Denis, along with tiresome offers of help. I refused, even though I was quite aware that I needed some sort of therapy. Somehow I had conceived the notion that to seek psychiatric help would be to "give in" to Don. I told myself that he was only a memory. He was dead, prayed over by the Church, buried in consecrated ground. Thoughts of him could hurt me only if I let them—and I would not! In time I would conquer him and the fears we had shared. Time would heal me.

But the bad dreams and the depression and the feeling of hovering doom that the French-speaking call malheur only sharpened as the day of the Edinburgh press conference drew nearer. I could no longer get to sleep at all without drinking myself into insensibility. A certainty took hold of me that I would end as Don had, a suicide, and damned. In earlier years I might have prayed. I still went through the arid formalities of religious practice, but only to ward off additions to my already intolerable spiritual burden. My prayers had the thin comfort of habit, but lacked the trust in divine mercy that compels the probability lattices ...

One day, rummaging through a recently arrived shipment of used books, I came upon a title that I remembered Elaine burbling over, a study of yogic techniques. I had smiled when she told me how the book had "helped her resolution of the death-space." (Death had been the furthest thing from my mind in those days!) The exercises she had described seemed to be mumbo jumbo, Eastern balderdash. But now in my extremity I took the book up to my untidy apartment and devoured it in a single reading. The states promised to the adept seemed analogous to the "astronomical consciousness" of Odd John, that supreme detachment that had made both the conquest of the universe and death become irrelevant to him.

So I tried.

Unfortunately, I was not very good at the meditations. They were too inwardly directed, too chilling to the sanguine Franco soul. Still I blundered on, for if the yogic exercises failed as the alcohol had failed, what hope was there? The inevitable day would arrive, and the exposure, and then I would be drawn along with all the rest of them to the inevitable end.

At the start of his research, Denis had told me that there was only one assured way that operants could escape the Odd John Effect, the potentially fatal dichotomy between Homo superior and the less favored mass of humanity. It lay in giving the "normals" hope that someday they—or their children or their children's children—might also attain the higher mind-powers. Much of the current work at Dartmouth was directed toward this end, and it was to be the subject of Denis's next book. Other research groups in other parts of the world were also studying the problem, trying to bridge the gap, to demonstrate that metafaculties were a universal fact of human nature.

Given time, these preparatory efforts might have defused the normals' perfectly rational fear of us. But there was no time.

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, EARTH

22
OCTOBER
1991

H
IS MENTAL ALARM
clock woke Jamie MacGregor at precisely 4:00
A.M.,
and he began the most memorable day of his life with a queasy stomach and aching sinuses. The first could be attributed to stage fright and a lingering anxiety over the spooks, who might still be entertaining notions of kidnaping him before he let the EE cat out of the bag. The second was evidence that his prayer for just one more day of beautiful October weather had gone unanswered; the low-pressure trough that had lurked coyly above the Orkneys for the past week now sat astride Britain, charging the atmosphere with inimical ions. That might mean that the demonstration could be adversely affected. Under laboratory conditions the matter could easily be remedied through artificial neg-ion generation—but any such fiddle was out of the question during the public experiments, where the EE faculty had at least to
seem
invincible.

Ah, well. If Nigel or Alana experienced problems he would simply step into the breach himself, and professional modesty be hanged.

It was still very dark. Lying there beside Jean, whose mind cycled in the serene delta waves of deepest sleep, Jamie MacGregor addressed the first order of business: banishing the sinus headache. He relaxed, adjusted his breathing, then summoned a picture of the front of his own skull in cutaway. He let gentle insinuation become a firm command:
Decrease histamine production shrink membranes inhibit mucus secretion initiate sinus drainage LET THERE BE NO PAIN.

It happened.

