THE CRUCIBLE OF TIME BY JOHN BRUNNER

“In other words, you think that your success in turning people inward upon themselves, making them preoccupied with their personal motives and reactions, is the response best fitted to the plight we find ourselves in?”

Awb curled his mantle into a patronizing smile.

“Very interesting,” Thilling murmured, resorting to the ultimate line of attack which the Jingfired had prepared for her. “This fits superbly with Yegbrot’s studies of the effect of radioactivity on nerve-pith, which demonstrate how even temporary exposure can derange the system.”

She refrained from mentioning how much she hated Yegbrot’s ruthlessness, which stemmed directly from Phrallet’s original proposal. If only Awb had chosen to attack the fact that nowadays psychologists were using experimental subjects deliberately rendered mindless by pithing…

In the act of reaching for a fresh and succulent fungus he checked and twisted towards her, glaring. “How dare you accuse me of being insane?”

A breakthrough!

“But I didn’t. My mission is merely to establish whether your regrettably successful attempt to distract the best of our young’uns from the branchway that alone can lead to the survival of our species is due to perversity or injury. I now conclude the latter. So you’re not to blame.”

Recovering, he chuckled. “You’re a classic case of the type I so often invoke in lectures: a sterile she’un determined to project a surrogate immortality on the rest of us because she can’t produce her own buds. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is. And there are many who would pay handsomely for so accurate a diagnosis from Scholar Awb!”

“Yet you sense my authority, don’t you?” she countered. “Despite smearing me with that repulsive muck you wear!”

He clattered his mandibles in amusement. “The more you say, the more you support my theory that people like you at some stage lost the ability to distinguish input due to the real world from what stems out of imagination and hence ultimately dreamness. How I wish I had a way to transcribe this conversation! It would confirm—”

“You’d like a recordimal, you mean.”

“Well, out of courtesy I didn’t bring one along, but if you’d permit it, certainly I—”

“Do you know who invented the recordimal?”

“No, I don’t believe I was ever told,” he answered, taking care as usual to protect his ego by not admitting he might have forgotten. “Who?”

“I was at her side during its development. Byra! With whom you won’t stop confusing me!”

“That,” Awb murmured, “must be because if anyone out of our group at the observatory had devised such a useful tool, I’d have expected it to be you. Sure you aren’t being modest?” He settled down with the comfortable air of one who, having turned a neat compliment, was expecting to be paid in kind.

But she reacted otherwise, sure now of her ascendancy.

“Once I hoped you’d find the answer to a question I never put to you. I was hoping you might say of your own accord what I once said, like all the Jingfired—the true Jingfired!—and declare that you wanted to devote your life to ensuring that we can overcome the worst the universe can throw at us. Don’t interrupt!”—as he showed signs of doing so. “I know what answer you’d give now, and it’s the same you’d have given then, had you been honest enough. In your own words, you’re a classic case. Yegbrot could tell me to a fraction of a clawide where particles of stumpium and sluggium have settled in your pith. But the real damage had been done already. Lesh died, Eupril died, Byra died, but to the last they fought to understand why, and to save others from the same fate! Whereas you’ve given up, for the sake of making over countless scores of young’uns into worshipers of Awb!”

By mustering her resources of contempt-stink, she had finally made an impression on him. He said at length, “But you seem to be claiming that I’m responsible for what Phrallet suggested. At that time, though, I was sick and mindless, remember. And I detest the cost of our recent advances in chemistry and medicine! Of course, I suppose you make out that the benefits outweigh—”

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