DeSilva looked at Martine. The doctor shook her head very slightly.
“Nothing much was done then,” the Commandant went on hurriedly. “We were still pretty upset. But then, at about fourteen hundred, it disappeared. It came hack a while later in its… ‘threatening mode.’ ”
Jacob let the interchange between the two women pass. But a thought suddenly occurred to him.
“Say, are you all positive “that they were the same Ghosts at all? Maybe the ‘normal’ and ‘threatening’ modes are actually two different species!”
Martine looked blank for a moment. “That could explain…” Then she shut up.
“Uh, we aren’t calling them Ghosts anymore,” deSilva said. “Bubbacub says they don’t like it.”
Jacob felt a moment of irritation, but he suppressed it quickly lest either woman notice it. This conversation wasn’t getting them anywhere!
“So what happened when it came in its threatening mode?”
DeSilva frowned.
“Bubbacub talked with it for a while. Then he got angry and made it go away.”
“He what?”
“He tried reasoning with it. Quoted the book on Patron-Client rights. Promised trade, even. It just kept making threats. Said it would send psi messages to Earth and cause disaster of some undescribed sort.
“Finally Bubbacub called it quits. He had everybody lie down. Then he pulled out that lump of iron and crystal he was so secretive about. He ordered everyone to cover their eyes, then said some mumbo jumbo and set the darn thing off!”
“What did it do?”
She shrugged again.
“The Progenitors only know, Jacob. There was a dazzling light, a feeling of pressure in the ears… and when we next looked, the Solarian was gone!
“Not only that! We went back to where we thought we’d left the toroid herd. It was gone too. There wasn’t a living thing in sight!”
“Nothing at all?” He thought about the beautiful toruses and their bright multicolored masters.
“Nothing,” Martine said. “Everything had been scared away. Bubbacub assured us that they hadn’t been harmed.”
Jacob felt numb. “Well, then at least there’s protection now. We can bargain with the Solarians from a position of strength.”
DeSilva shook her head sadly.
“Bubbacub says there can be no negotiation. They’re evil, Jacob. They’ll kill us now, if they can.”
“But…”
“And we can’t count on Bubbacub anymore. He told the Solarians there’d be vengeance if Earth was ever harmed. But other than that he won’t help. The relic goes back to Pila.”
She looked down at the deck. Her voice grew husky.
“Sundiver is finished.”
PART VI
The measure of (mental) health is flexibility (not comparison to some ‘norm’), the freedom to learn from experience… to be influenced by reasonable arguments… and the appeal to the emotions… and especially the freedom to cease when sated.
The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unaltered and insatiable patterns.
17. SHADOW
The workbench was bare, each tool of its accustomed clutter hanging in uncomfortable disuse from the appropriate hook on the wall. The tools were clean. The scored and pitted tabletop shone under a new layer of wax.
The stack of partly disassembled instruments which Jacob had shoved aside lay on the floor accusingly, like the chief mechanic, who had watched him in idle suspicion as he appropriated the workbench. Jacob didn’t care. Despite, or perhaps because of the fiasco aboard the Sunship, no one objected when he decided to continue his own studies. The workbench was a large and convenient space for him to use, and nobody else wanted it right now. Besides, it made it less likely he’d be found by Millie Martine.
In an apse of the huge Sunship Cavern, Jacob could see a sliver of the giant silvery ship, only partly cut off from view by the rock wall. Far overhead the wall arched into a mist of condensation.
He sat on a high stool in front of the bench. Jacob drew “Zwicky Choiceboxes” on two sheets of paper and laid them out on the table. The pink sheets had a yes or no question written on each, representing alternate possible morphological realities.
The one on the left read: B IS RIGHT ABOUT S-GHOSTS, YES (I)/NO(II)
The other sheet was even more difficult to look at: I HAVE FLIPPED OUT, YES (III)/NO(IV).
Jacob couldn’t let anyone else’s judgment sway him on these questions. That was why he’d avoided Martine and the others since the return to Mercury. Other than paying a courtesy call on the recuperating Dr. Kepler, he had become a hermit.
The question on the left concerned Jacob’s job, thought he couldn’t exclude a linkage with the question on the right.
The question on the right would be difficult. All emotion would have to be put aside to arrive at the right answer to that one.
He placed a sheet with the Roman numeral I just below the question on the left, listing the evidence that Bubbacub’s story was correct.
BOX I: B’s STORY TRUE.
It made a tidy list. First of all there was the neat self-consistency of the Pil’s explanation for the Sun Ghost’s behavior. It had been known all along that the creatures used some type of psi. The threatening, man-shaped apparitions implied knowledge of man and an unfriendly inclination. “Only” a chimpanzee had been killed, and only Bubbacub could demonstrate successful communication with the Solarians. All this fit in with LaRoque’s story — the one supposedly implanted in his mind by the creatures.
The most impressive achievement, one that took place while Jacob was unconscious aboard the Sun-ship, was Bubbacub’s feat with the Lethani relic. It was proof that Bubbacub had some contact with the Sun Ghosts.
To drive one Ghost off with a flash of light might be plausible, (although Jacob was at a loss as to how a being drifting in the brilliant chromosphere could detect anything from the dim ulterior of a Sunship), but the dispersal of the entire herd of magnetovores and herdsmen implied that some powerful force (psi?) must have been the Pil’s means.
Every one of these elements would have to be reexamined in the course of Jacob’s morphological analysis. But on the face of it, Jacob had to admit that box number I looked true.
Number II would be a headache, for it assumed the opposite of the proposition in Box I.
BOX II: B’s STORY WRONG — (HA) HE’S MISTAKEN/(IIB) HE’S LYING.
IIA didn’t give Jacob any ideas. Bubbacub seemed too sure, too confident. Of course, he could have been fooled by the Ghosts themselves… Jacob scribbled a note to that effect and put it in position IIA. It was actually a very important possibility, but Jacob couldn’t think of any way to prove or disprove it short of making more dives. And the political situation made more dives impossible.
Bubbacub, supported by Martine, insisted that any further expeditions would be pointless and probably fatal as well, without the Pil and his Lethani relic along. Oddly enough, Dr. Kepler didn’t fight them. Indeed, it was at his orders that the Sunship was dry-docked, normal maintenance suspended, and even data reduction halted while he conferred with Earth.
Kepler’s motives puzzled Jacob. For several minutes he stared down at a sheet that said: SIDE ISSUE-KEPLER? Finally he tossed it over on the stack of dis to be on Bubbacub’s head. Jacob was disappointed in the man. He turned to sheet IIB.
It was appealing to think that Bubbacub was lying. Jacob could no longer pretend any affection for the little Library Representative. He recognized his own personal bias. Jacob wanted IIB to be true.