To Ride Pegasus (20 page)

“Now, just a minute, Gillings,” Lester began, bristling. He subsided when he saw that his boss and the Police Commissioner were grinning at each other.

“So … just as you suspected, op Owen, she was a freak. Talent. We know from the ward nurses that she watched your propaganda broadcasts during her hospitalization. We can assume that she was aware of the search either when Gil Grade ‘found’ the coat, or when the definite fix was made. It’s not hard to guess her motivation in making the heist in the first place, nor her instinctive desire to hide.” Gillings gave his head an abrupt violent jerk and stood up. He started to hold out his hand, remembered and raised it in a farewell gesture. “You are continuing those broadcasts, aren’t you?”

Lester Welch glared so balefully at the Commissioner that op Owen had to chuckle.

“With certain deletions, yes.”

“Good. Talent must be identified and trained. Trained young and well if they are to use their Talent property.” Gillings stared op Owen in the eye. “The Boshe girl was bad, op Owen, bad clear through. Listen to what Jones said about her and you won’t regret Tuesday too much. Sometimes the young are inflexible, too.”

“I agree, Commissioner,” Daffyd said, escorting the man to the door as calmly as if he hadn’t heard what Gillings was thinking so clearly. “And we appreciate your help in the cover yarns that explained Tuesday’s odd occurrences.”

“A case of mutual understanding,” Gillings said, his eyes glinting. “Oh, no need to see me out I can open this door.”

That door was no sooner firmly shut behind him than Lester Welch turned on his superior.

“And just who was scratching whose back then?” he demanded. “Don’t you dare come over innocent either, Daffyd op Owen. Two days ago that man was your enemy, bristling with enough hate and distrust to antagonize me.”

“Remember what you said about Gillings Tuesday?”

“There’s been an awful lot of idle comment around here lately.”

“Frank Gillings
is
telepathic.” Then he added as Lester was choking on the news: “And he doesn’t want to be. So he’s suppressed it. Naturally he’d be antagonistic.”

“Hah!”

“He’s not too old, but he’s not flexible enough to adapt to Talent having denied it so long.”

“I’ll buy that. But what was that parting shot—‘
I
can open this door’?” Lester mimicked the Commissioner’s deep voice.

“I’m too old to learn new tricks, too, Les. I teleported through the roof door of that parking facility. He saw me do it. And
she
saw the memory of it in my mind. If she’d
lived, she’d’ve picked my mind clean. And—I didn’t
want
her to die.”

Op Owen turned abruptly to the window, trying to let the tranquillity of the scene restore his equilibrium. It did—until he saw Hariold Orley plodding along the path with his guide. Instantly a white, wide-eyed, hair-streaked face was superimposed over the view.

The intercom beeped and he depressed the key for his sanity’s sake.

“We’ve got a live one, Boss,” and Sally Iselin’s gay voice restored him. “A strong precog with kinetic possibilities. And guess what?” Sally’s excitement made her voice breathless. “He said the cop on his beat told him to come in. He doesn’t want any more trouble with the cops so he …”

“Would his name be Bill Jones?”

“However did you know?”

“And that’s no precog, Sally,” op Owen said with a ghost of a laugh, aware he was beginning to look forward again. “A sure thing’s no precog, is it, Les?”

Julian Pennstrak, Jerhattan City Manager, Daffyd op Owen, Director of the East American Parapsychic Center, and Frank Gillings, Commissioner of Law Enforcement and Order, had gathered in the latter’s office: an appropriate setting as the four sides of the tower office were tough plexiglass so the occupants had a full panoramic view of the city they managed or foresaw and protected.

“The Maggie O affair was not without some reward,” Daffyd op Owen reminded the other two. “Her … relation … in whatever degree of consulship Bill Jones stood … is proving to be a sound precog.”

Gillings grunted and rubbed the side of his fleshy nose, registering skepticism.

“Half a city semi-paralyzed with blinding headaches, two dead, and a lot of public lying and you say there was some reward!”

