Psi-High And Others

Part Three Mirror, Mirror

Somewhere down on the surface of Saturn the Enemy was waiting.

The Earth outpost on the Satellite ship orbiting Saturn knew that he was there, with his four great ships and the unimaginable power that had brought him from whatever place he had come. But the Earth outpost did not know why he had come, and now they did not know what he intended, to do.

He had come into the solar system, and struck with pointless savagery, and then fled to a place where Earth ships could not follow him. Now he waited there, silent and enigmatic. His very presence was intolerable: the i-.irth outpost knew they had to fight him, somehow, but the fight was on his terms, on the battleground he had chosen.

It was an impossible war from the very start, a vicious war, draining the last reserves of the tiny group of Earthmen who had to fight it. It engulfed their waking hours and tortured their sleep with nightmares. There was no time to stop and ask themselves: why are we fighting this war?

They were fighting it, that was enough. Only the Enemy knew why . . . .

The waiting was the most terrible part of all for John Provost.

There was no chronometer in the day room of the Satellite ship, but Provost had his own private chronometer buried in his skull somewhere in that vague impersonal space that lay between his left ear and his left eyebrow, deep down, ticking away hours, minutes, seconds, ridiculous fractions of ridiculous segments of seconds, marking them off against him inexorably, the epitome of all timepieces. It was there in his head and he couldn’t get away from it, not even when his shift was over and he was back in. Relief, laboriously rebuilding the fragments of John Provost that the Enemy had torn away. Now, almost whole and fresh again, he could hear the chronometer clicking away against him, and once more he was certain that it was the waiting he feared far more than he feared the Enemy.

Almost time, Provost. Almost your turn to go down again . . . .

He paced the day room of the Satellite ship and felt sweat trickle down his chest from the waiting and the silence. Always, in the last hour before his shift, he lived in an envelope of self-induced silence. Canned music blared from the wall speaker, unnaturally loud, but Provost did not hear it. There was talking and chatter in the day room, harsh laughter all about him, noises of glasses clinking, feet shuffling. A dozen men were here, but to Provost the day room was like a TV with the sound turned off. He was utterly isolated, and that was the way he wanted it.

He rubbed wet palms against his trousers and waited.

Nobody looked at him, of course. The men knew that his shift was next. Nobody spoke to him; he might smile and answer them pleasantly, or he might turn on them, savagely and without warning, like a cornered rat. It had happened before, with others. He was like a crossbow with the spring drawn tight, waiting to be triggered, and nobody wanted to tamper with him twenty minutes before shift change. Everyone knew he wouldn’t be responsible for what he might do.

And with every passing second the spring was pulled tighter. That was what made the waiting so terrible.

He went below and stepped into a hot foam shower, felt the powerful muscles of his shoulders and neck relax a trifle. Briefly he thought of the Turner girl. Would she be in Relief when he returned? Of course, there were others equally well trained to help the men through the period of childish regression that inevitably occurred when their shifts were over and the pressure suddenly off—the only way they could rebuild their mental resources for another shift—but to John Provost, the Turner girl seemed better than any of the others.

They’d actually begun to be good friends as he had come, slowly, to trust her under circumstances in which trust was difficult if not impossible. And then that new woman that DepPsych had sent out from the Hoffman Center, Dorie Kendall—what about her? Help, or hindrance? Dangerous, sending out new people at a time like this. Yet, she’d listened when he’d told her how he could use his Analogue to take his mind and sensorium down to Saturn’s surface without actually leaving the Satellite ship at all. Maybe she’d do. Maybe she might even be able to help him, somehow.

Provost dressed quickly now as the fear grew stronger in his mind. There was no use trying to fight it down; he knew that from long experience. It was far more exhausting to try than just to give in to it, start counting the minutes to Relief from now instead of when the shift began. It made things balance better in his mind that way, even if it made the DepPsych people scream and wring their hands. Well, let them scream. There was nothing they knew about this Idiot War that he didn’t know—absolutely nothing. He was an expert on this war. They couldn’t even imagine what an expert he was.

He checked at the Control board. “Provost on.”

“Are you steady?” the voice from Control asked.

Provost grunted.

“All right, here’s the report.” The voice hesitated an instant “I don’t think you’re going to like it very much.”

“Let’s have it.”

“Dead quiet on the front all through the last shift,” Control said.

Provost blinked. “Quiet!”

“That’s the report”

Provost shivered. “What do you suppose they’re cooking up now?”

“I wish I could tell you.” The voice from Control was puzzled and sympathetic. “They’re brewing something down there, that’s certain. Chances are it’ll be nasty, too. They haven’t given us a quiet shift in months.” Provost could almost see the face of the controller, somewhere deep in the lower regions of the Satellite ship. “You may be the one to get hit with it, John, whatever it is. But then, maybe it’ll stay quiet for you, too.”

“Not with my luck,” said Provost. “Well, I’m going in now.”

He stepped into the Analogue cubicle with the green flasher over the door, found the cockpit in the darkness, fit his damp hands into the grips. He shook the Analogue helmet down on his head until it was comfortable. He didn’t try to tell himself that he wasn’t really going down to Saturn’s surface, that only a tiny bit of metal and stamped circuitry was going down under his mental control. DepPsych had given up on that line of comfort long ago. Provost knew all too well that he didn’t have to be on the surface in the flesh in order for the Enemy to rip him apart. He closed his eyeg in the darkness, trying to relax.

Still waiting, now, for the signal to move in. He didn’t know which man he was relieving. DepPsych said it was better not to know. Even the signals from the Analogues were monitored so he wouldn’t have a hint. Every man operated his Analogue differently—but could the Enemy tell the different?

Provost was certain that they could. Not that it seemed to make any difference, to them.

“Countdown.” He heard the buzzer sound, and he crushed down with all his power on the hand grips. He felt the jolting thud as he slammed into full Analogue contact, and something deep in his mind began screaming now! now! now!

He dropped away into nothing.

Moments later he knew that he was on the surface, even though a corner of his mind was aware of the sticky hand grips, the dark closeness of the Analogue cubicle. Before him he could see the great yawning chasms of ice on Saturn’s surface stretching out into the distance. Yellow-gray light reflected down from the Rings. He could sense the devasting pressure of gravity here even though he could not feel it. Overhead, a rolling sea of methane and ammonia clouds, crashing lightning, the unspeakable violence of Saturn’s continual war with itself.

And somewhere beyond the place where he was, the Enemy.

There was no contact, at first. Provost groped, and found nothing. He could always tell their presence, just as he was certain now that they could tell his. But that was as far as he could go. They planned. They moved. If they were ready, they struck. If they weren’t ready, they didn’t.

And until they struck, he was helpless. There was nothing for him to fight against. All he could do was wait. For what? He did not know. But always before, there had been something.

Now, nothing. Not a whisper. He waited, sick with fear. He knew how brutal the Enemy could be. He knew the viciousness of their blows, the savagery, the cunning. These were things he could fight, turning their own weapons against them. But nothingness was something else.

How could he fight nothing? He couldn’t. He could only wait.

