Andre Norton (ed) (3 page)

Drawing
nearer, it revealed itself as a burly biped in dark blue overalls and wearing
heavy boots. His arms were shorter and thicker than Neshantan arms but his
hands were very similar, each having four fingers and one thumb. His broad,
brown-skinned face was marked with
a strong
blue-black
stubble and had unchitinous flexibility. Evidently his skeleton was internal
like those of the Neshantan slave-races. The thing he was bearing upon one
shoulder could be recognized as an axe—not the huge, half-moon-shaped thing
with which the observers were familiar, but still an axe.

"I cannot pick up his
mind," whispered Beneker. "Can you?"

"No,
Commodore," said Dith, all eyes. "Perhaps he is not employing it at
the moment."

"That
is unlikely. It is well-nigh impossible to exist with a completely empty mind.
Even an idiot's head is full of folly."

"Well, I can't pick up his,"
admitted Dith.

Beneker mulled it a moment. "He may
resemble our slave types. We have never been able to get more than incoherent
fragments of thought out of them. They are sensitive receivers but extremely
poor projectors. Their neural radiation is almost
nil
."
He brightened considerably. "If this creature is the same type we are
indeed in luck."

"Perhaps
his mind operates across a different band," Dith suggested.

"If
so, he won't get our pictures and we won't be able to deceive him."
Beneker crouched lower. "We'll soon see. I am going to try
make
him take his boots off."

"How?"

"I
am putting a stream across the road." His antenna bent toward Dith's.
"Quick! Get this picture and duplicate it. Well try it out at double force
for a start."

Picking
up the other's mental vision, Dith waited for the word of command. Twenty more
paces would bring the unwary biped immediately to their front.

"Now!" hissed
Beneker.

Together
they put an imaginary stream across the road, striving to drive the vision into
their victim's mind as vividly and realistically as possible.

The biped took six more steps, stopped,
stared
at the road. Then he scratched the back of his neck
and said something unintelligible. His voice was a low and chesty rumble.
Moving cautiously forward to get a closer look, he bent and dipped a finger
into what wasn't there. Then he looked at his finger.

"It looks wet,"
projected Beneker.

"It looks wet,"
simultaneously drove Dith's mind.

Obviously convinced, the biped turned away
from them to trace the flow of the stream down the opposite slope. With the
swift finesse of those to whom the aptitude comes naturally, the concealed
watchers extended their illusion, taking away trees and bushes, building a
waterfall over a ledge of rock, adding a few floating twigs and bits of bark.

Coming back to the middle of the road, the
biped considered a moment, made up his mind. His thoughts remained
undetectable, though at this short range his brain emitted a rapid series of
meaningless pips and pops like the chopped-off peaks of his wave-forms.
Evidently he overlapped the Neshantan frequency band by a percentage too small
to be useful.

He
reached a decision. He did not remove his boots as Beneker intended. Instead,
he walked straight ahead, his gait slower and more deliberate than before.

"Wading!"
realized Beneker, with triumph. "We made it a little too shallow but we
fooled him!"

Though
immensely pleased with himself, he kept his full attention on the other, not
relaxing for an instant. When Neshantans built a dream they did it properly, a
bang-up job in complete detail.

So when the biped came out of the stream his
boots looked wet, felt wet and seemed to make sloppy squelching sounds. His
feet felt cold and wet. Even the bottoms of his overalls appeared to be stained
a darker blue almost to knee-height. Several artistically-placed splashes of
dampness showed above the knees, each with its own tiny area of coolness.
Natural talents come mighty close to perfection no matter how outlandish by the
standards of elsewhere.

Stamping his feet hard, the biped cast a
final, slightly puzzled look back at the stream, hefted the axe more
comfortably on his shoulder, continued on his way.

"Zimpo!"
ejaculated Beneker, not too loudly.
"Success!"
He patted himself with satisfaction.
"How about your
unlucky sun now?
Doesn't this more than compensate for brain-twisting
spiders?"

"One creature is hardly sufficient for a
test," said Dith. "There may be special reasons for his
susceptibility. He may be the only half-wit in the village, abnormally credulous
and with a wave-band peculiarly his own."

"He may be
a
pornicker in
a
trance," scoffed Beneker. "Or he
may be somebody a spider whistled at. But I say that worked out beautifully.
All we need do now is try two or three more by way of confirmation. Then home
we go with news of a suitable slave-world."

At that point Molop crawled back. "The
guards were awake and jumpy. They came within a hair's breadth of blowing me
apart."

"If
the hair had been thinner," Beneker assured, "I would have been
sorely grieved."

"Me, too," said
Molop, fervently.

Beneker gazed prayerfully at the heavens and
inquired, "Look, have you ever created the vision of a vast hole filled
with flames?"

After
some thought, Molop answered, "Yes, many years ago when I wanted a slave
to . . ."

"Next
time you create it," Beneker interrupted, "kindly do me the favor of
jumping into it."

Dith nudged him.
"Another one comes."

"Keep low!" warned Beneker, banging
the unfortunate Molop's head into the turf. "At this stage we cannot
afford to be seen." He looked along the trail.

