“That’s quite…ingenious,” Pitman said. “How do people like you learn to think that way?”
“It was started a long time ago by a character called William of Occam.”
Pitman frowned. “Does Occamism explain why I would go to such lengths to deceive you?”
“Who knows why a…?” Jerome checked himself, aware that he was again straying into dangerous territory.
“Why a crank does anything?” The index finger of Pitman’s right hand slid off the gun’s trigger guard and curled around the trigger itself. can’t really be angry at you, Ray. The so-called rationalist mode of thought has saved my people from exposure time after time when one of us has accidentally given himself away. We’ve had reason to be grateful to your ability to blind yourselves to the obvious, but in this case…I wonder if I should stop wasting my valuable time on you.”
“I promised there’d be no tricks,” Jerome said, dry-mouthed. “That involved speaking my mind, voicing honest doubts—and I’ve just thought of something else.”
“Out with it.”
“I couldn’t fault your telepathy demonstration if it was done over again in front of my video camera.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Pitman said, laser-eyed. “Try your Occam’s Razor on this.”
Jerome knew several kinds of pain.
There was the straightforward physical pain of neural overload, centred on his brain…
There was the unmanning psychological pain, shot through with terror, of having another personality enter the temple of his own flesh, dispossessing him, perhaps for ever…
And there was the spiritual pain, the blighting of the soul with sadness and vain regrets, brought on when Nature practises one of her careless genocides on one’s own race. He saw Dorrinian men, women and children die in their millions. He took part in the agonizingly slow retreat to the depths of the planetary crust, while yet more of his kind perished with each awesome transit of the Sun…
There could be no physical escape to Earth for those who survived, but Jerome was vicariously present when the Dorrinian grand plan was conceived and executed. It took generations of selective breeding before the first supertelepaths appeared—individuals who could mentally reach out across space and by sheer concentration of will install their own personalities in Terran bodies. Jerome observed and took part in the surreptitious invasion of Earth, the slow, silent invasion which had been going on for more than three thousand years…
The linen tape binding the oar handle was shiny in places, blackened with use, but when one stared hard at the blackness the warp and weft of the material could still be seen inside it, like a microscopic grid of ivory inlaid in jet. Jerome gazed at the handle for a long time, trying to work out what it was, then he raised his head and made his eyes focus on Doctor Pitman.
He said, “That wasn’t fair.”
Pitman was unruffled. “You’re a hard man to reach, Ray. Quiet arrogance is the worst kind.”
“Even so…” Jerome felt dizzy and sick, suspended between two realities. “How many of you are there on Earth?”
“Not many. A very small proportion of Dorrinians have the required ability. Volunteers for the transfer usually have to spend days preparing themselves, taking special drugs, building up the necessary potential. Even then it’s a hazardous operation. Even for a supertelepath it is extremely difficult to locate the emanations from one target kald among the billions that are broadcasting on Earth.”
“Kald?” Jerome had an uneasy sense of having learned the word and forgotten it a thousand years earlier.
“There’s no equivalent in Earth languages,” Pitman said. “Kald is the Dorrinian word for the entire human entity—not just the body or the mind, but the complex of body, nervous system, brain, mind, spirit, personality and all the associated energy fields. Telepathy is partly a physical process, you see, and that’s what makes the Dorrin-to-Earth transfer so dangerous.”
There was an icy upheaving in Jerome’s subconscious. “Is this anything to do with SHC?”
“Unfortunately—yes. You can think of the kald as being like a flexible lens existing on several levels of reality. The analogy is greatly simplified, you understand, but when a Dorrinian is making a transfer to Earth that lens is adjusted to a focal length equal to the distance between the two worlds. And a lens is a two-way system. There is a narrow cone of influence reaching from Dorrin to Earth, and an opposing counterpart stretching back towards…”
“The Sun!” The gentle movement of the boat beneath Jerome could have been a rocking of the physical horizon.
“That’s correct.” Pitman’s voice was quiet and matter-of-fact, his words quickly fading away into the lake’s surrounding stillness. “Transfers are completely impossible when Mercury as seen from Earth is near the Sun. They are best achieved when Mercury is at its maximum elongation. That’s the safest time, but there’s no guarantee that something won’t go wrong. The Dorrinian may lose control for internal reasons, or there may be a continuum disturbance, or there may be a malign…well, let’s not go into that…
“The consequence is that for an instant the kald lens is disrupted. The needle cones of influence fan out into oscillating hemispheres which encompass the Sun, and solar heat is funnelled into the target body. And people on Earth—the few who choose to pay attention, that is—have another case of spontaneous human combustion to marvel at.”
“I…But…” Jerome suddenly realized he had nothing to say. It was partly an after-effect of his telepathic excursion into the Dorrinian racial consciousness, partly the shock value of what he had just heard, but he found himself overwhelmed, unable to cope with the torrent of new concepts.
“The people who were interested in recent decades have been using computers in their search for patterns in the incidence of SHC,” Pitman continued, almost as though talking for his own benefit. “They’ve had hundreds of dates to feed into their playthings, and I kept waiting for somebody to notice that no case had ever been reported when Mercury was in line with or close to the Sun. That regular trough has been clearly visible in the data right from the beginning, but nobody caught on. Can’t really blame them. Thinking in other categories is all very well, but you can’t help unconsciously setting a limit. What do you say, my boy?”
“I’ve just understood why you talked about my betraying the whole race,” Jerome said, aimlessly trailing his oars in the water. “From what you told me, we only get to know about these transfers of yours that go wrong. Presumably a much greater number of transfers take place without anything going wrong…and…and the word transfer is a euphemism, isn’t it? It’s another way of saying murder.”
Jerome stared at Pitman, wondering how he had brought himself to go so far, surprised to discover that anger and resentment can be more persuasive than fear. All scepticism had been banished from his mind and he now understood the doctor’s earlier cryptic remark about being thirty years older than his body. It meant that the physical form of Robert Pitman, exuding its manicured reassurance and Rotary Club respectability, actually housed a member of an alien race.
Apparently the Dorrinians felt they were entitled to use their mind science and psi-powers as weapons against the ordinary people of Earth, but whether an Art Starzynski or a Sammy Birkett burned up with solar heat in a failed transfer or simply had his personality erased, the end result was the same. It amounted to nothing less than murder. The Dorrinians could no more be justified than invaders using bomb or bayonet—and Jerome resented their actions. He resented their alien presence so passionately that there was no point in his trying to disguise the fact, either from Pitman or from himself.