INTERVENTION (52 page)

What perverse compulsion had led me to top my nephew's display of psychokinesis with one of my own, thus revealing my most closely guarded secret on a television program beamed around the globe?

Oh yes, I had been more than a little drunk at the time, having given in to the need to fortify myself against the invasion of my bookshop by Carlos Moreno and his squad of muckrakers. But to show my power so flippantly, with such comball insouciance! I had to be cracking up.

After the fatal taping session in the shop, when we had all had our giggle and it occurred to me what a piece of
lunacy
I had perpetrated, I went on a towering binge. I missed the actual
60 Minutes
telecast that took place on Sunday, three days later, as well as the debriefing party afterward that was given at the Metapsychology Lab, where Denis and his Coterie celebrated having thrown their bonnets over the windmill. Apparently only one person missed me, out of all that supposedly psychosensitive lot, and wondered where I had disappeared to, and figured things out, and had the compassion to come and ring the bell to my apartment and shout telepathically until I was roused from my stupor and coerced into opening the door ...

Lucille.

"I knew it!" she exclaimed, pushing inside. "I just knew you'd done something stupid. Look at you! Roger, what are you
doing
to yourself?"

"Good question," I mumbled, grinning down at her. But my drunken insolence quailed in the face of her terrible charity. I must have looked like a sodden scarecrow, half conscious and filthy; but she had helped tend her invalid father for years and had no trouble at all coping with me. She forced me to take a shower, dressed me in clean pajamas, and pummeled my brain until I swallowed a vitamin-laden milkshake. Then she put me to bed. When I woke up ten hours later she was still there, dozing in a chair in the parlor, and my hurrah's nest of an apartment was now spotless and my entire stock of booze had been poured down the drain.

With my head throbbing like a calliope at full steam and my knees awobble, I looked in hung-over wonderment at the sleeping young woman, trying to think why she, of all people, had come to my rescue.

Her eyes opened. They were brown and
very stern, and
I couldn't help remembering how she had sent Denis and me packing when we had first dowsed her out eleven years earlier.

"Why?" she said quietly, echoing my telepathic question. "Because I know just what came over you when Denis did his thing and you knew the jig was up. Poor old Roger."

She stretched, then got up from the chair and looked at her wristwatch. "Quarter to eight. I have a seminar at nine this morning, but there's time to scramble some eggs." She headed for my kitchen.

"What d'you mean you know?" I croaked, shuffling after. "I don't even know! And what the hell right do you have coming up here and interfering with me? Don't tell me the fuckin' Ghost sent you!"

She began to crack eggs. The sound was like ax-blows against my tortured eardrums. I lurched and her coercion reached out and coolly tipped me into a kitchen chair. I let out a groan and caught my head before it bounced on the freshly polished maple table top. A few moments later she was shoving a cup of coffee under my nose.

"Microwaved instant, but strong enough to etch glass," she said. "Drink." Coercion locked on, stifling my instinctive refusal. I drank. Then she produced a nauseously aromatic plate of eggs with buttered toast. My guts cringed at the loathsome prospect.

"Eat."

"I can't—"

YES YOU CAN.

Bereft of will power, I dug in. Lucille sat down opposite me and sipped tea, keeping the compulsion firm by maintaining eye contact. She was not a pretty woman but her face had that high-colored attractiveness indicative of a formidable character. Her dark hair was cut in a simple pageboy with the bangs just touching thick, straight brows. She wore a scarlet turtleneck sweater and jeans, and her hands were raw, the once polished fingernails damaged from the heavy housecleaning chores she had undertaken on my behalf.

As my stomach filled and my aching head deflated to a size approximating normality, I felt ashamed of my surly ingratitude and more than ever mystified that she should have been the one to think of me. She had been an occasional customer at the bookshop, showing a rather regrettable penchant for fantasy books featuring dragons. Her mind had always closed primly at my avuncular jests and resisted my attempts to put her onto a more sophisticated style of escapist literature. Lucille knew what she liked and stuck to it with Franco stubbornness. She was not even a full-fledged member of the Coterie, but only one of the more talented experimental subjects—a mere student—which made her assertion that she understood my mental state all the more improbable.

