To Ride Pegasus Page 7

  “No, no. At least … not yet,” he said just to watch the outraged expression on Andres’s mobile face.

  There were few people with whom Daffyd op Owen could relax or indulge in his flights of humor and hyperbole. “Seriously, Joel, the Monterey Quake is a spectacular Incident and a prime example of the concerted use of Talent, minimizing the loss of life or property. We have never had so many precogs stimulated in their separate affinities. And it’s the most concrete example of why precogs need legal protection. Do you realize that the Western Center was deluged with damage suits for the tsunami that followed?”

  “That was predictable.”

  “But we issued no warnings. And it’s against such irrational attitudes that precogs need legal protection more than any other Talent. Theirs is stimulated by mental perceptions as erratic as a smell in the morning air, a glance at a photo, the sound of a name. In a sense, precog is tremendously unreliable because it cannot be used as consciously as telepathy, teleportation and telekinesis. And to protect the Talent as well as the Center, we insist on computer corroboration when details are coherently specific. We never issue a public warning until the computer admits reliability … and we get damned because we have ‘heard’ and not spoken. Of course, a number of our precogs have become absorbed into business where peculiar affinities place them. For instance,” and Daffyd held up a tape-file, “this young man, who’s applying for progeny approval, is a fire-conscious. But he’s one reason this city has such low fire-insurance rates: his Talent prevents them—a blessing indirectly passed on to every resident …”

  “Hmmm, but scarcely spectacular enough to register with the average egocentric Joe Citizen,” said Andres sourly. He was restless with Daffyd’s earnest review of facts he knew well. “However, every little bit helps, Dave, and the public moves a lot faster pro bona pocketbook.”

  “True, exactly true, and they get rather nasty when we try to save them money and will not understand that a legitimate forewarning automatically alters the future, even to the point of preventing the foreseen Incident which will have cost old publican money, or time, or effort he then feels was unnecessary.”

  “And there we are, right back at square one,” said Joel in flat disgust. “That is what Mansfield calls ‘meddling’ and what makes him fight this Bill with every ounce of his outraged moralistic, neo-religious, mock-ethical fibre. Remember, he’s backed by the transport lobbies, and every time one of your precogs hits that jolly little brotherhood, causing delays, hurried inspections, the whole jazz—you got a number-one headache. Because, when the predictions don’t happen as predicted, Transport swears your meddling is superstitious interference, uncalled for, unnecessary and nothing would have happened anyway.”

  Daffyd sighed wearily. “How many times have we found bombs? Fuel leaks? Averted hijacks? Metal fatigue … mechanical justifications?”

  “Doesn’t signify, Dave, not if it touches the pocketbook of the Transport Companies. Remember, every precog implies fault: human or mechanical, since the Companies will not recognize Providence as a force. And human or mechanical, the public loses faith in the Company thus stigmatized. When Company profits are hit, Company gets mad, sues the precog for defamation of character, interference, et cetera.”

  “Then we are to allow the traveling public to fry in their own juice or be spread across the fields because a precog has seen a crash but doesn’t want to offend a Company? For want of a screw the nail was lost!” op Owen’s usually soothing voice was rough with asperity. “Damn it, Joel, we have to preserve impartiality, and warn any one or anything that is touched by the precognitive Talent, or we do usurp the position of the Almighty by withholding that evidence. I don’t care if the transportation companies then decide to disregard the warning—that’s their problem. But I want my people protected when, in good faith and based on computer-accepted detail, they issue that warning. We have no ax to grind, commercially, thanks to the Darrow endowment and member support, but we must continue to be impartial.”

  “I hope your altruism is not going to be your downfall,” said Joel, his manner unusually grave.

  “There’s been no warning that it will,” Daffyd replied. A hint of irritation in his voice.

  “You’re too honest to be up against us crook politicians,” Joel said, grinning, then glanced at his watch. “Wup. Gotta go.”

  “You push yourself too hard, Joel. You don’t look well.”

  “A bit liverish, that’s all, and no snooping.”

