INTERVENTION (16 page)

HALLOO! WHAT'S NEW? DAFT JAMIE SAYS: SOD YOU!

Climb up laughing at the uselessness of it. Climb above the winterfast reeky city toward a louring sky still scarlet in the west. Climb up the steepest, most dangerous way in shifty twilight, hurting all the while. Scramble up rocks. Creep along the igneous ridge all frosty and windblasted. Climb finally to the top of that ancient crag, that sentinel of Dun Eadain beloved of tourists and sentimentalists and trysting lovers. Climb up to Arthur's Seat!

HALLOO! HURRAW! EXCELSIOR!...

The near-gale blowing up the Forth from the North Sea now smote him squarely. To escape he sprawled bellyflaught, face cradled in his arms, and let rattling gasps from his parched throat soften while his heart tripped over itself and slowed. He licked cracked lips and tasted salt from wind-tears and wool from his sweater. The sheepy taste and the ocean taste and the smell of wet cold stone and moorland! The thrill of climbing in the high air, the pain of it, the happiness ... and see—the humor was coming on him again, just as it used to so easily in the early days when he was still excited with the novelty of demonstrating his uncanny powers to the psychologists. He felt it coming. He knew that he was going to be able to do it again.

The thing he thought he'd lost. What they'd been coaxing him vainly to do again down in the damned laboratory for nigh on a year.

The out-of-body thing.

I'M AWAY!

Oh, aye, it was grand! To soar up and see himself left prone below, a husk without a soul. He sped into the sunset, across West Lothian's black fells and crouching Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde, over Arran and Kintyre and tiny Gigha, beyond the sea to home. To Islay, to his private place. Like a sea bird he hovered, seeing the surf crash against the shoulder of Ton Mhor. A few sheep skirted the bog on their way downhill. Somewhere one of the dogs was barking. The ruins of the old croft near the bay sheltered a shaggy red longhorn stot. In his own snug home the lights were on and a thread of smoke rose from the chimney. Suppertime on a winter's Friday night, and Granny portioning out the sweet while Mum dished up savory haddock and fried potatoes. Dad and Colin and old Iain came trampling in tired and famished and red-cheeked.

He watched them, full of joy and with all pain abolished. Then he concentrated on the well-known dear aura. He said:

It's me! I'm here!

Granny looked up from the trifle she'd made that day for a special treat: Jamie my dear laddie. It's been so long. And how are you then?

Ah Gran I'm that miserable here at university I could die I think!

Such blether.

No no they're all fools and Dr. Dunlap the biggest of all with his testing testing testing as if he didn't
know
my powers exist but had to prove it over and over endlessly with his damned statistics and I get so tired and impatient and I feel the hostility from the other undergrads because I'm a privileged character and allowed my special academic track here in the Psychology Department and Gran dear Gran this queer mind of mine sometimes does its tricks and sometimes not but what's the use it's not as though I could use the Sight or the Speech or the Out-of-Body Thing to earn a good living as a bookie or a blackmailer or a spy Lord knows the powers are too unreliable and me too conscience-tender for that but Gran I'm beginning to think I don't want to be a psychologist either not even to study the powers if it means this endless dull dull testing not only of me but of
common
folk and Dunlap and his two assistants nattering on about "extrachance performance" and the "psi-missing effect" (which means can you believe it test results so rotten that the psi experts have decided they must be significant!) and they keep trying to find a theory in physics to fit the powers and nothing works and still they write their papers and look wise and pretend it all
means
something when we know it doesn't have to and what I'd really like to do is chuck the whole thing and go off and be a stage magician or a mind reader on the telly and make a packet like Uri Geller or the Amazing Kreskin ...

Jamie Jamie ungrateful gorlin the time's come to stop playing with the powers selfishly as I've told ye for now they must be put to use for all mankind. And if the good Professor can't solve the problem of making the powers fit into real science then maybe the job's meant for YOU Daft Jamie MacGregor!

