INTERVENTION Read Online Free PDF

into a longer view of Earth as seen from the Milieu observation vessel. The sun shone full on it and it was blue and white, suspended like a brilliant agate against the foaming silver breaker of the galactic plane.
    "There is more," Doka'eloo said. "The Lylmik order us observers to commence a thirty-year phase of intensified overt manifestation. The people of Earth are to be familiarized with the concept of interstellar society—as a preliminary to possible Intervention."
    The three affronted Simbiari fell to choking on green phlegm. The Poltroyan couple clapped their hands and trilled.
    NupNup Nunl controlled itself heroically, quieting its reproductive organs to the magenta state, and uttered a luxurious sigh. "I'm so glad. It's really a fascinating world, and there
is
a statistically significant chance that the people will shape up. Very long odds, but by no means hopeless..."
    It extended a six-jointed digit and activated the ambient audio system, which was patched to Vienna radio. The climaxing strains of "Verklärte Nacht" filled the oversight chamber of the exotic space vessel.
    Invisible, it continued the Milieu's surveillance of over sixty thousand years.

3
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
     
    I WAS BORN in 1945, in the northern New Hampshire mill town of Berlin. My twin brother Donatien and I took our first breaths on 12 August, two days after Japan opened the peace negotiations that would end World War II. Our mother, Adèle, was stricken with labor pains at early Sunday Mass, but with the stubbornness so characteristic of our clan gave no indication of it until the last notes of the recessional hymn had been sung. Then her brother-in-law Louis and his wife drove her to St. Luke's, where she was delivered of us and died. Our father Joseph had perished six months earlier at the Battle of Iwo Jima.
    On the day of our birth, clouds of radioactivity from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still being carried around the world by the jet-stream winds. But they had nothing to do with our mutations. The genes for metapsychic operancy lay dormant in many other families besides ours. The immortality gene, however, was apparently unique. Neither trait would be recognized for what it was until many years had gone by.
    Don and I, husky orphans, had a legacy from our mother of a GI insurance policy and an antique mantelpiece clock. We were taken in by One' Louie and Tante Lorraine. It meant two more mouths to feed in a family that already included six children; but Louis Remillard was a foreman at the big Berlin paper mill that also employed other males of our clan (and would employ Don and me, in good time). He was a stocky, powerful man with one leg slightly shorter than the other, and he earned good wages and owned a two-storey frame apartment on Second Street that was old but well maintained. We lived on the ground floor, and Oncle Alain and Tante Grace and their even larger brood lived upstairs. Life was cheerful, if extremely noisy. My brother and I seemed to be quite ordinary children. Like most Franco-Americans of the region, we grew up speaking French to our kinfolk, but used English quite readily in our dealings with non-Francophone neighbors and playmates, who were in the majority.
    The Family Ghost, when I first met it, also spoke French.
    It happened on an unforgettable day when I was five. A gang of us cousins piled into the back of an old pickup truck owned by Gerard, the eldest. We had a collection of pots and pans and pails, and were off on a raspberry-picking expedition into the National Forest west of town, a cut-over wilderness beyond the York Pond fish hatchery. The berries were sparse that year and we scattered widely, working a maze of overgrown logging tracks. Don and I had been warned to stick close to our cousin Cecile, who was fourteen and very responsible; but she was a slow and methodical picker while we two skipped from patch to patch, skimming the easily reached fruit and not