"Sure, but I don't think they're processed yet."
"Why didn't you tell me that in the first place? Check them, will you?"
The general made a short phone call. When he hung up he looked
embarrassed. "You want to see them?"
"Very much."
"There's a viewing room in Building Three," Banning said. "We can walk."
* * * * *
When the lights had come on again, Colin sat staring at the blank
screen for a long time. Finally he sighed, stood and stretched.
"Well," Banning said. "What do you think?"
"I'll want to see it again. But it's pretty clear, I think."
The general looked up in surprise. "Clear? It's just the same thing I
told you."
"Oh, no," Colin said. "You left out the most important part."
"What was that?"
"Your boy is blind and deaf."
"Blind and deaf! You're crazy. The ship, he looked at the ship, and the
microphone, and...."
"Oh, it's pretty selective blindness," Colin said. He filled his pipe
with maddening slowness and lit it before he spoke again.
"People," he said finally. "He doesn't see people. At all."
* * * * *
Harkins fell asleep leaning forward in the control chair with his
head on his arms. When he wakened, the sky outside the viewport was
turning dark. With a sense of sudden danger, he clamped down the metal
shutters over the port. Methodically he climbed down catwalks the
length of the ship, making certain all ports were secured both from
entry and from sight. He didn't want to see outside.
When he had done this, he felt easier. Walking to the galley, he put a
can of soup in the heater, and took it back up to the control room with
him.
He sat there, absently eating his soup and staring ahead at the
console. He noted he was beginning to get used to the harsh outlines it
presented in this space. Suddenly he realized there was a red light on
the board. He put the bowl of soup carefully on the deck and went over
to the transmitter where a loop of tape was endlessly repeating itself,
apparently broadcasting. He could not remember having inserted it. The
empty spool lying beside the transmitter read AUTOMATIC DISTRESS CODE.
He understood all the words, all right, but put together they didn't
seem to make any sense. AUTOMATIC DISTRESS CODE. What would it be for?
Why would such a thing be broadcast? If you were in distress, you
surely knew it without transmitting it.
He shook his head. Things were very bad with him. He was profoundly
disturbed by his loss of control. Performing all sorts of meaningless
actions without volition.... And now, with this tape, he had not even
been conscious of the act, could not remember it.
He went back to the control chair and finished his bowl of soup.
Thinking about it, his meaningless activities had all been centered
around one thing, this odd transmit-receive apparatus, this radio.
He had looked at it before, and he realized it was very carefully
constructed, and complicated. The wiring itself confused him. And more
than that, he could not determine any possible use such a thing might
have.
Thinking about it gave him the same prickly sensation at the back of
his neck as when he thought about the nonsense words in the songs he
knew. "Wife." Things like that.
He rubbed the back of his neck hard, until it hurt. He realized his
headache had almost gone away when he secured the ports, but now it was
coming back again.
Another light flashed on the console, and a melodic "beep--beep" began
to sound from somewhere behind the panel.
Automatically he reached forward and flipped a switch, and the
"beep--beep" stopped. Without surprise, he noticed it was the switch
marked Receive.
So. When the light flashed and the "beep--beep" sounded he was supposed
to throw that Receive switch. Presumably, then, he should receive
something. Was that right?
He looked around the control room, but nothing happened.
Just on the edge of his consciousness there was a faint sussuration,
but when he turned his attention to it, it disappeared. There was no
sound. But when he thought of something else, it came back again.
It was like an image caught in the corner of his eye. There was
nothing there, but sometimes you thought you caught just a flash of
something out of the corner of your eye. Like this afternoon....
He shuddered at the recollection.
In all his life, he could not remember anything that had driven him
into such pure panic as the loathsome invisible touches he had felt.
What kind of creatures were these?
This was Earth. This was his home, it was where he belonged, and he
couldn't remember anything about invisible....
Yes! Yes, he did remember! But there was still something wrong
because--he couldn't think why.
He remembered walking on a grassy meadow on a spring day. The grass
was rich and luxuriant and the sun was hot copper in the sky. He was
walking toward the top of a hill. Right at the top there was a single
small, green tree. He was going to go up and lie down under that tree
and look down in the valley at the meadow. And beside him there was--a
presence. He remembered turning to look, and--nothing. There was
nothing there.
But the feeling of the presence next to him made him pleased, somehow.
