"No," said Lucy. "I'm a girl—I'm not a Ph.D. in physics. I'm a brand-new M.D. instead. They won't ask me to help them. You didn't, Jim. I volunteered what I did volunteer. But I'm not interested in that!"
"What do you want, then?" asked Hackett crossly.
"I—" Lucy said very carefully, "I can work with you, Jim. I think I'm on the track of what that Aldarian gadget is supposed to do. I'd like to work on it with you."
"What've you found out?"
"Nothing," said Lucy. "But I think I've found a way to find out something." Hackett frowned.
"I'll ask for some extra cooperation with you," he promised. "But you've got to go back to Traylor, where apparently you'll be safe. I've this job to do."
"What is it?"
He hesitated. Then he said, "They want me to look over a Grek power-broadcast transmitter and see if I can break it down to simplicity like I did the receiver."
Lucy said evenly, "There are two transmitters in the United States. They're broadcasting all the power that's picked up by all the receivers. They're run by Aldarians because we humans can't understand them yet. They're guarded like Fort Knox, but that's the story. Are the Aldarians going to be asked to let you putter with one of them?"
"No-o-o," admitted Hackett. "Since that satellite picked up those signals, it looks like the Greks are keeping in touch with Earth. So we daren't do anything that suggests we're using our brains."
"Then you can't see the generators?"
Hackett said uncomfortably, "Oh, I'll see them! That's being arranged . . ."
Lucy stared at him. "You're trying not to tell me, so it must be dangerous."
"I don't think so," protested Hackett. "No—not at all. There shouldn't be any danger to it."
"You're protesting too much," said Lucy.
Hackett spread out his hands. He said impatiently, "My dear Lucy, it's something that's done every day. People make a profession of it. I'll have expert advice. There's no reason to worry. I happen to have worked out a sort of trick way of looking at things—"
"Jim," said Lucy, "what is it you're going to do?"
He looked guilty. Then he grinned unconvincingly.
"If you must have it, I'm to sneak a look at a power broadcaster. Nothing to that!"
Lucy went pale.
"You mean burglary. Unofficially approved, of course. But the Greks have said the broadcasters are dangerous! They can leak a lightning-bolt at anybody who comes near them without knowing how to be safe. They've put elaborate alarm-systems around them—to prevent, they said, curious or meddling persons from being killed."
"But they're Bars," protested Hackett. "So if they say they're dangerous, they aren't."
"Of course they're liars," said Lucy. "So when they say the alarm-system is to protect meddlers, it isn't. Jim, it's deadly! They don't want us to know things. They don't mind killing people. There were three human skeletons in their garbage pit! They tried to get us killed—and of all people in the world, you're the one they'd best like to see dead. I don't want you to do it!"
Hackett said insistently, "There's not a chance in a million that we can stall off the Greks unless we find out what they've got and get something better! The world's falling apart all around us." Then he said doggedly, "I ought to be back in Traylor in a few days, Lucy. See you then. Goodbye."
He moved quickly away. Lucy said, "Jim!" but he didn't turn. And she couldn't run after him. She was very quiet when the FBI man who'd driven them down from Traylor took her to the car to start back.
And Hackett went off to be instructed in the very latest techniques of breaking and entering, housebreaking, felonious entry, burglary, and the manners and customs of Aldarian power-broadcast technicians as far as they were known.
He studied hard. From time to time he took an hour off to attempt unavailingly to make promising young scientists grasp the trick of assuming that devices were not meant to be simple but deceptive; not efficient but incomprehensible; that they were intended to work only after bewildering anybody who tried to find out how they worked. A normal technically educated man instinctively assumed that things were meant to be simple and rational and efficient. It went against his nature to try to persuade him to the contrary.
"Dammit!" he protested hotly to four young men whose scholastic records were outstanding. "You have to become crackpots to try this trick! Listen. If a device looks like it works this way, it doesn't. You take it apart and find out where the design was tricked so that it looked important without being so. You assume that everything you see is all wrong and then find out what it includes that you can't see that is right and does work and is brand-new. That's the job!"
They were very conscientious young men. They tried hard. But as the time drew near for Hackett to try to look at a power-broadcasting unit, he was more and more disheartened. They could think with admirable precision about everything they'd studied, and they could use everything they'd been taught. But they had trouble trying to learn a new way of thinking.
Somehow, Hackett's depression grew deeper when he got a letter from Lucy, forwarded by hand through the FBI. It was a very friendly letter and he chafed at the fact. Its contents, though, showed that Lucy had every qualification he'd been trying to beat into the heads of others. The letter:
Dear Jim,
Something occurred to me. I've been trying things with the gadget like the Aldarian gave me. You agreed that it did something, but we couldn't imagine what, though it seemed it ought to be something we humans wouldn't want. I've been trying to think what they'd want that we don't. It occurred to me that they are deaf. Not naturally deaf, but deafened. The Greks want them that way. They can't eavesdrop and it wouldn't be easy for them to conspire, but they know about hearing. They used to hear. They might want to be able to hear again.
I found a patient of the local doctor who was deafened in one ear by an accident that severed his left auditory nerve. I tried the gadget on him. It is a hearing aid. Its cover is thin enough to vibrate from sound and it produces some sort of field effect that affects the ends of severed nerves only. If you aren't deaf it does nothing, and the same if your deafness is from any cause but a severed nerve. But it affects all severed nerves. I turned it on near a man who lost his hand in a tractor accident. He felt all sorts of sensations as if he had his hand back.
I think that if the Greks found out that such things existed they'd be merciless toward slaves who'd fooled them and who might be thinking of revolt.
I hope you're well and thriving,
Lucy.
Hackett wrote back:
I've passed on your letter. I would rather have you working with me than anybody else in the world, but if you think that by proving again that the two of us make up one smart character, it won't work. Not this time! If I get away with what I'm going to try, you'll see me immediately afterward. And I repeat what I once said about your brains.
Then he angrily lectured everyone about him on the kind of brains Lucy possessed, and the stark, raving lunacy of authorities who put him to work trying to learn from the lies of the Greks and didn't use her.
But he didn't want her with him now. He would have wanted any man whose way of thinking meshed with his own as hers did. But he didn't want her to share the hair-raising experience he anticipated. The eastern broadcast-power unit was in the center of a five-acre enclosure. It was surrounded by an electrified fence, booby-trapped and undoubtedly filled with capacity-detectors and infra-red beams and such matters. It ought to be simple suicide to try to approach the squat power-broadcast structure.