INTERVENTION (15 page)

Dr. Danilov's eyes met those of Dr. Lubezhny. The woman said, "If only she were younger. Then it would be a game."

"She will bend to larger considerations in time," Danilov said. He picked up the red microphone and keyed it. "Attention, Peygalitsa. The experiment is ended. Thank you for your cooperation."

"Message coming through," said the loudspeaker.

Danilov almost dropped the microphone. "What's that?"

The amplified voice was brisk. "We receive another set of letters. It spells ... nyet."

"Nyet?" exclaimed Danilov and Lubezhny in unison.

Down in the Faraday cage, Tamara Sakhvadze looked at them and slowly nodded her head.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

I
CAME TO
Don and Sunny's house every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evening for nearly three years. We would have supper, and Sunny would stack the dishes. Then she would bring little Denis into the living room for the educational sessions that we came to call "head-lessons."

At first Don tried to work along with me. But he had very little empathy with the infantile mind and his attempts at telepathic rapport were so crude as to be little more than mental puppy-training: Here it is, kid—learn or else! He couldn't resist teasing the baby, looking upon our work with him as an amusement rather than serious business, treating the child like some glorified pet or a sophisticated toy. The occasional mental quantum leaps made by the boy could be very exciting, and then Don was all praise and affection. But there were tedious times as well, the nuts and bolts of teaching that Don found to be a colossal bore. He would put pressure on Denis, and more often than not the session would end with the child crying, or else stubbornly withdrawn in the face of his father's mocking laughter.

As I expected, Don got tired of the teaching game after only a few weeks. Not even Sunny's pleas would move him to continue serious participation. So he watched television while Sunny and I worked with the child, and looked in with a proprietary condescension during commercial breaks. This might have been a satisfactory solution—except that babies have no tact, and little Denis couldn't help showing how much he preferred my mental tutelage to that of his father. Don's pride was hurt and he began to broadcast bad vibes that the sensitive baby reacted to, setting up a kind of mind-screen that threatened to cut him off not only from his father but also from me. I had to tell Don what was happening, dreading his reaction. He surprised me, however, and said, "What the hell! Teaching kids is no job for a man like me." And he began going out to the Blue Ox right after supper, leaving me alone with his wife and son.

I found out some time later that a burly tavern habitué named Ted Kowalski dared to make a suggestive crack about this unorthodox domestic arrangement. Don decked him with a single uppercut. Then he made a little speech to the awed onlookers at the Ox:

"My egghead brother Rogi is writing a book. It's about the way that little kids' minds work. Me and Sunny are letting him use our son Denis as a kind of guinea pig. Rogi runs tests on the kid using blocks and beads and pictures cut from magazines and other suchlike crap. Sunny helps. I used to help, too, but it was dull as dishwater. That's why I'm here, and why my brother and my wife and kid are at home. Now would anybody besides the late Kowalski care to comment?"

Nobody did, then or ever.

Don got so fond of the Blue Ox that he took to spending evenings there even when there were no head-lessons scheduled. Sunny was sorry about that but she never reproached him. She did cook especially fine meals for him on the nights that I visited, and kept urging him to stay with us and see what Denis had learned. When Don refused, as he almost invariably did, she kissed him lovingly goodbye. When he returned two hours later in a haze of alcohol, she kissed him lovingly hello. His drinking became heavier as the months went by and the baby made spectacular progress.

At Remillard family gatherings, Don boasted to one and all that he was proud as hell of his son, the genius. Denis, carefully coached by me, let the relatives see him as a child who was plainly above average—yet not so advanced as to appear bizarre. We let him start speaking in public when he was thirteen months old, three months after he had actually mastered speech. He learned to walk when he was a year old; in this and in other purely physical developments he was very nearly normal. In his appearance he favored the Fabré side of his family, having Sunny's fair skin and intensely blue eyes but lacking her beauty. He was never sick, even though he had a deceptively frail look about him. His temperament was shy and withdrawn (which was a vast disappointment to Don), and I believe that he was by far the most intellectually gifted of all the Remillards, not even excluding such metapsychic giants as Jack and Marc. There are some Milieu historians, I know, who mistook his gentleness for weakness and his innate caution for vacillation, and who say that without the psychic impetus furnished by his wife, Lucille Carrier, Denis's great work might have remained unaccomplished. To counter these critics I can only present this picture of the young Denis as I knew him, surmounting the emotional trials of his youth with quiet courage—and almost always facing those problems alone, since I was only able to aid him during his earliest years, and circumstances conspired to separate us during his latter childhood and adolescence.