It was right. It was not menacing, like this afternoon, it was
more--comforting. As the sound the Skipdrive made was comforting. It
made him feel fine. But when he turned to look, there was nothing.
He could not remember.
What kind of presence? Like the ship? No, much smaller. Smaller even
than himself. Compared to the ship, he was small, quite small. He was
infinitely smaller than even planetary mass. And there were things on
the ship that were smaller than he.
But he couldn't quite place himself with assurance on the scale of
size. He was larger than some things, like the bowl of soup, and he was
smaller than other things, like planets. He must be of a sort of medium
size. But closer to the bowl of soup than the planet.
_A wife is a Martha._
He remembered thinking that just as the rockets had fired. It was in
the song.... He whistled a few bars. _I had a good wife but I left her,
oh, oh, oh, oh._
And it had something to do with the remembered--presence, when he was
walking in the meadow.
But what was a Martha? You can't define a nonsense word in terms of
another nonsense word. Or perhaps, he thought ruefully, you can't
define it any _other_ way.
_A wife is a Martha. A wife is a Martha. A Martha is a wife._
Nothing.
But he felt the headache coming on again.
He went down to the galley again, and took the soup bowl with him. He
put it in the washer, and rummaged around in the cabinets until he
found the little white pills that helped his headaches. He took three
of them before he went back up to the control room.
He had to make some kind of plans for--for what? Escape? He didn't want
to escape. He was home. He wanted to stay here. But he had to deal with
the--things, somehow. He wondered if they could be killed. There was
no way to tell. If you killed one you couldn't see its body.
And he didn't have any weapons, at any rate. He would simply have to
outsmart them. He wondered how smart they were. And how large. That
would make a good deal of difference, how large they were.
He went to the viewport and cracked the shutter, just a little. It was
dark. He didn't want to go out in the dark, that was too much. It would
be too much risk. He would wait until morning.
In spite of the pills, the headache was getting worse, almost to the
insane level it had been in the afternoon. He decided he'd better try
to sleep.
3.
Colin and General Banning stood at the shoulder of the radio operator
in Gila Base IV Central Control. It was just past midnight. Banning's
fatigue was evident; Colin, having been involved a shorter time, still
looked reasonably fresh.
Monotonously the radio tech droned: "Gila Control to _Phoenix I_ come
in please. Gila Control to _Phoenix I_ come in please. Gila Control to
_Phoenix I_ come in please." After every third repetition of the chant,
he switched to Receive and briefly listened to the buzz and crackle
from the overhead speakers.
"Gila Control to _Phoenix I_...."
"Is he still transmitting the distress code?" Colin asked.
"Yes, sir," the tech said. "But he could still reply if he wanted
to. Distress operates from a separate transmitter on a single fixed
frequency. The ordinary transmitter isn't tied up."
"Is he receiving?"
"I think so. When we gave him the 'Message coming' impulse, he switched
to receive. That was hours ago."
"Maybe he's tuned to the wrong frequency," Banning suggested.
The tech looked up in surprise, then resumed his respectful attitude
toward the brass. "No, sir. His rig is a self-tuner. The signal
automatically tunes the receiver to the right frequency. He's getting
it, all right."
"In other words," Colin said, "your voice is being broadcast on the
ship's speakers."
"As far as I can tell."
"Mm."
Colin leaned back against a chart table and pulled on his pipe for a
few moments.
"Please go on, sergeant," he said finally. "Keep trying. But change the
patter to 'please reply,' would you?"
"What difference does that make?" Banning asked. "That's what 'come in'
means, anyway. Same thing."
"Just an idea," Colin said. "Why don't you get some rest? You look
beat."
"What kind of an idea?" Banning said, rubbing his forehead.
"Can you get a couple of cots brought to your office?"
"Yes, but what's your idea?"
"Come on along and I'll tell you about it," Colin said.
They left Central Control, with the voice of the sergeant sounding
behind them, "_Gila Control to Phoenix I please reply. Gila
Control...._"
Reaching Banning's office, Colin sent one of the ubiquitous armed
guards after two cots.
"You can't shoot all your energy at once," he pointed out, when Banning
protested he didn't need the sleep. "If we're going to get Harkins
out of that ship, we're going to have to stay in pretty good shape
ourselves."
