“I think,” said Thornybright, precisely, after the vote was taken, “anyone with any doubts about holding off ought to reconsider. After all, we’ve gone as far as private citizens can be expected to go.”
“On the other hand,” Dystra, “the work of a great many good men and the cost of a great deal of expensive equipment is tied up in something that’s working for us now. We’ve turned things over to the authorities before, only to watch them fumble it and mess it all down the drain because one branch of the government won’t play ball with another branch.” He looked around the table. “Once we turn it over, we can’t take it back. And what we set out to do isn’t done. I say, wait until we can be sure the work will be carried on right, before we turn it over. If we’ve contacted the Rural, they’ve also contacted us. They can examine our Bait and learn a lot. —How about it? Anyone want to change their vote?”
He looked around the table again. No one there spoke or moved.
“All right,” he nodded at Thornybright. Thornybright turned to Jase.
“All right, Jase,” he echoed, “it’s up to you. Which way do you want to break the tie?”
Hang on to the project ourselves,” said Jase.
He saw them all watching him. He had spoken quickly, so quickly that Thornybright had hardly had time to finish the question.
“You forget,” he said. “Our original idea was that the earthworm infected with transmitting mechanisms would be passed from hand to hand, so that we’d have a number of contacts, not just one. So far my contact has kept it to himself, and his partner is dead. Let’s hang on at least until Kator gets home for it and we have a number of contacts with Ruml minds.”
Thornybright looked around for a final time at the Board members.
“That argument make any of you want to change your vote?” he asked.
Again, nobody moved.
“Nor does it make me want to change mine,” said Thornybright. “I still believe that now contact has been made matters belong in the hands of the authorities. Anyhow, Jase’s vote has decided the question. According to previous arrangements, Jase will now move here into the Foundation building, where he can be kept under constant observation and guard by one of the Board members, and a constant record of information received from his alien contact can be maintained. —Do I hear a motion to close this meeting?”
“I so move,” said Dystra.
“Second,” said Heller.
“It being moved and seconded, this meeting is closed,” said Thornybright and turned off the recorder.
Its click sounded strangely loud in the ears of Jase and seemed to echo on and on as if it reverberated over an inconceivable distance—a distance as far as from where he sat now to the scout ship of Kator Secondcousin, with its artifact in tow, heading back toward the experts of the Ruml Homeworld.
Chapter Five
Jason was installed in a room already prepared for the first of the subjects of the Project to make contact with an alien mind. The room was in the basement of the Foundation building, between the billiard room and the bottom level of the library stacks. The library room in which the Board had met with Jase and Mele actually held only a few of the Foundation’s many and valuable volumes. The rest were in a five-story stack running from basement to roof in the space formerly used by three of the four elevators that had served the building when it had contained offices, before the Foundation had taken over and remodeled it. Connected by a door to the library room was a small room that was Mele’s office, and a further door in this communicated with the stacks, which managed to cram two levels of stacks into each of the fifteen-foot floors of the building.
Jason’s basement room had a door leading into the stack, but this was locked by Thornybright, who took the first shift of keeping him under observation.
“Sorry, Jase,” Thornybright had said, locking it, “but we’ve got to stick by the rules. Everything we do will be gone over with a microscope when the authorities take over.”
He settled himself in an easy chair, with the light turned low, while Jase gratefully turned in to get some sleep on the bed provided. He had been provided with seconal to knock out the intellectual centers of his forebrain and insure that he slept rather than contacting Kator again. The moment he touched the pillow, he felt himself going down into slumber.
The last thing he remembered was watching Thornybright seated in the lamplight, reading. The lean psychologist’s coat was open, and something dark and heavy was suspended under his armpit. It took little imagination to deduce that it was a gun, and loaded. Still, in his alien-sensitized brain, a little fear moved Jase at the sight of that weapon, before he went on down into sleep.
After all, the Foundation member responsible for the development of the virus-sized contact mechanisms had been emphatic about stating that certain things about them were unknown. They had been tested and observed to cause no harm, physical or psychological, between human subjects, or even between human and animal. —But how could anyone anticipate what would happen in the case of a linkage between the minds of a human and an alien…?
Sleep put a period to that thought.
Jase woke “about ten the next morning, feeling much more rested and cheerful. He had breakfast brought to him, went for a walk around the various floors of the Foundation and out into the walled garden with Dystra, who was then on shift guarding him. Afterward he came back into the library to start writing his full report of the initial contact between his mind and Kator’s.
He worked at it through the rest of the morning and the afternoon. When he was done, he found he still had not mentioned the vague but powerful emotional feelings that had been part of the contact. He told himself they were too hard to define, and that succeeding contacts would probably focus them in to the point where he could justifiably write them up.
He ate dinner in Mele’s office that evening. He thought he noticed her eyeing him covertly from time to time during the meal, but he paid it little attention. That night he contacted Kator again. But in this contact, and in those that followed it for the next ten days, Kator was still in process of returning to the Ruml Homeworld, the original birth-planet of the race and capital of the worlds of four star systems to which the Ruml had spread.