I must not minimize the role that Sunny played. Denis learned to read before he was two, and she saved her housekeeping money in order to buy him an encyclopedia. Since the child had a never-ending thirst for novel sensations and experiences, she wheeled him all over Berlin in a stroller during the warm months and toted him on a sled in the winter. Later, she drove him about the countryside in the family car, until the rising cost of gasoline and Don's precarious financial situation put an end to her expeditions, and their growing family left her less and less time to spare.

The metapsychic training of Denis was left almost entirely to me. I worked hard, if inexpertly, in the development of his farsenses and wasn't surprised when his abilities quickly surpassed my own. He learned the art of long-sight amplification all by himself—and tried in vain to pass the skill on to me. His mental screening function very early became so formidable that neither Don nor I could penetrate it; aside from that, Denis seemed untalented in coercion. Psychokinesis didn't interest him much either, except as an adjunct to manipulation when his little fingers were inadequate for handling some tool, or for supporting books too heavy to be held comfortably. It was an eerie thing to come upon the child, not yet three years old, still sucking his thumb as he perused a levitated volume of the
World Book Encyclopedia;
or perhaps sitting in unconsidered wet diapers, studying a disassembled transistor radio while a cloud of electronic components and a hot soldering iron floated in thin air within easy reach.

But I had even more disquieting experiences in store for me.

One February night in 1970 Don returned from the tavern a bit early. He was no drunker than usual, and unaccustomedly cheerful. He said he had a surprise for me, and admonished me and Sunny to stay right where we were with Denis. He went into the kitchen and closed the door.

Denis was deeply engrossed in a new book on the calculus that I had just bought, thinking we might learn it together. Sunny was knitting. Outside the little house on School Street a frigid wind from Canada howled down the Androscoggin Valley and solidified the old snowdrifts into masses like dirty white styrofoam. I hated to think of walking home.

Don came back into the living room sans outdoor wear, carrying a cup of steaming hot cocoa. Grinning, he held it out to me. "Just what you need, Rogi mon vieux, to warm you up on a truly rotten night."

My brother making a cup of cocoa was an event about as unprecedented as me doing a tap dance on the bar at the Blue Ox. I probed his mind, but the usual barriers were in place. What was he up to?

Little Denis looked up from his differentiation formulas. His eyes went first to his father, then to his mother. His expression was puzzled.

Sunny gasped.

Don held out the cup to me.

"No!" Sunny cried. She sprang from her chair and slapped the cup from Don's hand. It made an ugly brown splash on the wall. I was flabbergasted.

Denis asked me gravely, "Uncle Rogi, will
you
tell me why lysergic acid diethylamide makes cocoa taste better?"

Don started to giggle. Sunny regarded him with a terrible expression of outrage. His mind-screen, shaken by her unexpected action, wavered just enough to let me see what kind of joke he had intended to play on me. Little Denis had had no trouble penetrating Don's psychic barricade when it was still firm, and he had perceived the name of the drug emblazoned on his father's short-term memory trace as on a lighted theatre marquee.

But how had Sunny known!

Don's laugh was louder, more unsteady. "Hey, it was only a gag! This hippie came into the Ox lookin' to deal, and we were ready to throw him out on his ass when I remembered ol' Rogi jabbering about altered states of consciousness. And I thought—hey! Whole lotta talk about the wild side of the mind, but never any action. That's you, Rog."

I said, "You were going to slip the LSD into me and supervise my trip."

His grin became a grimace of pure hate. "You been experimenting. I figured it was my turn."

Sunny grabbed his arm. "You're drunk and you don't know what you're saying!"

He shook Sunny off as though she were some importunate kitten and took one step toward me, big hands opening and closing. Denis whimpered, abandoned his book, and scuttled aside.

