Higgins looked a little surprised, but after a moment he nodded. "An expert in the field might argue with you on that. But I know no objection to the idea. Not that it matters either way . . . "
"No? Well, tell me this, Higgins. Have your people ever made a study of Pack people's traits, from generation to generation, to see if physical indications of regression are rising or falling at the same rate as the Novo senses?"
"I doubt it," said Higgins.
"Then how, in the name of the Sacred Gene or the objective knowledge you pretend to worship, can you tie the two things together? You've failed to make the kind of study that would provide real evidence for or against your belief that the Novo senses and the regressive signs have the same source! You have no use for the Novo senses, just like the ancient scientists. But you can't deny their existence like they did, so instead you put your evidence together in a way that says 'Novo senses are primitive, and no good!'
"What's more, you've overlooked something important about this connection you say exists between the genetic structures and the unconscious mind. The Pack people have been seeking stronger Novo senses for hundreds of years! Our unconscious minds must be as aware of that as they were of the fall of Science! Why don't you admit that this desire might be getting through to our chromosomes, Higgins? Is it because that would be admitting the Pack people are making progress in a very real way, and in a way you haven't touched with all your miraculous gadgetry?"
"Nonsense!" Higgins exploded. "Of all the absurd, self-justifying pieces of warped reasoning I've ever heard—"
"Don't get so red in the face, Higgins," Starn chided him icily. "After all, I was merely presenting a theory."
"Umpf!" grunted Higgins, obviously annoyed at himself over his loss of temper. He simmered down. "I'm sorry I blew up that way, Starn. As you say, you were merely presenting a theory—an extremely childish one, I must say, but . . . "
"Where's the flaw?" asked Starn.
"Let's see if I have this straight," said Higgins. "Your idea is that the fall of Science did have a regressive effect on the Pack people, but that this had nothing to do with the Novo senses, which received their stimulus later on, and from another source."
"That's about it. Where's the flaw?"
"Well, I can't say right off. But there has to be one there somewhere! Something wrong in another way, though, is your motivation for producing such a theory. You have a deep emotional need for it to be true, Starn! The truth of a theory with such a motivation is necessarily suspect."
"And doesn't that apply to Olsapern theories that make Pack men degenerates?" demanded Starn.
"Absolutely not! We have no ill will toward the Pack people. Our trading posts, which we keep going solely to relieve hardships within the Packs, should make that clear."
"Solely for that reason?" Starn countered. "Don't you think helping the poor Pack savages gives you another reason to feel superior? Or that you might actually be trying to keep us inferior by making us dependent?" Higgins grimaced angrily and strode off across the room to gaze out a window. Starn smiled. He had the Olsapern on the run.
"Don't ignore the lesson of this fight with Nagister Nornt, Higgins," he continued relentlessly. "Your science didn't stop him, and our Novo senses didn't stop him. He was beaten by the combination of the two, working together! We needed your talents and you needed ours! You can't keep pretending the Novo senses are worthless, and beneath the attention and understanding of your scientists, when you find them very worthwhile indeed when you're face to face with a dangerous enemy.
"And one final point, which my father made years ago: What about my own special sense, Higgins? I know you Olsaperns are fascinated and puzzled by it. Why? Because it is without precedent! You can't find a single slim thread of evidence tying it to ancestral man! That disturbs you, doesn't it? You're afraid it is something completely new, something leading directly toward the Ultimate Novo!"
He fell silent and eyed Higgins expectantly, waiting for the man to turn and face him. But when Higgins turned, the smile on his face was not one of gracious surrender. It was, startingly, a smile of triumph.
"Starn, lad," he chuckled, "how can you be so sure you're right about everything else when you're so totally wrong about yourself! A special Novo sense? Hell, boy! You have no such thing! What you have is a creative mind, and a fine one even if it is overloaded with nonsense! That 'special sense' is something you created, to meet a critical need of your boyhood, to make you the equal or better of your telepathic playmates!"