"But I do understand," she said, reading my subvocalizations. "You and I are really quite a bit alike. Both of us are still trying to adapt, asking questions about ourselves that desperately need answers."

I glared at the nervy little chit, mopping my plate with the last of the toast. Her coercion slid aside as I managed to prop my mental barricade into position.

She only smiled. "There's a person who's helped me to find some answers, Roger. I think he could help you, too. I'm going to come back here this afternoon at three o'clock and take you along with me to meet him."

"No, you aren't," said I. "Don't think that I'm not grateful to you for shoveling me up and putting this place back in order after my lost weekend—but I'm quite all right now. I don't need any help from your friend. And don't think you can force me. You'll find I'm not nearly so susceptible to coercion when I'm compos mentis."

She leaned toward me earnestly. "I wouldn't coerce you to come. That wouldn't be any use. But you must, Roger! You know that you're seriously in need of help. Everybody knows."

I laughed. "So I'm the talk of the town, am I? A disgrace and an embarrassment, sans doute, to my nephew the distinguished supermind! And which one of his brilliant young colleagues have you pegged to drag the black sheep out of his alcoholic wilderness?"

"None of the Coterie. I want you to talk to my own analyst, Dr. Bill Sampson. He isn't an operant at all. But he has more insight—more caring competence—than that whole damned labful of superior metapsychic pricks. Denis included."

Oh my God. I squeezed my crusty eyelids shut.

She babbled on. "When I felt how deeply afraid you were there in the bookshop, with the TV people closing in and Denis put in the position of having to demonstrate his PK, I was just appalled. Then you
defied
it! I knew right then that I'd have to do something to help you. Take you to Bill. He helped me lick my dragons and he can help you—"

Lightning struck.

Now I knew why I had made that lunatic gesture in front of the TV cameras, why I had berated myself so that her mind's ear overheard, why I had admitted her to my squalid sanctum, asking if my own special dragon had sent her.

It had.

Poor little kindhearted Lucille! Let me reinforce my mind-screen, hiding from you the blaze of certainty. It had been more than a year ago that I was admonished to break up your love affair with Dr. Bill Sampson, and I put the notion completely out of my mind. But synchronicity is not so easily denied ... and here we are, and there the inevitability awaits us.

Once again I am not a man but a tool. And how is the dirty deed to be done? (Neither she nor Sampson are fools, and any blatant action, such as reporting the prima facie breach of doctor-patient ethics, would tend to solidify their liaison rather than sever it.) No, I would have to be both subtle and direct.

All that is really necessary is to show old Sampson the truth.

The psychiatrist is a normal, but he is clearly enthralled by the metapsychic phenomenon in his beloved. Show him how he has played the romantic hero, rescuing a malleable young Andromeda from the mental rock where she chained herself as dragon-meat. The princess is tender and grateful now; but her chains can be taken up and worn again at any time—and they can be stretched to fit two minds as easily as one when reality inevitably intrudes on the glamour. Then she will destroy the mortal lover as well as herself, surrendering to her dragon's fire...

Does he think that love will transcend? Then show him what operancy really means—what a mature operant can do—what
she
will be able to do someday! Now, blinded and gentled, she shrinks from prying into the deeper layers of his mind. But pry she will, and she'll find the petty, cruel, and unworthy thoughts that flit through every human mind, no matter how loving, and in her hurt she'll fling them into his face. Show him how easily it's done! And then coerce him. Show how his darling will be capable of violating his sovereign will, should the mood come upon her. Show him the PK! Give him just a hint of the healing faculty's flip side! And then the clincher. Project the image that every operant, even the most noble, holds deep in his heart when he compares himself to lowly normals. Show him Odd John's truth.

"
I was living in a world of phantoms, 01 animated masks. No one seemed really alive. I had a queer notion that if I pricked any of you there would be no bleeding but only a gush of wind...
"

Learn the truth, Dr. Bill Sampson. Then find a normal woman to love and leave Lucille Cartier to her metapsychic destiny. Learn the easy way, from somebody who learned the hard way.

"Roger," Lucille said. "Please come with me this afternoon. It will all be for the best."

"I hope so," I told her. "God, I hope so."

