Psi-High and Others (Ace G-730)

by Alan E Nourse

  It caught him off guard. He tried to formulate an answer, but they swept in swiftly, surrounding him with wave after wave of reproach. As always, he could not tell how this contact with the Enemy was made. Perhaps they, too, had Analogues. He simply felt them, deep in his mind, and they were closer now, all about him, sucking him deep into their minds. He felt a glowing warmth there now that was utterly different from before. He felt himself drawn, moving slowly, then faster and faster, in tightening spirals toward the vortex as the Enemy’s minds drew him in. We want to stop this fighting, but you prolong it. Why? Why wont you give us a chance?

  For the first time he saw the physical images of the Enemy. They were approaching him on the surface. He couldn’t see them clearly . . . only fuzzy outlines . . . but enough to see that they were humanoid, manlike. They moved toward him as he watched. His heart roared with sudden excitement. Could they mean it? Could they really want to reveal themselves, establish contact, put an end to this grueling, brutal Idiot War that had been going on for so long?

  Something in his own mind called out a warning, shrieking an alarm. Don’t be a fool! They’re treacherous, there’s nothing they won’t try. Don’t let them poison you, fight back!

  He caught at the grips, trying to center his mind on the approaching emissaries, trying to catch the fringes of thought that lay beneath the surface, but the wave of reproachfulness came back at him with increasing intensity.

  Why do you hate us so much?

  He knew, coldly, what he had to do. It was the only thing to do, even though it seemed so horribly wrong.

  He waited until the emissaries were close. Then he struck out at their minds, as viciously as he knew how. He drove the blow home with six long months of bitterness and hatred behind it, striking out wildly, slicing them down like wheat before a scythe. He felt them recoil and crumble, and he pressed his advantage coldly, flailing at the insidious supplicating pattern of thought surrounding him.

  The spiral broke, suddenly, releasing him, but this time there was no stark, brutal core of malignancy that he had glimpsed beneath their illusions so many times before. Instead, the vortex receded gently, regretfully . . . injured, bewildered, helpless to understand.

  Why? Why will you not even give us a chance? Why do you hate us so much?

  It was harder to bear than naked savagery. Frantically Provost rang for Relief. It seemed, suddenly, as if all the wrongs and imagined wrongs he had done in his whole life were welling up to torment him; he knew it was only Enemy illusion, but his mind was screaming, twisting in on itself. A sense of guilt and self-loathing swept through him in waves as he fought to maintain the tiny thread of control. Butcher! his own mind was screaming at him. What kind of monster are you. What if they were sincere? What if you were the one who was wrong?

  The Control board jerked him back before he broke, snapped off his Analogue contact abruptly. He stood up in the darkness of the cubicle and disengaged his cramped hands from the grips. It was over; he was safe. His Rehab conditioning cut in now to take over . . . now there would be Relief from the onslaught, quietness, gentleness, childhood memories, peace....

  But the waves of guilt were still washing at his mind. He started walking down the corridor toward the Relief room as his hands began to tremble; then he broke into a run. He knew that only seconds now stood between him and sanity, and sanity lay at the end of the corridor.

  The Turner girl was in the room waiting for him. There was soft music, gentle light. She sat across the room, and suddenly he was a five-year-old again, bewildered and overwhelmed by the frightening world around him, desperate for comfort, affection, reassurance. He hurled himself onto the recliner, felt the Turner girl’s fingers gently stroking his forehead as he let himself go completely, let great sobs of relief erupt from his throat and shake his shoulders.

  She was silent for a long time as his knotted muscles began to relax. Then she leaned forward, bent her lips to his ear.

  “Butcher!” she whispered.

  Only a whisper, but virulent, malignant. “Toad! You call yourself human, but you go down there to butcher them! Monster!”

  Provost screamed. He threw himself back against the wall, arms outstretched, clawing at it and screaming as he stared at her in horror. She faced him, and spit at him, and burst out in mocking laughter as his screams rose from torment to agony.