Starn shook his head. "It was nothing I did. It was just there."
"Not when you first needed it. Not until you were eight years old. You needed it before then. Novo senses don't wait that late to appear, do they?"
Starn frowned but didn't speak as Higgins continued, "We know quite a bit about the creative process, lad. It's our stock in trade, after all. One thing we know is that it isn't a conscious process entirely. The key activity is unconscious. Of course you have to be aware of a problem that urgently needs solving. Also, it helps to cast around consciously for an answer, or for data and ideas that might help supply one, but this is only to feed the unconscious mind, and to focus its attention. The creative solution doesn't come from reasoning and the use of logic. It suddenly just flashes up from the unconscious! Then all you have to do is make it work.
"In your case, you had to have a defense against telepaths, and your unconscious went to work on the problem. When you were fishing that day and needed the solution, the unconscious had finished its job and gave you the answer! Of course you couldn't understand that it was something you had created—that was part of the solution. You had to think it was a Novo sense, because nothing else would have made you normal and acceptable."
Higgins beamed at him. "Why do you think we've gone to such expenditure of effort and resources to grow you a new and genuine body, now that Nornt is disposed of? Out of sheer gratitude? Not that we're ungrateful for your valuable collaboration in a critical matter, but . . . well, gratitude isn't that strong a motivation.
"We did it because of the unique quality of your mind, your creative potential. We don't know of any mind ever displaying such flexibility, or such immediate or total rapport between conscious and unconscious as that 'special sense' of yours requires. Your wife has more than a touch of it, herself, and your son—well, we'll have to watch him and see. The point is, you've got the seeds of greatness in you, Starn!"
Feeling stunned, Starn slumped on the bed. He had found reason to reject many Olsapern theories, and those objections still held good whether Higgins accepted them or not. But so far as the nature of his own, highlyprized special sense was concerned, the Olsaperns were obviously and damnably right!
Novo senses did not wait until the age of eight to suddenly appear. And there were his strange dream experiences, while his new body was growing, in which hundreds of thoughts and clues had milled around, finally fitting themselves together into answers to the puzzling mysteries that had plagued him for so long—answers that came readily to conscious recall after he woke. The experience fitted Higgins' description of creative thinking with appalling accuracy.
"Then there is nothing special about me," Starn muttered. "No special sense."
"The only special sense anybody needs," Higgins beamed cheerily. "The infinity sense—the creative imagination. There's no limit to it."
Starn hardly heard him, because the world that had opened when he was eight years old had finally, irretrievably closed. He was no unique step toward the Ultimate Novo. He was, in fact, little more than what he looked like—an Olsapern with a silly imagination!
His failure to make Higgins see the value of the Novo senses was another blow. Because he had been wrong about one thing—himself—he had given Higgins the only excuse the man needed to conclude, quite comfortably, that he was wrong about everything else as well. Why, if Higgins thought his mind was so uniquely gifted, was he so eager to discard its products?
Because, Starn realized. Higgins had a mind every bit as tightly closed as that of Starn's own father, back in Foser Compound preaching the gospel of the Sacred Gene and belaboring the sins of the Olsaperns! Higgins could give all the lip service he wished to "objectivity" and willing receptiveness of new data and theories, but on the subject of Novo senses his views were more firmly fixed than the stars in the sky. Reasoning and debating the question would never sway him, nor in all probability the majority of Olsaperns, by an inch!
And with that thought, Starn suddenly saw what he had to do. The infinity sense? That's what Higgins had called it, although creative imagination was not really a "sense" in a strict interpretation of the word. But if that was what Starn had, he might as well put it to work! Higgins was talking: " . . . So why don't you dress and I'll send in your wife and son? Too bad we can't continue this discussion for hours, and clear up some of your faulty assumptions. But other duties are calling me."
"O.K.," said Starn distractedly, and began dressing as Higgins left.
