“Culla!” he shouted. “Don’t you think this has gone far enough? Why don’t you come out now and we’ll talk!”
He listened. There was a faint buzzing, as if Culla’s mashies were chattering softly behind the thick prehensile lips. During the fight topside, half of the problem facing him and- Donaldson had been avoiding the flashing white grinders.
“Culla!” he repeated. “I know it’s stupid to judge an alien by your own species’ values, but I really thought you were a friend. You owe us an explanation! Talk to us! If you’re acting under Bubbacub’s orders, you can surrender and I swear we’ll all say you put up a hell of a fight!”
The buzzing grew louder. There was a brief shuffle of footsteps. One, two, three… but that was all. Not enough to get a fix on.
“Jacob, I am shorry,” Culla’s voice carried softly across the deck.
“You musht be told, before, we die, but firsht I ashk that you have that lasher turned off. It hurtsh!”
“Culla, so does my hand.”
The Pririg sounded woebegone. “I am sho, sho, shorry, Jacob. Pleash undershtand that you are my friend. It ish partly for your shpeciesh that I do thish.
“Theshe are neceshary crimesh, Jacob. I am only glad that death ish near sho that I may be free of memory.”
Jacob was astonished by the alien’s sophistry. He had never expected such sophomore whinings from Culla, whatever his reasons for what he’d done. He was about to frame a reply when Helene deSilva’s voice boomed over the intercom.
“Jacob? Can you hear me? The gravity thrust is deteriorating fast. We’re losing headway.”
What she didn’t say was the threat. If something wasn’t done soon they’d begin the long fall toward the photosphere, a fall from which they’d never return.
Once in the grip of the convection cells, the ship would be pulled downward into the stellar core. If there was a ship left, by then.
“You shee, Jacob,” Culla said. “To delay me will do no good. It ish already done. I will shtay to make shertain you cannot correct it.
“But pleashe, let ush talk until the end. I do not wish to die ash enemiesh.”
Jacob stared out into the wispy, hydrogen-red atmosphere of the Sun. Tendrils of fiery gas were still floating ‘downwards’ (up, to him), past the ship, but that could be a function of the motion of the gas in this area at this time. Certainly they were going by much less quickly. It could be that the ship was already falling.
“Your dischovery of my talent and my hoax wash most ashtute, Jacob. You combined many obshcure cluesh to find the anshwer! Tying in the background of my race wash a brilliant shtroke!
“Tell me, although I avoided the rim detectorsh with my phantomsh, didn’t it throw you off that they shometimesh appeared on topshide when I wash on flip-shide?”
Jacob was trying to think. He had the cool side of the stun gun against his cheek. It felt good, but it wasn’t helping him come up with ideas. And he had to spare some of his attention to talk to Culla.
“I never bothered to think about it, Culla. I suppose you just leaned over and beamed through the transparent deck-suspension field. That’d explain why the image looked refracted. It was actually reflected, at an angle, inside the shell.”
Actually that was a valid clue. Jacob wondered why he’d missed it.
And the bright blue light, during his deep trance in Baja! It happened just before he awoke to see Culla standing there! The Eatee must have taken a hologram of him! What a way to get to know somebody and never forget his face!
“Culla,” he said slowly. “Not that I’m one to hold a grudge or anything, but were you responsible for my crazy behavior at the end of the last dive?”
There was a pause. Then Culla spoke. His lisp was getting worse.
“Yesh, Jacob. I am shorry, but you were getting too inquishitive. I hoped to dishcredit you. I failed.”
“But how…”
“I lishtened to Dr. Martine talk about the effect of glare on humansh, Jacob!”
The Pring almost shouted. For the first time in Jacob’s memory, Culla had interrupted somebody. “I ekshperi-mented on Doctor Kepler for months! Den on La-Roque and Jeff… den on you. I ushed a narrow diffracted beam. No one could shee it, but it unfocushed your thoughtsh!
“I did not know what you would do. But I knew it would be embarrasshing. Again, I am shorry. It wash neceshary!”
They had definitely stopped rising. The big filament that they had left only a few minutes before loomed over Jacob’s head. High streamers twisted and curled up toward the ship, like grasping fingers.
Jacob had been trying to find a way, but his imagination was blocked by a powerful barrier.
All right! I give up!
He called on his neurosis to offer its terms. What the hell did the damned thing want of him?
He shook his head. He’d have to invoke the emergency clause. Hyde was going to have to come out and become part of him, like in the bad old days. Like when he chased down LaRoque on Mercury, and when he broke into the Photo Lab. He got ready to go into the trance.
“Why Culla. Tell me why you did all this!”
Not that it mattered. Maybe. Hughes was listening. Perhaps Helene was recording. Jacob was too busy to care.
Resistance! In the non-linear, non-orthogonal coordinates of thought he sifted feelings and gestalts through a sieve. To whatever extent the old automatic systems still worked, he set them off to do their jobs.
Slowly, the window dressing and camouflage was stripped away and he came face to face with his other half.
The battlements, unscalable in every past siege, were even more formidable now. The earthen breastworks had been replaced by stone. The abatis was made of sharpened needles, slender and twenty miles long. At the top of the highest tower a flag rippled. The pennant read “Loyalty.” It flew above two stakes, on each of which a head was impaled.
One head he recognized at once. It was his own. The blood that, dripped from the severed neck still glistened. The expression was one of remorse.
The other head set him shivering. It was Helene’s. Her face was streaked and pockmarked, and as he watched the eyes fluttered weakly. The head was still alive.
But why! Why this rage against Helene? And why the overtones of suicide… this unwillingness to join with him to create the near ubermensch he once had been?
If Culla decided to attack now, he’d be helpless. His ears were filled with the cry of a whistling wind. There was a roar of jets and then the sound of someone falling… the sound of someone calling as she fell past him.
And for the first time he could make out her words.
“Jake! Watch that first step… !”
Is that all? Then why all the fuss over it? Why the months trying to drag out what turned out to be Tania’s last ironic dig?
Of course. His neurosis was letting him see, now that death was imminent, that the hidden words had been another red herring. Hyde was hiding something else. It was…
Guilt.
He knew he carried a burden of it after the affair on the Vanilla Needle, but how much he’d never realized. He now saw how sick this Jekyll and Hyde arrangement he’d been living with really was. Instead of slowly healing the trauma of a painful loss, he’d sealed off an artificial entity, to grow and feed on him and on his shame for having let Tania fall… for the supreme arrogance of the man who, on that crazy day twenty miles high, thought he could do two things at once.