To Ride Pegasus

by Anne McCaffrey

  The Center believed that psionic abilities were latent human characteristics: their absence due to malfunction of the necessary brain synapses or, even more basically, underdevelopment due to a protein lack in the gene. When chromosomes in the twenty-first pair were damaged or blurred, no Talent was detected. There was no aberration in Ruth’s chromosomes, and although she tested as Talented, her ability was unidentiflable. She had never been able to stimulate an Incident involving any of the known abilities. She’d met Lajos during her testing: they’d been approached by the Eastern American Center after finishing their secondary schooling and had qualified for the six-months’ training designed to stimulate latent Talent. Their genetic history had been taped back to the fourth generation. They had endured hours of cerebral recording on the Goosegg under a variety of stimuli. Ruth was finally labeled “indeterminate”; Lajos showed strong precog tendencies.

  Ruth still secretly hoped that her Talent would develop. She’d been assured that this was a possibility: they cited her high empathy rating, her ability to anticipate attitudes and actions of those nearest and dearest to her. True, she might be no more than a receptive telempath, one unable to broadcast but receptive. Ruth therefore alternated between hope and despair: being a practical creature, she dwelt mostly on the pessimistic side of the pendulum, refusing to believe anything but the most conclusive evidence. This attitude was reinforced during Lajos’s worst Incidents, when she wanted no part of the cruel gift.

  Lajos Honrath was one of several thousand Talented people, licensed and registered with the Center; devoted to its precepts and ideals, contributing all of his salary to it. The Center was not paternalistic, nor did it require any recompense. But the Talented preferred to live together, if possible, on or near, the Center’s grounds at Beechwoods, among their peers: reassured and reinforced. As the Center “policed” its own members, it also protected them.

  Ruth had no specific objections to their situation: she had willingly taken the course orienting unTalented partners to their gifted spouses. She would have undergone a far more arduous requirement so deep was her love of Lajos. But lately, obedience to E.A.C. had begun to gall Ruth and it was not due to any fault of the Center’s. She recognized that.

  The muted buzz of the intercom roused both of them. Lajos propped himself up on his elbows, his profile towards her so that she observed the thin bitter line of his mouth and knew that he was steeling himself.

  “Lajos,” it was Daffyd op Owen, “you were correct. A class 7 Reynarder had a propellant leak at Buffalo jet-port.”

  Something in the director’s slow deep voice told them that Lajos’s information had not averted.

  “And?” Lajos’s question was a firm demand for the truth.

  “We had to compute the variable details with the possible airports near water, flights landing or departing on the Reynarder line. We got only one other personal precog involving the Incident but your data alone—particularly the registry—was sufficient. The loss would have been catastrophic without your warning. Teleports on the Rescue Squad deflected most of the flaming wreckage into the Lake before it could land in the suburbs. Kinetics managed to shield the passenger deck until the propellant could be foamed. The passengers and crew suffered massive heat prostration but all will live. Ruth, does he need a tranquilizer?”

  “No!” the negative exploded from Lajos’s lips.

  “Good lad!” op Owen’s voice was warm with approval. “We’ve authenticated the Incident. It averted a major tragedy: one more pound of evidence on our side of the scalee for the Bill. And the passengers and jetport personnel know who gave the warning.”

  Lajos went limp with relief as the Director signed off with expressions of gratitude. Lajos half-turned his face and Ruth didn’t know for a moment whether to comfort him or not. She waited. Finally he gave a long shuddering sigh and relaxed, one hand slipping over the side of the bed, fingers limp, the veins in his forearm bulging, blue under his under his unusually fail skin.

  “Then what I saw—didn’t happen, Ruth. The jet didn’t turn into a flaming hull, exploding all over the suburbs. So what did I see? Which didn’t happen because I saw it? Because my seeing it was sufficient to alter the future?” He shook his head, his beard stubble rasping against the tightly drawn bedsheet, but his voice was no longer hoarse with recrimination; it was calm: his philosophy was asserting itself.

