INTERVENTION

by May, Julian; Dikty, Ted

  The sprawling white-stucco wedding-cake hotel at the western foot of Mount Washington seemed hardly to have changed at all from the days when I had worked there as its convention manager. It was as ridiculously posh and Edwardian as ever and served the same sumptuous meals, and in spite of America's depressed economy it was still crowded with virtually the same type of clientele—upscale young families, hiking fanatics with sybaritic base-camp tastes, and herds of nostalgic oldsters on expensive guided tours. The latter now arrived by X-wing airbus instead of the diesel motor coaches of my day; but they still wore lapel badges, and they were still escorted by pretty young women, and the old ladies still cheeped and tittered eagerly while the old gents looked glum and resigned.

  I had come to the hotel on business, to consult with the youngster who occupied my erstwhile position, one Jasper Delacourt. Ten years earlier the Twelfth Congress on Metapsychology had been held at the resort and Denis had roped me into making the arrangements. "Who," he had asked me reasonably, "could do a better job of it?" And so I did, and the hotel's Olde New England kitsch had charmed the socks off the foreign scholars, who found it a refreshing change from the modern university locales that had characterized most of the other Congresses. The cog railway had been a big hit, and the more able-bodied operants tramped around on Mount Washington during their spare time, marveling over the relict ice-age flora and the oddly portentous ambiance around the summit.

  This year's Congress (which many people at Dartmouth feared would be the last) was also scheduled to be held at the resort, and so it was only natural that I should do a reprise of my 2003 duties. I had made most of the arrangements by phone and data-link months earlier; but as September approached I drove over to wrap things up in person.

  Jasper Delacourt bounced up from behind his desk as I entered his office and wrung my hand. The hotel was extremely happy to be hosting twenty-eight hundred delegates during the somnolent post-Labor Day season.

  "Roger, you old sonuvagun! God, you look great. Ten years, you haven't aged a day, my man!"

  "You look pretty fit yourself," I lied. "The Congress committee over at Dartmouth is really very pleased that you could accommodate us, given the more modest budget this go-around."

  Jasper sighed. "Things are tough all over. I can level with you because you used to sit in this seat, right? I have to hustle my ass off scratching up tours and conferences and sales meetings to keep this hulk topped off. If we had to depend on straight vacationers, we'd belly-up."

  I chuckled. "It wasn't all that different in '90, when I left."

  He studied me narrowly and I could see his mind doing calculations. "Jeez—that long ago? But I thought—How the hell old are you, anyhow?"

  "In a week I'll be sixty-eight."

  "Holy moley," Jasper groaned. "What—d'you get your seltzer from Pounce de Leeon's fountain, man? I'd of said forty-five ten years ago and say the same now. I mean, you got that lived-in look and Miss Clairol never made a dime off those silver curls—but sixty-eightl No shit?"

  I shrugged. "Kind of runs in the family. I reckon I'll fall to pieces all at once at seventy ... But don't let me waste your time. I know you've got a lot to do. Mainly, I want to noodle with you on the matter of our big Saturday night banquet on the twenty-first. Our attendance will be a couple of hundred short of last time, but you remember how we had tables packed cheek-to-jowl in the Grand Ballroom, and out in the hall, and even filling up the Fern Salon. There were closed-circuit TV monitors spotted around so the speeches could be heard by the nonfarsensi-tive. But, Jasper ... metapsychic operants want to experience the full nuance spectrum when somebody sounds off! Conventional sensory input and ultrasensory. Is the speaker delivering with a straight tongue and mind—or is he or she peddling tosh? Listening to a TV just doesn't cut the mustard with an audience of heads. We've got to think of something else—and I don't mean a buffet."

  "Roger! Roger!" he chortled. "I'm way ahead of you, my man."

  With a flourish, he produced a folder bound in fake leather and smacked it open on the desk, pressing the upper right-hand corner. Ta-dah! A twenty-by-thirty plaque, playing a full-color loop showing a series of lap dissolves of a luxurious mountaintop restaurant: exteriors at sunset, in sun-drenched daylight, in a majestic snowy night; interiors showing the place tricked out as a cabaret, hosting a bar mitzvah, wining and dining some affair of the New England Medical Association; close-ups of Lucullan feasts and apres-hike fireside cheer. The book-plaque even had background music, for God's sake: Edward MacDowell's New England Idyls.

