He sought for it and found it in the corner of his mind, rolled tight against its fear, and he tried to comfort it even as he feared it. For it was a terrible thing, he told himself, to be caught inside an alien mind. And, on the other hand, it was a lousy deal to have a thing like this trapped inside his mind.
It’s tough on both of us, he said, talking to himself and to this other thing which was a part of him.
He lay there quietly — wherever he was lying — and tried to put himself in order. He had gone out some thirty hours before — not he, himself, of course, for his body had stayed here — but his mind had gone out, and with it the little scurrying machine, to this unguessed planet that spun an unknown sun.
The planet had been no different than a lot of other planets, just a howling wilderness, and that was what a lot of them turned out to be when you came stumbling down upon them. This time a howling wilderness of sand although it could just as well have been a jungle or a desert of ice or a bare and naked place of nothing but primeval rock.
For almost thirty hours he had roamed the sand and there had been nothing there. Then suddenly he had come upon the great blue room with the Pinkness sprawling in it, and when he had come home the Pinkness, or a shadow of the Pinkness, had come back with him.
It crawled out from where it had been hiding, and he felt the touch of it again, the knowing and the feeling and the knowledge. His blood crawled like icy slush gurgling in his veins, and he went rigid with the musty smell and the slimy feel of alienness, and he could have shouted in pure terror, but he did not shout. He lay there, quite unstirring, and the Pinkness scurried back to its nook once more and lay there tightly curled.
Blaine opened his eyes and saw that the lid of the place in which he lay had been tilted back, and the glare of brightness that was a hooded light bulb was stabbing down at him.
He took inventory of his body and it was all right. There was no reason for it not to be all right, for it had lain here and rested for all of thirty hours.
He stirred and raised himself so that he sat up, and there were faces, staring at him, faces swimming in the light.
“A tough one?” asked one face.
“They all are tough,” said Blaine.
He climbed from the coffinlike machine and shivered, for he suddenly was cold.
“Here’s your jacket, sir,” one of the faces said, a face that surmounted a white smock.
She held it for him, and he shrugged into it.
She handed him a glass, and he took a sip of it and knew that it was milk. He should have known it would be. As soon as anyone got back they gave him a glass of milk. With something in it, maybe? He had never thought to ask. It was just one of the many little things that spelled out Fishhook to him and to all the others like him. Fishhook, in its century or more, had managed to accumulate an entire host of moldy traditions, all of them fuddy-duddy in varying degrees.
It was coming back — familiar now as he stood there sipping at his glass of milk — the great operations room with its rows of glistening star machines, some of which were closed while the rest stood open. And in the closed ones lay others like himself, their bodies left behind and their minds far out in space.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Nine P.M.,” said a man who held a clipboard in his hand. The alienness was creeping in his mind again, and the words were there once more: Hi, pal. I trade with you my mind!
And now, in the light of human reason, it was crazier than hell. A form of greeting more than likely. A sort of shaking hands. A shaking of the minds. And when one thought of it, a lot more sensible than the shaking of the hands.
The girl reached out and touched him on the arm. “Finish up your milk,” she said.
If it were a mind-shake, it was a lasting one, for the mind was staying on. He could feel it now, an alien dirtiness, lurking just below the level of his consciousness.
“The machine got back O.K.?” he asked.
The man with the clipboard nodded. “Not a bit of trouble. We sent down the tapes.”
Half an hour, Blaine thought calmly, and was surprised that he could be so calm. Half an hour was all he had, for that was the length of time required to process the tapes. They always, he knew, ran through the exploratory tapes as soon as they came in.
It would all be there; all the data would be down, telling all the story. There would be no question of it, no doubt of what had happened. And before they read it, he must be out of reach.
He looked around the room and once again he felt the satisfaction and the thrill and pride that he had felt, years ago, when he’d first been brought into this room. For here was the heartthrob of Fishhook itself; here was the reaching out, here the dipping into distant places.
It would be hard to leave, he knew; hard to turn his back upon, for much of him was here.
But there was no question of it — he simply had to go.
He finished up the milk and handed the waiting girl the glass. He turned toward the door.
“Just a minute,” said the man, holding out the clipboard. “You forgot to sign out, sir.”
Grumbling, Blaine pulled the pencil from beneath the clip and signed. It was a lot of foolishness, but you went through the motions. You signed in and you signed out and you kept your mouth tight shut, and all of Fishhook acted as if the place would fall into a heap of dust if you missed a single lick.
He handed back the board.
“Excuse me, Mr. Blaine, but you failed to note when you would return for evaluation.”
“Make it nine tomorrow morning,” Blaine told him curtly. They could put down anything they wished, for he wasn’t coming back. He had thirty minutes left — less than thirty minutes now — and he needed all of it.
For the memory of that night of three years ago was becoming sharper with every passing second. He could remember, not the words alone, but the very tone of them. When Godfrey Stone had phoned that night there had been a sound of sobbing in his breath, as if he had been running, and there had been a sense of panic.
“Good night, everyone,” said Blaine.
He went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him, and the place was empty. The flanking doors were closed, although lights burned in some of them. The corridor was deserted and everything was quiet. But even in the quietness and the emptiness there was still a sense of massive vitality, as if all of Fishhook might have stood on watch. As if all the mighty complex never slept at all — all the laboratories and experimental stations, all the factories and the universities, all the planning boards and the vast libraries and repositories and all the rest of it never closed an eye.
He stood for a moment, considering. And it all was simple. He could walk out of here and there was not a thing to stop him. He could get his car out of the parking lot just five blocks away and head northward for the border. But it was, he told himself, too simple and direct. It was too obvious. It was just the thing that Fishhook would figure him to do.
And there was something else — the nagging thought, the clinging, monstrous doubt: Did he really need to run?
Five men in the three years since Godfrey Stone — and was that evidence?
He went striding down the corridor, and his mind was busy sorting out the doubts, but even as he sorted he knew there was no room for doubts. Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.
He admitted to himself that it all boiled down to a single factor: He did not want to flee from Fishhook. He liked being here; he liked the work he did; he didn’t want to leave.
But he had fought that out with himself many months ago. He’d reached decision then. When the time came, he would go. No matter how much he might want to stay, he’d drop everything and run.