He stretched his mind, groping for them. Then, suddenly, he felt a gentle brush of contact. . they were there, all right. Also waiting. But for what? His muscles knotted, cramped. Why didn’t they do something? a quick, stabbing blow would be merciful relief. . but it did not come.

The Enemy had never been merciful. There was something else they were going to do.

When it came, it was almost overpowering in its intensity. Not hostility, nor anger, nor hatred, as before. Instead, incredibly, a soft gentle mist of supplication, a wave of reproach insinuating itself in his mind. Why do you hate us when we want only peaceful contact with you? Why do you try to drive us back? We have come from so far, and now you try only to destroy us.

It caught him off guard. He tried to formulate an answer, but they swept in swiftly, surrounding him with wave after wave of reproach. As always, he could not tell how this contact with the Enemy was made. Perhaps they, too, had Analogues. He simply felt them, deep in his mind, and they were closer now, all about him, sucking him deep into their minds. He felt a glowing warmth there now that was utterly different from before. He felt himself drawn, moving slowly, then faster and faster, in tightening spirals toward the vortex as the Enemy’s minds drew him in. We want to stop this fighting, but you prolong it. Why? Why wont you give us a chance?

For the first time he saw the physical images of the Enemy. They were approaching him on the surface. He couldn’t see them clearly. . only fuzzy outlines. . but enough to see that they were humanoid, manlike. They moved toward him as he watched. His heart roared with sudden excitement. Could they mean it? Could they really want to reveal themselves, establish contact, put an end to this grueling, brutal Idiot War that had been going on for so long?

Something in his own mind called out a warning, shrieking an alarm. Don’t be a fool! They’re treacherous, there’s nothing they won’t try. Don’t let them poison you, fight back!

He caught at the grips, trying to center his mind on the approaching emissaries, trying to catch the fringes of thought that lay beneath the surface, but the wave of reproachfulness came back at him with increasing intensity.

Why do you hate us so much?

He knew, coldly, what he had to do. It was the only thing to do, even though it seemed so horribly wrong.

He waited until the emissaries were close. Then he struck out at their minds, as viciously as he knew how. He drove the blow home with six long months of bitterness and hatred behind it, striking out wildly, slicing them down like wheat before a scythe. He felt them recoil and crumble, and he pressed his advantage coldly, flailing at the insidious supplicating pattern of thought surrounding him.

The spiral broke, suddenly, releasing him, but this time there was no stark, brutal core of malignancy that he had glimpsed beneath their illusions so many times before. Instead, the vortex receded gently, regretfully. . injured, bewildered, helpless to understand.

Why? Why will you not even give us a chance? Why do you hate us so much?

It was harder to bear than naked savagery. Frantically Provost rang for Relief. It seemed, suddenly, as if all the wrongs and imagined wrongs he had done in his whole life were welling up to torment him; he knew it was only Enemy illusion, but his mind was screaming, twisting in on itself. A sense of guilt and self-loathing swept through him in waves as he fought to maintain the tiny thread of control. Butcher! his own mind was screaming at him. What kind of monster are you. What if they were sincere? What if you were the one who was wrong?

The Control board jerked him back before he broke, snapped off his Analogue contact abruptly. He stood up in the darkness of the cubicle and disengaged his cramped hands from the grips. It was over; he was safe. His Rehab conditioning cut in now to take over. . now there would be Relief from the onslaught, quietness, gentleness, childhood memories, peace . . . .

But the waves of guilt were still washing at his mind. He started walking down the corridor toward the Relief room as his hands began to tremble; then he broke into a run. He knew that only seconds now stood between him and sanity, and sanity lay at the end of the corridor.

The Turner girl was in the room waiting for him. There was soft music, gentle light. She sat across the room, and suddenly he was a five-year-old again, bewildered and overwhelmed by the frightening world around him, desperate for comfort, affection, reassurance. He hurled himself onto the recliner, felt the Turner girl’s fingers gently stroking his forehead as he let himself go completely, let great sobs of relief erupt from his throat and shake his shoulders.

She was silent for a long time as his knotted muscles began to relax. Then she leaned forward, bent her hps to his ear.

“Butcher!” she whispered.

Only a whisper, but virulent, malignant. “Toad! You call yourself human, but you go down there to butcher them! Monster!”

Provost screamed. He threw himself back against the wall, arms outstretched, clawing at it and screaming as he stared at her in horror. She faced him, and spit at him, and burst out in mocking laughter as his screams rose from torment to agony.

An alarm bell was clanging now; the girl’s lips twisted in revulsion. She threw open the corridor door. “Butcher!” she hurled back at him once more, and broke for the door.

Gunfire rattled from both ends of the corridor. The crossfire caught her, lifted her off her feet and dropped her in a crumpled heap on the metal floor plates.

Provost huddled in the corner of the room, babbling.

The enormity of the blow did not register immediately. Like any warfare operation, the Satellite ship was geared to face emergencies; the sheer momentum of its battle station procedure delayed the impact for hours. Then, slowly, the entire operation of the Satellite ship began to freeze in its tracks.

What had happened was no ordinary emergency.

To Dorie Kendall the full, terrifying implication was clear from the start. She had long months of Department of Psychology training behind her at the Hoffman Center, weeks of work with the very men who had developed the neuromolecular Analogues that were Earth’s only weapon in this war. Even then, the training had not stopped; on the long passage out from Earth she had continued with days and nights of tape-study and hypno-sleep to prepare her for this crucial assignment. She herself had never been in Analogue contact with the Enemy, but she knew a great deal about the Enemy and what the Enemy might do. The instant Dr. Coindreau, the Satellite surgeon, had called her down to the autopsy, she realized what had happened.

Only now it was dawning on her, in a cold wash of horror, that it was very possibly her own fault that it had happened at all.

“But why don’t you attack them?” she had asked John Provost a few hours before his shift was to begin. “Why do you always take the defensive?”

Provost had looked at her, patiently, as though she were a child who didn’t quite understand the facts of life. “They’re perceptive,” he said. “They’re powerful. Incredibly powerful.”

“All the more reason to hit them hard,” she had argued. “Hit them with a blow that will drive them back reeling.”

Frovost smiled. “Is that the new DepPsych theory?”

“All DepPsych knows is that something has to be changed. This war has gone on and on.”

“Maybe after a while you’ll understand why,” he had said slowly. “How can we hit them with this powerful blow you talk about when they’re busy driving mental javelins into us with all the force they can muster? I can try, but I don’t know how to do it.”

Well, he had tried, all right, the psychologist reflected, and now bare hours later Provost was strapped down screaming and shattered in one of the isolation cubicles, and the Relief girl . . . .

She watched Dr. Coindreau’s lean face and careful fingers as he worked at the autopsy table. Every room in Medical Section, every fixture, had a double use. Sick bay and Rehab quarters. Office and lab. Examining room doubling as surgery. Now it was doubling as morgue. She peered down at the remains of the Turner girl in growing anger and revulsion and wondered, desperately, how the Enemy had managed to do it.

She realized, coldly, that it was up to her to find out how, and fast.

The Enemy had poisoned the Turner girl, somehow. They had reached into the heart of the Satellite ship and struck at the most critical link in the chain—the Relief program that enabled the men to go back into battle. Without Relief, there could be no men to fight. But why did we have to murder her? the Kendall girl thought bitterly. If we could have studied her, we might have learned how the Enemy had done it.

