“Do you want him dead?” she asked. “That’s what you’ll get if I drive him too hard. He’s clinging to his life, and I mean that literally. To him, I am the Turner girl, and all that is sustaining him is this vicious drive to destroy me, as quickly as he can, as horribly as he can. You can use your imagination, I think.”
Vanaman stared at her. She met his haggard eyes defiantly. Vanaman broke first. It was almost pitiable, the change; he seemed to age before her eyes. The creases in his face seemed to harden and deepen, and his heavy hands— threatening weapons before—fell limp. Like a spirited dog that had been whipped and broken by a brutal master, he crumbled. “All right. I can’t fight you.” He spread his hands helplessly. “You know that I'm beaten, don’t you? I’m cornered, and there’s no place to turn. I know why Provost dreaded those long waits between shifts now. Thats all I can do—wait for the blow to fall.”
“What blow?” said the girl.
“Maybe you can tell me.” A strangled sound came from Vanaman’s throat. “Everything we’ve done against them has been useless. Our attempt to contact them, our probing for them and fighting them on the surface—useless. When they got ready to hit us here, they hit us. All our precautions and defenses didn’t hinder them.” He glared at her. “All right, you tell me. What is it we’re waiting for? When is the blow coming? From where?”
“I don’t think there’s going to be any blow,” said Dorie Kendall.
“Then you’re either blind or stupid,” Vanaman snapped. “They’ve driven a gaping hole in our defenses. They know that. Do you think they’re just going to let the advantage slide?”
“Human beings might not, but they’re not human beings. You seem to keep forgetting that.”
Words died on Vanaman’s lips. He blinked and frowned. “I don’t follow you,” he said after a moment.
“So far, everything they’ve done fits a pattern,” Dorie said. “They have physical destructive power, but the only times they’ve used it was to prevent physical contact. So then after they struck, what did they do? Press forward? Humans might, but they didn’t. Instead, they moved back to the least accessible geographical region they could find in the solar system, a planetary surface we could not negotiate, and then they waited. When we sent down Analogue probers, they fought us, in a way, but what had made that fight so difficult? Can you tell me?”
“The fact that we didn’t know what we were fighting, I suppose,” Vanaman said slowly. “The Analogue operatives didn’t know what was coming next, never two attacks the same.”
“Exactly,” said the girl. “They knocked us off balance and kept us there. They didn’t use their advantage then. Everything was kept tightly localized until the Analogue operatives began to get their feet on the ground. You saw the same tapes I did. Those men were beginning to know what they were doing down there; they knew they could count on their conditioning and the Relief rooms to keep them from breaking, no matter how powerful the onslaught. So now, only now, the Enemy has torn that to ribbons, through the Turner girl.” She smiled. “You see what I mean about a pattern?”
“Maybe so,” Vanaman conceded, “but I don’t see why.” “Look—when you poke a turtle with a stick, what happens? He pulls in his head and sits there. Just that one little aggressive act on your part gives you a world of information about how turtles behave. You could write a book about turtles, right there. But suppose it happened to be a snapping turtle you poked, and he took the end of the stick off. You wouldn’t need to poke him a second time to guess what he would do, would you? You already know. Why bother with a second poke?”
“Then you’re saying that the Enemy won’t strike again because they have what they want,” said Vanaman.
“Of course,” the girl said bleakly. “They have Provost. Through Provost they have every mind on this Satellite. They don’t need to fight on the surface any more, they’re right here.”
Vanaman’s eyes were hard as he rose from his seat. “Well, we can stop that. We can kill Provost.”
She caught his arm as he reached for the intercom switch. "Don’t be ridiculous,” she said tightly. “What do you think you’re going to do when you’ve killed him?"
“I don’t know,” he snarled. “But I’ll do something. I’ve got to get them out into the open somehow, out where I can see them, before we all split open at the seams."