  “Not without permission and you know it.”

  “Hah! Among friends, I don’t trust telepaths. Say, how’s the recruiting program?” Joel asked as he swooped up his travel cape and case.

  “We get hopefuls every week,” the director replied as he escorted the senator to the elevator. “Sometimes we even catch a few young ones, before they learn to suppress a perfectly normal ability.”

  “That’s another phrase you should delete around Zeusman,” Joel said. “He will not buy your premise that every mind has psionic Talent.”

  “But, Joel, that is scientifically valid. We know that those who possess Talent have strong, healthy twenty-first chromosome pairs. It is certainly admissible evidence that when the twenty-first is blurred or damaged to any degree, brain function is inhibited. And, with the Downs’s Syndrome, you have mental retardation.”

  “Don’t beleaguer me,” Joel said with widened eyes of innocence, “I believe!” He laid a hand on his heart. “I couldn’t doubt—not after that ‘finder’ located my brother in the mine Shaft before he bled to death. If we could only subject Mansfield Zeusman to such an experience, he wouldn’t be so skeptical. Can’t one of your pet Talents do something about that? I thought they always keep an eye on controversial men to prevent assassination and stuff.”

  Op Owen gave a snort. “Would Senator Zeusman honor a precog foreseeing his own demise?”

  “Hmmm. Probably not. Say, you’re not funded on the Government Research Program, are you?”

  “No, thank God. The Henner Bequest was reserved for that Why?”

  “Hmmm. Just that Zeusman is extending this argument against the Bill to all ‘specious’—as he terms it—forms of research, government funded. And spring is appropriations time, you know.”

  “Fortunately, we’ve never had that kind of pressure.”

  “Talented of you,” Joel said with a grin.

  Behind him the elevator door slid open and a young woman, obviously in a hurry, ran out, right into the muscular frame of the young Senator.

  She blurted out an apology, flushing with embarrassment as Andres reached out to steady her. Then her eyes opened wider as she saw op Owen and one hand flew to her mouth. “I’m awfully sorry, sir.”

  Just as Daffyd recognized Ruth Horvath, he also identified the combined emotions of shame at her precipitous arrival into a distinguished champion of the Talented, regret for her impulsiveness in coming to the Tower at this hour, and the underlying hope and apprehension that had compelled her to come. Instinctively, Daffyd touched her with soothing reassurances: but Joel Andres’s amiable and admiring glance was the tonic the pretty woman needed.

  “No harm done, I assure you, Miss …?”

  “Mrs. Horvath … Senator Andres,” Daffyd said and watched Joel’s expression change from delighted interest to flattering chagrin.

  “I do apologize, Senator,” Ruth repeated, her cheeks blush-stained again.

  “And I apologize for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and …” an extravagant sigh “… too late.” He bowed deeply to Ruth, reluctantly stepping aside to let her pass.

  Instead she fumbled with the elevator button.

  “I’m on my lunch break,” she said with a stammer. “I’ve got to get back.”

  The panel slid open and Andres stepped in beside her, one finger jamming the “hold” button.

  “Me, too,” he said, grinning down at her.

  “Your file is on my desk right now, Ruth,” Daffyd said, suddenly
comprehending the reason for her visit and her hesitancy in mentioning the subject in Andres’s presence. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Her face lit up, her eyes became eager and, as she glanced away, Daffyd thought he saw the shine of tears.

  “Take care of yourself, Joel. You’re working too hard.”

  “A pleasure, I assure you.” Joel’s laugh was cut off by the closing door.

  Daffyd op Owen stood looking at the indicator panel for a few moments before he turned slowly back to his isolated tower office. He had much to think about. Not that he would deflect one centimeter from his course of action. Only his firm beliefs sustained him for it didn’t require precog, only intelligent extrapolation—which some uninformed people insisted was the essence of precog—to determine the difficulties still faced by the Talented all over the world. The Bill was so vital a forward step, raising the Talents from the onerous category of “mental chiropractors,” (Senator Zeusman’s phrase, though chiropractic treatment had long been an accredited branch of medicine), to a creditable position among professional abilities. Mansfield Zeusman had already stalled the Bill in Committee for months, was capable of stalling it through the summer, and keeping it off the agenda next year. The senator was hoping to find some discrediting Incident that would forever banish hope of legal protection for the Talented.

