Andre Norton (ed) (26 page)

"How do you
know?"

She shrugged. "When I was a kid, a
Dominator worked on me for a week trying to lay in a compulsion I wouldn't be
able to spot. And, believe me, after a day or two I was doing my best to
co-operatel
The
type of mind we have simply can't
accept amnesia."

She added, "Of course, a Dominator—or a
human psycho, if you agree to it—can hold you in a cloud just as long as they
can keep on direct pressure. You'll do and believe anything they tell you then.
Like the time when you—"

"I
remember that time," Grevan acknowledged shortly. She was referring to an
occasion when he had authorized her without reserve to attempt some
unspecified new line of investigation on him. Some while later, he had
realized suddenly that for the past half hour he had been weeping noisily
because he was a small, green, very sour apple which nobody wanted to eat.

"Boy, you looked
silly!" Freckles remarked reminiscently.

Grevan
cleared his throat. She might, he remarked, have looked somewhat silly herself,
around the
south polar region
, if he'd caught up with
her before he cooled off.

"Ah, but you
didn't!" said Freckles. "A good researcher knows when to include a
flying start in her computations. Actually, I did come across something really
fancy in mental energy effects once. But if CG could operate on those levels,
they wouldn't need a hundredth part of the organization they've got. So it
stands to reason they can't."

"What sort of effects?" he inquired
uneasily.

"You've
got me therel" Freckles admitted, pulling the white hat thoughtfully down
on her forehead. "I haven't the faintest idea of what they were, even in
principle. I was still alone then-it was about four years before they got us
together to make up the Group. They brought a man into the Center where I was,
in an ambulance. He looked unconscious, and our psychos were all excited about
him. They took him off to the laboratories, where they had one of those mobile
Dominators—and then people suddenly started screaming and falling down all
around me, and I felt something like fire—herel" She tapped the top of her
hat. "I remember I seemed to understand at once that the man was using
some kind of mental energy against the Dominator—"

"Eh?" said Grevan
incredulously.

"That's right. And also some kind of gun
which wasn't any CG type, by the sound of it. Of course, I was out of a window
by then and going straight away; but the whole thing only lasted a few seconds
anyhow. I heard the Dominator cut loose in the laboratories with its physical
armament—disruptive sonics, flash-fire and plain projectiles. The burning
feeling suddenly stopped again, and I knew the man was dead."

"For
a moment," Grevan said gloomily, "I thought you were going to tell me
a human being had beaten a Dominator!"

Freckles
shook her head. "I doubt that's ever happened. The filthy things know how
to take care of themselves. I saw one handle a riot once—some suicide cult. The
suiciders got what they were after, all right! But that man had enough on the
mental level to make the Dominator use
everything
it
had to stop him. So there definitely are degrees and forms of mental energy
which we know nothing about. And, apparently, there are some people who do know
about them and how to use them. But those people aren't working for CG—"

Grevan pondered that for a
moment,
disturbed and dissatisfied.

"Freck,"
he said finally, "everybody but Muscles and myself seems to agree that
there's no way of knowing whether we're improving our chances or reducing them
by inviting a showdown with CG via the contact set. If you had to decide it
personally, what would you do?"

Freckles
stood up then and looked at the stars for a moment. "Personally," she
said—and he realized that there was a touch of laughter in her voice—T wouldn't
do anything! I wouldn't smash the set like Muscles, and I wouldn't accept
contact, like you. I'd just stay here, sit quiet and let CG make the next move,
if anyl"

Grevan swore gently.

"Well,"
she said, "that's the kind of situation it is! But we might as well do it
your way." She stretched her arms over her head and sniffed at the breeze.
"That whole big beautiful oceanl If CG doesn't eat us
tomorrow, Grevan, I'll sprout gills and be a fish!
I'll go live with
those plankton eaters and swim up to the polar ice and all the way through
beneath it! I'll—"

"Listen, Freck; let's
be practical—"

"I'm listening," Freckles
assured him.

"If anyone—including Muscles—can think
of a valid reason why I shouldn't make contact tomorrow, right up to the moment
I plug in that set, I want to hear about it."

"You
will!
and
don't worry about Muscles. He can't see beyond
Klim at the moment, so he's riding a small panic just now. Hell
be
all right again—after tomorrow."

She
waited then, but Grevan couldn't think of anything else to say. "Well,
good night, Grevan!"

"Good
night, Freck." He watched her move off like a slender ghost towards the
dim glow of the fire. The cubs felt they'd won—simply by living long enough to
have left the musty tang of half-alive, history-old Central Government worlds
far behind them and to be breathing a wind that blew over an ocean no human being
had seen before. Whatever happened now, they were done with CG and
all its
works, forever.

And the difference might be
simply, Grevan realized, that he wasn't done with it yet. He still had to win.
His thoughts began to shift back slowly, almost cautiously, to the image of a
woman whose name was Priderell and who had stood impossibly at the foot of his
ship's ramp, smiling up at him with slanted green eyes. She had been in his
mind a good deal these months; and if present tensions couldn't quite account
for that momentary hallucination, the prospect of future ones might do it.
Because, while the cubs didn't know it yet, once he had them settled safely
here, he was going to make his way back into CG's domain and head for a
second-rate sort of planet called Rhysgaat, where—to be blunt about it—he
intended to kidnap Priderell and bring her back to round out the Group.

