“Oh?”
“You don’t even,” said Pilch, “have the original moderate inclination. Now one might have some suspicions there! But we’ll let them ride for the moment.”
She did something on the desk. The huge wall-screen suddenly lit up. A soft, amber-glowing plane of blankness, with a suggestion of receding depths within it.
“Last night, shortly before you woke up,” Pilch said, “you had a dream. Actually you had a series ofeight dreams during the night which seem pertinent here. But the earlier ones were rather vague preliminary structures. In one way and another, their content is included in this final symbol grouping. Let’s see what we can make of them.”
A shape appeared on the screen.
Trigger started, then laughed.
“What do you think of it?” Pilch asked.
“A little green man!” she said. “Well, it could be a sort of counterpart to the little yellow thing on the ship, couldn’t it? The good little dwarf and the very bad little dwarf.”
“Could be,” said Pilch. “How do you feel about the notion?”
“Good plasmoids and bad plasmoids?” Trigger shook her head. “No. It doesn’t feel right.”
“What else feels right?” Pilch asked.
“The farmer. The little old man who owned the farm where the mud pond was.”
“Liked him, didn’t you?”
“Very much! He knew a lot of fascinating things.” She laughed again. “You know, I’d hate to have him find out — but that little green man also reminds me quite a bit of Commissioner Tate.”
“I don’t think he’d mind hearing it,” Pilch said. She paused a moment. “All right — what’s this?”
A second shape appeared.
“A sort of caricature of a wild, mean horse,” Trigger said. She added thoughtfully, “There was a horse like that on that farm, too. I suppose you know that?”
“Yes. Any thoughts about it?”
“No-o-o. Well, one. The little farmer was the only one who could handle that horse. It was a mutated horse, actually — one of the Life Bank deals that didn’t work out so well. Enormously strong. It could work forty-eight hours at a stretch without even noticing it. But it was just a plain mean animal.”
“‘Crazy-mean,'” observed Pilch, “was the dream feeling about it.”
Trigger nodded. “I remember I used to think it was crazy for that horse to want to go around kicking and biting things to pieces. Which was about all it really wanted to do. I imagine it was crazy, at that.”
“You weren’t ever in any danger from it yourself, were you?”
Trigger laughed. “I couldn’t have got anywhere near it! You should have seen the kind of place the old farmer kept it when it wasn’t working.”
“I did,” said Pilch. “Long, wide, straight-walled pit in the ground. Cover for shade, plenty of food, running water. He was a good farmer. Very high locked fence around it to keep little girls and anyone else from getting too close to his useful monster.”
“Right,”said Trigger. She shook her head. “When you people look into somebody’s mind, you look!”
“We work at it,” Pilch said. “Let’s see what you can do with this one.”
Trigger was silent for almost a minute before she said in a subdued voice, “I just get what it shows. It doesn’t seem to mean anything?”
“What does it show?”
“Laughing giants stamping on a farm. A tiny sort of farm. It looks like it might be the little green man’s farm. No, wait. It’s not his! But it belongs to other little green people.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Well — I hate those giants!” Trigger said. “They’re cruel. And they laugh about being cruel.”
“Are you afraid of them?”
Trigger blinked at the screen for a few seconds. “No,” she said in a low, sleepy voice. “Not yet.”
Pilch was silent a moment. She said then, “One more.”
Trigger looked and frowned. Presently she said, “I have a feeling that does mean something. But all I get is that it’s the faces of two clocks. On one of them the hands are going around very fast. And on the other they go around slowly.”
“Yes,” Pilch said. She waited a little. “No other thought about those clocks? justJust that they should mean something?”
Trigger shook her head. “That’s all.”
Pilch’s hand moved on the desk again. The wall-screen went blank, and the light in the little room brightened slowly. Pilch’s face was reflective.
“That will have to do for now,” she said. “Trigger, this ship is working on an urgent job somewhere else. We’ll have to go back and finish that job. But I’ll be able to return to Manon in about ten days, and then we’ll have another session. And I think that will get this little mystery cleared up.”
“All of it?”
“All of it, I’d say. The whole pattern seems to be moving into view. More details will show up in the ten-day interval; and one more cautious boost then should bring it out in full.”
Trigger nodded. “That’s good news. I’ve been getting a little fed up with being a kind of walking enigma.”
“Don’t blame you at all,” Pilch said, sounding almost exactly like Commissioner Tate. “Incidentally, you’re a busy lady at present, but if you do have half an hour to spare from time to time, you might just sit down comfortably somewhere and listen to yourself thinking. The way things are going, that should bring quite a bit of information to view.”
Trigger looked doubtful. “Listen to myself thinking?”
“You’ll find yourself getting the knack of it rather quickly,” Pilch said. She smiled. “Just head off in that general direction whenever you find the time, and don’t work too hard at it. Are there any questions now before we start back to Manon?”
Trigger studied her a moment. “There’s one thing I’d like to be sure about,” she said. “But I suppose you people have your problems with Security too.”
“Who doesn’t?” said Pilch. “You’re secure enough for me. Fire away.”
“All right,” Trigger said.”Commissioner Tate told me people like you don’t work much with individuals.”
“Not as much as we’d like to. That’s true.”
“So you wouldn’t have been working with me if whatever has been going on weren’t somehow connected with the plasmoids.”
“Oh, yes, I would,” said Pilch. “Or old Cranadon. Someone like that. We do give service as required when somebody has the good sense to ask for it. But, obviously, we couldn’t have dropped that other job just now and come to Manon to clear up some individual difficulty.”
“So I am involved with the plasmoid mess?”
“You’re right in the middle of it, Trigger. That’s definite. In just what way is something we should be able to determine next session.”
Pilch turned off the desk light and stood up. “I always hate to run off and leave something half finished like this,” she admitted, “but I’ll have to run anyway. The plasmoids are nowhere near the head of the Federation’s problem list at present. They’re just coming up mighty fast.”
Again, we see the same problem: way too much background information for the needs of the story. Which, as before, has the main effect of slowing down the pace of the story badly — right at the point of the novel where we’re building toward the dramatic climax, when the pace should be picking up.
There’s nothing wrong, in and of itself, with having slow-paced scenes in a novel. In fact, as a rule a novel will benefit from it. Unless it is done almost perfectly, novels which are fast-paced from beginning to end can be just as fatiguing to a reader as novels which move like molasses.
But three things must happen, in a slow-paced scene. First, the material itself should be interesting. Second, it should be necessary for the story. Third, it should come at the right place in the story.
You could argue, I suppose, that all the material which I cut is interesting in its own right. I dunno. Me, I think it’s pretty boring. But what should be obvious is that it fits neither of the other criteria.
The matter of “place” is clear enough. At this stage of the novel, we are entering the “final moments” — and Schmitz has done a very good job of building up the dramatic tension in the preceding chapters. This is no time to dissipate that gathering tension with a slow-moving talk session unless the material covered is absolutely critical.
Well? What about that?Is the material covered in the stuff I cut critical?
Of course not. In fact, it’s completely pointless.
Think about it. What is happening here? It’s very simple. There is a mystery to be cleared up. Trigger has been behaving very oddly. Part of that oddness — a subtle thing which Pilch has spotted — is that Trigger is no longer repelled by plasmoids.
Almost all of the material I cut does absolutely nothing except explain — at great length — why Trigger found plasmoids repellent in the first place.