Quickly Jerry looked at the sky again. Not a cloud had moved. Their
rotund fleeciness might have been carven there. He gave himself a
mental kick. Hadn't one of his first alien awarenesses been the sound
of wind? And yet the grass lay still. The trees stood silent. And the
clouds, so nearly over his head that he could have touched one, hung
quietly against a perfectly calm sky.
It was not the wind he had heard. It was air. Just molecules of air, as
they shifted and flew about at incredible speeds.
The alien-baby's time-sense was occluded, as that of any Earth-baby, by
shortness of life. It was the paradox of relative lifetime.
A lifetime, Old Peters had said, training the eager young men who were
to become graduate Space Zoologists, is a lifetime. He'd written it on
the blackboard so they might understand he was not speaking in circles.
"A lifetime," he'd said, "is the time one spends from birth until any
present moment. A lifetime is the actual count of moments of existence
from birth. When a baby has been born for an hour, its lifetime is
sixty minutes. And to the baby, that sixty minutes is a lifetime."
He'd written the two words on the board, and would point from one to
the other as he spoke, so the class could understand the distinction
visually, and not have to rely on his inflection to tell which term
he'd used.
"A lifetime," he'd continued, "is subjective; a lifetime is objective.
The first deals in one's personal sense of time passed. The second is
simply readings from a clock. When a man turns ninety, he is usually
surprised to find how short a life he's seemed to have had. His ninety
years seem hardly longer to him than a single day seemed when he was a
baby.
"It is a lucky thing that we cannot penetrate the mind of an
intelligent creature. If any of us got into the mind of a baby, we'd
soon start going out of our minds with the maddening length of a day's
time, seen from a baby's viewpoint. Remember, when you are in Contact
with an alien mind, for that immutable forty minutes your _sensation_
of elapsed time will be subject to that of your host. To a baby, forty
minutes is forever."
* * * * *
And here Jerry Norcriss was, in a baby's mind.
No wonder no tree had rippled, no cloud had blown. The baby-senses
were geared to a near-eternal forty minutes. For all practical
purposes, Jerry was stuck in one frame of a movie film, trapped for
who-knows-how-long till the next frame came by.
"_That's_ why the car melted!" he realized. "The movement of the car
toward me, in my hand, must have been infinitely shorter than the few
seconds it seemed to take. I tried to make the mine car move more
than five hundred feet, in an actual time less than a thousandth of a
_second_!"
Jerry wasn't overly concerned about the duration itself. He'd been in
subjectively-slow creatures before. If things got too boring, he could
always doze off; that usually served to pass the time. Even a baby's
time-sense jumps long gaps when it sleeps.
The thing that puzzled him was this: If the mine car had burnt up
from moving too far too fast, why hadn't the baby's hand and arm been
scorched by the motion? The heat of the car had affected it, so that
let out inborn heat-resistance....
His hands once again went to his face. He felt not only the
features--familiar features, eerily like a human baby's--but the
skull-size. When he'd finished, he no longer had reason to doubt that
the baby was of an intelligent species. Too much cranial allotment to
think any differently.
The whole situation, Jerry mused with grim humor, was screwy. The
six-month roborocket could not have missed a creature with such an
intense life-pulse, but it had. Contact could not be achieved with an
intelligent mind, but it had been. Invisibility--except for certain
species of underwater, creatures--was supposed to be impossible for a
living organism. Yet here it was.
Three separate impossibles ... all accomplished.
"Still," said Jerry to himself, "that's not the main puzzle. The
vanishing of those two shifts of miners is still beyond me. They could,
of course, have simply walked head-on into this invisible leviathan.
But how fast can a man walk? And would they _all_ have done it? Now, if
this kid happened to pick one of them _up_--" Jerry gave a shudder at
the thought of what had happened to that metal mine car. "Still," he
sighed, baffled, "a man who bursts into flame is no more fun to hold
than a hot mine car. After maybe two or three deaths at the _outside_,
the kid would've learned not to touch them."
Then he had an even eerier thought. If this creature were a baby--where
did its mother and father lurk?
The thought of two more invisible giants at large on the planet was
unbearable.
* * * * *
Jerry decided to chance losing control over the alien mind, to let its
own instincts come to the fore.
There was the possibility that it knew where its folks were, and would
try moving in that direction. Or it might cry for its mother, and she'd
hurry back. If there _were_ invisible giants, the sooner the colony was
informed the better.
As Jerry's control of his host grew tenuous, he could feel the baby's
mind taking over once again. Feeble pulsations reached him--nothing
like solid thought, but mere urgencies about comfort, food and
affection.