  The sheer genius of that Pope quotation was a measure of their opponent’s worth, op Owen mused as he turned to the mass of administrative files awaiting him. The pity of it was that the quote would have been much more applicable to the Talent side of the argument. Come to think of it, much of Pope’s “Essay on Man” was to the point.

  Other pertinent lines came easily out of mental storage. Not much that Daffyd op Owen had once seen could elude his recall.… a blessing as well as a handicap.

  With too much knowledge for the Skeptic side,

  With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,

  He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest:

  In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast:

  In doubt his mind or body to prefer

  Born but to die and reasn’ning but to err …

  “Enough!” and op Owen roused from introspection to direction. He flipped open the nearest tape case and slapped it into the playback. It seemed somehow meet that it was the Horvaths’s progeny application. Were op Owen a superstitious man he could have accounted it a good omen: a favorable auspice for the work he and his fellow directors around the world were inaugurating. Breed like to like, strengthen strong genetic Talent traits and develop, not the super race of omniscient, omnipotent superpeople Zeusman basically feared, but people trained and conditioned from childhood to use their Talents for the benefit of man. And, by such service, force the World to recognize the treasure that can be unlocked in the unused, untapped portion of the human brain.

  A flaming, shattering precog caught Lajos Horvath at the moment when REM deep was over and his unconscious mind was rousing from that phase of rest.

  His groan of anguish awakened his wife instantly. With the reflex of training. Ruth flipped the recorder and pulled the retractable electrode Goosegg net to his head, expertly clamping the metal discs on the circles of his scalp that had been permanently depilated.

  Blinking her eyes to see the reading in the dawn-dim room, Ruth watched the definite pattern of an Incident emerge. Center was already picking it up for authentication. The Incident lasted a scant eleven seconds before the brain waves settled back to a calm reading. She lay back, going through the discipline that would relax her and prevent her from imposing her haste-urgency reaction on Lajos. As soon as he roused, she must be composed enough to question him for a verbal report.

  She achieved the proper repose quickly, suppressing the thrill of satisfaction at her success. She was no longer as troubled by flashes of envy that Lajos possessed a valid Talent while hers was so nebulous as to elude identification. Now it was enough for her to know that, by the exercise of the deep empathy which existed between them, by her womanliness, she made his development more certain. Lajos needed her as a buffer, a source of solace from the sharp edges of Talent. Even the strongest personality could succumb to the Cassandra complex that destroyed the sanity of the unwary precog. Why was it, Ruth mused in a quiet inner voice, that tragedy has such a vicious way of reaching out of the mists of the future: like a falling man, blindly grabbing at anything to restore balance and avert his fall?

  Again the needle rushed across the graph, a slight whoosh barely audible in the quiet room. Ruth glanced over to make sure the Incident was being beamed to the Center and noticed the smile on her husband’s face. A smile? A happy premonition? She forced herself to relax, unaccountably assailed by a raving curiosity. Lajos so rarely had happy foresights, and fleetingly she regretted that he was a precog.

  Lajos stirred restlessly. He was waking now. She turned on the voice recorder and leaned towards him.

  “What is it? What do you see?” she asked in the soft persuasive voice the Center had taught her to use at these times. Her ability to stimulate his verbal accounts was highly praised, for it was sometimes difficult for the precog to articulate the semi-real into sufficient detail for preventive or supportive action.

  “Flames!” Lajos groaned “Must it always be flames?” He sat bolt upright in bed then, Ids brown eyes wide as he stared straight ahead at the retinal image of his premonitory vision. The electrodes were jerked from his skull, retracting with a metallic clink into the case. “The ship’s burning, exploding. Throwing flaming debris across the harbor into the suburbs. Damp it! Deflect! Shield those passengers. Watch out! The propellant will spray. It’s exploding. Contain it!”

