To Ride Pegasus

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 unusually fair 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, she 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 industries to see the advantages of staff ‘precogs’; particularly one such as Lajos whose accuracy in fire-hazard control had been established beyond question.