To Ride Pegasus (11 page)

“A pure case of doing what comes naturally.”

“Nothing must interfere with that child’s development.”

“I still don’t see why we’ve kept it from the parents. Are you stepping down from your “know-all, tell-all’ pedestal after all?”

Op Owen returned the physician’s sardonic look.

“I’m not a precog, but I felt a strong reluctance to inform Lajos.”

“Why? He’d be walking nine feet tall to think he produced such a Talented child.”

“Haven’t we changed sides, Jerry?”

“It’s one thing to withhold information from the unwashed public, but another to clam up on one of the gang.”

“We don’t know positively that Dorotea Horvath is …”

“Come off it Dave. Cecily King is a strong TP and she
heard
that child protest birth. Oh, I know that some of ’em can cry out in the womb but this was no physical cry or it would have been audible to the rest of the delivery room personnel. Is your stumbling block Ruth Horvath?”

Op Owen nodded slowly.

“Well, that makes a little more sense, although I’d say she’d welcome her daughter’s Talent. A kind of vindication that she’s never been identified. Unless you call the transmission of strong genetic traits a Talent.”

Op Owen shook his head, his lips pursed in thought. “She has wanted a child desperately. As a mother wants a child: not as a Talented person wants evidence of succession.” He spoke slowly, the words dragged out of his mouth as if he were sorting the thoughts. “Lajos says that although Ruth is a great help and very understanding, sometimes his Incidents bother her more than she admits. Let’s just let things take their course. We’ll keep an eye on them.”

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them, huh?” Frames sighed. “Wish you’d let that attitude spill over into other areas, Dave.”

Op Owen regarded the doctor intently. “I can conceivably bend a little privately, for the benefit of those under my care, but I cannot as easily rationalize the broader issue which I cannot oversee or control.”

“All right Dave, but I feel, and Jod Andres feels, that private reactions are a strong basis for predicting public ones. You’re reluctant to tell Ruth Honrath, a girl conditioned and trained to accept Talent that her child shows exceedingly strong telepathic Talent. You willingly want to broadcast information that even frightens me, and I’m Talented, to a public that is in no way conditioned to accept a fragment of that knowledge. The two attitudes cannot be reconciled.”

“The ethical position of the Talented must never be questioned.”

“Dave,” and there was entreaty in Jerry Frames’s voice and manner, “
you
are unable to be unethical. The withholding of prejudicial knowledge is not unethical, it’s plain good ol’ common sense. Which you are sensibly applying to Ruth Horvath’s case. How many times I have considered telling a patient he’s bought it and how few times have
I actually come clean. Very few people can stand the whole, complete, unvarnished truth.”

“I hang between, in doubt to act or rest,” op Owen said, resigned as well as frustrated.

“What’s that?”

“I apologize, Jerry. Your point is well taken. I’ve erred—on the side of the angels, I hope—but this attitude of mine towards Ruth Horvath
is
a curious vacillation from my tendency to be forthright. Yet I know that there is a reason to be slightly devious.”

“Then you’ll ease back on this all-open-and-above-board routine?”

“Yes, I’ll ease back as you put it.”

“Still,” and Jerry frowned slightly, “it isn’t as if they won’t find out soon enough.” He meant the Horvaths.

“They need time to get used to the idea.” Op Owen was thinking about humanity.

“Where on earth did she get those blue eyes?” Lajos asked as he sat entranced by his three-month-old daugher’s attempts to capture her toes. She flopped over, gurgling cheerfully to herself.

“Heavens, it’s possible,” Ruth replied, beaming fatuously as she caught her daughter’s eye. “I may be grey-eyed, and you brown, but we both have ancesters with blue eyes—four generations back.”

“I always said you were recessive, hon.”

“Humph. I don’t mind in the least, not if it produces a blue-eyed blonde daughter with dimples. And I’ve got her, haven’t I, love? You’re all mine.”

“Except for the twenty-three chromosomes from me.”

Dorotea twisted her head backwards over her shoulder and burbled moistly at her mother.

“Love at first bite,” Lajos said in a mutter of mock surliness. “There’s a conspiracy of females against this poor lone male.”

Dorotea impartially gurgled at him, her eyes bright and wide and happy.

“You never had it so good,” said Ruth.

And Lajos privately admitted the truth of that. Ruth was so enthralled with her daughter, their apartment had a noticeable atmosphere of benevolence. He was more relaxed than ever, and despite an increase in Incidents, extending beyond his usual affinity, he suffered less from the depressions and exhaustions that were the inevitable postlude.