  An alarm bell was clanging now; the girl’s lips twisted in revulsion. She threw open the corridor door. “Butcher!” she hurled back at him once more, and broke for the door.

  Gunfire rattled from both ends of the corridor. The crossfire caught her, lifted her off her feet and dropped her in a crumpled heap on the metal floor plates.

  Provost huddled in the comer of the room, babbling.

  II

  The enormity of the blow did not register immediately. Like any warfare operation, the Satellite ship was geared to face emergencies; the sheer momentum of its battle station procedure delayed the impact for hours. Then, slowly, the entire operation of the Satellite ship began to freeze in its tracks.

  What had happened was no ordinary emergency.

  To Dorie Kendall the full, terrifying implication was clear from the start. She had long months of Department of Psychology training behind her at the Hoffman Center, weeks of work with the very men who had developed the neuromo-lecular Analogues that were Earth’s only weapon in this war. Even then, the training had not stopped; on the long passage out from Earth she had continued with days and nights of tape-study and hypno-sleep to prepare her for this crucial assignment. She herself had never been in Analogue contact with the Enemy, but she knew a great deal about the Enemy and what the Enemy might do. The instant Dr. Coindreau, the Satellite surgeon, had called her down to the autopsy, she realized what had happened.

  Only now it was dawning on her, in a cold wash of horror, that it was very possibly her own fault that it had happened at all.

  “But why don’t you attack them?" she had asked John Provost a few hours before his shift was to begin. “Why do you always take the defensive?”

  Provost had looked at her, patiently, as though she were a child who didn’t quite understand the facts of life. “They’re perceptive,” he said. “They’re powerful. Incredibly powerful.” “All the more reason to hit them hard," she had argued. “Hit them with a blow that will drive them back reeling.” Provost smiled. “Is that the new DepPsych theory?”

  “All DepPsych knows is that something has to be changed. This war has gone on and on.”

  “Maybe after a while you’ll understand why,” he had said slowly. “How can we hit them with this powerful blow you talk about when they’re busy driving mental javelins into us with all the force they can muster? I can try, but I don’t know how to do it.”

  Well, he had tried, all right, the psychologist reflected, and now bare hours later Provost was strapped down screaming and shattered in one of the isolation cubicles, and the Relief girl. . ..

  She watched Dr. Coindreau’s lean face and careful fingers as he worked at the autopsy table. Every room in Medical Section, every fixture, had a double use. Sick bay and Rehab quarters. Office and lab. Examining room doubling as surgery. Now it was doubling as morgue. She peered down at the remains of the Turner girl in growing anger and revulsion and wondered, desperately, how the Enemy had managed to do it.

  She realized, coldly, that it was up to her to find out how, and fast.

  The Enemy had poisoned the Turner girl, somehow. They had reached into the heart of the Satellite ship and struck at the most critical link in the chain—the Relief program that enabled the men to go back into battle.

  Without Relief, there could be no men to fight.

  But why did we have to murder her? the Kendall girl thought bitterly. If we could have studied her, we might have learned how the Enemy had done it.

  The blinker over the door flashed, and a big heavy-set man stepped into the room. She recognized Vanaman, commander of the Satellite ship. She had talked
to him briefly before. It had been an unpleasant interview; Vanaman had made it quite clear that he could not understand why DepPsych insisted upon sending women out to Saturn Satellite, nor why Earth Control chose now of all times to shift gears and saddle him with Dorie Kendall, intent on finding some new approach to the fighting. The big man glared at her, and then stared down at the thing on the table.

  “The Turner girl?” he asked the surgeon.

  “What’s left of her,” Dr. Coindreau said. “I’m about finished. It’s not going to help us any.”

  “It’s got to help us.” Vanaman’s voice was harsh.

  Done Kendall looked up at him sharply. “Your trigger happy firing squad didn't leave us much to work with, you know.”

  Vanaman’s fist clenched on the table. Deep-cut lines sliced from his nose down to the comers of his mouth. His face showed the grueling, pressure of months of command, and he seemed to control himself only with difficulty. “What did you expect them to do?” he said. “Give her a medal?” The girl flushed. “They didn’t have to kill her.”

