INTERVENTION (60 page)

Jamie shrugged. They were all rising from the table and going after their raincoats. "I didn't say that. I said it was a theory, and one of Remillard's to boot. You can think as you like, lass."

"Do you still feel fey?" Jean asked Alana solicitously. "You're dreadfully pale and you didn't eat a thing."

"It's a blank," the girl whispered. She tried to smile. "There doesn't seem to be anything beyond."

"Take my arm," Nigel urged her.

Alana's eyes slid away. "I'd really rather not. Please, Nigel."

"No problem," he said easily, and held the door open.

The two women went out into the rain.

By the churchyard gate, the elderly man was now kneeling on the pavement, rooting in the plastic carrier bag and muttering. He had lost his hat and the rain soaked his thin white hair and ran down his furrowed cheeks. He looked up wildly and froze as he saw Alana.

There shalt not be found among you any one that useth divination, or an enchanter, or a witch! For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee!

Alana stopped as the cry flooded her mind and tried to crowd Jean back into the pub doorway with her body, but she was not quick enough; the machine pistol that the old man pulled from his bag spat five sudden gouts of yellow fire and woke thundering echoes up and down the ancient street. Alana crumpled, her face turned scarlet and formless, dead before she reached the ground. Jean took only one bullet, but that was in the neck, and she fell back into Jamie's arms with her life fountaining onto the rain-darkened granite pavement.

The old man shouted: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!" He threw down his weapon and darted into the Greyfriars churchyard.

Jamie went to his knees with Jean clasped to his breast, hearing her mind say what her voice was unable to utter:

Katie and David... love them ... continue the work...

He bent and kissed her, with the rational part of his brain assuring him that this could not be happening. Not to her. Not to them. Their life together had been absurdly perfect, an idyll throughout the thirteen years of their marriage and professional collaboration and the rearing of their joy-bedight offspring. This sort of ending was impossible.

Jean said: I'm always with you.

He kissed her again, and was aware of a terrible howling sound. Then, shockingly, he was almost bowled over by a plunging shape and knew it was Nigel, gone after the madman, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Jean said: He mustn't. Stop him.

When Jamie continued to cling to her, she mustered up a last coercive impulse.

Go before it's too late!

He lowered her carefully to the stones. People were pushing out of the pub, babbling and shouting. Several cars had stopped and their occupants looked out, horror-stricken. Jamie dodged pedestrians and pounded through the churchyard entrance. Beneath one of the venerable trees just softening in spring leaf was a fierce orange blaze. Nigel stood over it, his scholarly face as implacable as the marble death's-heads that decorated the seventeenth-century tombs on either hand. A man writhed in the midst of the fire, making a shrill keening sound.

Jamie ripped off his coat to blanket the flames, rolling the burning man on the wet turf. Suddenly, without a word, Nigel leapt onto Jamie's back and clawed at his eyes. Jamie levered himself upright, got a grip on the wrists of the smaller man, and pried the hands away from his face. Redness tinged the vision of one eye.

"No, Nigel! For God's sake!"

"Let the swine burn!" Nigel sank his teeth into Jamie's right hand. Agonized, Jamie lifted Nigel bodily and flung him headfirst against the trunk of the tree. He fell, groaning feebly, and Jamie turned again to the smoldering body beneath the raincoat.

There were people running about the churchyard now and a sound of approaching police cars. The flames seemed to be out. Jamie pulled a fold of fabric aside and saw the charred features of the fanatic—hawk-like nose, bold brow-arches of Caledonian bone, lantern jaw—a face very much like his own. The eyes in their lidless sockets seemed to retain an uncompromising gleam and the mouth, distorted by the rictus of violent death, might have been triumphantly grinning.

Jamie let the cloth drop back. He got up and limped over to Nigel, who appeared to be embracing the tree as he attempted to haul himself upright. One sleeve of his coat was torn and his bald pate was purpled with a massive contusion. Jamie extended his left hand to his colleague and pulled him to his feet. Nigel reciprocated by binding Jamie's bitten hand with a handkerchief.

Police officers came and led them away, and then there was an interval during which they were asked the same questions over and over again with irritating persistence. Dr. Nigel Weinstein was arrested and charged with culpable homicide. Later he was released on his own recognizance to attend the Third Metapsychic Congress, which was held that year in Edinburgh. He did not present a paper.

