Provost obviously was not listening. “Look, Doc, why don’t you cut out of here? My business is with her, not you.”
“All right, John.” Dr. Coindreau turned away. He led the girl back into the corridor. She was no longer blushing. She was dead white and trembling. “You know that he’d kill you before he finished,” the doctor said to her gently.
“Yes.” She nodded. “I know.”
“At least the mechanism is direct enough. Fairly primitive, too. And let’s face it, a weaker man would either be dead or catatonic. Provost is a rock of stability in comparison.”
She nodded. “But he’s turned his hatred on the girl, not on the Enemy.”
“It was the girl who hit him, remember?” They stepped into an office, and she took die seat the doctor offered gratefully. “Anyway,” he said, “Provost never actually contacted the Enemy. We speak as though he’s actually been down on the surface physically, and of course he hasn’t. You know how an Analogue works?”
“I ought to—I have one—but I only know the general theory, not the details.”
“Nobody knows the details too well, not even your friends at the Hoffman Center. Nobody really could. An Analogue is at least quasi-sentient, and the relationship between an Analogue and its operator is extremely individual and personal. That’s precisely why Analogues are the only real weapons we have to use against the Enemy.”
“I can’t quite see that,” Dorie said.
“Look—these creatures, whatever they are—buried themselves on the surface of Saturn and just sat there, right? The blows they struck against Titan Colony and the contact ship showed us the kind of power they could bring to bear—but they didn’t follow up. They struck and ran. Pretty pointless, wouldn’t you say?”
It seemed so, at first glance. Dorie Kendall frowned. “Maybe not so pointless. It made counterattack almost impossible.”
Dr. Coindreau nodded grimly. “Exactly the point. We didn’t know what—or how—to counterattack. We practically had to do something, and yet there was nothing we could do.”
“Why didn’t we land and hunt them out?” the girl asked. “We can get down there, can’t we?”
“Well, it’s possible, but it would have been worse than useless. It would have taken all our strength and technology just to survive down there, let alone do anything else. So we used Analogues, just the way Grossman and his crew used them to explore the surface of Jupiter. The Analogues were originally developed to treat paranoids. The old lysergic acid poisons had proved that a personality could dissociate voluntarily and reintegrate, so that a psych man could slip right into a paranoid fantasy with his patient and work him on his own ground. Trouble was that unstable personalities didn’t reintegrate so well, which was why so many people blew up in all directions on LSD.” Dr. Coindreau paused, chewing his Up. “With Analogues, the dissociation is only apparent, not real. A carbon copy, with all the sensory, motor, and personality factors outlined perfectly on protein-molecule templates. The jump from enzyme-antagonists to electronic punched-molecule impressions isn’t too steep, really, and at least the Analogues are predictable.”
“I see,” Dorie Kendall said. “So the operatives—like Provost—could send their Analogues down and explore in absentia, so to speak.”
“As a probe, in hope of making contact with the Enemy. At least that was the original plan. It turned out differently, though. That was what the Enemy seemed to be waiting for. They drove back the first probers with perfectly staggering brutality. We struck back at them, and they returned with worse. So pretty soon we were dancing this silly gavotte with them down there, except that the operatives didn’t find it so silly. Maybe the medieval Earth wars seemed silly, too, with the battleground announced in advance, the forces lined up, the bugles blowing, parry and thrust and everybody quits at sunset. But lots of men got killed that way just the same.” He paused for a moment, wrappped in his own thoughts, and then went on with sudden firmness: “There was no sense to this thing, but it was what the Enemy seemed to want. And our best men have thrown everything they could into it, and only their conditioning and the Relief room has kept them going.”
“Weren’t Psi-Highs used for a while?” Dorie said.
“Yes, but it didn’t work. The Enemy is not telepathic, for one thing, or at least not in the sense we think of it; and anyway, the Psi-Highs couldn’t keep themselves and their analogues separated. It was pure slaughter, for them, so they were pulled back to Earth to help build the Analogues for psi-negatives to use.” He shot a glance toward the cubicle. “Well, now that’s all over. No Relief, no Analogues. The Enemy has simply shifted the battle scene on us, and we’re paralyzed.”
For a long moment, the DepPsych girl sat in silence. Then she said, “I don’t think ‘paralyzed’ is exactly the word you want. You mean ‘panicked’.”
“Does it make any difference?”
“Maybe a world of difference,” the girl said thoughtfully, “to the aliens.”
Paralysis oh panic, the effect on the Satellite ship was devastating.
Twelve hours after Provost was dragged kicking and screaming out of the Relief room, the ship’s crew waited in momentary anticipation, braced against the next blow. They could not guess from where it might come, nor what form it might take. They could only sit in agony and wait.
Twenty-four hours later, they still waited. Thirty-six hours, and they still waited. Activity was suspended, even breathing was painful. In the day room the Analogue operatives gnawed their knuckles, silent and fearful, unwilling to trust even a brief exchange of words. They were Earthmen, the girl realized, and Earthmen were old hands at warfare. They understood too well the horrible power of advantage. Earthly empires had tottered and fallen for the loss of one tiny advantage.
But the Enemy’s advantage was not tiny. It was huge, overpowering. The men here could only wait for the blow to fall. It had to fall, if there were order and logic in the universe.
It didn’t fall. They waited, and far worse than a brutal, concerted attack against them, nothing happened.
The paralysis deepened. The Enemy had reached a girl within the Satellite and turned her into a murderous blade in their midst Who could say how many others had been reached? No one knew. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to hold on to, nothing.
Dorie Kendall did not elaborate on her remark to Dr. Coindreau, but something had slid smoothly into place in her mind as she had talked to him, and she watched the Satellite and its men around her grinding to a halt with a new alertness.
The attack on Provost through the Turner girl was not pointless, she was certain of that. It had purpose. Nor was it an end in itself. It was only the beginning. To understand the purpose it was necessary somehow to begin to understand the Enemy.
And that, of course, was the whole war. That was what the Enemy had so consistently fought to prevent. They have built up an impenetrable wall, a blinding smokescreen to hide themselves, she thought, but there must be some way to see them clearly.
The only way to see them was through Provost. She was certain of this, though she wasn’t sure why. She went to the isolation cubicle to see him again, and then again and again. It was unrelieved torment for her each time; for all her professional training, she had never before encountered such a malignant wall of hatred. Each time his viciousness and abusiveness seemed worse as he fought against the restraining tangle-field, watching her with murderous hatred; she left each time almost physically ill, and whenever she slept she had nightmares. But again and again she worked to break through his violent obsession, more and more convinced that John Provost was the key. They were brutal interviews, fruitless—but she watched as she worked.