INTERVENTION (46 page)

The woman said, "Good morning, Professor MacGregor—and all of you members of the world media there in Edinburgh, Scotland! I'm Sylvia Albert and I host the Late-Late Talk Show here on KGO-TV, San Francisco. We're coming to you live via satellite in a special closed transmission that was arranged at the personal request of Dr. Lucius J. Kemp of Stanford University. Dr. Kemp is no doubt well known to you all as a distinguished brain researcher and a Nobel Laureate in Medicine ... Will you tell us, Dr. Kemp, why you're participating in this demonstration?"

Kemp had been staring at his clasped hands. Now he nodded very slowly several times. "Numbers of my colleagues at Stanford have been involved in parapsychology research for some twenty-three years. I've watched their progress with great interest, even though my own work involves a different area of study—one that you might say is more conventional."

He looked directly into the camera and leveled an index finger at his viewers on the other side of the world. "
You
might say! I say parapsychology is as respectable as any other branch of psychiatry. Now I study brain cells, things you can see and touch and measure. But the brain is a peculiar piece of matter that houses the mind—which we scientists most definitely
cannot
see or touch, and which we are only incompetently able to measure. The nature of mind, and its capabilities, are still nearly as mysterious as outer space. It wasn't too many years ago that the majority of educated people—scientists especially—dismissed parapsychology as nonsense. Things aren't that way today, but there are still skeptics in the scientific establishment who will try to assure you that paranormal psychic phenomena are either nonexistent or else freakish effects without practical value. I am not one of those scientists..."

The screen in the Edinburgh lecture theatre was now filled with the Nobel Laureate's face, copper-brown skin stretched over high cheekbones, black eyes narrowed with the intensity of his emotion, a few drops of perspiration trickling from the snowy wool of his hair onto his broad forehead. Then he flashed a brilliant smile.

"Because of that, the parapsychology researchers at Stanford nailed me! They asked for my help with this experiment, and they got it. That's why I'm here in the wee hours of the morning along with Miss Albert and the director and crew of her show and the three impartial witnesses we've asked to assist us."

The camera pulled back again and the talk-show hostess rapidly explained how the experiment was going to work. The three witnesses had each been asked to bring a small card with a picture or a few lines of writing. The subject of the card was to be known only to them, and they had sealed it inside three successive envelopes. The witnesses now waited in the TV studio's green room, where guests assembled before being taken on stage for their interviews. There were no cameras in the green room and the monitor there had been disconnected.

Now Jamie MacGregor asked, "Miss Albert, is it true that there is no means of outside communication in this green room? No telephones or radio equipment?"

"None whatsoever," she said.

"Very good. I want to be sure that the journalists with us here in Edinburgh understand that. Go on, Lucius. Tell us what your own part in the experiment will be.'"

"I'll wait," Kemp said, "until you tell me that your colleague, Dr. Weinstein, is ready to undertake a remote-viewing of those cards the three witnesses have hidden away on their persons. When you give me the word, I'll go to the green room and stand in the doorway. I'll ask the witnesses to take out the envelopes and hold them up, unopened, for two minutes. After that they'll accompany me back here to the cameras, envelopes still unopened. And then we'll see, won't we?" He smiled.

"Aye, we certainly will," Jamie said. "Thank you, Lucius."

The audience in the theatre let out a collective sigh. Seats creaked as many of them hunched forward. Jamie was holding a whispered colloquy with Nigel. The KGB agent turned to Finster and whispered, "If this works—great God, the repercussions!"

"You can say that again," the Mafia's man agreed. "In Finnish."

Nigel picked up his own microphone. He was still seated at the table, while Jamie had withdrawn to the left side of the platform.

"I'm afraid," Weinstein said, his expression mischievous, "that your worst suspicions are about to be confirmed. I'm going into a trance."

Tension-relieving laughter.

"Usually we do this EE business in a soundproofed room to avoid distraction. We relax in a kind of glorified barber's chair equipped with monitoring gadgets that tell what our brains and bods are up to while our minds go soaring through the blue empyrean ... but that wouldn't do today. We want you to see how
ordinary
EE can be. But I warn you—don't cough or drop your pencils or crack chewing gum while I'm off, or I just might crumble to dust before your eyes like Dracula in the sunlight."

