INTERVENTION (70 page)

"Let's go home," Fred said.

"I wish we
could,
" Willy muttered.

"Oh, you know what I mean," said Fred.

Together, they headed for the place where they had left their car.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

W
E WERE NOT
yet pariahs, only suspect.

The terrible murder and instant retribution that had taken place in Alma-Ata were played and replayed on the television screens of the world. The implications—perceived almost instinctively by every normal person—were argued in heat and in cold blood, but then rationalized away because humanity was not yet prepared to turn upon and repudiate the operants.

After an investigation that took more than a year, Soviet forensic scientists, assisted by experts from many other countries, determined that the assassinations of the General Secretary and the Grand Mufti were not accomplished by psychocreative energy at all, but by a chemical explosive device that was almost but not quite without traceless residue. That the agent provocateur had been operant himself was verified by the testimony of the delegate-witnesses there in the Lenin Palace of Culture, particularly those who had been on stage. The killer had used a quasi-hypnotic technique to stun and confuse those close to the General Secretary. Only Denis and Tamara had been able to resist the mind-paralysis; but they could not prevent the murder.

The killer's true identity was never discovered. His image was shown distinctly on the tapes of the video cameras recording the event; but the face was obscured by the large bouquet of flowers at first, and then by the miniature explosion. He had turned away as he started to flee, again hiding his face from the cameras, and his subsequent cremation obliterated any other clues to his identity.

The cremation, not the murder of the Soviet leader, was what really gave the world pause.

After months of hedging, a special investigatory committee of "blue-ribbon" metapsychologists called by the United Nations issued a lengthy analysis of the so-called Retributory Incident. Its findings can be compactly summarized:

1. The assassin of the Soviet General Secretary met his death through a process of incineration by psychoenergetic projection.

2. The energy projected came from the brains of the operant delegates who had just witnessed the assassination.

3. The energy was focused and amplified by means of a maneuver known as "metapsychic concert," in which numbers of operant brains act as one synergistically, the whole being capable of an output greater than the sum of the parts.

4. It was not possible to calculate with total accuracy the amount of energy focused upon the assassin, since its characteristics were anomalous. (For example, there were no auditory manifestations as there had been when the General Secretary's head was vaporized by the explosive device.) Furthermore, it was not possible to calculate the percentage of psychoenergy generated by individual delegates.

5. The metafaculty of psychocreativity, which may generate energy, is at present poorly understood. Except for the Weinstein case, there is no previous record of a fatality resulting from the projection of psychic energy. Metapsychic concert is also poorly understood. Its manifestation has been experimentally verified by magnetoenceph-alography; but in no instance have researchers ever encountered an effect even remotely approaching the magnitude of the Retributory Incident.

6. In the opinion of the investigatory committee, the Incident was the result of an unconscious velleity on the part of the delegate-minds, without true volition. In lay langauge, the delegates were so shocked and angered by the General Secretary's murder that their mutual loathing of the perpetrator generated the blast that killed him.

7. On the advice of the committee, no action at law against the delegate-perpetrators was contemplated by the Soviet judiciary. It was felt that the principle of diminished responsibility applied to their actions in view of the heinousness of the crime they had just witnessed.

8. Repetitions of Retributory Incidents could not be ruled out, given similar provocatory circumstances.

9. The committee recommended strongly that legal scholars, ethicists, and moral theologians address themselves to the unique problems of culpability devolving upon metapsychic operancy. The ancient question of whether the law should take the will for the deed would have to be reopened when, ipso facto, the will
was
the deed.

***

Debate over the philosophical and legal implications of operancy would beget an avalanche of articles, monographs, and books off and on over the next fifteen years, until the topic received its ultimate resolution in the Intervention. Of course Denis did not serve on the investigating committee. (The fact of his nonparticipation in the destructive metaconcert was proved when the Simbiari Proctorship reopened the inquiry into the Incident in 2017, at Denis's insistence.) Lucille, who had not attended the Sixth Congress because of her confinement with her first son, Philip,
did
serve. It should be noted that she laid open her personal psychocreative case history to assist the committee in its deliberations, an action that required great courage at the time. Fortunately for her, the committee decided that it was not necessary to include that history in the public record.

