It was like a dream, a waking nightmare. Provost was moving in on her slowly, his mouth twisting in hatred, great knots of muscle standing out in his arms. He seemed to tower over her for a moment in vicious anticipaton. She screamed and broke down the corridor. He was after her like a cat. He leaped, struck her legs, threw her down on the metal floor and fell on her. She saw his arm upraised, felt the fist crash down again and again and again. Broken flesh, broken bones, paste, pulp, again and again. And in the dark Analogue cubicle she seemed to feel every blow.
She closed her eyes, her control reeling. There would be no Relief for her later, she knew that. She fought him, then abandoned fighting and just hung on doggedly, waiting for the end.
Abruptly, he was gone. She had felt his release as his hatred had burned itself out on her. He had stopped, and stood still, suddenly mild, puzzled, tired, wondering as he looked down at the thing on the floor. And then. .
She knew he had started for the surface.
To Provost it was like awakening from warm and peaceful sleep into terror.
He was horrified and appalled to realize that he had been sleeping. What had happened? Why didn’t Control respond? Frantically he seized the hand grips, drove his Analogue down toward the surface. In his mind were fragments of memory. Something hideous had happened, long long ago, something in the Relief room. Afterwards he had been held down in a tangle-field, and time after time the Turner girl had come back to him in the isolation cubicle—or had it been the Turner girl? Then just now he had found her and the tangle-field was gone, and the hideous thing had been repeated.
And the horrible, abrupt awakening to the fact that the Satellite ship was utterly helpless and undefended from the Enemy.
How long had he slept? What had happened? Didn’t they realize that every passing second might be precious to the Enemy, fatal to the Satellite?
He felt someone following him, screaming out at him in alarm. Not the Turner girl, as he had thought, but Dorie Kendall, the DepPsych agent, following him down to the surface with her own Analogue.
Provost hesitated, fighting the sense of urgency in his mind. “Don’t stop me,” he told her. “I’ve got to get down there. There’s no one covering—”
“You can’t go down,” she cried. “You have no support here. No conditioning, no Relief. We’ve got to do something very different.”
“Different?” He felt her very close to him now and he paused in confusion. What did she know about the Enemy? “What’s happening here? The Enemy is down there. Why have we stopped fighting?”
She was telling him, frantically, as he groped through his confusion and tried to understand. “They had to know if we had a vulnerability, any vulnerability. Something they could use against us to protect themselves if they had to. They knew they could never risk direct contact with us until they knew that we were vulnerable in some way.”
Provost shook his head, uncomprehending. “But why not?”
“Try to see their view,” she said. “Suppose we were hostile, and invulnerable. We might not stop at destroying their ships, we might follow them home and destroy them there. They couldn’t know, and they couldn’t take a risk like that. They had to find a vulnerability to use as a weapon before any contact was possible. So they drew us out, prodded us, observed us, trying to find out limitations—if we had any. And they discovered our vulnerability—panic. A weakness in our natures, the point where intelligence deserts us and renders us irrational, helpless to fight any more.
This is what they could use to control us, except that they must have the same vulnerability!”
He hesitated. The driving urge to go on down to the surface was almost overwhelming, to grapple with them and try once again to break through their barrier there. “Why should they have the same weakness we have? They’re aliens, not humans.”
“Because they have been doing exactly the same thing that we would have done if we had been in their place. Think, John! In all the star systems they must have searched, no sign of intelligent life. Then, suddenly, a solar system that is teeming with life. Intelligent? Obviously. Dangerous? How could they know? We wouldn’t have known, would we? What would we have done?”
Provost faltered. “Tried to make contact, I suppose.”
“Physical contact? Nonsense. We wouldn’t have dared. We couldn’t possibly risk contact until we knew how they thought and behaved, until we knew for certain that we could defend ourselves against them if necessary, that they had some kind of vulnerability. Once we knew that, the way would be open for contact. But no matter how eager we were for contact, and no matter how friendly they might appear we would have had to have the weapon to fight them first. Or take an insane risk, the risk of total destruction.”
He understood her, but it didn’t make sense. He thought of Miranda outpost, Titan Colony, and shook his head. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “What they did here was incredible.”
“Only if you assumed that they were hostile,” she said softly.
“What about the contact ship, the colony on Titan? They burned them both, blew them to kingdom come.”
“Because they had to. They did what we would have done under the same circumstances. They goaded us. Then they took cover and waited to see what we would do. They made us come after them where we couldn’t reach them physically, to see what we could do. They deliberately kept one step ahead, making us reveal ourselves every step of the way, until they found the soft spot they were seeking and threw us into panic. What they failed to realize was that they were inevitably mirroring themselves in everything they did.”
Silence then. In the dark cubicle, Provost could see the hazy image of the girl in his mind, pleading with him, trying to make him understand. Gradually it began to make sense. “So they have their weapon,” he said slowly, “and still we can’t make contact with them because we have none against them.”
“Had none,” the girl corrected him. “But we have seen them in the mirror. Their thoughts and actions and approach have been human-like. They recognized our panic for what it was when they saw it. How could they have, unless they themselves knew what panic was—from their own experience?”
“And now?”
“We turn the tables,” she said. “If they also have a vulnerability, there will be no more barrier to contact. But we don’t dare assume, we have to know. Every time they have goaded us we have reacted. We’ve got to stop that now. We’ve got to withdraw from them completely, leave them with nothing to work with, nothing to grasp.”
“But the Satellite—”
“The Satellite is dead for the time being, asleep. There’s no one here but us for them to contact. Now we have to withdraw too. If we do that, can’t you see what they will have to do?”
Slowly he nodded. He sensed that she hadn’t told him all of it, but that, too, was all right. Better that there be nothing that the Enemy could draw from his mind. “You tell me what to do, and when,” he said.
“Close your mind down, as completely as you can. Barricade it against them, if you can. Keep them out, leave nothing open for them to probe. Cut them off cold. But be ready when I signal you.”
He twisted in the cramped seat in the cubicle, clamping down his control as he felt Dorie clamping down hers. It was an exercise in patience and concentration, but slowly he felt his mind clearing. Like a rheostat imperceptibly dimming the lights in a theater, the Satellite went dimmer, dimmer, almost dead. Only a flicker of activity remained, tiny and insignificant.