“Well,” Wintan said reflectively, “if he’d done that, we would have known he was ignoring the five or six plausible reasons against doing it that were planted in his awareness. In that case, we could have counted on his being an individual embodiment of the X factor, so to speak. The staff was prepared for the possibility.”
Duffold knew that Psychological Service as such was, as a matter of fact, prepared for the possibility that they had hauled a super-being on board which conceivably could destroy or take control of this huge ship—and distant weapons were trained on the ship to insure that it wouldn’t be under alien control for more than an instant. Even more distantly, out in the nothingness of space somewhere, events on the ship were being subjected to a moment-to-moment scrutiny and analysis.
Nor was that all. The Outposts patrol ships at Palayata had been relieved from duty by a Supreme Council order from the Hub; and, in their places, heavily armed cruisers of a type none of the patrol commanders could identify had begun to circle the planet.
“They won’t break up Palayata unless they have to, of course!” Cabon had said, in reporting that matter to Duffold. “But that’s no worry of ours at the moment. Our job is to trace out, record, and identify every type of thought, emotion, and motivation that possibly could go ticking through this Yunnan’s inhuman little head. If we find out he’s exactly what he seems to be, that eliminates one possible form of X.”
And if Yunnan was something other than the not too intelligent humanoid he seemed to be, they had X neatly isolated for study. Whether or not they completed the study then depended largely on the nature of the subject.
Rationally, Duffold couldn’t disagree with the method. It was drastic; the casually icy calculation behind the preparations made by the Service had, in fact, shocked him as nothing else had done in his life. But, at one stage or another, it would bring X into view. If X was both hostile and more than a match for man, man at least had avoided being taken by surprise. If X was merely more than a match for man—
“Mightn’t hurt us at all to learn how to get along with our superiors for a while,” Wintan had observed thoughtfully.
It was a notion Duffold found particularly difficult to swallow.
He had noticed, in this last hour while they completed their preparations to invade the Average Palayatan’s mind, occasional traces of a tingling excitement in himself—something close to elation. By and by, it dawned on him that it was the kind of elation that comes from an awareness of discovery.
He was engaged in an operation with the most powerful single organization of the Hub Systems. The despised specialists of Psychology Service, the errand boys of the major Departments, were, as a matter of fact, telling everyone, apparently including the Hub’s Supreme Council, just what should be done about Palayata and how to do it.
Probably, it hadn’t always been that way, Duffold decided; but the regular Departments of the Hub were getting old. For a decade, Outposts—one of the most brisk of the lot—had been gathering evidence that Palayatan civilization wasn’t so much quaint as incomprehensible. For an equal length of time, it had been postponing recognition of the fact that the incomprehensibility might have a deadly quality to it—that, quite possibly, something very strange and very intelligent was in concealment on Palayata, observing human beings and perhaps only tolerating their presence here for its unknown purposes.
Even after the recognition had been forced on it, the Department had been unwilling to make any move at all on its own responsibility, for fear it might make the wrong one. Instead, it called in Psychology Service—
For the same reason that Psychology Service always was called in when there was an exceptionally dirty and ticklish job to be done—the Service People showed an unqualified willingness to see any situation exactly as it was and began dealing with it immediately in the best possible manner, to the limits of human ability. It was an attitude that guaranteed in effect that any problem which was humanly resolvable was going to get resolved.
The excitement surged up in Duffold again. And that, he added to himself, was why they didn’t share the normal distaste for the notion of encountering a superior life form. The most superior of life forms couldn’t improve on that particular attitude! Here or elsewhere, the Service eventually might be defeated, but it could never be outclassed.
He wondered at that difference in organizations that were equally human and decided it was simply that the Service now attracted the best in human material that happened to be around. At other times in history, the same type of people might have been engaged in very different activities—but they would always be found moving into the front ranks of humanity and moving out of the organizations that were settling down to the second-rate job of maintaining what others had gained.
As for himself—well, he’d gone fast and far in Outposts. He knew he was brainier than most. If it took some esoteric kind of mental training to get himself into mankind’s real front ranks, he was going to take a look at it—
Providing, that was, that the lives of everyone on the ship didn’t get snuffed out unexpectedly sometime in the next few hours!
* * ** * *
Wintan: Pilch, your lad has just bucked his way through simultaneously to the Basis of Self-Esteem and the Temptations of Power and Glory! I’m a little in awe of him. What to do?
Pilch: Too early for a wide-open, I think! It could kill him. If we tap anything, we’re going to have trouble. Buchele isn’t—
Cabon: Make it wide-open, Wintan. My responsibility.
Pilch: No!
Voice from Somewhere Far Out: Agreement with Cabon’s decision. Proceed!
* * *
Wintan had left the pick-up room for the time being; and Duffold had it all to himself.
It was an odd place. Almost the most definite thing you could say about it was that it was somewhere within the vast bulk of the Service ship. Duffold sat in something like a very large and comfortable armchair with his feet up on a cushioned extension; and so far as he could tell, the armchair might have been floating slowly and endlessly through the pale-green, luminous fog which started about eight feet from his face in every direction. The only other thing visible in the room was another chair off to his right, in which Wintan had been sitting. Even the entrance by which they had come in was indetectable in the luminosity; when Wintan left, he appeared to vanish in cool green fire long before he reached it.
There wasn’t much more time before the work on the captured Palayatan began, and Duffold started running the information he’d been given regarding the operation and his own role as an observer through his mind. Some of the concepts involved were unfamiliar; but, on the whole, it sounded more comprehensible than he had expected. They were acting on the assumption that, with the exception of the X factor, the structure of a Palayatan’s mental personality was similar to the human one. They reacted to outside stimuli in much the same way and appeared to follow the same general set of basic motivations.
It was already known that there were specific differences. The Palayatan mind was impermeable to telepathic impulses at the level of sensory and verbal interpretations, which was the one normally preferred by human telepaths when it could be employed, since it involved the least degree of individual garbling of messages. Palayatans, judging by the keff creature’s inability to affect them, were also impermeable to telepathed emotional stimuli. In spite of the effect they themselves produced on most untrained humans, it had been demonstrated that they also did not radiate at either of these levels, as against the diffused trickling of mental and emotional impulses normally going out from a human being.
At least, that was the picture at present. It might change when the ship’s giant amplifiers, stimulators, and microscanners were brought into play upon Yunnan’s sleeping brain. If X was a concealed factor of the Palayatan’s personality, it would show up instantly. In that case, the investigation as such would be dropped, and the Service would switch its efforts into getting X into communication. It should at least be possible to determine rather quickly whether or not X was hostile and how capable it was of expressing hostility effectively, either here or on the planet.
But if it was found that Yunnan, as he knew himself, was Yunnan and nothing else, the search would drop below the levels of personality toward the routine mechanisms of the mind and the organic control areas. Somewhere in those multiple complexities of interacting structures of life must be a thing that was different enough from the standard humanoid pattern to make Palayata what it was. They had talked of the possibility that the X influence, if it was an alien one, did not extend actively beyond the planet. But the traces of its action would still be there and could be interpreted.