Chapter 4

An interregnum of shock followed in which his normal faculties were unseated, but with the passage of time he roused himself a little. Weakened as he was, his perception told him that the ship had buried itself deep in a swamp until it rested on bedrock. A dozen feet of muck and water lay over it. Even had they survived the crash they would have been helpless unless intelligent aid could be enlisted. He tried to drive out his thoughts in a cry for help, but the strength was gone from him. Within a radius of two miles there was no intelligent life, if any existed on the planet.

More from habit than for any other reason, he awakened the Challonari. It had survived the crash unharmed in its carefully cushioned immobility, unaware that anything had transpired between the last planetfall and this one. It immediately perceived that one of the Mentors had gone, but before it could ask questions it was sternly directed to concentrate its attention on the environs of the vessel. Having thus distracted it from the presence of death, he sank back gratefully into a stasis of no-thought. Let time pass. It would bring succor or death, and he could do nothing more to hasten either one.

The Challonari roused him from his stupor on the third day after the crash. It was disturbed, excited by something beyond its comprehension. While he had lain helpless and shriveling on a compartment floor something unusual had approached to within half a mile of the ship through the thick swamp vegetation. The life form had apparently detected the first tendrils of thought from the Challonari and without preamble, as a natural defense, erected a savage mental shield. Pain and chaos that made coherent thinking difficult shook the artificial brain, but since this evidently was not an intelligent life form, else it would not have reacted in such a manner, the Challonari increased in intensity its fear-reluctance impulse. The mental shielding of the intruder blazed and crackled with increasing dissonance, radiating pain, fear and panic, but no decipherable intelligent thought. It drew nearer, erratically, apparently running, then swiftly lapsed into unconsciousness. That was when the bewildered Challonari had called him for aid.

* * * * *

He reached out wearily with his mind in automatic response, touched and hastily withdrew. Even when unconscious the strange being had an aura of discordance about its mind. He would have shivered had he still been capable of physical reaction, for this was Unsanity, a thing he had heard of but never before encountered. The Challonari caught his protective thought and withdrew from contact, though not without a soft protest, for it was inquisitive as any child. It, too, had heard of unsanity. Rare stresses or injuries now and again temporarily upset the balance of the mind and required the healing touch of other minds. But unsanity was not something the Challonari could handle. It withdrew from possible infection, protestingly, fearful for its beloved Mentor but incapable of disobeying a clear command.

His own great pity for the sick creature outside conquered the inertia of approaching death and he rallied what mental forces he still retained. He could not disregard suffering nor withhold whatever aid it was in his power to give. Carefully, knowing something of what to expect, he probed the shield which was no true shield but an uproar of faulty coordination comparable to the disruptions coming from a badly tuned radio. Wincing, as a musician winces when harsh, grating dissonance strikes his ear, he gingerly probed deeper and deeper, exploring this strange and fascinating structure that was unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was an extraordinary complexity that spread before him--a maze, a labyrinth, a magnificent corruption of order and reason.

His first discovery he half expected. This was a mind of an intelligence level not far beneath his own, though fearfully hobbled by misconceptions, superstitions, half-truths and fallacies. Life had brutally mishandled and shackled--_life_ had? It was an adult of its species. How could its condition have existed undetected for so long? He extended his explorations, and suddenly the incredible truth lay revealed.

The dominant species on this planet was that theoretically possible but logically improbable mistake of nature, a race of intelligent nontelepaths!

Fantastic as it was, there was no room for doubt. He was glad he had ordered the Challonari to withdraw from contact. To accept the existence of such beings required a flexibility under shock, an adaptability of reasoning, that the limited Challonari could never rise to. It was like a blow at the structure of the universe, but it raised a fascinating, age-old problem--what possible means of adequate communication could they have?

Excited despite the great discomfort of maintaining contact with this mind, he extended his explorations in search of the answer. A growing suspicion was quickly confirmed beyond question, explaining at once the sickening deformities of the wasted mind and the enigma of the alternative means of communication. There simply was no adequate communication! From that, all else stemmed. Each of these creatures, these--he searched for the term--these "Man" as they called themselves, was an island, an isolation of ego in a flood of dark fears that began lapping about them in early childhood and never ceased to rise. And this, by its own conception, was a "normal" specimen! It had "matured" in a thoroughly competitive society instead of the completely coöperative society of the Challon. It had never really known or understood its own true nature, much less that of its fellows. It had never truly known security, serenity, freedom, or peace. The eternal wonder was that it had progressed at all.