Jerry waited, in the background of the unformed mind, for something to
happen. Then, suddenly, there was a shifting, something like a metal
earthquake. A cold hard light of awareness focused on him, where he'd
thought he was safely hidden in the background.
"Who are you?" asked the awareness.
It is not in so many words, of course. A mind speaks to another mind
in incredibly swift shorthand. The actual thought-impulse that came to
Jerry was a thick wave of curiosity, its stress laid upon identity.
"I am a Learner," Jerry's thought replied. It was a self-sufficient
response, since Jerry's concept of all that a Learner was was
incorporated in the thought.
"I see," said the alien. "You have memories of antagonism which are now
gone from your intent. Explain."
"I came to find a menace. I found a helpless child."
"I see," came the cold, thoughtful reply. "Yes, that is how I sensed
it."
"Is your mother around?" asked Jerry. "Or father?"
"Dead," said the awareness. "I am alone."
At the thought, the intense thought of loneliness, a kindred spark
flared in Jerry's own mind. The alien caught at the spark, recognized
it.
"Strange," it said. "You, too, are alone. But it is a different
aloneness."
Jerry's thoughts were whirling in confusion. To be read so easily by a
baby was incredible to him. Yet the situation was without precedent.
Perhaps a baby's mind was brighter than science gave credit. Since a
mind needed no words or manual skills, the mind of a baby might be open
to learn the thousand things necessary for adult survival. Maybe as a
man learned to use his body, he forgot in proportion how to use his
mind.
"How can you know my aloneness?" asked Jerry.
"I see it, there in your mind. It is plain to me. You have been
misled. You are a helpless pawn of a singularly wicked scheme. The
victim of a lie."
* * * * *
Jerry's recollection flashed to his conversation with Ollie Gibbs, to
the things he had wanted to tell the other man but was unable to put
into words. All the heaviness he had borne alone these many years was
apparent to this mind he enhosted. The alien mind knew. _Knew!_
"I see," it said again, though Jerry was unaware of expressing any
conscious thought. "It is clear to me now. You have suffered much--will
suffer much. No hope for you, is there?"
There was warmth in the words--warmth, friendship and compassionate
understanding. Suddenly, to this mind of an alien in its incongruous,
invisible baby's body, Jerry found himself blurting the things he
had never told to any man. Things which no Space Zoologist had ever
discussed even with another member of that hapless clan.
"They never told us," he said to the alien. "I don't hold any rancor
because of it; they dared not tell us, lest we refuse to become one
with them. They were fair, though. Long before we were indoctrinated,
long before we'd been allowed to attempt our first Contact, we were
told that there were dangers. Not the dangers we had heard about,
such as the imminent peril of dying if the host died while we were in
Contact. Another danger was implied, one which we could only learn of
by actually becoming Learners, and one which--once we had learned of
it--would be impossible to escape.
"With a little thought along the proper lines, we might almost have
guessed it. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
One of Newton's laws, applied in an area he did not even suspect
existed.
"Oh, we were a brave, adventurous lot, all of us. We would be Learners;
no alien mind but we could enter it, and actually become the alien for
the period of Contact. Thrills, danger and hairsbreadth escapes would
be ours. Ultimate adventurers, they called us. And all along, we were
fools."
The alien refrained from comment, although Jerry could feel its mind
waiting, listening, assimilating.
"Contact had a drawback. A basic one which we might have guessed, if
we hadn't been going around with stars in our eyes and a delightful
feeling of superiority over the men who would never know the interior
on any minds but their own. In Contact, just as in sunbathing, there is
a delayed reaction, a kickback."
"Sunbathing?" thought the alien.
Jerry's mind swiftly opened for the alien's inspection his full
storehouse of information on the subject. In an instant, the alien
apprehended the fate that lay in wait for the careless Space Zoologist--
* * * * *
"Sure is warm in here," said Bob, running a finger around inside his
sweat-dampened uniform collar.
"You have to be careful," said Jana, indicating the quartz panes that
formed the ceiling and three walls of the solarium. "The quartz passes
ultraviolet, unlike glass. You can pick up a severe burn if you sit out
here too long without some sort of protection for your skin."
The tech nodded. "The insidious thing about sunburn is that you only
turn a little pink as long as you're out in the sunlight. It's when
you've gone indoors, or the sun has set, or you put your clothes back
on that the red-hot burn begins to show up on your flesh."
"It's the light-pressure," said Jana. "As long as there's an influx
of ultraviolet, the flesh continues to absorb it without showing much
reaction. But as soon as you get away from the rays--the burns show
up.... I wonder how Norcriss is making out."