The Intervention Part 38

"We'd better hope the technique doesn't catch on in diplomatic circles, " Nigel said.

"According to Denis Remillard, " Jamie said, "it already has. But fortunately, not too many normals are able to keep it up for any length of time... I forgot to mention that Denis popped over via EE very early this morning. He had some important news. Dartmouth is establis.h.i.+ng a Department of Metapsychology with some whacking great grants that've fallen down the chimney, and Denis is being promoted to full professor and will head the thing up. "

"Lucky sod, " groaned Nigel. "And here we are with the University casting about for ways to put us under the U. K. Civil Service! Can't you just see our metapsychic peace initiative tucked tidily away in Whitehall?" And he sang, in an excruciating fruity tenor:

"But the privilege and pleasure That we treasure without measure Is to run on little errands for the Ministers of State!"

"Denis had some bad news, too. " Jamie spoke in a lower tone. "The bill for universal metapsychic testing of all American children died in committee. The Civil Liberties Union and the Bible-thumpers carried the day. Now the testing is to be done on a strictly voluntary basis. There was some demand that the names of the partic.i.p.ants and the results of the metapsychic a.s.say be made a matter of public record, but Denis is fairly certain that meta-supporters in Was.h.i.+ngton can shoot that one down by invoking the famous American right to privacy. I asked Denis if he senses any serious groundswell of antimeta sentiment building, but he thinks not. More like a blase att.i.tude on the part of the normals, he said - taking the mental marvels for granted the way they do s.p.a.ce travel. "

"We were all heroes, " Nigel declaimed, "right up until the last nukes in North Dakota and Skovorodino were dismantled! But what have we done for humanity lately?" He lifted his beer in a mock toast.

"Denis's new book is about due, " Jamie added. "He's calling it The Evolution of Mind. He said it may shake people up. I hope the lad hasn't said anything too reckless. Sometimes he strikes me as a bit toplofty, and I don't think that would sit well with the American public. Your Yank-on-the-street tends to follow egalitarianism right out the window, pretending that people really are all created equal and deserving of equal treatment across the board. It doesn't work out that way in actuality, of course -but G.o.d help the fellow who advocates any elitist scheme. " He chomped up the remains of his sandwich and took a deep draft of Arrol's.

"We, on the other hand, " Nigel said, "just love an aristocrat. "

"Speak for yourself, you kosher Sa.s.senach!" said Jean with spirit.

A number of colorful racial slurs were exchanged in good humor, and then all of them but Alana concentrated on food and drink. She persisted in her abstraction until she suddenly said: "Will Denis's new book have an explanation for precognition?"

"Have you had a skry, then?" Jean's face was troubled. "Not another warning?"

"Not exactly, " Alana said. "No firm premonition, only a kind of feeling. Just now. "

Nigel regarded the young woman with a pretense of exasperation. "She's facing her weird again, that's what. So she can get out of the excursion to Dallas. "

"It's no joke, " Jean admonished him. "Not to anyone born and reared in the Highlands. Our own little Katie's had the Sight - and I don't mind telling you it scares me. The other metafunctions are only extensions and elaborations of our normal mind-powers, after all. But precognition seems supernatural somehow... " She turned again to Alana. "Your feeling: was it for good or ill?"

"I - I don't know. I've never felt anything like it. It wasn't frightening. No vision, no notion of an event impending. Perhaps just the opposite. " She gave a small laugh and once again turned to the window. The old man was stooped over, rummaging in his carrier bag while the rain beat on his exposed neck. "He's still singing the hymn, " Alana noted softly. "Still upset. Perhaps it's his precognition. "

"Funny you should ask about the theoretical aspect of the Sight, " Nigel said. "I was defending the crystal-ball effect as a legitimate metafunction to Littlefield and Schneider just the other day. It has to be a warping of the temporal lattices producing a wormhole in the continuum through the agency of the seer's own coercion. In theory, one could catch glimpses of the future or the past quite as readily as contemporaneous remote-viewings in the here and now. It's a matter of willing - coercing - a momentary plication of time rather than s.p.a.ce. "

"But how, " Alana said slowly, "can you explain the unpremeditated glimpse of the future? The vision one doesn't ask for?"