The day Dorotea’s Talent blossomed, Daffyd op Owen was reviewing the records obtained overtly and covertly from the Horvath apartment He’d had Lester Welch, his electronic chief, rig a buried web in Ruth’s mattress, in case the baby instinctively contacted her mother first. However, Lester had pointed out the slight variation in Ruth’s readings. It was more as if the needle had snagged itself on an imperfection in the graph paper. There was no such variation on the baby’s recordings. Welch had been about to discredit the occurrences until he checked them against Lajos’s and discovered that the minute variations in Ruth’s chart always occurred exactly at the onset of Lajos’ Incidents.

“She might well be a latent ‘receiver,’ ” op Owen said to Welch, “only now beginning to develop from continued proximity to her husband and the advent of the child. I can’t present another explanation.”

“That’d be nice, Dave. Ruth’s a good little person: cheerful, intelligent and crazy for her husband and child. Just the sort of well-balanced, understanding parent to have for a …”

Lesto was abruptly staring at op Owen’s retreating back. The man had leaped to his feet and raced down the hall to the recording room. Lester Welch was not Talented, although his electronic engineering was often sheer inventive genius, but op Owen didn’t react like that without good cause. When Welch reached the doorway, he saw that Charlie Moorfield, the day engineer, was hunched over
the console, unconscious, but op Owen’s attention was for a graph.

“Take a close look at Dorotea’s graph,” op Owen said, grinning fit to pop his jaw, and then he passed his associate on his way out.

Common sense told op Owen that, despite the urgency of the summons, there could be no danger threatening the baby. Yet he could not disregard that call. What could have happened, he wondered as he ran down the front steps. Suddenly he noticed that there seemed to be a mass exodus from all parts of the building. And everyone was headed in the same direction. As abruptly as the call had been issued, it ceased. People slowed down, stopped, looked around, grinning foolishly.

“What was that?” “Who called?” “Wot hoppened?”

“It’s all right,” op Owen found himself reassuring them. “A new technique improperly shielded,” he said to the telepaths. And grinned at his own dissembling as he continued towards the Horvaths’s apartment.

There was a crowd in the hall before their apartment. Op Owen politely pushed his way through the disturbed residents. Dorotea, her baby face still tear-streaked, was held high in her mother’s arms, cooing and chortling at the smiling faces around her. Op Owen’s arrival signaled the crowd’s discreet dispersal and shortly, he was alone with the mortified mother.

“I’m so embarassed, sir,” Ruth said, jiggling her baby as she walked nervously up and down her living room. “I fell asleep with the tape recorder blaring away. And I just … didn’t hear Dorotea wake up … I’ve never done such a thing before and we’ve never permitted her to cry long …”

“No one is remotely suggesting that you mistreat Dorotea.” Op Owen smiled as the baby flirted delight fully with him. “In fact a little honest frustration is very useful. It certainly placed her Talent.”

“Ooooooooh,” and Ruth collapsed on the sofa, staring wide-eyed at Daffyd op Owen as she absorbed the implication,
which she had been too preoccupied with calming Dorotea to see.

“She broadcast a
very
loud signal. I shouldn’t be at all surprised if every Talent in the city heard her.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Lajos charged through the door.

“What happened to her? How did she get hurt? My head is splitting!” Lajos snatched Dorotea from her mother’s lap to Cramme her firsthand. She began to whimper, catching his anxiety.

“Only her feelings were hurt,” Ruth replied, suddenly very calm. Op Owen noticed that with approval: she was dampening her own distress to soothe the others. “I’d fallen asleep with the tape recorder blasting away and just didn’t hear her when she woke up hungry and all damp.” She took her daughter back, rocking her until the baby began to beam again. “She was hurt because she felt she was being ignored, isn’t that right, sweetie?”

“Well, good god!” Lajos sank onto the couch, mopping his forehead. “I never heard anything like it before. Sir,” and he turned to op Owen, “look, this can’t … I mean, can this sort of thing happen every time my daughter’s upset?”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s likely to protest many assumed indignities, Lajos. Babies have to suffer some frustrations to grow. We’ll just move you all to a shielded apartment and dampen down that lovely loud young voice.”

“You’re not surprised about Dorotea at all,” Ruth said, regarding op Owen with round, suspicious eyes. “So that’s why everyone was so excited about her in the nursery.”