  "The Summit Chalet!" Jasper declaimed. "Dine in opulent grandeur far above New Hampshire's White Mountains. Visit the fabled haunt of the Great Spirit, where even today flying saucers have been seen wafting through the crystalline air!"

  "I remember now," I said. "When they demolished the obsolete antenna farm and transmitter complex four or five years ago, they granted the hotel a concession to build the chalet. Is it paying its way?"

  "Not yet," Jasper confided. "We went way over budget on the environmental adaptations. You know—to keep it from blowing off the mountain when the wind's three hundred kloms an hour. The engineers finally licked it, though. A tornado couldn't budge that thing now. And what a showplace! Those globetrotting heads of yours'll eat it up, Roj."

  I was dubious. "We're talking about moving nearly three thousand people up there from the hotel, Jasper. In maybe an hour. And then getting them back down after the banquet."

  "No problem. We bring in ten X-wing shuttle buses, make three trips."

  "Who eats the transport costs?"

  "Goes with the deluxe dinner package: prime rib or lobster, BP and veggie, sabayon dessert, nonvintage champers, gratuity included—ninety bucks a head."

  I whistled. "Jasper—the budget! Do you realize that Dartmouth is so strapped that they're remerging the Department of Metapsychology with Psychiatry again? My nephew, the Nobel laureate, is getting shucked of two thirds of his staff! The research grants are gone, the endowments are gone, and this will probably be the last time the Congress meets for Christ knows how long."

  Jasper leaned toward me. "Then make it a whangdoodle. Take 'em out in style."

  "I don't see how I can justify—"

  "Do me one favor. Go up and look the place over."

  ***

  A van trundled me half a klom to the X-wing pad, which was tucked behind a sound-baffle wall hidden amidst greenery. In less than five minutes the versatile aircraft that combined the speed of a fixed-wing with the limited-space landing requirements of a helicopter whisked me to the top of Mount Washington. We landed in a bowl newly cut on the eastern shoulder of the summit. I recalled that environmentalists had bitterly protested both the landing facility and the new restaurant, demanding that the old Sherman Adams Summit Building, a graceless structure built in the 1980s, be retained as a historical monument and the rest of the summit be left "in a state of nature." However, since virtually the entire top of Mount Washington was covered with trucked-in rubble, and had been humanly modified in one way or another beginning in the 1820s, the natural-staters hadn't had much of a leg to stand on.

  The Summit Chalet was designed to blend with the lichen-crusted granite and dazzling hoarfrost that characterized New England's highest point. The building was trifoliate, the three lobes having armor-glass windows all around, providing maximum windowside seating. Its rock-strewn roof was surmounted by a wide turret with an observation deck and open balcony, mobbed with tourists on that balmy summer afternoon. On the level below the restaurant were boutiques, souvenir shops, and a small museum, together with more open balconies. A covered tunnel led to a new sheltered terminus of the little old cog railway, which was exactly as I had remembered it. After a short inspection tour I was admitted to one of the lower balconies by the chalet's manager and left alone to think things over.

  One of the primitive steam locomotives was toiling up-slope from the vicinity of the White Mountain Hotel, pushing its coach. The trail
s crisscrossing the summit had the same yellow-paint blazes. The grass-like sedges were desiccated, but here and there tufts of alpine herbiage grew green and indomitable, speckled with tiny flowers.

  ...The shivering boy standing at my side, pointing, his mind detecting the first empowered mind not of our own family.

  ...Hikers ascending in a line from behind the cog track, and little Denis's farsight lending me a glimpse of the second miracle: Elaine.

  It had all begun right here. It would be an appropriate place for the farewell.

  The wind was stiff that day, blasting in from the west, and my eyes misted over. I felt again the strange aetheric vibrations and an eerie sense of looming presence. The mountain that was sacred. The mountain that had killed so many. The mountain that had heard foolish dreamers crying out to the uncomprehending stars, and nurtured wild tales of frost-demons and Great Carbuncles and flying saucers...

  Bonjour Rogi!

  I started violently. "Est-ce toi?!"

  Arrange for the Metapsychic Congress to have its last supper on the mountain.

  "Hah! And should I tell them who decreed the final squandering of their treasury?"

