by Carol
Joe lay down on the ground, sighing. Fangs flashed in the mouth of the black beast which humped over to lick his face. His belly growled with hunger, but he was too tired to fix a meal. Once he had the dogs trained—
Another pseudo would be so much more rewarding to educate.
He could almost see it, in the weary darkening of his brain. Down there, in the valley below the hill, fire and thunder as the ship came to rest. And the steel egg would crack open, the steel arms—already crumbling, puny work of worms!—lift out the shape within and lay it on the earth.
She would stir, shrieking in her first lungful of air, looking about with blank mindless eyes. And Joe would come carry her home. And he would feed her, care for her, show her how to walk—it wouldn’t take long, an adult body would learn those things very fast. In a few weeks she would even be talking, be an individual, a soul.
Did you ever think, Edward Anglesey, in the days when you also walked, that your wife would be a grey, four-legged monster?
Never mind that. The important thing was to get others of his kind down here, female and male. The station’s niggling little plan would have him wait two more Earth-years, and then send him only another dummy like himself, a contemptible human mind looking through eyes which belonged rightfully to a Jovian. It was not to be tolerated!
If he weren’t so tired—
Joe sat up. Sleep drained from him as the realization entered. He wasn’t tired, not to speak of. Anglesey was. Anglesey, the human side of him, who for months had only slept in catnaps, whose rest had lately been interrupted by Cornelius—it was the human body which drooped, gave up, and sent wave after soft wave of sleep down the psibeam to Joe.
Somatic tension travelled skyward; Anglesey jerked awake.
He swore. As he sat there beneath the helmet, the vividness of Jupiter faded with his scattering concentration, as if it grew transparent; the steel prison which was his laboratory strengthened behind it He was losing contact—Rapidly, with the skill of experience, he brought himself back into phase with the neutral currents of the other brain. He willed sleepiness on Joe, exactly as a man wills it on himself.
And, like any other insomniac, he failed. The Joe-body was too hungry. It got up and walked across the compound towards its shack.
The K-tube went wild and blew itself out The night before the ships left, Viken and Cornelius sat up late.
It was not truly a night, of course. In twelve hours the tiny moon was hurled clear around Jupiter, from darkness back to darkness, and there might well be a pallid little sun over its crags when the clocks said witches were abroad in Greenwich. But most of the personnel were asleep at this hour.
Viken scowled. “I don’t like it,” he said. “Too sudden a change of plans. Too big a gamble.”
“You are only risking—how many?—three male and a dozen female pseudos,” Cornelius replied.
“And fifteen J-ships. All we have. If Anglesey’s notion doesn’t work, it will be months, a year or more, till we can have others built and resume aerial survey.”
“But if it does work,” said Cornelius, “you won’t need any J-ships, except to carry down more pseudos. You will be too busy evaluating data from the surface to piddle around in the upper atmosphere.”
“Of course. But we never expected it so soon. We were going to bring more esmen out here, to operate some more pseudos—”
“But they aren’t needed” said Cornelius. He struck a cigar to life and took a long pull on it, while his mind sought carefully for words. “Not for a while, anyhow. Joe has reached a point where, given help, he can leap several thousand years of history—he may even have a radio of sorts operating in the fairly near future, which would eliminate the necessity of much of your esping. But without help, he’ll just have to mark time. And it’s stupid to make a highly trained human esman perform manual labor, which is all that the other pseudos are needed for at this moment. Once the Jovian settlement is well established, certainly, then you can send down more puppets.”
“The question is, though,” persisted Viken, “can Anglesey himself educate all those pseudos at once? They’ll be helpless as infants for days. It will be weeks before they really start thinking and acting for themselves. Can Joe take care of them meanwhile?”
“He has food and fuel stored for months ahead,” said Cornelius. “As for what Joe’s capabilities are, well, hm-m-m…we just have to take Anglesey’s judgment. He has the only inside information.”
“And once those Jovians do become personalities,” worried Viken, “are they necessarily going to string along with Joe? Don’t forget, the pseudos are not carbon copies of each other. The uncertainty principle assures each one a unique set of genes. If there is only one human mind on Jupiter, among all those aliens—”
“One human mind?” It was barely audible. Viken opened his mouth inquiringly. The other man hurried on.
