Psi-High And Others

by Alan Edward Nourse

  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.

  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 Saturn. 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.”

  “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. That’s 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 kn
ow,” 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 softly, 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 alienness. But worse—even in trying desperately to comprehend alienness, 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 swiftly 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 anticipaton. 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 slept? 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 DepPsyc
h 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?”