His reunion with Cytherni and his introduction to his son was a moment of joy that briefly dispelled his doubts and gloom. But the decision he had reached a few moments earlier was going to affect the futures of his wife and child as well as himself. He had to talk it over with her, and hardly knew how to begin.
For a while Cytherni did not give him a chance. He had never seen her in such a talkative mood.
"And you should see the lovely house and things they've given us," she chattered rapidly, "with a garden and lots of forest and a sciencey kitchen you just wouldn't believe and a whole room full of books and a flier I've already learned to operate and I've taken up paint-sculpturing which is an art-form and a lot of people like my work and say it's imaginative and . . . "
She saw that Starn was staring at her strangely, and came to an uneasy silence. She looked embarrassed.
"You have liked it here?" he asked.
"Oh yes!"
Starn sighed. That eased him of part of his burden, at least.
"Cythie," he began, "it's been so long since we've talked that I'm afraid I'll sound like a stranger to you. I've thought about things we never thought about before. The Olsaperns aren't wrong about everything, Cythie. They've got a part of the truth. Their science has a reality. But in the Packs we have another part, and it is real and true, too, in its way.
"But . . . but the two parts have to be put together, Cythie! And nobody wants to! The Packs want nothing to do with Olsaperns and their science, and the Olsaperns refuse to study the Novo senses of the Packs. But if we ever hope to know the whole truth—and maybe if we ever expect to reach Ultimate Novo—they have to come together!
"The Olsaperns say I have an unusually strong creative imagination, Cythie . . . "
"Oh, you have, Starn," she replied earnestly.
"Well, it looks like that's about the only thing unusual I do have," he said, "so I'm going to use it. I'm going to stay here and try to become a scientist, Cythie! I'll never convince the Packs and Olsaperns that they have to get together by arguing with them. I'll have to show them! I'll have to prove the value of studying the Novo senses by doing it myself, and then producing results!
"So I can't go home, Cythie! There's too much to learn here that I can't learn in the Compound. And I already know things the Olsaperns couldn't let me take home in my head, so they would have to put me through hypnotic erasure to remove that knowledge, and I'd have to start from scratch when I came back.
"I'll have to spend my whole life with the Olsaperns, Cythie, because . . . well, because this is what I have to do. I hope you will stay too. This must sound strange and outlandish to you, but one thing about me hasn't changed. I still love you. Very much."
Suddenly she was in his arms sobbing happily. "Oh, Starn, you big oaf! I was so afraid you would insist on going back! And I don't think I could have, not with little William, or Billy, or Huill, or whatever you decide to call him! Did you think for a second that I could allow our son to suffer through the same kind of childhood we had, with those awful telepaths telling him what he could and couldn't think? I couldn't bear it!"
"You mean you would want to stay here, even if I didn't?" Starn asked, astonished.
"Yes. And don't worry about our people wondering what became of us. When the Olsaperns picked me up at Pile-Up Mountain, they took me to Foser Compound, and the telepaths read me. They know I killed Nornt and they think you're dead, because that's what I thought then. I had . . . gone crazy . . . so the people let the Olsaperns take me to cure me. That's all Higgins says the Pack people ought to ever know. We don't have to go back."
Starn held her close. Cytherni, the very best part of his old world now closed forever, was going to be with him in whatever new world was opening. And ahead was work to be done—a challenge of sweeping import that would have been incomprehensible to him in his earlier life.
The realization came abruptly that he had gained far more than he had lost.
The Mind-Changer
1
When the opportunity finally came, Starn didn't like it. The worst aspect of it was that he would have to use his wife Cytherni, without her knowledge or agreement. This would be far less forgivable than the use Higgins had made of him, to get rid of the telehypnotic megalomaniac Nagister Nornt. Although Starn had required a little coaxing along the way, he had been a willing weapon in the hands of the Olsapern Minister of Domestic Defense. Nornt had abducted Cytherni, and that gave Starn ample reason of his own for wanting the man killed. Nevertheless, while he liked Higgins well enough, Starn could not quite forget that the man had used him. This was a source of antagonism that lingered after five years of frequent association between the two men. Higgins had done his duty effectively by using Starn, and had to be respected for that. But Starn couldn't admire him for it.