“Oh, I’m sure Anglesey can continue to dominate them,” said Cornelius. “His own personality is rather—tremendous.”
Viken looked startled. “You really think so?”
The psionicist nodded. “Yes. I’ve seen more of him in the past weeks than anyone else. And my profession naturally orients me more towards a man’s psychology than his body or his habits. You see a waspish cripple. I see a mind which has reacted to its physical handicaps by developing such a hellish energy, such an inhuman power of concentration, that it almost frightens me. Give that mind a sound body for its use and nothing is impossible to it”
“You may be right, at that,” murmured Viken after a pause. “Not that it matters. The decision is taken, the rockets go down tomorrow. I hope it all works out.” He waited for another while. The whirring of ventilators in his little room seemed unnaturally loud, the colors of a girlie picture on the wall shockingly garish. Then he said, slowly:
“You’ve been rather close-mouthed yourself, Jan. When do you expect to finish your own esprojector and start making the tests?”
Cornelius looked around. The door stood open to an empty hallway, but he reached out and closed it before he answered with a slight grin: “It’s been ready for the past few days. But don’t tell anyone.”
“How’s that?” Viken started. The movement, in low-gee, took him out of his chair and halfway across the table between the men. He shoved himself back and waited.
“I have been making meaningless tinkering motions,” said Cornelius, “but what I waited for was a highly emotional moment, a time when I can be sure Anglesey’s entire attention will be focused on Joe. This business tomorrow is exactly what I need.”
“Why?”
“You see, I have pretty well convinced myself that the trouble in the machine is psychological, not physical. I think that for some reason, buried in his subconscious, Anglesey doesn’t want to experience Jupiter. A conflict of that type might well set a psionic amplifier circuit oscillating.”
“Hm-m-m.” Viken rubbed his chin. “Could be. Lately Ed has been changing more and more. When he first came here, he was peppery enough, and he would at least play an occasional game of poker. Now he’s pulled so far into his shell you can’t even see him. I never thought of it before, but…yes, by God, Jupiter must be having some effect on him.”
“Hm-m-m,” nodded Cornelius. He did not elaborate: did not, for instance, mention that one altogether uncharacteristic episode when Anglesey had tried to describe what it was like to be a Jovian.
“Of course,” said Viken thoughtfully, “the previous men were not affected especially. Nor was Ed at first, while he was still controlling lower-type pseudos. It’s only since Joe went down to the surface that he’s become so different.”
“Yes, yes,” said Cornelius hastily. “I’ve learned that much. But enough shop talk—”
“No. Wait a minute.” Viken spoke in a low, hurried tone, looking past him. “For the first time, I’m starting to think clearly about this…never really stopped to analyse it before, just accepted a bad situation. There is something peculiar
about Joe. It can’t very well involve his physical structure, or the environment, because lower forms didn’t give this trouble. Could it be the fact that—Joe is the first puppet in all history with a potentially human intelligence?”
“We speculate in a vacuum,” said Cornelius. ’Tomorrow, maybe, I can tell you. Now I know nothing.” Viken sat up straight. His pale eyes focused on the other man and stayed there, unblinking. “One minute,” he said.
“Yes?” Cornelius shifted, half rising. “Quickly, please. It is past my bedtime.”
“You know a good deal more than you’ve admitted,” said Viken. “Don’t you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“You aren’t the most gifted liar in the universe. And then—you argued very strongly for Anglesey’s scheme, this sending down the other pseudos. More strongly than a newcomer should.”
“I told you, I want his attention focused elsewhere when—”
“Do you want it that badly?” snapped Viken. Cornelius was still for a minute. Then he sighed and leaned back.
“All right,” he said. “I shall have to trust your discretion. I wasn’t sure, you see, how any of you old-time station personnel would react So I didn’t want to blabber out my speculations, which may be wrong. The confirmed facts, yes, I will tell them; but I don’t wish to attack a man’s religion with a mere theory.”