"All right," Banning grumbled. He made coffee on the hot plate from
the bottom drawer of his desk, grinning at Colin like a small boy
caught stealing cookies. "I like a little coffee once in a while," he
explained unnecessarily.
When they had settled themselves with the coffee, Banning asked, "All
right, now. Why'd you change 'come in please' to 'please reply'?"
"It's less ambiguous," Colin said. "'Come in please' could mean several
things."
"So? Anybody with as much radio experience as Harkins knows what 'Come
in please' means."
"You're going to have to get used to the idea you're not dealing with
Harkins in this. Take the point of view, this is somebody you've never
seen before. Somebody you have to figure out from scratch."
"Mm. I suppose so. Okay, why the change?"
"Well--" Colin hesitated. "First of all, this--blindness is purely a
functional block of some kind. There's nothing organically wrong with
his vision."
"I'm still not sure I go along with your blind-deaf idea," the General
said dubiously.
"I'm virtually certain, after seeing the film strip again. Your Colonel
Harkins behaves exactly like a man being molested by something he can't
see."
"For the sake of argument, then...." Banning nodded.
"All right. Presupposing he does not want to see human beings--for
whatever reason--there are several mechanisms he could use."
"He didn't even have to come back," Banning pointed out.
"That's one of the mechanisms. But he _did_ come back. Why? Problem
one, for the future. Mechanism two: Catalepsy. Suspension of _all_
sensation and consciousness."
"Obviously not the case."
"Right. Mechanism three," Colin went on, ticking the points off on his
fingers, "_partial_ disorientation. Loss of perception of a single
class of objects, human beings."
"Even that isn't entirely true," Banning said. "He _felt_ people."
"That's right. And I think this is our opening wedge. Of the possible
means of avoidance I named, partial disorientation is the _least_
successful of all. It involves too many contradictions. He was
disturbed by the microphones, for example. Why? Because they are
meaningful only in a context of human beings. Communication. He would
have to do some fancy twisting to avoid the notion of human beings.
The same goes for any other human artifact. Somehow, in order to
make the world 'reasonable' in his own terms, he has to explain the
existence of these things, without admitting the existence of people
who made and use them."
"Impossible."
"Very nearly. It means that some facet of his personality must be
continually making decisions about what can be recognized and what
cannot. His censoring mechanism is in a constant scramble to prevent
certain data from reaching his conscious mind. It has to justify and
explain away _all_ data which would eventually point to the existence
of human beings."
"What the hell does he think _he_ is?" Banning asked angrily.
"I have no idea. Maybe that's problem two for the future. At any rate,
as you pointed out, this is an impossible job. It must be infinitely
more difficult now that he's on Earth, where there are so many more
things to explain away. This is going to set up a terrific strain
inside. It may break him."
"What would do that to a man?"
"I don't know that, either," Colin admitted. "Our first problem now is
to get him out of the ship. And to do that, we have to contact him."
"This is why you changed to 'please reply'? What good is it going to do
if he can't hear it, anyway?"
"That's the point. I think he _can_ hear it. He can't _recognize_ it,
but that isn't quite the same thing. His eardrums still vibrate, the
data gets in, all right. But it doesn't reach the conscious level.
Fortunately, it isn't always necessary to be consciously aware of
a stimulus before you can respond to it. Frequently a persistent
stimulation just below the threshold of awareness will produce a
response in the organism. Sub-threshold stimulation, it's called."
"Yeah," Banning said, "I've heard of it. Used it in advertising, didn't
they?"
"For a while. Before Congress passed the Privacy Amendment."
"Okay. Now what?"
"Now we wait and see if it works. I'm going to take a nap. Wake me up
if anything happens."
Colin stretched out on one of the cots, put his hands behind his head
and soon was breathing deeply in an excellent imitation of sleep.
* * * * *
The clock on Banning's desk said 4:33 when his communicator chimed.
Banning was off his cot and at the desk before the first soft echoes
faded.
"Banning. Yes ... yes ... all right, right away."
"What is it?" Colin asked.
"They've got something from the _Phoenix_ at Control."
When they reached the radio room again, a different technician was on
shift. He was intently watching an oscilloscope face on the board in
front of him.
"What happened, did he answer?" the general asked.
"No, sir. But a few minutes ago we started getting a carrier wave on
his transmission frequency."