Somehow, there were always penalties for everybody when men exceeded the decent limits.
Cornelius swore at himself, voicelessly. Work to do. He sat down and fitted the helmet on his own head. The carrier wave made a faint pulse, inaudible, the trembling of neurones low in his awareness. You couldnt describe it.
Reaching up, he turned to Angleseys alpha. His own had a some—
what lower frequency, it was necessary to carry the signals through a heterodyning process. Still no reception. Well, of course he had to find the exact wave form, timbre was as basic to thought as to music. He adjusted the dials slowly, with enormous care.
Something flashed through his consciousness, a vision of clouds roiled in a violet-red sky, a wind that galloped across horizonless immensityhe lost it. His fingers shook as he turned back.
The psibeam between Joe and Anglesey broadened. It took Cornelius into the circuit. He looked through Joes eyes, he stood on a hill and stared into the sky above the ice mountains, straining for sign of the first rocket; and simultaneously he was still Jan Cornelius, blurrily seeing the meters, probing about for emotions, symbols, any key to the locked terror in Angleseys soul.
The terror rose up and struck him in the face.
Psionic detection is not a matter of passive listening in. Much as a radio receiver is necessarily also a weak transmitter, the nervous system in resonance with a source of psionic-spectrum energy is itself emitting. Normally, of course, this effect is unimportant; but when you pass the impulses, either way, through a set of heterodyning and amplifying units, with a high negative feedback.
In the early days, psionic psychotherapy vitiated itself because the amplified thoughts of one man, entering the brain of another, would combine with the latters own neural cycles according to the ordinary vector laws. The result was that both men felt the new beat frequencies as a nightmarish fluttering of their very thoughts. An analyst, trained into self-control, could ignore it; his patient could not, and reacted violently.
But eventually the basic human wave timbres were measured, and psionic therapy resumed. The modern esprojector analyzed an incoming signal and shifted its characteristics over to the listeners pattern. The really different pulses of the transmitting brain, those which could not possibly be mapped onto the pattern of the receiving neuronesas an exponential signal cannot very practicably be mapped onto a sinusoidthose were filtered out.
Thus compensated, the other thought could be apprehended as comfortably as ones own. If the patient were on a psibeam circuit, a skilled operator could tune in without the patient being necessarily aware of it. The operator could either probe the other mans thoughts or implant thoughts of his own.
Cornelius plan, an obvious one to any psionicist, had depended
on this. He would receive from an unwitting Anglesey-Joe. If his theory was right and the esmans personality was being distorted into that of a monster, his thinking would be too alien to come through the filters. Cornelius would receive spottily or not at all. If his theory was wrong, and Anglesey was still Anglesey, he would receive only a normal human stream of consciousness and could probe for other troublemaking factors.
His brain roared!
Whats happening to me?
For a moment, the interference which turned his thoughts to sawtoothed gibberish struck him down with panic. He gulped for breath, there in the Jovian wind, and his dreadful dogs sensed the alienness in him and whined.
Then, recognition, remembrance, and a blaze of anger so great that it left no room for fear. Joe filled his lungs and shouted it aloud, the hillside boomed with echoes:
Get out of my mind!
He felt Cornelius spiral down toward unconsciousness. The overwhelniing force of his own mental blow had been too much. He laughed, it was more like a snarl, and eased the pressure.
Above him, between thunderous clouds, winked the first thin descending rocket flare.
Cornelius mind groped back toward the light. It broke a watery surface, the mans mouth snapped after air and his hands reached for the dials, to turn his machine off and escape.
Not so fast, you. Grimly, Joe drove home a command that locked Cornelius muscles rigid. I want to know the meaning of this. Hold still and let me look! He smashed home an impulse which could be rendered, perhaps, as an incandescent question mark. Remembrance exploded in shards through the psionicists forebrain.