Deeper and deeper he explored, tracing and classifying, filled with awe. The incredible creature knew little or nothing of its own nervous system and would not have been aware of loss if the most essential portion of its brain had been surgically removed! Its life span was only a small fraction of what it should have been since, in its ignorance, it failed to repair itself as it had the innate ability to do. And yet, what an unbelievable treasury lay locked and sealed here. Only long study could render this infinite honeycomb intelligible, even to a Challon. Nothing like this had ever been known.

Mingled horror and profoundest admiration grew at what he found, but the creature began to awaken. With a deft skill he planted a suggestion, then hastily withdrew from contact before the impossible discord of mental cacophony became unbearable. The creature rose, wondering at its previous panic, and moved away from the vicinity of the vessel that now, above all else, it must never discover.

That was the first problem to be faced.

By learning what he had, the heaviest duty and the greatest moral obligation his race had ever borne was laid upon him. The last secret of these "Man" made effective action imperative. Although he him self was crushed beyond hope of survival, somehow his new knowledge and _all that it implied_ must survive.

* * * * *

Unobtrusive, physical reduction of the ship to completely unrecognizable debris might have to be accomplished eventually, but it certainly was not immediately possible. However, perception told him that the heavy vessel was already hidden beneath silt and stagnant water. It would be safe for a while from accidental discovery. The Challonari was self-sustaining and could survive untended for years, if necessary, serving to keep the area clear of wild life that might draw hunters of the dominant species dangerously near.

There remained, then, the problem of providing a substitute for his own personal survival. Here, the prospect seemed hopeless. The requirements were a continuance of understanding, together with both the will and the ability to act as necessary. Theoretically, he could have forcefully taken possession of the body and mind of any suitable subject, but the mere thought of such a violation was impossibly abhorrent. Respect for the right of the individual to self-will was so deeply ingrained as to make the deliberate unseating of another's reason virtually impossible. On the other hand, free-willed coöperation and understanding were equally out of reach; to enter the conscious mind of these beings was agony for both parties. They could neither project nor receive thoughts.

Ebbing vitality and the increased urgency of the problem drove him to a desperate resource. A pregnant female came within the extreme range of his perception. An embryo mind might serve! The mind, as yet unsullied, sleeping, a blank page untouched by the world, was open to him. If the appropriate knowledge was seeded in its memory banks it might--it _must_--remain sane despite the world, and a sane mind would not dispute what must be done.

He made a quick evaluation of the subject mind and discovered the flaw. The intelligence potential was too low. The embryo would not be capable of understanding the planted memories as they came to the conscious level, nor be capable of acting on them if they were understood. Time was ebbing fast, and vitality with it. Very well, then, the most desperate, the most questionable resource of all remained. The unused, unrecognized prime center, true seat of the intellect, must be activated the way nature presumably had intended that it should be, had not something gone wrong in the dawn years of the planet.

There could be no moral objection to this measure if successful, since it amounted to giving sight to a blind man. The element of grave doubt lay in the relative chances of success or failure. The strange, interlocking structure of the unconscious mind of the embryo was not something that could be unraveled and examined in a hurry. Honesty compelled him to evaluate himself as young and inexperienced, not especially noted among his own kind for brilliantly incisive judgment. It was not the sort of thing that he should even attempt without long study. It was too risky, too indecisive, too--

Time made the decision. There was no time left. The chill of death told its own story. In an agony of haste he summoned all that remained of vitality and fought off Death while he entered the embryo mind.

The fast-shriveling body in the spaceship retained life long enough to recognize the blunder, but not long enough to correct it. The wrong was done, and could not be undone.

* * * * *

The memories that mercifully blurred became clear again. He knew that in due course the mishandled embryo experienced birth, entering the world normally as a helpless, feebly squirming, pathetically vulnerable mite, and in no way drew unusual attention to itself. No one knew, or cared, that intellectual awakening was phenomenally quick, the first tentative questionings occurring in only the fourth week of life. He recalled how the stirring of objective awareness brought with it a half-remembered pang of death, and how the stirring of innocent wonder brought--memories. The memory banks flooded open at the touch of wonder, poured out their contents, and the fledgling ego went down before the surge, overwhelmed forever.

Inexperienced in such delicate maneuvers and overtaken at the crises by the climactic unseating of Death, he had poured into the empty memory banks the whole contents of his own mind. All his knowledge, all his experiences, all his memories on every level of incidents great and small. Everything. Including the complex and ineradicable concept of his own identity.

