INTERVENTION (36 page)

"Denis," I said, reaching across the table. "Tu es mon vrai fils."

Tears were streaming from behind his dark glasses. At my touch he lifted his chin and the drops of moisture vanished. "That's creativity," he said softly in response to my start. "A psychic power we've just begun to investigate, perhaps the capstone for all the rest. Let me show you, Uncle Rogi. Join us."

Love and a sudden inexplicable revulsion warred behind my mental barricade. Prudence dictated that I safeguard myself from Victor. But as for becoming closely involved with Denis and his crowd of youthful operants ... no. By no means.

The waitress handed me the check. I calculated the tip and fished in my wallet for bills. Denis and I headed for the cashier.

You must come with me to Hanover!
His coercion was poised. Ordinarily, I could fend him off readily (as I had been able to fend off Donnie and Victor) but there was a chance that if I drove him to extremes he might feel compelled to bludgeon me down. For my own good. I couldn't let that happen.

So I smiled over my shoulder at him.

"I think," said I, "that I'll call the shop The Eloquent Page."

SUPERVISORY CRUISER NOUMENON [LYL 1-0000]

26
APRIL
1990

F
OUR LYLMIK MINDS
watched from their invisible vessel as the last civilian evacuees from the American space station boarded the commercial shuttle Hinode Maru. The smaller American orbiters were still mated to the station's half-completed drive-unit while their crews completed the demolition arrangements.

The vector of the meteoroid that had struck the manned satellite might have been calculated with diabolical precision. The impact had killed the orbital velocity needed to keep the structure circling the Earth at its temporary altitude of five hundred kilometers, as well as killing six workers. The twenty-three other persons aboard the station survived because of the airlock system connecting the "Tinkertoy" units. These had suffered only minimal damage; but the power-plant that might have restored the velocity of the station was unfinished, and kicking such a huge satellite back into orbit by means of auxiliaries would have taken more booster engines than the Western world, Japan, and China possessed. The addition of Soviet boosters would have sufficed to save the station. However, in addition to its multinational commercial facilities, research labs, and astronomical observatory, the American station had also included a module with functioning military surveillance apparatus. The Soviets had declined to assist in the salvage; and now the elaborate station, only a few months short of completion, traveled a rapidly decaying orbit that doomed it. Rather than await the inevitable reentry and fall to Earth, the United States had decided, for strategic and safety reasons, to blow it up.

"The waste, the dashed hopes," Noetic Concordance mused. "The discrepancy between the promise of this great station and its abortion, brought about by a mere chunk of nickel-iron coated with ice ... The situation is fraught with nuance. I shall compose a poem."

"You'd better wait until I finish analyzing the disruption of the probability lattices," Homologous Trend warned. "This event may have a truly nodal significance."

"Then perhaps I'd better plan an elegy."

"A dirty limerick, rather," Eupathic Impulse suggested, "dedicated to the low-orbit proponents at NASA. If they'd been satisfied to build a smaller station at high orbit, as the Soviets did, a hundred meteor hits couldn't have knocked it down. But this close-in structure
was
more economical—assuming that no large object disrupted its delicately maintained low orbit during construction. One concedes that the odds were all in the Americans' favor! But, let's see:

The engineers trusted to luck,
Since they wanted more bang for the buck..."

"
Please,
" Homologous Trend admonished.

Asymptotic Essence said, "I think I perceive some sources of your anxiety, Trend. The new détente between the United States and the Soviet Union is lamentably fragile. In spite of their joint Martian Exploration Project, the ancient political dichotomy persists. The loss of this American station will be viewed by the strategists of both nations as a disruption of military parity."