“You do tend to adopt a negative attitude, don’t you, Frank?” the City Manager remarked, half amused. He was watching op Owen from the corner of his eye. He knew that the Director of the Parapsychic Center had been deeply shaken by the deaths of Gil Gracie and Solange Boshe, a.k.a. Maggie O. And the curious sparring between Gillings and op Owen dated from that incident: the one grudging admiration and the other exhibiting wistful regret. Well, Pennstrak possessed a certain empathy himself which told him not to delve too deeply into the denouement of that incident. Suffice it to say, the
truth about Maggie’s sudden rise and demise had been successfully obscured from public notice and, if Daffyd were satisfied that some profit existed on the black side of the ledger, the City Manager would be content. “Nonetheless,” Julian Pennstrak continued, “the Professional Immunity Law is now, as of yesterday, programmed into Federal Books and State Law Machinery. What’s your problem now, Frank?”

“It’s this: if renegades like Solange Boshe can exist, how do we smell ’em out before they cause trouble? Now,” and he held up his hand as Daffyd op Owen opened his mouth to speak, “I know you’ve got a subliminal TRI-D program going, Dave, but just how successful is it in routing out the odd-balls?”

Op Owen winced at Gillings’s phraseology.

“Unfortunately only time will tell. We do have Bill Jones, Maggie O’s cousin, and he’ll be a first rate precog. Sally Iselin at the Testing Clinic has upwards of fifty applicants a day.” He sighed. “Most are wishful thinkers, I’m afraid, but occasionally a live one does come in. You can’t make people get Talent-tested.”

“What we need,” the LEO Commissioner said in a deadly voice, “is enforced testing.”

“Of nine million people?” asked Pennstrak, good-humoredly aghast.

Gillings grunted. “The mavericks cost us more.”

Pennstrak agreed to that.

“Better still, early testing would be a tremendous help,” Daffyd op Owen said. “Our sensitives in the maternity wards do catch the occasional strong one at birth. But we lack adequate facilities and more important the personnel. It takes a special kind of Talent in itself, to spot embryo Talents. Salty Iselin is acutely sensitive in this area and I thank Providence for her presence in the Clinic. She’s never been wrong in her assessments. But she’s the only one Eastern has and she’s overworked as it is.” Daffyd smiled and decided against what he’d been about to confide. The dour face of Lester Welch leered
at him: For Christ’s sake, Dave, don’t tell everybody everything you know. They don’t always want to hear it. For instance, Daffyd doubted that Frank Gillings would take kindly to the notion that Sally Iselin’s chief assistant at the moment was the two-year-old Dorotea Horvath, the extraordinarily Talented daughter of two of his people. Dorotea came every morning and afternoon to the Clinic, to “play” in the room full of applicants. She’d instinctively approach anyone with the least vestige of Talent so that Sally could give the deeper testing. The others could be dismissed after the routine examinations, none the wiser for the pre-selection. Dorotea was blissfully unaware of what she could do—she simply did it.

“Talent is sometimes latent,” Daffyd told Gillings, “as it was in Solange Boshe, springing into maturity under pressure. But different minds react to different stimuli and the powerful Talent, such as Solange’s, to another set entirely. Talent can also be consciously or subconsciously suppressed rince any Talent singles one out for the unwelcome attentions of the less gifted. We do try to alleviate that envy with our public information broadcasts on what Talent does to relieve …”

Gillings cut him off with a brusque wave of his hand. As much, Daffyd op Owen thought wryly, because Gillings was a latent who had no wish to be trained or reminded of this defection.

“Sorry for the lecture,” op Owen said with an apologetic grin, “but you must realize that we are limited in what we can do even with all the Talent at our disposal. Nor can we foresee the stray maturing of Talent Your LEO operatives, Frank, have all the information we’ve collated on how to spot the latent or unconscious Talent What more can we do?”

“Get your Senator friend to write a rider on that Immunity Law,” said Gillings in a growl, “that it’s illegal to be Talented and conceal it.”

