Psi-High and Others (Ace G-730)

by Alan E Nourse

  They had come silent as death, unheralded: four great ships moving as one, slipping in from the depths of space beyond Pluto. How long they had been lurking there, unobserved but observing, no one could say. They moved in slowly, like shadows crossing a valley, with all space to conceal them, intruders in the enormous silence.

  An observation post on tiny Miranda of Uranus spotted them first, suddenly and incredibly present where no ships ought to be, in a formation that no Earth ships ever would assume. Instrument readings were confirmed, questioned, reconfirmed. The sighting was relayed to the supply colony on Callisto, and thence to Earth.

  Return orders were swift: keep silence, observe, triangulate and track, compute course and speed, make no attempt at contact. But return orders were too late. The observation post on Miranda had ceased, abruptly, to exist.

  Alerted patrol ships searched in vain, until the four strange ships revealed themselves in orbit around Saturn. Deliberately? No one knew. Their engines were silent; they drifted like huge encapsulated spores, joining the other silent moons around the sixth planet. They orbited for months. Titan Colony watched them, Ganymede watched them, Callisto watched them.

  Nothing happened.

  On Earth there were councils, debate, uncertainty; speculation, caution, fear. Wait for them to make contact. Give them time. Wait and see. But the four great ships made no move. They gave no sign of life. Nothing.

  Signals were dispatched, with no response. Earth prepared against an attack—a ridiculous move. Who could predict the nature of any attack that might come? Still, Earthmen had always been poor at waiting. Curiosity battled caution and won, hands down. What were these ships? Where did they come from? Hostile or friendly? Why had they come here?

  Above all, what did they want?

  No answers came from the four great ships. Nothing.

  Finally an Earth ship went up from Titan Colony, moving out toward the orbit of the intruders. The crew of the contact ship knew their danger. They had a single order: make contact. Use any means, accept any risk, but make contact. Approach with caution, with care, gently, without alarming. But make contact. At any cost.

  They approached the intruders, and were tom from space in one instantaneous flash of white light. Simultaneously, Titan Colony flared like an interplanetary beacon and flickered out, a smoking crater three hundred miles wide and seventy miles deep.

  Then, incredibly, the four great ships broke from orbit and fled deep beneath the methane and ammonia clouds of Saturn’s surface. Earth reeled from the blow, and waited, paralyzed, for the next—and nothing happened. No signal, no sign, nothing.

  But now the intruders were the Enemy. The war had begun, if it was a war; but it was not a war that Earthmen knew how to fight A war of contradiction and wild fllogic. A war fought in a ridiculous microcosm where Earthmen could not fight, with weapons that Earthmen did not comprehend. ,

  An Idiot War....

  Dorie went to see John Provost just eight hours after the Enemy had struck through the Turner girl. As she followed the tall, narrow-shouldered doctor into the isolation cubicles of Medical Section, he stopped and turned to face her. “I don’t think this is wise at all.”

  “Maybe not" the girl said. “But I have no choice. Provost was closer to the Enemy than anyone else here. There’s no other place to start.”

  “What do you think you’re going to learn?” Dr. Coindreau asked.

  “I don’t know. Only Provost knows exactly what happened in that Relief room.”

  “We know what happened,” the doctor protested. “The Relief room was monitored. Provost had come close to his breakpoint when Control jerked his Analogue back from the surface. The pressure on the men under battle conditions is almost intolerable. They all approach breakpoint, and induced regression in the Relief room is the fastest, safest way to unwind them, as long as we don’t let them curl up into a ball.”

  “You mean it was the fastest and safest way,” Dorie corrected him.

  The doctor shrugged. “They hit Provost at his weakest point. The Turner girl couldn’t have done worse with a carving knife. I still don’t see what you’re going to learn from Provost.”

  “At least I can see what they’ve done to him.” She looked at the doctor. “I don’t see how my seeing him can hurt him.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried about him.” The doctor opened the

  door. At the nursing desk a corpsman was punching chart-cards. “How’s he doing?” the doctor asked.