The blinker over the door flashed, and a big heavy-set man stepped into the room. She recognized Vanaman, commander of the Satellite ship. She had talked to him briefly before. It had been an unpleasant interview; Vanaman had made it quite clear that he could not understand why DepPsych insisted upon sending women out to Saturn Satellite, nor why Earth Control chose now of all times to shift gears and saddle him with Dorie Kendall, intent on finding some new approach to the fighting. The big man glared at her, and then stared down at the thing on the table. “The Turner girl?” he asked the surgeon. “What’s left of her,” Dr. Coindreau said. “I’m about finished. It’s not going to help us any.”

“It’s got to help us.” Vanaman’s voice was harsh.

Done Kendall looked up at him sharply. “Your trigger happy firing squad didn’t leave us much to work with, you know.”

Vanaman’s fist clenched on the table. Deep-cut lines sliced from his nose down to the comers of his mouth. His face showed the grueling, pressure of months of command, and he seemed to control himself only with difficulty. “What did you expect them to do?” he said. “Give her a medal?”

The girl flushed. “They didn’t have to kill her.”

Vanaman blinked at her. “They didn’t, eh? You’ve been helping the doctor here do the post?”

“Certainly.”

“And you’ve run a standard post-mortem brain wash?” He nodded toward the neuromolecular analyzer clicking in the wall, the great-grandfather of all Analogues.

“Of course.”

“And what did you find, Miss Kendall?”

“Nothing intelligible,” she said defiantly. “The Enemy had her, that’s all.”

“Fine,” said Vanaman. “And you’re standing her suggesting that we should have had that running around alive on this ship? Even for ten seconds? We know they had her tongue, they must have had her eyes also, her ears, her reason.” He shook his head. “Everything we’ve done against the Enemy has depended on keeping them away from us, off this ship. That’s why we monitor every move of every man and woman here, Miss Kendall, including yourself. That’s why we have guns in every corridor and room. That’s why we used them on the Turner girl.”

There was silence for a moment. Then the doctor pushed back from the table and looked up. “I’m afraid you used them too late on the Turner girl,” he said to Vanaman.

“You mean Provost is dead?”

“Oh, no.” The doctor jerked off his mask, ran a lean hand through his hair. “He’s alive enough. That is to say, his heart is beating. He breathes. Just what is going on above his ears is something else again. I doubt if even Miss Kendall could tell you that. I certainly can’t.”

“Then he’s a total loss.” Vanaman’s face seemed to sag, and Dorie realized suddenly how heavily the man had been hanging on the thread of hope that Provost might only have suffered minor harm.

“Who can say?” the doctor said. “You take a fine chunk of granite and strike precisely the right blow, precisely hard enough at precisely tie right angle, and it will shatter into a dozen pieces. That is what happened to Provost. Any salvage will be strictly up to DepPsych. It’s out of my province.” The surgeon’s dark eyes met Dorie’s for a moment, and shifted away. “Unfortunately, the significance of this attack is greater than than the survival or loss of John Provost. We might as well face that right now. The job the Enemy has done on Provost was a precision job. It can mean only one thing: that somehow they have managed to acquire a very complex understanding of human behavior patterns. Am I right, Dorie?”

She nodded. “It isn’t what they did to Provost that matters so much,” she said, “although that’s bad enough. It’s how they did it that matters.”

“Then how did they do it?” Vanaman asked, turning on her. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? This isn’t a war of muscle against muscle or bomb against bomb. This is a war of mind against mind. It’s up to the Department of Psychology and the Hoffman Center psych-docs to tell us how to fight this Enemy. Why don’t you know?”

“I need time,” she said. “I can’t give you an answer.”

The big man leaned forward, his lips tight across his teeth. “You’ve got to give me an answer,” he said. “We can’t afford time, can’t you see that? This Satellite is the only shield between Earth and Enemy. If you can’t give us the answer, we’re through, washed up. We’ve got to know how they did what they did to Provost.”

Through the viewport the pale, yellow globe of Saturn stared up at them, unwinking, like the pale eye of a snake. “I wish I could tell you,” Dorie Kendall said. “The Turner girl can’t tell us. Neither can Provost. But there may be one way we can learn.”

“And that is?”

“Provost’s Analogue. It has been the real contact with the Enemy. It should know everything Provost knows about them. The Analogue may give us tie answer.”

With Vanaman seated beside her, Done fed the tapes from John Provost’s Analogue into the playback unit in the tiny projection room in Integration Section. For a few moments, then, she ceased to be Dorie Kendall of DepPsych, trained for duty and stationed on Saturn Satellite, and became John Provost instead.

It was an eerie experience. She realized that every Analogue was different, a faithful impression of the mind of its human prototype; but she had not been prepared for the sudden, abrupt contact with the prototype mind of John Provost.

She felt the sickening thud of his contact with the Analogue just prior to its last descent to the surface. She felt the overwhelming wave of tension and fear that the Analogue had recorded; then the sudden, irrational, almost gleeful sense of elation as John Provost’s eyes and ears and mind floated down to the place where the Enemy was. The Analogue tape was accurate to a high degree of fidelity. Dorie Kendall gripped the chair arms until her wrists cramped.

It was like going to the surface herself.

Beside her she was aware of Vanaman’s huge body growing tense as he gnawed his knuckles, soaking in the tape record. She felt the growing tension, the snowballing sense of impending disaster reflecting from John Provost’s mind.

And then she lost contact with the things around her and fell completely into Provost’s role. The growing supplication of the Enemy surrounded her. She felt the sense of reproach, die helpless appeal of the illusion, and Provost’s response, calculated to perfection and deployed like a pawn on a chessboard. It’s a trick, a pitfall, watch out! Don’t be fooled, don’t fall into their trap. .

She felt the wild fury of Provost’s mind as he hurled the illusion aside, struck out at the Enemy as she had told him to do. And then the receding waves of supplication and reproach from the Enemy, and the overwhelming, demoralizing wave of guilt from his own mind—

In that moment she began to understand John Provost, and to realize what the Enemy had done. Her face was pale when the tape stopped. She clenched her fists to keep her hands from trembling.

Vanaman leaned back, defeat heavy on his face. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s always the same. We have nothing.”

“I didn’t realize what they could do,” Done said.

“But that was on the surface. Down there we could fight it, control it. Now they’ve reached us here, too.” The commander stood up and started for the corridor. “For all we know, they’ve been here all along, just playing with us. We can’t really be certain that they haven’t. Can you begin to see what we’ve been fighting, now? We don’t know anything about them. We can’t even be sure we’re fighting a war with them.”

Dorie Kendall looked up, startled. “Is there any doubt of that?”

“There’s plenty of doubt,” Vanaman said. “We seem to be fighting a war, except that nboody seems to understand just what kind of war we’re fighting, or just why we’re fighting it.” His voice trailed off and he shrugged wearily. “Well, we’re backed up to the wall now. Provost was our best Analogue man. He depended utterly on Relief to put him back together again after one of those sessions down there. The Turner girl was the whole key to our fighting technique, and they got to her somehow and poisoned her. If they can do that, we’re through.”

