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“Good God, no!”

“Even as a scientific experiment?” Anglesey grinned. “Has any esprojector operative ever poured on the juice and swamped the child’s brain with his own thoughts? Come on, Cornelius, I won’t snitch on you.”

“Well … it’s out of my line, you understand.” The psionicist looked carefully away, found a bland meter face and screwed his eyes to that. “I have, uh, heard something about … Well, yes, there were attempts made in some pathological cases to, uh, bull through… break down the patient’s delusions by sheer force—”

“And it didn’t work,” said Anglesey. He laughed. “It can’t work, not even on a child, let alone an adult with a fully developed personality. Why, it took a decade of refinement, didn’t it, before the machine was debugged to the point where a psychiatrist could even ‘listen in’ without the normal variation between his pattern of thought and the patient’s—without that variation setting up an interference scrambling the very thing he wanted to study. The machine has to

make automatic compensations for the differences’ between individuals. We stifi can’t bridge the differences between species.

“If someone else is willing to cooperate, you can very gently guide his thinking. And that’s all. If you try to seize control of another brain, a brain with its own background of experience, its own ego, you risk your very sanity. The other brain will fight back instinctively. A fully developed, matured, hardened human personality is just too complex for outside control. It has too many resources, too much hell the subconscious can call to its defense if its integrity is threatened. Blazes, man, we can’t even master our own minds, let alone anyone else’s!”

Anglesey’s cracked-voice tirade broke off. He sat brooding at the instrument panel, tapping the console of his mechanical mother.

“Well?” said Cornelius after a while.

He should not, perhaps, have spoken. But he found it hard to remain mute. There was too much silence—half a billion miles of it, from here to the sun. If you closed your mouth five minutes at a time, the silence began creeping in like fog.

“Well,” gibed Anglesey. “So our pseudojovian, Joe, has a physically adult brain. The only reason I can control him is that his brain has never been given a chance to develop its own ego. I am Joe. From the moment he was ‘born’ into consciousness, I have been there. The psibeam sends me all his sense data and sends him back my motornerve impulses. Nevertheless, he has that excellent brain, and its cells are recording every trace of experience, even as yours and mine; his synapses have assumed the topography which is my ‘personality pattern.’

“Anyone else, taking him over from me, would find it was like an attempt to oust me myself from my own brain. It couldn’t be done. To be sure, he doubtless has only a rudimentary set of Angleseymemories—I do not, for instance, repeat trigonometric theorems while controlling him—but he has enough to be, potentially, a distinct personality.

“As a matter of fact, whenever he wakes up from sleep—there’s usually a lag of a few minutes, while I sense the change through my normal psi faculties and get the amplifying helmet adjusted—I have a bit of a struggle. I feel almost a … a resistance until I’ve brought his mental currents completely into phase with mine. Merely dreaming has been enough of a different experience to – . .“ Anglesey didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

“I see,” murmured Cornelius. “Yes, it’s clear enough. In fact, it’s astonishing that you can have such total contact with a being of such alien metabolism.”

“I won’t for much longer,” said the esman sarcastically, “unless you can correct whatever is burning out those K tubes. I don’t have an unlimited supply of spares.”

“I have some working hypotheses,” said Cornelius, “but there’s so little known about psibeam transmission—is the velocity infinite or merely very great, is the beam strength actually independent of distance? How about the possible effects of transmission—oh, through the degenerate matter in the Jovian core? Good Lord, a planet where water is a heavy mineral and hydrogen is a metal! What do we know?”

“We’re supposed to find out,” snapped Anglesey. “That’s what this whole project is for. Knowledge. Bull!” Almost, he spat on the floor. “Apparently what little we have learned doesn’t even get through to people. Hydrogen is still a gas where Joe lives. He’d have to dig down a few miles to reach the solid phase. And I’m expected to make a scientific analysis of Jovian conditions!”