“Dear little Ivo studied your horoscope. Now all that information is mine.” He grinned. “You are, you see, in my power. That chart has you laid out and nakedly displayed, and I can sample any part of you I desire. Fortunately I don’t desire your mind.”
She controlled her mounting irritation. “How much do you expect to accomplish, depending on astrology?” Again, she had to keep him talking, while waiting for an opportunity to gain some advantage. Genius he might be, but his youthful arrogance might defeat him yet.
“There are many ways to view existence,” Schön said. “Symbols are useful for minds of any potential, and astrology is an organized system of symbols as valid as any. I would accept it as readily as, say, religion. Of course, no symbol has validity apart from the values and qualities assigned to it by the user. What alternative would you prefer for your nuptial?”
“What makes you think the ram is so damned attractive to the doe?”
“What makes you think the ram is trying to be?”
“You imagine your word is my command?”
“Sister, there is no other functioning homo-sapiens man within fifty thousand light-years, and you can’t penetrate the destroyer field by yourself. I can. The question is, am I to be obliged, however clumsily, on my way home, or do I travel alone?”
Could he travel alone? Even if he turned off the destroyer broadcast — a thing he might not be able to do, assuming it had safeguards against interference — he would not succeed in freeing the spaceways of its effect. Earth was in the field of another station, and in any event it would require at least fifteen thousand years for the destroyer to clear itself, limited as it was by light velocity.
Yet he was in control of his body and Ivo’s experience now. That meant he had found a way around the destroyer memory — and, therefore, the destroyer itself.
Or so he wanted her to believe.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I don’t think you can go home without my help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be chasing me now, or trying so hard to impress me.”
“Or winning rounds against you. Maybe I’m too softhearted to leave you here alone. Are you calling my bluff again?” he inquired scornfully.
Suddenly she was afraid again, and could not answer. Ivo’s body had been possessed by a demon. How important was this peculiar contest, and how badly was she losing? Evidently the verbal interchange was part of it, and she was at a disadvantage there. Brad had always been able to twist around her statements and confuse her, and Schön had the same ability.
On the other hand, if she should somehow win — and theoretically she had an equal chance to do so, if she could only marshal her complete resources — what would be her victory? A liaison with Schön?
“You always were slow to get the message,” he said. “I sent you an obvious one as soon as Brad lost out, but naturally you fouled it up.”
“You sent me a message!”
“Surely you didn’t think I needed to send Ivo one? I had to borrow his hand to type it.”
Her curiosity had been aroused, and she didn’t care that this was what he had intended. “Then why didn’t you just tell him what you wanted?”
“He wouldn’t listen.”
That simple? That all the mystery and confusion engendered by the obscure missives had been Ivo’s fault? Again, she doubted it.
“Why, you wonder, did I not address the message to you? And, I explain — for you are exceedingly interested in explanations at the moment, your symbol says — I found it necessary to be circumspect. Ivo was almost always on guard, and only in rare moments of negligence was I able to assume control of so much as a single limb. He happened to pass the teletype section while in a condition of shock from the Senator’s demise and Brad’s discommodation, and I froze him unaware and set up the message. But I didn’t dare to do it in any style he comprehended, or mention you at all, or he would have snapped right out of it then. I had very little time, so I just jotted down the opening line of Lanier’s “The Marshes of Glynn” in polyglot, sticking to languages you could interpret. I thought you’d be smart enough to follow that up and get the real message.”
“Well, I wasn’t and I didn’t,” she snapped. “So what was the ‘real message’?”
“The terminal couplet of the poem, stupid. ‘And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in / On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.’ Anybody with a note of savvy could see that what swam below Ivo’s Glynn was Schön, and of course a Georgia girl would be familiar with the poem. Once you fluttered your pale pink eyelashes and told him to give over—”
“What makes you so sure I would have told him?”
“Back in that hour you fancied you were enamored of Brad Carpenter. You thought Schön would help you get him back. You were charmingly naïve. Still are, too.”
She remembered. Had she known the truth then, she would have sacrificed Ivo… foolishly. It had taken the phenomenal chain of events of the ensuing period to change her thinking — and her values.
“After that, Ivo was on to the polyglot dodge, so I had to try other stuff. He wasn’t exactly bright, but he did know enough not to get taken twice on the same boat, and he was stubborn as hell. The problem was to identify him without alerting him, and there were not many opportunities. Fortunately he never did catch on to the fact the messages were not intended for him, so the arrow-address gimmick got through.”
“So you made a Neptune-symbol to send us so far out we’d be dependent on you to get us home again—”
“Obliged to cry uncle, yes. Neptune is the planet of obligation, if we accept the view of your engineer’s main authority on the subject. Traditionally, of course, Neptune is allied with liquids, gases, mystery, illusion, dreams, deceit — but that simple hint passed you by, naturally. At least Groton, duffer that he was, began to catch on that—”
“And a shorthand message once we were there,” she said, cutting him off. She was furious with herself for not delving beyond the superficial, at the time of that message. Liquids and gases — as in the melting process? Could Schön actually have foreseen that? Mystery, illusion — as in the whereabouts of Schön behind the illusion of Ivo. A multileveled communiqué indeed, and she had missed it. Brad would have grasped all of it…
“But why did you want to take over if you couldn’t help Brad?” she asked him then. “Surely you didn’t care about the world crisis?”
“There was an entertaining situation developing. Why else?”
She stared at him, aghast at his indifference, but he met her gaze levelly. “Brad’s mind gone and a United States Senator dead, the very future of the macroscope project in peril — and you found it amusing?”
“Entertaining. There’s a distinction, had you but the wit to grasp it, chick. The challenge of a signal from space that could stupefy and kill—”
“Why did the Senator die? No one else did.”
“The rules of the game require me to remind you that every serious question I answer seriously is gaining me points.”
“And any you can’t or won’t answer will gain me points.” She hoped.
He shrugged. “More people would have died had more been exposed. Your others were all mature, sedate, pacifistic scientists who had largely come to terms with reality. The destroyer activates a neural feedback that varies directly with intelligence and inversely with maturity. Thus an intelligent mature person is unaffected, or an unintelligent immature person. But an intelligent immature one is hit with all the voltage of the disparity between those qualities. The Senator was a primitive genius (I use the term loosely) — so he died. Brad was a medium-mature genius, as were the other scientists.”