It was an odd place. Almost the most definite thing you could say about it was that it was somewhere within the vast bulk of the Service ship. Duffold sat in something like a very large and comfortable armchair with his feet up on a cushioned extension; and so far as he could tell, the armchair might have been floating slowly and endlessly through the pale-green, luminous fog which started about eight feet from his face in every direction. The only other thing visible in the room was another chair off to his right, in which Wintan had been sitting. Even the entrance by which they had come in was indetectable in the luminosity; when Wintan left, he appeared to vanish in cool green fire long before he reached it.
There wasn’t much more time before the work on the captured Palayatan began, and Duffold started running the information he’d been given regarding the operation and his own role as an observer through his mind. Some of the concepts involved were unfamiliar; but, on the whole, it sounded more comprehensible than he had expected. They were acting on the assumption that, with the exception of the “X” factor, the structure of a Palayatan’s mental personality was similar to the human one. They reacted to outside stimuli in much the same way and appeared to follow the same general set of basic motivations.
It was already known that there were specific differences. The Palayatan mind was impermeable to telepathic impulses at the level of sensory and verbal interpretations, which was the one normally preferred by human telepaths when it could be employed, since it involved the least degree of individual garbling of messages. Palayatans, judging by the keff creature’s inability to affect them, were also impermeable to telepathed emotional stimuli. In spite of the effect they themselves produced on most untrained humans, it had been demonstrated that they also did not radiate at either of these levels, as against the diffused trickling of mental and emotional impulses normally going out from a human being.
At least, that was the picture at present. It might change when the ship’s giant amplifiers, stimulators and microscanners were brought into play upon Yunnan’s sleeping brain. If “X” was a concealed factor of the Palayatan’s personality, it would show up instantly. In that case, the investigation as such would be dropped, and the Service would switch its efforts into getting “X” into communication. It should at least be possible to determine rather quickly whether or not “X” was hostile and how capable it was of expressing hostility effectively, either here or on the planet.
But if it was found that Yunnan, as he knew himself, was Yunnan and nothing else, the search would drop below the levels of personality toward the routine mechanisms of the mind and the organic control areas. Somewhere in those multiple complexities of interacting structures of life must be a thing that was different enough from the standard humanoid pattern to make Palayata what it was. They had talked of the possibility that the “X” influence, if it was an alien one, did not extend actively beyond the planet. But the traces of its action would still be there and could be interpreted.
Duffold’s impressions of the possibilities at that stage became a little vague, and he shifted his attention to a consideration of what Wintan had said regarding himself. There was apparently always some risk involved in an investigation of this kind, not to the subject, but to the investigator.
Or, in this case, to the observer.
The trouble was, according to Wintan, that the human mind—or any other type of mind the Service had studied so far, for that matter—was consciously capable of only a very limited form of experience. “A practical limitation,” Wintan had said. “Most of what’s going on in the universe isn’t really any individual’s concern. If he were trying to be aware of it all the time, he couldn’t walk across the room without falling on his face. Besides, it would kill him.”
And when Duffold looked questioningly at him, he added, “Did you ever go in for the Sensational Limitations vogue, Excellency?”
“No,” Duffold said shortly.
“Well,” Wintan acknowledged, “they get a little raw, at that! However, they do show that a human being can tolerate only a definitely limited impact of emotion—artificially induced or otherwise—at any one time, before he loses awareness of what’s going on. Now, the more or less legitimate material the Sensationalists use is drawn from emotions that other human beings have at one time or another consciously experienced, sometimes under extreme stimulation, of course. However, as a rather large number of Sensationalists have learned by now, the fact that a sensation came originally from a human mind doesn’t necessarily make its re-experience a safe game for another human being.”
He was silent for a moment. “That keff animal,” he said then. “You saw it. Can you imagine yourself thinking and feeling like a keff, Excellency?”
Duffold grinned. “I hadn’t thought of it,” he said. He considered and shook his head. “Probably not too well.”
“It appears to be a fairly complicated creature,” Wintan said. “Stupid, of course. It doesn’t need human intelligence to get along. But it’s not just a lump of life responding to raw surges of emotion. There are creatures that aren’t much else, a good deal farther down on the scale. They haven’t developed anything resembling a calculating brain, and what we call emotion is what guides them and keeps them alive. To be effective guides to something like that, those emotions have to be pretty strong. As a matter of fact, they’re quite strong enough to wreck anything as complex and carefully balanced as a conscious human mind very thoroughly, if it contacts them for more than a very short time.”
“How do you know?” Duffold inquired.
“So far, our Hub Sensationalists haven’t learned how to bottle anything like that,” Wintan said. “At least, we haven’t run into any indications of it. However, Psychology Service did learn how, since it was required for a number of reasons. In the process, we might have discovered that emotion can kill the body by destroying the mind in a matter of seconds if we hadn’t been made aware of the fact a good deal earlier—”
“Yes?” Duffold said politely.
“Excellency,” Wintan said, “civilized man is—with good reason, I think—a hellishly proud creature. Unfortunately, his achievements often make it difficult for him to accept that his remote ancestors—and the remote ancestors of every other mobile and intelligent life form we’ve come across—were, at one period, specks of appetite in the mud, driven by terrors and a brainless lust for survival, ingestion and procreation that are flatly inconceivable to the conscious human mind today.”