  Vanaman blinked at her. “They didn’t, eh? You’ve been helping the doctor here do the post?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And you’ve run a standard post-mortem brain wash?” He nodded toward the neuromolecular analyzer clicking in the wall, the great-grandfather of all Analogues.

  “Of course.”

  “And what did you find, Miss Kendall?”

  “Nothing intelligible,” she said defiantly. “The Enemy had her, that’s all.”

  “Fine,” said Vanaman. “And you’re standing her suggesting that we should have had that running around alive on this ship? Even for ten seconds? We know they had her tongue, they must have had her eyes also, her ears, her reason.” He shook his head. “Everything we’ve done against the Enemy has depended on keeping them away from us, off this ship. That’s why we monitor every move of every man and woman here, Miss Kendall, including yourself. That’s why we have guns in every corridor and room. That’s why we used them on the Turner girl.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then the doctor pushed back from the table and looked up. “I’m afraid you used them too late on the Turner girl,” he said to Vanaman.

  “You mean Provost is dead?”

  “Oh, no.” The doctor jerked off his mask, ran a lean hand through his hair. “He’s alive enough. That is to say, his heart is beating. He breathes. Just what is going on above his ears is something else again. I doubt if even Miss Kendall could tell you that. I certainly can’t.”

  "Then he’s a total loss.” Vanaman’s face seemed to sag, and Dorie realized suddenly how heavily the man had been hanging on the thread of hope that Provost might only have suffered minor harm.

  “Who can say?” the doctor said. “You take a fine chunk of granite and strike precisely the right blow, precisely hard enough at precisely the right angle, and it will shatter into a dozen pieces. That is what happened to Provost. Any salvage will be strictly up to DepPsych. It’s out of my province.” The surgeon’s dark eyes met Dorie’s for a moment, and shifted away. “Unfortunately, the significance of this attack is greater than than the survival or loss of John Provost. We might as well face that right now. The job the Enemy has done on Provost was a precision job. It can mean only one thing: that somehow they have managed to acquire a very complex understanding of human behavior patterns. Am I right, Dorie?”

  She nodded. “It isn’t what they did to Provost that matters so much,” she said, “although that’s bad enough. It’s how they did it that matters.”

  “Then how did they do it?” Vanaman asked, turning on her. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? This isn’t a war of muscle against muscle or bomb against bomb. This is a war of mind against mind. It’s up to the Department of Psychology and the Hoffman Center psych-docs to tell us how to fight this Enemy. Why don’t you know?”

  “I need time,” she said. “I can’t give you an answer.” The big man leaned forward, his lips tight across his teeth. “You’ve got to give me an answer,” he said. “We can’t afford time, can’t you see that? This Satellite is the only shield between Earth and Enemy. If you can’t give us the answer, we’re through, washed up. We’ve got to know how they did what they did to Provost.”

  Through the viewport the pale, yellow globe of Satum stared up at them, unwinking, like the pale eye of a snake. “I wish I could tell you,” Dorie Kendall said. “The Turner girl can’t tell us. Neither can Provost. But there may be one way we can leam.”

  “And that is?”

  “Provost’s Analogue. It has been the real contact with the Enemy. It should know everything Provost knows about them. The Analogue may give us the answer.”

  III

  With Vanaman seated beside her, Dorie fed the tapes from John Provost’s Analogue into the playback unit in the tiny projection room in Integration Section. For a few moments, then, she ceased to be Dorie Kendall of DepPsych, trained for duty and stationed on Saturn Satellite, and became John Provost instead.

  It was an eerie experience. She realized that every Analogue was different, a faithful impression of the mind of its human prototype; but she had not been prepared for the sudden, abrupt contact with the prototype mind of John Provost.