  Ruth felt the muscles in her shoulders unknot and only then realized how tense she had become, waiting for his reaction.

  “ ‘A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox,’ ” she chanted lightly, stroking his back with her fingertips. “My darling pirate,” and she kissed his cheek.

  Lajos bounced out of bed and stretched, his sleep-pants falling off his narrow hips. He grabbed them back up, not out of modesty but to keep from tripping over them on the way to the bathroom.

  “Maybe the good precog you had … it followed a bare sixty seconds after the first, you know,” Ruth remarked later as she served his breakfast, “was the realization that you had averted.”

  Lajos considered that, then shook his head. “No. The two were definitely non-related.”

  “Why is it,” Ruth asked with mock shrewishness, “that you can detail the horrors but not the happies?”

  He didn’t know and began to eat heartily, his appetite indicative of restored equilibrium.

  “Got to run, honey. Be a busy day. And that’s no precog. It’s a sure thing.” He grinned then kissed her soundly. “Annual review of contracts, and Zeusman notwithstanding, the Firm handles the government’s insurances in this city.”

  Ruth would have to hurry as well. She disliked being late although her job was not essential. She fitted filaments to fractional feeders, an intricate, delicate operation which required deft hands even with waldo-aids, and a certain tenacious patience with micro-movements. Her employers never objected to her occasional delays as they employed teleports and telekinetics for the transportation of delicate equipment and to assemble by remote control the “hot” components of instrumentation to be used in the Jupiter probes. Ruth did not need to work, for Lajos was highly paid, but she preferred to keep busy until their request for progeny was approved. She wanted so to be a full-time mother.

  There was unlikely to be a problem in receiving approval—eventually—but anyone was liable to pick up a dose of accidental radiation that could blur or damage chromosomes. They knew their genetic patterns were sound and they had completed the three years’ probation to establish the compatibility and stability of their marriage. For the last six months they had undergone continual egg and sperm cell check for possible aberrations. It was time-consuming, but who wanted a handicapped child? It had taken years to weed out the psychedelic damages that had resulted in the freaks of the late Seventies and early Eighties. There were still occasional mutants as a result of the heavy Solar Winds in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was only common sense to check every variable.

  But Ruth found it hard to be patient. She asked for very little of what her heritage had once seemed to offer. She didn’t mind being an unidentifiable Talent, the had adjusted to it. She didn’t really mind the often worrisome role of a passive observer to the mental agonies of Lajos’s perceptions: she loved him and she helped him. She did mind the growing sense of futility. Nowadays, with shelter and food assured one, with the excitement of space explorations to capture the imagination, with leisure to develop interests and hobbies, everyone had the opportunity to use their full capabilities, yet she was constantly frustrated. If only she could be a full woman to Lajos, not just caring for him, but raising his children, preferably his Talented children! She would do everything in her power to make sure they would succeed where she had failed.

  On his firm’s table of organization, Lajos Horvath was listed as a “Contract Analyst and Underwriter” of the Eastern Headquarters of the Insurance Company. Conservative in so many areas, the insurance field had been one of the first major industrie
s to see the advantages of staff ‘precogs’; particularly one such as Lajos whose accuracy in fire-hazard control had been established beyond question.

  Most of his precognitive Incidents dealt with flaming substances, as other precogs seemed to have reliable affinities for water, autos, metals or certain types of personalities. There was a friendly debate within the Center whether “finders” were precogs or clairvoyants, but they had affinity for “lost items,” organic and inorganic. There were four in Lajos’ Firm, and they represented huge annual savings for their employers.