It
wouldn't be an impossible undertaking if he could get that far unspotted. It
seemed rather odd, when he considered it rationally, that the few meetings
he'd had with Priderell should have impressed him with the absolute necessity
of attempting it, and that somebody else—somebody who would be more accessible
and less likely to be immediately missed—shouldn't do just as well.

But
that was only one of the number of odd things that had happened on Rhysgaat,
which had been the Group's last scheduled port of call before they slipped off
on the long, curving run that had taken them finally into and halfway through
an alien cluster of the Milky Way. Taken together, those occurrences had seemed
to make up a sort of pattern to Grevan. The cubs appeared to notice nothing
very significant about them, and so he hadn't mentioned the fact.

But
it had seemed to him then that if he could understand what was happening on
Rhysgaat, he would also have the solution to the many questions that still
remained unanswered concerning the relationship between Central Government and
the Group—their actual origin, for one thing; the purpose for which they had
been trained and equipped at enormous cost; and the apparently idiotic
oversight in their emotional conditioning which had made them determined to
escape. Even the curious fact that, so far as they had ever been able to find
out, they were the only Exploration Group and the only members of their strain
in existence.

For
some four weeks, the answer to everything had seemed to be lying right there
about Grevan on Rhysgaat. But he had not been able to grasp it.

It was four months ago that they had set
their ship down at Rhysgaat's single dilapidated spaceport, with no intention
of lingering. Supply inventory, a final ground check, and they'd be off! The
taste of escape, the wonder that it might be so near, the fear that something
might still happen to prevent it, was a secret urgency in all of them. But the
check showed the need for some minor repairs, and to save his stores Grevan
decided to get some materials transferred to him from local CG stockpiles. As a
CG official, he was in the habit of addressing such requests to whatever
planetary governor was handiest; and after some tracing, he found the gentleman
he wanted presiding over a social gathering in a relaxed condition.

Rhysgaat's
governor gave a horrified start when Grevan stated his rank. Confusedly, he
began to introduce the official all around as an unexpected guest of honor. So
a minute or two later Grevan found himself bowing to Priderell.

She
was, he decided at once, as attractive a young woman as anyone could wish to
meet—later on, he discovered that practically all of Rhysgaat agreed with him
there. She was, he learned also, a professional dancer and currently the public
darling. Not, of course, he informed himself on his way back to the ship, that
this meant anything at all to him. Nobody who knew himself to be the object of
CG's particular interest would risk directing the same attention towards some
likable stranger.

But next day Priderell showed up of her own
accord at the spaceport, and he had to explain that his ship was part of a government
project and therefore off limits to anybody not directly connected with it.
Priderell informed him he owed her a drink, at any rate, for her visit; and
they sat around for a while at the port bar, and talked.

Just possibly, of course, she might have been
CG herself in some capacity. The Group had met much more improbable secret
representatives of government from time to time; and, when in the mood, the
cubs liked to booby-trap such characters and then point out to them gently
where their hidden identities were showing.

After she had left, he found the cubs in a
state of some consternation, which had nothing to do with her visit. They had
almost finished the proposed repairs; but signs of deterioration in other
sections of their supposedly almost wear-proof space machine had been revealed
in the process. After looking it over, Grevan calculated uneasily that it would
take almost a week before they could leave Rhysgaat now.

It
took closer to four weeks; and it had become obvious long before that time that
their ship had been sabotaged deliberately by CG technicians. Nobody in the
Group mentioned the fact. Apparently, it was some kind of last-minute test, and
they settled down doggedly to pass it.

Grevan had time to try to get Priderell clear
in his mind. The cubs had shown only a passing interest in her, so she was
either innocent of CG connections or remarkably good at covering them up.
Without making any direct inquiries, he had found out as much about her as
anyone here seemed to know. There was no real doubt that she was native to
Rhysgaat and had been dancing her way around its major cities for the past six
years, soaking up public adoration and tucking away a sizable fortune in the
process. The only questionable point might be her habit of vanishing from
everybody's sight off and on, for periods that lasted from a week to several
months. That was considered to be just another of the planetary darling's
little idiosyncrasies, of which she had a number; and other popular young women
had begun to practice similar tantalizing retreats from the public eye. Grevan,
however, asked her where she went on these occasions.

Priderell swore him to
silence first. Her reputation was at stake.

"At
heart," she explained, "I'm no dancer at all. I'm a
dirt-farmer."

He might have looked startled for a moment.
Technically, dirt-farming was a complicated government conducted science which
investigated the hit-or-miss natural processes that paralleled mankind's
defter manipulations of botanical growth. But Priderell, it appeared, was using
the term in its archaic sense. Rhysgaat had the average large proportion of
unpopulated and rarely visited areas; and in one of them, she said, was her
hideaway—a small, primitive farm, where she grew things in real dirt, all by
herself.

"What
kind of things?" asked Grevan, trying not to sound too
incredulous.

"Butter-squogs
are much the best," she replied, rather cryptically. "But there're
all kindsl
You've
no idea—"

She
was not, of course, implying that she ate them, though for a moment it had
sounded like that to Grevan. After getting its metabolism progressively
disarmed for some fifty centuries by the benefits of nutriculture,
ordinary-human knew better than to sample the natural growths of even its own
worlds. If suicide seemed called for, there were gentler methods of doing it.