The Intervention Part 27

Jamie battled the coercion, reeling like a drunken man, but his betraying legs carried him on toward the waiting Unknown. He tried to shout out loud, but his vocal cords now seemed paralyzed. Strangely, he was not afraid, only more than ever furious. First Nigel - now him!

The Unknown held a narrow tube, no larger than a biro, with a faint metallic gleam. He pointed this at Jamie.

Closer. Closer.

Don't be a b.l.o.o.d.y fool! Jamie's mind shouted. You won't stop EE by killing me...

In retrospect, Jamie was never quite sure what happened next. Strong arms suddenly grasped him from behind and hauled him off his feet. He got his voice back and uttered a bellow that rang up and down the close. The Unknown swore out loud, crouched, and thrust out the cylinder. Jamie heard a sharp hiss. Then he was wrenched violently to one side by the person who had seized him and fell in a heap onto the slippery stones, striking his head. Roman candles popped in the vault of his skull and he heard running footsteps receding into the distance.

"How're you doing, man? Did he hurt you?"

Dim flame of butane cigarette-lighter. Deep-set eyes and touseled fair hair glistening in the drizzle. A burly man wearing a duffel coat, bending over him. A wry but friendly smile.

"I think I'm all right, " Jamie said. "Bit of a b.u.mp. "

His rescuer nodded, extended a big hand, and helped Jamie climb to his feet. Although he was not young he was built like a stevedore, and he topped Jamie's six feet three inches. He held the lighter high, and its blue flame gave a surprising amount of light.

"Your friend the mugger seems to have run off. Did he get your wallet?"

"No. " Jamie used his handkerchief to dry his wet hands and explored the lump on his head with caution. "Thanks very much for your help. "

"Good thing I happened along. Now and again I use this close as a short cut. Want me to hunt up a policeman?"

"No... it wouldn't do much good, would it? As you said, he's gone. I'd rather go home. "

"Whatever you say. " The lighter snapped off. "But take my advice and stick to lighted streets after this. Better yet, take a taxi. You'll find one back there on the High Street. "

"Yes, well -"

The man in the duffel coat started off in the direction taken by the fleeing Unknown, calling over his shoulder with conventional good humor, "Get along now. We'd really hate to lose you. "

"A suggestive remark, that, " Jean commented.

"And with that he was off. " Jamie drew her more tightly against him, the palms of his hands enclosing her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as though they were talismans through which the healing magic flowed. "And it's only now, when I'm able to think clearly, that I realize how odd it was that he was able to see that I was in mortal danger. It's not as though the operant mugger had a gun or a knife. There was only the wee tube thing there in the dark. I was certain it'd be the death of me because the b.u.g.g.e.r's mind a.s.sured me of the fact -but how did my Good Samaritan know?"

Tell me the answer, said his wife's mind.

My rescuer was an operant too he must have been and that means of course it's only logical that there should be others but good G.o.d that they should be watching us!

"You aren't inconspicuous, " she said, laughing softly. "As you said it's logical. "

They lay together, naked before the fire, on a rug she'd made herself of pieced black and white Islay sheepskins. When he had come home, raging with worry and fear, she had closed her mind to him and not permitted him to tell the story until she had administered the great sovereign remedy there in the dark library, their private sanctum. Then she'd listened calmly.

He said, "We'll have to work out some ways to guard ourselves, until the public demonstration can be arranged. All of the EE adepts will be at risk. Aside from the mysterious a.s.sa.s.sin, there are the government agents lurking about. The CIA for certain - and if the two who talked to Nigel are to be believed, there are Russians and Israelis and even British agents to worry about... "

"You think they might try kidnaping if other recruitment tactics fail?"

"It's a possibility, " he said somberly.

She kissed his wrist lightly. "What you must do then is steal a march on the lot of them. For Whitehall, a preview of coming attractions demonstrating how an EE adept would react to involuntary sequestration by going out of body and raising a hue and cry among his colleagues. For the Yanks, a suggestion that Whitehall pa.s.s on the good word, with a judicious warning against poaching. For the others, a more devious approach. You and your colleagues will have to descend to cloak-and-daggering. Excurse into the appropriate emba.s.sies in London - and perhaps in Paris as well - and find out whether there are any nefarious schemes being planned against you. If there are take the aforementioned steps. "

Jamie gave a delighted laugh. "d.a.m.n, but you're a cool one!"

She grabbed him by his Dundrearies and pulled his face close. "Only because I don't think the intelligence people want to harm you. They don't know enough about you yet, my dear, for that. But your mystery man, the operant mugger, is something else altogether. He frightens me, and I have no notion at all how you can protect yourself from a person like that. He came from nowhere and vanished back into it. You know nothing of his motives. He may even have been a madman -"

"No, " said Jamie. "He was sane. "

"Then perhaps he's been frightened off by the other one. We can pray that it's so. And you can follow your rescuer's advice and take care not to travel in lonely places. "

"Not while I'm in my body, at least, " he said, and he kissed her lips, and they lay together for a few minutes more watching the fire die, and then went off to bed.

16.

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, EARTH.

5 SEPTEMBER 1991.

THE ELEVEN MEN and one woman who const.i.tuted the PRD, the banking regulatory board of Switzerland, watched without emotion as the confidential agent known as Otto Maurer showed his videotape of the photographed doc.u.ments that verified the nature of Dr. James Somerled MacGregor's researches.

