He waited until the emissaries were close. Then he struck out at their minds, as viciously as he knew how. He drove the blow home with six long months of bitterness and hatred behind it, striking out wildly, slicing them down like wheat before a scythe. He felt them recoil and crumble, and he pressed his advantage coldly, flailing at the insidious supplicating pattern of thought surrounding him.
The spiral broke, suddenly, releasing him, but this time there was no stark, brutal core of malignancy that he had glimpsed beneath their illusions so many times before. Instead, the vortex receded gently, regretfully. . injured, bewildered, helpless to understand.
Why? Why will you not even give us a chance? Why do you hate us so much?
It was harder to bear than naked savagery. Frantically Provost rang for Relief. It seemed, suddenly, as if all the wrongs and imagined wrongs he had done in his whole life were welling up to torment him; he knew it was only Enemy illusion, but his mind was screaming, twisting in on itself. A sense of guilt and self-loathing swept through him in waves as he fought to maintain the tiny thread of control. Butcher! his own mind was screaming at him. What kind of monster are you. What if they were sincere? What if you were the one who was wrong?
The Control board jerked him back before he broke, snapped off his Analogue contact abruptly. He stood up in the darkness of the cubicle and disengaged his cramped hands from the grips. It was over; he was safe. His Rehab conditioning cut in now to take over. . now there would be Relief from the onslaught, quietness, gentleness, childhood memories, peace . . . .
But the waves of guilt were still washing at his mind. He started walking down the corridor toward the Relief room as his hands began to tremble; then he broke into a run. He knew that only seconds now stood between him and sanity, and sanity lay at the end of the corridor.
The Turner girl was in the room waiting for him. There was soft music, gentle light. She sat across the room, and suddenly he was a five-year-old again, bewildered and overwhelmed by the frightening world around him, desperate for comfort, affection, reassurance. He hurled himself onto the recliner, felt the Turner girl’s fingers gently stroking his forehead as he let himself go completely, let great sobs of relief erupt from his throat and shake his shoulders.
She was silent for a long time as his knotted muscles began to relax. Then she leaned forward, bent her hps to his ear.
“Butcher!” she whispered.
Only a whisper, but virulent, malignant. “Toad! You call yourself human, but you go down there to butcher them! Monster!”
Provost screamed. He threw himself back against the wall, arms outstretched, clawing at it and screaming as he stared at her in horror. She faced him, and spit at him, and burst out in mocking laughter as his screams rose from torment to agony.
An alarm bell was clanging now; the girl’s lips twisted in revulsion. She threw open the corridor door. “Butcher!” she hurled back at him once more, and broke for the door.
Gunfire rattled from both ends of the corridor. The crossfire caught her, lifted her off her feet and dropped her in a crumpled heap on the metal floor plates.
Provost huddled in the corner of the room, babbling.
The enormity of the blow did not register immediately. Like any warfare operation, the Satellite ship was geared to face emergencies; the sheer momentum of its battle station procedure delayed the impact for hours. Then, slowly, the entire operation of the Satellite ship began to freeze in its tracks.
What had happened was no ordinary emergency.
To Dorie Kendall the full, terrifying implication was clear from the start. She had long months of Department of Psychology training behind her at the Hoffman Center, weeks of work with the very men who had developed the neuromolecular Analogues that were Earth’s only weapon in this war. Even then, the training had not stopped; on the long passage out from Earth she had continued with days and nights of tape-study and hypno-sleep to prepare her for this crucial assignment. She herself had never been in Analogue contact with the Enemy, but she knew a great deal about the Enemy and what the Enemy might do. The instant Dr. Coindreau, the Satellite surgeon, had called her down to the autopsy, she realized what had happened.
Only now it was dawning on her, in a cold wash of horror, that it was very possibly her own fault that it had happened at all.
“But why don’t you attack them?” she had asked John Provost a few hours before his shift was to begin. “Why do you always take the defensive?”
Provost had looked at her, patiently, as though she were a child who didn’t quite understand the facts of life. “They’re perceptive,” he said. “They’re powerful. Incredibly powerful.”
“All the more reason to hit them hard,” she had argued. “Hit them with a blow that will drive them back reeling.”
Frovost smiled. “Is that the new DepPsych theory?”
“All DepPsych knows is that something has to be changed. This war has gone on and on.”
“Maybe after a while you’ll understand why,” he had said slowly. “How can we hit them with this powerful blow you talk about when they’re busy driving mental javelins into us with all the force they can muster? I can try, but I don’t know how to do it.”
Well, he had tried, all right, the psychologist reflected, and now bare hours later Provost was strapped down screaming and shattered in one of the isolation cubicles, and the Relief girl . . . .
She watched Dr. Coindreau’s lean face and careful fingers as he worked at the autopsy table. Every room in Medical Section, every fixture, had a double use. Sick bay and Rehab quarters. Office and lab. Examining room doubling as surgery. Now it was doubling as morgue. She peered down at the remains of the Turner girl in growing anger and revulsion and wondered, desperately, how the Enemy had managed to do it.
She realized, coldly, that it was up to her to find out how, and fast.
The Enemy had poisoned the Turner girl, somehow. They had reached into the heart of the Satellite ship and struck at the most critical link in the chain—the Relief program that enabled the men to go back into battle. Without Relief, there could be no men to fight. But why did we have to murder her? the Kendall girl thought bitterly. If we could have studied her, we might have learned how the Enemy had done it.
The blinker over the door flashed, and a big heavy-set man stepped into the room. She recognized Vanaman, commander of the Satellite ship. She had talked to him briefly before. It had been an unpleasant interview; Vanaman had made it quite clear that he could not understand why DepPsych insisted upon sending women out to Saturn Satellite, nor why Earth Control chose now of all times to shift gears and saddle him with Dorie Kendall, intent on finding some new approach to the fighting. The big man glared at her, and then stared down at the thing on the table. “The Turner girl?” he asked the surgeon. “What’s left of her,” Dr. Coindreau said. “I’m about finished. It’s not going to help us any.”
“It’s got to help us.” Vanaman’s voice was harsh.
Done Kendall looked up at him sharply. “Your trigger happy firing squad didn’t leave us much to work with, you know.”
Vanaman’s fist clenched on the table. Deep-cut lines sliced from his nose down to the comers of his mouth. His face showed the grueling, pressure of months of command, and he seemed to control himself only with difficulty. “What did you expect them to do?” he said. “Give her a medal?”
The girl flushed. “They didn’t have to kill her.”