consciously aware of what it’s doing.” Jim’s almost desperate need to
believe in The Friend as a separate and purely benign creature must have
been evident in his face, for Holly took his right hand, held it in both
hers, and hurried on before he could interrupt: “The childish petulance,
the grandiosity of its claim to be reshaping the entire destiny of our
species, the flamboyance of its apparitions, its sudden fluctuations
between an attitude of syrupy goodwill and sullen anger, the way it lies
so damned transparently yet deludes itself into believing it’s clever,
its secretiveness about some issues when there is no apparent reason to
be secretive-all of that makes sense if you figure we’re dealing with an
unbalanced mind.”
He looked for flaws in her reasoning, and found one. “But you can’t
believe an insane person, an insane alien individual, could pilot an
unimaginably complex spacecraft across lightyears through countless
dangers, while completely out of its mind.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that. Maybe the insanity set in after it
got here. Or maybe it didn’t have to pilot the ship, maybe the ship is
essentially automatic, an entirely robotic mechanism. Or maybe there
were others of its kind aboard who piloted it, and maybe they’re all
dead now. Jim, it’s never mentioned a crew, only The Enemy. And
assuming you buy its extraterrestrial origins, does it really ring true
that only two individuals would set out on an intergalactic exploration?
Maybe it killed the others.”
Everything she was theorizing could be true, but then anything she
theorized could be true. They were dealing with the Unknown, capital
“U,” and the possibilities in an infinite universe were infinite in
number.
He remembered reading somewhere-even many scientists believed that
anything the human imagination conceived, regardless of how fanciful,
could conceivably exist somewhere in the universe, because the infinite
nature of creation meant that it was no less fluid, no less fertile than
any man’s or woman’s dreams.
Jim expressed that thought to Holly, then said, “But what bothers me is
that you’re doing now what you rejected earlier. You’re trying hard to
explain it in human terms, when it may be too alien for us to understand
it at all. How can you assume that an alien species can even suffer
insanity the way we can, or that it’s capable of multiple personalities?
These are all strictly human concepts.”
She nodded. “You’re right, of course. But at the moment, this theory’s
the only one that makes sense to me. Until something happens to
disprove it, I’ve got to operate on the assumption that we’re not
dealing with a rational being.”
With his free hand, he reached out and increased the gas flow to the
wicks in the Coleman lantern, providing more light. “Jesus, I’ve got a
bad case of the creeps,” he said, shivering.
“Join the club.”
“If it is schizo, and if it slips into the identity of The Enemy and
can’t get back out. . . what might it do to us?”
“I don’t even want to think about that,” Holly said. “If it’s as
intellectually superior to us as it seems to be, if it’s from a
long-lived race with experience and knowledge that makes the whole of
the human experience seem like a short story compared to the Great Books
of the Western World, then it sure as hell knows some tortures and
cruelties that would make Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot look like
Sunday-school teachers.”
He thought about that for a moment, even though he tried not to.
The chocolate doughnuts he had eaten lay in an undigested, burning wad
in his stomach.
Holly said, “When it comes back-”
“For God’s sake,” he interrupted, “no more adversarial tactics!”
“I screwed up,” she admitted. “But the adversarial approach was the
correct one, I just carried it too far. I pushed too hard. When it
comes back, I’ll modify my technique.”
He supposed he had more fully accepted her insanity theory than he was
willing to acknowledge. He was now in a cold sweat about what The
Friend might do if their behavior tipped it into its other, darker
identity.
“Why don’t we jettison confrontation altogether, play along with it,