SUPERVISORY CRUISER NOUMENON
[Lyl 1-0000]

4
JUNE
1992

W
HEN THE FANATICS
successfully smuggled the second of the Armageddon devices into place, and that place was the Israeli nuclear weaponry works at Dimona, the portents were such that Homologous Trend felt impelled to consult with its three fellow entities.

"One must admit," Trend told the others, "that my anatomization of the probability lattices is somewhat disorderly—but that's Earth for you. However, the resultant inevitably leads to still another global crisis capable of disrupting the planetary sexternion—and Intervention."

"One's sensibilities churn," Eupathic Impulse said, upon viewing the analysis. "From this one locus proceed conflicts not only in the Middle East, but also in South Africa, Uzbekistan, and India."

"One is chagrined," Asymptotic Essence said, "given the worldwide flowering of goodwill after the Scottish Demonstration, to note that the group instigating the atrocity stubbornly persists in its ancient tribal hostility mode. Other Earth populations at higher and lower levels of sociopolitical organization experienced positive transformational nuances as a result of MacGregor's ploy. What's wrong with this bunch?"

"Status Three indigenes," Noetic Concordance observed sadly, "are a perverse and difficult lot, more likely to stall in metapsychic development than other classifications. Status Threes vest authority in puppet rulers dominated by a powerful priestly caste. The intellectual establishment is subservient, and upward mobility of individuals is limited according to their profession of orthodoxy. The higher mind-powers—even elementary creativity—tend to be repressed, except insofar as they serve the narrow religious objective. The mind-set is intolerant, reactionary, xenophobic, and more than a little silly. Fanaticism is a prime activator of psychoenergies and the view of consequents is minimal. Even this impending catastrophe is seen by the perpetrators as a glorification of the All."

Eupathic Impulse said, "One has a sneaking suspicion that this particular terrorist group wants to get its licks in before the inspection teams of the UN Nuclear Nonproliferation Agency include persons adept in farsensing."

Trend waved all this thought-embroidery aside. "You three agree with my dire prognosis. Do you also agree that the gravity of the situation demands that we summon Atoning Unifex for a contemplation?"

"One regrets having to disturb It," Concordance said. "But if Earth is to be spared this profound trauma, overt action will have to be taken."

Asymptotic Essence permitted itself the barest hint of vexation. "Another deliberate skew of the noögenetic curvature? That will make three inside of fourteen months, including the rescue of MacGregor from the Mafia hit-man and the augmentation of the Alma-Ata group's coercion of the Soviet TV net. How long must we keep this up? If Earth's Mind were treated in a normal manner, it would never achieve coadunation!"

Eupathic Impulse was inclined to agree. "Intervention in due season is one thing: continued interference with significant nodalities on the evolving mental lattices is quite another. If it were any entity save Unifex commanding this most atypical wet-nursing, one might have the most serious misgivings."

"One of the most notable incongruities is our own physical presence here," Noetic Concordance reminded the others. "One questions why the Supervisory Body does not simply work through the Agent Polities, who are more than a little scandalized by our participation."

"One may question," Eupathic Impulse noted wryly, "but one doesn't necessarily get straight answers."

Homologous Trend said, "One
must
trust Unifex."

Eupathic Impulse said, "If It would only share Its prescience!"

Noetic Concordance said, "Of all our vague and absent-minded Lylmik race, It is the most terribly preoccupied. And weary. One intuits that It would transfer the burden of Galactic mentorship and submerge Itself in the Cosmic All in a trice, were It not faithful to some great overriding dynamic—"

"Which It declines to share," Impulse said.

"We must trust It," Trend reiterated, "as we have since the dawn of the Milieu, when It selected us four from all the eager Lylmik after manifesting the Protocol of Unification. Unifex
has
shared ... as much as It has been able to do so. You know our racial Mind's limitation as well as its strengths. We are ancient and tending toward stagnation, conservative and over-fond of the mystical lifestyle. Unifex's great vision of a Galactic Mind was able to electrify us, to send us beyond the Twenty-One Worlds in search of other, immature Minds that we might shepherd toward coadunation. Toward Unity.
That,
if you will, was the great outrage Unifex committed: the initiation of the Milieu. You younger entities have let the memory of it slip away in your earnest contemplation of present anomalies."