"It is now confirmed beyond a doubt, " Maurer said, "that the psychic procedure for remote clairvoyant viewing is reliably practiced by no less than thirty individuals connected with the Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University, plus an undetermined number of other persons in other parts of the world who have made use of the mental programming techniques for this - uh - talent, as perfected by Professor MacGregor and his a.s.sociates. Pursuant to my instructions, I have a.s.sembled other doc.u.mentation from the Psychology Department, the Astronomy Department, and the Office of Media Relations for the Medical School of the University of Edinburgh. This material confirms that on or about twenty-two October of this year, MacGregor will hold a briefing for world media announcing... and demonstrating this psychic espionage technique. "

The twelve banking directors uttered varied cries of dismay. Maurer lowered his head in a momentary gesture of commiseration, then said, "It is needless to belabor the obvious. MacGregor's researches effectively write 'finis' to the confidentiality of the Swiss banking system. Additionally, widespread utilization of psychic espionage will trigger chaos in every stock market, commodity exchange, and financial inst.i.tution throughout the world, opening virtually any transaction to the danger of public scrutiny... This concludes my report, Messieurs and Madame, and I await your questions and instructions. "

The woman asked, "This MacGregor - has he any radical political affiliation? Is he a Red? An anarchist? Or simply an ivory-tower academic unaware of the potentially disastrous consequences of his actions?"

"He is none of these things, Madame Boudry. MacGregor is a Scot and a fierce idealist. It is military secrecy he seeks to demolish by introducing this psychic spy technique, thinking thereby to preclude the possibility of nuclear war. The collapse of the world financial structure would seem to him a small price to pay for peace. "

There was an appalled silence.

A stout, placid-looking man asked, "You have explored avenues of - of influence that might deter him from his demonstration?"

Maurer nodded. "I have, Herr Gimel, but without conspicuous success. He is fearless, in spite of an attempt upon his life last April and intensive surveillance by a number of state security agencies. He would be affronted by any attempt at bribery. His position at the university is impregnable, and his professional status is beyond reproach so there is no chance of his work being discredited before or after the fact. "

"His personal life?" Gimel inquired.

Maurer spoke in English. "Squeaky clean. "

The bankers chuckled bitterly. A frail, ill-looking man with burning eyes leaned toward the agent and quavered, "Are you telling us that there is no way of stopping this man?"

"No licit way, Herr Reichenbach. "

The invalid clasped the edge of the mahogany table with skeletal hands. "Maurer! You will have to think about this matter urgently. It is of paramount importance to us, to your country's continuing prosperity. Find a way to stop this demonstration - or, failing that, a way to delay it. MacGregor himself is the key to the problem! Do you understand me?"

"I'm not sure, Herr Reichenbach... "

"It is privacy that this psychic madman threatens. A fundamental right of humanity! This thing you have shown us, this technique of spying, is a nightmare out of George Orwell that any right-thinking person would repudiate with horror. You say MacGregor hopes for peace. I say MacGregor is the greatest menace civilization has ever known. Think of it. Psychic overseers scrutinizing every action of business, politics, even our personal lives. Think of it!"

Maurer's eyes swept around the broad-room table. The other eleven PRD members were nodding their heads in solemn affirmation.

"Do something, " old Reichenbach whispered. "Think very carefully, then do something. "

17.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD.

THAT FIRST YEAR of mine in Hanover was very difficult. There is inevitably a lot of hard work involved in getting a new business off the ground, and my Eloquent Page bookshop was strictly a one-man operation. Early in 1991 I traveled a lot, hitting sales and thrift shops and jobbers all over New England as I gathered the basic stock of used fantasy and science-fiction t.i.tles that were to be my specialty. I ordered new books as well - not only fiction but also science nonfiction of the type that I thought might appeal to my hoped-for clientele. When spring came and the shop was pretty well filled I opened the doors to walk-in customers and began to prepare catalogs for the mail-order trade. Denis and his Coterie were faithful patrons. They even sent their student subjects along through subtle application of the coercer's art.

My nephew was always urging me to partic.i.p.ate in this or that experiment at his lab, but I invariably declined. The place crawled with earnest young students, all gung ho for the advancement of metapsychology, who made me feel like a scapegrace fogy when I refused to share their enthusiasm. And then there was the Coterie. Except for Sally Doyle, who was earthy and nonjudgmental, and her husband Tater McAllister, who had a wacko sense of humor in spite of being a theoretical physicist, the Coterie did not consist of folks I would have freely chosen as drinking buddies. They were fanatically loyal to Denis and his goals and did not suffer the heretical mutterings of the Great Man's uncle with equanimity. My reluctance to sacrifice myself on the altar of mental science was viewed as semitreasonable by Denis's chief a.s.sociate, Glenn Dalembert, by Losier and Tremblay, who ran the main operancy test program, and by the mystic medicine man, Tukwila Barnes. Colette Roy, Dalembert's wife, reacted to my negativism with the perky hopefulness of a camp counselor confronting a recalcitrant eight-year-old. But she moved me not a whit more than did Eric Boutin, the strapping ex-mechanic, whose toothy grin did not quite conceal his itch to whip me into tiptop mental shape, for my own good as well as the good of the cause.

"No thanks, " said I, not giving a flying f.u.c.k 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 a.s.say of my metafaculties. (Researchers now tended to cla.s.sify 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 bombsh.e.l.l 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: Voila! 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 t.i.tle 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 Onc' 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 overindulgence 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 d.a.m.ned. 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 t.i.tle 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-s.p.a.ce. " (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 a.n.a.logous 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 a.s.sured way that operants could escape the Odd John Effect, the potentially fatal dichotomy between h.o.m.o superior and the less favored ma.s.s 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.

18.

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, EARTH.

22 OCTOBER 1991.

His 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 modic.u.m 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 rea.s.serted itself. d.a.m.n 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 princ.i.p.al excorporeal excursion. Jean, sensing his tension, half woke and sent out a little nonverbal query. He told her: No no it's nothing sleep la.s.s 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, st.u.r.dy 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.