The Legacy of Alfred Bester

NOTE: This story is written as an epilogue to the Psi Corps series by J. Gregory Keyes. Characters and Places are the property of JMS, Babylonian Productions, and so forth.

"How'd your talk with the pricipal go?" James asked when he finished chewing and Ben had sat down.

Ben shrugged, "About as well as could be expected. On the condition that we both take counselling with the school psychologist, Linc wasn't suspended."

James covered a grim smile. "Take it then, that you didn't manage to talk about that missing pathology gene?"

"Ha," the sound was more word than laugh. "No, if anything, my arguments just convinced him more of it. But it's not even like my father was especially violent, really. 'Cold' was always the word used to describe him."

"Not violent?" Mark shook his head, denying the claim. "He killed I don't even know how many people, mundanes and telepaths alike."

"More mundanes than telepaths," James qualified.

"He considered all that a part of the war, and therefore, they were neccessary deaths as far as he was concerned. They were a part of his job. He never killed in anger or revenge. He never attacked anybody without reason. That's not pathology, and that's not what Mr. Thrapple is worried about. If he worried that Linc would turn into an assassin, that would at least be understandable, but he's afraid of senseless violence, something my father was never a part of. His violence always had some kind of logic to it. I'm not defending him, I'm just saying that he thought he was doing the right thing."

"You don't have to answer this, if you don't want to, but who's side in the war did you fight on?" Mark asked curiously. "I just wonder because when you say something for our side, I can't tell if you're distancing yourself from your - from Mr. Bester or if you actually believe it."

"If I'd fought on my father's side, do you really think I'd not be sharing the cell next to his?" Ben shook his head. "No, I was on the winning side." Publically, at least. Ben Bester had always been a pragmatist. He'd been on both sides. It was as close as he could have come to neutrality. Both sides had their pluses and their minuses. He helped the pluses and told the other side about the minuses. It also had the additional benefit of putting him on the winning side, regardless of who won - as long as he didn't get caught. The one time he'd been close to discovery, he passed it off as an intelligence gathering mission. Linc wasn't the only Bester who did well as the Blip - er, War Criminal - in those childhood games.

His phone rang, and pulled it out of his pocket with a look of distaste and apprehension. He passed it to James. "If that's Mr. Thrapple, could you tell him I'm ill?"

James accepted the thing, unfolded it, and pushed the ANSWER button. "Dr. Bester's phone, who may I ask is calling?" He listened a moment, then held the mouthpiece against his shoulder. "It's your lab."

Ben held out his hand and took the phone back. "Ben, go."

"Your unit's making a heck of a racket. Beeping. It's password protected so we can't turn it off, and we're getting headaches," the voice on the other side complained.

"I'll be right there." He snapped the phone closed, and looked down at his barely touched meal. He grabbed the hamburger, and said, "You're welcome to the fries, otherwise I'll throw them out."

Mark made a vague wave-like gesture. "I'll have them, you go on. Sounds urgent." Ben nodded and left, dropping the phone back into his pocket and trying to consume the hamburger before he reached the lab.

The others gathered around as he sat at his AI unit and quickly typed in his password, using his body to sheild it from his observers. The password request screen cleared to reveal another password request screen, and he typed in a different combination of letters and numbers. That cleared and the beeping finally stopped. The words "ANALYSIS COMPLETE. SEE RESULTS" were followed immediately by another password field. One of the lab techs huffed a laugh.

Ben ignored him and entered a third string of characters and the meassage "CORRELATION FOUND" appeared. "Found? It found one?" Ben asked, not daring to believe it. He hit another combination of keys even though no request for a password had been made. A colorful representation of a pair of chromosomes appeared on the screen with two places marked. One had a Psi symbol next to it, and the other had the letter P. Ben hit two more keys and the image magnified around the P marker. "There?" he muttered to himself, "That can't be right. That's in-between genes. What's the R-square?" He hit another button and the legend "R²=1" appeared under the picture.

"One?" Ben read in disbelief. He shook his head. "Can't be a hundred percent. A fluke." He began typing again. "Try a larger sample size." It asked for another password and he gave it.

"What?" someone behind him asked, and Ben realized his audience had not left.

"Oh, nothing much," Ben said, trying to keep his excitement in check. "The computer just thinks it found the point in the genome that determines telepathic ability."

One of them shook his head in confusion. "We've know that for centuries."

"No, not the marker that sometimes says you're a teep. The one that says what your P rating is." Stunned silence.

Finally, somebody said, "Impossible. You're right, it's got to be a fluke. They've been looking for that for even longer than we've had the marker." The rest nodded and mumbled their agreement, but they all looked hopefully at the "PROCESSING" screen of Ben's unit. Ben hit another button, and "TIME REMAINING 48:32:21" began counting down.

"Two days?" a middle aged woman exclaimed, "How large a sample size are you using?"

"The whole Psi Corps genetics library," Ben answered, a touch of smugness reaching his voice.

She blinked and shook her head in surprise. "You've permission to use that?"