"Oh, well, of course," Eupathic Impulse conceded. "One need only analyze the psychological dynamics at work. The Americans knew that their space station was immensely superior to the Soviet one from a standpoint of technological sophistication, and it was also to be a showcase of international goodwill. This made the Americans chockfull of condescending magnanimity. (They love being Grandfather to the world even more than we Lylmik do!) The Soviet-American Mars expedition was intended to be only the beginning of a new era of scientific, economic, and cultural intercourse between these two powers. Now, however, the Americans stand humiliated. The impetus toward camaraderie in outer space is disrupted. Worse, the Soviets will have a strategic advantage—at least until the Americans put up a new space station. (Two years? Three? The American economy is already strained.) One hopes that Trend's computation does not point toward the death of détente, but one must also keep in mind that we are dealing with ethical primitives."

"Logically," Essence said, "the Americans should not feel threatened. There are any number of robot surveillance satellites that can be co-opted as backup spy-eyes—and Omega knows both nations still have parity in nuclear weaponry. But the space station was a symbol of national pride as well as security, and the Soviets will certainly exult over the disaster while the Americans will feel naked to hostile scrutiny. And when has human warfare ever been logically motivated?"

"Listen to this," Noetic Concordance broke in. "An experimental apostrophe, but having possibilities:
O Meteor! Frost-cauled detritus of primordial cataclysm, fatal vagrant...
"

"One detects a soupçon of bathos," said Asymptotic Essence with regret.

Eupathic Impulse was less charitable. "You certainly can't use the meteor as the subject of the poem. It was a Pi-Puppid. How can one possibly compose an elegy on a Pi-Puppid? Now if the thing had belonged to a meteoric cloud having more intrinsic grandeur—say, if it had been a Beta-Taurid or even an Ursid—"

"I have the revised probability analysis, " Homologous Trend declared, displaying it without further ado.

Asymptotic Essence voiced the mutual dismay. "A threat to the Intervention Scheme? Surely not!"

"Beyond a doubt," Homologous Trend affirmed, "if one carries the proleptic analysis to the eighteenth differential, as I have done. The cuspidal locus results from my injection of the character of the American President. His background and his marketing genius link him inescapably to the destiny of the (at base) commercial orientation of the failed space station. Now his bellicose, jingoistic opponents will prevail. The next American station will be austere—and entirely military. With the dire consequences that you see in my projection of events for the next twenty years."

Eupathic Impulse strove for neutrality of tone and failed. "One might ask why the Supervisory Body failed to investigate the critical nodality of the space station earlier—and why we didn't take steps to protect the precious thing?"

"In the first case, " Trend said, "it is the responsibility of Atoning Unifex, acting with us in Quincunx, to define situations susceptible to such investigation. In the second case, overt protection would have violated the Scheme as it stands: Shielding the space station against meteoroids of consequent mass would require use of a sigma-field (which the Earthlings would surely have detected with their radio-telescope array); or else a preprogrammed hyperspatial matter trap (which as we know is unacceptably hazardous in a solar system having significant casual interplanetary traffic); or else we should have had to deploy a guardian vessel authorized to zap, deflect, grab, or otherwise dispose of intrusive space flotsam (which would grossly contravene the Oversight Directives)."

"Well, now what?" Eupathic Impulse asked.

Trend said, "The event requires contemplation by all five entities of the Lylmik Supervisory Body, acting in the aforesaid Quincunx."

"Anyone know where It is today?" Asymptotic Essence asked.

Noetic Concordance shrugged mentally. "Either extragalactic or lurking about that college again. We'd better call."

The four combined in metaconcert: Unifex!

One responds.

[Situational image] + [probability analysis].

Serene preoccupation.
Oh, yes. The collision was today, wasn't it!

Reproach. One might have shared one's prescience.

Well, I didn't exactly use prescience ... but I do apologize. There is no need for concern or action on your part with respect to this situation.

One disputes the probability analysis of Homologous Trend?!

Not at all. I plan to cope with the matter personally.

! [Forbearance.] Indirectly, one presumes, rather than through rescue of the space station.

Oh, yes. The station's nodality hinges upon its use in weaponry surveillance. I shall simply render the entire concept of spy-eye satellites obsolete. Metapsychically. The planetary Mind has already evolved the capability. Bifurcation is imminent. I do not violate the planetary Will in this but, as it were, anticipate the determination.

