To Ride Pegasus
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Серия: Talents #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «To Ride Pegasus». Краткое содержание книги:
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 overload 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 Laps 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 it, 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 fetus 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?”