“Two, older than I am. But they went away long ago. Until very recently I thought of them as having betrayed the family. Now I’ve done the same myself. And I can’t even pity my budder for losing all her offspring. She didn’t lose them. She drove them out!”
“So what plans do you have for yourself now?”
“None,” Chybee admitted miserably.
“And your parents would not want it published that all their young’uns have rejected them and their ideas?”
“I’m sure they’ll do their utmost to conceal it!”
“Then it all fits together,” Ugant said comfortably. “I can help you, and you can help me. Were you studying at Hulgrapuk?”
“I should have been”—with an angry curl. “But Whelwet wouldn’t let me choose the subjects I wanted, archeology and astronomy. She kept saying I must learn something useful, like plant improvement. Of course, what she was really afraid of was that I might find out too much about reality for her to argue against.”
Wam moved closer. “I’ve never met any adult dupes of the psycho-planetary movement, only a clawful of fanatical young’uns. How do you think it’s possible for grown-ups to become dreamlost, when famine is a thing of the past?”
Conscious of the flattery implicit in having so distinguished a scientist appeal to her, Chybee mustered all her wits. “Well, many people claim, of course, that it’s because some poisons can derange the pith. But I think my parents brought it on themselves. They never let their budlings go hungry; I must say that in their defense. Throughout my childhood, though, they were forever denying themselves a proper diet because of some scheme or other that they wanted to invest in, which was going to be a wild success and enable us to move to a grand house like this one, and then somehow everything went wrong, and…” She ended with a shrug of her whole mantle.
“In other words,” Wam said soberly, “they were already predisposed to listen when Aglabec started voicing his crazy notions.”
“They didn’t get them from Aglabec. At least, I don’t think they did. Someone called Imblot—”
“She was one of my students!” Ugant exclaimed. “And one of the first to desert me for Aglabec. She—No, I won’t bore you with the full story. But I do remember that Aglabec quarreled with her, and she left Slah and … Well, presumably she wound up in Hulgrapuk. Wam, have you padded across her?”
“I seem to recognize the name,” the latter grunted. “By now, though, there are so many self-styled teachers and dream-leaders competing as to who can spin the most attractive spuder-web of nonsense … I guess Whelwet and Yaygomitch have disciples of their own by this time, don’t they?”
“Yes!” Chybee clenched her claws. “And it’s tubule-bursting to see how decent ordinary people with their whole lives ahead of them are being lured into a dead-end path where they are sure to wind up deliberately starving themselves in search of madder and madder visions! They’re renouncing everything—all hope of budding, all chance of a secure existence—because of this dreamlost belief that they can enter into psychic contact with other planets!”
“Would I be right in suggesting,” Ugant murmured, “that it was as the result of one particular person falling into this trap that you decided to run away?”
Chybee stared at her in disbelief. At last she said gustily, “I could almost believe that you have psychic powers yourself, Professor. The answer’s yes. And I was so shocked by what was happening to him, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So here I am.”
“You yourself accept,” Ugant mused aloud, almost as though Chybee had not made her last confession, “that the planets are uninhabitable by any form of life as we know it.” Raising a claw, she forestalled an interruption from Wam. “Granting that we don’t yet know enough about life to say it cannot evolve under any circumstances but our own, at least the chance of other intelligent species existing close at claw is very slim. Correct?”
Wam subsided, and Chybee said uncertainly, “Well, we have discovered that Sunbride must be much too hot, let alone the asteroids that orbit closer to the sun, which are in any case too small to hold an atmosphere. And even Swiftyouth is probably already too cold. Some people think they’ve detected seasonal changes there, but they might as easily be due to melting icecaps moistening deserts during the summer as to any form of life. And what we know of the larger planets, further out, suggests that they are terribly cold and there are gigantic storms in their immensely deep gas-mantles. Just possibly their satellites might provide a home for life, but the lack of solar radiation makes it so unlikely … Oh, Professor! This is absurd! I’m talking as though I were trying to persuade some of my parents’ dupes not to commit themselves to dream-ness, whereas you know all this much better than I!”