Nigel looked uncomfortable. He swirled the last of his beer in the bottom of the gla.s.s. "It's hard to explain that through dynamic-field theory, I admit. You see, the temporal nodalities that we call 'events' require instigating forces. Causes, if you like. But if the unexpected premonition doesn't originate in the coercivity of the seer, we must ask just what the source of the coercive vector is. It could be another person. It could be the collective unconscious of humanity, if you want to accept Urgyen Bhotia's theory. "

"Or it could simply be angels, " said Jamie MacGregor.

Alana started. "Oh, you're putting me on!"

He was rummaging in his notecase for the Parapsychology Unit's credit card. Discovering it at last, he waved it at the barmaid. "If you eliminate the coercivity of the seer as the instigator of Sight, and eliminate the coercivity of other people - using the term in its broadest sense to mean 'sapient ent.i.ties inhabiting our physical universe' -then you are left with an enigma. An extradimensional genetrix. An initiating force outside the eighteen generative dynamic fields, but nevertheless congruent to the three matrix fields. "

The barmaid took Jamie's card away. Her face had an old-fas.h.i.+oned expression.

"Are you speaking of G.o.d?" Alana asked.

"Not necessarily, " said Jamie. "The Universal Field Theory doesn't define G.o.d, or the Cosmic All, or the Omega, or whatever. But if such an ent.i.ty exists outside our physical universe, then it must have a method of relating to that universe. Denis Remillard believes in G.o.d and suggests that an integral s.e.xternion - or a whole gaggle of them - operates between the All and the dimensional construct we call the physical universe. He says the s.e.xternions already have a perfectly good name in religious tradition: angels! Word means messenger. " He signed the credit-card slip with a flourish and pocketed his copy.

Alana peered at him with suspicion. "Do you mean to say you really believe second sight is instigated by angels?"

Jamie shrugged. They were all rising from the table and going after their raincoats. "I didn't say that. I said it was a theory, and one of Remillard's to boot. You can think as you like, la.s.s. "

"Do you still feel fey?" Jean asked Alana solicitously. "You're dread-fully pale and you didn't eat a thing. "

"It's a blank, " the girl whispered. She tried to smile. "There doesn't seem to be anything beyond. "

"Take my arm, " Nigel urged her.

Alana's eyes slid away. "I'd really rather not. Please, Nigel. "

"No problem, " he said easily, and held the door open.

The two women went out into the rain.

By the churchyard gate, the elderly man was now kneeling on the pavement, rooting in the plastic carrier bag and muttering. He had lost his hat and the rain soaked his thin white hair and ran down his furrowed cheeks. He looked up wildly and froze as he saw Alana.

There shah not be found among you any one that useth divination, or an enchanter, or a witch! For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy G.o.d doth drive them out from before thee!

Alana stopped as the cry flooded her mind and tried to crowd Jean back into the pub doorway with her body, but she was not quick enough; the machine pistol that the old man pulled from his bag spat five sudden gouts of yellow fire and woke thundering echoes up and down the ancient street. Alana crumpled, her face turned scarlet and formless, dead before she reached the ground. Jean took only one bullet, but that was in the neck, and she fell back into Jamie's arms with her life fountaining onto the rain-darkened granite pavement.

The old man shouted: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!" He threw down his weapon and darted into the Greyfriars churchyard.

Jamie went to his knees with Jean clasped to his breast, hearing her mind say what her voice was unable to utter: Katie and David... love them... continue the work...

He bent and kissed her, with the rational part of his brain a.s.suring him that this could not be happening. Not to her. Not to them. Their life together had been absurdly perfect, an idyll throughout the thirteen years of their marriage and professional collaboration and the rearing of their joy-bedight offspring. This sort of ending was impossible.

Jean said: I'm always with you.

He kissed her again, and was aware of a terrible howling sound. Then, shockingly, he was almost bowled over by a plunging shape and knew it was Nigel, gone after the madman, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Jean said: He mustn't. Stop him.

When Jamie continued to cling to her, she mustered up a last coercive impulse.

Go before it's too late!

He lowered her carefully to the stones. People were pus.h.i.+ng out of the pub, babbling and shouting. Several cars had stopped and their occupants looked out, horror-stricken. Jamie dodged pedestrians and pounded through the churchyard entrance. Beneath one of the venerable trees just softening in spring leaf was a fierce orange blaze. Nigel stood over it his scholarly face as implacable as the marble death's-heads that decorated the seventeenth-century tombs on either hand. A man writhed in the midst of the fire, making a shrill keening sound.

