The easiest course would have been for the Corps to withdraw and write the Gogleskan problem off as insoluble. Instead they had compromised by setting up a small base for the purposes of observation, long-range investigation, and limited contact.
Progress for any intelligent species depended on increasing levels of cooperation between individuals and family or tribal groups. On Goglesk, however, any attempt at close cooperation brought a period of drastically reduced intelligence, a mindless urge to destruction, and serious physical injury in its wake, so that the Gogleskans had been forced into becoming a race of individualists who had close physical contact only during the periods when reproduction was possible or while caring for their young.
The situation had been forced on them in presapient times, when they had been the principal food source of every predator infesting Goglesk’s oceans. Although physically puny, they had been able to evolve weapons of offense and defense—stings that paralyzed or killed the smaller life-forms, and long, cranial tendrils that gave them the faculty of telepathy by contact. When threatened by large predators they linked bodies and minds together in the numbers required to englobe and neutralize with their combined stings any attacker regardless of its size.
There was fossil evidence that a bitter struggle for survival had been waged between them and a gigantic and particularly ferocious species of ocean predator for millions of years. The presapient Gogleskans had won in the end, but they had paid a terrible price.
In order to englobe and sting to death one of those giant predators, physical and telepathic linkages between hundreds of presapient FOKTs were required. A great many of them had perished, been torn apart and eaten during every such encounter, and the consequent and often repeated death agonies of the victims had been shared telepathically by every member of the group. A natural mechanism had evolved that had fractionally reduced this suffering, diluting the pain of group telepathy by generating a mindless urge to destroy indiscriminately everything within reach that was not an FOKT. But even though the Gogleskans had become intelligent and civilized far beyond the level expected of a primitive fishing and farming culture, the mental wounds inflicted during their prehistory would not heal.
The high-pitched audible signal emitted by Gogleskans in distress that triggered the joining process could not be ignored at either the conscious or unconscious levels. That call to join represented only one thing, the threat of ultimate danger. And even in present times, when the danger was insignificant or imaginary, it made no difference. A joining led inevitably to the mindless destruction of everything in their immediate vicinity-housing, vehicles, crops, farm animals, mechanisms, book and art objects—that they had been able to build or grow as individuals.
That was why the present-day Gogleskans would not allow, except in the circumstances Khone had already mentioned, anyone to touch or come close to them or even address them in anything but the most impersonal terms while they fought helplessly and, until the recent visit of Diagnostician Conway to Goglesk, hopelessly against the condition that evolution had imposed on them.
“It is Conway’s intention to break the Gogleskan racial conditioning,” Khone went on, “by allowing the parent and offspring to experience gradually increasing exposure to a variety of other life-forms who were intelligent, civilized, and obviously not a threat. It was thought that the young one, in particular, might become so accustomed to the process that its subconscious as well as its conscious mind would be able to control the blind urge that previously caused a panic reaction leading to a joining. Mechanisms have also been devised by the hospital which distort the audible distress signal so that it becomes unrecognizable. The triggering stimulus and subsequent urge to mindless destruction would then be limited to the capabilities of one rather than a large group of persons acting in concert. Another solution which has doubtless already occurred to the trainee would be to excise the tendrils which allow contact telepathy and make it impossible for a joining to occur. But that solution is not possible because the tendrils are needed to give comfort and later to educate the very young, as well as to intensify the pleasures of mating, and the Gogleskans suffer privations enough without becoming voluntary emotional cripples.