INTERVENTION (29 page)

Nevertheless, in spite of his success in farspeaking me, Denis had no luck at all in contacting other telepaths using a generalized broad-spectrum hail. His mental CQs remained futile howls into an aetheric rain-barrel, messages lacking addresses, until that day in 1978 when we first tried the seriocomic tactic I dubbed Operation Witch Hazel.

It was in November, when Denis was eleven and in his final term of study at the academy. I had come down on a delicate and rather sticky mission: to break the bad news to Fathers Ellsworth and Dubois that their prize prodigy would not, after all, be matriculating at Georgetown University next year as they had hoped—and quite taken for granted. Denis himself had no objections to attending the Jesuit institution. It had a fine medical school and its faculty, secretly briefed by my nephew's clerical mentors, was quite willing to accommodate a twelve-year-old genius with a supernormal psyche.

But the Ghost had other ideas.

My interview with the good fathers was an uncomfortable one. Following the Ghost's suggestion, I told Ellsworth and Dubois that Georgetown, being situated in Washington, DC, was too susceptible to infiltration by government agents or other parties who might take an unhealthy interest in Denis's talents. (This maneuver of mine was undoubtedly the source of later rumors that Denis was actually pursued by unscrupulous psychological-warfare specialists.) The priests were deeply disappointed when I told them that I had already arranged for Denis to enter Dartmouth College, a venerable Ivy League school in western New Hampshire. My arguments in favor of Dartmouth must have had a paranoid flavor—and even worse, smacked of ingratitude after the special pains taken by the Brebeuf faculty in the first five years of the boy's education. The two priests tried hard to change my mind; but I had my orders, and so I prevailed. With Don's total abdication of responsibility, I was Denis's de facto guardian and the decision was mine to make. In the end, I cheered them up. Dartmouth was a small college but it did have a school of medicine sympathetic to the concept of metapsychic research. It was nearby, in the beautiful town of Hanover on the Connecticut River. It had been founded in 1769 and numbered among its alumni such luminaries as Daniel Webster and Dr. Seuss. Above all, because of its quixotic and individualistic atmosphere, it was about the last place in the world likely to be infiltrated by the CIA, the lackeys of the military-industrial establishment—or the KGB. So the matter was settled.

With the Ellsworth-Dubois ordeal behind me, I was glad to escape by taking Denis for a stroll into the gray and leafless woodland adjacent to the Brebeuf campus. The clouds hung low and there was a smell of snow in the air. Early frosts had withered the low-growing plant-life. Fragile rinds of ice crusted the puddles along the path. The boy and I walked for an hour or so, discussing Dartmouth and making plans to visit it over the upcoming Thanksgiving vacation. Then the conversation turned to a vexatious old topic: Denis's continuing futile attempts to farspeak other telepaths.

"I've been thinking over the
theory
of telepathic communication," the boy said. "Trying to discover why you and I can farspeak over long distances—while I have no luck when I call out to others." He detoured so as to walk through a deep drift of maple leaves, kicking them into the air with childish satisfaction. "The first possibility—and the most rotten!—is that there simply aren't any receptive minds within my telepathic radius. I just can't believe that. I
feel
them out there! They're probably unaware of their powers for the most part, but some of them might have a gut conviction that they're different from the rank and file of humanity ... Now the second possibility: The minds are there but they don't hear me for some reason. I have to find out why my transmissions don't reach them even though I can farspeak you."

Little chickadees, lingering tardily in the woods before their annual withdrawal to town and farmyard during fast winter, sang as we crunched along. I said, "The problem might simply be that your closet telepaths aren't listening! Look how we ignore the sounds made by these birds while we concentrate on each other's voices."

"That's a good point. The unknowns out there aren't expecting a telepathic message. They don't think such things are possible. So when farspeech inadvertently reaches them, they may not recognize it for what it is. They could think it was a daydream, or some notion cooked up by their own brains, or even a ghost or something."

"Mm," I said.

