To Ride Pegasus
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Серия: Talents #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «To Ride Pegasus». Краткое содержание книги:
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 Joel Andres feels, that private reactions are a strong basis for predicting public ones. You’re reluctant to tell Ruth
Horvath, 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.
“What’s that?”
“I apologize, Jerry. Your point is well taken. I’ve erred-on the side of the angels, I hope-but this attitude of mine towards Ruth Horvath is a curious vacillation from my tendency to be forthright. Yet I know that there is a reason to be slightly devious.”
“Then you’ll ease back on this all-open-and-above-board routine?”
“Yes, I’ll ease back as you put it.”
“Still,” and Jerry frowned slightly, “it isn’t as if they won’t find out soon enough.” He meant the Horvaths.
“They need time to get used to the idea.” Op Owen was thinking about humanity.
“Where on earth did she get those blue eyes?” Lajos asked as he sat entranced by his three-month-old daughter’s attempts to capture her toes. She flopped over, gurgling cheerfully to herself.
“Heavens, it’s possible,” Ruth replied, beaming fatuously as she caught her daughter’s eye. “I may be grey-eyed, and you brown, but we both have ancestors with blue eyes-four generations back.”
“I always said you were recessive, hon.”
“Humph. I don’t mind in the least, not if it produces a blue-eyed blonde daughter with dimples. And I’ve got her, haven’t I, love? You’re all mine.”
“Except for the twenty-three chromosomes from me.”
Dorotea twisted her head backwards over her shoulder and burbled moistly at her mother.
“Love at first bite,” Lajos said in a mutter of mock surliness. “There’s a conspiracy of females against this poor lone male.”
Dorotea impartially gurgled at him, her eyes bright and wide and happy.
“You never had it so good,” said Ruth.
And Lajos privately admitted the truth of that. Ruth was so enthralled with her daughter, their apartment had a noticeable atmosphere of benevolence. He was more relaxed than ever, and despite an increase in Incidents, extending beyond his usual affinity, he suffered less from the depressions and exhaustions that were the inevitable postlude.
The day Dorotea’s Talent blossomed, Daffyd op Owen was reviewing the records obtained overtly and covertly from the Horvath apartment. He’d had Lester Welch, his electronic chief, rig a buried web in Ruth’s mattress, in case the baby instinctively contacted her mother first. However, Lester had pointed out the slight variation in Ruth’s readings. It was more as if the needle had snagged itself on an imperfection in the graph paper. There was no such variation on the baby’s recordings. Welch had been about to discredit the occurrences until he checked them against Lajos’s and discovered that the minute variations in Ruth’s chart always occurred exactly at the onset of Laps’ Incidents.
“She might well be a latent ‘receiver,’” op Owen said to Welch, “only now beginning to develop from continued proximity to her husband and the advent of the child. I can’t present another explanation.”
“That’d be nice, Dave. Ruth’s a good little person: cheerful, intelligent and crazy for her husband and child. Just the sort of well-balanced, understanding parent to have for a…”
Lester was abruptly staring at op Owen’s retreating back. The man had leaped to his feet and raced down the hall to the recording room. Lester Welch was not Talented, although his electronic engineering was often sheer inventive genius, but op Owen didn’t react like that without good cause. When Welch reached the doorway, he saw that Charlie Moorfield, the day engineer, was hunched over the console, unconscious, but op Owen’s attention was for a graph.
“Take a close look at Dorotea’s graph,” op Owen said, grinning fit to pop his jaw, and then he passed his associate on his way out.
Common sense told op Owen that, despite the urgency of the summons, there could be no danger threatening the baby. Yet he could not disregard that call. What could have happened, he wondered as he ran down the front steps. Suddenly he noticed that there seemed to be a mass exodus from all parts of the building.
And everyone was headed in the same direction. As abruptly as the call had been issued, it ceased. People slowed down, stopped, looking around, grinning foolishly.
“What was that?” “Who called?” “Wot hoppened?”
“It’s all right,” op Owen found himself reassuring them. “A new technique improperly shielded,” he said to the telepaths. And grinned at his own dissembling as he continued towards the Horvath’s apartment.
There was a crowd in the hall before their apartment Op Owen politely pushed his way through the disturbed residents. Dorotea, her baby face still tear-streaked, was held high in her mother’s arms, cooing and chortling at the smiling faces around her. Op Owen’s arrival signaled the crowd’s discreet dispersal and shortly, he was alone with the mortified mother.
“I’m so embarrassed, sir,” Ruth said, jiggling her baby as she walked nervously up and down her living room. “I fell asleep with the tape recorder blaring away.
And I just…didn’t hear Dorotea wake up…I’ve never done such a thing before and we’ve never permitted her to cry long…”
“No one is remotely suggesting that you mistreat Dorotea.” Op Owen smiled as the baby flirted delightfully with him. “In fact a little honest frustration is very useful. It certainly placed her Talent.”
“Ooooooooh,” and Ruth collapsed on the sofa, staring wide-eyed at Daffyd op Owen as she absorbed the implication, which she had been too preoccupied with calming Dorotea to see.