  Once Lajos’s precogs would have been ascribed to astuteness or hunches or shrewd extrapolations. Indeed, he himself was perfectly willing to put the vaguer apprehensions under that generality. But training and sensitivity had sharpened many “hunches” into definitive perceptions: Check the cellar of that building for dangerous refuse, the janitor is lazy and has not discarded all possible combustibles. The wiring in that attic is frayed and the owners tend to overbad their circuits with heavy-draw appliances. Sometimes the Incident was sustained: This building will be vandalized, fire is involved. The police were then requested to keep that building under surveillance. The surveillance was sufficient to prevent the breaking and entering which Lajos had predicted, but the Company had long ago learned not to protest the measures suggested by their perceptives. Insurers are accustomed to statistics, and Talents saved them too much in claims. Sometimes, as that morning, Lajos would experience a general alarm, touched off by the imminence of a violent fire, or a sudden flaring of fire-danger resulting from a vehicular crash. There were days when nothing activated his Talent. And days, of which this was one, when everything seemed to smell vaguely of smoke or be wreathed in ghostly flames. He had to censor half a dozen false impressions by checking them against the small office Goosegg. He had learned to differentiate the valid precogs: that was why he was licensed and registered by the Center.

  He finished the pile of contracts, noting those about which he experienced twinge-hesitations that indicated a future review would be wise. On his way home, he suddenly felt a lightness of spirit, an ebullience quite unaccountable after his strenuous day. He didn’t try to analyze ft, too delighted with the relief to want to question the source. But as he opened his door, Ruth raced into his arms.

  “We’ve been approved as parents,” she cried, clasping him tightly to her in an excess of elation. “Director op Owen himself called me just a few minutes ago. You ought to have been home when he called.”

  “Which proves that op Owen is no precog,” Lajos said with a chuckle as he pressed her soft slenderness to him. He buried his lips into the curve of her neck. “That’s an anodyne for this morning.”

  “Why for this morning?” she asked, pulling back and searching his face with worried eyes.

  “Oh, it’s all right, sweetie, but he knew I’d hear all the details. Reynarder Inc. was warned the instant my Incident identified the ship but they refused to issue a blanket halt on all outgoing and incoming vessels with those numerals. Reynarder’s money is back of the Transport Lobby and they support Zeusman, you know. They can’t admit that Incidents, backed by cerebral variations, computer-sorted, validated by the Center are NOT superstitious nonsense. But a lot of people check out their flights nowadays with a licensed precog.”

  “Then I say that companies like Reynarder deserve what they get!”

  “Hey, we can afford not to be petty. And besides, I want to talk about us: about our child. What’ll we have first? Boy or girl?”

  Ruth stiffened in his arms and pulled back to look her husband straight in the eye.

  “Do we have to specify? Does it have to be predetermined?” she asked in a small voice, aware even as the words popped out that she sounded resentful. “Oh, I don’t mean it that way. It’s just that when you predetermine, it takes away all the mystery that’s left to motherhood.”

  “Ruthie,” and Lajos’s tender teasing voice thrilled her. “You’re a real recessive. O.K., we’ll just let nature take its course.”

  “Can’t we eat first?”

  Lajos threw back his head and laughed boyishly at her deliberate coquetry. He hugged her until he heard her ribs crack and her dinner sizzling.

  It was a magical night. Ruth responded to lovemaking with an ardor that astounded her husband: a surrender that left him breathless and not a little awed: as if, sloughing off the onus of contraceptive interference, she could allow herself to be touched to the depths of her being.

  If the quality of their loving had anything to do with the final product, their child ought to be a perfect human, Lajos thought as they finally fell asleep in each other’s arms. There was no guarantee that conception occurred that night. In fact, Lajos hoped that it hadn’t if Ruth would react like this until she did conceive.

  Shortly, however, it was apparent that conception had occurred. Ruth developed a luminous beauty that touched everything around her with harmony. Jerry Frames, the Center’s resident physician, with a healing talent, privately told op Owen that the foetus was female and that Ruth was healthy enough to experience no problems.

  The girl weighed seven pounds and three ounces at birth and was immediately christened the Little Princess by the nursery staff in the Center’s hospital. Her parents called her Dorotea and were utterly besotted with her miniature perfection, her pink-and-gold beauty. They were oblivious to the curious stares and whispered comments of the staff. It was Ruth, preternaturally sensitive to anything regarding her daughter, who began to notice the surreptitious glances, the cluster of people constantly near her daughter’s crib.