  “Markings on the liner?” a gentle but insistant voice whispered from the intercom.

  Lajos shook his head blinking furiously in an attempt to hold the fading sight. “It’s awash with flame. I think I see an eight, a four, a three—or is it another eight? It’s a Reynarder. It must be. They’re the only ones who use that class.”

  “Which class?” the inexorable whisper wanted to know.

  Suddenly Lajos sagged, panting with shock, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He lay back exhausted.

  “It’s gone,” he moaned. “It’s gone.”

  “You had a second one,” Ruth said. “What was that about?”

  Lajos’s brows drew together in a half frown as he brushed his straight black hair out of his face. He kept it overlong to hide the depilated circles where the electrodes fit. His lips curved in a half-sided smile. “Something good?” he asked hopefully.

  Ruth suppressed her sigh. Lajos rarely detailed the felicitous ones.

  “Incident validated, a strong reading, Lajos,” the intercom voice said. “Report in as soon as you’re able.”

  “They’ll check it out won’t they?” Lajos asked needlessly.

  “Action already initiated.”

  Lajos lay so still that Ruth knew it was not passive quiescence but rigid strain. Another thorn in the Talented’s side was the harsh realization that their warnings were often disregarded and they were forced to see their predictions come horribly true. Ruth wiped the sweat from Lajos’s forehead and began to massage his neck and shoulders. After a moment he grinned weakly up at her.

  “What a way to start the day, huh?”

  “At least you ended on a happy note. Maybe that means they’ll prevent?”

  “If they can correlate enough data, in enough time,” he said gloomily. “And Reynarder bothers to listen!” He flopped onto his stomach, pounding the mattress with impotent fists.

  Ruth transferred her attention to his muscular back. She loved the line of him, the broad double plateau of his shoulder blades with the small mounds of hard muscle, the graceful curve that swept down to the narrow waist, the hollow of his spine, the Grecian beauty of his buttocks. She quickly suppressed a flare of desire. This was not the time to intrude sex on his personal anguish. And she knew that her intense sexual hunger for him stemmed f
rom a yearning for the child of his seed. A daughter, tall and fair, with Lajos’s dimples in her cheek. A son, strong-backed and arrogant, with thick black straight hair.

  This hunger for his child was so primal, it paralyzed the sophistication overlaid by education and social reflexes. Nowadays a woman was expected to assume more than the ancient duties required of her. Nowadays, and Ruth smiled to herself, the sophists called those womanly talents, Maintenance, Repair and Replacement, instead of housekeeping, cooking, nursing and having babies, but the titles didn’t alter the duties nor curb the resurgent desires. And, when you got down to it, men still explored new ground, even if it were alien lands, and defended their homes and families. You could call Lajos’s precog a kind of an early-warning defense system. Well, then, she’d added the chore of being Cerebral-Recording Secretary to Maintenance and Repair but they’d better let her Replace soon or.…

  She concentrated on more soothing thoughts, using her latent empathy to case his remorse. When he began to take deep long breaths, the knew he was conquering the aftermath of the Incident, dispelling its destructive despondency. He had done everything he could. He could not change the course of every fated life. Some events had to come to their dire conclusions, for out of present tragedy so often rose future triumph; the result of sorrowful recriminations was often the catalyst of progress. A specious rationale in the Silver-lined Cloud Approach but true enough to save the sanity of the Talented.

  It was a bitter thing, Ruth understood, to be Talented: bitter and wonderful. But it was worse to have evidence of Talent and never know what it was. Nonsense, she told herself sternly, discarding these reflections, you can’t be what you can’t be.

  “Ahh, you’ve got the right spot,” Lajos said gratefully and she doubled her efforts across the heavy shoulder muscles.

  And yet, when she anticipated his desires and needs, sometimes the words from his mouth, she wondered just how she had tapped that need; just what might awaken the occluded Talent within her.