  You will be able to convince Denis that the site is suitable. Your coercion is more effective than you think. After he has agreed and all the arrangements are in train ... yes, you may tell him about me.

  "Grand dieu—you can't mean it!"

  Be subtle. Choose your time well. Perhaps you can tell him that you have long since accepted me as a minor delusion—a harmless unconscious projection of hope. Of reasonable hope, not one forlorn on the face of it.

  "You haven't been around here for a long time, mon fantôme. We Earthlings have made a botch of it!"

  Perhaps ... Tell him anyhow. Tell him that he is right in clinging to the ethic of nonviolence and service. Tell him he is wrong about wanting to retreat to a low profile. The Mind of Earth must not fragment but coadúnate—grow and flow together in a sublime metaconcert of goodwill, a renunciation of selfishness that coerces the Intervention of the Galactic Milieu at long last!

  "Now?" I cried. "When it's all fallen apart? You've got a weird sense of humor."

  The Ghost said: Your nephew Denis can scan your mind and apperceive the reality ... if you yourself believe it to be true.

  "Go away," I whispered, looking out over the western valley. "Leave me in peace. I'm only an old fool and no one listens to me, and there isn't a hope in hell that Denis or anyone else would take such a fairy tale seriously. Extraterrestrial redeemers are an old-fashioned aberration to psychiatrists like Denis. Jung even wrote a book about it! It's the perennial human desire for a fairy godmother or a deus ex machina to save us from our mortal folly—and I don't believe in it. So there!"

  The invisible thing seemed to sigh in exasperation. It said: I hoped it would not be this way. Obviously it must be. Le bon dieu, il aime a plaisanter! Always the humorist ... So! Tell me Rogi: Do you still have the Great Carbuncle?

  "The key ring?" I blurted. Digging in my hip pocket, I pulled out the silvery chain that held my shop and apartment keys. The little red-glass ball of the fob winked in the powerful sunlight. "This thing?"

  That thing ... At the Congress, when the moment seems appropriate, you will once again urge Denis to unite his colleagues—and the Mind of Earth—in prayerful metaconcert. As a token of your serious intent, invite him to scrutinize the Carbuncle with his deep-sight.

  "Just like that!" I laughed bitterly. "And how will I know this magic moment?"

  The Ghost said, rather ominously: It will be self-evident. Do it without fail. And now, au revoir, cher Rogi. We may meet again soon!

  A deathly chill smote me. I gasped, and my breath exhaled in a white cloud, and I realized that the temperature of the air had fallen precipitously. Stumbling, I turned to the sliding glass door behind me and hauled it open, flinging myself inside as if the frost-demons themselves were on my tail.

  The manager of the chalet was there, and he said, "Oh, there you are, Mr. Remillard. When you didn't stop in again at my office, I thought you might have left—"

  "We'll have our banquet here," I said. "I've made up my mind. Let's go to your office and draw up the contract."

  "Wonderful!" he said. "You'll be glad you made this decision!"

  "Somebody will be," I growled, and followed him back upstairs.

  ***

  The following week I drove to Concord, where I had made an appointment with a consulting gemologist. He was understanding when I said that I'd like an appraisal of the Carbuncle while I waited—and watched. But as it happened, I was out of luck. He rather quickly ascertained that the chain wasn't silver, but a platinum-iridium alloy; it was also easy to determine that the flawless, transparent ball was not glass, but some other substance with a hardness of ten on Moh's scale.

  "Now, ordinarily, that would suggest that we have a diamond," the gemologist said. "But a blood-red diamond would be fabulously valuable, and no person in his right mind would polish one into a spherical shape rather than facet it. So this may be some very unusual synthetic with a similar thermal conductivity."

  My mind had gone numb. "Yes. That's probably just what it is. An old friend of mine gave me this. A chemist. Dared me to find out what it was. I think this is his idea of a practical joke."

  The gemologist said, "To tell what this stone is, we'd have to do a crystallographic analysis with special equipment. That would run into money and take a while."

  "No, no," I protested. "Why don't you just put down on your appraisal the bare facts you've told me. No monetary value of the stone, of course."

  "Well, if that's what you want. You know, if this really were a diamond, it'd weigh upward of twenty-five carats. Because of the rare color, it'd likely be worth a couple million."