The girl stared at him. “You mean we should just quit? Withdraw?”

Vanaman’s voice was bitter. “What else can we do? Any one of the girls in Relief could be just the same as the Turner girl, right now. They’ve cracked open our entire strategy in one blow. The Relief program is ruined, and without Relief I can’t send another man down there.”

“But you’ve got to,” Dorie said. “This Satellite is the Earth’s only shield. We can’t stop now.”

“We can’t fight them, either. We’ve been fighting them for months, and we know nothing about them. They come from—somewhere. We don’t know where, or when, or how.

All we know is what they did to Titan. We’re trying to defend ourselves against an imponderable, and our defenses are crumbling.” Vanaman closed the tape cans and tossed them into the return file with an air of finality. “Do you know what Provost called this war?”

Done Kendall nodded. “He told me. An Idiot War.”

“And he was right. Their war, not ours. What do they want? We don’t know. On their choice of battlefield, in their kind of warfare, they’re whipping us, and we don’t even know how. If we had even a glimpse of what they were trying to do, we might be able to fight them. Without that, we’re helpless.”

She heard what he was saying, and she realized that it was almost true, and yet something stuck in her mind, a flicker of an idea? “I wonder,” she said. “Maybe we don’t know what the Enemy is trying to do here—but there’s one possibility that nobody seems to have considered.”

Vanaman looked up slowly. “Possibility?”

“That they don’t know what they’re trying to do, either,” Dorie Kendall said.

It was a possibility, even Vanaman grudgingly admitted that. But as she went down to Isolation Section to examine John Provost, Dorie Kendall knew that it made no sense, no more nor less than anything else that the Enemy had done since they had come six months before into Earth’s solar system.

They had come silent as death, unheralded: four great ships moving as one, slipping in from the depths of space beyond Pluto. How long they had been lurking there, unobserved but observing, no one could say. They moved in slowly, like shadows crossing a valley, with all space to conceal them, intruders in the enormous silence.

An observation post on tiny Miranda of Uranus spotted them first, suddenly and incredibly present where no ships ought to be, in a formation that no Earth ships ever would assume. Instrument readings were confirmed, questioned, reconfirmed. The sighting was relayed to the supply colony on Callisto, and thence to Earth.

Return orders were swift: keep silence, observe, triangulate and track, compute course and speed, make no attempt at contact. But return orders were too late. The observation post on Miranda had ceased, abruptly, to exist.

Alerted patrol ships searched in vain, until the four strange ships revealed themselves in orbit around Saturn. Deliberately? No one knew. Their engines were silent; they drifted like huge encapsulated spores, joining the other silent moons around the sixth planet. They orbited for months. Titan Colony watched them, Ganymede watched them, Callisto watched them.

Nothing happened.

On Earth there were councils, debate, uncertainty; speculation, caution, fear. Wait for diem to make contact. Give them time. Wait and see. But the four great ships made no move. They gave no sign of life. Nothing.

Signals were dispatched, with no response. Earth prepared against an attack—a ridiculous move. Who could predict the nature of any attack that might come? Still, Earthmen had always been poor at waiting. Curiosity battled caution and won, hands down. What were these ships? Where did they come from? Hostile or friendly? Why had they come here?

Above all, what did they want?

No answers came from the four great ships. Nothing.

Finally an Earth ship went up from Titan Colony, moving out toward the orbit of the intruders. The crew of the contact ship knew their danger. They had a single order: make contact. Use any means, accept any risk, but make contact. Approach with caution, with care, gently, without alarming. But make contact. At any cost.

They approached the intruders, and were torn from space in one instantaneous flash of white light. Simultaneously, Titan Colony flared like an interplanetary beacon and flickered out, a smoking crater three hundred miles wide and seventy miles deep.

Then, incredibly, the four great ships broke from orbit and fled deep beneath the methane and ammonia clouds of Saturn’s surface. Earth reeled from the blow, and waited, paralyzed, for the next—and nothing happened. No signal, no sign, nothing.

But now the intruders were the Enemy. The war had begun, if it was a war; but it was not a war that Earthmen knew how to fight A war of contradiction and wild illogic. A war fought in a ridiculous microcosm where Earthmen could not fight, with weapons that Earthmen did not comprehend.

An Idiot War . . . .

Dorie went to see John Provost just eight hours after the Enemy had struck through the Turner girl. As she followed the tall, narrow-shouldered doctor into the isolation cubicles of Medical Section, he stopped and turned to face her. “I don’t think this is wise at all.”

“Maybe not” the girl said. “But I have no choice. Provost was closer to the Enemy than anyone else here. There’s no other place to start.”

“What do you think you’re going to learn?” Dr. Coindreau asked.

“I don’t know. Only Provost knows exactly what happened in that Relief room.”

“We know what happened,” the doctor protested. “The Relief room was monitored. Provost had come close to his breakpoint when Control jerked his Analogue back from the surface. The pressure on the men under batde conditions is almost intolerable. They all approach breakpoint, and induced regression in the Relief room is the fastest, safest way to unwind them, as long as we don’t let them curl up into a ball.”

“You mean it was the fastest and safest way,” Dorie corrected him.

The doctor shrugged. “They hit Provost at his weakest point. The Turner girl couldn’t have done worse with a carving knife. I still don’t see what you’re going to learn from Provost.”

“At least I can see what they’ve done to him.” She looked at the doctor. “I don’t see how my seeing him can hurt him.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about him.” The doctor opened the door. At the nursing desk a corpsman was punching chart-cards. “How’s he doing?” the doctor asked.

“Same as before.” Then the corpsman saw the girl. “Doc, you aren’t taking her in there, are you?”

“That’s what she wants.”

“You know he’s not exactly sold on girls, right now.”

“I’ll risk it,” Dorie said sharply.

Inside the cubicle they found Provost lying on his back on a bunk. The pale blue aura of a tangle-field hovered over him, providing gentle but effective restraint.

Provost was singing.

The words drifted across the room. Dorie suddenly caught them and felt her cheeks turn red.

“Hello, John,” the doctor said. “How are you feeling?”

Provost stopped singing. “Fine. Yourself?”

“This is Miss Kendall. She’s going to help take care of you.”

“Well, now, that’s just fine.” Provost turned his face toward Dorie. No sign of recognition; his eyes were flat, like a snake’s eyes. Impersonal—and deadly. “Why don’t you leave us alone to talk, Doc? And turn this tangle-field off. Just for a minute.”

She shivered at the tone. Dr. Coindreau said, “John, do you know where you are?”

“In a tangle-field.”

“Do you know where?”

Provost ignored the question, stared fixedly at the girl. She had never seen such a malignant stare.

“Do you know what happened to you?” the doctor tried again.

His eyes didn’t waver, but he frowned. “Memory’s a little sticky. But ten seconds out of this tangle-field would help, I bet.” She saw his hand clench on the coverlet until the knuckles whitened.

The doctor sighed. “Listen to me, John. You were on the surface. Something happened down there. What—”

Provost obviously was not listening. “Look, Doc, why don’t you cut out of here? My business is with her, not you.”