In spite of this, Jase was busy. One of the reasons he had been picked from the mass of volunteers to be one of the subjects on the Project was that he could draw. He had trained himself to sketch accurately and quickly as a tool to aid him in the observation of wild animals in their natural habitats. He had found that if he sketched an animal, bird, reptile, or insect, he not only observed it more closely than if he photographed it, but remembered the observation so that he could recall details at a later time. Now he spent his days sketching for the Project the instruments and tools and devices of the Ruml scoutship’s interior. This in addition to recording all the information he was able to absorb.
He found that he had no real thought-contact with Kator, any more than humans using the tiny mechanism contact device had been able to read each other’s thoughts. He saw with Kator’s eyes, he felt with Kator’s body, and the stronger of Kator’s emotions moved him to parallel emotions. In addition to this, he would occasionally be able to catch and interpret memories of Kator’s, when the Ruml concentrated strongly on them. These came through to Jase not as pictures seen by the human, but in terms of remembered light, shade, muscle tensions, emotions and conversations.
Conversations were what disturbed Jase most at first. So Tar Kator had had no one to talk to, and no reason to speak. The remembered conversations that rose to the surface of his mind from time to time came through to Jase in an odd sort of double sensation. Jase would hear in his human ear the memory echo of strange sounds in the gruff, lower register of the Ruml. The jaws of the Ruml were longer and narrower than those of the human, and there were other, more serious differences toward the back of the mouth and throat. Particularly, there were no palatal or nasal tones to the Ruml speech at all. English m, n, c,
and j, for example, were completely missing from their language. On the other hand, their narrow, thicker tongue was capable of rolling English t, d, and l in a manner that a human could not accomplish. Jase would, in contact, however, hear himself in memory making these sounds and at the same time get a certain impression of their meanings.
It was necessary to qualify the word “impression” even to himself. Because what bothered him was something that had never bothered any human speaking a foreign tongue of earth. To put it clearly, if confusingly, Jase understood perfectly what Kator remembered saying. But his human mind was often unable to relate that understanding fully to human terms.
For instance, when Kator was hungry, he thought of himself as “permitting” himself to hunger. And yet he had no more conscious control over his body’s sensation of a desire for needed food than Jase did. The difference was buried in a maze of instinctual and social differences of the Ruml culture from the human culture.
“I understand, but I can’t always translate. And I can hardly ever translate perfectly,” said Jase to Mele, one evening ten days after the original contact. They were in her office, and he was showing her the sketches he had made that day while she had been out of the building on Foundation business. “Not merely the signs and labels of the instruments on the control panel of the scout, there—” he pointed at the sketch before her. “But the instruments themselves don’t seem to come out quite right when I sketch them. —Maybe Kator’s eyes see a slightly different spectrum than we do.”
“It fascinates you, doesn’t it?” she asked, unexpectedly.
Something jumped inside him, uncontrollably. He looked up and saw her brown eyes—lighter than his own—watching him intently.
“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice calm, “I suppose it does. They’re like a new species of animal—“
“No,” she interrupted him. “I don’t mean the Ruml. I mean the process of contact fascinates you.”
“Not… fascinates…” he said, slowly. Inside him an inexplicable fear was beginning to beat.
“Does it frighten you, then?” she asked.
“Frighten… yes,” he admitted. “A little.”
“It does something to you,” Mele said. “I’ve been watching. Jase—“
“What?” he said, sharply, shuffling the sketches back into a stack.
“Maybe you shouldn’t go on.”
“No!” The harshness of his own answer fascinated him. He lowered his voice and softened it to a reasonable tone. “There’s something here more important than anything we’ve run into since fire was discovered and controlled. —I think. I just can’t pin it down. Anyway,” he added, “we can’t stop now.”
“If it was really dangerous for you, the Board would agree—”
“No,” he said. “It’s not dangerous. Anyway, we can’t think of stopping. We have to go through with it now. —I'll know better about the limitations of contact after Kator lands. He should be landing tomorrow afternoon at In Point of the Homeworld.”
But Kator landed, not the night after that, but the same night he talked to Mele. Jase had misunderstood the time interval somehow. In fact, by the time Jase fell asleep that night and his mind slipped into contact with Kator, the Ruml was already landed and making his report to the Ruml authorities in a building near the forty-mile-square landing area from which the Homeworld sent forth and received its space vessels.
If Jase had not made that mistake—if he had gone to bed, or even closed his eyes early, as he had planned to do the following day—he would have gained invaluable data on the landing area and its defenses. Now that chance was lost
Lying suspended in a pool of darkness in the basement of the Foundation building, Jason drifted into the slightly stooping, harnessed, black-furred body hundreds of light years distant that stood facing three older Ruml on a platform, seated behind something like a desk. It was Kator who stood there, but it was Jason who stood within him. Jason-Kator stood before the Panel of Inspectors. Jason stood there, proud and triumphant, but hiding the double-beat of his warm heart beneath the formality of his posture.