"If they were seriously expecting a farspoken message it would be entirely different. You know that our own head-skeds were carefully planned. We were both alert and waiting at the time we'd arranged to communicate—and I knew where you would be. It didn't matter that your mind has a relatively puny receptive faculty—"

"Thank you very much!"

His solemn little face broke into a grin. "Nothing personal. Your mind is a weak telepathic transmitter and you're not a very sensitive receiver. But my mind makes up for it. I put out a high-powered signal that you can read, and I listen for you with an ultrasensitive mental antenna. Theoretically, I should be able to bespeak other weak or untrained telepaths—if only they knew enough to listen for me."

His mind flashed a farcical display advertisement:

TELEPATHS OF THE WORLD!
TUNE IN YOUR MENTAL EARS
WITHOUT FAIL
NEXT TUESDAY,
8:00
P.M. EST
FOR AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!

He added aloud, "Of course we'd never dare do it. And even if we did, the very people we wanted most to reach would ignore it completely."

"Eventually there will be a public acknowledgment," I said. "You
will
be able to discuss the powers openly someday ..."

He nodded. "When I'm grown up, and I have my research facility and a suitable aura of academic respectability." The irony on his young face was almost tragic. "But it's so tempting to take a short cut!"

"You're talking like a child."

He wryly agreed. Then he gave me a sidelong look. "You've saved me from making a lot of mistakes, Uncle Rogi. I'm just beginning to understand that. And the way you got me away from Papa—to this school, where I'd be safe and able to grow. Now this business of going to Dartmouth instead of Georgetown. I trust your judgment and you know I'd never try to probe your motivation. But I hope that someday..."

All I said was, "At the proper time."

He sighed. We walked along in vocal and mental silence for several minutes, and then he returned to our previous topic of discussion.

"I've thought of another reason why my farspeech might not reach other telepaths; signal incompatible with receiver. The
AM/FM
thing."

"Could be," I agreed. "Our voices can whisper, talk, yell, sing. Why shouldn't there be different modes of telepathic output?"

"I believe there must be at least two. You know, when we're home in Berlin, how you and I can bespeak each other without Papa or Victor listening in? That's a sort of private mode. But there's a public mode, too—the way we farspeak when the message comes to you and me and Papa and Victor all at once."

He stopped walking, frowned, and cogitated. Then he said, "What if that private kind of telepathy is the most efficient kind? What if it's coherent farspeech, say, sort of like a laser beam of light! Public mode might be more like a streetlamp—casting light in all directions but only illuminating a small, nearby area. You need a tight beam for lighting up faraway objectives. Maybe thoughts need to be beamed, too."

"Makes sense."

His face went gloomy. "But if that's true, then my random telepathic calls can never work. I don't know how I aim the beam ... I suppose I recognize your mind-pattern and tune to it in some instinctive way when we go private, or when we do long-distance farspeaking. But how will I ever find out the mental signatures of unknown telepaths?" He was thinking hard, and in a moment he brightened. "I bet they'd hear me if I spoke in public mode right up close to them! Then I wouldn't need any signature. After all, I heard Elaine okay when she was half a mile away on Mount Washington that first time, and later she could hear me when we were a couple hundred yards apart. Funny, though. I never seemed to be able to go private with her."

I let that one lie. "You can hardly travel all over the country farshouting in crowds, hoping to scratch up other telepaths. It would be prohibitively expensive, slow, and boring beyond belief."

"There ought to be another ultrasense for locating people," the boy growled. "A seekersense."

We were going downhill, toward a little brook. The low ground had moisture-loving red alder trees and occasional small thickets of witch hazel. The clouds opened briefly, letting a shaft of sunlight lance down, and from a distance it seemed that the leafless branches were wrapped in a yellow haze. Then I realized that the witch hazel shrubs were in bloom. I pointed out the phenomenon mentally to Denis. It was a small bit of botanical sorcery repeated every late fall in the New England woods.

"Weird old witch hazel," Denis said. "No wonder the early folks thought it was magic."