“Well, yes,” the Director agreed slowly. “She was heard by the TP nurse at birth.”

“But I thought psionic Talents don’t usually show up until adolescence …”

“Conscious Talent,” op Owen said, correcting her.

Ruth looked down at the drooling baby in her arms. A strained look crossed her pretty face. “But I want Dorotea to have a normal, happy childhood!”

“And she won’t because she’s Talented? Is that it, my dear?” Op Owen knew, sadly, that his instinct about not telling Ruth at once had been all too well-founded “Except for this ability, which might as well be drawing freehand, she
is
a normal, healthy child, totally unaware that she is in any way remarkable …”

“But I know you’ll want to test her, and all that, with stimuli …” Ruth’s distress was so acute that she couldn’t go on.

“Ruth!” Lajos bent to comfort her, surprised by her reaction. She clutched her daughter tightly to her.

“My dear Ruth!” op Owen said gently, “testing and stimuli are for people who come to us after they have subverted and suppressed their Talents. We know what Dorotea is already, a very strong telepath. And we’ve been ‘testing’ her, as you call it, already. As for stimuli, I assure you,” and there was nothing forced in op Owen’s chuckle, “
she’s
applying the only stimuli … to us.”

Lajos laughed, brushing his hair back from his forehead as he remembered his frantic homeward flight. Beneath his arm, he could feel Ruth relaxing. A slight smile touched her lips.

“Dorotea will have an unusual opportunity, my dear. One denied you and Lajos, and myself, and so many other potential Talents. She has the chance to grow up in her Talent learning to use it as naturally as she learns to walk and talk. We will all help her to understand it … as much as we do ourselves,” he added with a wry smile. “To be candid, Ruth, we are in much the same position as your daughter. We are all learning to act in a publicly acceptable fashion with this new facet of human evolution. Psionic Talents are in their infancy, too, you know.

“You might even extend the analogy a little to include the Andres Bill, which we hope will afford all Talents professional status and legal protection. We, in effect must prove to the public, our parent-body, if you wish, that we are not ‘bad,’ ‘naughty’ or ‘capricious’ children. Dorotea has already contributed something to that end,”
and op Owen caught himself before he explained his own revelation. “Dorotea needs love and reassurance, discipline and understanding. Shell pick that up from you, Ruth, with your warmth and sweetness. I want her, possibly more than you do, to have a normal, happy childhood so that she will be a normal, happy adult.”

He rose, smiling at the baby’s infectious gaiety.

“See, she knows how pleased we are with her right now, the little rascal.”

Op Owen left, assuring them new quarters within the week. Ruth was so quiet and thoughtful that Lajos remained home the rest of the day. He found the revelation of Dorotea’s Talent as much a shock as Ruth apparently did. However, by morning, he was consumed with a paternal pride and, in the succeeding days, discovered an overweening tendency to maunder on about his daughter’s prowess. By the time they moved to the larger, shielded apartment he was accustomed to the notion and, since Dorotea made no more frantic summonses, succeeded in ignoring it. Until he noticed the gradual change in Ruth. At first, it was no more than a sudden frown, quickly erased, or a nervous look towards the baby’s room if she slept longer than usual. Then he caught Ruth looking at her child with that wary expression he had once privately called the Freak Look,’ which unTalented people occasionally directed at him when they discovered his affiliation with the Center.

“You’ve got to stop that, honey,” he blurted out. “You’ve got to keep thinking … strongly … that Dorotea is just like other kids. Or you’ll prejudice her. Which is the one thing we have to avoid.”

Ruth vehemently denied the accusation but she turned so white around the lips that Lajos gathered her quickly into his arms.

“Ah, sweetie, she hasn’t changed just because we’ve found out she’s Talented. But she
is
perceptive and she
can sense your feelings towards her. You start suppressing that ‘freak-feeling’ right now. You think positively that she’s our beautiful baby girl, sweet and loving, kind and thoughtful. She’ll have that opinion of herself and it won’t matter that she’s a strong TP as well. She’ll merely consider that part of the whole bit. It’s when she senses criticism and restraint and hypocrisy that we’ll be in trouble. I had to get used to it, too, Ruthie. Say,” and he tilted her chin up and grinned down at her reassuringly, “why don’t we get a little help from op Owen? Talk this over with him. He can put a block on if you need one.”