In February 1995 Weinstein was acquitted when the Scottish jury brought in a verdict of "Not Proven." By then, however, with the worldwide publicity given the trial, the damage had been done.

SURVEY VESSEL
KRAK RONA'AL
[Kron 466-010111]

SECTOR 14: STAR 14-893-042
[LANDA]:
PLANET 4 [ASSAWOMPSET]

GALACTIC YEAR! LA PRIME
1-357-627
[8
AUGUST
1994]

T
HE MONSTROUS KRONDAKU
are a race fabled throughout the Galactic Milieu for their ancient wisdom, their merciless objectivity, and their composure. But there is another aspect to the great tentacled invertebrates that other polities (except the Lylmik) do not suspect.

At those rare times when they can be certain of being unobserved by exotic minds, the Krondaku are given to fooling around.

The mated pairs, especially, in conditions of absolute privacy, will cast aside all decorum and circumspection and for a brief interval submerge themselves completely in sensory input. They revel, they wallow, they become intoxicated voluptuaries—drinking in, above all, the supernal pla'akst sensation engendered by their ponderous amours. Only the Gi, those paragons of concupiscence, have a greater capacity for pla'akst than dallying Krondaku. When the passionate interlude ends, its memory lingers on and suffuses the normal Krondak phlegmatism with sunniness. For a while, the terrible monsters are awash with uncharacteristic bonhomie.

It was in just such a mood that two senior Krondak planetologists approached the Landa solar system in the 14th Sector.

Comparator Dota'efoo Alk'ai and her mate, Attestor Luma'eroo Tok, had received a most unusual assignment from the Sector Base on Molakar [Tau Ceti-2]. They were to go themselves, without the usual support crew consisting of a mixed bag of Milieu races, and perform an update assessment of the fourth Landa planet, which they had surveyed many Galactic millenaries ago. Once a promising prospect for colonization, the world had suffered the misfortune of being within a critical distance of supernova 14-322-931B-S2. As this dying star exploded, it launched a relativistic blast wave of high-energy particles, x-rays, and gamma rays in all directions. For several centuries, the normal background cosmic radiation flux through the Landa system increased by a factor of nearly five thousand, with cataclysmic effects upon the biota of the single habitable world. The blast wave had swept past Landa exactly two Galactic millenaries ago [5476 Earth years]. The 14th Sector Survey Authority decided it was now time to find out if the irradiated fourth planet had simmered down, and if it was still potentially colonizable. A full-scale resurvey was not required. Experienced field-workers such as Dota'efoo and Luma'eroo would be able to decide rather quickly whether or not the world was a write-off.

The Landa solar system lay on the outer fringe of the Orion Arm of the Galaxy, some 6360 light-years from Molakar. Traveling at its usual brisk displacement factor of 370, the starship of the two Krondak planetologists required 17.19 subjective Galactic days to make the trip, which was executed in eighteen consecutive hyperspatial catenaries. Twice each day, as the ship entered and left subspace by means of its upsilon-field superluminal translator, the two entities within experienced a brief moment of horrific pain, which they bore with Krondak stoicism. But in between the translations, when they were alone together in the gray limbo of the hyperspatial subuniverse, that most remote of nonlocations, the couple felt free to doff their dour racial façade and romp. They had not had a honeymoon in more than five millenaries, and its glow stayed with them as they neared the journey's end and climbed reluctantly out of the connubial vat of glycerin, imidazolidinyl urea, and iso-yohimbine.

The terminal break through the superficies was due any minute. They headed for the survey craft's control room slithering side by side, settled into their squatting pads, and waited. A small cyan indicator on the instrumentation panel flashed on as the translator mechanism spun the upsilon-field gateway. The viewport showed only quasi-dimensional gray negation ... and then there was a unique swimming snap, a
zang
attended by incredible agony, a
zung,
and relief. They had returned to normal space, in the vicinity of the Landa system.

The smallish Gi sun was of modest mass and luminosity, unassoci-ated with solar companions. It shone golden-yellow, exhibiting minimal flare activity and an attractive "butterfly" corona with pearly equatorial streamers and polar plumes. Five of its family of fourteen planets were immediately visible to the multiple Krondak oculi, but all of them were gas-giants of no interest to colonization evaluators.

