Vanaman blinked at her. “They didn’t, eh? You’ve been helping the doctor here do the post?”
“Certainly.”
“And you’ve run a standard post-mortem brain wash?” He nodded toward the neuromolecular analyzer clicking in the wall, the great-grandfather of all Analogues.
“Of course.”
“And what did you find, Miss Kendall?”
“Nothing intelligible,” she said defiantly. “The Enemy had her, that’s all.”
“Fine,” said Vanaman. “And you’re standing her suggesting that we should have had that running around alive on this ship? Even for ten seconds? We know they had her tongue, they must have had her eyes also, her ears, her reason.” He shook his head. “Everything we’ve done against the Enemy has depended on keeping them away from us, off this ship. That’s why we monitor every move of every man and woman here, Miss Kendall, including yourself. That’s why we have guns in every corridor and room. That’s why we used them on the Turner girl.”
There was silence for a moment. Then the doctor pushed back from the table and looked up. “I’m afraid you used them too late on the Turner girl,” he said to Vanaman.
“You mean Provost is dead?”
“Oh, no.” The doctor jerked off his mask, ran a lean hand through his hair. “He’s alive enough. That is to say, his heart is beating. He breathes. Just what is going on above his ears is something else again. I doubt if even Miss Kendall could tell you that. I certainly can’t.”
“Then he’s a total loss.” Vanaman’s face seemed to sag, and Dorie realized suddenly how heavily the man had been hanging on the thread of hope that Provost might only have suffered minor harm.
“Who can say?” the doctor said. “You take a fine chunk of granite and strike precisely the right blow, precisely hard enough at precisely tie right angle, and it will shatter into a dozen pieces. That is what happened to Provost. Any salvage will be strictly up to DepPsych. It’s out of my province.” The surgeon’s dark eyes met Dorie’s for a moment, and shifted away. “Unfortunately, the significance of this attack is greater than than the survival or loss of John Provost. We might as well face that right now. The job the Enemy has done on Provost was a precision job. It can mean only one thing: that somehow they have managed to acquire a very complex understanding of human behavior patterns. Am I right, Dorie?”
She nodded. “It isn’t what they did to Provost that matters so much,” she said, “although that’s bad enough. It’s how they did it that matters.”
“Then how did they do it?” Vanaman asked, turning on her. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? This isn’t a war of muscle against muscle or bomb against bomb. This is a war of mind against mind. It’s up to the Department of Psychology and the Hoffman Center psych-docs to tell us how to fight this Enemy. Why don’t you know?”
“I need time,” she said. “I can’t give you an answer.”
The big man leaned forward, his lips tight across his teeth. “You’ve got to give me an answer,” he said. “We can’t afford time, can’t you see that? This Satellite is the only shield between Earth and Enemy. If you can’t give us the answer, we’re through, washed up. We’ve got to know how they did what they did to Provost.”
Through the viewport the pale, yellow globe of Saturn stared up at them, unwinking, like the pale eye of a snake. “I wish I could tell you,” Dorie Kendall said. “The Turner girl can’t tell us. Neither can Provost. But there may be one way we can learn.”
“And that is?”
“Provost’s Analogue. It has been the real contact with the Enemy. It should know everything Provost knows about them. The Analogue may give us tie answer.”
With Vanaman seated beside her, Done fed the tapes from John Provost’s Analogue into the playback unit in the tiny projection room in Integration Section. For a few moments, then, she ceased to be Dorie Kendall of DepPsych, trained for duty and stationed on Saturn Satellite, and became John Provost instead.
It was an eerie experience. She realized that every Analogue was different, a faithful impression of the mind of its human prototype; but she had not been prepared for the sudden, abrupt contact with the prototype mind of John Provost.
She felt the sickening thud of his contact with the Analogue just prior to its last descent to the surface. She felt the overwhelming wave of tension and fear that the Analogue had recorded; then the sudden, irrational, almost gleeful sense of elation as John Provost’s eyes and ears and mind floated down to the place where the Enemy was. The Analogue tape was accurate to a high degree of fidelity. Dorie Kendall gripped the chair arms until her wrists cramped.
It was like going to the surface herself.
Beside her she was aware of Vanaman’s huge body growing tense as he gnawed his knuckles, soaking in the tape record. She felt the growing tension, the snowballing sense of impending disaster reflecting from John Provost’s mind.
And then she lost contact with the things around her and fell completely into Provost’s role. The growing supplication of the Enemy surrounded her. She felt the sense of reproach, die helpless appeal of the illusion, and Provost’s response, calculated to perfection and deployed like a pawn on a chessboard. It’s a trick, a pitfall, watch out! Don’t be fooled, don’t fall into their trap. .
She felt the wild fury of Provost’s mind as he hurled the illusion aside, struck out at the Enemy as she had told him to do. And then the receding waves of supplication and reproach from the Enemy, and the overwhelming, demoralizing wave of guilt from his own mind—
In that moment she began to understand John Provost, and to realize what the Enemy had done. Her face was pale when the tape stopped. She clenched her fists to keep her hands from trembling.
Vanaman leaned back, defeat heavy on his face. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s always the same. We have nothing.”
“I didn’t realize what they could do,” Done said.
“But that was on the surface. Down there we could fight it, control it. Now they’ve reached us here, too.” The commander stood up and started for the corridor. “For all we know, they’ve been here all along, just playing with us. We can’t really be certain that they haven’t. Can you begin to see what we’ve been fighting, now? We don’t know anything about them. We can’t even be sure we’re fighting a war with them.”
Dorie Kendall looked up, startled. “Is there any doubt of that?”
“There’s plenty of doubt,” Vanaman said. “We seem to be fighting a war, except that nboody seems to understand just what kind of war we’re fighting, or just why we’re fighting it.” His voice trailed off and he shrugged wearily. “Well, we’re backed up to the wall now. Provost was our best Analogue man. He depended utterly on Relief to put him back together again after one of those sessions down there. The Turner girl was the whole key to our fighting technique, and they got to her somehow and poisoned her. If they can do that, we’re through.”
The girl stared at him. “You mean we should just quit? Withdraw?”
Vanaman’s voice was bitter. “What else can we do? Any one of the girls in Relief could be just the same as the Turner girl, right now. They’ve cracked open our entire strategy in one blow. The Relief program is ruined, and without Relief I can’t send another man down there.”
“But you’ve got to,” Dorie said. “This Satellite is the Earth’s only shield. We can’t stop now.”
“We can’t fight them, either. We’ve been fighting them for months, and we know nothing about them. They come from—somewhere. We don’t know where, or when, or how.