You, the entity reading these memoirs, should not get the impression that reaction to the Retributory Incident was as reasoned and high-minded as this chapter may have thus far implied. On the contrary, there was a royal rumpus kicked up in the United States, where the media hashed and rehashed the affair ad nauseam, bringing the term "psychozap" into slang usage, together with the pejorative "head," applied to operants—which was perversely embraced by us and later used as an innocent appellation. As the Third Millennium approached, cranks and fanatics of every sort crept out of the woodwork—most notably the Sons of Earth movement, which claimed worldwide adherents by 1999 and succeeded in disrupting part of the Eighth Metapsychic Congress in London.

The Great California Earthquake gave new life to the prophecies of Nostradamus. Never mind that the prophet's dating for the quake was so ambiguous that it might have referred to any century following the sixteenth, with the locale of the seismic disaster unspecified. Two other pertinent quatrains from Nostradamus were dusted off and presented to the gullible as portents of things to come:

L'an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ceil viendra un grand Roi deffraieur.
Resusciter le grand Roi d'Angolmois.
Avant que Mars regner par bonheur.

Apres grand troche humaine plus grande s'appreste,
Le grand moteur des Siecles renouvelle.
Pluie, sang, laict, famine, fer et peste
Au feu ciel veu courant longue estincelle.

Which can be roughly translated:

In the seventh month of the year 1999,
A great King of Terror will come.
He will revive the great King of the Mongols.
Before that Mars will run riot.

After great human suffering, even greater comes,
When the great motive power of the Centuries is renewed.
Rain, blood, milk, famine, iron [war], and disease
In the heavens is seen a fire, a long flow of sparks.

The hysterical could equate the new, bellicose leader of the Soviet Union, Marshal Kumylzhensky, with the King of Terror. By a long stretch of the imagination, the new Genghis Khan could be seen in the insurrections flaring up in Soviet Central Asia. (No one yet had any inkling that the Chinese were watching the accelerating dissolution of the USSR with keen interest.) The continued fighting throughout the Islamic world was certainly a source of suffering, and the crazy weather that had rotted the crops in some parts of the world while parching others also seemed to fit. As to the milk, there remained the legacy of the Armageddon fallout, poisoning both milk and "blood" in a wide swath of the Middle East and the Balkans for seven years now. The fateful Seventh Month of 1999 came and went without any signal disaster; but in August, the total eclipse of the sun that was visible in Europe, the most embattled regions of the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent wreaked havoc among the superstitious, who were certain that the end of the world had come. After that crisis had passed, there was another to be endured on ii November, when Earth passed through the great Leonid meteor "storm," a Nostradamic fiery flow of sparks if there ever was one. But once again Earth abided, the day of wrath was unaccountably postponed, and the eschatologists went back to their original prediction of doomsday at the actual turn of the Millennium.

***

Sadly enough, certain of the Remillards did meet their end during those days. Their tragedy went virtually unnoticed because of the gaudier events that Milieu historians have concentrated on; but I will tell it here as part of the family chronicle.

In the months following the Alma-Ata affair, Denis brooded over the misuse of operant metafacuities. He discussed this subject at length with both Tamara Sakhvadze and Urgyen Bhotia, and was convinced that resolute pacifism was the only ethical course open to persons with higher mind-powers. There remained, however, the odious problem of Victor. Denis had told Lucille what he knew and what he suspected about his younger brother, and she was simultaneously outraged and wary. Lucille was particularly concerned for Sunny and the nonoperant siblings left under Victor's influence, and pressed Denis to do something to help them, even if it meant a direct confrontation that might end in violence. But Denis refused, countering her reproaches with both logic and his espousal of the superChristian ethic. No course short of engineering Victor's demise was likely to resolve the terrible stalemate—and Denis would not kill his brother in cold blood even to save the lives of his mother and the others.