Luma'eroo shut down the overdrive mechanism and fired up the subliminal gravo-magnetic propulsion generators. He switched the ship's navigation unit from automatic to tentacular. A crawling network of faint violet fire, the rho-field, now clothed the outer hull of the dull-black spheroid. Under Luma'eroo's pilotage, it went full inertialess and proceeded to the fourth planet, moving at a sizable percentage of the speed of light. The ship took up station in a geosynchronous orbit a few hundred thousand kilometers above a bluish-green, cloud-swirled world.

"I wish thou wouldst not hot-dog, Tok." Dota'efoo's admonition had overtones of fond languor; the aftereffects of the recent debauch were still very much with her.

"The sooner we get this evaluation over with, the sooner we can begin the trip back to Molakar." Luma'eroo's primary eyes retained a misty periwinkle color and his integument was flushed with the telltale rosy blotches of fulfillment. "This mission is hardly likely to end positively, Alk'ai, given the proximity of the poor planet to the supernova."

"I daresay thou art right," Dota'efoo said, stroking his warty dorsal prominence with absent-minded affection as she stared out the main viewport. "Just look. The cloud cover has deteriorated to only about fifty percent and there are polar ice caps now. The atmospheric ozone layer must have been zapped to a green frazzle. All-in-All pity the life-forms!..."

"I'm going to call up a précis of our last survey. It's been a long time—and thanks to thee, O alluring source of hyperhedonia, my mnemonic faculties are just the least bit unresponsive." He flicked a request to the computer and the abbreviated data flashed into both their minds:

EVALUATION SUMMARY—14-893-042-4

This eminently habitable world is a typical small metallolithoid with an equatorial radius of [5902 km] and a mean density of [5.462 gm/cm3]. It has a nickel-iron core and is internally heated by natural radioactivity. The dipolar magnetic field is classed 06:2:05:9. Planet Four is attended by three interlocked moons: A is a coreless lithoid giant with a diameter 0.22 and a mass 0.01 that of the primary; B and C are lithoid midgets scarcely i/ioooth as massive as A, orbiting at the equilateral points of the giant. Planet Four has an axial tilt of 19.35 degrees and a nearly circular orbit around its sun. Its year is equivalent to 611.3 Galactic days and its day 93 time units. The planetary albedo is 39.7 percent.

The atmosphere of Planet Four is generally within acceptable parameters for Milieu races: 22.15 percent oxygen, 0.05 percent carbon dioxide, and 77.23 percent nitrogen, with the balance consisting of noble gases, hydrogen, ozone, miscellaneous trace gases, miscellaneous suspended particulates, and varying amounts of dihydrogen oxide vapor. Clouds formed of the latter shroud about 62 percent of the planetary surface.

Land areas comprise 19 percent of Planet Four, and 81 percent is covered with dihydrogen oxide oceans with an average salinity of 3.03 percent. Nearly 20 percent of the hydrosphere is epicontinental and very shallow. There are many freshwater lakes of small area. The lithosphere has a Class 4 motile-plate structure with a basaltic abyssal sea-floor and granitic continents. Two continents are of moderate size and five are much smaller. There are myriads of continental-class islands and many extensive island-arcs at oceanic plate boundaries. Continental mountain ranges have formed adjacent to the active subduction zones of the two principal land masses, and some of their peaks exceed [6000 m] in height. The continents also feature eroded highland remnants of earlier cycles of continental drift. There is moderate vulcanism in the island-arcs, along mid-oceanic ridges, and in the subduction ranges.

Planet Four has a generally warm and humid maritime climate, lacking polar or continental glaciation. Tropical conditions prevail in the equatorial belt, with full-summer temperatures exceeding [40°C] and no winter. The midlatitude continental temperature range is: summer—above [40°C]; winter—above [io°C], Island temperatures are generally lower than continental in summer and higher in winter. One small continent near the North Pole has a summer maximum temperature of [23°C] and a winter minimum of [-s°C]. There is only one small desert, in the rain-shadow of the coast range at the equatorial region of the largest continent.