Duffold laughed. “I’ll accept it,” he said agreeably.
“In that case,” said Wintan, “you might consider accepting that precisely the same pattern is still present in each of our intelligent life forms and is still basically what motivates them as organisms. Selfgenerated or not, emotions like that can still shock the mind that contacts them consciously in full strength to death. Normally, of course, that’s a flat impossibility—our mental structure guarantees that what Alters through into consciousness is no more than the trace of a shadow of the basic emotions . . . no more than consciousness needs to guide it into reasonably intelligent conduct and, usually, at any rate, no more than consciousness can comfortably tolerate. But in an investigation of this kind, we’ll be playing around the edges of the raw stuff sooner or later. We’ll try to keep out of it, of course.”
Duffold said thoughtfully that he was beginning to see the reason for safeguards. “What makes it possible for you to get into trouble here?”
“Something like a cubic mile of helpful gadgetry,” Wintan said. “It’s quite an accomplishment.”
“It is,” Duffold said. “So it’s not all conditioning then. Can you—conditioned—people get along without safeguards?”
Wintan said amiably that to some extent they could. On reflection, it didn’t sound too bad to Duffold. The particular type of safeguard that had been provided for him in the pick-up room was to the effect that as he approached an emotional overload, he would be cut out of contact automatically with the events in
the ship. Otherwise, he would remain an observer-participant, limited only by his lack of understanding of the progress of the operation.
Wintan: I’ve given him fair warning, Pilch.
Pilch, grudgingly: There’s no such thing in this game! I suppose you did what you could.
Pictures moved now and then through the luminous mist. Some were so distinct that it seemed to Duffold he was looking straight through the bulk of the ship at the scene in question. Most were mere flickers of form and color, and a few a tentative haziness in which a single detail might assume a moment of solidity before the whole faded out.
“Cabon’s checking the Anal arrangements,” Wintan said from the chair to Duffold’s right.
Duffold nodded, fascinated by the notion that he was observing the projected images of a man’s mind, and disappointed that the meaning of much of it apparently was wasted on him. Buchele’s waxy face showed up briefly, followed by the picture of a thick-necked man whose cheekbones and jaw were framed by a trimmed bristle of red beard.
“Our primary investigators, those two,” Wintan said briefly. “The other one’s Ringor—head of Pattern Analysis.” The mind-machines and their co-ordinators did what they could; they supplied power and analyzed a simultaneous wealth of detail no human mentality could begin to grasp in the same span of time. To some degree, they also predicted the course that should be followed. But the specific, moment to moment turns of the search for “X” were under the direction of human investigators. Eight or nine others would trace the progress of the leading two but would not become immediately involved unless they were needed. Pilch was one of these.
The reconstruction of Yunnan’s camp area came gradually into sight now, absorbing the pick-up medium as it cleared and spread about and behind the two observers. Presently, it seemed to Duffold that he was looking down at the sleeping figure near the fire from a point about forty feet up in Palayata’s crisp night air. The illusion would have been perfect except for two patches of something like animated smoke to either side of Yunnan. He studied the phenomenon for a moment and was startled by a sudden impression that the swirling vapory lines of one of those patches was the face of the red-bearded investigator. It changed again before he could be sure. He glanced over at Wintan, suspended incongruously in his chair against the star-powdered night.
The Service man grinned. “Saw it, too,” he said in a voice that seemed much too loud here to Duffold. “The other one is Buchele—or the projector’s impression of Buchele at the moment. They’re designed to present what they get in a form that makes some meaning in human perceptions, but they have peculiar notions about those! You’ll get used to it.”
He was, Duffold decided, speaking of one of the machines. He was about to inquire further when the scene became active.
Something a little like a faint, brief gleaming of planetary auroras . . . then showers of shooting stars . . . played about the horizons. For a moment he forgot he was watching a reconstruction. The lights and colors flowed together and became the upper part of the body of a blond woman smiling down over the distant mountains at the sleeping Palayatan, her hands resting on the tops of the ridges. Briefly, the face blurred into an unpleasantly grimacing mask and cleared again. Then the woman was gone, and in her place was a brightly lit, perfectly ordinary-looking room, in which a man in the uniform of the Service sat at a table.
“What’s all this?” breathed Duffold.
“Eh?” Wintan said absently. “Oh!” He turned his head and laughed. “Our investigators were tuning in on each other. They’ve worked together before, but it takes a moment or so—Ah, here we go!”
Duffold blinked. The universe all around them was suddenly an unquiet grayness, a vaguely disturbing grayness because there was motion in it which couldn’t be identified. A rapid shifting and flowing of nothing into nothing that just missed having significance for him.
“About as good a presentation as the projector can manage,” Wintan’s voice said, almost apologetically—and Wintan, too, Duffold noticed now, was invisible in the grayness. He felt uncomfortably isolated. “You’re looking at . . . well, it would be our Palayatan’s consciousness, if he were awake.”
