III

 

 

For a good while Chybee paid little or no attention to what was being said. The rushing sound of the rain soothed her as it flowed over the tight-folded leaves of the house and found its way through countless internal and external channels not only to the roots of its bravetrees but also to the elegant little reservoirs disposed here and there to supply its luminants and food-plants … and sundry other secondary growths whose purpose she had no inkling of.

Maybe, she thought, if her parents had enjoyed more of this sort of luxury they would not have gone out of their minds. Maybe it was bitterness at the failure of every venture they attempted which had ultimately persuaded them to spurn the real world in favor of vain and empty imaginings. Yet she and her sibs had shared their hardships, and clung nonetheless to the conviction that plans must be made, projects put into effect, to prevent life itself from being wiped out when the sun and its attendant planets entered the vast and threatening Major Cluster.

Then, quite suddenly, normal alertness returned thanks to the food she had eaten, and memory of what Wam and Ugant had proposed came real to her. She could not suppress a faint cry. At once they broke off and glanced at her.

“Of course, if you’re unwilling to help …” Wam said in a huffy tone.

“But you’re drafting a scheme for my life without consulting me!” Chybee countered.

“A very fair comment!” Ugant chuckled. “Forgive us, please. But you must admit that you haven’t vouchsafed much about yourself. So far we know your name and your parents’, and the fact that you’ve run away from them. Having got here, have you changed your mind? Are you planning on returning home?”

“I wouldn’t dare!”

“Would your parents want it noised abroad that their budling—? One moment: do they have others?”

“Two, older than I am. But they went away long ago. Until very recently I thought of them as having betrayed the family. Now I’ve done the same myself. And I can’t even pity my budder for losing all her offspring. She didn’t lose them. She drove them out!”

“So what plans do you have for yourself now?”

“None,” Chybee admitted miserably.

“And your parents would not want it published that all their young’uns have rejected them and their ideas?”

“I’m sure they’ll do their utmost to conceal it!”

“Then it all fits together,” Ugant said comfortably. “I can help you, and you can help me. Were you studying at Hulgrapuk?”

“I should have been”—with an angry curl. “But Whelwet wouldn’t let me choose the subjects I wanted, archeology and astronomy. She kept saying I must learn something useful, like plant improvement. Of course, what she was really afraid of was that I might find out too much about reality for her to argue against.”

Wam moved closer. “I’ve never met any adult dupes of the psychoplanetary movement, only a clawful of fanatical young’uns. How do you think it’s possible for grown-ups to become dreamlost, when famine is a thing of the past?”

Conscious of the flattery implicit in having so distinguished a scientist appeal to her, Chybee mustered all her wits. “Well, many people claim, of course, that it’s because some poisons can derange the pith. But I think my parents brought it on themselves. They never let their budlings go hungry; I must say that in their defense. Throughout my childhood, though, they were forever denying themselves a proper diet because of some scheme or other that they wanted to invest in, which was going to be a wild success and enable us to move to a grand house like this one, and then somehow everything went wrong, and …” She ended with a shrug of her whole mantle.

“In other words,” Wam said soberly, “they were already predisposed to listen when Aglabec started voicing his crazy notions.”

“They didn’t get them from Aglabec. At least, I don’t think they did. Someone called Imblot—”

“She was one of my students!” Ugant exclaimed. “And one of the first to desert me for Aglabec. She—No, I won’t bore you with the full story. But I do remember that Aglabec quarreled with her, and she left Slah and … Well, presumably she wound up in Hulgrapuk. Wam, have you padded across her?”

“I seem to recognize the name,” the latter grunted. “By now, though, there are so many self-styled teachers and dream-leaders competing as to who can spin the most attractive spuder-web of nonsense … I guess Whelwet and Yaygomitch have disciples of their own by this time, don’t they?”

“Yes!” Chybee clenched her claws. “And it’s tubule-bursting to see how decent ordinary people with their whole lives ahead of them are being lured into a dead-end path where they are sure to wind up deliberately starving themselves in search of madder and madder visions! They’re renouncing everything—all hope of budding, all chance of a secure existence—because of this dreamlost belief that they can enter into psychic contact with other planets!”

“Would I be right in suggesting,” Ugant murmured, “that it was as the result of one particular person falling into this trap that you decided to run away?”

Chybee stared at her in disbelief. At last she said gustily, “I could almost believe that you have psychic powers yourself, Professor. The answer’s yes. And I was so shocked by what was happening to him, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So here I am.”

“You yourself accept,” Ugant mused aloud, almost as though Chybee had not made her last confession, “that the planets are uninhabitable by any form of life as we know it.” Raising a claw, she forestalled an interruption from Wam. “Granting that we don’t yet know enough about life to say it cannot evolve under any circumstances but our own, at least the chance of other intelligent species existing close at claw is very slim. Correct?”

