“It was too much like a woolly comforter,” said Milt, shuddering. “It was unbearable.”
“To you. Right,” said Jerry. “But to Communicator, it was ideal. And if that was ideal, think what it was like when he had to step into a human mind—mine.”
Milt stared at him.
“Why? “Milt asked.
“Because,” said Jerry, “he found himself alone there!”
Milt’s eyes widened.
“Think about it, Milt,” said Jerry. “From the time we’re born, we’re individuals. From the moment we open our eyes on the world, inside we’re alone in the universe. All the emotional and intellectual resources that Communicator draws from his identity with the stewing vat of his cosmos, each one of us has to dig up for and out of himself!”
Jerry stopped to give Milt a chance to say something. But Milt was evidently not in possession of something to say at the moment.
“That’s why Communicator and the others couldn’t take it, when they hooked into my human mind,” Jerry went on. “And that’s why, when they found out what we were like inside, they couldn’t wait to get rid of us. So they gave me the vines and kicked us out. That’s the whole story.” He lay back on the bunk.
Milt cleared his throat.
“All right,” he said.
Jerry’s heavy eyes closed. Then the other man’s voice spoke, still close by his ear.
“But,” said Milt, “I still think you took a chance, going down to butt heads with the natives that way. What if Communicator and the rest had been able to stand exposure to your mind. You’d locked me in and the other men were in restraint. Our whole team would have been part of that stewing vat.”
“Not a chance,” said Jerry.
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“Yes I can.” Jerry heard his own voice sounding harshly beyond the darkness of his closed eyelids. “It wasn’t just that I knew my cosmological view was too tough for them. It was the fact that their minds were closed—in the vat they had no freedom to change and adapt themselves to anything new.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” demanded the voice of Milt.
“Everything,” said Jerry. “Their point of view only made us more uncomfortable—but our point of view, being individually adaptable, and open, threatened to destroy the very laws of existence as they saw them. An open mind can always stand a closed one, if it has to—by making room for it in the general picture. But a closed mind can’t stand it near an open one without risking immediate and complete destruction in its own terms. In a closed mind, there’s no more room.”
He stopped speaking and slowly exhaled a weary breath.
“Now,” he said, without opening his eyes, “will you finally get oot of here and let me sleep?”
For a long second more, there was silence. Then, he heard a chair scrape softly, and the muted steps of Milt tiptoeing away.
With another sigh, at last Jerry relaxed and let consciousness slip from him.
He slept.
—as sleep the boar upon the plain, the hawk upon the crag, and the tiger on the hill…
THE HARD WAY
Once again, the story is told from the alien viewpoint, and Dickson excels at building up the alien society, and the viewpoint character’s motivations. Said character is not at all safe to be around, even in the case of members of his own species, yet the reader is liable to have a sneaking urge to root for such a clever alien anti-hero to succeed, even though his success would be very bad news for the Earth and its inhabitants. Of course, the trouble with being clever and having a cunning plan that cannot fail is that someone even more clever just may have incorporated your cunning plan into their cunning plan….
Kator Secondcousin, cruising in the neighborhood of a Cepheid variable down on his charts as 47391L, but otherwise known to the race he was shortly to discover as A Ursae Min.—or Polaris, the pole star—suddenly found himself smiled upon by a Random Factor. Immediately—for although he was merely a Secondcousin, it was of the family of Brutogas—he grasped the opportunity thus offered and locked the controls while he set about planning his Kingdom. Meanwhile, he took no chances. He fastened a tractor beam on the artifact embodying the Random Factor. It was a beautiful artifact, even in its fragmentary condition, fully five times as large as the two-man scout in which he and Aton Maternaluncle—of the family Ochadi—had been making a routine sampling sweep of debris in the galactic drift. Kator locked it exactly in the center of his viewing screen and leaned back in his pilot’s chair. A polished bulkhead to the left of the screen threw back his own image, and he twisted the catlike whiskers of his round face thoughtfully and with satisfaction, as he reviewed the situation with all sensible speed.
The situation could hardly have been more ideal. Aton Maternaluncle was not even a connection by marriage with the family Brutogas. True, he, like the Brutogasi, was of the Hook persuasion politically, rather than Rod. But on the other hand the odds against the appearance of such a Random Factor as this to two men on scientific survey were astronomical. It canceled out Ordinary Duties and Conventions almost automatically. Aton Maternaluncle—had he been merely a disinterested observer rather than the other half of the scout crew—would certainly consider Kator a fool not to take advantage of the situation by integrating the Random Factor positively with Kator’s own life pattern. Besides, thought Kator, watching his own reflection in the bulkhead and stroking his whiskers, I am young and life is before me.
He got up from the chair, loosened a tube on the internal ship’s recorder, and extended the three-inch claws on his stubby fingers. He went back to the sleeping quarters behind the pilot room. Back home the door to it would never have been unlocked—but out here in deep space, who would take precautions against such a farfetched situation as this the Random Factor had introduced?
Skillfully, Kator drove his claws into the spinal cord at the base of Aton’s round skull, killing the sleeping man instantly. He then disposed of the body out the air lock, replaced the tube in working position in the recorder, and wrote up the fact that Aton had attacked him in a fit of sudden insanity, damaging the recorder as he did so. Finding Kator ready to defend himself, the insane Aton had then leaped into the air lock, and committed suicide by discharging himself into space.
After all, reflected Kator, as he finished writing up the account in the logbook, While Others Still Think, We Act had always been the motto of the Brutogasi. He stroked his whiskers in satisfaction.
A period of time roughly corresponding to a half hour later—in the time system of that undiscovered race to whom the artifact had originally belonged—Kator had got a close-line magnetically hooked to the blasted hull of the artifact and was hand-over-hand hauling his spacesuited body along the line toward it. He reached it with little difficulty and set about exploring his find by the headlight of his suit.
It had evidently been a ship operated by people very much like Kator’s own human kind. The doors were the right size, the sitting devices were sittable-in. Unfortunately it had evidently been destroyed by a pressure-warp explosion in a drive system very much like that aboard the scout. Everything not bolted down in it had been expelled into space. No, not everything. A sort of hand carrying-case was wedged between the legs of one of the sitting devices. Kator unwedged it and took it back to the scout with him.