"I know exactly what I'm saying," Don blustered. "You and your fuckin' mind-games! You turned my own kid against me! And my wife—my wife—" He faltered, looked at Sunny in a dazed fashion. His mind-walls were down and I could see the wheels turning as he made the connection about the cup of cocoa and Sunny's frustration of his plan.

"You
knew,
" he accused her. His tone was confused, the anger momentarily sidetracked. "But how?"

She straightened. "Denis asked me about the LSD before he asked Rogi. Our son has been teaching me telepathy. It was to be a surprise for you and Rogi."

I was stunned. None of my books on parapsychology had prepared me for a mind capable of exercising psychoredaction, the "mental editing" faculty that is so taken for granted in Milieu pedagogy and psychiatry. I cried:

Sunny—is it true!

She didn't respond.

Denis said: Mommy can only mindspeak me. She can't hear you or Papa. You aren't strong enough.

Don looked down incredulously at the little toddler in corduroy overalls and a miniature lumberjack shirt. Denis was on his hands and knees. His lower lip trembled.

"I'm not strong enough?" Don roared. He stooped to seize the child, ready to shake him, to slap him—

Sunny sensed what was coming and I saw it clearly in Don's mind. We both started to intercept him. But it wasn't necessary.

"Papa won't hurt me," Denis said. He climbed to his feet and stood in front of his father. His head was about on a level with Don's knees. "You won't ever hurt me, will you Papa." It wasn't a question. The boy's magnetic blue eyes were rock-steady as he looked up.

"No," said Don. "No."

Sunny and I let out suppressed breath. She bent down and lifted Denis in her arms.

Don turned to me. He moved like a man in a dream, or one in an extremity of pain. His mental walls were back in place. I had no idea what message Denis had transmitted, what coercive interdict the child had used. I knew that Denis would never be harmed by his father—but the protective aegis did
not
extend to me.

Don said, "You won't have to bother coming over in the evening anymore, Rogi."

"I suppose not," I said.

The child reached out to comfort and reassure me. In those days I knew nothing of the intimate mode of farspeech, that which tunes directly to the personal mind-signature of the recipient; nevertheless, I was aware that Denis spoke to my mind alone when he said:

We will find a way to continue.

"Denis has had enough coddling," Don said, "and Sunny's going to be too busy to play games with you two. Did she tell you she's expecting again?"

She held Denis close, her eyes brimming with tears. She hadn't. And I'd never noticed the knitting. "Congratulations," I said in a level voice.

Don was at the front closet getting my coat and things. He held them out to me, a defiant smile twisting up one side of his mouth, his thoughts unreadable.

He said, "I plan to take care of the next kid's training myself."

EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, EARTH

28
JANUARY
1972

H
E CLIMBED, AS
he often did when the tensions became too great, clutching at slippery rocks and gnarled heather stems with frostbitten hands gone numb.

HALLOO!

Reveling in the height, the separation from the world of ordinary mortals, he scrabbled for precarious footholds. His mud-clotted, soggy waffle-stompers abraded the fresh blisters on his heels, adding to the welcome ensemble of pain.

HALLOO OUT THERE!

His heart was banging in his throat fit to brast. The wintry gusts blowing into the steep defile called the Guttit Haddie froze his hurdies and his ears and his chin and his nose.

HALLOO! OI! IS THERE A BODY CAN HEAR ME?

He climbed like a man pursued by demons invisible, never looking down. The spreading sea of city lights seemed to undulate dizzily below—glittering currents of traffic, dirty backwaters of tenements and shops, the up-thrust reefs of church steeples and castle ramparts and the perilous shoals of the University.

HALLOO!

Down there ran the Pleasance and on it stood the building with the laboratory. It had a grand name: the Parapsychology Unit of the Department of Psychology of the University of Edinburgh; but it was only a big dreary room up under the eaves, partitioned into cramped wee offices and carrels for the endless testing. It was presided over by the eminent Dr. Graham Finlay Dunlap, whose staff—alas!—consisted only of two graduate assistants, William Erskine and Nigel Weinstein, and him: fames Somerled MacGregor, a silly gowk of twenty, by virtue of his fey talents awarded a bursary at one of the finest universities in Britain—and for all that bored and wretched and wanting only to go home to Islay in the Hebrides.