  “You’re hiding something from me,” she told Jerry Frames accusingly. “There’s something wrong with Dorotea.”

  “There’s not a thing wrong with her, Ruth,” Jerry replied sharply and thrust the baby’s chart at her. “You’ve enough pediatrics to read the medical notations. Go ahead.”

  Ruth scanned the sheets quickly, then reread word and graph, checking the laboratory reports of body function, the cerebral and cardiac readings, even the nourishment intake and eliminations. There was definitely nothing abnormal about Dorotea. Even her chromosome mapping was XX/healthy/normal. Reassured, Ruth passed the clip board back, and smiling confidently, continued to nurse her child.

  Frames later said that he’d had a moment of pure panic because he couldn’t remember how much genetic training Ruth had had or might remember. Op Owen assured him that his instinctive impulse had been the only possible course under the circumstances.

  “It’s exceedingly fortunate, though, Jerry,” the director said, his eyes active with speculation, “that they are already under the Center’s protection. That child must have every safeguard we can provide. I want equipment installed in her nursery, tuned to her pattern day and night. If what we suspect is correct, it may manifest itself in her first six months. Can you imagine the strides we can make in formulating an early childhood program with such a superb example?”

  “A pure case of doing what comes naturally.”

  “Nothing must interfere with that child’s development.”

  “I still don’t see why we’ve kept it from the parents. Are you stepping down from your “know-all, tell-all’ pedestal after all?”

  Op Owen returned the physician’s sardonic look.

  “I’m not a precog, but I felt a strong reluctance to inform Lajos.”

  “Why? He’d be walking nine feet tall to think he produced such a Talented child.”

  “Haven’t we changed sides, Jerry?”

  “It’s one thing to withhold information from the unwashed public, but another to clam up on one of the gang.”

  “We don’t know positively that Dorotea Horvath is …”

  “Come off it Dave. Cecily King is a strong TP and she heard that child protest birth. Oh, I know that some of ’em can cry out in the womb but this was no physical cry or it would have been audible to the rest of the delivery room personnel. Is your stumbling block Ruth Horvath?”

 
Op Owen nodded slowly.

  “Well, that makes a little more sense, although I’d say she’d welcome her daughter’s Talent. A kind of vindication that she’s never been identified. Unless you call the transmission of strong genetic traits a Talent.”

  Op Owen shook his head, his lips pursed in thought. “She has wanted a child desperately. As a mother wants a child: not as a Talented person wants evidence of succession.” He spoke slowly, the words dragged out of his mouth as if he were sorting the thoughts. “Lajos says that although Ruth is a great help and very understanding, sometimes his Incidents bother her more than she admits. Let’s just let things take their course. We’ll keep an eye on them.”

  “What they don’t know won’t hurt them, huh?” Frames sighed. “Wish you’d let that attitude spill over into other areas, Dave.”

  Op Owen regarded the doctor intently. “I can conceivably bend a little privately, for the benefit of those under my care, but I cannot as easily rationalize the broader issue which I cannot oversee or control.”

  “All right Dave, but I feel, and Jod Andres feels, that private reactions are a strong basis for predicting public ones. You’re reluctant to tell Ruth Honrath, a girl conditioned and trained to accept Talent that her child shows exceedingly strong telepathic Talent. You willingly want to broadcast information that even frightens me, and I’m Talented, to a public that is in no way conditioned to accept a fragment of that knowledge. The two attitudes cannot be reconciled.”

  “The ethical position of the Talented must never be questioned.”

  “Dave,” and there was entreaty in Jerry Frames’s voice and manner, “you are unable to be unethical. The withholding of prejudicial knowledge is not unethical, it’s plain good ol’ common sense. Which you are sensibly applying to Ruth Horvath’s case. How many times I have considered telling a patient he’s bought it and how few times have I actually come clean. Very few people can stand the whole, complete, unvarnished truth.”

  “I hang between, in doubt to act or rest,” op Owen said, resigned as well as frustrated.