  She felt the sickening thud of his contact with the Analogue just prior to its last descent to the surface. She felt the overwhelming wave of tension and fear that the Analogue had recorded; then the sudden, irrational, almost gleeful sense of elation as John Provost’s eyes and ears and mind floated down to the place where the Enemy was. The Analogue tape was accurate to a high degree of fidelity. Dorie Kendall gripped the chair arms until her wrists cramped.

  It was like going to the surface herself.

  Beside her she was aware of Vanaman’s huge body growing tense as he gnawed his knuckles, soaking in the tape record. She felt the growing tension, the snowballing sense of impending disaster reflecting from John Provost’s mind.

  And then she lost contact with the things around her and fell completely into Provost’s role. The growing supplication of the Enemy surrounded her. She felt the sense of reproach, the helpless appeal of the illusion, and Provost’s response, calculated to perfection and deployed like a pawn on a chessboard. It’s a trick, a pitfall, watch out! Don’t be fooled, don’t fall into their trap. . . .

  She felt the wild fury of Provost’s mind as he hurled the illusion aside, struck out at the Enemy as she had told him to do. And then the receding waves of supplication and reproach from the Enemy, and the overwhelming, demoralizing wave of guilt from his own mind—

  In that moment she began to understand John Provost, and to realize what the Enemy had done. Her face was pale when the tape stopped. She clenched her fists to keep her hands from trembling.

  Vanaman leaned back, defeat heavy on his face. “Nothing," he said. “It’s always the same. We have nothing.”

  “I didn’t realize what they could do,” Dorie said.

  “But that was on the surface. Down there we could fight it, control it. Now they’ve reached us here, too.” The commander stood up and started for the corridor. "For all we know, they’ve been here all along, just playing with us. We can’t really be certain that they haven’t. Can you begin to see what we’ve been fighting, now? We don’t know anything about them. We can’t even be sure we’re fighting a war with them.”

  Dorie Kendall looked up, startled. “Is there any doubt of that?”

  “There’s plenty of doubt,” Vanaman said. “We seem to be fighting a war, except that nboody seems to understand just what kind of war we’re fighting, or just why we’re fighting it.” His voice trailed off and he shrugged wearily. “Well, we’re backed up to the wall now. Provost was our best Analogue man. He depended utterly on Relief to put him back together again after one of those sessions down there. The Turner girl was the whole key to our fighting technique, and they got to her somehow and poisoned her. If they can do that, we’re through.”
/>   The girl stared at him. “You mean we should just quit? Withdraw?”

  Vanaman’s voice was bitter. “What else can we do? Any one of the girls in Relief could be just the same as the Turner girl, right now. They’ve cracked open our entire strategy in one blow. The Relief program is ruined, and without Relief I can’t send another man down there.”

  “But you’ve got to,” Dorie said. “This Satellite is the Earth’s only shield. We can’t stop now.”

  “We can’t fight them, either. We’ve been fighting them for months, and we know nothing about them. They come from—somewhere. We don’t know where, or when, or how.

  All we know is what they did to Titan. We’re trying to defend ourselves against an imponderable, and our defenses are crumbling.” Vanaman closed the tape cans and tossed them into the return file with an air of finality. “Do you know what Provost called this war?”

  Dorie Kendall nodded. “He told me. An Idiot War.”

  “And he was right. Their war, not ours. What do they want? We don’t know. On their choice of battlefield, in their kind of warfare, they’re whipping us, and we don’t even know how. If we had even a glimpse of what they were trying to do, we might be able to fight them. Without that, we’re helpless.”

  She heard what he was saying, and she realized that it was almost true, and yet something stuck in her mind, a flicker of an idea? “I wonder,” she said. “Maybe we don’t know what the Enemy is trying to do here—but there’s one possibility that nobody seems to have considered.”

  Vanaman looked up slowly. “Possibility?”

  “That they don’t know what they’re trying to do, either," Dorie Kendall said.

  IV

  It was a possibility, even Vanaman grudgingly admitted that. But as she went down to Isolation Section to examine John Provost, Dorie Kendall knew that it made no sense, no more nor less than anything else that the Enemy had done since they had come six months before into Earth’s solar system.