Viken scowled. “What the devil do you mean?” Cornelius puffed hard on his cigar, its tip waxed and waned like a miniature red demon star. “This Jupiter V is more than a research station,” he said gently. “It is a way of life, is it not? No one would come here for even one hitch unless the work was important to him. Those who re-enlist, they must find something in the work, something which Earth with all her riches cannot offer them. No?”
“Yes,” answered Viken. It was almost a whisper. “I didn’t think you would understand so well. But what of it?”
“Well, I don’t want to tell you, unless I can prove it, that maybe this has all gone for nothing. Maybe you have wasted your lives and a lot of money and will have to pack up and go home.”
Viken’s long face did not flicker a muscle. It seemed to have congealed. But he said calmly enough: “Why?”
“Consider Joe,” said Cornelius. “His brain has as much capacity as any adult human’s. It has been recording every sense datum that came to it, from the moment of ‘birth’—making a record in itself, in its own cells, not merely in Anglesey’s physical memory bank up here. Also, you know, a thought is a sense datum too. And thoughts are not separated into neat little railway tracks; they form a continuous field. Every time Anglesey is in rapport with Joe, and thinks, the thought goes through Joe’s synapses as well as his own—and every thought carries its own associations, and every associated memory is recorded. Like if Joe is building a hut, the shape of the logs might remind Anglesey of some geometric figure, which in turn would remind him of the Pythagorean theorem—”
“I get the idea,” said Viken in a cautious way. “Given time, Joe’s brain will have stored everything that ever was in Ed’s.”
“Correct Now a functioning nervous system with an engrammatic pattern of experience—in this case, a nonhuman nervous system—isn’t that a pretty good definition of a personality?”
“I suppose so—Good Lord!” Viken jumped. “You mean Joe is—taking over?”
“In a way. A subtle, automatic, unconscious way.” Cornelius drew a deep breath and plunged into it. “The pseudojovian is so nearly perfect a life form: your biologists engineered into it all the experiences gained from nature’s mistakes in designing us. At first, Joe was only a remote-controlled biological machine. Then Anglesey and Joe became two facets of a single personality. Then, oh, very slowly, the stronger, healthier body…more amplitude to its thoughts…do you see? Joe is becoming the dominant side. Like this business of sending down the other pseudos—Anglesey only thinks he has logical reasons for wanting it done. Actually, his 'reasons’ are mere rationlizations for the instinctive desires of the Joe-facet.
“Anglesey’s subconscious must comprehend the situation, in a dim reactive way; it must feel his human ego gradually being submerged by the steamroller force of Joe’s instincts and Joe’s wishes. It tries to defend its own identity, and is swatted down by the superior force of Joe’s own nascent subconscious.
“I put it crudely,” he finished in an apologetic tone, “but it will account for that oscillation in the K-tubes.” Viken nodded slowly, like an old man. “Yes, I see it,” he answered. “The alien environment down there…the different brain structure…good God! Ed’s being swallowed up in Joe! The puppet master is becoming the puppet!” He looked ill.
“Only speculation on my part,” said Cornelius. All at once, he felt very tired. It was not pleasant to do this to Viken, whom he liked. “But you see the dilemma, no? If I am right, then any esman will gradually become a Jovian—a monster with two bodies, of which the human body is the unimportant auxiliary one. This means no esman will ever agree to control a pseudo—therefore the end of your project.”
He stood up. “I’m sorry, Ame. You made me tell you what I think, and now you will lie awake worrying, and I am maybe quite wrong and you worry for nothing.”
“It’s all right,” mumbled Viken. “Maybe you’re not wrong.”
“I don’t know.” Cornelius drifted towards the door. “I am going to try to find some answers tomorrow. Good night.”
The moon-shaking thunder of the rockets, crash, crash, crash, leaping from their cradles, was long past. Now the fleet glided on metal wings, with straining secondary ramjets, through the rage of the Jovian sky.
