Hank Merry and Robert Benedict had been silent on the trip through Ironstone Threshold to the receiver station in Philadelphia. Hank was suddenly and acutely uneasy about riding the Threshold at all, Robert was just preoccupied with his thoughts. A quick aircar jaunt from the station set them down on the parking ramp of the main Hoffman Center building complex, a haphazard pile of high-rising glass-and-concrete buildings. It was only the part of the iceberg that was visible above water, Hank had heard, with many miles of underground corridors hidden below, miles of rooms, laboratories, treatment rooms, maybe even dungeons—who could say? There had always been rumors about medicine and hospitals, and there were rumors about what went on in this great medical research center, too, some of them most disquieting. But as they came down into the great reception hall and receiving room, all that Hank saw had a look of busyness and well controlled function about it.
Whatever happened here, the place seemed to say, didn’t happen by accident.
“Who is this girl?” Hank asked finally. “Where did you run into her?”
“Oh, she’s one who’s been working with Dad,” Robert answered vaguely.
Hank frowned. “She’s not one of the Mercy Men, is she?”
“No, no, nothing like that. No indenture, no big fees.” Robert knew that there were still programs here using Mercy Men, the hired medical mercenaries who signed contracts to serve as experimental guinea pigs in some of the more dangerous research areas, in return for high wages if they survived. But those programs had never been very fruitful, and under the inevitable pressure of social and political disapproval, the Mercy Men were almost a thing of the past. “No, Sharnan is a healthy, interested, cooperative girl, working here because she chooses to. A very gifted girl, too, in many ways.” Robert grinned. “You’ll notice I didn’t say she’s normal, so don’t be too surprised. She’s very odd, but it’s just exactly the right kind of oddness to make her highly helpful. Not to mention that she’s a good kid and I happen to like her quite a lot.”
They had taken an elevator up to one of the skyscraping towers, and hopped aboard a jitney heading down a long corridor. Finally they reached an office room stacked with dusty journals and a tape reader and other disordered paraphernalia, with Ed Benedict planted in the middle of it all, doing something to an electroencephalograph tracing on his desk with a pair of calipers.
He stood up, shook hands with Hank. “Good to see you! Robert said you’d be coming along. Gail would like to have been here, but she’s still tied up with that survey McEvoy asked her to do over in England. They’re getting to be old friends, those two. And as for you, my lad—” He turned to Robert and sighed. “What a mess you’ve got me into. That girl—” He threw up his hands in dismay.
“We’d like to see her if she’s around,” Robert said.
“She’s as much around as she’s ever going to get, as far as I can tell. But these new tracings are no more help than the last ones, maybe even less. Of course, she’s still scared silly. Maybe you can cheer her up, or something.”
“She hasn’t withdrawn?”
“Oh, no. She isn’t that scared. It’s just—well, you know.”
Robert looked relieved. “I was afraid maybe I’d scared her off altogether.”
“The fact is, I think you’re the main reason she’s stayed,” Ed said, smiling. “Of course, that’s just a psychologist’s hunch, but you’ve caught her eye. After all, she is a girl, with a mind of her own.”
Robert flushed. “I’ve gotten a hint or two,” he said. “Sharnan may be way out, but she’s no dope. It just seems a little ridiculous, under the circumstances.”
Ed glanced at Hank. “Does he know anything about her?”
“Not much,” Robert said. “I thought it might be better for him to see for himself.”
“Maybe so,” Ed Benedict said. “Well, good luck.”
Down another corridor they knocked on a door and walked into a spacious room, more like a well-appointed apartment than a reaction-and-behavior laboratory or a hospital suite.
It was bright and cheerful, with shelves of video tapes, and drapes covering the one-way glass windows into the control room, to insure privacy. There was also a TV screen with a functioning cut-off switch. All these things Robert had personally insisted on. In the center of the room was a girl, perhaps eighteen years old, sitting on a straight chair. She wore a green skirt and blouse; her brown hair was held back in a pony-tail. A strikingly pretty girl, Hank thought, as she rose to greet them. She regarded Hank without interest, turning to Robert with a warm smile. Instantly Hank was aware of something odd about the girl, something very odd that he couldn’t quite pin down until she looked straight at him and he saw her eyes.
Her eyes: Not blue eyes, not gray, not green nor brown nor hazel. Incredible eyes, Hank thought, a deep, startling shade of clear violet. They set off her face; they caught your own eyes, made you look again, made you wonder if you were seeing quite right. Violet. Strange eyes, too, as though when you looked past the surface you were stopped by an impenetrable barrier.
“Sharnan,” Robert said, “this is Dr. Merry, an old friend. He helped me with our problem, once before.”
The girl smiled and said something to Hank in a pleasant musical voice, but Hank couldn’t quite catch the words.
“I’m glad to meet you,” he said. “Robert has told me—”
She laughed, cutting him off in mid-sentence, and gestured helplessly to Robert. Again she spoke in her odd musical way. Robert shook his head at Hank. “Don’t try to catch the words,” he said. “You won’t be able to understand them. And she can’t understand a thing either of us have said.”
Hank blinked. “Doesn’t she speak International?” he asked, amazed.
“No. Nor American. Nor Russian, nor Swahili, nor any other language that you ever heard of. She has her own language, maybe very uniquely her own. I can’t understand it either, and she hasn’t been able to teach me, or else she hasn’t chosen to.” He paused.
“She can read minds, though, sometimes, so watch your step. It can be embarrassing. Like right now: she doesn’t like what I’ve been thinking a bit.”
And indeed, the girl’s smile had faded, and she turned her back on the two men as though they had suddenly ceased to exist. Walking across the room, she fed a tape into the reading machine, and sat watching the flickering image on the screen. After a moment or two she pressed her hands over her ears and looked up at Robert with fear in her violet eyes.
“I know,” Robert said to her gently. “So am I. But we’ve tried everything else.” He sat down facing her, holding out his hand. For the moment Hank was totally out of it, ignored; he had the uncanny feeling that he was witnessing a curious dream, in which two people were talking to each other in different languages, yet understanding each other perfectly. “We’ve got to do it,” Robert was saying to the girl. “We’ve never really tried it before, not both of us.