"I'm going in! You're Martian and you're sensitive. Maybe you can catch
the backwash if there's any mental shenanigans."
"I'll try."
"Believe it now?" called Lindsay.
"Not entirely. But I'm not missing any bets. Now, I am taking my little
hatchet in one hand and I'm going out to ... _Jenna! You--!_"
The storm burst, the sky flared bright, and the waves of sheer energy
beat the ship, stormed in through the windows and the radiation counter
shrilled madly. The pillar of fire mounted like a rolling cloud,
reaching for the sun.
"Grant," said Lindsay with a dry throat.
Jenna sobbed.
"What did he mean?" demanded Lindsay.
Jenna shook away her tears, swallowed deeply. "I know," she said. "I
know."
"You--?"
"I caught it," she said.
"Then it was you," he snapped harshly. "Tell me, Jenna, what kind of
enticement did you use to get him going?"
"You fool," she snarled at him. "Blind, stupid fool." She stood up,
blazing. "Yes," she said. "I've taken all you gave me, and took it
gladly, happily. And I hoped that I could make up to you for ...
for ... causing your loss. Yet you've never forgotten that I'm Martian,
and that if you'd married a Terran you could have the plaudits and the
admiration due any fighting officer. That's rankled in your soul until
you hate me!" she screamed. "And what could I do? I'd have made it up
to you," she said, her voice quieting, "but I didn't know how. And now
you think I'm responsible. Well," she said accusingly, "how do I know
but that you are planning revenge on Terra for being blind."
"Jenna, you--"
"Well, I do know. And if you think that I'm--"
"What do you want me to think?" he asked her. "What were Grant's last
words?"
"He--"
"Accused you!"
Jenna turned quietly. She stopped at the door. "I solved one fuse
because I thought Martian," she said quietly. "I'll solve the next
one for you! You've wanted to be free to join the Corps in space.
Then follow me close, because when I solve this one there will be no
question."
"Jenna--what is it?"
"It is the fuse itself," she said. "A rudimentary brain that reacts
upon receiving any thought of removal when that thought originates
within a hundred feet or so."
"Utterly fantastic!"
"Is it?" she asked. "Watch!"
* * * * *
Jenna passed through the door and left. Moments later, the whine of a
skyplane crescendoed and diminished. Jenna was heading for the next
site. Lindsay sat for a long time, his mind whirling.
Jenna was right. He'd been fretting over his denial of the right to
command. It hadn't been fair. A group of psychoneurotics--commanded by
one. Himself. Not denied the right to command because of his wife, but
because of his psychotic nature. For one, any Terran who would enter
a mixed-marriage was not possessed of the normal adjustment, and the
same true of any Martian. Secondly, were he normal, fighting in combat
would produce a psychotic condition since he'd be set against his
wife's countrymen.
He leaped up and ran to the driving panel. Harshly he threw the
autopilot out of gear and took the controls himself. The ship took off
raggedly and hissed through the upper air, racing.
"Jenna!" he called into the radio.
No answer.
"Jenna! Turn on your receiver! Please," he begged.
No answer.
His trembling hands turned up the power and the ship shuddered at the
overload drive. The upper air shrilled against rivet head and port
sill. The burble point came and the ship shook and rattled terribly.
Yet he knew that he had but an even chance. For Jenna was driving a
superspeed plane that could race as fast as the big ship--with less
danger in atmosphere.
No spacecraft was made to travel horizontally across a planet. But
Ralph Lindsay in a frenzy, swore at the sidelong pace, and turned his
ship to arrow through the upper air. The burble died, but throughout
the ship came the rattle of falling objects, dumped from table and
shelf.
He continued to cry into the microphone, and strained his ears for the
answer that was not there.
He depressed the nose of the ship and went into a steep, screaming dive.
He--saw her. A minute speck, even through the telescope.
And at the moment he saw her, she stepped from the plane onto the
ground, and spoke to him through the radio.
"I've no receiver on, Ralph. But listen--and stay back!"
"Jenna!" he screamed.
"Your duty, remember?" she said quietly. "It is to solve these--things.
Your duty, I took away, and now I will return it."
"Jenna!" he pleaded. "I don't want--"
In futility, he gave up. She could not hear. An hypnosis took him, held
him in its grip.
"Ralph," she said. "Watch carefully."
He shook himself.
Angrily, he fought the controls. Madly he tried to urge another dyne
from the drivers. He would be--too late.
"Jenna! Don't!"
"Ralph, I'm approaching the bomb. I am now seventy feet from it. See?"
Seventy feet?
