He found that, his fears forgotten, he had been glaring down at the enormous hulk of the Jovian rippling gently under the transparent tank-surface. This quiet-appearing sea of turgid scarlet soup in which an occasional bluish-white dumpling bobbed to the surface only to dwindle in size and disappear—this was one of the creatures that had robbed him of the life he should have had and had hurled him into a by-the-numbers purgatory. And why? So that their own peculiar concepts of mastery might be maintained, so that another species might not arise to challenge their dominion of the outer planets. No attempt at arbitration, at treaty-making, at any kind of discussion—instead an overwhelming and relatively sudden onslaught, as methodical and irresistible as the attack of an anteater on an anthill.
A slender silvery tendril rose from the top of the tank to meet him and the chair came to an abrupt halt in its swaying journey across the roof of the gigantic cave. Mardin’s shoulders shot up against his neck convulsively, he found himself trying to pull his head down into his chest—just as he had scores of times in the prison cell that had once been the Three Watertanks Public Library.
At the sight of the familiar questing tendril, a panic eighteen years old engulfed and nauseated him.
It’s going to hurt inside, his mind wept, twisting and turning and dodging in his brain. The thoughts are going to be rubbed against each other so that the skin comes off them and they hurt and hurt and hurt…
The tendril came to a stop before his face and the tip curved interrogatively. Mardin squirmed back against the metal chair back.
I wont! This time I don’t have to! You can’t make me—this time you re our prisoner—you can’t make me—you can’t make me—
“Mardin!” Billingsley’s voice bellowed in his headphones. “Put the damn thing on and let’s get going! Move, man, move!”
And almost before he knew he had done it, as automatically as he had learned to go rigid at the sound of attenshun! Mardin’s hand reached out for the tendril and placed the tip of it against the old scar on his forehead.
There was that anciently familiar sensation of inmost rapport, of new-found completeness, of belonging to a higher order of being. There were the strange double memories; a river of green fire arching off a jet-black trembling cliff hundreds of miles high, somehow blending in with the feel of delighted shock as Dave Weiner’s baseball hit the catcher’s mitt you’d gotten two hours ago for a birthday present; a picture of a very lovely and very intent young female physicist explaining to you just how somebody named Albert Fermi Vannevar derived E=mc2, getting all confused with the time to begin the many-scented dance to the surface because of the myriad of wonderful soft spots you could feel calling to each other on your back.
But, Mardin realized with amazement in some recess of autonomy still left in his mind, this time there was a difference. This time there was no feeling of terror as of thorough personal violation, there was no incredibly ugly sensation of tentacles armed with multitudes of tiny suckers speeding through his nervous system and feeding, feeding, greedily feeding…This time none of his thoughts were dissected, kicking and screaming, in the operating theater of his own skull while his ego shuddered fearfully at the bloody spectacle from a distant psychic cranny.
This time he was with—not of.
Of course, a lot of work undoubtedly had been done on the Jovian question-machine in the past decade. The single tendril that contained all of the intricate mechanism for telepathic communion between two races had probably been refined far past the coarse and blundering gadget that had gouged at his mind eighteen years ago.
And, of course, this time he was the interrogator. This time it was a Jovian that lay helpless before the probe, the weapons, the merciless detachment of an alien culture. This time it was a Jovian, not Igor Mardin, who had to find the right answers to the insistent questions—and the right symbols with which to articulate those answers.
All that made a tremendous difference. Mardin relaxed and was amused by the feeling of power that roared through him.
Still—there was something else. This time he was dealing with a totally different personality.
There was a pleasant, undefinable quality to this individual from a world whose gravity could smear Mardin across the landscape in a fine liquid film. A character trait like—no, not simple tact—certainly not timidity—and you couldn’t just call it gentleness and warmth—
Mardin gave up. Certainly, he decided, the difference between this Jovian and his jailer on Mars was like the difference between two entirely different breeds. Why, it was a pleasure to share part of his mental processes temporarily with this kind of person! As from a distance, he heard the Jovian reply that the pleasure was mutual. He felt instinctively they had much in common.
And they’d have to—if Billingsley were to get the information he wanted. Superficially, it might seem that a mechanism for sharing thoughts was the ideal answer to communication between races as dissimilar as the Jovian and Terrestrial. In practice, Mardin knew from long months of squeezing his imagination under orders in Three Watertanks, a telepathy machine merely gave you a communication potential. An individual thinks in pictures and symbols based on his life experiences—if two individuals have no life experiences in common, all they can share is confusion. It had taken extended periods of desperate effort before Mardin and his Jovian captor had established that what passed for the digestive process among humans was a combination of breathing and strenuous physical exercise to a creature born on Jupiter, that the concept of taking a bath could be equated with a Jovian activity so shameful and so overlaid with pain that Mardin’s questioner had been unable to visit him for five weeks after the subject came up and thenceforth treated him with the reserve one might maintain toward an intelligent blob of fecal matter.
But mutually accepted symbols eventually had been established—just before Mardin’s rescue. And ever since then, he’d been kept on ice in Intelligence, for a moment like this…
“Mardin!” Old Rockethead’s voice ripped out of his earphones. “Made contact yet?”
“Yes. I think I have, sir.”
“Good! Feels like a reunion of the goddamn old regiment, eh? All set to ask questions? The slug’s cooperating? Answer me, Mardin! Don’t sit there gaping at him!”
“Yes, sir,” Mardin said hurriedly. “Everything’s all set.”
“Good! Let’s see now. First off, ask him his name, rank and serial number,”
Mardin shook his head. The terrifying, straight-faced orderliness of the military mind! The protocol was unalterable; you asked a Japanese prisoner-of-war for his name, rank and serial number; obviously, you did the same when the prisoner was a Jovian! The fact that there was no interplanetary Red Cross to notify his family that food packages might now be sent…