  I forced a laugh. "Well, the joke's on me, isn't it?...Now how much do I owe you?"

  The fee was fifty dollars. I paid it gladly, and tucked the appraisal paper into my wallet and the Great Carbuncle into my pants pocket. Then I went back to Hanover to wait for the third week in September, when the last Metapsychic Congress was scheduled to begin.

  I didn't say anything to Denis about the Family Ghost, not even when the Carbuncle seemed to burn a hole in my pocket. The Ghost was welcome to make a fool of me if it could; but I was damned if I would make a fool of myself.

  29

  BRETTON WOODS, NEW HAMPSHIRE, EARTH

  21 SEPTEMBER 2013

  SWIFTLY, BEFORE ANY early risers who shared Ilya and Katie's apprehensions could spot him and detain him, old Pyotr Sakhvadze slipped outside the grand hotel into dawn silence. He hurried across the dry lawn, noting that the absence of dew probably signified that rain was on the way. The sky was bright with a high overcast. It would be too bad if lowering clouds spoiled the view from the Summit Chalet during the banquet that evening, but a bit of thunder and lightning might actually liven things up.

  Here and there among the beds of chrysanthemums and the formal evergreen plantations lay incongruous masses of litter—broken placards, torn banners, scattered leaflets, some beer and pop cans and snack-food wrappers—mementos of the crowd of antioperant pickets that had invaded the resort grounds last night. All throughout the week-long Metapsychic Congress there had been small groups of Sons of Earth demonstrators parading outside the main entrance of the complex; but several hundred had shown up on Friday evening, and the hotel security force had finally had to call in the State Police to clear them out. Pyotr's grandson Ilya had been quite alarmed at the sluggish response of the local authorities. He had warned Pyotr not to go outside alone on the final day of the Congress, when even more serious confrontations might be expected. However, the old man had no intention of forgoing his morning constitutional. The antioperants, he reasoned, would hardly be up and about at six in the morning. They would be sleeping off the Friday-night fracas and doubtless renewing their energies for a more climactic face-off tonight...

  Abandoned placards blocked the pathway an
d Pyotr flicked them aside with his walking stick, tsking disapproval of the impudent sentiments. WE ARE HUMAN—ARE YOU? one sign inquired. Pyotr chuckled at another that proclaimed SUPERBRAINS INVADE YOUR INNER SPACE! By far the majority of the professionally printed placards echoed the Sons of Earth chant, "Off With the Heads"—which was often abbreviated in a sinister fashion to "Off the Heads!" The meaning of one slogan, WHERE IS KRYPTONITE NOW THAT WE REALLY NEED IT?, eluded Pyotr completely. He was relieved when he came to the turnoff at the X-wing pad and was able to head into the thick woods along the little Ammonoosuc River, which threaded the resort grounds.

  Down by the brawling stream there were no traces of the demonstration. Sugar maple trees were just beginning to turn color in that amazing North American fashion that was—typically!—so much more spectacular than any Europe or Asia had to offer. But Pyotr was really hoping to rediscover another tree that he had taken note of ten years earlier, during his first visit to the White Mountain Hotel. On and on he walked, without catching sight of it, and he began to fear that it had perished, perhaps toppling into the river during a spring freshet. But no ... there it was. A solitary mountain ash laden with marvelous great bunches of scarlet berries, the very image of the beloved ryabina trees of Pyotr's native Caucasus.

  He paused and contemplated the scene with a full heart. The rushing stream, the magic tree, the mighty mountain looming darkly to the east—all so reminiscent of his old home that it made him want to weep with the loss.

  No, he told himself, and forged on. What a fool you are, Pyotr Sergeyevich! You have lived ninety-nine years and you are still vigorous and in control of most of your mental faculties—meager though they be—and you have a safe home with your loving grandson Ilya in Oxford, and a wealth of memories and experiences to share with your great-granddaughters. You are as fortunate as the patriarch Seliac Eshba—even though not so tranquil, or so wise.

  The path turned south, away from the river, and passed along the boundary of the resort's beautiful golf course, through an open area where the long rampart of the Presidential Range still hid the sun. The air was utterly calm. No birds sang and no civilized noises intruded upon the immense quiet. It seemed almost as if the entire New Hampshire countryside were holding its breath in anticipation.