“Just first cousins.” The voice was all right, too—clear and easy. Trigger felt herself relax somewhat. “That’s one reason they picked me to come and get you. We’re already almost acquainted. Another is that I’ve been assigned to take you through the preliminary work for your interview after we get to the ship. We can chat a bit on the way, and that should make it seem less disagreeable. Boat’s in the speedboat park over there.”
They started down a short hallway to the park area. “Just how disagreeable is it going to be?” Trigger asked.
“Not at all bad in your case. You’re conditioned to the processes more than you know. Your interviewer will just pick up where the last job ended and go on from there. It’s when you have to work down through barriers that you have a little trouble.”
Trigger was still mulling that over as she stepped ahead of Pilch into the smaller of two needle-nosed craft parked side by side. Pilch followed her in and closed the lock behind them. “The other one’s a combat job,” she remarked. “Our escort. Commissioner Tate made very sure we had one, too!” She motioned Trigger to a low soft seat that took up half the space of the tiny room behind the lock, sat down beside her and spoke at a wall pickup. “All set. Let’s ride!”
Blue-green tinted sky moved past them in the little room’s viewer screen; then a tilted landscape flashed by and dropped back. Pilch winked at Trigger. “Takes off like a scared yazong, that boy! He’ll race the combat job to the ship. About those barriers. Supposing I told you something like this. There’s no significant privacy invasion in this line of work. We go directly to the specific information we’re looking for and deal only with that. Your private life, your personal thoughts, remain secret, sacred and inviolate. What would you say?”
“I’d say you’re a liar,” Trigger said promptly.
“Supposing I told you very sincerely that no recording will be made of any little personal glimpses we may get?”
“Lying again.”
“Right again,” said Pilch. “You’ve been scanned about as thoroughly as anyone ever gets to be outside of a total therapy. Your personal secrets are already on record, and since I’m doing most of the preparatory work with you, I’ve studied all the significant-looking ones very closely. You’re a pretty good person, for my money. All right?”
Trigger studied her face uncomfortably. Hardly all right, but . . .
“I guess I can stand it,” she said. “As far as you’re concerned, anyway.” She hesitated. “What’s the egghead like?”
“Old Cranadon?” said Pilch. “You won’t mind her a bit, I think. Very motherly old type. Let’s get through the preparations first, and then I’ll introduce you to her. If you think it would make you more comfortable, I’ll just stay around while she’s working. I’ve sat in on her interviews before. How’s that?”
“Sounds better,” Trigger said. She did feel a good deal relieved.
They slid presently into a tunnel-like lock of the space vehicle Holati Tate had described as a flying mountain. From what Trigger could see of it in the guide lights on the approach, it did rather closely resemble a very large mountain of the craggier sort. They went through a series of lifts, portals and passages, and wound up in a small and softly lit room with a small desk, a very large couch, a huge wall-screen, and assorted gadgetry. Pilch sat down at the desk and invited Trigger to make herself comfortable on the couch.
Trigger lay down on the couch. She had a very brief sensation of falling gently through dimness.
* * *
Half an hour later she sat up on the couch. Pilch switched on a desk light and looked at her thoughtfully. Trigger blinked. Then her eyes widened, first with surprise, then in comprehension.
“Liar!” she said.
“Hm-m-m,” said Pilch. “Yes.”
“That was the interview!”
“True.”
“Then you’re the egghead!”
“Tcha!” said Pilch. “Well, I believe I can modestly describe myself as being something like that. Yes. You’re another, by the way. We’re just smart about different things. Not so very different.”
“You were smart about this,” Trigger said. She swung her legs off the couch and regarded Pilch dubiously. Pilch grinned.
“Took most of the disagreeableness out of it, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” Trigger admitted, “it did. Now what do we do?”
“Now,” said Pilch, “I’ll explain.”
* * *
The thing that had caught their attention was a quite simple process. It just happened to be a process the Psychology Service hadn’t observed under those particular circumstances before.