“All right, John.” Dr. Coindreau turned away. He led the girl back into the corridor. She was no longer blushing. She was dead white and trembling. “You know that he’d kill you before he finished,” the doctor said to her gently.

“Yes.” She nodded. “I know.”

“At least the mechanism is direct enough. Fairly primitive, too. And let’s face it, a weaker man would either be dead or catatonic. Provost is a rock of stability in comparison.”

She nodded. “But he’s turned his hatred on the girl, not on the Enemy.”

“It was the girl who hit him, remember?” They stepped into an office, and she took die seat the doctor offered gratefully. “Anyway,” he said, “Provost never actually contacted the Enemy. We speak as though he’s actually been down on the surface physically, and of course he hasn’t. You know how an Analogue works?”

“I ought to—I have one—but I only know the general theory, not the details.”

“Nobody knows the details too well, not even your friends at the Hoffman Center. Nobody really could. An Analogue is at least quasi-sentient, and the relationship between an Analogue and its operator is extremely individual and personal. That’s precisely why Analogues are the only real weapons we have to use against the Enemy.”

“I can’t quite see that,” Dorie said.

“Look—these creatures, whatever they are—buried themselves on the surface of Saturn and just sat there, right? The blows they struck against Titan Colony and the contact ship showed us the kind of power they could bring to bear—but they didn’t follow up. They struck and ran. Pretty pointless, wouldn’t you say?”

It seemed so, at first glance. Dorie Kendall frowned. “Maybe not so pointless. It made counterattack almost impossible.”

Dr. Coindreau nodded grimly. “Exactly the point. We didn’t know what—or how—to counterattack. We practically had to do something, and yet there was nothing we could do.”

“Why didn’t we land and hunt them out?” the girl asked. “We can get down there, can’t we?”

“Well, it’s possible, but it would have been worse than useless. It would have taken all our strength and technology just to survive down there, let alone do anything else. So we used Analogues, just the way Grossman and his crew used them to explore the surface of Jupiter. The Analogues were originally developed to treat paranoids. The old lysergic acid poisons had proved that a personality could dissociate voluntarily and reintegrate, so that a psych man could slip right into a paranoid fantasy with his patient and work him on his own ground. Trouble was that unstable personalities didn’t reintegrate so well, which was why so many people blew up in all directions on LSD.” Dr. Coindreau paused, chewing his Up. “With Analogues, the dissociation is only apparent, not real. A carbon copy, with all the sensory, motor, and personality factors outlined perfectly on protein-molecule templates. The jump from enzyme-antagonists to electronic punched-molecule impressions isn’t too steep, really, and at least the Analogues are predictable.”

“I see,” Dorie Kendall said. “So the operatives—like Provost—could send their Analogues down and explore in absentia, so to speak.”

“As a probe, in hope of making contact with the Enemy. At least that was the original plan. It turned out differently, though. That was what the Enemy seemed to be waiting for. They drove back the first probers with perfectly staggering brutality. We struck back at them, and they returned with worse. So pretty soon we were dancing this silly gavotte with them down there, except that the operatives didn’t find it so silly. Maybe the medieval Earth wars seemed silly, too, with the battleground announced in advance, the forces lined up, the bugles blowing, parry and thrust and everybody quits at sunset. But lots of men got killed that way just the same.” He paused for a moment, wrappped in his own thoughts, and then went on with sudden firmness: “There was no sense to this thing, but it was what the Enemy seemed to want. And our best men have thrown everything they could into it, and only their conditioning and the Relief room has kept them going.”

“Weren’t Psi-Highs used for a while?” Dorie said.

“Yes, but it didn’t work. The Enemy is not telepathic, for one thing, or at least not in the sense we think of it; and anyway, the Psi-Highs couldn’t keep themselves and their analogues separated. It was pure slaughter, for them, so they were pulled back to Earth to help build the Analogues for psi-negatives to use.” He shot a glance toward the cubicle. “Well, now that’s all over. No Relief, no Analogues. The Enemy has simply shifted the battle scene on us, and we’re paralyzed.”

For a long moment, the DepPsych girl sat in silence. Then she said, “I don’t think ‘paralyzed’ is exactly the word you want. You mean ‘panicked’.”

“Does it make any difference?”

“Maybe a world of difference,” the girl said thoughtfully, “to the aliens.”

Paralysis oh panic, the effect on the Satellite ship was devastating.

Twelve hours after Provost was dragged kicking and screaming out of the Relief room, the ship’s crew waited in momentary anticipation, braced against the next blow. They could not guess from where it might come, nor what form it might take. They could only sit in agony and wait.

Twenty-four hours later, they still waited. Thirty-six hours, and they still waited. Activity was suspended, even breathing was painful. In the day room the Analogue operatives gnawed their knuckles, silent and fearful, unwilling to trust even a brief exchange of words. They were Earthmen, the girl realized, and Earthmen were old hands at warfare. They understood too well the horrible power of advantage. Earthly empires had tottered and fallen for the loss of one tiny advantage.

But the Enemy’s advantage was not tiny. It was huge, overpowering. The men here could only wait for the blow to fall. It had to fall, if there were order and logic in the universe.

It didn’t fall. They waited, and far worse than a brutal, concerted attack against them, nothing happened.

The paralysis deepened. The Enemy had reached a girl within the Satellite and turned her into a murderous blade in their midst Who could say how many others had been reached? No one knew. There was nothing to grasp, nothing to hold on to, nothing.

Dorie Kendall did not elaborate on her remark to Dr. Coindreau, but something had slid smoothly into place in her mind as she had talked to him, and she watched the Satellite and its men around her grinding to a halt with a new alertness.

The attack on Provost through the Turner girl was not pointless, she was certain of that. It had purpose. Nor was it an end in itself. It was only the beginning. To understand the purpose it was necessary somehow to begin to understand the Enemy.

And that, of course, was the whole war. That was what the Enemy had so consistently fought to prevent. They have built up an impenetrable wall, a blinding smokescreen to hide themselves, she thought, but there must be some way to see them clearly.

The only way to see them was through Provost. She was certain of this, though she wasn’t sure why. She went to the isolation cubicle to see him again, and then again and again. It was unrelieved torment for her each time; for all her professional training, she had never before encountered such a malignant wall of hatred. Each time his viciousness and abusiveness seemed worse as he fought against the restraining tangle-field, watching her with murderous hatred; she left each time almost physically ill, and whenever she slept she had nightmares. But again and again she worked to break through his violent obsession, more and more convinced that John Provost was the key. They were brutal interviews, fruitless—but she watched as she worked.

Vanaman found her in Medical Section on the third day, a red-eyed, bitter Vanaman, obviously exhausted, obviously fighting for the last vestige of control, obviously helpless to thwart the creeping paralysis in the ship under his command “You’ve got to hit Eberle with something,” he said harshly. “I can’t make him budge.”

“Who is Eberle?” the girl wanted to know.

“The Analogue dispatcher. He won’t send an Analogue down.”

“I thought you weren’t going to.”

“I’ve got to do do something, Relief or no Relief, but Eberle is dragging his feet.”