More laughter. Then total silence.

Nigel had closed his eyes and was breathing slowly and deeply. Up on the giant video screen the American scientist and the talk-show hostess waited.

"Ready," said Nigel in a flat voice.

Jamie spoke into his microphone. "You may go to the green room now, Lucius."

The California camera followed Kemp into the studio wings, where he vanished amidst a clutter of equipment. Then it swiveled back to Sylvia Albert and held. Twenty-six seconds clicked by on the digital display.

Nigel's eyes opened. "Got it," he said simply.

Jamie went to the platform edge. "Would one of you be so kind as to pass up a sheet of paper and something to write with?"

A BBC technical director thrust up a yellow sheet and a pencil. Jamie nodded his thanks and passed them on to Nigel, who scribbled energetically for a few minutes. Then he gave the sheet back to Jamie, who returned it to the BBC man, saying, "Hold on to that. We'll want you to read it shortly."

Almost nine thousand kilometers away, the two minutes having passed, Dr. Kemp was returning to the talk-show set leading two women and a man. The newcomers sat down at the glass table and placed their sealed envelopes in front of them.

Sylvia Albert said, "May I present our guinea pigs! Lola McCafferty Lopez, Assistant District Attorney for San Francisco County; Maureen Sedgewick, Associate Editor of the
San Francisco Chronicle;
and Rabbi Milton Green of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation of the University of California at Berkeley ... Now, will you tell us what results you have, Professor MacGregor?"

Jamie leaned down to the BBC crewman. "Sir, would you please read out what Dr. Weinstein wrote?" He reversed his microphone so that the tiny parabolic receiving dish at its tip was aimed at the technician.

"First card," came the man's voice clearly. "From a Monopoly game: GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL, DO NOT COLLECT $200."

The audience roared as on the screen, the attorney ripped open her multiple envelopes and showed the card. The cartoon face peering through bars loomed in an extreme close-up.

"Second card," the BBC man read. "Handwritten quote from Shakespeare: 'To be, or not to be: that is the question.'"

The Edinburgh audience was murmuring loudly. As the California camera zoomed in for the second confirmation the noise swelled to a clamor. Jamie lifted his arms. "Please! There's still Rabbi Green's card."

The BBC man read, "Picture postcard of planet Earth taken from space with handwritten note on back: 'Let there be light.'"

Instead, there was bedlam.

The false reporter from the
Helsingen Sanomat
covered his face with his hands and groaned, "Yob tvoyu mat'!" Finster appended, "In spades, tovarishch."

While the hubbub quieted, Jamie gave brief thanks to the California participants and the screen blanked out. Almost immediately it was replaced by a new image, a stark newsroom desk backed by a station logo: Tv-3
AUCKLAND.
A comfortably homely man and a blond young woman with an abstracted Mona Lisa smile sat close together at one end of the desk. The time was 20:18.

"Good evening, Professor MacGregor! Ron Wiggins here, with your graduate student Miss Alana Shaunavon, who flew in on Air New Zealand SST from London earlier today. Alana, tell us just a little bit about yourself."

"I'm a doctoral candidate in parapsychology at Edinburgh University, where I work with Professor Jamie MacGregor. There are thirty-two of us at the Unit, in various stages of training for EE—excorporeal excursion. I was chosen to come here and attempt to view a message written by a member of the audience there at the Edinburgh press conference."

Ron Wiggins gave a worldly chuckle. "Well, we'll give it a fair go!...And here to keep a sharp eye on things are Bill Drummond of the
Auckland Star,
Melanie Te Wiata of the
New Zealand Heiald,
and Les Seymour of the
Wellington Evening Post.
"

The camera panned over the scribes, who sat at the opposite end of the desk, looking aloof. Wiggins said, "As I understand it, Alana will leave her body here in Kiwi Land and attempt to project herself more than eighteen thousand kilometers to Scotland—"

"Excuse me," the girl interrupted firmly. The close-up showed eyes of a magnetic emerald green. Her voice was low and cajoling as she contradicted Wiggins. "It's really not like that, you know. Subjectively, I may feel as though I were traveling, but I don't—any more than we travel when we dream. Current metapsychic theory holds that the EE experience is a type of sensory response, like long-distance sight. Farsight. But it's not mystical, and my mind certainly doesn't leave my body."

