For a full hour Cantrell tried to claw his way back to the mind stream of the man who was raptly sitting a few feet from him, but the obtrusive thoughts of people back on Earth insisted on popping up. For a full hour Cantrell plumbed the depths of degradation in some minds, read the noble and exalted thoughts of others. He tuned in on one murder and two suicides, seen in dizzy angles by the different participants in the violence done.
Through them all was a continual undertone of abominable worry and expectancy of death. Cantrell grunted softly whenever that image emerged. He recognized it easily; that was what he and Boyle were out there in space to fight. It was the ever-present dread of being struck down by the plague raging on Earth—the shakes, spastitis malignans, whatever you wanted to call it.
Cantrell saw people drop in the street, only to begin to tremble horribly at the hands and feet with the disease. Finally he tore the headset off in disgust. Boyle looked at him mildly.
"You try it solo," said Cantrell. "I can't get a damned thing out of the ether except the pressure-waves from Tellus. And they aren't pretty."
Boyle removed his own set carefully. "It's eavesdropping," he said. "I tried to get you every second. What were you doing?"
"Just what you were," grunted his partner. "Just exactly. I was trying to get you, but you weren't to be had. We have to move on, Boyle. Do what you can with the accelerators."
Boyle went to the instrument panel, worked the multiplex of levers. Too near the Earth! Too near to the suffering stew of human beings in agony, never knowing who would be next with the shakes. That was what they had to get away from—the emotional jags and lunatic vibrations from the home planet.
He and Cantrell had been carefully teamed as psychological mates for the full utilization of the polyphone. Essentially the machine was intended to heighten to the nth degree the rapport of a pair like this one. But they were too sensitive for the machine. There was interference from the thousands who passed in the street, from everybody all over the globe who was thinking consecutively at the time.
And because the shakes was a disease of psychological degeneration, you had to fight it by probing into a mind and finding what was wrong.
It didn't have to be a diseased mind, for every normal mind has in its depths the seeds of every psychological affliction that breaks out in wilder form. In Boyle's well-ordered brain were minute traces of megalomania, satyriasis, schizophrenia, all the words ending in philia and phobia as well as other unpleasant matters. Everybody has them, whether he knows it or not.
The idea had been to shoot these two out into space, far from the influence and interference of Earth; then they would work deeper and deeper into each other's minds, finally to discover the seeds of the shakes that were inevitably lying dormant.
One of the pleasant features of psychiatry is that once you have your problem broken down it is already solved. The synthetic element of logic is superfluous; analysis is sufficient. It might be that the shakes consisted of a fear of technical progress reaching epidemic proportions through hysterical contagion. You see a man fall in the street feebly kicking his heels in protest at being deprived of the liberty to roam on grassy fields and your own elements of protest are somewhat stirred.
Then one day you feel despondent and they explode when your censor band is not on guard against subversive urges like that. And for the rest of your life you are a spastic, kicking and squirming uncontrollably. Or until someone calmly explains to you what is wrong—about the machine age and the rest. Then you are miraculously cured. And one cure breeds a thousand as confidence grows.
Meanwhile there was the matter of interference from Earth. Boyle pushed the fuel rod down to the limits of the outward-bound trip.
Dammit, they'd have to get away from the static, he brooded.
"What's our position?" queried Boyle. He was relaxing, Cantrell at the driving panel.
"Practically ideal," said his partner. "I haven't checked, but we should be well out of the range of anything from Earth. Going high and fancy, we are—per second acceleration for two weeks. That's plenty far. Do you want to try out the polyphone again?"
"Blow off the dust," grunted Boyle, swinging himself from the bunk.
Gravity on the ship was at Earth level; that had meant tons of extra equipment and power consumption far above normal, but these two on whom the fate of their planet depended could not be distracted by space sickness and flying soup.
Cantrell readied the polyphone, testing and checking the scores of minute connections and solders that held the complex creation together. Some he tightened, others he ripped out and replaced. At length the psychologist reported: "All ready. Let's make this tryout a good one."
"Right. You stay open and receptive; I'll drive as deep into your mind as I can. And Cantrell—I know it's not a nice thing to ask, but you'll have to have complete confidence in me. I don't want you to seal off any sections at all from me. I want you to stay as open as though you weren't being probed. You're a specialist; you could close off whatever you wanted to. But we don't know where the spastitis seeds lie. It may be in some group-unconscious engram or some especially unsavory crime you've committed and forced yourself to forget. I'll play square with you, Cantrell. For the sake of the whole planet back there—don't keep any secret places."
His partner stared at him curiously. "Okay," he said at last. "You know best. But if you find anything especially nasty, do me the favor of not telling me about it."
"Agreed," said Boyle with relief. He switched on the machine as they donned the head sets. The great tube glowed.
Cantrell relaxed in body and mind as he felt the probing fingers sent from his partner's brain pluck away at his grey matter. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation, rather like a mental Swedish massage. Vaguely, images came through. He stiffened a little. There shouldn't be any images here, and if there were he shouldn't get them. For the moment putting aside the receptive mood, he reached out, shutting his eyes and wrinkling his brow in an effort to encompass the foreign thought vibrations that were filtering into his skull.
He saw a sky then through the eyes of some person on whose mind he had landed. The sky was curiously dusky. And with the vision of the sky was a poignant sense of longing that filled the mind of Cantrell's host.
The words of it seemed to be: "My loved one! My loved one—on their side. Now we are enemies …"
A quick start of alarm. The sky swiveled away, and Cantrell saw through these other eyes a group of horsemen bearing down on his host. A shrill scream of terror, an intolerable wave of revulsion and regret, and then the blankness of death. Cantrell's host had been ridden under the hooves of the horsemen.
The psychologist, not believing what he had experienced, reached out with his mind and seized on one of the riders. He did know that there was a sense of guilt in the rider's mind; what it meant he could not tell.
He heard a conversation begun with a shrill, nervous laugh. Then:
"Damned rebel—we showed him."
"Right. Fix them all up like that and this world will be worth living on, sir. Where do we go now?"
"Keep scouting. Look for rebels and treat them the right way, like that dead thing back there—"
Cantrell had suddenly lost interest in the conversation. The talk of rebels was beyond him anyway. He had been studying, through his host's eyes, the costume of the riders. They were unfamiliar, and somehow totally alien to anything earthly. Then with a shock of terror Cantrell saw that the horses had peculiarly long heads—and six legs!
He tore the set from his head and stared, wide-eyed, at Boyle. "Where were you?" he demanded. There was a shrill, hysterical note in his voice.
"Trying to get over," said Boyle as he switched off the set. "But there was interference. We'll have to go farther yet. I tuned in on a series of love-affairs from back on Earth."