She found John Eberle in the Analogue Banks, working by himself, quietly and efficiently and foolishly, testing wires, testing transmission, dismantling the delicate electronic units and reassembling them in an atmosphere of chaos around liim. The operative cubicles were empty, the doors hanging open, alarm signals winking unheeded.

“What are you doing with them?” Dorie asked, staring down at the dismantled Analogues.

Eberle grinned foolishly. “Testing them,” he said “Just testing.”

“But Vanaman says we need them down on the surface now. Can’t you see that?”

Eberle’s smile faded. “I can’t send them down there.”

“Why not?”

“Who’s going to operate them?” the dispatcher asked. “What will the operators due for Relief?” His eyes narrowed. “Would you want to take one down?”

“I’m not trained to take one down. But there are operators here who are.”

Eberle shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’re DepPsych, maybe you’ve got some magic formula to make the men go down without any Relief to count on. I can’t make them. I’ve already tried it.”

She stared at him, and felt a wave of helplessness sweep over her. It was as though she were standing in an enormous tangle-field, and all her efforts to free herself only settled it more firmly on her shoulders. She knew it wasn’t anything as simple as fear or cowardice that was paralyzing the ship.

It was more than that, something far deeper and more basic.

Once again she was forced back to where it had all started, the only possible channel of attack.

John Provost. She headed for the isolation cubicle.

Thirty-six hours, and she had barely slept; when exhaustion demanded rest, her mind would not permit it, and she would toss in darkness, groping for land, for something solid to grasp and cling to.

Provost sucked up most of her time—wasted hours, hours that drained her physically and emotionally. She made no progress, found no chink in the brutal armor. When she was not with him she was in the projection booth, studying the monitor tapes, watching and listening, trying somehow to build a composite picture of this enigmatic Enemy that had appeared from the depths of space, struck, and then drawn back to the inaccessible surface of Saturn. There were too many pictures, that was the trouble. None of them fit. None corresponded to the others. She was trying to make sense from nonsense, and always the task seemed more hopeless than before.

And yet, slowly, a pattern began to emerge.

An alien creature, coming by intent or accident into a star system with intelligent life, advanced technology. The odds were astronomical against its ever happening. Probably not a truly unique occurrence in the universe, but very possibly unique for these alien creatures.

What then?

A pattern was inevitable . . . .

She answered a violent summons from Vanaman. He demanded progress with John Provost, and she told him there was no progress. He paced the floor, lashing out at her with all the fury that had been building up as the hours had passed. “That’s what you’re here for,” he told her harshly. “That’s why we have DepPsych—to deal with emergencies. We’ve got to have progress with that man.”

Dorie Kendall sighed. “I’m doing everything I can. Provost has a good, strong mind. He has it focussed down on one tiny pinpoint of awareness, and he won’t budge it from there.”

“He won’t!” Vanaman roared. “What about you? You people are supposed to have techniques. You can break him away from it.”

“Do you want him dead?” she asked. “That’s what you’ll get if I drive him too hard. He’s clinging to his life, and I mean that literally. To him, I am the Turner girl, and all that is sustaining him is this vicious drive to destroy me, as quickly as he can, as horribly as he can. You can use your imagination, I think.”

Vanaman stared at her. She met his haggard eyes defiantly. Vanaman broke first. It was almost pitiable, the change; he seemed to age before her eyes. The creases in his face seemed to harden and deepen, and his heavy hands—threatening weapons before—fell limp. Like a spirited dog that had been whipped and broken by a brutal master, he crumbled. “All right. I can’t fight you.” He spread his hands helplessly. “You know that I’m beaten, don’t you? I’m cornered, and there’s no place to turn. I know why Provost dreaded those long waits between shifts now. That’s all I can do—wait for the blow to fall.”

“What blow?” said the girl.

“Maybe you can tell me.” A strangled sound came from Vanaman’s throat. “Everything we’ve done against them has been useless. Our attempt to contact them, our probing for them and fighting them on the surface—useless. When they got ready to hit us here, they hit us. All our precautions and defenses didn’t hinder them.” He glared at her. “All right, you tell me. What is it we’re waiting for? When is the blow coming? From where?”

“I don’t think there’s going to be any blow,” said Dorie Kendall.

“Then you’re either blind or stupid,” Vanaman snapped. “They’ve driven a gaping hole in our defenses. They know that. Do you think they’re just going to let the advantage slide?”

“Human beings might not, but they’re not human beings. You seem to keep forgetting that.”

Words died on Vanaman’s lips. He blinked and frowned. “I don’t follow you,” he said after a moment.

“So far, everything they’ve done fits a pattern,” Dorie said. “They have physical destructive power, but the only times they’ve used it was to prevent physical contact. So then after they struck, what did they do? Press forward? Humans might, but they didn’t. Instead, they moved back to the least accessible geographical region they could find in the solar system, a planetary surface we could not negotiate, and then they waited. When we sent down Analogue probers, they fought us, in a way, but what had made that fight so difficult? Can you tell me?”

“The fact that we didn’t know what we were fighting, I suppose,” Vanaman said slowly. “The Analogue operatives didn’t know what was coming next, never two attacks the same.”

“Exactly,” said the girl. “They knocked us off balance and kept us there. They didn’t use their advantage then. Everything was kept tightly localized until the Analogue operatives began to get their feet on the ground. You saw the same tapes I did. Those men were beginning to know what they were doing down there; they knew they could count on their conditioning and the Relief rooms to keep them from breaking, no matter how powerful the onslaught. So now, only now, the Enemy has torn that to ribbons, through the Turner girl.” She smiled. “You see what I mean about a pattern?”

“Maybe so,” Vanaman conceded, “but I don’t see why.”

“Look—when you poke a turtle with a stick, what happens? He pulls in his head and sits there. Just that one little aggressive act on your part gives you a world of information about how turtles behave. You could write a book about turtles, right there. But suppose it happened to be a snapping turtle you poked, and he took the end of the stick off. You wouldn’t need to poke him a second time to guess what he would do, would you? You already know. Why bother with a second poke?”

“Then you’re saying that the Enemy won’t strike again because they have what they want,” said Vanaman.

“Of course,” the girl said bleakly. “They have Provost. Through Provost they have every mind on this Satellite. They don’t need to fight on the surface any more, they’re right here.”

Vanaman’s eyes were hard as he rose from his seat. “Well, we can stop that. We can kill Provost.”

She caught his arm as he reached for the intercom switch. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said tightly. “What do you think you’re going to do when you’ve killed him?”

“I don’t know,” he snarled. “But I’ll do something. I’ve got to get them out into the open somehow, out where I can see them, before we all split open at the seams.”

“You mean find out whether they have green skins and five legs or not? Who cares?” She twisted his arm with amazing strength, pushing him back into the seat. “Listen to me, you fool. What we have to know is what they want, how they think, how they behave. Physical contact with them is pointless until we know those things. Can’t you see that? They’ve realized that from the start.”

He stared at her. “But what do you think we should do?”

“First, find out some of the things we have to know,” she said. “That means we have to use the one real weapon we’ve got—John Provost—and I’m going to see that he’s kept alive. Show me your arm.”

