The Intervention Part 7

I had never in my life touched her with my coercion, but there was nothing else to do.

Sit down.

Her voice choked off and she turned into a statue, except for her widening eyes. Her face was a tragic mask, open-mouthed in silent screaming.

Sit down.

Somewhere the baby was howling like a wild thing, reacting to the emotion of his mother. Sunny's eyes implored me but I held her fast. Two tears rolled down her frozen cheeks. She let her eyelids close and volition evaporated. She sank slowly onto one of the chairs. Her head fell forward, veiled by the long blond hair, and she wept without making a sound.

Don't be afraid. Stay right there.

She wasn't hearing my precise telepathic words, of course, only their meaning filtered through the larger coercive impulse. I went and got Denis, wrapped him in a blanket, and handed him carefully to his mother. Then I freed her mind from the compulsion and projected rea.s.surance at the baby.

CRY. [Tranquillity.] "It's okay, Denis. Maman's fine now. "

His wails ceased abruptly. He hiccupped and sniffed. I extended my hand to the child, pointing my index finger, and exerted the lightest invitation. The baby's eyes were still swimming but his tiny mouth curved in a smile. A bare doll-like arm came out from under the blanket, reached unerringly, and clasped the end of my finger in a firm grip. I said: ROGI [touch] DENIS. I/Rogi -you/Denis. Rogi [love] Denis.

There was a sudden radiant concordance. Even Sunny must have sensed it for she gave a slight gasp. The baby cooed.

"Your name is Denis, " I said.

The baby made a small sound.

"Denis, " I repeated.

The little face shone. His mind said: DENIS! His voice uttered the same funny little noise.

"He's trying to say his name, " I explained to Sunny, "but his vocal cords and tongue really aren't hooked up properly to his brain yet. But his mind knows that he's called Denis. "

Sunny rocked the child without speaking. She was still weeping softly but the horror was gone, leaving only bewilderment and reproach. Oh, Sunny, I'm so sorry you were afraid, so sorry for my clumsiness...

"But I had to do it, " I told her, no longer coercing but pleading for understanding. "I couldn't let you go on denying. It wouldn't be fair to Denis. You're going to have to be brave for his sake. He's a responsibility. He probably has all the special mental abilities that Don and I have - plus more. I think he has superior intelligence, too. If that giant brain of his has a chance to develop properly, he'll grow up to be a great man. "

She was now entirely calm. The infant basked in self-satisfaction and yawned. She held him tightly against her breast. "What am I going to do, Rogi? Will - will they take him away from me?"

"Of course not! For G.o.d's sake, Sunny - when I said you could have him tested by scientists, I only meant that you could do it if you felt you had to. To prove he was - what I said. But n.o.body can force you to give Denis up for experiments. No way! Not in this country. If he was my son -"

She looked at me expectantly.

I was standing so close to her and the child that their combined aura enveloped me. There was relief and dependency emanating from her, and from the baby a strengthening variant of the harmonious bond I had felt earlier.

Denis [love] Rogi.

Oh, Denis, you can't! You're not mine. She's not mine. It's Don you have to imprint on. Your real father. Not me...

She asked quietly, "What would you do if Denis was your son?"

I heard myself speaking dispa.s.sionately. "The people who run those ESP labs wouldn't have the faintest idea how to give this baby what he needs. They're only normals. They've only dealt with normals. Denis needs to be taught by others like himself. Only his father and I are able to mindspeak him, so Don will have to - will have to -"

DENIS/ROGI!.

Mind to mind the bond was forging, whether I willed it or not. The child was catching me just as he had earlier caught his mother, as all babies form a linkage with their nearest and dearest.

Denis, no! Not me! (Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Attempted murder. Yes, we'd both been drinking. Yes, I was out of my mind for love of her. Yes, I'm sorry sorry sorry... thank you. No, Don never even knew. It was all in my mind? No, I don't think so, but perhaps- perhaps - I don't know. Two months' fast and abstinence and a good act of contrition and it's over and gone and I'll never forget never...) Sunny was saying, "Don help me teach the baby? Well, I suppose we could ask him. He loves Denis, of course, but he's terribly old-fashioned. I can't get him to change diapers or even give Denis his bottle. What would Don have to do?"

My heart sank. I might have known. The Family Ghost knew all along, of course. If it was a ghost.

