INTERVENTION (49 page)

The little office was becoming chilly with the close of day, but the General Secretary's balding head had a gleam of sweat. "The militarist lunatics were voted down resoundingly for now. The Politburo knows that the present euphoric mood of our people would never countenance a first strike—no more than it would allow the psychics to be harmed. The people demand—demand!—that MacGregor's proposal be implemented."

"There was dancing in the streets of Alma-Ata," Tamara said.

"And in Moscow. And everywhere throughout the Soviet Union! By allowing them to view that telecast—and we are investigating
that,
too!—we have indeed opened the door to a new age. But that age may not be golden, as you and your idealistic associates hope, Tamara Petrovna. You know that I have been striving for years now to upgrade our faltering economy, to instill a new spirit of industry and progress into our people, to control military adventurism, to fight the ingrained corruption, the laziness, the despair infecting our youth ... And now, suddenly, there is this! Our enemies all around us will be thwarted in aggression by the psychic observers. The people will expect drastic disarmament initiatives. They will believe that reductions in our huge defense budget will bring about improved domestic conditions. For a while, they will wait patiently for this to come about. Perhaps they will wait as long as a decade, distracted by our travels to Mars and other wonders. But then..."

"I read your subvocal thoughts, Comrade General Secretary. We are not a unified nation. Discipline and right order have up until now been preserved among our disparate ethnic elements primarily through the Great Russian bureaucracy, and the people's determination to stand fast and defend the Motherland against the common enemy."

Smoothly, he took up the skein of his own thoughts again. "But without that enemy to distract us, the masses will look more critically at the kind of life they live—at the inefficiencies of our system, at the often unjust decrees of the central power structure, at our economy based upon obsolete philosophic principles that falls further and further behind the other industrialized nations of the world ... Look into your crystal ball, Tamara Petrovna, you and your psychic colleagues with your shining dream of peace for the future! Will we have that peace in the Soviet Union? Will we be able to adapt fast enough to avoid catastrophe?"

She turned her face away abruptly, lips tightening. "I don't know. Sometimes I
do
see the future. And far away ... years from now ... there is a great change, a time of expanding horizons, when our people will help to colonize the stars as we now seek to colonize Mars ... But the near future? I do not see that, Comrade General Secretary. Thank God I do not. The job of guiding our nation through the last perilous years of this twentieth century is yours, not mine—and I also thank God for that. Now take the portfolio with the details of the psychic-oversight scheme, and do what you must."

"While you watch," he said.

She rose from her chair, turning her back on him, and looked out at the gleaming mountains. "While the world watches."

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

T
HE SPECIFICS OF
the EE monitoring plan were promptly delivered to both Washington and Moscow, and a Summit was scheduled. The much-battered Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty was dusted off, updated, and promised to an exultant world as a Christmas present.

In the United States, the emplacement of Psi-Eye was considered a fait accompli by the general public—and the White House did nothing to discourage the impression, nor did the Soviets. Most people were happy to believe that vigilant American EE adepts (inevitably dubbed pEEps) had settled in on the job immediately following the Scottish telecast. There were "Big Brother Is Watching You" jokes and voyeuristic editorial cartoons, however, and a tentative panic on Wall Street that was quashed by the President in a brilliant personal appeal. Some nay-sayers recalled the madman who had tried to shoot MacGregor with a camera-gun, whose identity was released to the press by the British only after a question had been raised in Parliament. By and large, however, the United States reacted with happy exuberance to the Psi-Eye scheme. It was seen as a virtually foolproof reprieve from nuclear doomsday. The identities (and the numbers) of the pEEps were kept secret, of course; but everyone knew that they were en garde night and day, keeping a mind's eye out for potential Kremlin button-pushers—at the same time that their noble Russian opposite numbers scrutinized the U.S. Joint Chiefs sulking impotently in the Pentagon war-room.

