Duffold’s impressions of the possibilities at that stage became a little vague, and he shifted his attention to a consideration of what Wintan had said regarding himself. There was apparently always some risk involved in an investigation of this kind, not to the subject, but to the investigator.
Or, in this case, to the observer.
The trouble was, according to Wintan, that the human mind—or any other type of mind the Service had studied so far, for that matter—was consciously capable of only a very limited form of experience. “A practical limitation,” Wintan had said. “Most of what’s going on in the universe isn’t really any individual’s concern. If he were trying to be aware of it all the time, he couldn’t walk across the room without falling on his face. Besides, it would kill him.”
And when Duffold looked questioningly at him, he added, “Did you ever go in for the Sensational Limitations vogue, Excellency?”
“No,” Duffold said shortly.
“Well,” Wintan acknowledged, “they get a little raw, at that! However, they do show that a human being can tolerate only a definitely limited impact of emotion—artificially induced or otherwise—at any one time, before he loses awareness of what’s going on. Now, the more or less legitimate material the Sensationalists use is drawn from emotions that other human beings have at one time or another consciously experienced, sometimes under extreme stimulation, of course. However, as a rather large number of Sensationalists have learned by now, the fact that a sensation came originally from a human mind doesn’t necessarily make its re-experience a safe game for another human being.”
He was silent for a moment. “That keff animal,” he said then. “You saw it. Can you imagine yourself thinking and feeling like a keff, Excellency?”
Duffold grinned. “I hadn’t thought of it,” he said. He considered and shook his head. “Probably not too well.”
“It appears to be a fairly complicated creature,” Wintan said. “Stupid, of course. It doesn’t need human intelligence to get along. But it’s not just a lump of life responding to raw surges of emotion. There are creatures that aren’t much else, a good deal farther down on the scale. They haven’t developed anything resembling a calculating brain, and what we call emotion is what guides them and keeps them alive. To be effective guides to something like that, those emotions have to be pretty strong. As a matter of fact, they’re quite strong enough to wreck anything as complex and carefully balanced as a conscious human mind very thoroughly, if it contacts them for more than a very short time.”
“How do you know?” Duffold inquired.
“So far, our Hub Sensationalists haven’t learned how to bottle anything like that,” Wintan said. “At least, we haven’t run into any indications of it. However, Psychology Service did learn how, since it was required for a number of reasons. In the process, we might have discovered that emotion can kill the body by destroying the mind in a matter of seconds if we hadn’t been made aware of the fact a good deal earlier—”
“Yes?” Duffold said politely.
“Excellency,” Wintan said, “civilized man is—with good reason, I think—a hellishly proud creature. Unfortunately, his achievements often make it difficult for him to accept that his remote ancestors—and the remote ancestors of every other mobile and intelligent life form we’ve come across—were, at one period, specks of appetite in the mud, driven by terrors and a brainless lust for survival, ingestion, and procreation that are flatly inconceivable to the conscious human mind today.”
Duffold laughed. “I’ll accept it,” he said agreeably.
“In that case,” said Wintan, “you might consider accepting that precisely the same pattern is still present in each of our intelligent life forms and is still basically what motivates them as organisms. Self-generated or not, emotions like that can still shock the mind that contacts them consciously in full strength to death. Normally, of course, that’s a flat impossibility—our mental structure guarantees that what filters through into consciousness is no more than the trace of a shadow of the basic emotions . . . no more than consciousness needs to guide it into reasonably intelligent conduct and, usually, at any rate, no more than consciousness can comfortably tolerate. But in an investigation of this kind, we’ll be playing around the edges of the raw stuff sooner or later. We’ll try to keep out of it, of course.”
Duffold said thoughtfully that he was beginning to see the reason for safeguards. “What makes it possible for you to get into trouble here?”
“Something like a cubic mile of helpful gadgetry,” Wintan said. “It’s quite an accomplishment.”
“It is,” Duffold said. “So it’s not all conditioning then. Can you—conditioned—people get along without safeguards?”
Wintan said amiably that to some extent they could. On reflection, it didn’t sound too bad to Duffold. The particular type of safeguard that had been provided for him in the pick-up room was to the effect that as he approached an emotional overload, he would be cut out of contact automatically with the events in the ship. Otherwise, he would remain an observer-participant, limited only by his lack of understanding of the progress of the operation.
* * *
Wintan: I’ve given him fair warning, Pilch.
Pilch, grudgingly: There’s no such thing in this game! I suppose you did what you could.
* * ** * *
Pictures moved now and then through the luminous mist. Some were so distinct that it seemed to Duffold he was looking straight through the bulk of the ship at the scene in question. Most were mere flickers of form and color, and a few a tentative haziness in which a single detail might assume a moment of solidity before the whole faded out.
“Cabon’s checking the final arrangements,” Wintan said from the chair to Duffold’s right.
Duffold nodded, fascinated by the notion that he was observing the projected images of a man’s mind, and disappointed that the meaning of much of it apparently was wasted on him. Buchele’s waxy face showed up briefly, followed by the picture of a thick-necked man whose cheekbones and jaw were framed by a trimmed bristle of red beard.
“Our primary investigators, those two,” Wintan said briefly. “The other one’s Ringor—head of Pattern Analysis.” The mind-machines and their coordinators did what they could; they supplied power and analyzed a simultaneous wealth of detail no human mentality could begin to grasp in the same span of time. To some degree, they also predicted the course that should be followed. But the specific, moment to moment turns of the search for X were under the direction of human investigators. Eight or nine others would trace the progress of the leading two but would not become immediately involved unless they were needed. Pilch was one of these.
The reconstruction of Yunnan’s camp area came gradually into sight now, absorbing the pick-up medium as it cleared and spread about and behind the two observers. Presently, it seemed to Duffold that he was looking down at the sleeping figure near the fire from a point about forty feet up in Palayata’s crisp night air. The illusion would have been perfect except for two patches of something like animated smoke to either side of Yunnan. He studied the phenomenon for a moment and was startled by a sudden impression that the swirling vapory lines of one of those patches was the face of the red-bearded investigator. It changed again before he could be sure. He glanced over at Wintan, suspended incongruously in his chair against the star-powdered night.
The Service man grinned. “Saw it, too,” he said in a voice that seemed much too loud here to Duffold. “The other one is Buchele—or the projector’s impression of Buchele at the moment. They’re designed to present what they get in a form that makes some meaning in human perceptions, but they have peculiar notions about those! You’ll get used to it.”
He was, Duffold decided, speaking of one of the machines. He was about to inquire further when the scene became active.
Something a little like a faint, brief gleaming of planetary auroras . . . then showers of shooting stars . . . played about the horizons. For a moment he forgot he was watching a reconstruction. The lights and colors flowed together and became the upper part of the body of a blond woman smiling down over the distant mountains at the sleeping Palayatan, her hands resting on the tops of the ridges. Briefly, the face blurred into an unpleasantly grimacing mask and cleared again. Then the woman was gone, and in her place was a brightly lit, perfectly ordinary looking room, in which a man in the uniform of the Service sat at a table.
“What’s all this?” Duffold breathed.
“Eh?” Wintan said absently. “Oh!” He turned his head and laughed. “Our investigators were tuning in on each other. They’ve worked together before, but it takes a moment or so—Ah, here we go!”