"Well, Don would have to spend time with the baby. Talk to him, mind to mind. Show him mental pictures. Help him learn control of his faculties. "

She made a dubious little moue. "I suppose I can try. "

"This is important, Sunny! Listen. When Don and I were babies, Tante Lorraine hardly had time to give us the love and attention ordinary babies need - and G.o.d knows, she wasn't a telepath. So we grew up stunted. "

Sunny opened her mouth to protest, but I held up my hand and rushed on.

"Stunted in our use of the ESP powers, I mean. Look. Have you ever read about feral children, ones raised by animals or locked away from human contact by criminal parents? When they get out at last into the normal world they're hardly human at all because they were deprived of a certain kind of education they needed when their young minds were most impressionable. Don and I seem to be normal men - but we're really cripples, too. We should have had somebody to teach us how to use our special mind-powers when we were tiny babies. All my psychology books say that the first three years of life are critical for mental development. That must hold true for special powers even more than for ordinary ones. Don and I discovered our powers accidentally and developed them in a haphazard way. We've never been comfortable with them. Don doesn't really understand them at all and I'm - I know a bit more about them than he does, but not enough. "

"You would have to explain to Don what had to be done. "

"Yes, of course. I'll work out some kind of general outline. Denis would need to interact with both of you. There'd be a lot of things you could do alone, Sunny - reading aloud to him, just talking to him. I have a book by Piaget, a famous French child psychologist, that I'll let you read. It gives the step-by-step progress of a baby's learning. Really fascinating."

She nodded, holding the child close. The little boy's eyes were fixed on me and there seemed to be an air of puzzlement about him. I realized then that I had erected a mental barrier against his persistent reaching out. He was rooting against the obstruction like a puppy trying to dig under a wall.

No child no.

ROGI!.

He forced himself on me. I tried to break eye contact with him and found that I could not. There was a strength and determination in him that was formidable, for all his immaturity, and I felt myself weakening. Babies! They have ways to insure their survival that even the normals are aware of. Mental ways. Why else do we think a helpless, noisy, smelly, demanding, inconvenient little travesty of a human being is almost irresistibly adorable?

No!

ROGImyROGI. [Love.]

My mental armor was dissolving. And then Denis smiled at me, and the trap closed.

Sunny said, "We mustn't let any outsiders know the truth about Denis for a long time. Not until he's old enough to protect himself from people who might exploit him. We'll teach him to be cautious - and to be good. " She cuddled his head against her cheek. "Strange little superbaby. How will I ever keep up with him? I wonder how Mama Einstein managed?"

"Little Alfred was a disappointing child, " I told her. "He didn't even speak until he was four."

I went to the sink and began to gather up the broken pieces of the lilac vase. It was quite a mess.

Don came home from work that evening and found Sunny and me sitting with the baby on the front porch. While she made supper, he and I had our first telepathic interchange in more than a year. I told him what I had done, and why.

At first he laughed, and then he was enraged when I told him it was his moral duty to undertake the special education of his son. We got into a shouting match in the living room and Sunny came running to put herself between us. Then she proceeded to beat down every objection Don could think of, all the while radiating such pa.s.sionate devotion to him and to Denis that I was astounded. It was plain even to a fool like me that coercion was not the force that bound Don and Sunny - nor had it ever been.

As she finished telling him of the plans she and I had worked out for the first course of instruction, Don lifted his powerful arms in a resigned shrug. "All right! You win! I think it's a mistake to treat the kid special - but what the h.e.l.l. I'll mindspeak him the way you want. But don't expect me to turn into a G.o.ddam kindergarten teacher, okay?"

Sunny flung herself against him joyously and kissed him long and hard. When he broke away from her he looked over her head and gave me a sardonic grin.

"This business of working with the kid in the evenings. The flash cards and all that c.r.a.p. I'd be lousy at it. Tell you what, Rogi. You help Sunny and me teach the kid. It's just the kind of thing you'd be good at - and the whole d.a.m.n thing is your idea, after all. How about it?"

"What a wonderful idea, " Sunny said warmly. "Say you will, Rogi. "

From the bedroom came another plea: a formless mental one.

It was hopeless. The Family Ghost had won. I said, "All right. "

"Well, that's settled, " Don said. "What's for supper, sweetheart?"

12.

EXCERPTS FROM:.

FINAL REPORT OF THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS.

CONDUCTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO UNDER CONTRACT TO THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE.