“You mean find out whether they have green skins and five legs or not? Who cares?” She twisted his arm with amazing strength, pushing him back into the seat. "Listen to me, you fool. What we have to know is what they want, how they think, how they behave. Physical contact with them is pointless until we know those things. Can’t you see that? They’ve realized that from the start.”
He stared at her. “But what do you think we should do?” “First, find out some of the things we have to know,” she said. “That means we have to use the one real weapon we’ve got—John Provost—and I’m going to see that he’s kept alive. Show me your arm.”
Puzzled, Vanaman held it out to her. The needle bit so quickly he could not pull back. Realization dawned on his face.
Sorry,” she said gently. “There’s only one thing we can do, and killing Provost isn’t it” She pushed Him back in the seat like a sack of flour. “I wish it were,” she added softiy, but Vanaman wasn’t listening any more.
VI
As she moved down the corridor the magnitude of what she was doing caught Dorie,and shook her violently. Things had crystallized in her mind just before she had gone to talk with Vanaman. A course of action had appeared which she only grasped in outline, and she had moved too fast, too concisely, before thinking it out in full. But now she had tripped the switch. The juggernaut was moving in on her now, ponderously, but gaining momentum.
There would be no stopping it now, she knew, no turning it back. A course of action, once initiated, developed power of its own. She was committed....
Earth was committed. ...
She shook off that thought, forcefully. She was too terrified to think about that aspect of it. Her mind was filled and frozen by the ordeal she knew was facing her now: John Provost.
Somehow she had to take Provost back from them, wrench him out of their grasp. She remembered the hard, flat look in his eyes when he watched her, and she shuddered.
There was a way to do it.
All around her she could feel the tension of the Satellite ship, waiting helplessly, poised for demolition. She ran down the empty corridors, searched the depths of the ship until she found the place she was seeking. Once inside Atmosphere Control section she leaned against the wall, panting.
Then she slipped the filters into her nostrils, and broke the tiny capsules, feeding them into the ventilation ducts of the ship.
She would take Provost back from the Enemy; then, if she survived—what? There were only hazy outlines in her mind. She knew the limitation of thought that was blocking her. It was the limitation that was utterly unavoidable in thinking of an alien, a creature not of Earth, not human. The limitation was terribly easy to overlook until the alien was there facing her: the simple fact that she was bound and strapped by a human mind. She could only think human thoughts, in human ways. She could only comprehend the alien insofar as the alien possessed human qualities, not an inch further. There was no way she could stretch her mind to cope with alien-ness. But worse—even in trying desperately to comprehend alien-ness, her own human mind inevitably assumed a human mind on the part of the alien.
This the Enemy did not have. What kind of mind the Enemy did have she could not know, but it was not a human mind. Yet that alien mind had to be contacted and understood.
It had seemed an insoluble conundrum—until she had realized that the Enemy had faced exactly the same problem, and solved it.
To the Enemy, stumbling upon intelligent life in Earth’s solar system, a human mind was as incomprehensible as an alien mind was to a human. They had faced the same dilemma, and found a way to cope with it. But how? The very
pattern of their approach showed how. It was data, and Dorie Kendall had treated it as data, and found the answer.
It revealed them.
They tried so hard to remain obscure while they studied us, she thought as she moved back toward the Analogue Section, and yet with every move they made they revealed themselves to us further, if we had only had the wit to look. Everything they did was a revelation of themselves. They thought they were peering at us through a one-way portal, seeing us and yet remaining unseen, but in reality the glass was a mirror, reflecting their own natures in every move they made. They discovered our vulnerability, true, but at the same time inadvertently revealed their own.
The ventilators hummed. She felt the tension in the ship relaxing as the sleep-gas seeped down the corridors. Muscles uncoiled. Fear dissolved from frightened minds. Doors banged open; there was talking, laughter; then lethargy, dullness, glazed eyes, yawns, slack mouths—
Sleep. Like Vanaman, slumped back in his chair, everyone on the Satellite slept. Operatives fell forward on their faces. The girls in the Relief rooms yawned, dozed, snored, slept.