VIII

The involuntary start that shook the pine cone from his hand freed Phil's nostrils of the anaesthetic. Rapidly clearing eyes watched the cone fall near his feet and roll a few inches. A hawk that had been wheeling in the sky at the edge of his vision was still wheeling. Only seconds had elapsed, but this time there remained a clear recall of all that had transpired in those few seconds of lost time--seconds in which he had lived another's memories as though they were his own.

Reluctantly, impelled more by fascination than intent, he raised his head and faced his companion. The compassionate eyes that met his did hold certain childlike qualities of freedom from suspicion or hardness, but the gaze was not that of a simple child, nor was the bearing. Incongruity sparked a scarcely-controllable impulse to hysterical laughter. A small boy seated on a log, regarding his elder with gentle kindliness and understanding! Phil made a sound deep in his throat and swung his head away, afraid he was going to be sick. "Timmy" made no move. The silence endured, as it had to endure until one reaction or another prevailed. Gradually Phil worked to a conclusion.

"You call it a 'blunder,'" Phil said thickly. "You made a freak of an unborn baby for your own ends, and you call it a blunder. Anyone else might be content with a little innocent butchery, but not you ... you take over children, body and soul!"

"No."

"What we've been calling Timmy is a secondhand suit of clothes for _you_! And you claim you're not a monster!"

"Nor am I."

Phil struggled for violent words to match his feelings, then sighed heavily. "No," he agreed, despite himself. "You are not. I know that. Maybe you've controlled me just as you tricked me into entering your mind and living your memories but, sickened as I am, I still can't help believing you more implicitly than I've ever believed anyone. Nor do I see any reason to."

"You've never known anyone as surely as you know me, now that our minds have been in phase. Emotional reactions stemming from a dozen hidden causes may mislead you, but at the back of your mind you _know_ me."

"And you know--me."

"I know only what I need to know about you. Your private memories are your own and will always remain so unless you invite me to share them."

"Yet you opened all yours to me?"

"Far from it. At this point it would give you too much to digest all at once. The major part of my concentration was required to maintain mental contact without any help from you, and to blanket the interference set up by the analytical part of your ego through its fixed, deep-rooted conviction equating the individual with mental isolation. Faced with absolute proof to the contrary, your analytical mind still tries to insist that what it has always believed to be true must still be true, otherwise everything is suspect and, therefore, anti-survival. In other words, on a survival level your mind tries to reject free telepathy as it would reject any other upsetting of the basic tenets of your existence. That and the disharmony existing in your mind is a large part of the 'protecting' aura of discordance that seals you off from me. The memories I shared with you I selected and edited for expediency. Unfortunately, your physical reaction to a startling thought caused you to break away before you had the full truth and left you with a false impression."

"Either the memories you fed me were truth, or they were lies. Which is it?"

"The data was true, but your interpretation of it is false because you are still in a state of shock, still fighting for survival on a moronic level. What do you take me to be?"

"You name it. By your own admission, at best 'you' are a false personality forcibly impressed on a helpless mind that never had a ghost of a chance. In effect, you are a parasite living on a host, the reincarnation of an ego that should be eleven years dead."

"Not eleven years dead--only eight."

"What difference does ... _eight_?"

"Eight years dead."

Prickles crawled over Phil's scalp and his mind raced. A series of memories snapped into place.

"Eight. And I laughed at Clancey!"

"I know--I heard. You were getting too close for comfort so I distracted you by giving you a headache."

"Stop--let me get my breath!" His voice rose until it threatened to crack. What am I talking to! A _dog_?"

"Yes."

"_Homer_? I don't believe it!"

"Watch." The boy slipped from the log and sat beside it on the ground, his back braced. "Timmy would simply fall on his face," he explained, and with the words the face became empty and the mouth hung foolishly open. Control had been relinquished. The corner of Phil's eye caught an answering movement that his senses wanted to reject, but he turned. Homer had raised his head painfully and was looking directly at him, unmistakable intelligence in the exhaustion-glazed eyes. The fringed lips curled back, the throat worked. Strange sounds were forced out, growling but not doglike.

"Ar-ro ... ar-rik." It was a barely recognizable distortion of "Hello-Warwick." "Ok-all ... orr ... ron." Vocal-cords-wrong? "Im ... ork." Tim-talk?

The gray-muzzled head sank back wearily. A scuffling sound drew Phil's dazed eyes and he turned back in time to see Tim sit up again briskly, ignoring the old dog.