He savored relief for a few moments, listening to the faint ticking of sleet against the windowpanes and his wife's gentle snores. Her strongest faculty was the healing, and she had taught it to him and to their two children and to numbers of their colleagues at university. The gift was widespread among Celts and many Scots possessed it suboperantly, with its practice requiring only strong will power and never a modicum of doubt. It did not seem to matter whether or not the healer's perception of the ailment's source was scientifically accurate. Experiments with their own young Katie and David had proved that—and Jamie had to smile as he recalled certain bizarre visualizations by the children. Yet if a person sincerely believed that tiny demons with hammers were the true source of sinusitis, wishing the evil creatures dead would work a cure just as surely as his own explicit redactive commands had done...

Outside in Dalmond Crescent an automobile engine whirred to a reluctant start and settled into a rough idle. The car did not drive off and Jamie's uneasy stomach reasserted itself. Damn them! Who was it this time? He cursed his inability to identify individual auras at a distance. Those lucky enough to possess that faculty, seekersense adepts such as Denis Remillard or the Tibetan Urgyen Bhotia, who headed up the Darjeeling establishment, did not have to fear being stalked or ambushed by human predators. But Jamie was blind to mental signatures. There was only one way he would be able to find out which foreign agent or British spook had spent a dreary night on station outside his house and now suffered predawn demoralization that required the comfort of a car's heater.

Jamie let his mind go out of body.

He seemed to ascend through the bedroom ceiling, through the loft, through the roof. He hovered above leafless trees tossing in the wind and streetlamps glimmering on the dark granite paving setts. One of the autos parked along the crescent, a Jaguar XJS HE, had twin plumes of vapor rising from it. Jamie swooped down to peer inside and saw Sergei Arkhipov, the London KGB resident, wiping his streaming nose with a sodden handkerchief before sucking a tot from his nearly depleted flask. The stereo was playing "Fingal's Cave." This solitary vigil by an agent of Arkhipov's high rank undoubtedly meant that the Russians had finally ruled out a kidnap attempt, even as the Americans had. Sergei was probably standing by only to make certain that no other faction—especially the GRU, Soviet military intelligence—got reckless.

Were there other spooks about? Jamie rose high again and began to search for signs of the Yanks or MI5; but the other parked cars on the street and in the adjacent mews were empty, and the only wakeful persons in the neighborhood besides himself and Arkhipov were Mrs. Farnsworth and her fretful infant and old Hamish Ferguson, insomniac again, watching
Deep Throat
on his VCR.

Jamie's upset stomach responded now to self-redaction and he returned briefly to his own body to prepare for the principal excorporeal excursion. Jean, sensing his tension, half woke and sent out a little nonverbal query. He told her: No no it's nothing sleep lass sleep not quite time to rise for the Big Day ...

Then he was off again through the freezing dark, a soul that would girdle the globe before returning to its physical anchorage. But first, before crossing the Atlantic, he'd stop at Islay, for Gran.

Storm winds out of the northwest smote the shoulder of the island squarely, shoving mountainous waves into Sanaigmore Bay. The farmsteading in its hollow seemed to crouch like a patient, sturdy beast, back to the gale. To Jamie's mind's eye, refined by the EE faculty as it never was during short-distance attempts at clairvoyance, the Hebridean darkness was as lucid as day, except that there were no colors and the lack of shadows gave the scene a peculiar flatness. The area lights that usually lit the farmyard at night were out and the house looked unilluminated as well, alarming Jamie. But when he glided down and came close he saw the glow of a paraffin lamp through the kitchen window and a smoky thread blasted horizontally from the chimney of the ancient, peat-burning hearth. His older brother Colin and his wife Jean and their grown son Johnnie, who worked the farm now, were still abed, enjoying the last precious half hour of rest. But Gran was up getting breakfast, as was her custom. He heard her humming as she put another peat on the fire and stirred the porridge.

Jamie said: Gran it's me.

Dear laddie you took the time to come! said she.

For your blessing now that we're ready to show our secret to the world ... I see your electricity's gone out in the storm.

Aye and the fancy cooker and the lights and the closed-circuit telly to the barn and all the other modem thingamajiks useless until Colin wakes and starts the Honda generator but he and Jean and Johnnie will wake to hot food naetheless I cooked over peat for fifty years and I don't mind doing it now it's a comfort to know the old ways still have their worth.