“Here’s what our investigators had the last time,” Pilch said. “Lines and lines of stuff, of course. But there’s a simple continuity which makes it clear. No need to go into details. As classes—you’ve stepped now and then on things that squirmed or squashed. Bad smells. Etcetera. How do you feel about plasmoids?”
Trigger wrinkled her nose. “I just think they’re unpleasant things. All except—”
Oops! She checked herself.
“—Repulsive,” said Pilch. “It’s quite all right about Repulsive. We’ve been informed of that supersecret little item you’re guarding. If we hadn’t been told, we’d know now, of course. Go ahead.”
“Well, it’s odd!” Trigger remarked thoughtfully. “I just said I thought plasmoids were rather unpleasant. But that’s the way I used to feel about them. I don’t feel that way now.”
“Except again,” said Pilch, “for that little monstrosity on the ship. If it was a plasmoid. You rather suspect it was, don’t you?”
Trigger nodded. “That would be pretty bad!”
“Very bad,” said Pilch. “Plasmoids generally, you feel about them now as you feel about potatoes . . . rocks . . . neutral things like that?”
“That’s about it,” Trigger said. She still looked puzzled.
“We’ll go over what seems to have changed your attitude there in a minute or so. Here’s another thing—” Pilch paused a moment, then said, “Night before last, about an hour after you’d gone to bed, you had a very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you experienced on that plasmoid station.”
“While I was asleep?” Trigger said, startled.
“That’s right. Comparatively very light, very brief. Five or six minutes. Dream activity, etcetera, smooths out. Some blocking on various sense lines. Then, normal sleep until about five minutes before you woke up. At that point there may have been another minute touch of the same pattern. Too brief to be actually definable. A few seconds at most. The point is that this is a continuing process.”
She looked at Trigger a moment. “Not particularly alarmed, are you?”
“No,” said Trigger. “It just seems very odd.”
“Yes, I know.”
* * *
Pilch was silent for some moments again, considering the wall-screen as if thinking about something connected with it.
“Well, we’ll drop that for now,” she said finally. “Let me tell you what’s been happening these months, starting with that first amnesia-covered blankout on Harvest Moon. When you got the first Service check-up at Commissioner Tate’s demand, there was very little to go on. The amnesia didn’t lift immediately—not very unusual. The blankout might be interesting because of the circumstances. Otherwise the check showed you were in a good deal better than normal condition. Outside of total therapy processes—and I believe you know that’s a long haul—there wasn’t much to be done for you, and no particular reason to do it. So an amnesia-resolving process was initiated and you were left alone for a while.
“Actually something already was going on at the time, but it wasn’t spotted until your next check. What it’s amounted to has been a relatively minor but extremely precise and apparently purposeful therapy process. The very interesting thing is that this orderly little process appears to have been going on all by itself. And that just doesn’t happen. You disturbed now?”
Trigger nodded. “A little. Mainly I’m wondering why somebody wants me to not-dislike plasmoids.”
“So am I wondering,” said Pilch. “Somebody does, obviously. And a very slick somebody it is. We’ll find out by and by. Incidentally, this particular part of the business has been concluded. Apparently, our `somebody’ doesn’t intend to make you wild for plasmoids. It’s enough that you don’t dislike them.”
Trigger smiled. “I can’t see anyone making me wild for the things, whatever they tried!”
Pilch nodded. “Could be done,” she said. “Rather easily. You’d be bats, of course. But that’s very different from a simple neutralizing process like the one we’ve been discussing . . . Now here’s something else. You were pretty unhappy about this business for a while. That wasn’t `somebody’s’ fault. That was us.
“Your investigators could have interfered with the little therapy process in a number of ways. That wouldn’t have taught them a thing, so they didn’t. But on your third check they found something else. Again it wasn’t in the least obtrusive; in someone else they mightn’t have given it a second look. But it didn’t fit at all with your major personality patterns. You wanted to stay where you were.”