“Well … maybe not. But if somebody else has, why haven’t they visited us long ago?”
“Simple arithmetic, pal; it’s a big universe and we’re just one small corner of it. Or maybe they did. That’s my own notion; they surveyed us and Earth wasn’t what they wanted-maybe us, maybe the climate. So the U.F.O.’s went away.” He considered it. “Maybe they landed just long enough to fuel.”
That was all I got out of my tenure as a member of the scientific party; when Harry submitted my name an his list, the Captain drew a line through it. “No special communicators will leave the ship.”
That settled it; the Captain had a will of iron. Van got to go, as his brother had been killed in an accident while we were at peak-so I called Pat and told him about Van and suggested that Pat drop dead. He didn’t see anything funny in it.
The Elsie landed in ocean comfortably deep, then they used the auxiliaries to bring her close to the shore. She floated high out of the water, as two-thirds of her tanks were empty, burned up, the water completely disintegrated in boosting us first up to the speed of light, then backing us down again. The engineers were already overhauling her torch before we reached final anchorage. So far as I know, none of them volunteered for the landing party; I think that to most of the engineers the stop on Constance was just a chance to pick up more boost mass and take care of repairs and overhauls they had been unable to do while underway. They didn’t care where they were or where they were going so long as the torch worked and all the machinery ticked. Dr. Devereaux told me that the Staff Metallurgist had been out to Pluto six times and had never set foot on any planet but Earth.
“Is that normal?” I asked, thinking how fussy Doc had been about everybody else, including me.
“For his breed of cat, it’s robust mental health. Any other breed I would lock up and feed through the keyhole.”
Sam Rojas was as annoyed as I was at the discrimination against us telepaths; he had counted on planting his feet on strange soil, like Balboa and Columbus and Lundy. He came around to see me about it. “Tom, are you going to stand for it?”
“Well, I don’t want to-but what can we do?
“I’ve been talking to some of the others. It’s simple. We don’t.”
“We don’t what?”
“Mmm … we just don’t. Tom, ever since we slowed down, I’ve detected a falling off in my telepathic ability. It seems to be affecting all of us-those I’ve talked to. How about yourself?”
“Why, I haven’t-”
“Think hard,” he interrupted. “Surely you’ve noticed it. Why, I doubt if I could raise my twin right now. It must have something to do with where we are … maybe there is something odd about the radiation of Tau Ceti, or something. Or maybe it comes from Connie. Who knows? And, for that matter, who can check on us?”
I began to get the pattern. I didn’t answer, because it was a tempting idea.
“If we can’t communicate,” he went on, “we ought to be useful for something else … like the landing party, for instance. Once we are out of range of this mysterious influence probably we would be able to make our reports back to Earth all right. Or maybe it would turn out that some of the girls who didn’t want to go with the landing party could manage to get in touch with Earth and carry the reports … provided us freaks weren’t discriminated against.”
“It’s an idea,” I admitted.
“Think about it. You’ll find your special talent getting weaker and weaker. Me, I’m stone deaf already.” He went away.
I toyed with the idea. I knew the Captain would recognize a strike when he saw one … but what could he do? Call us all liars and hang us by our thumbs until we gave in? How could he be certain that we hadn’t all gone sour as m-r’s? The answer was that he could not be certain; nobody but a mind reader knows what it feels like, nobody but the mind reader himself can tell that he is doing it. When we slipped out of contact at peak he hadn’t doubted us, he had just accepted it. He would have to accept it now, no matter what he thought.