Mindbridge (12 page)

Around dusk I went back into town. This time of year, it never got really dark, because 61 Cygni A came up about the time B set. It didn’t provide much heat, but was a good deal brighter than the full moon.

I found the planet’s only tavern, a small adjunct to the adults’ dining area. It was almost full, with five patrons. One of them was Gus.

He had accomplished his mission, of course. Hester was out on the river, checking crab pots; she was going to meet him here for the night’s party (everybody coming to watch us disappear). I started to tell him about my problems with Ellen, but he said he knew. The whole town knew.

The only drink was a strong sour beer that they served with ice, flavored with fruit juice. If you drink it fast enough and are careful to avoid the aroma, it’s sort of like a Berlinerweiss. We started talking about that, naturally enough in German, and stayed in German when the conversation shifted to women, our four barmates in particular. And that’s what started the trouble.

The German was the last straw, anyhow. I haven’t felt so edgy since school days, what with the physical discomfort, anxious clockwatching, drugs screwing up my hormones . . . and comparing my wretched state to Gus’s obvious comfort. And suspecting that I was the object of a certain amount of ribald speculation by the adults on the planet, ninety percent of whom were female.

Gus has that irritating Germanic habit of constantly correcting your grammar while you’re trying to talk, muttering the proper forms sotto voce. It got me rattled; in the course of assembling a complicated sentence I managed to use the wrong mood, and put the primary verb phrase in the wrong place, with the wrong declension.

He laughed.

I slugged him.

He was more startled than injured. I hit him on the shoulder, not too hard, but neither of us was accustomed to three-fourths gravity, and the blow was sufficient to tip his chair back. His Tamer reflexes took over; he twisted out of the chair, made a soft landing on fingertips and toe, and sprung back up.

I got out of my chair to help him, anger gone as quickly as it came. He looked at me in a puzzled way and explained that he hadn’t been laughing at my German, which wasn’t bad for one so out of practice, but at the unconscious pun I’d made on the verb schiessen. I apologized and laughed at the joke and tried to explain my mental state. He understood perfectly, he said, but was distant. I wondered what kind of report he was going to file.

An hour early, Ellen came to the tavern door and signaled me. We hustled back to her cabin. She proved to be a tender and humorous lover. My own performance was remarkable in certain unsettling ways, but she was accustomed to that. She said we would have to get together under more conventional circumstances one day.

And remarked wistfully that two of her three previous mates didn’t live long enough to keep their appointments.

Our going-away party was fun, but it was a little strange to be at an affair where most of the people were pregnant (the seven men who were stationed there semipermanently all wore vasectomy bracelets and a haggard look). The steamed “crabs”-if you can call something with twelve legs a crab-were exotic and delicious, a rare treat for the natives as well as for Gus and me. The children eat them all the time, but the adults have to strictly limit their intake of alien protein. Otherwise the slingshot xenasthenia can be fatal.

At the appointed time we jumped back to Colorado Springs. After a short debriefing we went our separate ways.

There was a note from Carol in my box, saying she had rented a cottage in Nassau for a couple of weeks. I was to call if I didn’t want to come; she would find another companion.

There was a Denver-Miami flight leaving the next hour. I managed to get on it, then chartered an aged floater to Nassau. I’d telephoned from Miami, so she was waiting for me at the Paradise Island heliport.

Tamers don’t make quite enough to stay on Paradise Island, not by an order of magnitude. We took a jinriksha to the place she’d rented on Nassau proper.

It had been some time since I’d gone anyplace more foreign than Denver, at least on earth. Nassau was full of strange sights and sounds and smells, and it was crowded. God, was it crowded. A half-million people on a tiny speck of land.

I’m as cynical as any Tamer about the highflown rhetoric the AED uses to justify its colonization program. Anyone with basic macroeconomics knows the real story. But the comparison was inevitable between this packed island and the bucolic village I’d left a few hours before. Maybe things will fall apart again; maybe this time will be the last time. One rash person in the right place and the earth could be a sterile cinder in seconds, but that’s been more-or-less true for a century.

Still, I was glad that all those babies were up there in the sky. And comforted that one of them would be partly me.

When we got inside the cottage Carol asked whether I had successfully “carried the seed.” I told her that it had been very much the other way around-and offered to demonstrate. The effects of the last pill hadn’t quite worn off, and I still had two of them left. She thought it sounded interesting.

Two days later I was so exhausted she had to go swimming without me. Mark Twain once wrote to the effect that there wasn’t a woman alive who couldn’t defeat any ten men at the ultimate battleground between the sexes. When I first read that I thought he was exaggerating. (And I probably would’ve envied the seven male captives of Starbase.)

We did other things while we were in the Islands: went to a festival, sailed in an ancient windjammer, swam and skindived all the time. Sunned and rested and read some good books. Will write more tomorrow morning. Can’t put off this stack of reports any longer.

I was glad to hear that Dr. Jameson lived. Vivian says he claims the bridge made him do it. Maybe it’s in this stack somewhere.

Text of postoperative interview between Dr. Raymond Sweeney (Chief, Psych Group) and Dr. Philip Jameson, 2 September 2051.

(Thirty seconds of introductory politeness)

JAMESON:
         
Are you recording this, Ray?

SWEENEY:
         
What makes you-

J:
  
Come off it, Ray. I’m not being paranoid. We’ve worked together for over ten years, and I’ve never seen you wear a coat. You needed it to carry the recorder . . . because one shirt pocket has your cigarettes, and the other—

S:
 
All right, Sherlock, I’m recording. You mind?