9 JANUARY 1969.

THE IDEA THAT some UFOs may be s.p.a.cecraft sent to Earth from another civilization, residing on another planet of the solar system, or on a planet a.s.sociated with a more distant star than the Sun, is called the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH). Some few persons profess to hold a stronger level of belief in the actuality of UFOs being visitors from outer s.p.a.ce, controlled by intelligent beings, rather than merely of the possibility, not yet fully established as an observational fact. We shall call this level of belief ETA, for extraterrestrial actuality....

Direct, convincing, and unequivocal evidence of the truth of ETA would be the greatest single scientific discovery in the history of mankind. Going beyond its interest for science, it would undoubtedly have consequences of surpa.s.sing significance for every phase of human life. Some persons who have written speculatively on this subject profess to believe that the supposed extraterrestrial visitors come with beneficent motives, to help humanity clean up the terrible mess that it has made. Others say they believe that the visitors are hostile. Whether their coming would be favorable or unfavorable to mankind, it is almost certain that they would make great changes in the conditions of human existence....

The question of ETA would be settled in a few minutes if a flying saucer were to land on the lawn of a hotel where a convention of the American Physical Society was in progress, and its occupants were to emerge and present a special paper to the a.s.sembled physicists, revealing where they came from, and the technology of how their craft operated. Searching questions from the audience would follow.

In saying that thus far no convincing evidence exists for the truth of ETA, no prediction is made about the future. If evidence appears soon after this report is published, that will not alter the truth of the statement that we do not now have such evidence. If new evidence appears later, this report can be appropriately revised in a second printing....

Whether there is intelligent life elsewhere (ILE) in the Universe is a question that has received a great deal of serious speculative attention in recent years.... Thus far we have no observational evidence whatsoever on the question, so therefore it remains open.... The ILE question has some relation to the ETH or ETA for UFOs as discussed in the preceding section. Clearly, if ETH is true, then ILE must also be true because some UFOs have then to come from some unearthly civilization. Conversely, if we could know conclusively that ILE does not exist, then ETH could not be true. But even if ILE exists, it does not follow that the ETH is true.

For it could be true that the ILE, though existent, might not have reached a stage of development in which the beings have the mechanical capacity or the desire to visit the Earth's surface.... We have no right to a.s.sume that in life-communities everywhere there is a steady evolution in the directions of both greater intelligence and greater technological competence. Human beings now know enough to destroy all life on Earth, and they may lack the intelligence to work out social controls to keep themselves from doing so. If other civilizations have the same limitation, then it might be that they develop to the point where they destroy themselves utterly before they have developed the technology needed to enable them to make long s.p.a.ce voyages.

Another possibility is that the growth of intelligence precedes the growth of technology in such a way that by the time a society would be technically capable of interstellar s.p.a.ce travel, it would have reached a level of intelligence at which it had not the slightest interest in interstellar travel. We must not a.s.sume that we are capable of imagining now the scope and extent of future technological development of our own or any other civilization, and so we must guard against a.s.suming that we have any capacity to imagine what a more advanced society would regard as intelligent conduct.

In addition to the great distances involved, and the difficulties which they present to interstellar s.p.a.ce travel, there is still another problem. If we a.s.sume that civilizations annihilate themselves in such a way that their effective intelligent life span is less than, say, one hundred thousand years, then such a short time span also works against the likelihood of successful interstellar communication. The different civilizations would probably reach the culmination of their development at different epochs in cosmic history....

In view of the foregoing, we consider that it is safe to a.s.sume that no ILE outside of our solar system has any possibility of visiting Earth in the next ten thousand years.

13.

LENINGRAD, USSR, EARTH.

5 MARCH 1969.

"WE HAVE SAVED the best for the last, Comrade Admiral. Please be seated here at this table with the microphones... You other comrades may take the chairs nearer the observation window. Dr. Valentina Lubezhny, our specialist in biocommunications phenomena, will bring the subject into the Faraday cage in just a moment. There is a small delay. " Danilov offered an apologetic smirk. "The little girl was very nervous. "

