If those mental pictures hadn’t been so clear, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but since Hannibal was the kind of thing he was they couldn’t be anything but clear.
Chambers recognized the place Hannibal was remembering. It wasn’t the first time Hannibal had remembered it and this time, as always, it held a haunting tinge of nostalgia. A vast green valley, dotted with red boulders splotched with gray lichens, and on either side of the valley towering mountain peaks that reached spear-point fingers toward a bright-blue sky.
Chambers, seeing the valley exactly as Hannibal saw it, had the uncomfortable feeling that he knew it, too—that in the next instant he could say its name, could give its exact location. He had felt that way before, when the identification of the place, just as now, seemed at his fingertips. Perhaps it was just an emotional hallucination brought about by Hannibal’s frequent thinking of the place, by the roseate longing with which he invested it. Of that, however, Chambers could not be sure. At times he would have sworn the feeling was from his own brain, a feeling of his own, set apart and distinct from Hannibal’s daydreams.
At one time that green valley might have been Hannibal’s home, although it seemed unlikely. Hannibal had been found in the Asteroid Belt, to this day remained the only one of his species to be discovered. And that valley never could have been in the Asteroids, for the Belt had no green valleys, no blue skies.
Chambers would have liked to question Hannibal, but there was no way to question him—no way to put abstract thoughts into words or into symbols Hannibal might understand. Visual communication, the picturing of actualities, yes—but not an abstract thought. Probably the very idea of direct communication of ideas, in the human sense, was foreign to Hannibal. After months of association with the outlandish little fellow, Chambers was beginning to believe so.
The room was dark except for the pool of light cast upon the desk top by the single lamp. Through the tall windows shone the stars and a silvery sheen that was the rising moon gilding the tops of the pines on the nearby ridge.
But darkness and night meant nothing to either Chambers or Hannibal. For Hannibal could see in the dark, Chambers could not see at all. Spencer Chambers was blind.
And yet, he saw, through the eyes—or, rather, the senses of Hannibal. Saw far plainer and more clearly than if he had seen with his own eyes. For Hannibal saw differently than a man sees—much differently, and better.
That is, except when he was daydreaming.
The daydream faded suddenly and Chambers, brain attuned to Hannibal’s sensory vibrations, looked through and beyond the walls of his office into the reception room. A man had entered, was hanging up his coat, chatting with Chambers’ secretary.
Chambers’ lips compressed into straight, tight lines as he watched. Wrinkles creased his forehead and his analytical brain coldly classified and indexed once again the situation which he faced.
Moses Allen, he knew, was a good man, but in this particular problem he had made little progress—perhaps would make little progress, for it was something to which there seemed, at the moment, no answer.
As Chambers watched Allen stride across the reception room his lips relaxed a bit and he grinned to himself, wondering what Allen would think if he knew he was being spied upon. Moses Allen, head of the Solar Secret Service, being spied upon!
No one, not even Allen, knew the full extent of Hannibal’s powers of sight. There was no reason, Chambers realized, to have kept it secret. It was just one of his eccentricities, he admitted. A little thing from which he gained a small, smug satisfaction—a bit of knowledge that he, a blind man, hugged close to himself.
Inside the office, Allen sat down in a chair in front of Chambers’ desk, lit a cigarette.
“What is it this time, chief?” he asked.
Chambers seemed to stare at Allen, his dark glasses like bowls of blackness against his thin, pale face. His voice was crisp, his words clipped short.
“The situation is getting worse, Moses. I’m discontinuing the station on Jupiter.”
Allen whistled. “You’d counted a lot on that station.”
“I had,” Chambers acknowledged. “Under the alien conditions such as exist on that planet I had hoped we might develop a new chemistry, discover a new pharmacopoeia. A drug, perhaps, that would turn the trick. Some new chemical fact or combination. It was just a shot in the dark.”
“We’ve taken a lot of them,” said Allen. “We’re just about down to a point where we have to play our hunches. We haven’t much else left to play.”
Chambers went on, almost as if Allen hadn’t spoken. “The relief ship to Jupiter came back today. Brought back one man, mind entirely gone. The rest were dead. One of them had cut his throat. The relief men came back too. Refused to stay after what they saw.”
Allen grimaced. “Can’t say I blame them.”
“Those men were perfectly sane when they went out,” declared Chambers. “Psychologists gave every one of them high ratings for mental stability. They were selected on that very point, because we realized Jupiter is bad—probably the most alien place in the entire Solar System. But not so bad every one of them would go mad in three short months.”
Chambers matched his fingers. “The psychologists agree with me on that point.”
Hannibal stirred a little, sharp claws scratching the desk top. Allen reached out a hand and chucked the little creature under the chin. Hannibal swiped angrily at the hand with an armored claw.
“I’m getting desperate, Moses,” Chambers said.
“I know,” said Allen. “Things getting worse all the time. Bad news from every corner of the Solar System. Communications breaking down. Machines standing idle. Vital installations no good because the men crack up when they try to run them.”
They sat in silence. Allen scowling at his cigarette, Chambers stiff and straight behind his desk, almost as if he were sitting on the edge of his chair, waiting for something to happen.
“Situational psychoneurosis.” said Allen. “That’s what the experts call it. Another sixty-four dollar word for plain insanity. Men walking out on their jobs. Men going berserk. The whole Solar System crumbling because they can’t do the jobs they’re meant to do.”
Chambers spoke sharply. “We can’t get anywhere by ranting at it, Moses. We have to find the answer or give up. Give up the dream men held before us. The dream of an integrated Solar System, integrated by men and for men, working smoothly, making the life of the human race a better life.”
“You mean,” said Allen, slowly, “what have I done about it?”
Chambers nodded. “I had that in mind, yes.”
“I have been working on a lot of angles,” Allen declared. “Canceling out most of them. Really just one big one left. But you won’t find the answer in sabotage. Not that I won’t work to find it there. Because, you see, that’s my business. But I feel in my bones that this really is on the up and up—would know it was, except for one thing. To solve this problem, we have to find a new factor in the human mind, in human psychology—a new approach to the whole problem itself.
“Geniuses are our trouble. It takes geniuses to run a Solar System. Just ordinary intelligence isn’t enough to do the job. And geniuses are screwy. You can’t depend on them.”
“And yet,” said Spencer Chambers, almost angrily, “we must depend on them.”