“Ancestral image,” Wintan said, “or I miss my guess! And that means—it almost has to mean that at one time the Palayatans weren’t immune to . . . ah, wait!”
“Something new?” Duffold said quickly.
Wintan seemed to hesitate. “Yes,” he said.
“Then cut me in again. I don’t want to miss more than I have to.”
For a moment, Duffold thought Wintan hadn’t responded. Then he realized that the blackness before him wasn’t quite what it had been a few seconds ago.
He stared uncomprehendingly. An eerie shiver went over him. “What’s this?” he demanded, his voice unaccountably low.
“Something really new!” Wintan said quietly. “I think, Excellency, that they’ve found ‘X’ !”
For the moment, that seemed to have no meaning to Duffold. The pale thing swimming in the dark before them was roughly circular and quite featureless. He had a feeling it was nothing tangible, a dim light—but his hair was bristling at the back of his neck. The thought came to him that if this was what the projectors were making of the thing that had been tracked down, the mind-machines were as puzzled as he was. “Something really new—” Wintan had said.
He realized that the thing wasn’t alone.
To right and left of it, like hounds cautiously circling a strange beast they had overtaken, moved two lesser areas of light. The human investigators hadn’t withdrawn.
They’re trying to make contact with it, he thought. And some of the sense of awe and oppression left him. If they could face this strangeness at first hand—
It happened quickly. One of the smaller areas of light moved closer to the large one, hesitated and moved closer again. And something like a finger of brightness stabbed out from the large one and touched the other.
Instantly, there was only blackness. Duff old heard Wintan catch his breath, and started to ask what had happened. He checked himself, appalled.
A face swam hugely before them. It was Buchele’s, and it was the face of a personality sagging out of existence. The eyes were liquid, and the mouth slid open and went lax. Across the fading image flashed something sharp and decisive; and Duffold knew, without understanding how he knew it, that Cabon had given a command and that it had been acknowledged.
In the next instant, as the scene of darkness and its pale inhabitant reshaped itself, he knew also by whom the command had been acknowledged.
“No!” he shouted. He was struggling to get up out of the chair, as Wintan called out something he didn’t understand. But it was over by then.
Again there had been three areas of light, two small and one large. Again, a small one came gliding in towards the large one; and again light stabbed out to meet it.
This time, it was like a jarring dark explosion all around him. Dazed, Duffold seemed to hang suspended for a moment over a black pit, and then he was dropping towards it. It was, he sensed suddenly, like dropping into a living volcano. Its terrors, stench, and fury boiled up horribly to engulf him.
The office seemed stuffy. Duffold reached back and turned the refresher up a few notches, simultaneously switching the window view to the spaceport section where the shuttles and transports stood ramped. Since he’d got back, that was the only available outside view he’d cared to look at. Except for that guide of Wintan’s—Albemarl or whatever his name was—four days ago, no Palayatan ever had been allowed into that area. They hadn’t sense enough to insure they would remain un-cindered there.
He noticed the Service transport had landed at Ramp Thirteen. They were punctual, as usual. A few figures moved about it, too far off to be recognized. Duffold picked up the sheaf of Service reports from a corner of the desk, flicked through them and hauled out a sheet. There were some points he wanted to refresh his mind on before the coming interview with—well, with whomever it was they’d decided to send down! He hadn’t specified Pilch, though he imagined it was the kind of job she would be likely to take on.
He read hurriedly, skipping sections here and there . . . Originally, then, it was the class of creatures of which the present-day keff is the only surviving species that forced the divergence in mental development on the proto-humanoids. Their evolutionary response was a shift of the primary center of awareness from the level of sensory interpretation to that of organic control, which has remained a semiautomatic, unconscious area of mind in any similar species. The telepathic bands on which the keff-like carnivores operated could stimulate only the sensory-response areas of the brain. The controlling central mind of the humanoid was no longer affected by them. The continuing inflow of keff-impulses on the upper telepathic bands became a meaningless irritation, and the brain eventually sealed off its receptors to them . . .
“To an observer of the period, it might have seemed that the Palayatan humanoid species now had trapped itself in an evolutionary pocket. Animal intelligence must isolate itself from the full effect of the primitive emotional storms of the unconscious if it is to develop rationality and the ability of abstract thought. In doing this, it reduces its awareness of the semiautomatic levels of mind which remain largely in the area of the unconscious. In this case, however, it was losing contact with the level of sensory interpretation which normally is the indicated area of intellectual development . . . For many hundreds of thousands of years, the Palayatan humanoid remained superficially an animal. His brain was, in fact, continuing to evolve at a rate comparable to the proto-human one; but the increase in consciousness and potential of organization was being absorbed almost entirely by the internal mind to which he as a personality had retreated . . .”
Duffold put that sheet down, shook his head, and selected another one. “. . . The fairly well-developed civilization we now find on Palayata . . . of comparatively recent date . . . The humanoid being with whom we have become familiar conveniently might be regarded as a secondary personality, subordinate to the internal one. However, the term is hardly more justified than if it were applied to the human sympathetic nervous system . . .