Ah Gran. Dunlap's department doesn't have the money to do the job proper. Ah you should see what a threadbare wee place this Parapsychology Unit is. If we were in America now it might be different for there all the colleges are rich but here in Edinburgh the two doctoral candidates working under Dunlap must live on cheese sandwiches and beer I'm all right of course eating in the Pollock dining room but—

It's time for us to eat here as well so stop your whinging. You must fulfill your part of the bargain so bear with Professor Dunlap and his perjinkities and study hard and be a credit to us. Then later if you can't abide parapsychology you can shrink silly neurotics and get rich.

Ah Gran.

Ah Jamie. Go back now. Your poor body's freezing in the haar and one of your good friends has come searching for you...

He opened his eyes. He was back in Holyrood Park on the pinnacle of Arthur's Seat and stiff as an iced halibut. He stood upright, tottering in the east wind, tucked his bare hands into his warm crutch, and stamped his feet. The pins-and-needles effect was exhilarating.

It was too dark now to climb down the way he'd come, for the western side of the small mountain was steep and trackless down the Haddie. And besides, the lights of Edinburgh were turning yellow and fuzzy. It was the haar, as Granny had warned him, sneaking in from the Firth to swaddle the city in freezing mizzle. He'd have to go back the long way, down the easy east path to Dunsapie Loch, and then along the Queen's Drive to the Dalkeith entrance to the park where he'd come in. A dreary mile and a half, but there was no helping it.

He came down the east side of the knoll into thickening fog. The temperature was dropping and he moved as rapidly as he could along the footpath, comforting himself with the thought that antibiotics easily cured pneumonia these days—

"Jamie!"

He heard the thin shout from below. Gran had said a friend was looking for him, hadn't she? But nobody knew where he'd gone! He cantered down a precipitous stretch of track and saw an amber light bobbing about: someone with a torch coming up to meet him.

"Oi!" he shouted. "I'm here!"

And there was a familiar stocky figure pouring out vibes of relief only slightly tainted by peevish mutterings.

"Nigel!" Jamie exclaimed delightedly. "Did you track me with psi? The hill's strongly magnetic, you know. I would've thought that—"

"Oh, put a sock in it, you young idiot, and let's get down to the car before we both freeze." Nigel Weinstein unwound a long striped muffler from his own neck, flung it at Jamie, and glowered. "You and your magnetism! Dunlap was pissed to the wide when Wee Wully Erskine told him you'd aborted the afternoon magnetometer session and run off. You bloody ass! We had a devil of a time getting that test set up with the physics boys—and now, thanks to your silly-buggery, we can go back to square one."

"I'm sorry, Nigel." The two of them came to the road. Dunsapie Loch was lost in the murk. They turned right and hurried toward the car-park at the south end. "Were you really worried about me?"

"You might have broken your neck," the graduate assistant snapped. "Where would we find another test subject with your talent? You know we're all chewing nails worrying about the new research grant."

The underlying fear leaked through his gruff words: And who knows what kind of stupid thing a morose young Celt might get up to on a slippery crag in the dead of winter?

"I'm not
that
depressed," Jamie told him. But thanks for caring. "As for the tests, they'd have been no good anyway. The morning runs wore me down and I just didn't have the heart to keep on. I keep telling Erskine that it's no good endlessly repeating really tough mind maneuvers. I lose motivation and get to swithering and then the powers wonk out. I'm not a bloody computer, you know. And Wee Wully's attitude is no help—Mr. Objectivity, plug me into the circuit and work me like a damn dray-horse!"

Weinstein heaved a sigh. "Dr. Dunlap would say you're suffering from a psi decline. Me—I'd label you a prima donna."

"So'd my Granny," Jamie admitted, grinning.

They found Weinstein's battered Hillman at last and climbed in. There was no traffic at all on the one-way Queen's Drive that encircled Holyrood Park and the fog was getting so thick that the car's headlamps were worse than useless. Nigel muttered a curse, switched them off, and navigated with the ambers. He drove little faster than a walking pace. Outside was a world of dull-glowing golden cotton wool.

Jamie said, "Tests like those we were doing today are a waste of time. So I try to move drinking straws with psychokinesis and the instrument measures the perturbation of the magnetic field around my head. Super! A needle wiggles, the field gets slightly bent, and it's all recorded for posterity ... which won't give a tinker's dam."