It seemed to Dorie that she could sense Provost’s thoughts twisting out toward her in a tight, malignant channel driving to destroy her, seeking release from the dreadful hatred the aliens were using to bind him. But then even Provost dozed and slept.
With the filters protecting her, she was alone on the ship, a ghost. In the Analogue bank she activated the circuits she needed, set the dials, rechecked each setting to make certain that she made no error.
She dared not make an error.
Finally, she went to Provost. She dragged his drugged body into the Analogue cubicle and strapped him down. She fit his hands into the grips. Another needle, then, to counteract the sleep-gas, and his eyes blinked open.
He saw her and lunged for her with no warning sound. His arms tore at the restraints, jerking murderously. She jumped back from him a little, forcing out a twisted smile. She reached out mockingly to stroke his forehead, and he tried to bite her hand.
“Butcher!” she whispered. “Monster!”
Pure hate poured from his mouth as she laughed at him. Then she threw the Analogue switch. He jerked back as contact was made, and she moved swifdy to her own Analogue helmet waiting in the adjacent cubicle, threw another switch, felt in her own mind the sickening thud of Analogue contact.
Her Analogue. A therapeutic tool before, now a deadly weapon in frightened, unsteady hands.
She was afraid. It seemed that she was watching images on a hazy screen. She saw Provost there, facing her, hating her, but it was only a mental image. She was sitting alone in darkness and knew that he also was sitting in darkness. Then gradually the darkness seemed to dissolve into unreality; the two Analogue 'images—hers and Provost’s—became sharp and clear.
It was like a dream, a waking nightmare. Provost was moving in on her slowly, his mouth twisting in hatred, great knots of muscle standing out in his arms. He seemed to tower over her for a moment in vicious antidpaton. She screamed and broke down the corridor. He was after her like a cat. He leaped, struck her legs, threw her down on the metal floor and fell on her. She saw his arm upraised, felt the fist crash down again and again and again. Broken flesh, broken bones, paste, pulp, again and again. And in the dark Analogue cubicle she seemed to feel every blow.
She closed her eyes, her control reeling. There would be no Relief for her later, she knew that. She fought him, then abandoned fighting and just hung on doggedly, waiting for the end.
Abruptly, he was gone. She had felt his release as his hatred had burned itself out on her. He had stopped, and stood still, suddenly mild, puzzled, tired, wondering as he looked down at the thing on the floor. And then. . . .
She knew he had started for the surface.
VII
To Provost it was like awakening from warm and peaceful sleep into terror.
He was horrified and appalled to realize that he had been sleeping. What had happened? Why didn’t Control respond? Frantically he seized the hand grips, drove his Analogue down toward the surface. In his mind were fragments of memory. Something hideous had happened, long long ago, something in the Relief room. Afterwards he had been held down in a tangle-field, and time after time the Turner girl had come back to him in the isolation cubicle—or had it been the Turner girl? Then just now he had found her and the tangle-field was gone, and the hideous thing had been repeated.
And the horrible, abrupt awakening to the fact that the Satellite ship was utterly helpless and undefended from the Enemy..
How long had he sleptP What had happened? Didn’t they realize that every passing second might be precious to the Enemy, fatal to the Satellite?
He felt someone following him, screaming out at him in alarm. Not the Turner girl, as he had thought, but Dorie Kendall, the DepPsych agent, following him down to the surface with her own Analogue.
Provost hesitated, fighting the sense of urgency in his mind. “Don’t stop me,” he told her. “I’ve got to get down there. There’s no one covering—”
“You can’t go down,” she cried. “You have no support here. No conditioning, no Relief. We’ve got to do something very different.”
“Different?” He felt her very close to him now and he paused in confusion. What did she know about the Enemy? “What’s happening here? The Enemy is down there. Why have we stopped fighting?”
She was telling him, frantically, as he groped through his confusion and tried to understand. “They had to know if we had a vulnerability, any vulnerability. Something they could use against us to protect themselves if they had to. They knew they could never risk direct contact with us until they knew that we were vulnerable in some way.”
