I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I
was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a
converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery
range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive
my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I
was acting under Gool orders.
I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan,
psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks
earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were
mine, all mine....
But how could I be sure of that?
Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as
skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of
their tampering--not at a conscious level.
But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting
like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I
wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the
mind--and I had been prepared for just such an attack.
Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one
resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious--and see again
what had happened.
I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on
the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence....
Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a
first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty
surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in
their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke
through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of
mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper....
* * * * *
The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before
me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring
personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional
continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.
And found it.
As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity
of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the
probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried
motivations.