In actuality, neither the American nor the Soviet authorities achieved a working psychic monitoring effort for nearly three months, until early 1992. There were endless niggling details to be resolved, the most critical of which was: Where do you look? As in the classic
BEWARE OF THE DOG
sign ploy, however, the mere proclamation of Psi-Eye was as good as its actuality. Neither of the superpowers was willing to risk being caught out trying to steal a march on the other—and although the Americans and Soviets might have had doubts about each other's Psi-Eye capability, they had none whatsoever about Scotland's. At the close of the Edinburgh Demonstration, Jamie MacGregor had remarked offhandedly that the University's independent psychic surveillance team of thirty-two EE adepts was already at work, and would be issuing regular press releases of selected U.S. and Soviet military secrets. The team's revelations were far from sensational; they were not intended to be. But they did provide a continual reminder to the world that excorporeal exclusion was a reality, and inspired the two superpowers to get on with the right stuff. Both the Soviet Union and the United States behaved with unblemished probity throughout the Summit talks, the SALT signing and ratification, and the initiation of nuclear disarmament. The threats to world peace came from entirely different directions.

Here in the United States, a groundswell from burdened taxpayers called for an immediate halt to military spending. The few remaining Congressional hawks, the fundamentalist Red-haters, and the as yet insignificant numbers of meta-skeptics had their objections steamrollered into oblivion. The President, shrewd as ever in his response to consumer demand, hailed Tamara Sakhvadze's call for a World Congress on Metapsychology, and then proposed that the United States host a sister international conference on shared high technology. The Soviet General Secretary said that his nation would eagerly participate in both meetings. Then he suggested that Professor Jamie MacGregor be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

My nephew Denis was closeted with the President for nearly a week, briefing him on virtually every aspect of current metapsychic research. He also testified before the House Committee on Science and Technology, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a full meeting of the Cabinet. He would accept only an advisory appointment to the Presidential Commission on Metapsychology, but promised to consult with the Meta Brain Trust on a regular basis.

Figuratively crowned with laurel and trailed by belling newshounds, Denis returned to Dartmouth intending to get back to his researches. It was a vain hope. Post-Edinburgh and post-Washington, he and his little establishment became very big news indeed. Now prestigious foundations stampeded to Dartmouth's door, proffering endowments; and these, unlike the tainted Pentagon grants that Denis had helped to discredit during the Mind Wars scandal, were accepted "for the good of Dartmouth College and for the advancement of metapsychology as a whole."

There would be no more dodging of the media, either. Submitting to the inevitable, Denis put his associate Gerard Tremblay in charge of the lab's public affairs. At that time, the vivacious former granite-quarryman was thirty-one years old and had taken his M.D. just three years earlier. In spite of his Franco heritage, he was the member of the Coterie that I liked least. He was a fiery, good-looking fellow with intense presence; but I had always thought him a bit of a brown-nose, suspecting that his obsequious manner might be compensation for an unconscious envy of my nephew. My suspicions were to be eventually confirmed. But until he precipitated the disastrous Coercer Flap during President Baumgartner's second term, Tremblay did an outstanding job coping with the media, with curious politicians, and with the many national and international organizations that suddenly focused their attention on the shoestring research establishment at 45 College Street, Hanover, New Hampshire.

Tremblay's first PR triumph took place in November 1991, with the interview of Denis by the investigative news program
60 Minutes.
CBS was prepared to devote the entire hour-long telecast to metapsychology's Wunderkind. The interview would be combined with a tour of the Dartmouth facility and would show the actual testing of operant subjects, who would remain anonymous. Denis's lab was a prime media target because it had always remained off-limits to journalists during the blizzard of publicity attending the publication of
Metapsychology.
Heaven only knows what kind of Frankenstein shenanigans the 60
Minutes
people hoped to uncover. As it happened, the program was destined to be nearly as memorable as MacGregor's Edinburgh shocker ... only this time
I
was there, doing my thing in front of the network cameras, and daring the world to make something of it.

