"I boil mine," Lanoir added feelingly.
"It's agreed by everyone that the frequency and severity of attacks have been stepped up." Daniels indicated the massive wall charts and graphs. "Without our bomb-proof screen and our constant direction network, we'd be overwhelmed tonight. The real question is—who are our attackers?"
"Terrans," Horstokowski said.
Tate shook his head. "Terrans, hell! What would monkey men be doing out this far?"
"We're out this far, aren't we?" Lanoir retorted. "And we were Terrans once."
"Never!" Fisher shouted. "Maybe we lived on Terra, but we aren't Terrans. We're a superior mutant race."
"Then who are they?" Horstokowski insisted.
"They're other survivors from the ship," Tate said.
"How do you know?" asked Silberman. "Have you ever seen them?'
"We salvaged no lifeboats, remember? They must have blasted off in them."
"If they were isolated survivors," O'Keefe objected, "they wouldn't have the equipment and weapons and machines they're using. They're a trained, integrated force. We haven't been able to defeat them or even kill any of them in five years. That certainly shows their strength."
"We haven't tried to defeat them," Fisher said. "We've only tried to defend ourselves."
A sudden tense silence fell over the nine men.
"You mean the ship," Horstokowski said.
"It'll be up out of the bog soon," Tate replied. "And then we'll have something to show them—something they'll remember."
"Good God!" Lanoir exclaimed, disgusted. "The ship's a wreck—the meteor completely smashed it. What happens when we do get it up? We can't operate it unless we can completely rebuild it."
"If the monkey men could build the thing," Portbane said, "we can repair it. We have the tools and machinery."
"And we've finally located the control cabin," O'Keefe pointed out. "I see no reason why we can't raise it."
There was an abrupt change of expression on Lanoir's face. "All right, I withdraw my objections. Let's get it up."
"What's your motive?" Daniels yelled excitedly. "You're trying to put something over on us!"
"He's planning something," Fisher furiously agreed. "Don't listen to him. Leave the damn thing down there!"
"Too late for that," O'Keefe said. "It's been rising for weeks."
"You're in with him!" Daniels screeched. "Something's being put over on us."
The ship was a dripping, corroded ruin. Slime poured from it as the magnetic grapples dragged it from the bog and onto the hard surface that the fusing bugs had laid down.
The bugs burned a hard track through the bog, out to the control cabin. While the lift suspended the cabin, heavy reinforced plastic beams were slid under it. Tangled weeds, matted like ancient hair, covered the globular cabin in the midday sun, the first light that had struck it in five years.
"In you go," Domgraf-Schwach said eagerly.
Portbane and Lanoir advanced over the fused surface to the moored control cabin. Their handlights flashed ominously yellow around the steaming walls and encrusted controls. Livid eels twisted and convulsed in the thick pools underfoot. The cabin was a smashed, twisted ruin. Lanoir, who was first, motioned Portbane impatiently after him.
"You look at these controls—you're the engineer."
Portbane set down his light on a sloping heap of rusted metal and sloshed through the knee-deep rubbish to the demolished control panel. It was a maze of fused, buckled machinery. He squatted down in front of it and began tearing away the pitted guard-plates.
Lanoir pushed open a supply closet and brought down metal-packed audio and video tapes. He eagerly spilled open a can of the video and held a handful of frames to the flickering light. "Here's the ship's data. Now I'll be able to prove there was nobody but us aboard."
O'Keefe appeared at the jagged doorway. "How's it coming?"
Lanoir elbowed past him and out on the support boards. He deposited a load of tape-cans and returned to the drenched cabin. "Find anything on the controls?" he asked Portbane.
"Strange," Portbane murmured.
"What's the matter?" Tate demanded. 'Too badly wrecked?"
"There are lots of wires and relays. Plenty of meters and power circuits and switches. But no controls to operate them."
Lanoir hurried over. "There must be!"
"For repairs, you have to remove all these plates—practically dismantle the works to even see them. Nobody could sit here and control the ship. There's nothing but a smooth, sealed shell."
"Maybe this wasn't the control cabin," Fisher offered.
"This is the steering mechanism—no doubt about that." Portbane pulled out a heap of charred wiring. "But all this was self-contained. They're robot controls. Automatic."
They looked at each other.
'Then we were prisoners," Tate said, dazed.
"Whose?" Fisher asked baffledly.
"The Terrans!" Lanoir said.
"I don't get it," Fisher muttered vaguely. "We planned the whole flight—didn't we? We broke out of Ganymede and got away."
"Get the tapes going," Portbane said to Lanoir. "Let's see what's in them."
Daniels snapped the vidtape scanner off and raised the light.
"Well," he said, "you saw for yourselves this was a hospital ship. It carried no crew. It was directed from a central guide-beam at Jupiter. The beam carried it from the Sol System here, where, because of a mechanical error, a meteor penetrated the protection screen and the ship crashed."
"And if it hadn't crashed?" Domgraf-Schwach asked faintly.
'Then we would have been taken to the main hospital at Fomalhaut IV."
"Play the last tape again," Tate urged.
The wall-speaker spluttered and then said smoothly: "The distinction between paranoids and paranoiac syndromes in other psychotic personality disorders must be borne in mind when dealing with these patients. The paranoid retains his general personality structure unimpaired. Outside of the region of his complex, he is logical, rational, even brilliant. He can be talked to—he can discuss himself—he is aware of his surroundings.
"The paranoid differs from other psychotics in that he remains actively oriented to the outside world. He differs from so-called normal personality types in that he has a set of fixed ideas, false postulates from which he has relentlessly constructed an elaborate system of beliefs, logical and consistent with these false postulates."
Shakily, Daniels interrupted the tape. "These tapes were for the hospital authorities on Fomalhaut IV. Locked in a supply closet in the control cabin. The control cabin itself was sealed off from the rest of the ship. None of us was able to enter it."
"The paranoid is totally rigid," the calm voice of the Terran doctor continued. "His fixed ideas cannot be shaken. They dominate his life. He logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system. He is convinced the world is plotting against him—that he is a person of unusual importance and ability against whom endless machinations are directed. To thwart these plots, the paranoid goes to infinite lengths to protect himself. He repeatedly vidtapes the authorities, constantly moves from place to place and, in the dangerous final phases, may even become—"
Silberman snapped it off savagely and the chamber was silent. The nine leaders of the camp sat unmoving in their places.