"Mm," Wiggins said. "Be that as it may, let me assure our witnesses here and overseas that we have no electronic means of viewing events there at the Edinburgh press conference. Furthermore, we aren't broadcasting this transmission to our national audience. It's a coded impulse beamed solely to Scotland via satellite. We are recording here for a later presentation, however, in conjunction with the material we expect to receive from our people on the scene in Edinburgh ... And now, Alana, are you ready to begin?"

"Yes."

Jamie spoke once again to the BBC man who had read Nigel's results aloud: "Sir, will you please select a colleague in your immediate vicinity to write our sample message for Alana?"

"Right," said the Beeb technician. "How about this Swiss bloke over here with the Hasselblad?"

There was a brief wrangle when the Swiss seemed reluctant to cooperate, apparently perturbed when camera lenses were aimed in his direction by the TV crews of several dozen nations.

Fabian Finster felt the skin along his spine tingle with the same uneasy premonition he had experienced earlier. He whispered to the KGB agent, "You know anything about that guy? Otto Maurer, his badge says, photographer for the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung ...
but I have reasons to doubt that he's legit."

"He would not have been admitted without a computerized credential check. He is surely a bona fide journalist. As legitimate as you or I."

"Idi v zhopu," scoffed The Fabulous Finster. The thunderstruck Russian gaped at him.

Meanwhile, the Swiss had evidently complied with the request to pen a brief message. Jamie MacGregor was saying, "Thank you, Herr Maurer. Now if you will place the sheet of paper on the floor, face down. None of the people around you have seen what you've written?...Good. You must try not to think of it, either. EE seems to be an ultrasense quite distinct from telepathy. It also seems inconsequential what position the target object may be in, or what barriers of matter may lie between the target and the percipient. What we seek to demonstrate is that EE makes it possible for trained persons to remotely view virtually anything in any part of the world."

A wave of incredulous exclamations swept the hall. Somebody called out, "But if that's true, it means—"

"Please!" Jamie held up his hand again. "Let us have the demonstration first, then the questions."

"I have already read the paper," came the amplified voice of Alana Shaunavon. Her young face was enormous on the screen, the brilliant green eyes fixed, wide open, blinking slowly. "He has written a verse in German:

Die Gedanken sind frei,
Wer kann sie erraten?
Sie fliegen vorbei
Wie nächtliche Schatten.
Kein Mensch kann sie wissen,
Kein Jäger erschiessen.
Es bleibet dabei: die Gedanken sind frei.

I can translate it rather freely : 'Thoughts are free, who can discover them? They fly past like shadows of the night. No one can know them, no hunter can shoot them down. When all's said and done, thoughts—'
My God, look out!
His camera! It's a weapon!"

A wild fracas broke out on the floor and there were shouts as the Swiss attempted vainly to rush away. But too many bodies and too much equipment hemmed him in and he went down, tackled by two intrepid Canadian Broadcasting Corporation telecasters. The lethal Hasselblad was wrestled away and smashed by a soundman of the Fuji Network. Plainclothes police officers materialized and camera crews leapt about balletically recording the capture.

As Maurer was being hauled away, he screamed, "Fools! Crétins! Er hat Sie alles beschissen! Don't you know what's going on here? What this MacGregor has done? Um Gottes Willen ... Pandora's box ... ruin ... chaos ... anarchy ... Weltgetümmel ..."

The uproar subsided slowly. Jamie spoke into his microphone and the screen was wiped clear of the New Zealand transmission. There was a burst of video clutter and then the simple advisory:

OVERSEAS TELEPHONE MESSAGE READY
AUDIO SIGNAL ONLY

"Jamie? Jamie? I could not wait!" A woman's voice, speaking heavily accented English, came through a hiss of interference. "I saw everything—but then I became so excited that I lost the sight! Tell me—is everything all right?"

The confusion subsided and the attention of the crowd of newspeople was drawn once again to the platform. Jamie MacGregor tugged at one of his Dundreary cheek-whiskers. His expression was resigned. "All is quite well for the moment, lass. But I think this wee carfuffle's only the beginning of what we'll be seeing anon."