Ben shrugged, "I know the password, anyway." Someone muttered his last name, but nobody commented to that aloud. He was confident that they were all to eager to know the results than to wonder too much at the legality of him knowing and using the password. Some things about Psi Corps had not changed with the new order. The quest for better telepaths was one of them. If a few unauthorized passwords were used, it wasn't exactly the same thing as human experimentation, and most of the genetists had dabbled in that, too. The majority had all been blanket pardoned for 'just following orders,' Ben included.

Linc was already sitting on the patient's table when Ben entered Dr. Schlick's office. "Sorry I'm late," he said, glancing at the digital clock on the desk that read 16:23. "Exciting day at work." He took the little orange chair again.

"That's alright," the doctor assured him. "Linc was just telling me about his day."

"I was the War Criminal again," Linc explained. "And I hid all during recess and they never found me. They were looking, this time, too. Sometimes, they don't," he added this last for Dr. Schlick's benefit.

She made an appropriately sympathetic noise, then sat forward, signaling the formal begining of the session. "Everything said here will be held in confidence, though I reserve the right to tell Mr. Thrapple my conclusions regarding Linc's social threat or lack thereof."

"Sounds fair," Ben agreed.

She nodded and folded her hands together in front of her. "Good. According to Mr. Thrapple, my assignment here is to make sure Linc and yourself, Dr. Bester, are not a threat to his classmates and the employees of the school. I already feel confident that neither of you are, but I've been paid for weekly sessions with you two, so I'm going to change the focus to helping you cope with your surname and just generally advise on anything you feel you want to bring up with me. Does this seem a reasonable goal?"

Ben nodded, "It does." Linc looked up from the hold in the table's cushion that currently held his interest, and quickly pulled his finger out of it, as though expecting to get in trouble. "What?" he asked when no rebuke seemed forthcoming from the two adults looking at him.

"Linc, please try to pay attention," Ben told him, with little hope of being heeded.

"I was," he insisted. "You and her were talking about grown-up things. Bills and stuff."

Close enough. He'd apparently caught the word 'paid.' "And stuff," Ben agreed. "You were saying, Doctor?"

She smiled a doctor's smile and asked, "So is there anything you'd like to talk about right off? Linc's mother, Linc's grandpapa, your friends, the world in general . . ."

None of the above, Ben thought. But for an answer he shrugged and shook his head. Linc did likewise. "Your friends then," Dr. Schlick said as though he'd spoken. "A neutral topic."

Ben tried to laugh. "It might have been a neutral topic had I had any."

Linc looked at his hands, then spread them, palms upward. "I don't got any either. Just Dad."

"Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't think - Acquaintances then."

Ben exchanged a glance with Linc, *You go ahead first.*

"K. Well, I guess the kids in my class are ack-ackqwain-that word. I play War Criminal and EABI with them at recess, but they always make me be the War Criminal and they don't always look for me and they don't like me much. They always call me Mr. Bester instead of Linc." That, Ben had not known.

"Does that bother you?" the doctor asked.

Linc shrugged. "It's not my name yet. Mr. Bester is a grown-up name."

"But it won't bother you being Mr. Bester when you are a grown-up?"

Linc shook his head. "Nu-uh."

"What about you, Dr. Bester?"

Ben blinked, not expecting the conversation to turn to him so soon. "Do I mind him being called Mr. Bester? Or are we talking about my acquaintences now?"

"Did it bother you being called Mr. Bester, Dr. Bester? You're a P12, why aren't you a Psi Cop?"

"At the time, I was trying to be as unlike my father as I could be. That had nothing to do with what he did and morality played no role in that. You have to understand that I was still reeling from the results of the paternity test. My father never acknowledged me as his own, you know, and even though my mother swore up and down that I was, I didn't know who to believe. So when I was seventeen - and pretty close to graduating as a Psi Cop, actually - I insisted on a test, and it came back positive. I was more than a little upset that he was my dad and he never even bothered with the test and just assumed I wasn't, so I intentially failed all my Psi Cop class finals, thus disqualifying me for the occupation, and went into genetics instead. Figured I wouldn't run across him much there. I was just being a selfish, stupid, vengeful teenager. I should have gone into the Culinary."

"Why's that?"

"The only experimentation they do there is taste testing."

She sat up straight at his sharp tone, and said only, "Oh." Several moments passed in silence. Linc shifted position and his heels soon began to thunk against the drawers. Ben looked pointedly at his son's feet and the thumping stopped as he changed position again. "Well," the doctor finally said, "If you'd like to come by when Linc's in class sometime, we could talk about that more."

"No," Ben said firmly.

"Or anything else you feel uncomfortable discussing in front of him."

"No," Ben repeated, starting to feel like a petulant two-year-old.

She sighed and looked at the clock. 16:31. Had it really been less than ten minutes since he arrived? "Look, Dr. Bester, if you don't talk, I can't help you."

"I thought you were supposed to be helping Linc."

"Sometimes, the most help I can give a kid is to help his parent," she leaned forward and responded with a hint of angry frustration in her voice.

"And you think this is one of those situations?" Ben shot back, causing Linc to push himself against the wall, as though trying to get out of a crossfire.

She glanced at Linc and answered more slowly thatn she almost had. "Yes. Your father's shadow falls much more heavily on you. Only a shadow of that shadow falls on Linc and I think most of that is filtered through you." She sat back and asked clinically, "What is Grandpapa's secret?"

