The Intervention Part 6

Unable to perceive his target, Rogi found that his coercion and psychokinesis were useless. He let out a shout of despair and relief and dropped like a dead man to the pavement. The voice that addressed him was calm and remote: Once more it seems that I am fated to intervene. How interesting. One might conjecture that Don survived in some other fas.h.i.+on, and yet the proleptic foci show no asymmetry as a result of my obtrusion...

Rogi lifted his head and groaned. "You! You again. "

It said: Your brother must live, Rogi. He must wed Marie-Madeleine Fabre and beget children of her according to the great pattern. One of those children will become a man of high destiny. He will not only possess mental powers more extraordinary than his father's, but he will understand them - and help the whole human race to understand them. This child unborn will have to overcome great hards.h.i.+p. He will need consolation and guidance that his parents will be unable to supply, and the friends.h.i.+p of another operant metapsychic. You will be that child's friend and mentor, Rogi. Now get up.

Nonono goaway let me kill him Imustonlyway must KILL - Rogi, get up.

Better perhaps weboth die freaks d.a.m.ned unrealmen unrealhuman kill them kill them BOTH intowaterdowndowndissolve - Du calme, mon infant.

Best. Would be best.

You know nothing. Nothing! Get up, Rogi. You will remember everything I have said and you will act upon it at the appropriate time.

"You're not my Ghost at all. " The realization filled him with irrational sorrow.

The thing said: All of you are my responsibility and my expiation. Your entire family. Your entire race.

With great difficulty, Rogi climbed to his feet. He was no longer blind and he could see Don standing under a lamp, swaying, one hand over his face. Poor old Donnie.

The Ghost said: Your brother has forgotten your attack. His injuries are healed. Take him home, put him to bed, and get him to the church on time.

Rogi began to laugh. He rocked and roared and stamped his feet and howled. He wouldn't have to do it after all, and he wouldn't be d.a.m.ned. Only poor Donnie, not him. The Ghost, that meddling s.h.i.+t, had turned "Thou shalt not" into "Thou canst not" and set him free! Oh, it was so funny. He couldn't stop laughing...

The Ghost waited patiently.

Rogi finally said to it, "So I let Don have his way. Then later on I become a kind of G.o.dfather to his child prodigy. "

Yes.

Fury took hold of him suddenly. "But you couldn't let me be the kid's father! You couldn't let me marry Sunny and beget the superbrat myself. Don's genes are h.o.m.o superior and mine are -"

The Ghost said: You are sterile.

Don was walking shakily toward him. A single car turned off Main Street onto the bridge, slowed as it pa.s.sed them, then accelerated again when Don waved mockingly at it.

"I'm sterile... "

The Ghost said: The orchitis you suffered five years ago destroyed the s.e.m.e.niferous tubules. Your self-redactive faculty was inadequate to repair the damage. You function as a male but will sire no offspring.

No little Odd Johns to dandle on his knee? Rogi was quite unconcerned. The responsibility for unleas.h.i.+ng the freaks on the world would be Don's, not his! But pride made him say, "Heal me! You could. I know it. "

It is not possible, nor is it appropriate. When the design is complete you'll understand. For now, let it be. But take heart, because you have a long life to live and important work ahead of you.

It was drunken lunacy! A nightmare. And all at once Rogi was deathly tired. "I don't know what the h.e.l.l you're talking about. Go away. For G.o.d's sake, leave me alone!"

I'll go for now, but I'll be back... when I'm needed. Au 'voir, cher Rogi.

Don came stumbling up, a bleary smile on his face. "Hey, Rogi, you look bad, man. Never could hold your liquor. Not like me. C'mon, man, let's go home. "

"Right, " Rogi said. He draped an arm over his brother's shoulder. Supporting each other, the two of them went off into the night.

10.

EXCERPTS FROM:.

ADDRESS GIVEN BY DR. J. B. RHINE.

AT THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL a.s.sOCIATION.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON, DC, EARTH.

4 SEPTEMBER 1967.

SOME IMPRESSION OF the spread of psi research over the world in recent years can be had from facts connected with the McDougall Award. This annual event, like the Parapsychological a.s.sociation, was initiated at Duke in 1957 and was later adopted by the Inst.i.tute for Parapsychology when it took over the laboratory. The Award is granted each year by the Inst.i.tute staff for the most outstanding contribution to parapsychology published during the preceding year by workers not on the staff of the Inst.i.tute. During the ten years in which the awards have been made, two have been given for American contributions and two for British, with one divided between the two countries; one award each was made to Czechoslovakia, India, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Sweden.

Another indication of the expansion of parapsychology may be had from the establishment of new research centers. A number of these have had the sponsors.h.i.+p of psychiatry, such as the one at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, one at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and a third at the Neuropsychiatric Inst.i.tute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Others with more physically and technologically oriented connections are located at the Newark College of Engineering in New Jersey, the Department of Biophysics at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Boeing Research Laboratories in Seattle.

The center in Leningrad is in the department of physiology; that at Strasbourg, in psychophysiology; and the laboratory at St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia, in the department of biology. Psychology-centered psi research in the university is found mainly in foreign countries rather than in the U. S. City College in New York has what may rightly be called a center; and at Clemson University, as well as at branches of the University of California (Los Angeles, Berkeley, Davis), psychologists are allowed to do psi research. But something more like centers have long existed in Europe at Utrecht and Freiburg. More recently work has begun that seems firmly planted in psychology departments at the j.a.panese Defense Academy and the Universities of Edinburgh, Lund, and Andhra (India). Some recognized research, of course, is not connected with any inst.i.tution whatever, as, for example, the work of Forwald in Sweden and that of Ryzl while still in Prague.

One of the noteworthy changes taking place in the present period is the development of more teamwork with workers in other branches and the use of skills, knowledge, and equipment of many other research areas. Some of the psi workers today are working with physiological equipment or with computer a.n.a.lyses; others are depending on electronic apparatus in the measurement of psi performance or utilizing new devices in statistics. Numbers of them are using psychological tests or perhaps working in a laboratory of microphysics, or of animal behavior....

Psi research is obviously of special concern to those who are interested in the full range of the unexplored nature of man, over and above the existing subdivisions of science. As has happened already in many of the smaller branches, parapsychology is certain to find itself grouped sooner or later with other fields in one or more of those composite sciences which are reshaping the modern structure of knowledge - groupings such as the s.p.a.ce sciences, the earth sciences, the microbiological sciences, or such major disciplines as medicine, education, and the like. When we come eventually to the stage when the sciences of man take a pre-eminent position, we shall find that one of the places around the conference table will have to be reserved for parapsychology. 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tute 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 a.s.sisted by careful effort and understanding and by recognition of its significance.

11.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD.

AFTER 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 get-togethers 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 s.h.i.+pping, 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 born 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: [Discomfort.] CRY. [Rea.s.surance.]

He was dubious: ? !! CRY!

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

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

I said: [Affirmation.] MotherGOOD. CRY. [Comfort + rea.s.surance.]

He said: LoveYOU. [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 thras.h.i.+ng 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, cafe 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.

G.o.d... 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 "sub-vocalized" - 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-sc.u.m 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 born with, something we can't help. You've read about people who seem to predict the future. And - and water-dowsers! My G.o.d, that's an old New England thing that n.o.body 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Get out of my house!"