Amy's touch stopped him. "Go gentle, you ape," she snarled at Larkin. "Or yours will be the second big mouth he's shut today."
Larkin took it as a wisecrack, started toward Moyshe.
BenRabi bounced him off the bulkhead and floor a couple of times.
"I meant what I said," Amy told Larkin. Her badge was showing now, literally. "How was your air supply this afternoon?"
"Eh?" Larkin's eyes widened. His face grew pale.
"Yeah. You see what I mean," Amy told him.
Moyshe slowly relaxed. "Have the covers turned down when I get home, Love," he said, blowing a kiss. He did it to irritate Larkin. Would you want your sister to marry one? "I'm going to sleep for a week." He settled himself on the scooter's passenger seat. "Ready when you are, Teddy."
He had to hang on for his life. The scooter seemed designed for racing. Its driver was a madman who did not know how to let up on the go-pedal.
"What's the hurry?"
"I get to get me some sleep when I deliver you."
A big airtight door closed behind them the instant they entered Operations Sector. Sealed in, Moyshe thought. An instant of panic flashed by. Nervous, he studied his surroundings. Ops seemed quieter, more remote, less frenzied than his home sector. It looked less touched by battle. There was no confusion. People seemed more aloof, more calm, less harried. He supposed they had to be. They had to think Danion past defeat. The fighting may have stopped, but it was not finished.
Larkin braked to a frightening, squealing stop that almost threw Moyshe off the scooter. Larkin led him into a large room filled with complex electronics. "Contact," Larkin muttered by way of explanation.
The battle had reached this place. Acrid smoke hung thick here. It still curled up from one instrument bank. Ozone underlay the stench. Casualties awaiting ambulances rested along one wall. There were at least a dozen stretchers there. But the hull had remained sound. There were no suits in evidence.
Larkin led Moyshe to the oldest man he had yet seen aboard Danion. "BenRabi," he said, and instantly disappeared.
Moyshe examined his surroundings while waiting for the old man to acknowledge his presence. The vast room looked like a crossbreed of ship's bridge and lighter passenger compartment. The walls were banked with data processing equipment, consoles, and screens whose displays he could not fathom. Seiners in black, seated shoulder to shoulder, manipulated, observed, and muttered into tiny mikes. The wide floor of the room was occupied by corn-rows of couches on which more Seiners lay, their heads enveloped in huge plastic helmets which twinkled with little telltale lights. Beside each couch stood a motionless pair of Seiners. One studied the helmet lights, the other a small, blockish machine which looked uncomfortably like a diagnostic computer. A constant pavanne of repairmen moved among the couches, apparently examining the empties for defects.
BenRabi finally spied something familiar. It was a spatial display globe that lurked blackly in a far corner. Centered in it were ten golden footballs apparently representing harvestships. He supposed the quick, darting golden needles represented service ships. They were maneuvering against scarlet things which vaguely resembled Terran sharks. The tiny golden dragons at the far periphery, then, should represent distant starfish. Stars' End would be the deeper darkness biting a chunk from the display's side. He saw nothing that could be interpreted as Sangaree. He hoped they would stay gone, though it was not their style and he did not expect it.
"Mr. benRabi?" The old man said.
"Why dragons?"
"Image from our minds. You'll see."
"I don't understand."
Instead of responding, the old man plunged into a prepared speech. "Nobody explained this to you, did they? Well, our drives are dead, except for minddrive. The sharks can't kill that till they get to us here, or till we stop getting power from the fish. But we're in trouble, Mr. benRabi. We do have minddrive, but the sharks mindburned most of my techs." He indicated the nearest stretcher. A girl barely out of creche smiled in vacant madness. "I've lost so many I'm out of standbys. I'm drafting marginal sensitives from the crew. You're subject to migraine, aren't you?"
Moyshe nodded, confused. Here they came with the headaches again.
He had suspected for several months now... But the implications were too staggering. He did not want to believe. The psi business had been discredited.
Maybe if he remembered that hard enough this man and place would go away.
"We want you to go into rapport with a fish."
"No!" Panic smote him. He did not entirely understand his response.
A niggling little demon named Loyalty, to whom he seldom listened, urged him to surrender for the sake of information. Beckhart would reward him with a shovel full of medals.
He thought of sudden, terrible headaches, and of frightening, haunting dreams. He recalled his fear that he had made involuntary contact with the starfish. "I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"I don't know how."
"You don't need to. The techs will put you in. The fish will do all the work. All you do is serve as a channel."
"But I'm tired. I've been up for... "
"Tell me a story. So has everybody else." He gestured impatiently. A couple of technicians, hovering nearby, approached. "Clara, put Mr. benRabi in Number Forty-three." Both techs nodded. "There's nothing to be afraid of, Mr. benRabi."
Moyshe wanted to protest being pushed around, but lacked the will. The technicians pressed him into a couch. He surrendered. Undoubtedly he had been through worse.
The technician whom the old man had called Clara reminded him of the professional mother of his childhood. She was grey-haired, cherry-faced, and chattered soothingly while strapping his arms to those of the couch. She placed his fingers on grip-switches before she started on his legs.
Her partner was a dark-haired, quiet youth who efficiently prepared Moyshe's head for the helmet. He began by rubbing Moyshe's scalp with an unscented paste, then he covered benRabi's short hair with a thing like a fine wire hairnet. Moyshe's skin protested a thousand little tingles that quickly faded.
I'm taking this too passively, he thought. "Why are you strapping me down?" he demanded.
"So you can't hurt yourself."
"What?"
"Take it easy. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's just a precaution," the woman replied. She smiled gently.
Damn, he thought. Better be two shovels full of medals.
"Lift your head, please," the younger Seiner said. Moyshe did. The helmet devoured his head. He was blind.
His fear redoubled. A green ogre with dirty claws shoved nasty hands into his guts, grabbed, yanked. His heart began playing a theme for battle drums. Words came echoing through his mind, Czyzewski's, from his poem "The Old God": "... who sang the darkful deep, and dragons in the sky." Had Czyzewski had starfish in mind?
Moyshe felt his body growing wet with fear-sweat. Maybe the contact wouldn't work. Maybe his mind wouldn't be invaded. That had to be the root of his terror. He did not want anything looking inside his head, where the madness lay behind the most fragile of barriers.
It had taken him all year to get it under control... Guns, dragons, headaches, improbable, obsessive memories of Alyce, continuous instability... He did not dare go under. His balance was too delicate.
Guns! Did the image of the gun have anything to do with the Stars' End weaponry? Was it some twisted symbol his mind had created for a part of the mission that Psych had not wanted him to remember?
Somewhere, a voice. "We're ready, Mr. benRabi." The old woman. It was an ancient trick for calming a man. It worked, a little. "Please depress your right side switch one click."
He did. He lost all sensation. He floated. He saw, smelled, felt nothing. He was alone with his tortured mind.