  "Same as before.” Then the corpsman saw the girl. “Doc, you aren’t taking her in there, are you?”

  “That’s what she wants.”

  “You know he's not exactly sold on girls, right now.” “I’ll risk it,” Dorie said sharply.

  Inside the cubicle they found Provost lying on his back on a bunk. The pale blue aura of a tangle-field hovered over him, providing gentle but effective restraint.

  Provost was singing.

  The words drifted across the room. Dorie suddenly caught them and felt her cheeks turn red.

  “Hello, John,” the doctor said. “How are you feeling?" Provost stopped singing. “Fine. Yourself?”

  “This is Miss Kendall. She’s going to help take care of you.” “Well, now, that’s just fine.” Provost turned his face toward Dorie. No sign of recognition; his eyes were flat, like a snake’s eyes. Impersonal—and deadly. “Why don’t you leave us alone to talk, Doc? And turn this tangle-field off. Just for a minute.”

  She shivered at the tone. Dr. Coindreau said, “John, do you know where you are?”

  “In a tangle-field.”

  “Do you know where?”

  Provost ignored the question, stared fixedly at the girl. She had never seen such a malignant stare.

  “Do you know what happened to you?” the doctor tried again.

  His eyes didn’t waver, but he frowned. “Memory’s a little sticky. But ten seconds out of this tangle-field would help, I bet.” She saw his hand clench on the coverlet until the knuckles whitened.

  The doctor sighed. “Listen to me, John. You were on the surface. Something happened down there. What—” Provost obviously was not listening. “Look, Doc, why don’t you cut out of here? My business is with her, not you.” “All right, John.” Dr. Coindreau turned away. He led the girl back into the corridor. She was no longer blushing. She was dead white and trembling. “You know that he’d

  kill you before he finished,” the doctor said to her gently. “Yes.” She nodded. “I know."

  “At least the mechanism is direct enough. Fairly primitive, too. And let’s face it, a weaker man would either be dead or catatonic. Provost is a rock of stability in comparison.”

  She nodded. “But he’s turned his hatred on the girl, not on the Enemy.”

  “It was the girl who hit him, remember?” They stepped into an office, and she took die seat the doctor offered gratefully. “Anyway,” he said, “Provost never actually contacted the Enemy. We speak as though he’s actually been down on the surface physically, and of course he hasn’t. You know how an Analogue works?”

  “I ought to—I have one—but I only know the general theory, not the details.”

  “Nobody knows the details too well, not even your friends at the Hoffman Center. Nobody really could. An Analogue is at least quasi-sentient, and the relationship between an Analogue and its operator is extremely individual and personal. That’s precisely why Analogues are the only real weapons we have to use against the Enemy.”

  “I can’t quite see that,” Dorie said.

  “Look—these creatures, whatever they are—buried themselves on the surface of Saturn and just sat there, right? The blows they struck against Titan Colony and the contact ship showed us the kind of power they could bring to bear— but they didn’t follow up. They struck and ran. Pretty pointless, wouldn’t you say?”

  It seemed so, at first glance. Dorie Kendall frowned. “Maybe not so pointless. It made counterattack almost impossible.”

 
Dr. Coindreau nodded grimly. “Exactly the point. We didn’t know what—or how—to counterattack. We practically had to do something, and yet there was nothing we could do.”

  “Why didn’t we land and hunt them out?” the girl asked. “We can get down there, can’t we?”

  “Well, it’s possible, but it would have been worse than useless. It would have taken all our strength and technology just to survive down there, let alone do anything else. So we used Analogues, just the way Grossman and his crew used them to explore the surface of Jupiter. The Analogues were originally developed to treat paranoids. The old lysergic acid poisons had proved that a personality could dissociate voluntarily and reintegrate, so that a psych man could slip right into a paranoid fantasy with his patient and work him on his own ground. Trouble was that unstable personalities didn’t reintegrate so well, which was why so many people blew up in all directions on LSD.” Dr. Coindreau paused, chewing his lip. “With Analogues, the dissociation is only apparent, not real. A carbon copy, with all the sensory, motor, and personality factors outlined perfecdy on protein-molecule templates. The jump from enzyme-antagonists to electronic punched-molecule impressions isn’t too steep, really, and at least the Analogues are predictable.”