Kolinsky gave a curt nod and lowered his ample b.u.t.tocks to the hard wooden chair. Scared children! And you are the most frightened of all, Comrade Doctor a.s.slicker, and rightly so, considering the flimsy quality of entertainment offered thus far in your extremely expensive laboratory. Dull demonstrations of the human bioenergetic field. A Chukchi shaman able to stop the heart of a rat (but not the heart of any creature weighing more than four hundred grams). A neurasthenic blind youth reading printed matter with his fingertips. A modern Rasputin (sanitized) laying hands on tortured rabbits and healing their wounds. A housewife doing psychokinetic tricks with cigarettes and water gla.s.ses. A gypsy who peers into a Polaroid camera lens and produces blurry "astral photos" of the Petropavlovskaya Fortress, the Bronze Horseman, and other local landmarks. (That one had looked promising - until Danilov admitted that the subject could only "envision" places where he had been. So much for psychic espionage!) Sternly, Kolinsky said, "We have been most interested to see how far you have progressed in the area of pure research, Comrade Danilov. Still, it was not the existence of psychic powers that we hoped to prove. Unlike the skeptics of the West, we are quite willing to concede that the human brain is capable of such activities. However, we had hoped that after five years of work you might have uncovered a bioenergetic effect of more immediate military significance. "

Danilov fiddled with the microphones, set out a pad of paper and marker-pens, saw that the naval aides Guslin and Ulyanov and the GRU attache Artimovich were settled in. "In just a few minutes we will demonstrate the talents of our most remarkable subject. I don't think you'll be disappointed, Comrade Admiral. By no means!"

Down in the test chamber on the other side of the gla.s.s a door opened. A white-coated female scientist appeared with a redheaded girl wearing a school uniform. The child had an extraordinarily pretty face. She eyed the men in the observation booth with a certain apprehension.

Danilov hurriedly addressed the admiral and the other officers. "The girl is very sensitive to adverse mental att.i.tudes - even more so than the other subjects you have seen today. For this experiment to succeed, we must have an atmosphere pervaded with kindness and goodwill. Please try to banish all doubts from your minds. Cultivate a positive att.i.tude. "

Commander Guslin coughed. Ulyanov lit a cigarette. Artimovich, the intelligence man, sat bolt upright with a fixed smile on his face.

Danilov picked up a microphone with blue tape wrapped around its stand. "I will introduce you, Comrade Admiral, and then perhaps you will speak a few words to the child and rea.s.sure her. "

Kolinsky, who had seven grandchildren, sighed. "As you wish. "

Danilov pressed the microphone stud. "All ready now, Tamara?"

The girl's voice came to them over a ceiling speaker. "Yes, Comrade Doctor. "

"We have a special guest here today, Tamara. He is Admiral Ivan Kolinsky, a great hero of the Soviet Navy. He is eager to see how well you do your biocommunication exercise. The Admiral would also enjoy talking to you. " The scientist made a formal gesture. "Admiral Kolinsky, may I present Tamara Sakhvadze."

Kolinsky took the microphone and winked at the little girl. "Now, you must not be nervous, devushka. We will leave the nervousness to Dr. Danilov. " The child giggled. She had marvelous white teeth. "How old are you, Tamara?"

"Eleven, Comrade Admiral. " Great dark eyes, rose-petal mouth.

"You have a Georgian name. Where is your home?"

"I live in Sochi - I mean, I used to live there before they found me and brought me here to work and go to school. Sochi is on the Black Sea. "

Ah, yes - a Celtic Caucasian girl, one of that ancient breed famed through history for their beauty and bewitching ways! "I know Sochi very well, Tamara. I have a vacation villa there, a very pretty place. It must be spring in Sochi now, with flowers blooming and birds singing in the palm trees. What a pity both of us are here in wintry Leningrad instead of in your pleasant hometown. "

And if I were there, I could sail my little boat - or sit at a small table in Riviyera Park, sipping a cold mix of Georgian champagne and orange juice and baking my tired bones in the sunshine. Gorgeous young things (your older sisters or cousins, Tamara!) would stroll by, tall and barelegged and bold of eye, and I would admire and remember old pleasures. When that palled I would plot the destruction of Gorshkov, that p.r.i.c.k on wheels, and the KGB schemer Andropov, whose hobbyhorse this whole bioenergetics farce is, and put an end to it, and get on with the Extremely Low Frequency Broadcaster, just as the Yankees have done. Psychic forces as weapons! What superst.i.tious peasants we Russians remain, in spite of our thin veneer of science and culture. One might as well speak of enlisting the terrible Baba Yaga and her hut on fowl's legs...