Puzzled, Vanaman held it out to her. The needle bit so quickly he could not pull back. Realization dawned on his face.

“Sorry,” she said gently. “There’s only one thing we can do, and killing Provost isn’t it” She pushed him back in the seat like a sack of flour. “I wish it were,” she added softly, but Vanaman wasn’t listening any more.

As she moved down the corridor the magnitude of what she was doing caught Dorie,and shook her violently. Things had crystallized in her mind just before she had gone to talk with Vanaman. A course of action had appeared which she only grasped in outline, and she had moved too fast, too concisely, before thinking it out in full. But now she had tripped the switch. The juggernaut was moving in on her now, ponderously, but gaining momentum.

There would be no stopping it now, she knew, no turning it back. A course of action, once initiated, developed power of its own. She was committed . . . .

Earth was committed . . . .

She shook off that thought, forcefully. She was too terrified to think about that aspect of it. Her mind was filled and frozen by the ordeal she knew was facing her now: John Provost.

Somehow she had to take Provost back from them, wrench him out of their grasp. She remembered the hard, flat look in his eyes when he watched her, and she shuddered.

There was a way to do it.

All around her she could feel the tension of the Satellite ship, waiting helplessly, poised for demolition. She ran down the empty corridors, searched the depths of the ship until she found the place she was seeking. Once inside Atmosphere Control section she leaned against the wall, panting.

Then she slipped the filters into her nostrils, and broke the tiny capsules, feeding them into the ventilation ducts of the ship.

She would take Provost back from the Enemy; then, if she survived—what? There were only hazy outlines in her mind. She knew the limitation of thought that was blocking her. It was the limitation that was utterly unavoidable in thinking of an alien, a creature not of Earth, not human. The limitation was terribly easy to overlook until the alien was there facing her: the simple fact that she was bound and strapped by a human mind. She could only think human thoughts, in human ways. She could only comprehend the alien insofar as the alien possessed human qualities, not an inch further. There was no way she could stretch her mind to cope with alienness. But worse—even in trying desperately to comprehend alienness, her own human mind inevitably assumed a human mind on the part of the alien.

This the Enemy did not have. What kind of mind the Enemy did have she could not know, but it was not a human mind. Yet that alien mind had to be contacted and understood.

It had seemed an insoluble conundrum—until she had realized that the Enemy had faced exactly the same problem, and solved it.

To the Enemy, stumbling upon intelligent life in Earth’s solar system, a human mind was as incomprehensible as an alien mind was to a human. They had faced the same dilemma, and found a way to cope with it. But how? The very pattern of their approach showed how. It was data, and Dorie Kendall had treated it as data, and found the answer.

It revealed them.

They tried so hard to remain obscure while they studied us, she thought as she moved back toward the Analogue Section, and yet with every move they made they revealed themselves to us further, if we had only had the wit to look. Everything they did was a revelation of themselves. They thought they were peering at us through a one-way portal, seeing us and yet remaining unseen, but in reality the glass was a mirror, reflecting their own natures in every move they made. They discovered our vulnerability, true, but at the same time inadvertently revealed their own.

The ventilators hummed. She felt the tension in the ship relaxing as the sleep-gas seeped down the corridors. Muscles uncoiled. Fear dissolved from frightened minds. Doors banged open; there was talking, laughter; then lethargy, dullness, glazed eyes, yawns, slack mouths—

Sleep. Like Vanaman, slumped back in his chair, everyone on the Satellite slept. Operatives fell forward on their faces. The girls in the Relief rooms yawned, dozed, snored, slept.

It seemed to Dorie that she could sense Provost’s thoughts twisting out toward her in a tight, malignant channel driving to destroy her, seeking release from the dreadful hatred the aliens were using to bind him. But then even Provost dozed and slept.

With the filters protecting her, she was alone on the ship, a ghost. In the Analogue bank she activated the circuits she needed, set the dials, rechecked each setting to make certain that she made no error.

She dared not make an error.

Finally, she went to Provost. She dragged his drugged body into the Analogue cubicle and strapped him down. She fit his hands into the grips. Another needle, then, to counteract the sleep-gas, and his eyes blinked open.

He saw her and lunged for her with no warning sound. His arms tore at the restraints, jerking murderously. She jumped back from him a little, forcing out a twisted smile. She reached out mockingly to stroke his forehead, and he tried to bite her hand.

“Butcher!” she whispered. “Monster!”

Pure hate poured from his mouth as she laughed at him. Then she threw the Analogue switch. He jerked back as contact was made, and she moved swiftly to her own Analogue helmet waiting in the adjacent cubicle, threw another switch, felt in her own mind the sickening thud of Analogue contact.

Her Analogue. A therapeutic tool before, now a deadly weapon in frightened, unsteady hands.

She was afraid. It seemed that she was watching images on a hazy screen. She saw Provost there, facing her, hating her, but it was only a mental image. She was sitting alone in darkness and knew that he also was sitting in darkness. Then gradually the darkness seemed to dissolve into unreality; the two Analogue images—hers and Provost’s—became sharp and clear.

It was like a dream, a waking nightmare. Provost was moving in on her slowly, his mouth twisting in hatred, great knots of muscle standing out in his arms. He seemed to tower over her for a moment in vicious anticipaton. She screamed and broke down the corridor. He was after her like a cat. He leaped, struck her legs, threw her down on the metal floor and fell on her. She saw his arm upraised, felt the fist crash down again and again and again. Broken flesh, broken bones, paste, pulp, again and again. And in the dark Analogue cubicle she seemed to feel every blow.

She closed her eyes, her control reeling. There would be no Relief for her later, she knew that. She fought him, then abandoned fighting and just hung on doggedly, waiting for the end.

Abruptly, he was gone. She had felt his release as his hatred had burned itself out on her. He had stopped, and stood still, suddenly mild, puzzled, tired, wondering as he looked down at the thing on the floor. And then. .

She knew he had started for the surface.

To Provost it was like awakening from warm and peaceful sleep into terror.

He was horrified and appalled to realize that he had been sleeping. What had happened? Why didn’t Control respond? Frantically he seized the hand grips, drove his Analogue down toward the surface. In his mind were fragments of memory. Something hideous had happened, long long ago, something in the Relief room. Afterwards he had been held down in a tangle-field, and time after time the Turner girl had come back to him in the isolation cubicle—or had it been the Turner girl? Then just now he had found her and the tangle-field was gone, and the hideous thing had been repeated.

And the horrible, abrupt awakening to the fact that the Satellite ship was utterly helpless and undefended from the Enemy.

How long had he slept? What had happened? Didn’t they realize that every passing second might be precious to the Enemy, fatal to the Satellite?

He felt someone following him, screaming out at him in alarm. Not the Turner girl, as he had thought, but Dorie Kendall, the DepPsych agent, following him down to the surface with her own Analogue.

Provost hesitated, fighting the sense of urgency in his mind. “Don’t stop me,” he told her. “I’ve got to get down there. There’s no one covering—”

“You can’t go down,” she cried. “You have no support here. No conditioning, no Relief. We’ve got to do something very different.”