Ben found himself on his feet with no memory of stading up. He made a conscious effort to unclench his jaw and fists. "Come on, Linc," he said, slowly, holding a hand out toward his son, though his brown eyes never left the psycologist. Linc took it tentatively then sensing that his father was not at all upset with him, he hopped down from the table confidently. "In one week," Ben told her, "we'll talk about my acquiantances."

She slumped in her seat as the door closed behind Dr. Bester and ran a shaking hand over her eyes. That man could be as frightening as his father when he had a mind to be. It wasn't so much the flash of temper that was scary as the way he bottled it back up inside him. She wondered, not for the first time that day, whether she was good enough to handle this case. She was a school psychologist. She was supposed to deal with the children. Upsets over grades, sibling rivalry, self-confidence problems, jiltings by boyfriends or girlfriends. A few parent divorces, some deaths of grandparents or other older family, and the occassional parent's or friend's death.

Well, Lincoln Bester met two of the criteria: a mother's death and a grandparent's death. But where was it written that she had to deal with a child facing seclusion because his grandfather was Alfred Bester? What right do war criminals have to have children? It creates all sorts of messy problems. Which brings her back to Benjamin Bester. His were the problems she might have been able to help with if she'd caught him when he was still Linc's age or even a little older. Parental rejection. A famous father. But back then it was still the Grins who dealt with psychology and she'd been a child herself. Whatever could have been done then, the damage was there in his psyche now. So now her job was not to prevent, but to repair.

There were no books or course that she'd ever heard about that said how to fix the mental wounds of having a father like Alfred Bester. To her knowledge, Hitler was childless, so no previous case there. Children of other dictators . . . well, they probably hadn't gone to see psychologists. If it hadn't been for Linc and Mr. Thrapple, neither would Ben - Dr. Bester. He didn't understand the importance that he get help. Raised by anybody else, preferably with a different surname, Linc would be like any other child.

Al Bester was a product of his time and his experiance more than his genes. After all, nobody had ever heard of the Mr. Bester who was Al's father except to hear that he was dead. Everyone knew Al had been raised by the Corps with no human parents. She wished a psychologist had been around to help him. The Grins were a very poor substitute.

Linc, for certain, had never met his grandfather in person. He and his father hadn't even gone to his funereal. She'd checked. Dr. Bester had attended Al Bester's trial in Paris, but that was the last, and possibly the only, time he'd seen his father alive. As far as she could tell, Dr. Bester had never told Mr. Bester of the result of the paternity test.

Despite, or perhaps because, of this lack of contact, Mr. Bester was possibly the most defining role model in Benjamin Bester's life. And Benjamin Bester was the most defining role model in Lincoln Bester's life. Linc's grandpapa was only important to him because his grandpapa was important to his dad.

And then there was 'grandpapa's secret.' That, more than anything else, was what worried her. What could the son and grandson - who had almost no contact with him - know of Alfred Bester that nobody else did? Most of his life was public record, especially with that autobiography that was just published, but somehow Ben and Linc knew something that was worthy of the title 'grandpapa's secret,' a title powerful enough to cut a chattering boy off in mid-sentance. A secret powerful enough to send Dr. Bester fleeing, not once, but twice. Mr. Bester's life was scary enough, she wasn't sure she wanted to know what kept his descendants tight-lipped even in a protected conversation. But a secret is a dangerous thing and sometimes talking about them helps. At this late date, who could one of Bester's secrets possibly hurt?

Ben sat in a soft blue armchair, with his face in his hands, looking anything but comfortable. "Linc," he finally said.

The boy lay on the grey carpet, practicing drawing his letters. He carefully finished crossing a 't' before saying, "Yeah."

Ben sat straighter, and dropped his hands into his lap. "Do you want to go to school or is home-schooling good enough?"

Linc shrugged. "Dunno." He put his pencil down, and swiveled to a sitting position. He cock his head to one side and asked, "Why?"

"I don't really like Dr. Schlick, and if you get home schooled, then we don't have so talk to her anymore."

"Oh." He picked up the pencil again and started drawing a 'u'. When he reached the bottom of the curve, he stopped and looked at his dad again. "Dunno," Linc said in case he wanted another opinion on the subject.

"One more week," Ben decided. "We'll see then." That felt a little less like a cowardly escape. A little. And yet the thought of meeting with Dr. Schlick again made him break out in a cold sweat of fear. He didn't want to talk about his life, his father, and most especially, his father's secrets. The Shadow tech alone would open the way for a board of inquiry that he probably couldn't withstand. And Lincoln had used it. That would cast a dark shadow over the boy that he did not deserve. And then there was the Dexter thing. That wouldn't be dangerous, exactly, but he knew in his gut that it shouldn't get out that Stephen Dexter and Al Bester were one and the same. No, that irony was for the Bester family only. "Linc?"

He finished a 'v'. "Yeah?"

"Don't tell her about the vids you saw on my computer, ok?"

He nodded, crossed his heart, and locked his lips. "Grandpapa's secret." He started drawing a 'w.'