One of your esteemed Remillards?

No. The Scottish connection has been working on this particular speciality. Given a gentle nudge, there should be a satisfactory manifestation within the critical time-period, restoring the original coefficients of the sexternion and putting our Intervention Scheme back on the rails.

Comprehension. Most gratifying—and ingenious.

I really should have contemplated the matter with you prior to the space-station disaster, however, in order to have spared you needless distress. My absent-mindedness is getting to be a scandal. I become rapt in nostalgia, to say nothing of my joy in the unfolding of the metapsychic World Mind at long last ... Now you must excuse me.

"Gone again," Asymptotic Essence said. "Ah, well."

"One notes how confident It remains," Homologous Trend remarked.

Noetic Concordance said, "It has a unique perspective."

"One hopes," Eupathic Impulse added astringently, "that It knows something we don't know about these contentious larvae, validating Its confidence in them..."

"The probabilities are in Its favor." Homologous Trend said, "as one might expect."

The four entities shared certain ironic retrospections. Then they waited. Eventually, Eupathic Impulse said, "There goes the destruct signal for the space station."

"O Fireball!" declaimed Noetic Concordance. "O perished pride of rigid circumstance—"

The other three Lylmik settled back to study the spectacle while the poet's mind continued its commemoration.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, EARTH

2
MAY
1990

H
E HAD COMPLETED
the mental exercises that he was accustomed to perform at the start of each business day, and now Kieran O'Connor stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of his office and let his mind range out. His aerie was on the 104th floor of the Congress Tower, Chicago's most prestigious new office building, and from its vantage point he could oversee thousands of lesser structures, hives of concentrated mental energy that invigorated his creative mind-powers at the same time that they stimulated his hunger. Kieran had known other great cities—Boston, where he was born in poverty and educated in Harvard's affluence; Manhattan, where he had apprenticed in a law firm having a sizable Sicilian fraction among its well-heeled clientele—but the effete and tradition-bound East was an unsuitable home base for a unique upstart such as himself. Instinctively he had come to the dynamic heartland of North America, to this city notorious for its cavalier misprision and polymorphous get-up-and-go. Chicago was the perfect place for him; its commerce was thriving, its politics disheveled, and its morals overripe. It was a coercer's town with bioenergies that matched Kieran's own, not suffering fools but welcoming bullies with open arms—a bottomless wellspring of novelty, hustle, and clout.

From his high place Kieran looked out across a bristling forest of skyscrapers, a grid of crowded streets, green bordering parklands along the Lake Michigan shore that flaunted lush tints of spring. Countless cars ant-streamed along the multiple lanes of the Outer Drive. The lake waters beyond were a rich iris-purple, paling to silver along the eastern horizon. Outside the breakwater was a dancing sailboat. On a whim, he zeroed in on it and was rewarded with the ultrasensory impressions of two people making love. He smiled and lingered over the emanations momentarily, not with a voyeur's vulgar need but in dispassionate reminiscence. He had other pleasures now; still, the resonances were good...

A chime sounded, pulling him back to reality.

He turned away from the window and went to his enormous desk. The polished surface mirrored a single yellow daisy in a black vase and a photograph in an ebony frame—Rosemary holding the infant Kathleen, little Shannon in a white pinafore clinging to her mother's skirts. Rosemary and Kathleen would never grow older, but Shannon was a moody fifteen-year-old now, resisting initiation into her father's world. The phase would pass; Kieran was sure of it.

The chime sounded again.

Kieran touched one of a line of golden squares inset into the rosewood desk-top. A compact communication unit lifted into ready position. Arnold Pakkala looked out of the screen with his deceptively distant expression. His colorless eyes seemed to study a potted fig tree behind Kieran's right shoulder.

"Good morning, Arnold."

"Good morning Mr. O'Connor. You'll be interested to know that Grondin has checked out and approved two more California recruits. They'll be flying in to the corporate training facility next week."