  “I see,” Dorie Kendall said. “So the operatives—like Provost—could send their Analogues down and explore in absentia, so to speak.”

  “As a probe, in hope of making contact with the Enemy. At least that was the original plan. It turned out differently, though. That was what the Enemy seemed to be waiting for. They drove back the first probers with perfectly staggering brutality. We struck back at them, and they returned with worse. So pretty soon we were dancing this silly gavotte with them down there, except that the operatives didn’t find it so silly. Maybe the medieval Earth wars seemed silly, too, with the battleground announced in advance, the forces lined up, the bugles blowing, parry and thrust and everybody quits at sunset. But lots of men got killed that way just the same." He paused for a moment, wrappped in his own thoughts, and then went on with sudden firmness: “There was no sense to this thing, but it was what the Enemy seemed to want. And our best men have thrown everything they could into it, and only their conditioning and the Relief room has kept them going.”

  “Weren’t Psi-Highs used for a while?” Dorie said.

  “Yes, but it didn’t work. The Enemy is not telepathic, for one thing, or at least not in the sense we think of it; and anyway, the Psi-Highs couldn’t keep themselves and their analogues separated. It was pure slaughter, for them, so they were pulled back to Earth to help build the Analogues for psi-negatives to use." He shot a glance toward the cubicle. “Well, now that’s all over. No Relief, no Analogues. The Enemy has simply shifted the battle scene on us, and we’re paralyzed.”

  For a long moment, the DepPsych girl sat in silence. Then she said, “I don’t think ‘paralyzed’ is exactly the word you want. You mean ‘panicked’.”

  “Does it make any difference?”

  “Maybe a world of difference,” the girl said thoughtfully, “to the aliens.”

  V

  Paralysis oh panic, the effect on the Satellite ship was devastating.

  Twelve hours after Provost was dragged kicking and screaming out of the Relief room, the ship’s crew waited in momentary anticipation, braced against the next blow. They could not guess from where it might oome, nor what form it might take. They could only sit in agony and wait.

  Twenty-four hours later, they still waited. Thirty-six hours, and they still waited. Activity was suspended, even breathing was painful. In the day room the Analogue operatives gnawed their knuckles, silent and fearful, unwilling to trust even a brief exchange of words. They were Earthmen, the girl realized, and Earthmen were old hands at warfare. They understood too well the horrible power of advantage. Earthly empires had tottered and fallen for the loss of one tiny advantage.

  But the Enemy’s advantage was not tiny. It was huge, overpowering. The men here could only wait for the blow to fall. It had to fall, if there were order and logic in the universe.

  It didn’t fall. They waited, and far worse than a brutal, concerted attack against diem, nothing happened.

  The paralysis deepened. The Enemy had reached a girl within the Satellite and turned her into a murderous blade in their midst Who could say how many others had been reached? No one knew. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to hold on to, nothing.

  Dorie Kendall did not elaborate on her remark to Dr. Coindreau, but something had slid smoothly into place in her mind as she had talked to him, and she watched the Satellite and its men around her grinding to a halt with a new alertness.

  The attack on Provost through the Turner girl was not pointless, she was certain of that. It had purpose. Nor was it an end in itself. It was only the beginning. To understand the purpose it was necessary somehow to begin to understand the Enemy.

  And that, of course, was the whole war. That was what the Enemy had so consistently fought to prevent. They have built up an impenetrable wall, a blinding smokescreen to hide themselves, she thought, but there must be some way to see them clearly.