The newcomer was another of about the same
size and build as his predecessor but his clothes were not the same, a
wide-brimmed tan hat shaded his face, and his body clothes were in two distinct
pieces separated by a belt. To top matters, he was riding on the back of a big,
brown, four-legged creature.

"A
nice problem," murmured Dith. "If the biped is a slave, what is the
quadruped which is carrying him?"

"Your
premise is shot to a stink-star," Beneker gave back vulgarly. "The
two-legger is not a slave—yet!" He noted that the subject of their
interest was coming on fast. "It would be useful to discover whether the
lower form can be deceived along with the higher."

"It
would be equally useful to discover why they can be deceived when there is so
small an overlap."

"I
have solved that problem," Beneker informed. "I think that like our
slaves they do not use the full capacity of their brains. They employ only a
part. Hence, the wave-band on which they think is only a portion of the far
wider band to which they are inherently sensitive. We're hitting them across
the full width." His voice petered out as he flattened himself still more.
Then he added, "That brown creature is swift. Hurry, put the stream
across, and let's throw in a little depth this time."

They made the stream complete with eddies and
ripples. It was wider than the oncoming horse was long and its depth was sufficient
to reach above the animal's knees. Dith noticed a bug on a nearby
leaf,
copied it mentally and had another bug on a leaf drifting
lazily in a tiny backwater. Beneker added a few Neshantan water-plants, vague
and shadowy in the bottom so that they would not be noticeably different from
whatever water-plants this world possessed.

At a
steady jog-trot the rider came on, his attention on the distant mountains. The
hidden Neshantans feared that he was going to go right through their mirage
from sheer absent-mindedness when the quadruped slowed of its own accord.

The
rider glanced downward, stopped his beast, took off his Stetson and bent
forward to peer over the quadruped's neck.

"I'll be damned," he said. Like the
other he looked upstream, noted the provided waterfall and added, "This
country is sure changing fast."

Shoving his hat back onto his head, the
rancher shrugged and urged his mount forward.

The pony immediately went ahead. It had
uttered no sound nor displayed any surprise.

Nevertheless,
it lifted its legs higher than before and ploughed forward like an animal going
through deep water.

Ghost-drops splashed upward complete with
mock-glitterings in the sunlight. A little wash widened behind each leg,
spreading V-shaped, making phantasmal leaves swirl and bob.

Emerging, the horse emitted a loud snort and
broke into its jogtrot. The stream and the waterfall dissolved like swept
mist, leaving only the dusty trail.

"By the giant sun of Nellerl"
exclaimed Beneker, "It is almost too easy to be true. Think what you like
and they too think it."

"Providing
it is plausible," Dith qualified. "That is understood,
Bugbrain."

"I
know,"
persisted
Dith, "but what I meant was
that we aren't sufficiently informed about local conditions to tell what is or
is not convincing. For instance, I put a little insect on a leaf in that
stream. I copied one which was near my face. But supposing that in a moment of
forgetfulness I had put a bright red water-skater with button eyes? If there
are no such creatures on this world
..."

"The
moral of that is not to be forgetful," Beneker reproved. "It would be
a mistake to alarm them or arouse their suspicions just now. Let them rest in
blissful ignorance until we return in strength to take them over."

He
peered up the trail toward the mountains. The rider had gone from sight.

"This
path is not frequently used," he commented. "We may have a long wait
before we can make another test." He stood up, stretched himself to his
full three feet of height, confident in remaining unseen. "You two lie
low and keep watch. I'm going back to the ship to make sure the crew is being
energetic about the cleaning and overhauling. Don't try any foolish tricks
during my absence."

"No,
Commodore," promised Dith.

Beneker
gave Molop a sardonically inquiring eye and said, "May I assume that goes
for you too?"

"Yes,
Commodore," said Molop, happy at being in sweet accord.

"I
thought it would," remarked Beneker, with unpleasant pleasantness. He
slipped away.

Dith sighed and said, "Now he's gone,
let's relax. Sometimes I wish I were a slave."

"Why?"
inquired Molop.

"A slave has his dreams. They are
created for him, custom-built to suit his heart's desires, real enough to be as
satisfying as the really real. That makes him contented.

"What
dreams can we have? None at all! We can seek refuge only in our own imaginations
and that is like pursuing the shadow of a shadow. An illusionary cannot delude
himself or be helpfully fooled by other illusionaries. That is a natural law. I
wish someone would abolish it." "Why?" asked Molop.

"Because
then you could build a dream or two for me." Ignoring the trail, Dith lay
flat on his back, meditatively studied the leaves and branches overhead.
"You could conjure for my long-starved delectation a certain female with a
beautiful gray-green shell whom I once met during a spring feast on Neshanta.
All I can do is lug her out of my memory and dump her into my imagination. But
if I were a slave, you could make her real for me." He sighed again, long
and deeply. "So wonderfully reall"

"Um-m," said
Molop, wistfully.

"But
a dream-maker is a dream-resister. He cannot be deceived by another's
projections.
Sad and unfair."
Dith yawned,
blinking at the sun-gaps between the leaves.
"Anything
coming?"

Molop had a look at the
trail. "No."

"As if I cared."
Dith mused awhile. "I still feel that we ought to try another sun.
I have forebodings about this one." He closed his eyes and did not bother
to roll off his back until he heard Beneker returning.