“Row us out to the centre of the lake, but do it gently and don’t overexert yourself,” Pitman said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Jerome tried to sneer. “Unless you do it.”
“I understand your feeling that way, but speaking as a medical practitioner I’m advising you to…How old are you, anyway?”
“Fifty,” Jerome snapped. “How old are you?”
An enigmatic expression appeared on Pitman’s face. “The body you’re looking at is seventy-six years of age. I am almost thirty years older.”
Jerome considered the statement. “Talk sense.”
“I’m sorry,” Pitman said, looking genuinely contrite. “This is so difficult. What would you say if I told you I wasn’t born on Earth?”
“I’d say you were a spaceman.”
“Pejorative use of the word, I think, but this is the truth—I was born on a different planet.”
“One I would know about?”
“My people’s name for it is Dorrin.” Pitman’s gaze was steady. “But you know it as Mercury.”
“I see.” Jerome felt appreciably relieved. He had made the mistake of underestimating Pitman where telepathy was concerned and since then had been psychologically disadvantaged at every turn, but at last there had come a development which offered some hope. The doctor still had the upper hand, but if he was deluded enough to believe he was an extraterrestrial that was evidence of a weakness of mind which might be exploited. Jerome thought briefly of the utterly barren, radiation-scoured surface of Mercury, familiar to him from photographs, then with an effort of will changed his visualization to that of an Earth-bound astronomer. He pictured a soft speck of light almost lost in the afterglow of sunset.
“I don’t know much about Mercury,” he said, trying to strike the right note of credulity. “Is it a pleasant place?”
“It’s a hellish place, as you very well know,” Pitman replied. “I told you before, Ray—there’s no point in trying to fool me.”
“All right, I just can’t see how any life could have evolved in a place like that.”
Pitman shook his head. “There was no evolution. Both Earth and Mercury were colonized by human space travellers from another star system. It happened so long ago that we have no records of which star our ancestors came from or why they were attracted to Mercury in the first place. It was hardly an obvious choice for colonization, even though its synchronous rotation meant there was a fairly habitable twilight zone.”
Got you! Jerome thought triumphantly. Your knowledge of your so-called home planet is about forty years out of date. For an instant he was tempted to remain quiet, to encourage the doctor to make more elementary blunders, then he thought better of it. Pitman reacted badly to insincerity.
Jerome cleared his throat and said, “I hate to drag in an awkward fact, but…”
“But Mercury does rotate in respect to the Sun. That fact isn’t awkward, my boy—it’s tragic. When Mercury was colonized it was in captured rotation, keeping one hemisphere away from the Sun, and the Dorrinian people were able to exist there in relative comfort. Our cities were underground, of course, and we had to manufacture our own atmosphere, but the system was viable and stable—until the Days of the Comet.”
“Ah, yes,” Jerome said. “H. G. Wells.”
Pitman sighed his disapproval. “That tongue of yours must cost you a lot of friends.”
“My friends don’t aim shotguns at me.”
“Point acknowledged, but it’s in your own interests to take what I’m saying very seriously. I advise you to keep quiet and absorb the information.”
“Go on.” Jerome rowed in a slow rhythm, the familiar activity pointing up the bizarre nature of the situation. The sunlight was intensely bright on the open stretch of lake and Pitman was delineated with a kind of luminous clarity against a background made up of horizontal bands of water, hushed trees, blue-green hills and sky. With his broad, benign countenance, silver hair and conservative business suit he should have been behind a desk, posing for a let-me-be-your-father advertising shot, instead of sitting in a rowboat with a gun on his knee, interlarding expressions of concern with death threats, fact with fantasy…
“More than three thousand Earth years ago—in the 15th century BC to be precise—a very large comet blundered into the solar system,” Pitman went on, the intensity of his gaze warning Jerome to remain silent.
“It was drawn into the Sun, brushing close by Mercury on the way and imparting to it the spin which is now observed by Earth astronomers, one revolution every fifty-eight Earth days. That was a catastrophe for the Dorrinians, who found the former temperate zone being blasted by the full radiation of the Sun. Most of them died before they could go far enough underground to find shelter. Even those who did survive were hard-pressed to stay alive, because the Sun’s heat penetrated farther into the planetary crust with each new rotation. It is estimated that ninety per cent of the Dorrinian population was lost in the Days of the Comet.”
Jerome nodded, not trusting himself to make any comment. It had taken him a moment to understand why he had found Pitman’s reference to the 15th century BC significant, then his memory had stirred into action. Immanuel Velikovsky, perhaps the crankiest pseudo-scientist of all, had assigned that dating to his giant comet which was supposed to have grazed Earth and caused a number of Biblical “miracles’. In Velikovsky’s scenario the comet had eventually settled down to become the planet Venus, but here it was careering onwards into the Sun and on the way playing havoc with civilization on Mercury. Pitman’s story had the classical attributes of all such fanciful edifices, which were grab-bags of anything which could be filched from other disciplines to mask their essential implausibility. It appeared that being a telepath, assuming the doctor genuinely had the ability, was no defence against eccentricity—but there still remained the enigma of his connection with the fire death…
“You’re not paying attention, Ray,” Pitman reproved. “You should mark the fact that Dorrinian science has evolved differently from that of Earth. The sheer lack of physical resources forced us to concentrate on our mental abilities. We are weak on hard technology and engineering, but we have compensated with our progress on mind-to-mind and mind-to-matter interactions. I have already given you proof of that.”
“I admit I was impressed back there in the house,” Jerome said, deciding to risk open scepticism as a way to keep the doctor talking, “but I’ve just thought of a non-psi explanation.”
“You’d better verbalize it—I can’t read the melange of blurry abstracts in your mind.”
Jerome forced a smile. “That’s neat. Look, I freely concede that you’re an excellent hypnotist—you proved it when you commanded me to get over the shock I had when I found you in the house with a gun.”
“Continue.”
“Well, I’ve also seen a lot of astonishing things done with post-hypnotic commands. You could easily have ordered me to say the name of any object I pictured in my mind, and also to be unaware that I was saying it. And there you have it—a totally convincing demonstration of telepathy.”