EXCERPTS FROM THE CBS-TV
PUBLIC AFFAIRS PROGRAM
60
Minutes

17
NOVEMBER
1991

FADE IN

BG STILL SHOT (MATTE) EXT DARTMOUTH RESEARCH FACILITY A picturesque, rather dilapidated three-storey New England saltbox building, dark gray; resembling a bam on side of wooded hill, it looms almost ominously above a stretch of rain-wet pavement and is framed by bare-branched trees. In FG of MATTE stands reporter CARLOS MORENO, whose hard-hitting questions, mobile woolly-bear eyebrows, and divergent squint have often provoked unexpectedly revealing responses from even the most guarded interviewees. TITLE AND CREDIT ROLL

SUPERMINDS AMONG US?
Produced by feananne Lancaster

CARLOS MORENO

(addressing viewers)

Tonight we conclude our special three-week investigation of the startling new developments in psychic research by meeting a scientist who is acknowledged throughout the world to be one of the most influential in the field. He heads this laboratory at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire ... a place that has been, up until now, completely off-limits to reporters.
60 Minutes
will be taking you inside this deceptively modest building, the workplace of the man who was described by the President of the United States as "the most awesome person I have ever met, an authentic supermind"...But first, let's meet him in a more conventional setting ...

INT BOOKSHOP

Begin with ECU of DENIS REMILLARD, with downcast eyes; then SLOW REVERSE ZOOM to a FULL SHOT of him sitting at table in ELOQUENT PAGE BOOKSHOP signing volumes for a crowd of CUSTOMERS who include students in Dartmouth sweat shirts, professional types, working-class types, retirees. Remillard is slight of physique, blondish, with a pleasant, shy smile. He wears tweed jacket with shirt and tie, exchanges inaudible comments with his fans during MORENO VOICE OVER.

MORENO (VOICE OVER)

Denis Remillard looks more like a graduate student than an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at an Ivy League school. He is only twenty-four years old and he has always shunned publicity—even after his book,
Metapsychology,
leaped to Number One on national best-seller lists last year. Unlike the other psychic researchers we've interviewed during this series, Denis Remillard doesn't concentrate on narrow areas of mind-study. Instead, he's a theoretician who has tried to fit the puzzling higher mental powers into a larger context.

CU REMILLARD

REMILLARD

I think my book was a success because people are very open to new ideas now. Things that our grandparents would have called absurd—like traveling to Mars—are reality. But the New Physics shows us that even
reality itself
isn't what common sense says it ought to be!

(quizzical boyish grin, eyes averted)

The universe isn't just space and time, matter and energy. You have to fit
life
into a valid Universal Field Theory—and
mind
as well. That's basically what my book is all about. Theoretical physicists and life-scientists have known for quite a while that the old view of the universe as a kind of supermachine just doesn't work. It doesn't explain the natural phenomena we experience, and it especially doesn't explain the higher mind-powers, which have never fitted into a conventional biophysical format.

INT BOOKSHOP—CLOSE SHOT MORENO

Remillard and his fans visible in BG as CAMERA MOVES BACK.

MORENO

(addressing viewers)

As he autographs copies of his book here in Hanover, New Hampshire, in a little shop owned by his Uncle Roger, Denis Remillard hardly seems to fulfill one's expectation of a world-renowned psychologist—much less a supermind. But he was the first person summoned to be a presidential consultant on psychic affairs following the sensational Edinburgh Demonstration. He declined the chairmanship of the President's recently organized blue-ribbon Advisory Commission on Metapsychology ... But he
has
agreed to head the American delegation to Alma-Ata in the Soviet Union, where researchers from dozens of nations will meet next year to discuss the practical applications of mind-power ... And last week, Remillard's lab was singled out for a ten-million-dollar grant from the Vangelder Foundation. The allocation has been earmarked for an investigation into ways whereby ordinary people—people like you and me—might someday be able to learn the amazing mental feats that Denis Remillard has studied and written about ... feats that
he himself
performs.