Jamie ripped off his coat to blanket the flames, rolling the burning man on the wet turf. Suddenly, without a word, Nigel leapt onto Jamie's back and clawed at his eyes. Jamie levered himself upright, got a grip on the wrists of the smaller man, and pried the hands away from his face. Redness tinged the vision of one eye.

"No, Nigel! For G.o.d's sake!"

"Let the swine burn!" Nigel sank his teeth into Jamie's right hand. Agonized, Jamie lifted Nigel bodily and flung him headfirst against the trunk of the tree. He fell, groaning feebly, and Jamie turned again to the smoldering body beneath the raincoat.

There were people running about the churchyard now and a sound of approaching police cars. The flames seemed to be out. Jamie pulled a fold of fabric aside and saw the charred features of the fanatic -hawklike nose, bold brow-arches of Caledonian bone, lantern jaw - a face very much like his own. The eyes in their lidless sockets seemed to retain an uncompromising gleam and the mouth, distorted by the rictus of violent death, might have been triumphantly grinning.

Jamie let the cloth drop back. He got up and limped over to Nigel, who appeared to be embracing the tree as he attempted to haul himself upright. One sleeve of his coat was torn and his bald pate was purpled with a ma.s.sive contusion. Jamie extended his left hand to his colleague and pulled him to his feet. Nigel reciprocated by binding Jamie's bitten hand with a handkerchief.

Police officers came and led them away, and then there was an interval during which they were asked the same questions over and over again with irritating persistence. Dr. Nigel Weinstein was arrested and charged with culpable homicide. Later he was released on his own recognizance to attend the Third Metapsychic Congress, which was held that year in Edinburgh. He did not present a paper.

In February 1995 Weinstein was acquitted when the Scottish jury brought in a verdict of "Not Proven. " By then, however, with the worldwide publicity given the trial, the damage had been done.

5.

SURVEY VESSEL.

KRAK RONA'AL [Kron 466-010111]

SECTOR 14: STAR 14-893-042 [LANDA]: PLANET 4 [a.s.sAWOMPSET].

GALACTIC YEAR: LA PRIME 1-357-627.

[8 AUGUST 1994].

THE MONSTROUS KRONDAKU are a race fabled throughout the Galactic Milieu for their ancient wisdom, their merciless objectivity, and their composure. But there is another aspect to the great tentacled invertebrates that other polities (except the Lylmik) do not suspect.

At those rare times when they can be certain of being un.o.bserved by exotic minds, the Krondaku are given to fooling around.

The mated pairs, especially, in conditions of absolute privacy, will cast aside all decorum and circ.u.mspection and for a brief interval submerge themselves completely in sensory input. They revel, they wallow, they become intoxicated voluptuaries - drinking in, above all, the supernal pla'akst sensation engendered by their ponderous amours. Only the Gi, those paragons of concupiscence, have a greater capacity for pla'akst than dallying Krondaku. When the pa.s.sionate interlude ends, its memory lingers on and suffuses the normal Krondak phlegmatism with sunniness. For a while, the terrible monsters are awash with uncharacteristic bonhomie.

It was in just such a mood that two senior Krondak planetologists approached the Landa solar system in the 14th Sector.

Comparator Dota'efoo Alk'ai and her mate, Attestor Luma'eroo Tok, had received a most unusual a.s.signment from the Sector Base on Molakar [Tau Ceti-2]. They were to go themselves, without the usual support crew consisting of a mixed bag of Milieu races, and perform an update a.s.sessment of the fourth Landa planet, which they had surveyed many Galactic millenaries ago. Once a promising prospect for colonization, the world had suffered the misfortune of being within a critical distance of supernova 14-322-931B-S2. As this dying star exploded, it launched a relativistic blast wave of high-energy particles, x-rays, and gamma rays in all directions. For several centuries, the normal background cosmic radiation flux through the Landa system increased by a factor of nearly five thousand, with cataclysmic effects upon the biota of the single habitable world. The blast wave had swept past Landa exactly two Galactic millenaries ago [5476 Earth years]. The 14th Sector Survey Authority decided it was now time to find out if the irradiated fourth planet had simmered down, and if it was still potentially colonizable. A full-scale resurvey was not required. Experienced field-workers such as Dota'efoo and Luma'eroo would be able to decide rather quickly whether or not the world was a write-off.