Wam subsided, and Chybee said uncertainly, “Well, we have discovered that Sunbride must be much too hot, let alone the asteroids that orbit closer to the sun, which are in any case too small to hold an atmosphere. And even Swiftyouth is probably already too cold. Some people think they’ve detected seasonal changes there, but they might as easily be due to melting icecaps moistening deserts during the summer as to any form of life. And what we know of the larger planets, farther out, suggests that they are terribly cold and there are gigantic storms in their immensely deep gas-mantles. Just possibly their satellites might provide a home for life, but the lack of solar radiation makes it so unlikely … Oh, Professor! This is absurd! I’m talking as though I were trying to persuade some of my parents’ dupes not to commit themselves to dreamness, whereas you know all this much better than I!”

“You have no idea how reassuring it is to find a person like you,” Ugant sighed. “If you’d followed formal courses in astronomy, you might just be parroting what your instructors had told you. But you said you haven’t. Yet you take the result of our studies seriously. Someone is listening, at least.”

“And sometimes I can’t help wondering why,” muttered Wam. “Dreams of colorful and exotic alien civilizations are obviously more attractive than dull and boring facts. The giant planets which you, like us, believe to be vast balls of chilly gas—are not they among the favorite playgrounds of the psychoplanetarists?”

“Indeed yes!” Chybee shuddered. “They like them particularly because they are so huge. Thus, when two—well—teachers, or dream-leaders, make contrary claims about the nature of their inhabitants, Imblot can reconcile them with one another on the grounds that on such a vast globe there’s room for scores, scores-of-scores, of different species and different cultures.”

“That may be relatively harmless,” Ugant opined. “What frightens me above all is this new yarn that’s spreading so rapidly, most likely thanks to a pithstorm on the part of Aglabec himself.”

“You mean the idea that our ancestors were on the verge of spaceflight, so alien creatures hurled the Greatest Meteorite at them?” Wam twisted her mantle in pure disgust. “Yes, I’m worried too at the way it’s catching on here. Chybee, had you heard of it in Hulgrapuk?”

“It’s very popular there,” the girl muttered. “Just the sort of notion my parents love to claw hold of!”

“Not only your parents,” Ugant said. She turned back to Wam. “I’ll tell you what worries me most. I’m starting to suspect that sooner or later projects like yours and mine will be attacked—physically attacked—by people who’ve completely swallowed this kind of loathsome nonsense and now feel genuinely afraid that if either of us achieves success we can look forward to another hammerblow from on high.”

“But we have to anyway!” Chybee cried.

“Yes indeed!” Wam said. “That’s why it’s at once so subtle and so dangerous, and also why Ugant proposes to enlist your help. Will you do as she suggests?”

Chybee searched her memory for details of Ugant’s plan, and failed to find them. She had been too distracted during the earlier part of the discussion. At length she said, “Perhaps if you could explain a bit more …?”

“It’s very simple.” Ugant hunched forward. “What we don’t understand, what we desperately need to understand, is how to prevent the spread of this—this mental disorder. As you mentioned just now, some folk suspect that modern air-pollution has already rendered a counterattack hopeless. Even our ancestors, according to the few records we’ve managed to excavate or recover from under the sea, realized that tampering with metals can be dangerous to our sanity—not just radioactive metals, either, like stumpium and sluggium, but any which don’t occur naturally in chemically reactive form. If I start using too many technical terms, Wam me.”

“I understand you fine so far!”

“Oh, I wish there were laqs more like you in Slah, then! But we’re trapped by this fundamental paradox: no substance of organic origin can withstand the kind of energy we need to deploy if we’re to launch even the most basic vehicle into space. Correct, Wam?”

“I wish I didn’t have to agree, but I must,” the other scientist grumbled. “Though I won’t accept the view that we’ve been poisoned into insanity. If that’s the case, then our opponents can just as well argue that we too have lost our wits. Hmm?”

“Not so long as we benefit from the best available advice concerning our homes and our diet. But few people share our good fortune—Yes, Chybee?”

“I was thinking only a moment ago that if my parents had been as well off as you, then maybe …” She broke off in embarrassment, but she had given no offense. Ugant was nodding approval.

“One reason why I feel that trying to go the whole way at once is over-risky! We might harm the very people we’re most eager to protect from the consequences of their own folly … All right, Wam! I’m not trying to reopen the whole argument! I’m just asking Chybee whether she’s willing to act as a spy for us, pretend she’s still a dedicated follower of Aglabec and infiltrate the psychoplanetarist movement on our behalf. I won’t insist on an immediate answer. Before you return home, I want you to look over my experimental setup. We’ll take her along, and leave it to her to judge whether what we’re doing justifies our making such a demand.”