"The research adds to the body of parapsychological evidence."

Jamie rolled his eyes. "How much evidence do you need, man? It isn't as though the magnetic measurements told you anything
useful.
You still haven't a clue about the nature of mental energy—what forces operate during PK, how telepathic messages are carried, what mechanism enables me to travel without my body. There's no scientific theory for any of it."

"We're still assembling data. Eventually we'll fit psi phenomena and the whole notion of mind into the reality framework."

Jamie huddled closer to the warm air beginning to come from the car heater. "Weird powers have been around since caveman days. How come Australian bushmen and Eskimos and African witch doctors and fire-walking Hindus can use the powers and not worry about it—but scientists can't? Science flies to the moon, but it diddles and daddies and wrings its hands when the mind performs its psychic tricks, and needs to be convinced over and over again that it's not all a sham. As far as useful theory goes, we're not much wiser today in 1972 than we were in 1572—when people blamed it all on the devil and burnt blokes like me at the stake ... For God's sake, why can't we simply buckle down and
use
the powers without the endless havering?"

Weinstein laughed. "Science likes things it can measure. Psi powers are too slippery for comfort. So we must try to analyze them, try to formulate theories and test them. And if psychic research had the kind of financial backing that astronautics has, we'd get results."

"I used to think so," Jamie said slowly, "but I've chewed over the matter a lot lately. And I've about concluded that there may be a basic flaw in the entire concept of psi research—one that makes our kind of research futile."

"Bosh!"

"No—listen to me, Nigel. All over the world scientists have been doing serious studies of psi effects. The Russians are keen on it because they think it might make a weapon. Give them credit for a pragmatic attitude, anyhow! The Yanks are a touch leery just because the Russkies believe in it—but they have quite a few dedicated research groups, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science
did
finally admit the Parapsychological Association to membership. Our British teams are going full throttle. There's good work being done by the Dutch and the Indians and the Finns and the Japs and the Germans. Nobody who matters laughs at us anymore or calls us crackpots. The consensus in scientific circles is that psi effects are real. But ... the net
practical
result of nearly twenty years of activity has been just about nil! You still get untrained people finding water with forked sticks, and fakirs treading hot coals, and faith healers laying on hands and curing the sick, and all the rest of the disorganized clamjamphrie of PK and telepathy and precognition and all the rest—unreliable and unexplainable—while trained researchers still have no coherent results from their experiments."

"That's no reason to label our work futile—"

"What if the human race had the eyesight of a mole? Could we develop a science of astronomy? Of course not! The appropriate sense organs would be too weak even to notice the stars, much less organize scientific data concerning them. I think that's the way it is with psi and normal humanity right now. Most human beings have some kind of parapsychological capability, but it's so weak and undependable that it might as well not exist. The few people like me who have stronger powers are still too ill-equipped to demonstrate much that's useful. I think that science won't get off the ground analyzing higher mind-powers until really efficient psychic operators are born."

"You're saying that our data will remain essentially incomplete until ... mental giants come along. Until the brain evolves further."

"Exactly. When people have full control of their paranormal faculties—whether they're born with it, or develop control through training—
then
we'll be able to do valid testing. Nigel, I know I'm right! I'm one of the flawed ones myself—not totally eyeless, but still only seeing the stars as off-again, on-again blurs ... Just look at the fog outside this car of yours. Would you know there was a great city all around Arthur's Seat if you spent your entire life in a car, cruising around and around this misty drive, only catching a rare glimpse of the lights outside? And with Edinburgh only a half-seen mystery, would you even dream that other cities existed?"

They glided through mustard-colored murk, searching for the exit road. And then a gust of wind blew the swirling vapors aside for a moment and they saw the junction ahead, and both of them gave exclamations of relief, and Nigel said, "You see? Breakthroughs do happen. Take a lesson, Jamie." He turned the regular headlamps back on and made the turn.

"You want us to keep traveling our research road, no matter how foggy, until we find a way into the hidden city—and maybe a body with radar eyes."