The coordinator gestured eloquently. "She knows everything. Do you
think they know everything on Earth? Don't believe propaganda. There
are things she can tell them."
Hammen looked again to the creature huddled on the floor. "What could
she tell anyone?"
"There are words buried in any conglomeration of letters. Confusion is
the basis of all codes. There is always a cipher for any code."
Hammen exhaled. "Never mind. What do I care what they want with her?
All right, I'll try to take her through. You don't want me to use the
dog?"
"No. It won't do."
"Then let me take her alone. I could do it this once."
"Negative. Besides, need I remind you that you have already graciously
agreed to take a human Companion?"
"And," Hammen said ponderously, "I can't get any Companion other than
you to go with me."
"You can't? Sad. But why wouldn't I be acceptable?"
"I hate your soul."
"No doubt," Gordus sighed. "But I believe you said you hated all
people."
"I can't stand people, only some people especially do I hate."
"I see. But surely it is only a small difference in degree, not kind,
between the contempt and aversion you hold for humanity at large and
that which you hold for me. Surely that difference is too small to
cause you to break your word, given under the Code."
"I suppose it is." The words tasted bad in his mouth. "Very well. I'll
transmit with you."
"_Of course_ you will," the coordinator said smoothly.
* * * * *
"Are you ready to transmit now?"
"Of course we are."
Hammen stood within the platform diagram with Gordus and the woman.
Beyond the boundaries stood the technicians, one at the control mosaic,
the other holding to the neck of Lad, who suffered it under orders.
"Wiggle away from the Mindsnake, citizens," a technician called.
A native, Hammen thought. He had never been in transmission himself. No
one who had ever joked about the Mindsnake, or rarely even spoke of him.
Hammen looked around him, slate eyes chalking the outline of the
diagram in which they stood. It was only a rectangle, but shouldn't it
be rather a pentagram?
From the time of Aristotle, the populace equated science with magic.
Wasn't the diagram only a sign to conjure the demon, Spatium, to do the
boon of transporting his servants across the void without decay of time?
No. Instantaneous transmission of matter wasn't magic. It had always
been a part of folklore as teleportation, but just as machines had been
made to duplicate the legendary feats of human extrasensory perception,
machines made to let men speak over great distances to duplicate the
strange voices of mystics, and machines made that would indeed show
strange visions over vast expanses, science had made the Transmatter
for null-time object displacement.
Transmatters were a logical, progressive theoretical implementation.
If electrical impulses could recreate patterns first in sound, then
in light, it followed relentlessly that someday some form of impulses
would be found to recreate matter. Energy and matter were only
different forms of one unity.
Fortunately, matter duplication had come before matter transmission. As
the researches of Phillips established, an exact duplicate is _not_ the
original.
A duplication of a man is only a duplicate, not the original, unless
the _elan vital_, the spirit, the soul, is transmitted, for it cannot
be duplicated. A duplicated man is a perfect robot, capable of memory
and learning, and developing into a human being in time. But it is not
a human being immediately, and it can _never_ become the original of
the duplicate. Every human viewpoint is unique and irreplaceable.
Duplication of matter was uneconomical. The power outlay was too great,
the equipment too costly to build and operate. So transportation by
transmission was investigated. Again, it was too expensive except for
very great distances, trips of light-years to worlds established over
the generations by the spaceships which had reached virtual light-speed
and could not go beyond it.
* * * * *
Personalities of transmittees got lost among the stars.
Transmitted poets arrived with a dim itch for a brutal fight, due to
some residue of glandular acid from a parting insult affecting their
birth trauma on the new world.
Great conductors solidified, hating music.
Competent engineers were imported with an infantile urge toward lyric
verse.
And the Companions came into being as a profession.
Men with will power, psionic abilities, strength of character. You
could call it what you liked, depending on your profession, your
politics, your religion. At any rate, men (and women) who could hold
human personalities together on the long, instantaneous voyage through
null space.
But still some personalities drifted away.
Or, some darkly superstitious people suggested, were they sucked away?
They were.
Personalities in transmission were being captured by an intelligent
entity, unimaginably vast in size, which some believed used the
movements of galaxies as the synapse responses of its brain.
It was a vast entity, but not a very intelligent one, due to the
square of signal decay and noise over light-years. Moreover, it was
psychopathic. From contact with human minds, it had decided it was, or
would become (it was obviously confused on the point) the god of the
humans.
It proposed to do this by eventually incorporating all intelligence
into itself. But, seemingly, only intelligences in transmission were
soft enough for the Mindsnake to get a hold on.
The Companions were harder-shelled.
But the Mindsnake grew stronger.
And Companions began traveling with other Companions, as teams, to
resist the Mindsnake.
And there came a class of Companions who did not need the help of
any other man or woman, but only a touchstone of reality, something
familiar of Earth--the mind of a dog or a cat or some other animal.
Familiars. So was born the Corps of Witches.
And here, Hammen wondered, was this where the Witches came to an end?
He looked at the bulging head of Gordus. He couldn't see inside it.
Maybe there would ultimately be men who could, but he could only
contact other minds when they were taken off the level of matter and
energy, and placed in null-space. Where there is no space, there can be
no barriers.
There was nothing but confusion in the woman's mind if he could touch
it. Nothing but boredom and routine in the minds of the technicians.
Hammen's eyes moved to the dog. He suddenly decided Lad looked sad. But
dogs have human facial muscles, and it would be impossible between a
man and a dog for one to look into the other's mind, while they weren't
in transmission.
Uselessly, he permitted himself to wish Lad was going with him....
The heavy shoulder muscles of the dog ripped him free from the
technician's grasp and Lad threw himself across the diagram line as the
coordinants of the transmatter phased.
* * * * *
Transmission. No time. No space. Hammen felt an overblown wave of force.
"How's that for power?" Gordus demanded.
It came as words to him, as communication between people had come to
him all of his life. Deaf-mute Companions had told him communication in
transmission came to them as hands and fingers feeling of words.
"You've never had a _real_ Companion before, have you?" Gordus asked.
"You've never felt _real_ power like this before?"
"Power? I've heard members of the cargo scream as loud from terror and
horror. We don't scream in transmission, Coordinator. Let the Snake
sleep."
"Power," the coordinator repeated. "I always held my cargo together
with power."
"When you were a Companion, the Snake wasn't as strong as it is now.
Quiet, please."
Hammen felt out for his Familiar. A tail wagged somewhere. A head
cocked to one side in puzzlement, concern. What wasn't a hand petted
that which wasn't a head.
"Just us--just the two of us--to see after the woman," Gordus said with
a leer in his voice.
* * * * *
Didn't he know about Lad crossing the diagram? Hadn't he seen?
"You sound as if you were about to suggest we team up and rape her.
It's hardly practicable here."
"But that's it, Hammen! That's it! I want to rape her mind!"
"Go away, Gordus. I don't believe in you. Nobody really makes a career
out of being that swinish."
"My profession is power, Hammen. I find your attitude unprofessional."