J:
  
Why should I? It’s like I told the orderly-you talked with the orderly?

S:
 
He didn’t understand what you said.

J:
  
You mean he thought it was crazy.

S:
 
Well...

J:
  
Sounds crazy to me, too. But it is true. I didn’t try to commit suicide. That god-damned creature, that bridge, had control of me, made me cut my throat.

S:
 
It did an expert job.

J:
  
(Fingering scar) That it did. Right under the ear and then straight across the carotid, deep. Lucky I can talk.

S:
 
The work of a skilled surgeon...

J:
  
Bullshit, Sweeney. It obviously had access to my mind. (Pause) If I were going to commit suicide, I could do it more successfully, a thousand different ways. Not by opening an artery in a roomful of doctors, next door to a hospital.

S:
 
Phil, most suicides don’t want to die. They want to be saved.

J:
  
All right, I know that. But don’t you think it’s quite a coincidence? With what happened to poor Willard?

S:
 
But Willard didn’t attempt suicide; he-

J:
  
Had a heart attack, sure. Path of least resistance. (Pause) The creature tried for my heart, too, Ray. Just before I blanked out, I felt this tightness, squeezing in my chest. But my heart’s strong. It was easier for the creature to control my arm.

S:
 
Blanked out?

J:
  
That’s right. Just as I went to make the first incision. I felt dizzy and . . . thick, I don’t know. Then every thing went white and I woke up being prepped for surgery.

(Pause) Have they done an autopsy on Willard?

S:
 
Yes.

J:
  
Well?

S:
 
It was inconclusive. We’re having specialists-

J:
  
In other words, his heart stopped and nobody knows why.

S: We have to wait-

J:
  
I rest my case, damn it! Ask your cardiac specialists what sort of heart ailment would cause a robust man to sit down and die quietly in seconds. That thing had control of him. It found the weakest part of his body and squeezed the life out of him.

S:
 
That’s awfully dramatic.

J:
  
What happened to me was pretty god-damned dramatic. I was there, Sweeney; I felt the thing take over. It just didn’t do as good a job on me as it did on Bob. And that first Tamer, the Chinese boy. . . . Has anyone talked to the two Tamers who were in contact when we tried to dissect it?

S: One of them’s on a mission. The other said that the bridge functioned normally up to the time when Willard or you touched it. Then it didn’t function at all.

(Pause) That’s what they expected, though. It’s never worked with three people.

J:
  
I see. . . . Listen, Sweeney. I’ll make a deal with you. You can shrink my head all you want; I’ll cooperate a hundred per cent. If you conclude that I have suicidal tendencies, I’ll take an indefinite leave of absence.

S: I don’t think-

J:
  
But. . . in the meantime, I teach you everything I know about invertebrate anatomy. And the next time they bring one of those creatures back...

S: I get to cut it up.

J:
  
That’s right.

S:
 
Fair enough. Unless you can convince me. I don’t think I have suicidal tendencies, either.

John Thomas Riley usually liked his job: Director of Personnel and Operations Chief for AED, Colorado Springs. Sometimes it was not so pleasant.

He went into the briefing room and the talking stopped abruptly. He sat down at the end of the seminar table and began without preamble.

“I know there’s been talk.” The ten Tamers stared at him. He wished he’d brought some papers to fiddle with. “People have called this a suicide mission. But it definitely is not.”

Three of them nodded, good. “It’s pretty well established that the Groombridge bridge killed two people, and almost a third, by telepathic control of their bodies. And we’re asking you to go collect as many of the creatures as you can find.

“But this bridge was handled by a total of 38 people, and did no harm to 35 of them. We know that in two out of three cases the creature killed in self-defense. Or attempted to kill. And we aren’t asking you to harm them. Lefavre?”

Jacque put down his hand. “That’s the main thing that’s bothering us. Ch’ing wouldn’t have harmed the bridge. Not intentionally, anyhow.”

“Maybe there was some kind of accident,” Carol said. “He squeezed it too hard, or something.”

“We’ll never know, of course,” Riley said. “But we have to go on the assumption that they can somehow sense when an organism is threatening them, and take action.

“How they could do this is a mystery. Physiologically, they seem barely more sophisticated than a sponge. But there is other compelling evidence that they can do this, besides the violence done to the men who attempted dissecting it. Jeeves, you’re preparing a report . .

“That’s right,” Tania said. “I’ve talked to my team about this, but not Manuel’s.

“One clue is in the geophysical analysis. We picked up several fossils that appear to be remnants of large carnivores, aquatic ones. The bridges would be obvious sources of food for these creatures.

“But the only place we found any other form of animal life was in the Crater Sea. Completely isolated from the rest of the ecosystem.

“It could be that the bridges came along after some natural disaster that killed off the planet’s animal life. Or the bridges themselves might be that natural disaster: once they evolved their telepathic facility, they proceeded to kill off all of their rivals. They wouldn’t have to kill every single individual; just reduce the population density to where there weren’t enough mating opportunities for each species to survive. This happened to some species of whales, on Earth in the last century.

“We’ll have a clearer picture after this trip, of course.”

“It still doesn’t explain Ch’ing,” Jacque said. “Maybe the creature makes mistakes, kills when it’s not really threatened. Maybe it kills at random, to keep in practice.”

Carol nodded. “We can theorize forever, but we really don’t know anything about it.”