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

was late on a dreary winter day. School was over, and Don and I were fooling around in what we thought was an empty school gym, making a basketball perform impossible tricks. An older boy named O'Shaughnessy, newly come to the school from a tough neighborhood in Boston, happened to come along and spot us working our psychokinetic magic. He didn't know what he was seeing—but he decided it must be something big and sauntered out to confront us.
    "You two," he said in a harsh, wheedling voice, "have got a
secret gimmick
—and I want in on it!"
    "Comment? Comment? Qu'est-ce que c'est?" we babbled, backing away. I had the basketball.
    "Don't gimme that Frog talk—I know you speak English!" He grabbed Don by the jersey. "I been watching and I seen you gimmick the ball, make it stop in midair and dribble all over your bodies and go into the hoop in crazy ways. Whatcha got—radio control?"
    "No! Hey, leggo!" Don struggled in the big kid's grip and O'Shaughnessy struck him a savage, sharp-knuckled blow in the face that made my own nerves cringe. Both of us yelled.
    "Shaddup!" hissed O'Shaughnessy. His right hand still clenched Don's shirt. The left, grubby and broken-nailed, seized Don's nose in some terrible street-fighter grip with two fingers thrust up the nostrils and the thumbnail dug into the bridge. Don sucked in a ragged agonized breath through his mouth, but before he could utter another sound the brute said:
    "Not a squeak, cocksucker—and your brother better hold off if he knows what's good for the botha you!" The fingers jammed deeper into Don's nose. I experienced a hideous burst of sympathetic pain. "I push just a little harder, see, I could
pop out his eyeballs.
Hey, punk! You wanna see your brother's eyeballs rollin' on the gym floor? Where I could
step
on 'em?"
    Queasily, I shook my head.
    "Right." O'Shaughnessy relaxed a little. "Now you just calm down and do a repeat of that cute trick I saw you doing when I came in. The in-and-outer long bomb."
    My mind cried out to my brother: "DonnieDonniewhatgonnaDO?
    TricktrickDOit! DOitGodsake—
    Thenhe'llKNOW—
    O'Shaughnessy growled, "You stalling?" He dug in. I felt pain and nausea and the peripheral area of the gym had become a dark-red fog.
    "Don't hurt him! I'll do it!"
    Trembling, I held the ball between my hands and faced the basket at the opposite end of the court. It was fully sixty feet away, more than eighteen meters. I made a gentle toss. The ball soared in a great arc as though it were jet-propelled and dropped into the distant basket. When it hit the floor it bounced mightily, came up through the hoop from beneath, and neatly returned to my waiting hands.
    "Jeez!" said O'Shaughnessy. "Radio control! I knew it. Thing's a gold mine!" Raw greed glared out of his eyes. "Awright, punk, hand over the ball and the gimmick."
    "Gimmick?" I repeated stupidly.
    "The thing!" he raged. "The thing that controls the ball! Dumb little fart-face frog! Don't you know a ball-control gimmick like that's gotta be worth a fortune? Get me outa this backwoods hole and back to Beantown and my Uncle Dan and—never mind! Hand it over."
    "Let my brother go first," I pleaded.
    The big kid laughed. He crooked one leg around Don's ankle and simultaneously pushed. My brother sprawled helplessly on the floor, gagging and groaning. O'Shaughnessy advanced on me with hands outstretched. Two of his fingers were bloody.
    "The ball and the gimmick," he demanded, "or it's your turn, punk."
    "The only gimmick's inside my head," I said. "But you can have the ball."
    I drove the rubber sphere at him with all my psychokinetic strength, hitting him full in his grinning face. His nose shattered with the impact and the ball burst its bladder. I heard a gargling scream from O'Shaughnessy and a throaty noise like a Malamute snarl from somebody else.
    Help me
get
him Donnie!
    The torn and flattened ball like some writhing marine organism clamping itself across a horror-stricken face. Savage sounds and