He had just come through the door on the order of the Inspector’s clerk. He stood now, harness bright, feet solidly planted, knees as close together as he could bring them and body so stiffly erect that it barely slanted forward from his hips at all. His whiskers never moved. His expression was imperturbable, for he, like the Inspectors, was playing the game that his return was no different than thousands of others that monthly took place in this building.
“I trust I am among friends,” he addressed the Inspectors.
“You are among friends,” said the presiding Inspector on the right of the panel. But the tone of his answer was ironic. Jason did not blame him. The Inspectors were all men of age and Family. Their harnesses were heavy with inherited honors, while Jason, in addition to his small Scouting Honor, had only the small Honor of a lesser Brutogasi: and the new, if large, Honor of the Random Factor fixed to his harness. And this last Honor was brilliant in its shininess, almost cheap looking, so new it was. While the inherited honors of the older men behind the desk were respectably dull with tarnish and dust.
The polite forms were required before this Panel, where people of all Honor stood at times—but of course that did not mean that the Inspectors must actually react toward young Jason as if he were an equal.
“We have examined your report, Kator Secondcousin Brutogasi,” said the Presiding Inspector. “The artifact you brought back is, I believe, being gone over already at the Examination Center. Have you anything to add-particularly about the death of your partner on the scoutship.”
“It happened so quickly,” said Jason. “One moment I was fighting for my life—the next he was gone, and the airlock inner door was closed behind him. I couldn’t open it against the air pressure inside the ship in time to stop him from opening the outer door.”
“Indeed!” said one of the other Inspectors. There was a faint tone of respect in his voice, which paid tribute to the coolness of Kator’s answer. It was something for someone just two seasons adult to answer so well. “Young man, you may even live out a respectable man’s lifetime if you keep on like this.”
Kator bent his head in acknowledgment of the compliment. He saw that the Inspector who had just spoken wore the badge of the Hook party—like himself and all the Brutogasi. The Presiding Inspector, as well as the other senior, wore the emblem of the Rods. It occurred to Jason for the first time that perhaps the whole Panel had wished to express its approval to him—naturally, the Rods could hardly make such an expression. Jason glowed inside, and his lungs felt filled with fire.
“Then,” said the Presiding Inspector, “if there’s no other questions, we won’t keep you. You’ll be called to assist Examination Center if any questions come up about the artifact.”
Jason inclined his head again, back to the door and went out. Outside the clerk handed him the short, ceremonial single-bladed sword he had been holding, and Jason reslung it in his harness. The clerk had not been particularly respectful, but Jason unclipped the top piece of money from the bandoleer strap of his harness and tipped the man anyway.
“May you found a Kingdom,” said the clerk, bowing his head.
The poor lad did not know. Jason went out and took a seat on the overhead belt into the inner city and the section containing the Castle of the Brutogas. It was a short walk through narrow shell-paved streets to the Castle, and many older women who had had their children were at work in gangs, raking the shell. The shell fragments glittered in the blue-white light from the pinpoint of the sun, now above the roofs of the western quarter of the city. The little ornamental pools along the way glittered also with clean blue water, like Honor settings for the crystals growing in the center of the circular, or oval, or other-shaped pool bottoms.
The women sang as they raked-the house songs and the Songs of the Kingdom Founders. How beautiful, thought Jason, was this city of his people with the early sun on it an
d the women singing. At the curve of one steep, narrow road, he stopped to drink from a double-curved pool about as wide as his outstretched arms and as deep as his waist. Magnified, the center of its bottom of white, small tiles, the random shape of a growing crystal was ruby-colored. It shone like some’ great Honor in the clean water.
“Shade be with me, water be with me, strength be with me,” whispered Jason, lifting his dripping whiskers from the water, speaking the invocation. He got back to his feet.
A solitary woman was raking nearby. She was of an age to be Jason’s mother, though that was unlikely. Jason’s mother was undoubtedly still in the palace of the Brutogasi. Someday he must look up the records and see. It was a matter he had always meant to get around to. An honorable man should know the identity of the woman who bore him and carried him sleeping in her pouch for seven years.
An impulse—perhaps it came to him from the Random Factor—moved Jason. He unclipped a coin from his bandoleer and gave it to the raking woman.
“Will you sing a song for me, fruitful lady?” he asked. ‘The song of the founding of the Kingdom of the Brutogas?”
She took the coin, leaned on her rake, and sang. Her voice was high-pitched and sweet. She was older than he had thought. She sang how the Brutogas had gone on the great expedition to the third planet of the second system the people had expanded to. That planet which, full of jungle or poisonous seas, had destroyed two expeditions before that. How, with twelve companions out of all those who had gone, the Brutogas—then Brutogas Thirdcousin’s Firstchild of the Leechena—had returned with a settlement planted. How he then had accused the other eleven of crimes against the expedition and dulled them, one after another, killing all eleven between sunset and sunrise of one day—so winning the worth of the settlement for himself and Founding the Kingdom of the Brutogasi for himself.