The Landa solar system lay on the outer fringe of the Orion Arm of the Galaxy, some 6360 light-years from Molakar. Traveling at its usual brisk displacement factor of 370, the stars.h.i.+p of the two Krondak planetologists required 17.19 subjective Galactic days to make the trip, which was executed in eighteen consecutive hyperspatial catenaries. Twice each day, as the s.h.i.+p entered and left subs.p.a.ce by means of its upsilon-field superluminal translator, the two ent.i.ties within experienced a brief moment of horrific pain, which they bore with Krondak stoicism. But in between the translations, when they were alone together in the gray limbo of the hyperspatial subuniverse, that most remote of nonlocations, the couple felt free to doff their dour racial facade and romp. They had not had a honeymoon in more than five millenaries, and its glow stayed with them as they neared the journey's end and climbed reluctantly out of the connubial vat of glycerin, imidazolidinyl urea, and iso-yohimbine.

The terminal break through the superficies was due any minute. They headed for the survey craft's control room slithering side by side, settled into their squatting pads, and waited. A small cyan indicator on the instrumentation panel flashed on as the translator mechanism spun the upsilon-field gateway. The viewport showed only quasi-dimensional gray negation... and then there was a unique swimming snap, a zang attended by incredible agony, a zung, and relief. They had returned to normal s.p.a.ce, in the vicinity of the Landa system.

The smallish G1 sun was of modest ma.s.s and luminosity, una.s.sociated with solar companions. It shone golden-yellow, exhibiting minimal flare activity and an attractive "b.u.t.terfly" corona with pearly equatorial streamers and polar plumes. Five of its family of fourteen planets were immediately visible to the multiple Krondak oculi, but all of them were gas-giants of no interest to colonization evaluators.

Luma'eroo shut down the overdrive mechanism and fired up the subliminal gravo-magnetic propulsion generators. He switched the s.h.i.+p's navigation unit from automatic to tentacular. A crawling network of faint violet fire, the rho-field, now clothed the outer hull of the dull-black spheroid. Under Luma'eroo's pilotage, it went full inertialess and proceeded to the fourth planet, moving at a sizable percentage of the speed of light. The s.h.i.+p took up station in a geosynchronous...o...b..t a few hundred thousand kilometers above a bluish-green, cloud-swirled world.

"I wish thou wouldst not hot-dog, Tok. " Dota'efoo's admonition had overtones of fond languor; the aftereffects of the recent debauch were still very much with her.

"The sooner we get this evaluation over with, the sooner we can begin the trip back to Molakar. " Luma'eroo's primary eyes retained a misty periwinkle color and his integument was flushed with the telltale rosy blotches of fulfillment. "This mission is hardly likely to end positively, Alk'ai, given the proximity of the poor planet to the supernova. "

"I daresay thou art right, " Dota'efoo said, stroking his warty dorsal prominence with absent-minded affection as she stared out the main viewport, "Just look. The cloud cover has deteriorated to only about fifty percent and there are polar ice caps now. The atmospheric ozone layer must have been zapped to a green frazzle. All-in-All pity the life-forms!... "

"I'm going to call up a precis of our last survey. It's been a long time - and thanks to thee, O alluring source of hyperhedonia, my mnemonic faculties are just the least bit unresponsive. " He flicked a request to the computer and the abbreviated data flashed into both their minds:

EVALUATION SUMMARY- 14-893-042-4.

This eminently habitable world is a typical small metallolithoid with an equatorial radius of [5902 km] and a mean density of [5.462 gm/cm3]. It has a nickel-iron core and is internally heated by natural radioactivity. The dipolar magnetic field is cla.s.sed 06:2:05:9. Planet Four is attended by three interlocked moons: A is a coreless lithoid giant with a diameter 0. 22 and a ma.s.s 0. 01 that of the primary; B and C are lithoid midgets scarcely 1/1000th as ma.s.sive as A, orbiting at the equilateral points of the giant. Planet Four has an axial tilt of 19.35 degrees and a nearly circular orbit around its sun. Its year is equivalent to 611.3 Galactic days and its day 93 time units. The planetary albedo is 39.7 percent.