Duffold said nothing. He had been seized by the panicky notion that breathing might become difficult in this stuff, and he was trying to dismiss that notion. A splash of blue, a beautiful, vivid blue, blazed suddenly in the grayness and vanished. “They’re moving,” Wintan’s voice murmured. “Dream level now!”
Breathing was difficult! If only that blue would come back—
It came. Duffold gasped with relief, as gray veils exploded about him and a bright blue sky, deep with cloud-banks, spread overhead and all about. Wintan spoke from somewhere, with a touch of concern, “If this is bothering you at all, I can shut you out of it instantly, you know!”
“No,” Duffold said. He broke out laughing. “I just discovered I’m not here!”
It was true in a peculiar way. There wasn’t a trace of Wintan or himself or of their supporting chairs in sight here. He looked down through empty space where his body should have been and laughed again. But he could still feel himself and the pressure of the chair against him, at any rate; so he hadn’t become disembodied.
“Dreams are odd.” Wintan’s voice sounded as if he might be smiling, too, but the concern hadn’t quite left it. “Especially when they’re somebody else’s. And especially again when that someone isn’t human. Incidentally, this is a visual pick-up for you. All you have to do to break it is to close your eyes.”
Duffold closed his eyes experimentally and patted the side of the chair. Then he opened them again—
Yunnan’s dream had changed in that instant. He was looking down now into a section of a shallow stream, swift-moving and clear, through which a creature like a mottled egg darted behind a silver lure. Another one showed up beyond it, both dashingly quick, propelled by a blurred paddling of red legs.
“Mountain soquas,” said Wintan. “Our friend was spearing them during the day.” His voice sounded thoughtful. “No trace of anything that might indicate ‘X’, so far. I imagine they’ll stimulate a different type of sequence—”
The scene flowed, as he spoke, into something entirely different again. This was, Duffold decided, apparently an angular caricature of a Palayatan town-street, presented in unpleasantly garish colors. Something that was in part a redlegged soqua and in part an extremely stout Palayatan was speaking excitedly to a small group of other Palayatans. The next moment, they had all turned and were staring straight at Duffold. Their eyes seemed to contain some terrible accusation. Involuntarily, he cringed—just as the scene flickered out of existence.
The green luminescence was about them again. From the other chair, Wintan grinned briefly at him.
“Tapped a nightmare layer,” he explained. “It woke him up. So our little friends have bad dreams, too, occasionally!” He studied Duffold quizzically. “Did you get the guilt in that one?”
“Guilt?” Duffold repeated.
“He’d been killing soquas,” Wintan said. “Naughty thing to do, according to his subconscious, so it punished him.” He added, “No luck at all, so far, unless there was something I missed. An orderly, childish mind. No real guile in it—and it does fit the way they look and act!”
“Could it be faked?”
“Well,” Wintan said, “we couldn’t do it. Not to that extent. They’ll hit the Deep Downs next, I imagine. Should become more interesting now.”
A riot of color blazed up about them—color that was too rich and in meaningless flux and motion, or frozen into patterns that stirred Duffold uncomfortably. Something came to his memory and he turned and spoke in Wintan’s direction.
“Yes,” Wintan’s voice replied, “it’s not surprising that it makes you think of some forms of human art. We have a comparable layer.” He was silent for a moment. “How do you feel?”
“Slight headache,” Duffold said, surprised. “Why?”
“It migh
t affect you that way. Just close your eyes a while. I’ll let you know if we run into something significant.”
Duffold closed his eyes obediently. Now that his attention was on it, the headache seemed more than slight. He began to massage his forehead with his fingertips. Wintan’s voice went on, “It’s a nearly parallel complex of mental structures, as one would expect, considering the physical similarities. This particular area originates when the brain’s visual centers are developing in the zygote. It’s pure visual experience, preceding any outside visual stimulus. Later on, in humans anyway, it can become a fertile source of art . . . also of nightmares, incidentally.” His voice stopped, then resumed sharply, “Buchele’s tracing something—there!”
Duffold opened his eyes. Instantly, he had a sensation that was pure nightmare—of being sucked forward, swept up and out of his chair, up and into—
The sensation stopped, and a velvety blackness swam in front of him like an intangible screen. He was still in his chair. He drew in a quivering breath. The only reason he hadn’t shouted in fright was that he hadn’t been capable of making a sound.
“That—!” he gasped.
“Easy,” Wintan said quietly. “I’ve shut you off.”
“But that was that keff animal!”
“Something very like it,” Wintan said, and Duffold realized that he could see the Service man again now. Wintan was watching something that was behind the area of screening blackness for Duffold, and if he felt any of the effects that had paralyzed Duffold, he didn’t show it. He added, “It’s very interesting. We’d been wondering about the keff!”
“I thought,” Duffold said, “that Palayatans weren’t bothered by the animal.”
Wintan glanced at him. “Our present Palayatans aren’t. Did you notice the stylized quality of that image and the feeling of size—almost like a monument?”
Duffold said shortly that he hadn’t been in a frame of mind to observe details. His vulnerability was still irritating. “It looked like a keff to me. Why should it be in this fellow’s mind?”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 60