"I'm seventy feet from it, Ralph, because I've thought only of you. Not
once have I thought of defus--"
The blast caught the diving ship and stopped it in its tracks, turned
it end for end and sent it rocketing crazily away from the mad scene
of turbulence. It arched high into the sky, tumbling. Numb, Lindsay
reacted automatically. War, hatred, suspicion. All boiled up in his
mind.
The answer? It was clear, finally. The how and the why and the
wherefore. His problem--solved.
But the solution was bitter in his mouth.
Instinctively driving the ship toward the next site Lindsay's eyes
still saw the pathetic figure silhouetted against that intolerable
blast. Solution? She had given him both solutions.
His mind went back through the years. She'd been his, completely.
He'd known all the happiness any man needed. Now he was free to take
his place--and he didn't want it. What was honor? A mind, clinging to
its own ideals. Was there more honor in clinging to his choice or in
becoming a public figure, abandoning his choice.
No, Jenna hadn't given it to him. He'd taken it.
More balance, more sensible evaluation of his own set of desires would
have kept him from driving her--
* * * * *
He landed his ship flatwise, furrowing the ground. Blindly, he looked
across the field toward the--ticking thing.
"Blast!" he snarled at the thing.
He selected tools. Then he faced it again. "Go ahead. Explode."
Briefly, he wondered how it would feel--and if any feeling were
possible in microseconds.
"I'm coming," he told it.
He hit it a ringing blow with a sledge hammer. "Blast!" he cried
angrily.
Down within the robomb, a lacery lacework of silver in a mass of
complex hydrocarbon dielectrics sent impulses along flowing filaments
of metal to other shapeless tangles of silver globs. Countercurrents
flowed back and the filaments of metal became a tangled highway of
multi-purposed impulses. Countercurrents canceled and mixed with
flowing currents, creating new wave shapes that flowed in both
directions from the mixing point, and the silver-shot masses at either
end of the multitudinous filamentary transmission lines accepted the
false wave shapes, became confused by their unfamiliarity, and sent
forth more shapes of meaningless nature.
It was unable to cope with a situation whereby it was commanded to
explode. The right act--upon that stimulus--had not been taught--built
into--it.
And still the thoughts beat upon the rudimentary brain.
Lindsay climbed atop the thing. "Blast!" he screamed.
The leering face of a Martian looked up at him, and smiled sneeringly.
Lindsay snapped his cutting torch and thrust the white-hot flame in
the Martian's eye, and the face distorted and became Jenna. She lifted
a hand and pushed the flame away. It went, cutting the hard metal
around her face. Characters were burned in her forehead, and he read
them without understanding. Tiny hands came out through the cut in the
metal and wiped Jenna's face from the top of the fuse. They took the
white-hot flame in their hands and directed it.
He lifted. He struck at Jack Grant's laughing face with a bar and drove
it loose.
"Blast," he told Jack Grant.
Violently, he pried upon the thing. It came up slowly, like Circe,
rising out of the sea--or was it Venus--or Jenna. It was exquisitely
formed, delicately shaped, but his hands took it and crushed the softly
curving figure into a geometrical cylinder, and the softness left it as
he lifted it out of the body of the bomb.
From the vacant hole there came a small flow of neutrons and they
registered on the counter he wore.
Lindsay jumped down, the mists clearing. He looked at the thing in
his hands and laughed. The laugh welled up and broke into a wild sob.
Lindsay crumpled to the ground, holding the fuse in his lap and crying
over it.
He cried with grief, raved at his own madness. He ignored his own loss,
for had he admitted that, he would have gone mad once more.
Paradox, paradox. He--who had tried to force death--was unable to do
so. He was alone and a failure. He hurled the fuse at the vast shell of
the robomb.
"Stinking failure," he snarled at it. Then came clearness. He picked up
the fuse once more and looked at it. Somewhere in his cloud of madness
he had succeeded in defus--
The auxiliary detonator went BANG! and startled him from the
last hazy mists of madness into cold reality.
* * * * *
Once back in the loneliness of his ship, he called Haynes. He reported
all, in a dull voice and asked for help. Later, the help came to find
Lindsay working over the two-ended artificial mind, measuring minute
electronic impulses and stimulating the nodules of the filamentary
connectors to see what happened. From this sample, he knew that the
Terran Technical Corps could devise a means of confusing the mental
fuses in other robombs.
* * * * *
Ralph Lindsay concluded his lecture to the members of his reconstructed
Decontamination Squadron. Then he turned away from them and a
bitterness twisted his mouth as he looked up into the sky at the flight
squadron that was passing overhead.
It still was not for Lindsay.
He picked up the counter-mentapath and started the battle buggy across
the rough field toward the waiting Martian robomb. In the back of his
mind was a half-formed prayer that some day he might find one too
complicated for him. But until that day he would search for that peace
he knew that he would never find.