Harfex, a reserved and patient man, said, "The reason is that we shall be spending several years together. Life will be better for all of us if -- "
"Can't you understand that I don't give a damn for all of you?" Osden said, took up his microtapes, and went out Eskwana had suddenly gone to sleep. Asnanifoil was drawing slipstreams in the air with his finger and muttering the Ritual Primes. "You cannot explain his presence on the team except as a plot on the part of the Terran Authority. I
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saw this almost at once. This mission is meant to fail," Harfex whispered to the Coordinator, glancing over his shoulder. Porlock was fumbling with his fly-button; there were tears in his eyes. I did tell you they were all crazy, but you thought I was exaggerating.
All the same, they were not unjustified. Extreme Surveyors expected to find their fellow team members intelligent, well-trained, unstable, and personally sympathetic. They had to work together in close quarters and nasty places, and could expect one another's paranoias, depressions, manias, phobias and compulsions to be mild enough to admit of good personal relationships, at least most of the time. Osden might be intelligent, but his training was sketchy and his personality was disastrous. He had been sent only on account of his singular gift, the power of empathy: properly speaking, of wide-range bioempathic receptivity. His talent wasn't species-specific; he could pick up emotion or sentience from anything that felt He could share lust with a white rat, pain with a squashed cockroach, and phototropy with a moth. On an alien world, the Authority had decided, it would be useful to know if anything nearby is sentient, and if so, what its feelings towards you are. Osden's title was a new one: he was the team's Sensor.
"What is emotion, Osden?" Haito Tomiko asked him one day in the main cabin, trying to make some rapport with him for once. "What is it, exactly, that you pick up with your empathic sensitivity?"
"Muck," the man answered in his high, exasperated voice. "The psychic excreta of the animal kingdom. I wade through your feces."
"I was trying," she said, "to learn some facts." She thought her tone was admirably calm.
"You weren't after facts. You were trying to get at me. With some fear, some curiosity, and a great deal of distaste. The way you might poke a dead dog to see the maggots
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crawl. Will you understand once and for all that I don't want to be got at, that I want to be left alone?" His skin was mottled with red and violet, his voice had risen. "Go roll in your own dung you yellow bitch!" he shouted at her silence.
"Calm down," she said, still quietly, but she left him at once and went to her cabin. Of course he had been right about her motives; her question had been largely a pretext, a mere effort to interest him. But what harm in that? Did not that effort imply respect for the other? At the moment of asking the question she had felt at most a slight distrust of him; she had mostly felt sorry for him, the poor arrogant venomous bastard, Mr. No-Skin as Olleroo called him. What did he expect, the way he acted? Love?
"I guess he can't stand anybody feeling sorry for him," said Olleroo, lying on the lower bunk, gilding her nipples.
"Then he can't form any human relationship. All his Dr. Hammergeld did was turn an autism inside out... "
"Poor frot," said Olleroo. "Tomiko, you don't mind if Harfex comes in for a while tonight, do you?"
"Can't you go to his cabin? I'm sick of always having to sit in Main with that damned peeled turnip."
"You do hate him, don't you? I guess he feels that But I slept with Harfex last night too, and Asnanifoil might get jealous, since they share the cabin. It would be nicer here."
"Service them both," Tomiko said with the coarseness of offended modesty. Her Terran subculture, the East Asian, was a puritanical one; she had been brought up chaste.
"I only like one a night," Olleroo replied with innocent serenity. Beldene, the Garden Planet, had never discovered chastity, or the wheel.
"Try Osden, then," Tomiko said. Her personal instability was seldom so plain as now: a profound self-distrust manifesting itself as destructivism. She had volunteered for this job because there was, in all probability, no use in doing it
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The little Beldene looked up, paintbrush in hand, eyes wide. 'Tomiko, that was a dirty thing to say."
"Why?"
"It would be vile! I'm not attracted to Osden!"
"I didn't know it mattered to you," Tomiko said indifferently, though she did know. She got some papers together and left the cabin, remarking "I hope you and Harfex or whoever it is finish by last bell;
I'm tired."
Olleroo was crying tears dripping on her little gilded nipples. She wept easily. Tomiko had not wept since she was ten years old.
It was not a happy ship; but it took a turn for the better when Asnanifoil and his computers raised World 4470. There it lay, a dark-green jewel, like truth at the bottom of a gravity well. As they watched the jade disc grow, a sense of mutuality grew among them. Osden's selfishness, his accurate cruelty, served now to draw the others together. "Perhaps," Mannon said, "he was sent as a beating-gron. What Terrans call a scapegoat Perhaps his influence will be good after all." And no one, so careful were they to be kind to one another, disagreed.
They came into orbit There were no lights on nightside, on the continents none of the lines and clots made by animals who build.
"No men," Harfex murmured.
"Of course not," snapped Osden, who had a viewscreen to himself, and his head inside a polythene bag He claimed that the plastic cut down on the empathic noise he received from the others. "We're two light centuries past the limit of the Hanish Expansion, and outside that there are no men. Anywhere. You don't think Creation would have made the same hideous mistake twice?"
No one was paying him much heed; they were looking with affection at that jade immensity below them, where there was life, but not human life. They were misfits
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among men, and what they saw there was not desolation, but peace. Even Osden did not look quite so expressionless as usual; he was frowning
Descent in fire on the sea; air reconnaissance; landing. A plain of something like grass, thick, green, bowing stalks, surrounded the ship, brushed against extended view cameras, smeared the lenses with a fine pollen.
"It looks like a pure phytosphere," Harfex said. "Osden, do you pick up anything sentient?"
They all turned to the Sensor. He had left the screen and was pouring himself a cup of tea. He did not answer. He seldom answered spoken questions.
The chitinous rigidity of military discipline was quite inapplicable to these teams of mad scientists; their chain of command lay somewhere between parliamentary procedure and peck-order, and would have driven a regular service officer out of his mind. By the inscrutable decision of the Authority, however, Dr. Haito Tomiko had been given the title of Coordinator, and she now exercised her prerogative for the first time. "Mr. Sensor Osden," she said, "please answer Mr. Harfex."
"How could I 'pick up' anything from outside," Osden said without
turning, "with the emotions of nine neurotic hominids pulsating around me like worms in a can? When I have anything to tell you, 111 tell you. I'm aware of my responsibility as Sensor. If you presume to give me an order again, however, Coordinator Haito, 111 consider my responsibility void."