How, then, could he ever hope for Cytherni to forgive her own husband if he pulled the scheme he had in mind?
The idea hit him late one afternoon when, feeling frustrated by the slowness of his research work, he had left his workshop and strolled through the house to visit Cytherni's studio. She was working on a large abstract piece of paint-sculpture, so he perched on a stool to chat with her while he watched.
Paint-sculpting was a highly sophisticated and effective art form, and the process of creating in this field was a fascinating one to observe. The "canvas" was a threedimensional matrix of menergy—stuff related to the solid force fields which formed the Hard Line defensive barrier along the Olsapern border—into which paint was injected and precisely located through slender needles of unwettable insulation. The elements of the menergy matrix were flexible enough to allow limited motion, which was powered like the matrix itself by a small nuclear source that usually wound up well concealed in the finished work of art.
The injected paint did not dry; it remained liquid and mobile, but confined by the matrix elements to its proper place in the composition. It could gleam with the wetness of life, of glowing lips or bedewed leaves. And depending on the motions of matrix elements, lips could smile, leaves could quake, sunlit waters could ripple.
The art form was one which Cytherni had mastered quickly after coming to Olsapern country. Because of her Pack upbringing, her works had an appeal for the Olsaperns that was both primitive and exotic, and were in much demand.
In a way this bothered Starn. In the austere society of the Packs, a husband who did not provide for his family was a worthless creature, deserving of little respect. Conditions were, of course, different among the Olsaperns. The necessity of "earning a living" was a concept that didn't apply where advanced technologies supplied an abundance of the necessities and luxuries of life. A person's worth was judged by criteria other than his earning power.
Yet, even from the Olsapern viewpoint, the fact was that Cytherni was providing something society found worthwhile, and Starn was not. She was the valuable member of the family. And Starn, who chose to devote himself to investigation of the Novo senses, was
doing something the Olsaperns not only failed to appreciate, but refused to recognize as even having potential value. Starn was as philosophical as he could be about this, but couldn't help feeling like a squaw-man sometimes. His self-esteem had to suffer terrific punishment, and would have suffered still more if he hadn't been thoroughly convinced of the importance of his researches. But all in all, he was not an unhappy man. He could appreciate his work though nobody else could—except, of course, his young son Billy and to some extent Cytherni. And he had his wife and boy.
For a man who was grimly determined to rip up the fabric of human society, Starn was about as content as any man could possibly be.
* * *
"What do you think you're grinning at?" Cytherni mock-scolded. Starn chuckled. "Same thing as usual. Those busts of Billy." He motioned toward the two lifesize replicas of their son's head and shoulders sitting side by side on a nearby table. "Maybe they're not great art to the Olsaperns, but I think they're the most delightful work you've done!"
"You're as bad as Billy!" she complained, although she was obviously pleased. "It's not enough for him to stand giggling at them for ten minutes at a time. After lunch today he brought three of his playmates in to join him."
"Did they see the humor?"
"Yes indeed. The little Carsen boy nearly split his sides. They're not that funny!"
"I'm not so sure," said Starn, walking over to take another close look at the heads.
Unlike her usual work, these were strictly representational. Each of them looked enough like Billy to be a color triphoto. And at first glance, there was no difference at all between the pair. Only after looking at them for a few moments would someone who knew the boy's parents realize that one of the pieces grasped that which was his mother in the son while the other portrayed him as a reincarnation of his father. To a large degree, these separate resemblances were brought out not by form but by subtle differences in motion of the head, eyes, eyebrows, lips and chin. The movements were all slight, but they succeeded in capturing the special little individual mannerisms of each parent.
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