The organic brain specialists had developed startling techniques during the war. They had learned how to totally erase a captured human's mind and refill it with false identity and purpose. It had been these unknowing traitors among the human fleets who had signaled the turning of the war tide against mankind. The naoli doctors had now learned to use the same procedures on their own kind in the treatment of the most mentally deranged.
Once washed, he would never remember his first two hundred and eighty-seven years of life. The centuries to come would be nothing more than a farce without history-and therefore without purpose. Such a thing should be avoided at all cost.
Yet now he was considering letting the human escape, thereby risking all of these things. It had to do with the boy's saving him from the rat. But there was also that great pool of misery lying on his soul bottom: the knowledge that he had assisted in the extermination of an entire race.
"No," he said. "I am not taking you in to be killed. But I want you to be gone from here as fast as possible. I will be back tomorrow to continue my work. You will be gone?"
"Of course," Leo said. Hulann thought of him as Leo now, not just as a human or a boy. He wondered if Leo also thought of him by his naoli name.
"I'll go now," Hulann said.
He went. He took with him the knowledge that he was now a criminal against all others of his race, against the naoli treasures and traditions, against the beloved home worlds and the powerful central committee. Against Fiala-and maybe against himself as well.
Banalog, the chief traumatist of the occupation forces' Second Divison, leaned his head into the scope of the tapeviewer and watched the life history of Hulann Po'-naga flit before his weary eyes. The film moved at a rate four times faster than he could consciously comprehend.
The end of the film passed, then only whiteness. Banalog pushed the viewer away and settled back in his chair, crossing his hands on the slight rise of his primary stomach. When his overmind had mulled the data, he punched a desk stud and spoke to the air in a gruff, commanding tone-his natural voice.
"Tentative recommendation based on files. Hulann should be returned to home world for therapy. Otherwise, he will become a hopeless neurotic. He is a fine and gentle person; the war has affected him more than most. Too, he has a history of mild obsessions. Therapy will be to his advantage. Naturally, final recommendation will be deferred until I've seen the patient first-hand as per the Phasersystem's advice. Perhaps it is relevant to note that, although he was told to contact me as soon as possible, Hulann has thus far not come to schedule an interview. This may be an indication he is suffering and subconsciously nursing his guilt. The Phasersystem should remind him of the necessity of making an appointment during the condition period in the morning."
He shut off the recorder.
For a while, he sat in the office with the lights dimmed nearly to total darkness. Not much illumination filtered through the windows from the late winter afternoon.
He thought of the home world where his family was now safe. The menace had been put down; mankind was gone. There would be much mating, many days spent in the warrens in rejoicing. He thought of his children, the entire brood of three hundred and some. How many exactly? He did not know. But he was proud of all of them.
Inexorably, his mind traced rambling patterns until it had returned to the situation at hand. The occupied planet. The dead cities. The ill naoli stationed here.
So Hulann's conscience was bothering him. Genocide was a bitter pill to swallow.
Banalog toyed with the recorder microphone, then thumbed the lights completely out. The room seemed to shrink in the darkness until it was the size of a closet.
He rose from his desk and went to the window to look upon the fallen city that the humans had called Boston. He could not see much, for the clouds hung low and a snowfall was beginning. Sheets of fine white flakes drifted by the glass, some smearing wetly along it, distorting what little the traumatist could see of the place where men had once lived.
So Hulann's conscience was bothering him, eh?
Well, there were other naoli with the same problem
Later that same night, Fiala stretched in the invisible strands of her bed and allowed the pleasant power web to caress her lithe body. Though her flesh tingled excitingly and began to feel better as the tension and fatigue drained from it, her mind still boiled. She was cultivating her hatred for Hulann.
There was no reason why he should have been appointed director of this team. His record was no better than hers. Not substantially, anyway. And his time of service was actually somewhat less. She could see no logic in his receiving the position other "than the possibility that he had been able to pull strings of which she had no knowledge.
Today, when he had left the diggings early, he had looked drawn and troubled. His lids had been drooping until his eyes were only slits. He had his lips drawn tightly over his teeth, covering them: the sign of shame. She knew that he was a strong possibility for therapy, and she had been expecting him to be pulled out of the operation by this time, sent home to recover. Yet he hung on.
Damn him!
And she could no longer afford to wait for his breakdown. Whoever brought this job to a conclusion would be established for the rest of his or her career. It was the greatest chore in the history of archaeology, in the entire span of naoli scientific history. And Boston was one of the few unatomized cities where something worthwhile could still be uncovered.
There must be some way of hurrying Hulann's certain collapse, she thought, though the method presently evaded her. She toiled over various plans, rejecting one, after another, and finally gave up on it for the night.
Elsewhere in the dead city:
Hulann slept the death sleep, his overmind tucked in its nether-world pocket. Even with his burdens, he could know peace in this manner.
Leo had finished fashioning a place for himself among clothes that had spilled from a shattered closet. He nestled deeply in them to ward off the cold of the New England night. There was a knife by his side which he could reach easily if he should need it. As he was falling asleep, a picture of perfect clarity burst into his mind. It was of his father, lying dead beneath the grenade lobbing station. He sat upright in the clothes, as if activated by a spring, shivering. He refused to allow himself to think about it. When he felt he could trust to sleep without a nightmare, he laid down again and sought his pocket of warmth.
Two blocks away, above ground, a winter bird worked its way down into a nest of offal and grass, string and ribbon, pecking and plucking at the fibers of its home with a quick, unpleasant nervousness. Farther along the rain gutter, a hundred feet from where the bird worried, a sick and dying mutant rat crept as stealthily as it could. Its head kept drooping, and it found itself stopping at the same spot for long periods of time, delirious. Its legs felt weak and almost useless to it, and there was a sharp burning sensation along its spine. It could not know of the naoli virus that did deadly work within it. It only knew that it was hungry. When it was within a few feet of the nest, it stopped and tensed to leap. Somehow, the bird heard it and took wing into the darkness. The diseased rat jumped, in one last, desperate effort, missed the slapping feathers, and felt itself going over the edge of the rain gutter. It clawed wildly at the stone, but could find no purchase. It fell away from the top of the empty cathedral toward the silent street below.
In the chief administration building of the occupation forces, the programmers of the Phaserdreams worked industriously on the broadcasts for the following morning. Now and then, one of the technicians took a break, went outside and popped a sweet-drug lozenge for fifteen minutes of drifting pleasure, watched the snow fall and eddy around his splayed feet. Under the effects of the chemicals, it seemed as if the naoli were one with the floating flakes, as though losing his identity to the natural forces of this world.