INTERVENTION by Julian May, Ted Dikty Read Free Book Online Page A

sharing a wide range of nuance and emotional content. Our farscanning ability was weaker, requiring intense concentration in the transmission of any but the simplest images. By mutual agreement, we never told anyone explicit details of our telepathic talent, and we became increasingly wary of demonstrating metapsychic tricks to our cousins. Like all children, we wanted to be thought "normal." Nevertheless there was a good deal of fun to be had using the powers, and we couldn't resist playing with them surreptitiously in spite of vague notions that such mind-games might be dangerous.
    In the lower grades of grammar school we drove the good sisters crazy as we traded farspoken wisecracks and then snickered enigmatically out loud. We sometimes recited in eerie unison or antiphonally. We traded answers to test questions until we were placed in separate classrooms, and even then we still managed to cooperate in uncanny disruptive pranks. We were tagged fairly early as troublemakers and were easily bored and inattentive. To our contemporaries we were the Crazy Twins, ready to do the outrageous to attract attention—just as in our baby years we had vied to attract the notice of hard-working, hard-drinking One' Louie and kind but distracted Tante Lorraine. (But our foster parents had three additional children of their own after our arrival, for a total of nine, and we were lost in the crowd of cousins.)
    As we grew older we developed a small repertoire of other metafaculties. I was the first to learn how to raise a mental wall to keep my inmost thoughts private from Don, and I was always better at weaving mind-screens than he. It provoked his anger when I retreated into my private shell, and he would exercise his coercive power in almost frantic attempts to break me down. His mental assaults on me were at first without malice; it was rather as if he were afraid to be left "alone." When I finally learned to block him out completely he sulked, then revealed that he was genuinely hurt. I had to promise that I would let him back into my mind "if he really needed me." When I promised, he seemed to forget the whole matter.
    Don amused himself by attempting to coerce others, a game I instinctively abhored and rarely attempted. He had some small success, especially with persons who were distracted. Poor Tante Lorraine was an easy mark for gifts of kitchen goodies while she was cooking, for example; but it was next to impossible to coerce the redoubtable nuns who were our teachers. Both of us experimented in trying to read the minds of others. Don had little luck, except in the perception of generalized emotions. I was more skilled in probing and occasionally picked up skeins of subliminal thought, those "talking to oneself" mumblings that form the superficial layer of consciousness; but I was never able to read the deeper thoughts of any person but my twin brother, a limitation I eventually learned to thank God for.
    We developed a modest self-redaction that enabled us to speed the healing of our smaller wounds, bruises, and blisters. Curing germ-based illness, however, even the common cold, was beyond us. We also practiced psychokinesis and learned to move small objects by mind-power alone. I remember how we looted coin telephones throughout two glorious summer weeks, squandering the money on ice cream, pop, and bootleg cigarettes. Then, because we were still good Catholic Franco-American boys at heart, we had qualms of conscience. In confession Father Racine gave us the dismal news that stealing from New England Bell (we didn't reveal our modus operandi) was just as much of a sin as stealing from real human beings. Any notions we might have had of becoming metapsychic master-thieves died aborning. Perhaps because of our upbringing, perhaps because of our lack of criminal imagination, we were never tempted along these lines again. Our fatal flaws lay in other directions.
    The first indications of them came when we were ten years old.
    It