As Cornelius opened the control-room door, he looked at his telltale board. Elsewhere a voice tolled the word to all the stations, one ship wrecked, two ships wrecked, but Anglesey would let no sound enter his presence when he wore the helmet. An obliging technician had haywired a panel of fifteen red and fifteen blue lights above Cornelius’ esprojector, to keep him informed, too. Ostensibly, of course, they were only there for Anglesey’s benefit, though the esman had insisted he wouldn’t be looking at them.
Four of the red bulbs were dark and thus four blue ones would not shine for a safe landing. A whirlwind, a thunderbolt, a floating ice meteor, a flock of mantalike birds with flesh as dense and hard as iron—there could be a hundred things which had crumpled four ships and tossed them tattered across the poison forests.
Four ships, hell! Think of four living creatures, with an excellence of brain to rival your own, damned first to years in unconscious night and then, never awakening save for one uncomprehending instant, dashed in bloody splinters against an ice mountain. The wasteful callousness of it was a cold knot in Cornelius’ belly. It had to be done, no doubt, if there was to be any thinking life on Jupiter at all; but then let it be done quickly and minimally, he thought, so the next generation could be begotten by love and not by machines!
He closed the door behind him and waited for a breathless moment. Anglesey was a wheelchair and a coppery curve of helmet, facing the opposite wall. No movement, no awareness whatsoever. Good!
It would be awkward, perhaps ruinous, if Anglesey learned of this most intimate peering. But he needn’t, ever. He was blindfolded and ear-plugged by his own concentration.
Nevertheless, the psionicist moved his bulky form with care, across the room to the new esprojector. He did not much like his snooper’s role, he would not have assumed it at all if he had seen any other hope. But neither did it make him feel especially guilty. If what he suspected was true, then Anglesey was all unawares being twisted into something not human; to spy on him might be to save him.
Gently, Cornelius activated the meters and started his tubes warming up. The oscilloscope built into Anglesey’s machine gave him the other man’s exact alpha rhythm, his basic biological clock. First you adjusted to that, then you discovered the subtler elements by feel, and when your set was fully in phase you could probe undetected and—
Find
out what was wrong. Read Anglesey’s tortured subconscious and see what there was on Jupiter that both drew and terrified him.
Five ships wrecked.
But it must be very nearly time for them to land.
Maybe only five would be lost in all. Maybe ten would get through. Ten comrades for—Joe?
Cornelius sighed. He looked at the cripple, seated blind and deaf to the human world which had crippled him, and felt a pity and an anger. It wasn’t fair, none of it was.
Not even to Joe. Joe wasn’t any kind of soul-eating devil. He did not even realise, as yet, that he was Joe, that Anglesey was becoming a mere appendage. He hadn’t asked to be created, and to withdraw his human counterpart from him would be very likely to destroy him.
Somehow, there were always penalties for everybody, when men exceeded the decent limits.
Cornelius swore at himself, voicelessly. Work to do. He sat down and fitted the helmet on bis own head. The carrier wave made a faint pulse, inaudible, the trembling of neurones low in his awareness. You couldn’t describe it Reaching up, he turned to Anglesey’s alpha. His own had a somewhat lower frequency. It was necessary to carry the signals through a heterodyning process. Still no reception…well, of course, he had to find the exact wave form, timbre was as basic to thought as to music. He adjusted the dials, slowly, with enormous care.
Something flashed through his consciousness, a vision of clouds rolled in a violet-red sky, a wind that galloped across horizonless immensity—he lost it His fingers shook as he turned back.
The psibeam between Joe and Anglesey broadened. It took Cornelius into the circuit. He looked through Joe’s eyes, he stood on a hill and stared into the sky above the ice mountains, straining for a sign of the first rocket; and simultaneously, he was still Jan Cornelius, blurrily seeing the meters, probing about for emotions, symbols, any key to the locked terror in Anglesey’s soul. The terror rose up and struck him in the face.
Psionic detection is not a matter of passive listening in. Much as a radio receiver is necessarily also a weak transmitter, the nervous system in resonance with a source of psionic-spectrum energy is itself emitting. Normally, of course, this effect is unimportant; but when you pass the impulses, either way, through a set of heterodyning and amplifying units, with a high negative feedback—