The atmosphere of Planet Four is generally within acceptable parameters for Milieu races: 22.15 percent oxygen, 0.05 percent carbon dioxide, and 77.23 percent nitrogen, with the balance consisting of n.o.ble gases, hydrogen, ozone, miscellaneous trace gases, miscellaneous suspended particulates, and varying amounts of dihydrogen oxide vapor. Clouds formed of the latter shroud about 62 percent of the planetary surface.

Land areas comprise 19 percent of Planet Four, and 81 percent is covered with dihydrogen oxide oceans with an average salinity of 3.03 percent. Nearly 20 percent of the hydrosphere is epicontinental and very shallow. There are many freshwater lakes of small area. The lithosphere has a Cla.s.s 4 motile-plate structure with a basaltic abyssal sea-floor and granitic continents. Two continents are of moderate size and five are much smaller. There are myriads of continental-cla.s.s islands and many extensive island-arcs at oceanic plate boundaries. Continental mountain ranges have formed adjacent to the active subduction zones of the two princ.i.p.al land ma.s.ses, and some of their peaks exceed [6000 m] in height. The continents also feature eroded highland remnants of earlier cycles of continental drift. There is moderate vulcanism in the island-arcs, along mid-oceanic ridges, and in the subduction ranges.

Planet Four has a generally warm and humid maritime climate, lacking polar or continental glaciation. Tropical conditions prevail in the equatorial belt, with full-summer temperatures exceeding [40C] and no winter. The midlat.i.tude continental temperature range is: summer - above [40C]; winter - above [10C]. Island temperatures are generally lower than continental in summer and higher in winter. One small continent near the North Pole has a summer maximum temperature of [23C] and a winter minimum of [-5C]. There is only one small desert, in the rain-shadow of the coast range at the equatorial region of the largest continent.

Life-forms of Planet Four are C-H-O-N-S-Fe proteinoid, predominantly aerobic. Both the oceans and the land harbor large populations of protist and multicellular autotrophs. There are some 690,000 species of photoautotrophic, chemoautotrophic, and mixotrophic plants - with green photoautotrophs making up the majority of micro- and macroflora. About 60 percent of the energy they bind is taken up by heterotrophic life-forms. Heterotrophs include some 2,000,000 species of protists, plants, and animals - marine, amphibian, terrestrial, and semiaerial. Most of the animals and about half of the protists and plants are mobile. Higher species of animals display homeostasis, bilateral symmetry, dis.e.xuality, and endoskeletal body structure, with increasing cephalization in the more highly evolved species. The most advanced life-form is a presapient ovoviviparous semierect terrestrial biped with a brain cla.s.sification of 67:3:462. It is stalled in its cephalic evolution by a low birth rate and the presence in its ecosystem of six major predators, two of them aerial.

PRELIMINARY PLANETOLOGICAL RATING:.

Suited for colonization, with optional ecological modification to the Fifth Degree.

WEIGHTED RACIAL COMPATIBILITY PERCENTAGE:.

Simb: 89. Gi: 80. Poltroyan: 48. Krondak: 13.

"Well, " Dota'efoo noted sadly, "even a quick visual scan shows that the place was severely damaged. The cloud cover's down to about fifty percent. The climate has cooled to the ice-age stage, and the concomitant lowering of sea level has exposed nearly all of the continental shelves. The greater percentage of the islands has merged into dry land. "

"So much for Gi colonization. Without plenty of island trysting sites, their reproductive psychology packs up and the eggs are sterile. " Luma'eroo activated a battery of monitoring devices at the same time that he sent the craft plunging out of orbit. When the black spheroid reached the planetary tropopause it came to an abrupt halt, hovering in the deep-blue sky while thin jet-stream winds hummed around it. "At least the magnetosphere has recovered to its normal value. Reversed, though. "

"I was afraid of that. Is the ozone layer rebuilt?"

"To within normal parameters for the Gi sun. " He twiddled with the radiation-monitoring unit, which was overdue for a refit. "Albedo's down to twenty-eight overall. UV and solar wind penetration to surface within normal range. Ditto the cosmic radiation. "

Dota'efoo studied the atmosphere a.n.a.lysis. "Oxygen is down by a full two percent, and nitrogen is up one. Carbon dioxide has gone from .05 to .03... And just look at the biotic differentiation read-out! We've lost nearly half of the plant species and an even larger percentage of the animals to hard radiation overdose, UV exposure, or general niche deterioration. "