Then he sat down to await results. He had never been so tired in his life. The minute he touched the chair, his eyes started to close. He struggled to his feet and forced himself to pace the floor until the green vines, which had already sent hair-thin tendrils into the ulnar arteries of the arms around which they were wrapped, pumped certain inhibitory chemicals into the bloodstreams of the seven men.
When the men started to blink their eyes and look about sensibly, he went to work to unfasten the homemade straitjackets that had held them prisoner. When he had released the last one, he managed to get out his final message before collapsing.
“Take the ship up,” croaked Jerry. “Then, let yourself into the sick bay and wrap a vine piece around the wrists of Milt, and Art, and Ben. Ship up first—then when you’re safely in space, take care of them, in the sick bay. Do it the other way and you’ll never see Earth again.”
They crowded around him with questions. He waved them off, slumping into one of the abandoned bunks.
“Ship up—” he croaked. “Then release and fix the others. Ask me later. Later—”
…And that was all he remembered, then.
IV
At some indefinite time later, not quite sure whether he had woken by himself, or whether someone else had wakened him, Jerry swam back up to consciousness. He was vaguely aware that he had been sleeping a long time; and his body felt sane again, but weak as the body of a man after a long illness.
He blinked and saw the large face of Milt Johnson, partly obscured by a cup of something. Milt was seated in a chair by the side of the bunk Jerry lay in, and the Team captain was offering the cup of steaming black liquid to Jerry. Slowly, Jerry understood that this was coffee and he struggled up on one elbow to take the cup.
He drank from it slowly for a little while, while Milt watched and waited.
“Do you realize,” said Milt at last, when Jerry finally put down the three-quarters-empty cup on the nightstand by the bunk, “that what you did in locking me in the sick bay was mutiny?”
Jerry swallowed. Even his vocal cords seemed drained of strength and limp.
“You realize,” he croaked, “what would have happened if I hadn’t?”
“You took a chance. You followed a wild hunch—”
“No hunch,” said Jerry. He cleared his throat. “Art found that growth on Wally’s brain had quit growing before Wally killed himself. And I’d been getting along without tranquilizers—handling the nightmares better than I had with them.”
“It could have been the growth in your own brain,” said Milt, “taking over and running you—working better on you than it had on Wally.”
“Working better—talk sense!” said Jerry weakly, too pared down by the past two weeks to care whether school kept or not, in the matter of service courtesy to a superior. “The nightmares had broken Wally down to where we had to wrap him in a straitjacket. They hadn’t even knocked me off my feet. If Wally’s physiological processes had fought the alien invasion to a standstill, then I, you, Art, and Ben—all of us—had to be doing even better. Besides—I’d figured out what the aliens were after.”
“What were they after?” Milt looked strangely at him.
“Curing us—of something we didn’t have when we landed, but they thought we had.”
“And what was that?”
“Insanity,” said Jerry grimly.
Milt’s blond eyebrows went up. He opened his mouth as if to say something disbelieving—then closed it again. When he did speak, it was quite calmly and humbly.
“They thought,” he asked, “Communicator’s people thought that we were insane, and they could cure us?”
Jerry laughed; not cheerfully, but grimly.
“You saw that jungle around us back there?” he asked. “That was a factory complex—an infinitely complex factory complex. You saw their village with those tangles of roots inside the big whitish shells?—that was a highly diversified laboratory.”
Milt’s blue eyes slowly widened, as Jerry watched.
“You don’t mean that—seriously?” said Milt, at last.
“That’s right.” Jerry drained the cup and set it aside. “Their technology is based on organic chemistry, the way ours is on the physical sciences. By our standards, they’re chemical wizards. How’d you like to try changing the mind of an alien organism by managing to grow an extra part on to his brain—the way they tried to do to us humans? To them, it was the simplest way of convincing us.”
Milt stared again. Finally, he shook his head.
“Why?” he said. “Why would they want to change our minds?”
“Because their philosophy, their picture of life and the universe around them grew out of a chemically oriented science,” answered Jerry. “The result is, they see all life as part of a closed, intra-acting chemical circuit with no loose ends; with every living thing, intelligent or not, a part of the whole. Well, you saw it for yourself in your nightmare. That’s the cosmos as they see it—and to them it’s beautiful.”
“But why did they want us to see it the way they did?”
“Out of sheer kindness,” said Jerry and laughed barkingly. “According to their cosmology, there’s no such thing as an alien. Therefore we weren’t alien—just sick in the head. Poisoned by the lumps of metal like the ship and the translator we claimed were so important. And our clothes and everything else we had. The kind thing was to cure and rescue us.”
“Now, wait a minute,” said Milt. “They saw those things of ours work—”
“What’s the fact they worked got to do with it? What you don’t understand, Milt,” said Jerry, lying back gratefully on the bunk, “is that Communicator’s peoples’ minds were closed. Not just unconvinced, not just refusing to see—but closed! Sealed, and welded shut from prehistoric beginnings right down to the present. The fact our translator worked meant nothing to them. According to their cosmology, it shouldn’t work, so it didn’t. Any stray phenomena tending to prove it did were simply the product of diseased minds.”
Jerry paused to emphasize the statement and his eyes drifted shut. The next thing he knew Milt was shaking him.
“…Wake up!” Milt was shouting at him. “You can dope off after you’ve explained. I’m not going to have any crew back in straitjackets again, just because you were too sleepy to warn me they’d revert!”
“…Won’t revert,” said Jerry thickly. He roused himself. “Those lengths of vine released chemicals into their bloodstreams to destroy what was left of the growths. I wouldn’t leave until I got them from Communicator.” Jerry struggled up on one elbow again. “And after a short walk in a human brain—mine—he and his people couldn’t get us out of sight and forgotten fast enough.”
“Why?” Milt shook him again as Jerry’s eyelids sagged. “Why should getting their minds hooked in with yours shake them up so?”
“…Bust—bust their cosmology open. Quit shaking…I’m awake.”
“Why did it bust them wide open?”
“Remember—how it was for you with the nightmares?” said Jerry. “The other way around? Think back, about when you slept. There you were, a lone atom of humanity, caught up in a nightmare like one piece of stew meat in a vat stewing all life together—just one single chemical bit with no independent existence, and no existence at all except as part of the whole. Remember?”
He saw Milt shiver slightly.
“It was like being swallowed up by a soft machine,” said the Team captain in a small voice. “I remember.”
“All right,” said Jerry. “That’s how it was for you in Communicator’s cosmos. But remember something about that cosmos? It was warm, and safe. It was all-embracing, all-settling, like a great, big, soft, woolly comforter.”