Provost shook his head, uncomprehending. “But why not?” “Try to see their view,” she said. “Suppose we were hostile, and invulnerable. We might not stop at destroying their ships, we might follow them home and destroy them there. They couldn’t know, and they couldn’t take a risk like that. They had to find a vulnerability to use as a weapon before any contact was possible. So they drew us out, prodded us, observed us, trying to find out limitations— if we had any. And they discovered our vulnerability—panic. A weakness in our natures, the point where intelligence deserts us and renders us irrational, helpless to fight any more.
This is what they could use to control us, except that they must have the same vulnerability!”
He hesitated. The driving urge to go on down to the surface was almost overwhelming, to grapple with them and try once again to break through their barrier there. “Why should they have the same weakness we have? They're aliens, not humans.”
“Because they have been doing exactly the same thing that we would have done if we had been in their place. Think, John! In all the star systems they must have searched, no sign of intelligent life. Then, suddenly, a solar system that is teeming with life. Intelligent? Obviously. Dangerous? How could they know? We wouldn’t have known, would we? What would we have done?”
Provost faltered. “Tried to make contact, I suppose.” “Physical contact? Nonsense. We wouldn’t have dared. We couldn’t possibly risk contact until we knew how they thought and behaved, until we knew for certain that we could defend ourselves against them if necessary, that they had some kind of vulnerability. Once we knew that, the way would be open for contact. But no matter how eager we were for contact, and no matter how friendly they might appear we would have had to have the weapon to fight them first. Or take an insane risk, the risk of total destruction.”
He understood her, but it didn’t make sense. He thought of Miranda outpost, Titan Colony, and shook his head. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “What they did here was incredible.” “Only if you assumed that they were hostile,” she said softly.
“What about the contact ship, the colony on Titan? They burned them both, blew them to kingdom come.”
“Because they had to. They did what we would have done under the same circumstances. They go
aded us. Then they took cover and waited to see what we would do. They made us come after them where we couldn’t reach them physically, to see what we could do. They deliberately kept one step ahead, making us reveal ourselves every step of the way, until they found the soft spot they were seeking and threw us into panic. What they failed to realize was that they were inevitably mirroring themselves in everything they did.”
Silence then. In the dark cubicle, Provost could see the hazy image of the girl in his mind, pleading with him, trying to make him understand. Gradually it began to make sense. “So they have their weapon,” he said slowly, “and still we can’t make contact with them because we have none against them.”
“Had none,” the girl corrected him. “But we have seen them in the mirror. Their thoughts and actions and approach have been humanlike. They recognized our panic for what it was when they saw it. How could they have, unless they themselves knew what panic was—from their own experience?”
“And now?"
“We turn the tables,” she said. “If they also have a vulnerability, there will be no more barrier to contact. But we don’t dare assume, we have to know. Every time they have goaded us we have reacted. We’ve got to stop that now. We’ve got to withdraw from them completely, leave them with nothing to work with, nothing to grasp.”
“But the Satellite—”
“The Satellite is dead for the time being, asleep. There’s no one here but us for them to contact. Now we have to withdraw too. If we do that, can’t you see what they will have to do?”
Slowly he nodded. He sensed that she hadn’t told him all of it, but that, too, was all right. Better that there be nothing that the Enemy could draw from his mind. “You tell me what to do, and when,” he said.
“Close your mind down, as completely as you can. Barricade it against them, if you can. Keep them out, leave nothing open for them to probe. Cut them off cold. But be ready when I signal you.”
He twisted in the cramped seat in the cubicle, clamping down his control as he felt Dorie clamping down hers. It was an exercise in patience and concentration, but slowly he felt his mind clearing. Like a rheostat imperceptibly dimming the lights in a theater, the Satellite went dimmer, dimmer, almost dead. Only a flicker of activity remained, tiny and insignificant.
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