“The Palayatan superficial mind has become an increasingly complex structure because the details of its required activities are complex. It has awareness of its motivations, but is not aware that an internal mind is the source of those motivations. It has no understanding of the fact that its individual desires and actions are a considered factor in the maintenance of the planetary civilization which it takes for granted.
“On the other hand, the internal personality, at this stage of its development, is still capable of only a generalized comprehension of the material reality in which it exists as an organism. It employs its superficial mind as an agent which can be motivated to act towards material goals that will be beneficial to itself and its species. By human standards, the goals have remained limited ones since the possibility of achieving them depends on the actual degree of intelligence developed at present by the superficial minds. They are limited again by the internal minds’ imperfect concept of the nature of material reality. As an example, the fact that space might extend beyond the surface of their planet has had no meaning to them, though it has been presented as a theoretical possibility by some abstract thinkers . . .”
Duffold shoved the sheets back into the stack. He couldn’t argue with the reports or with the Service’s official conclusion regarding Palayata, and he didn’t doubt that the Hub Departments would accept them happily. So we’re dealing with a native race of split personalities this time—no matter, so long as the Service guarantees they’re harmless! The emotional disturbance they caused human beings couldn’t be changed, unfortunately; but any required close contacts could be handled by drug-fortified personnel.
Everybody was going to feel satisfied with the outcome—except Duffold. He was reaching for another section of the reports when the desk communicator murmured softly up at him.
“Oh!” he said. “Why, yes. Send her right in!”
He studied Pilch curiously after she was seated. Objectively, she locked as attractive as ever, with her long, cle
an lines and a profile almost too precisely perfect. Otherwise, she stirred no feeling in him this time; and he was a little relieved about that.
“I understand,” she said, “that you weren’t entirely pleased with our reports?”
“I did have a few questions,” Duffold said. “It was very good of you to come. The original reports, of course, have been transmitted to my headquarters.”
She nodded briefly.
“Personally,” Duffold said hesitantly, “I find all this a little difficult to believe. Of course, I blacked out before the investigation was concluded. The reports simply state what you found, not how you got the information.”
“That’s right,” said Pilch. “How we got it wouldn’t mean much to someone who wasn’t familiar with our methods of operation. What part can’t you believe? That the real Palayatan is so far inside himself that he hardly knows we’re around when we meet him?”
“Oh, I’ll accept that that’s the way it is!” Duffold said irritably. “But how did you find out?”
“One of those inner minds told us,” said Pilch. “Not the one inside Yunnan—he was scared to death by the time we got done with him and yelled for help. So another one reached out far enough from the planet to see what was wrong—a colleague of ours, so to speak. At least, he regards himself as a psychologist—a specialist in mental problems.”
Duffold shook his head helplessly.
“Well, it’s an odd sort of existence, by our standards,” Pilch said. “I don’t think I’d go for it myself. But they like it well enough.” She thought a moment and added, “The feeling I had was as if you were a deep-sea animal, intensely aware of yourself and of everything else in a big, dark ocean all around you. Actually, there was a sort of richness in the feeling. I’d say their life-experience is at least as varied as the average human one.”
“What scared Yunnan?” Duffold asked.
“He knew something was wrong. He didn’t realize he’d been removed bodily from the planet, but to use our terms, he felt as if he had suddenly grown almost deaf—and invisible. He couldn’t understand the other Palayatans very well anymore, and they didn’t seem to be too aware of him. And then our investigators suddenly were talking to him! Do you know what human beings seem like to those inside Palayatans? Something like small sleepy animals that have mysteriously turned up in their world. I imagine our degree of organic intelligence can’t be too impressive at that! So when two of those animals began to address him—conscious minds like himself, but not his kind of mind—Yunnan panicked.”
“So he killed Buchele,” Duffold said.
Pilch said impassively, “It would be correct to say that Buchele killed himself. There were sections of his mind that he had never been able to accept as part of himself. Buchele was an idealist in his opinion of himself, and in Service work that’s a risk. Of course, he had a right to insist on taking that risk if he chose.”
“Exactly what did happen to him?” Duffold said carefully.
“The Palayatan jolted a sealed-off section of Buchele’s mind into activity, and Buchele met its impact in full consciousness. It killed him.”
“No matter how you phrase it,” Duffold said, “it seems that one human being, at least, has been murdered by a Palayatan!”
She shook her head. “Not if murder is in the intention. Because it was only trying to frighten Buchele off. It’s the way they deal with another mind that is annoying them.”
“Frighten him off?” Duffold repeated incredulously.
“Look,” Pilch said, “every time you felt that anxiety you mentioned, you’d been jolted by some Palayatan in exactly the same way! Every human being, every intelligent life-form we know about, keeps that stuff out of awareness by layers and layers of mental padding. Our heavy-duty civilized emotions are just trickles of the real thing! It takes the kind of power equipment we have on the ship to drive ourselves down consciously, with full awareness, to the point where we’re close enough to it that a Palayatan could topple us in. So it can’t ever happen on the planet.”
Duffold looked like a man who has suddenly come upon a particularly distasteful notion.