Daffyd returned Gillings’s half guilty glare with a wide-eyed look of surprise. Gillings’s perception was not dull:
he knew what was behind op Owen’s grin and he scowled fiercely at him.

“I’ll suggest it to Joel Andres when next we meet,” op Owen said politely. “It’s a point well taken.”

“How in hell could you implement such a statute under the conditions you’ve just cited, Daffyd?” demanded Pennstrak with understandable disgust “No facilities, not enough Talent. Besides, latents wouldn’t know and therefore wouldn’t register, and a Talent who knew of his ability could claim he didn’t.”

“Well, it’d be a help to me,” Gillings said, still in a growling mood. Yet he glanced at op Owen with less choler. Obviously the telepath hadn’t mentioned Gillings’s latent abilities to the City Manager. The man knew when to keep his mouth shut. “I could shut up suspects and keep them from running amok like that gypsy girl.”

Op Owen’s smile faded.

“You can’t suppress or contain Talent, Frank. That’d put exactly the sort of pressure on them we’d want at all costs to avoid. There’s so much we don’t know about the parapsychic, so much.”

“Like what for instance?” asked the LEO Commissioner, steeling himself for unwelcome information.

Op Owen spread his hands wide. “I can’t tell you. I’m not a precog.” To which he added a devout and silent “Amen!”

Gillings unloosed another grunt. “Now, on that score, have your Talents come up with anything on this ethnic employment allocation nonsense? You guys are, I sincerely trust, pan-ethnic?”

“Demonstrably.”

Gillings gave him a long look as if he suspected op Owen of facetiousness. Julian Pennstrak cleared his throat hastily.

“That’s one less headache at any rate,” the LEO man went on, “but your precogs haven’t had any Incidents beyond this nebulous warning?” He tapped the Incident
readings which had been sent to his office the previous day.

Daffyd shook his head. “The precognitive faculty is the most erratic but generally speaking, the larger the number of people involved, the greater the possibility of detailed Incidents. Or, conversely, the severer the change to a prominent person or a linked or emotional association, the more likelihood of a definitive Incident.

“The old tea-leaf and card readers attempted to tell the future, anyone’s future: and while I suppose they could generalize for the average soul well enough? The best of them were only accurate when predicting the future of lives which affected a large section of general mankind. Some precogs operate only on a direct confrontation with a personality, which is why we keep key personnel folders with those sensitives. But you can’t actually provoke a precog.

“In the instance of Maggie O: she was a fluke to begin with, an isolated case, unintegrated in any group or with any affiliation that would cause one of our precogs to ‘read’ for her. That is, until circumstances put her in a position to cross Gil Grade’s lifeline. Then we had a reading on
him
, but only because the precog was tuned to Gil.

“There are, as I keep saying ad nauseam I know, a lot of parapsychic manifestations about which we know nothing. Every time I believe I understand one combination or facet, exceptions to that comprehension appear to confound me.

“Henry Darrow said that having any Talent is like riding a winged horse, you get a magnificent view but you can’t always dismount when you want to.”

Gillings had waited patiently through op Owen’s perforation; now he rattled the urgently tagged tapes on his desk. Pennstrak regarded the Director with new insight.

“I’d always thought that Pegasus was the symbol of poetry … flights of verbal fantasy. But I must say, I like
your notion, Dave. A winged hone is an appropriate mount for you people. Not that I’d have the courage to hop on its back.”

“If you two would deign to consider the mundane problems of the earthbound,” Offlings said in an add tone of voice, “Just how in hell are we going to find jobs for all these eager mud-grubbers?”

On a morning some two months later when Daffyd op Owen reached his office, there was a message on his desk to call Sally Iselin as soon as he had a moment. To a semantically-sensitive personality, the phrasing was provocative, added to the fact that Sally Iselin was in charge of recruit-testing. Daffyd punched her call numbers as soon as he read the note, disregarding other red and white flagged tapes and messages. If only one psi-latent was uncovered in a month of public information broadcasts, the program would be worth its cost.