* * * * *

"I hate that mangled speech, don't you, Uncle Phil? I'll still call you that, if you don't mind. You're still as much my uncle as you ever were, and I'm the only Tim you've known." He watched Phil anxiously. "Knocks the wind out of you, doesn't it? But ordinary speech is painfully limited to begin with, without trying to force it from poor old Homer." He chattered on nervously, giving Phil time to collect himself. "You see, Timmy is as mindless now as when he was born, three years before 'my' ship crashed in the swamp over there. Look back through your newspaper files and you'll find a brief mention of a mysterious explosion reported during a night of heavy rain. That was us." He wet his lips, watching the silent white face. "Look, I had nothing at all to do with Timmy being born an imbecile. He's like a car that functions well enough if a driver takes over the physical controls that Timmy is incapable of handling for himself. Lacking a driver, the controls and the car stand idle. It is only the body that I manipulate, not the dormant, disconnected mind. For myself, although I can't help identifying myself emotionally and subjectively as the Challon, Objective reason assures me that I am Homer, with a complete but false set of memories and an artificially stimulated intelligence.

"As the Challon, I realized that the embryo Homer was of low actual intelligence, but high potential intelligence. The dangerous peculiarity of this planet is that several of the higher species have no known or recognized function for the most important portion of their brain. It lies fallow, unused, blocked off much as Timmy's whole mind is blocked off from his service. In eight years I have done no more than form the mere skeleton of a theory to account for that, but the means of correction was obvious from the start. Like the appendix that floats free at one end and serves no known purpose, the brain has an incomplete neural path of an unusual nature that has effectively camouflaged its true purpose. The intended function of the connection was the energizing of that prime center which you have not yet discovered and without which you differ from Timmy only in degree, for you cannot realize more than a fragment of your incredible potential.

"The same condition exists among the higher mammals. Releasing Homer's blocked potential placed at his service the intellectual capacity of a very clever human--according to your false standards--but not of a human genius. If I had not imposed my ego on him ... you see, I cannot help thinking of myself as the Challon, although I know I am Homer ... if I had not robbed Homer of his identity and self-will, of his right to possess and control himself, he would have developed personality, characteristics and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I 'remember' working on machines of my own design. Homer's mind, in other words, remembers as first-person data experiences it never had.

"In actual fact, 'I' who speak to you now am no more than the record contained in a book. In terms of personality, Homer is the hidden structure giving strength and substance to a false facade. 'I' am the false facade, faithfully copied from another structure. 'I' am a superimposure of ephemeral data, governing its own employment by a mind that has been restricted from developing its own data. The 'I' that speaks to you has no real existence, though its pattern is being subtly and continuously altered by that which it cloaks. If you put a drop of intense stain and a drop of powerful scent into a large tank of distilled water, you change the superficial character of the water, make it seem to be other than what it is. But it remains essentially a tank full of water, now containing an obtrusive trifle of alien matter in addition to the hydrogen and oxygen that decide its most significant properties. That is what the Challon did to Homer--he released the potential, then accidentally but indelibly stained it with his own personality.

"To me, now, it merely _seems_ as though I first suffered death and then an unwelcome resurrection, awakening in despair to find myself usurping the helpless body of an almost new-born animal. Nothing physical or spiritual of the Challon survived, but the embryo mind had been fed a ready-made identity and so believed that it had already existed as a Challon before re-birth as a dog. Its brain received instantly all 'my' training, so that it became at once 'mature.' What I have endured in these eight years--the isolation of mind and inadequacy of body--have been a blunderer's reward visited upon his victim as a further injury. Now that Homer lies near death--and 'I' with him, of course--I welcome 'our' approaching release from an unhappy situation.

* * * * *

"Wait--let me finish. Your main concern is what will happen to Timmy when 'we' die, but it will be simpler to understand if I explain as much as I can first. Finding myself to be a rational mind in the helpless, immature body of an animal, I thought I was isolated forever. In choosing the embryo to begin with, I was driven by the need for haste and had not understood the limitations of a canine in a human world, nor would I have had any alternative if I had fully understood. When it was too late, it was not difficult to predict my future. I had no means of communicating with the dominant species, Man. In time, if I survived the hazards a puppy is exposed to, I could reveal my unusual intelligence--could even learn to communicate in some hopelessly labored manner. By using my store of inherited knowledge I could, if anyone would take a dog seriously, advance your science. But I could do nothing toward my main goals without exposing myself as an imitation Challon, and that I must never do lest I loose terrible consequences.

"I knew that the life span of my new body was pitifully short. The female had suffered repeated convulsions that affected the formation of the embryos and we were an ugly litter of little mongrels, doomed by our physical imperfections to a shorter-than-normal life if we were allowed to live and exposed to early drowning if we could not quickly charm ourselves into a home.