“You can go back,” a masculine voice said in his ear, in Phoenician.
Ivo clenched Afra’s hand. “Pull me out!” he said urgently. “It’s Schön!”
He felt her fingers returning his pressure, as from a distance, and the tug of the goggles coming off — but the scene did not shift.
“Why do you fight me?” Schön asked in Ivo’s voice.
“Because you may be destroyed the moment you take over, for one thing. Don’t you know that?”
“When I take over,” Schön said as though never doubting the eventuality, “I will have the whole of your experience to draw on, should I require it. At present I have almost none of it. It is exceedingly difficult for me even to contact you, since you don’t let go until your mind is distracted. So I don’t know what your problem is — but I do know there is something intriguing afoot.”
Someone was still tugging at a distant extremity. “Hold up a minute, Afra,” Ivo called. “He only wants to talk.”
“I don’t trust him,” she said from the far reaches.
“Give us two minutes.”
“Little puritan Ivo has a girlfriend now?” Schön inquired. Obviously he knew — but how much?
“No. Now look, I have to explain why I can’t let you have the body. We’re in touch with a nonhuman signal that—”
“I can give you romantic prowess. No woman can withstand that. A warty toad could seduce a princess.”
“I know, but no. Now this galactic civilization has broadcast what we call the destroyer signal that—”
“How about turning me loose for a specified interval? Just long enough to lick this problem of yours.”
“No! You don’t understand what I’m—”
“Junior, are you trying to lecture me on—”
A cold shock hit him, reminding him of the original plunge into the Mediterranean. Ivo looked up to find Afra standing before him, the bucket in her hands. “Yeah, that did it,” he said, shaking himself. She had doused him with icewater: three gallons over his head.
“Are you going to be trapped every time you use the scope?” she demanded. “You were talking in Phoenician again, but I got the bit about two minutes, not that I waited that long. What did he want?”
“He wants out,” Ivo said, shivering. He began to strip off his clothing. “But he can’t get out until I let him.”
“What about the destroyer?”
“He doesn’t seem to know about that, or want to hear it. I couldn’t make him listen.”
“He must know about it. What about that message — ‘My pawn is pinned’? He knew then.”
Ivo, bouncing up and down to warm up, halted. The wet floor was slippery under his bare toes. “I didn’t think of that. He must be lying.”
“That doesn’t make sense either. If he knew the destroyer would get him, why should he expose himself to it? And if he knows it won’t, why not say so? This isn’t a game of twenty questions.”
“Now that I think of it,” Ivo admitted, “he didn’t sound much like a genius to me, I’ve never actually talked directly with him before, but — it was more like a kid bargaining.”
“A child.” She brought a towel and started patting him dry, and he realized that for the first time he had undressed unselfconsciously before her. They had all seen each others’ bodies during the meltings, but this was not such an occasion. Barriers were still coming down unobtrusively. “How old was he when — ?”
“I’m not sure. It took some time to — to set me up. I remember some events back to age five, but there are blank spots up until eight or nine. That doesn’t necessarily mean he took over then—”
“So Schön never lived as an adult.”
“I guess not, physically.”
“Or emotionally. You matured, not he. Is it surprising, then, that he appears childish to us? His intelligence and talent don’t change the fact that he is immature. He likes to play games, to send out mysterious messages, create worlds of imagination. For him, right and wrong are merely concepts; he has no devotion to adult truth. No developed conscience. And if the notion of the destroyer frightens him — why, he puts it out of his mind. He no longer admits its danger. He thinks that he can conquer anything just by tackling it with gusto.”
Ivo nodded thoughtfully, looking about for some dry shorts. “But he’s still got more knowledge and ability than any adult.”
She brought the shorts. “A sixteen-year-old boy has better reflexes than most mature men, and more knowledge about automotive engineering — turbo or electric or hydraulic — but he’s still the world’s worst driver. It takes more than knowledge and ability; it takes control and restraint. Obviously Schön doesn’t have that.”
“If he began driving — what a crash he could make!”
“Let’s just defuse the destroyer first,” she said, smiling grimly. “You were right all along: we’re better off without Schön.”
CHAPTER 9
“We have made,” Afra announced as though it were news, “five jumps — and we are now farther removed from the destroyer source than we were when we started.”
“Schön says he can get us there within another six,” Ivo said. “He has been figuring the configurations.”
“How does he know them? I thought he didn’t have access to — no, I see he does. He’s there when we pinpoint our distance by Earth history, and he probably picks up everything you hear when you’re on the scope. Though how he can figure anything meaningful from the pitiful information we have—”
“Let’s review,” Harold said. “Obviously there is something we have missed — unless Schön is lying.”
“He could be lying,” Ivo said. “But he probably wouldn’t bother. He wouldn’t be interested in coming out unless he were sure he could accomplish something — and he wouldn’t have the patience to go through many more jumps.”
“Our first jump was about fifty years, to 1930,” Harold said. “Our second was almost three thousand years, to 930 BC as we make it. A 2,860 year difference, but actually a larger jump because it landed us on the opposite side of Earth, spacially. Then another fifty-year jump to 890 BC, slantwise. This could get confusing if it were not so serious! Finally, jumps to 975 and 975 BC — just sliding around the arc, getting nowhere. But apparently Schön can make something of it.”
Afra turned to Ivo. “You have his computational ability. Can’t you map the pattern he sees?”
“No. He’s using more than mathematics, or at least is making use of more factors than I know how to apply. He can be a lot more creative than I can; his reasoning is an art, while mine is conventional.”
“Maybe he’s using astrology,” Afra said sourly.
Harold shook his head. “Astrology doesn’t—”
“Chances are he knows it, though,” Ivo said. “So it’s no joke. If it is possible to make a space-curvature map of the galaxy by astrological means, Schön can do it. He—”
“Forget it,” Afra snapped.
But Harold was thoughtful. He believes, Ivo thought, having this come home to him personally for the first time, though of course he had known it intellectually before. He really believes.
And suppose Schön believed too?
How was any one person to know what was valid and what was not? Even if astrology were a false doctrine, Harold had already applied it to better effect than Afra had her doctrines.
“I wonder whether we haven’t taken too naïve a view of jumpspace,” Afra said after a pause. “We’ve been thinking of a simple string-in-circle analogy — but a four-dimensional convolution would be a system of a different order. We can’t plot it on a two-dimensional map.”