“Different?” He felt her very close to him now and he paused in confusion. What did she know about the Enemy? “What’s happening here? The Enemy is down there. Why have we stopped fighting?”

She was telling him, frantically, as he groped through his confusion and tried to understand. “They had to know if we had a vulnerability, any vulnerability. Something they could use against us to protect themselves if they had to. They knew they could never risk direct contact with us until they knew that we were vulnerable in some way.”

Provost shook his head, uncomprehending. “But why not?”

“Try to see their view,” she said. “Suppose we were hostile, and invulnerable. We might not stop at destroying their ships, we might follow them home and destroy them there. They couldn’t know, and they couldn’t take a risk like that. They had to find a vulnerability to use as a weapon before any contact was possible. So they drew us out, prodded us, observed us, trying to find out limitations—if we had any. And they discovered our vulnerability—panic. A weakness in our natures, the point where intelligence deserts us and renders us irrational, helpless to fight any more.

This is what they could use to control us, except that they must have the same vulnerability!”

He hesitated. The driving urge to go on down to the surface was almost overwhelming, to grapple with them and try once again to break through their barrier there. “Why should they have the same weakness we have? They’re aliens, not humans.”

“Because they have been doing exactly the same thing that we would have done if we had been in their place. Think, John! In all the star systems they must have searched, no sign of intelligent life. Then, suddenly, a solar system that is teeming with life. Intelligent? Obviously. Dangerous? How could they know? We wouldn’t have known, would we? What would we have done?”

Provost faltered. “Tried to make contact, I suppose.”

“Physical contact? Nonsense. We wouldn’t have dared. We couldn’t possibly risk contact until we knew how they thought and behaved, until we knew for certain that we could defend ourselves against them if necessary, that they had some kind of vulnerability. Once we knew that, the way would be open for contact. But no matter how eager we were for contact, and no matter how friendly they might appear we would have had to have the weapon to fight them first. Or take an insane risk, the risk of total destruction.”

He understood her, but it didn’t make sense. He thought of Miranda outpost, Titan Colony, and shook his head. “It doesn’t add up,” he said. “What they did here was incredible.”

“Only if you assumed that they were hostile,” she said softly.

“What about the contact ship, the colony on Titan? They burned them both, blew them to kingdom come.”

“Because they had to. They did what we would have done under the same circumstances. They goaded us. Then they took cover and waited to see what we would do. They made us come after them where we couldn’t reach them physically, to see what we could do. They deliberately kept one step ahead, making us reveal ourselves every step of the way, until they found the soft spot they were seeking and threw us into panic. What they failed to realize was that they were inevitably mirroring themselves in everything they did.”

Silence then. In the dark cubicle, Provost could see the hazy image of the girl in his mind, pleading with him, trying to make him understand. Gradually it began to make sense. “So they have their weapon,” he said slowly, “and still we can’t make contact with them because we have none against them.”

“Had none,” the girl corrected him. “But we have seen them in the mirror. Their thoughts and actions and approach have been human-like. They recognized our panic for what it was when they saw it. How could they have, unless they themselves knew what panic was—from their own experience?”

“And now?”

“We turn the tables,” she said. “If they also have a vulnerability, there will be no more barrier to contact. But we don’t dare assume, we have to know. Every time they have goaded us we have reacted. We’ve got to stop that now. We’ve got to withdraw from them completely, leave them with nothing to work with, nothing to grasp.”

“But the Satellite—”

“The Satellite is dead for the time being, asleep. There’s no one here but us for them to contact. Now we have to withdraw too. If we do that, can’t you see what they will have to do?”

Slowly he nodded. He sensed that she hadn’t told him all of it, but that, too, was all right. Better that there be nothing that the Enemy could draw from his mind. “You tell me what to do, and when,” he said.

“Close your mind down, as completely as you can. Barricade it against them, if you can. Keep them out, leave nothing open for them to probe. Cut them off cold. But be ready when I signal you.”

He twisted in the cramped seat in the cubicle, clamping down his control as he felt Dorie clamping down hers. It was an exercise in patience and concentration, but slowly he felt his mind clearing. Like a rheostat imperceptibly dimming the lights in a theater, the Satellite went dimmer, dimmer, almost dead. Only a flicker of activity remained, tiny and insignificant.

They waited.

It might have been hours, or even days, before the probing from the Enemy began. Provost felt it first, for he had known it before, tiny exploratory waves from the alien minds, tentative, easy to strike away. He caught himself just in time, allowed himself no response, trying to make his mind a blank gray surface, a sheet of nothing.

More probing then, more urgency. Sensations of surprise, of confusion, of concern. Unanswered questions, fleeting whispers of doubt in the alien minds. Slowly confusion gave way to doubt, then to fear.

This was something the Enemy clearly had not anticipated, this sudden unequivocal collapse. The probing grew more frantic in its intensity. Deepening of doubt, and then, amazingly, regretfulness, self-reproach, uncertainty. What has happened? Could we have destroyed them? Could we have driven them too far?

The probing stopped abruptly. Provost felt the DepPsych girl stir; vaguely his eyes registered the darkness of the cubicle around him, the oval viewport in the wall showing the pale yellow globe of Saturn lying below, its rings spreading like a delicate filigree . . . .

Nothing.

In his own mind he felt a stir of panic, and fought it down. What if the DepPsych girl were wrong? It was only a human mind which had assumed that creatures which behaved alike were alike. In the silence a thousand alternative possibilities flooded his mind. The minutes passed and the panic rose again, stronger. .

Then he saw it in the viewport. Up from the methane clouds they came, slowly, four great ships in perfect formation. They rose and stabilized in orbit, moved again, stabilized, moved again.

They were approaching the Satellite.

He felt his fingers clench on the grips as he watched, his mind leaping exultantly. She had been right. They were forced out. The offensive had shifted, and now the Enemy were forced to move.

Provost saw with perfect clarity the part the DepPsych girl hadn’t told him—the thing he and she were going to do.

They waited until the ships were very close. Then:

“Provost! Now!”

They struck out together, as a unit, hard. They hit with all the power they could muster, striking the sensitive alien minds without warning. They could feel the sudden crashing impact of their attack. He could never have done it alone; together their power was staggering. The alien minds were open, confused, defensive; they reeled back in pain and fear—

In panic.

Suddenly the four great ships broke apart. They moved out in erratic courses, driving back for the planet’s surface. They scuttled like bugs when a rock is overturned, beyond control and frantic. In a matter of minutes they were gone again, and the silence rose like a cloud from the surface.

Somewhere in the Satellite a bell was ringing. John Provost heard it, dreamily, as he rose and stretched his cramped muscles. He met Dorie Kendall in the corridor, and he could tell from the look on her face that she knew it was over, too.

The aliens were vulnerable. They were vulnerable to the same primitive and irrational defense reactions that humans were vulnerable to when faced with a crisis? the suspension of reason and logic that constituted panic. The knowledge was the weapon that Earthmen needed, to make contact possible.

Now each side had a weapon. The mirror had reflected the aliens accurately, and the meaning of the reflection was unmistakably clear. There need be no danger in contact now. Now there could be a beginning to understanding.

Without a word John Provost and the girl began to waken the crew of the Satellite.