“Some people reported euphorias!” he said.
Pilch nodded. “I didn’t mention that because I knew you wouldn’t care for it. Well, I told you they’ve been regarding us as some sort of small strange animal. Some of them become quite fond of the little beasts. So they stimulate us pleasantly—till we take a nip out of them or whatever it is we do that annoys them. Tell me something,” she went on before he could reply, “just before you blacked out during the investigation, what were the sensations you hit—terror, self-disgust, rage?”
He looked at her carefully. “Well—all of that,” he said. “The outstanding feeling was that I was in close contact with something incredibly greedy, devouring . . . foul! I can appreciate Buchele’s attitude.” He hesitated. “How did it happen that I wasn’t aware of what got Buchele?”
“Automatic switch-off for the instant it lasted. It was obvious that it was going over the level of emotional tolerance that had been set for you. We told you there’d be safeguards.”
“I see,” said Duffold. “Then what about the other thing?”
Pilch looked faintly surprised. “Wintan would have cut you out of it, if he’d had the time,” she said. “But obviously you did tolerate it even if you blacked out for a while. That was still well within the safe limit.”
Duffold felt a slow stirring of rage. “When you took Buchele’s place, it seemed to me that the Palayatan struck at you in the same way he had at Buchele. Is that correct?”
Pilch nodded. “It is.”
“But because of your . . . superior conditioning, it didn’t disturb your . . .”
“Not enough to keep me from making use of it,” Pilch said.
“In what way?”
“I opened it up on the Palayatan. That,” said Pilch, “was when he yelled for help. But it was too bad you picked it up!”
Duffold carefully traced a large, even circle on the desk top with a fingertip. “And you could accept that as being part of your mind?” he said with a note of mild wonder. “Well, I suppose you should be congratulated on such an unusual ability.”
She looked a little pale as she walked out of the office. But, somehow, Duffold couldn’t find any real satisfaction in that.
Wintan was leaning against the side of the central Outpost building as Pilch came out of the entrance. She stopped short.
“Thought you’d be at the transport,” she said.
“I was,” Wintan said. “Twelve slightly stunned keffs in good shape have been loaded, and I was making a last tour of the area.”
“Albemarl?” she asked as they started walking back to the ramps. “Or the psychologist?”
“Both,” Wintan said. “I’d have liked to say good-by to Albemarl, but there’s still no trace of the old tramp anywhere. He’d have enjoyed the keff hunt, too! Too bad he had to wander off again.”
“How about the other one?”
“Well, there’s very little chance he’ll actually contact us, of course,” Wintan said. “However”—he held his right hand up—“observe the new wrist adornment! If he’s serious about it, that’s to help him locate me.”
She looked at two polished black buttons set into a metal wrist-strap. “What’s it supposed to do?”
“Theoretically, it sets up a small spot of static on their awareness band. Tech hasn’t had a chance to test it, of course, but it seems to be working. I’ve been getting some vaguely puzzled looks from our local friends as I wander about, but that’s as much interest as they’ve shown. How did it go with his Excellency?”
“Satisfactorily, I suppose,” Pilch said grudgingly. “No heavy dramatics. But for a while there, you know, that little man had me feeling mighty unclean!”
“Self-defense,” Wintan said tolerantly. “Give him time to shake it down. Basically, he already knows it was one of his own little emotional volcanoes he dropped
into, not yours. But it’ll be a year or two before he’s really able to admit it to himself, and meanwhile he can let off steam by sitting around and loathing you thoroughly from time to time.”
“I read the Predictor’s report on him, too,” Pilch said. “I still don’t agree it was the right way to handle it.”
Wintan shrugged. “Cabon can estimate them! If we’d jolted this one much heavier, it might have broken him up. But if the jolt had been a little too light, he could have buried it permanently away and forgotten about it again. As it is, he knows what’s inside him, and eventually he’ll know it consciously. When he does, he’ll be ready for Service work without qualifications—and that means he won’t go out some day like Buchele did!”
They walked on in silence for a while, through the drifting crowds of visiting Palayatans. Assorted Hub perfumes tinged the air, soft voices chattered amiably, faces turned curiously after the passing humans. “What makes you all so sure Duffold will be back?” Pilch said finally. “Even if he realizes what happened, the rap on the nose he got could be discouraging.”
“It could be, for someone else,” Wintan said. “But there’re some you can’t keep away, once they learn where the biggest job really is. For his Excellency, the rap on the nose will turn out eventually to have been Stage One of conditioning.”
“Well, maybe. But an idealist like that,” said Pilch, “always strikes me as peculiar! They never want to look at the notion that the real reason Man rates some slight cosmic approval is that he can act as well as he does, in spite of the stuff he’s evolving from.”
“Can’t really blame them,” Wintan remarked. “As you probably discovered in your own conditioning, some of that stuff just isn’t good to look at.”
“Now there for once,” Pilch agreed darkly, “you spoke a fairsized truth! Incidentally, that static you’re spreading doesn’t seem to meet with everyone’s approval around here. I’ve been jolted three times in the last ten seconds!”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 61