  The only way to see them was through Provost. She was certain of this, though she wasn’t sure why. She went to the isolation cubicle to see him again, and then again and again. It was unrelieved torment for her each time; for all her professional training, she had never before encountered such a malignant wall of hatred. Each time his viciousness and abusiveness seemed worse as he fought against the restraining tangle-field, watching her with murderous hatred; she left each time almost physically ill, and whenever she slept she had nightmares. But again and again she worked to break through his violent obsession, more and more convinced that John Provost was the key. They were brutal interviews, fruitless—but she watched as she worked.

  Vanaman found her in Medical Section on the third day, a red-eyed, bitter Vanaman, obviously exhausted, obviously fighting for the last vestige of control, obviously helpless to thwart the creeping paralysis in the ship under his command “You’ve got to hit Eberle with something,” he said harshly. “I can’t make him budge.”

  “Who is Eberle?” the girl wanted to know.

  “The Analogue dispatcher. He won’t send an Analogue down.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to.”

  “I’ve got to do do something, Relief or no Relief, but Eberle is dragging his feet.”

  She found John Eberle in the Analogue Banks, working by himself, quietly and efficiently and foolishly, testing wires, testing transmission, dismantling the delicate electronic units and reassembling them in an atmosphere of chaos around him. The operative cubicles were empty, the doors hanging open, alarm signals winking unheeded.

  "What are you doing with them?” Dorie asked, staring down at the dismantled Analogues.

  Eberle grinned foolishly. “Testing them,” he said “Just testing.”

  “But Vanaman says we need them down on the surface now. Can’t you see that?”

  Eberle’s smile faded. “I can’t send them down there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who’s going to operate them?” the dispatcher asked. “What will the operators due for Relief?” His eyes narrowed. “Would you want to take one down?"

  “I’m not trained to take one down. But there are operators here who are.”

  Eberle shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’re DepPsych, maybe you’ve got some magic formula to make the men go down without any Relief to count on. I can’t make them. I’ve already tried it.”

  She stared at him, and felt a wave of helplessness sweep over her. It was as though she were standing in an enormous tangle-field, and all her efforts to free herself only settled it more firmly on her shoulders. She knew it wasn’t anything as simple as fear or cowardice that was paralyzing the ship.

  It was more than that, something far deeper and more basic.

  Once again she was forced back to where it had all started, the only possible channel of attack.
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br />   John Provost. She headed for the isolation cubicle.

  Thirty-six hours, and she had barely slept; when exhaustion demanded rest, her mind would not permit it, and she would toss in darkness, groping for land, for something solid to grasp and cling to.

  Provost sucked up most of her time—wasted hours, hours that drained her physically and emotionally. She made no progress, found no chink in the brutal armor. When she was not with him she was in the projection booth, studying the monitor tapes, watching and listening, trying somehow to build a composite picture of this enigmatic Enemy that had appeared from the depths of space, struck, and then drawn back to the inaccessible surface of Satum. There were too many pictures, that was the trouble. None of them fit. None corresponded to the others. She was trying to make sense from nonsense, and always the task seemed more hopeless than before.

  And yet, slowly, a pattern began to emerge.

  An alien creature, coming by intent or accident into a star system with intelligent life, advanced technology. The odds were astronomical against its ever happening. Probably not a truly unique occurrence in the universe, but very possibly unique for these alien creatures.

  What then?

  A pattern was inevitable. ...

  She answered a violent summons from Vanaman. He demanded progress with John Provost, and she told him there was no progress. He paced the floor, lashing out at her with all the fury that had been building up as the hours had passed. “That’s what you’re here for,” he told her harshly. “That’s why we have DepPsych—to deal with emergencies. We’ve got to have progress with that man.”

  Dorie Kendall sighed. “I’m doing everything I can. Provost has a good, strong mind. He has it focussed down on one tiny pinpoint of awareness, and he won’t budge it from there.”

  “He won’t!” Vanaman roared. "What about you? You people are supposed to have techniques. You can break him away from it.”