Denis stood by, apparently impotent, while his younger twin brothers Louis and Leon, who turned twenty-one in 1999, were brainwashed by Victor and joined him in Remco Industries as nonoperant factotums. Both young men were ruthless and intelligent, and they were also completely trustworthy, unlike many of Victor's operant associates. That left only George, who was nineteen, and Pauline, two years younger, still living with Sunny. George was an unprepossessing young man, very unassertive, who was studying computer technology under Victor's orders. I had always thought him a poor stick. Paulie, the youngest of Don and Sunny's big brood, was an exquisite creature. Except for her dark eyes, she was the image of her mother as a young woman—and when I saw her that year at the family Easter get-together, suddenly matured into radiant femininity, my heart stood still.

Their older sister Yvonne had been married in 1996 to the middle-aged operant crook Robert Fortier, whose sinister mother still acted as Sunny's nominal housekeeper, all the while contriving to dominate her utterly. Over the years, by use of ingenious metapsychic variants on old-fashioned racketeering, Victor and Fortier had converted Remco into an international operation that now owned not only pulpwood harvesting companies but a large paper mill in New Brunswick, a chemical plant in Maine, and other forest-product industries in cities scattered across upper New England and southeastern Canada. Having succeeded so well in his first dynastic ploy, Victor now decided to attempt a much more audacious variation on the theme.

One of my nephew's underhanded acquisitions was a small genetic-engineering firm in Burlington, Vermont. This outfit had perfected and patented a bacterial organism called a lignin degrader, that broke down (i.e., "ate") a common waste product of the pulpwood industry, converting it into a host of valuable chemicals that had heretofore been obtained from increasingly scarce petroleum. The process utilizing the superior bug was very nearly ready to be put into production, and it was going to be a gold mine; but Victor's Remco Industries faced a dilemma well known to medium-sized corporations—it did not have enough capital to develop a lignin-chemistry company of its own, which would reap huge profits. Rather, it would have to license the process to giant petrochemical conglomerates and settle for a much smaller piece of the pie.

Naturally, Victor balked at this. The golden bug and its principal nurturer had been stolen from a famous Michigan university at considerable risk to Victor's own hide, and he had invested a good deal of money in the perfecting of the process. Having won game and set, as it were, he wasn't going to let outsiders rob him of the match.

There was only one font of finance he felt he could safely approach for additional capitalization, a money source that had earlier approached
him,
only to be repulsed. Now, Victor decided, the time was ripe for reconsideration. And so he made a telephone call to Kieran O'Connor's Chicago office, waited patiently while his name was passed from buffer zone to buffer zone in the corporate hierarchy until it reached the Boss of Bosses, and then made his proposition.

A merger, to their mutual profit. To seal the deal, Victor would marry Shannon O'Connor and Kieran would take Pauline Remillard.

O'Connor laughed his head off at the raw Franco chutzpah of it all. It was
primitive.
It was damn near Sicilian! Still, Kieran had kept his eye on Victor over the years and had been impressed. At the callow age of twenty-nine, Victor was worth upward of sixty-two million dollars—peanuts when compared to Kieran's own empire, but not too shabby when you remembered that the kid had started out with nothing but his drunken daddy, a '74 Chevy pickup truck, and two Jonsered chain saws boosted from a local logging-equipment supplier. And this lignin-gobbling bacterium had possibilities. Kieran's facile mind hatched a scenario in which the process could be used as a fulcrum in a scheme to corner the world's energy supply. As for Victor himself, he would either have to be made an ally or eliminated. The dynastic link-up opened the way for either option.

After their telephone conversation had gone on for some ten minutes, Kieran told Victor that he was inclined to accept the proposition. There were, however, two small matters that would have to be clarified. First, did Victor have his sister Pauline under complete control, as Kieran did Shannon? ... and was she really beautiful and unsophisticated?