«In a way. A subtle, automatic, unconscious way.» Cornelius drew a deep breath and plunged into it. «The pseudojovian is so nearly perfect a life-form: your biologists engineered into it all the experience gained from nature’s mistakes in designing us. At first, Joe was only a remote-controlled biological machine. Then Anglesey and Joe became two facets of a single personality. Then, oh, very slowly, the stronger, healthier body… more amplitude to its thoughts… do you see? Joe is becoming the dominant side. Like this business of sending down the other pseudos—Anglesey only thinks he has logical reasons for wanting it done. Actually, his ‘reasons’ are mere rationalizations for the instinctive desires of the Joe facet.
«Anglesey’s subconscious must comprehend the situation, in a dim reactive way; it must feel his human ego gradually being submerged by the steamroller force of Joe’s instincts and Joe’s wishes. It tries to defend its own identity, and is swatted down by the superior force of Joe’s own nascent subconscious.
«I put it crudely,» he finished in an apologetic tone, «but it will account for that oscillation in the K tubes.»
Viken nodded, slowly, like an old man. «Yes, I see it,» he answered. «The alien environment down there… the different brain structure… Good God! Ed’s being swallowed up in Joe! The puppet master is becoming the puppet!» He looked ill.
«Only speculation on my part,» said Cornelius. All at once, he felt very tired. It was not pleasant to do this to Viken, whom he liked. «But you see the dilemma, no? If I am right, then any esman will gradually become a Jovian—a monster with two bodies, of which the human body is the unimportant auxiliary one. This means no esman will ever agree to control a pseudo—therefore, the end of your project.»
He stood up. «I’m sorry, Arne. You made me tell you what I think, and now you will lie awake worrying, and I am maybe quite wrong and you worry for nothing.»
«It’s all right,» mumbled Viken. «Maybe you’re not wrong.»
«I don’t know.» Cornelius drifted toward the door. «I am going to try to find some answers tomorrow. Good night.»
The moon-shaking thunder of the rockets, crash, crash, crash, leaping from their cradles, was long past. Now the fleet glided on metal wings, with straining secondary ram-jets, through the rage of the Jovian sky.
As Cornelius opened the control-room door, he looked at his telltale board. Elsewhere a voice tolled the word to all the stations, One ship wrecked, two ships wrecked, but Anglesey would let no sound enter his presence when he wore the helmet. An obliging technician had haywired a panel of fifteen red and fifteen blue lights above Cornelius’ esprojector, to keep him informed, too. Ostensibly, of course, they were only there for Anglesey’s benefit, though the esman had insisted he wouldn’t be looking at them.
Four of the red bulbs were dark and thus four blue ones would not shine for a safe landing. A whirlwind, a thunderbolt, a floating ice meteor, a flock of mantalike birds with flesh as dense and hard as iron—there could be a hundred things which had crumpled four ships and tossed them tattered across the poison forests.
Four ships, hell! Think of four living creatures, with an excellence of brain to rival your own, damned first to years in unconscious night and then, never awakening save for one uncomprehending instant, dashed in bloody splinters against an ice mountain. The wasteful callousness of it was a cold knot in Cornelius’ belly. It had to be done, no doubt, if there was to be any thinking life on Jupiter at all; but then let it be done quickly and minimally, he thought, so that the next generation could be begotten by love and not by machines!
He closed the door behind him and waited for a breathless moment. Anglesey was a wheel chair and a coppery curve of helmet, facing the opposite wall. No movement, no awareness whatsoever. Good! It would be awkward, perhaps ruinous, if Anglesey learned of this most intimate peering. But he needn’t, ever. He was blindfolded and ear-plugged by his own concentration.
Nevertheless, the psionicist moved his bulky form with care, across the room to the new esprojector. He did not much like his snooper’s role, he would not have assumed it at all if he had seen any other hope. But neither did it make him feel especially guilty. If what he suspected was true, then Anglesey was all unawares being twisted into something not human; to spy on him might be to save him.
Gently, Cornelius activated the meters and started his tubes warming up. The oscilloscope built into Anglesey’s machine gave him the other man’s exact alpha rhythm; his basic biological clock. First you adjusted to that, then you discovered the subtler elements by feel, and when your set was fully in phase you could probe undetected and—
Find out what was wrong. Read Anglesey’s tortured subconscious and see what there was on Jupiter that both drew and terrified him.
Five ships wrecked.
But it must be very nearly time for them to land. Maybe only five would be lost in all. Maybe ten would get through. Ten comrades for—Joe?
Cornelius sighed. He looked at the cripple, seated blind and deaf to the human world which had crippled him, and felt a pity and an anger. It wasn’t fair, none of it was.
Not even to Joe. Joe wasn’t any kind of soul-eating devil. He did not even realize, as yet, that he was Joe, that Anglesey was becoming a mere appendage. He hadn’t asked to be created, and to withdraw his human counterpart from him would very likely be to destroy him.
Somehow, there were always penalties for everybody when men exceeded the decent limits.
Cornelius swore at himself, voicelessly. Work to do. He sat down and fitted the helmet on his own head. The carrier wave made a faint pulse, inaudible, the trembling of neurons low in his awareness. You couldn’t describe it.
Reaching up, he turned to Anglesey’s alpha. His own had a somewhat lower frequency, it was necessary to carry the signals through a heterodyning process. Still no reception. Well, of course he had to find the exact wave form, timbre was as basic to thought as to music. He adjusted the dials slowly, with enormous care.
Something flashed through his consciousness, a vision of clouds roiled in a violet-red sky, a wind that galloped across horizonless immensity—he lost it. His fingers shook as he turned back.
The psibeam between Joe and Anglesey broadened. It took Cornelius into the circuit. He looked through Joe’s eyes, he stood on a hill and stared into the sky above the ice mountains, straining for sign of the first rocket; and simultaneously he was still Jan Cornelius, blurrily seeing the meters, probing about for emotions, symbols, any key to the locked terror in Anglesey’s soul.
The terror rose up and struck him in the face.
Psionic detection is not a matter of passive listening in. Much as a radio receiver is necessarily also a weak transmitter, the nervous system in resonance with a source of psionic-spectrum energy is itself emitting. Normally, of course, this effect is unimportant; but when you pass the impulses, either way, through a set of heterodyning and amplifying units, with a high negative feedback…
In the early days, psionic psychotherapy vitiated itself because the amplified thoughts of one man, entering the brain of another, would combine with the latter’s own neural cycles according to the ordinary vector laws. The result was that both men felt the new beat frequencies as a nightmarish fluttering of their very thoughts. An analyst, trained into self-control, could ignore it; his patient could not, and reacted violently.
But eventually the basic human wave timbres were measured, and psionic therapy resumed. The modern esprojector analyzed an incoming signal and shifted its characteristics over to the «listener’s» pattern. The really different pulses of the transmitting brain, those which could not possibly be mapped onto the pattern of the receiving neurones—as an exponential signal cannot very practicably be mapped onto a sinusoid—those were filtered out.