Sometimes the boy would cry out his distress without waking. Once Baslim was jerked awake by hearing Thorby wail, “Mama, Mama!” Without making a light he crawled quickly to the boy’s pallet and bent over him. “There, there, son, it’s all right”
“Papa?”
“Go back to sleep, son. You’ll wake Mama.” He added, “I’ll stay with you — you’re safe. Now be quiet. We don’t want to wake Mama . . . do we?”
“All right, Papa.”
The old man waited, almost without breathing, until he was stiff and cold and his stump ached. When he was satisfied that the boy was asleep he crawled to his own bed.
That incident caused the old man to try hypnosis. A long time earlier, when Baslim had had two eyes, two legs, and no reason to beg, he had learned the art. But he had never liked hypnosis, even for therapy; he had an almost religious concept of the dignity of the individual; hypnotizing another person did not fit his basic evaluation.
But this was an emergency.
He was sure that Thorby had been taken from his parents so young that he had no conscious memory of them. The boy’s notion of life was a jumbled recollection of masters, some bad, some worse, all of whom had tried to break the spirit of a “bad” boy. Thorby had explicit memories of some of these masters and described them in gutter speech vivid and violent. But he was never sure of time or place — “place” was some estate, or household, or factor’s compound, never a particular planet or sun (his notions of astronomy were mostly wrong and he was innocent of galactography) and “time” was simply “before” or “after,” “short” or “long.” While each planet has its day, its year, its own method of dating, while they are reconciled for science in terms of the standard second as defined by radioactive decay, the standard year of the birthplace of mankind, and a standard reference date, the first jump from that planet. Sol III, to its satellite, it was impossible for an illiterate boy to date anything that way. Earth was a myth to Thorby and a “day” was the time between two sleeps.
Baslim could not guess the lad’s age. The boy looked like unmutated Earth stock and was pre-adolescent, but any guess would be based on unproved assumption. Vandorians and Italo-Glyphs look like the original stock, but Vandorians take three times as long to mature — Baslim recalled the odd tale about the consular agent’s daughter whose second husband was the great grandson of her first and she had outlived them both. Mutations do not necessarily show up in appearance.
It was conceivable that this boy was “older” in standard seconds than Baslim himself; space is deep and mankind adapted itself in many ways to many conditions. Never mind! — he was a youngster and he needed help.
Thorby was not afraid of hypnosis; the word meant nothing to him, nor did Baslim explain. After supper one evening the old man simply said, “Thorby, I want you to do something.”
“Sure, Pop. What?”
“Lie down on your bed. Then I’m going to make you sleepy and we’ll talk.”
“Huh? You mean the other way around, don’t you?”
“No. This is a different sort of sleep. You’ll be able to talk.”
Thorby was dubious but willing. The old man lighted a candle, switched off the glow plates. Using the flame to focus attention he started the ancient routines of monotonous suggestion, of relaxation, drowsiness . . . sleep.
“Thorby, you are asleep but you can hear me. You can answer.”
“Yes, Pop.”
“You will stay asleep until I tell you to wake. But you will be able to answer any question I ask.”
“Yes, Pop.”
“You remember the ship that brought you here. What was its name?”
“The Merry Widow. Only that wasn’t what we called it.”
“You remember getting into that ship. Now you are in it — you can see it. You remember all about it. Now go back to where you were when you went aboard.”
The boy stiffened without waking. “I don’t want to!”
“I’ll be right with you. You’ll be safe. Now what is the name of the place? Go back to it. Look at it.”