"That's why they used it for dowsing, I guess. You can find water by divining with just about any kind of wooden rod, or even a piece of wire. But the experts say that nothing works quite so well as a branch of witch hazel. I remember reading about one dowser who could find water just by moving a forked witch hazel stick over a
map.
"

"It's your mind that does the finding," the boy said absently. "The stick probably just helps you to focus the—" He broke off abruptly. His eyes met mine and we found ourselves mind-shouting in unison:

Seekersense!

"The guy really used a map?" Denis whispered.

I nodded. "Found water on the island of Bermuda, as I recall. From here in the States."

"It's a cockamamie idea. Totally bananas. To think that I might be able to dowse out telepaths with a forked stick and a road map."

"Only," I said pointedly, "if you believe you can. But it can't hurt to try. I have a large-scale Delorme Atlas of New Hampshire in my Volvo..."

"Even if I did manage to find people, we'd still have to drive to the place where they were so I could send out a public-type hail. We'd still have to do some hunting."

"It can be managed," I told him, "provided you don't turn up eight hundred prospects." I reached into my pocket for my trusty penknife, and led the giggling boy into a witch hazel thicket to select a suitable forked stick.

***

I only saw a water dowsing operation once, and that was on television back in the '50s when I was just a kid. The program was one of those down-around-home local documentaries that were common then, and featured a famous "water-witch" from Hancock in the southern part of the state. I remember being disappointed, after the narrator's exciting build-up, when the witch turned out to be a balding elderly man with a lantern-jawed Yankee face and eyeglasses framed in black plastic. His clothes were unexceptional and his manner laconic—until he took up his forked stick.

In the experiment, a fifty-five-gallon drum full of water had been buried six feet deep in a freshly plowed area of field. The witch held his Y-shaped divining rod by the two short arms and extended the thing ahead of him as he slowly walked up and down the furrows. The camera showed close-ups of his face, staring at the ground with rapt attention, eyes wide behind the eyeglass lenses, sweat beading his forehead. Then the camera pulled back and we saw the witch plodding toward us, stick outstretched.

And the point of the stick suddenly dipped down.

There didn't seem to have been any causative movement of the old man's hands: the stick just revolved a bit and pointed to an area near the witch's feet. The tiniest glimmer of a smile crossed his lips. He backed up, let the stick rise, then walked over the spot once again. A dip. He approached the spot from the sides. As if with a life of its own, the stick turned down perpendicular to the earth.

"I reckon she's there," said the witch.

Two sturdy fellows with shovels stepped forward and the soft dirt began to fly. In a few minutes the drum lay revealed in an open pit; its bung was removed and water gurgled from it. The witch allowed as how he could find water "mebbe eighty percent of the time." He was the fourth generation of his family to have the gift and apparently the last. His children and grandchildren, he said, lacked confidence. Then he added, "But there ain't much call for water-witching nowadays anyhow. Folks feel a little foolish about it. They'd rather call in a geologist—nevvamind he hands 'em a whoppin' bill for his services, so long's he's
scientific.
But the old way still works..."

It worked for Denis, too—but only after six months of self-training. I watched him mind-hunting many times, first using the atlas, later poring over a series of aerial photos I'd purchased for him at the cost of an arm and a leg. I had very little seekersense myself (youthful experiments in imitation of the water-witch had proved that), but it was possible for me to share the boy's search by means of our mental rapport. He would sit at a table in a species of trance, the forked twig moving slowly over the surface of the map, and what passed through his mind was almost magical.

We have all flown in aircraft at night and looked down on the scattered jewel-lights that mark towns and settlements. The higher one is, the more indistinct the luminous splotch; but descend, and the individual streetlamps and lighted windows and slowly moving ground-cars become clearly visible. Denis's seeking looked rather like a night flight, when seen by my mind's eye. When he first began to hunt he sensed only bright fuzzy masses that signified concentrations of ordinary mentation: thinking people. But in time he learned to sharpen his focus, to sort the sapient blur into a sparkling collection of separate minds. They were multicolored, bright and dim, large and small. Just as a dowser for water or minerals visualizes the object of his search, then directs his higher senses to find it, so Denis conjured up the quintessence of "operant" mental energy and went hunting for it during a variant of the classic out-of-body experience.