James Edwin Gunn

“ Paresi stood up. “Why, they are. In the last analysis, so is suicide.”
“I'll think about that,” said Hoskins softly.
“Paresi!” spat Anderson. “Medic or no, you'll watch your mouth!”
“Sorry, Captain. That was panic seed. Hoskins—”
“Don't explain it to me,” said the engineer mildly. “I know what you meant. Suicide's the direct product of survival compulsions—drives that try to save something, just as fight and flight are efforts to save something. I don't think you need worry; immolation doesn't tempt me. I'm too—too interested in what goes on. What are you going to do about Ives?” ”

“ Paresi said bitterly, “You think it makes any difference if we say what we think?”
“Perhaps...”
“Nup,” said Paresi positively. “Look at the way this thing works. First it traps us, and then it shows us a growing darkness. Very basic. Then it starts picking on us, one by one. Johnny gets machines that don't work, when with his whole soul he worships machines that do. Ives gets a large charge of claustrophobia from the black stuff over there and goes into a flat spin.” ”

“ Look at him playing chess, making of this very real situation a theoretical abstraction ... like leaving a marriage for deep space.
“Johnny we know about. Brought up with never failing machines. Still plays with them as if they were toys, and like any imaginative child, turns to his toys for reassurance. He needs to be a hero, hence the stars...
“Ives ... always fat. Learned to be easy-going, learned to laugh with when others were laughing at, and bottling up pressures every time it happened. A large appetite. He's here to satisfy it; he's with us so he can eat up the galaxies...” ”

“ In other words, none of us is a balanced individual. And the imbalances are chosen to match and blend, so that we will react as a balanced unit. Sure I know Johnny's bugaboos, and Hoskins', and yours. They were all in my indoctrination treatments. I know all your case histories, all your psychic push-buttons.”
“And yours?” demanded the Captain.
“Hoskins, for example,” said Paresi. “Happily married, no children. Physically inferior all his life. Repressed desire for pure science which produced more than a smattering of a great many sciences and made him a hell of an engineer. ”

“ Paresi grinned broadly, and the exchange between them was clear: Why do you needle the kid? and Quiet, Engine-room. I know what I'm doing. Hoskins shrugged, and, with Ives, crossed to the communications desk.
Ives ran his fat, skilled hands over the controls and peered at his indicators. “It's more than a good landing,” he grunted. “That squeak-box we homed in on can't be more than a hundred meters from here. First time I've ever seen a ship bullseye like that.”
Johnny locked his gimbals, ran a steady, sensitive hand over the turn of the console as if it were a woman's flank. ”

“ Captain Anderson chuckled. “Cut your jets, Johnny. Maybe Paresi's tortuous reasoning does seem out of order on such a nice day. But remember—eternal vigilance isn't just the price of liberty, as the old books say. It's the price of existence. We know we're here—but we don't know where ‘here’ is, and won't until after we get back. This is really Terra Incognita. The location of Earth, or even of our part of the galaxy, is something that has to be concealed at all costs, until we're sure we're not going to turn up a potentially dangerous, possibly superior alien culture. ”

“ Do you believe that these experiences are real?”
“Of course not!”
“Then, Madam, you are, by definition, sane; for insanity, in the final analysis, is the inability to distinguish the real from the unreal.”
Paresi and the Captain ran aft together, and together they stopped four paces away from the bulging blackness.
“Johnny!” The Captain's voice cracked with the agonized effort of his cry. He stepped to the black wall, pounded it with the heel of his hand.
“He won't hear you,” said Paresi bleakly. “Come back, Captain. Come back.”
“Why him? Why Johnny? ”

“ The Captain ignored him. “‘Men of Earth...’” he quoted. “Ives, they've gotten into Survey's squeak-box and analyzed its origin. They know all about us!”
“They don't because they can't,” said Ives flatly. “Survey traverses those boxes through second-order space. They materialize near a planet and drop in. No computation on earth or off it could trace their normal-space trajectory, let alone what happens in the second-order condition. The elements the box is made of are carefully averaged isotopic forms that could have come from any of nine galaxies we know about and probably more. ”

“ Through the hull?”
Hoskins, who knew the hull, how it was made, how fitted, how treated once it was in place, snorted at the idea.
“If it was a gas,” said Paresi, “there'd be diffusion. And convection. If it were poisonous, we'd all be dead. If not, the chances are we'd smell it. And the counter's not saying a thing—so it's not radioactive.”
“You trust the counter?” asked Ives bitterly.
“I trust it,” said Paresi. His near-whisper shook with what sounded like passion. “A man must have faith in something. ”

“ Anderson stepped back against the inboard bulkhead and stood rigid. Paresi walked with great purpose to the medical chest, took out a small black case and opened it.
Ives cowered down to his knees and began to blubber openly, without attempting to hide it, without any articulate speech. Paresi approached him, half-concealing a small metal tube in his hand.
A slight movement on the deck caught Anderson's eye. He was unable to control a shrill intake of breath as an enormous spider, hairy and swift, darted across to the couch and sprang. It landed next to Ives' knee, sprang again. ”

“ Hoskins explained, “Whoever it was who said ‘Welcome to our planet.’”
Ives turned toward them, and Paresi's relief was noticeable. Ives said, “They want us dead.”
“Do they?” asked the Captain.
“They don't want us to leave the ship, and they don't want the ship to leave the planet.”
“Then it's the ship they want.”
“Yeah,” amended Ives, “without us.”
Paresi said, “You can't conclude that, Ives. They've inconvenienced us. They've turned us in on ourselves, and put a drain on our intangible resources as men and as a crew. But so far they haven't actually done anything to us. ”

“ To Johnny, he called, “Hiya, John?”
“I got to pass,” said Johnny worriedly. He swung his feet to the deck. “You see,” he said earnestly, “being the head of your class doesn't make it any easier. You've got to keep that and pass the examinations too. You've got two jobs. Now, the guy who stands fourth, say—he has only one job to do.”
Anderson turned a blank face to Paresi, who made a silencing gesture. Johnny put his head in his hands and said, “When one variable varies directly as another, two pairs of their corresponding values are in proportion.” He looked up. ”

“ Anderson waved the bottle at the figurine, which called it to his attention again, and so again he drank. “Johnny turned into what he thinks he is. A little guy with a big victory. Hoskins, there, he's going to be a slide-rule, jus' you wait and see. Ol' Ives, that's easy. He's goin' to be a beer barrel, with beer in it. Always did have a head on him, Ives did.” He stopped to laugh immoderately at Paresi's darkening face. “Me, I have no secrets no more. I'm going to be a coat of arms—a useless philosophy rampant on a field of stars.” ”

“ Hoskins, check the landing-suits—food, water, oxygen, radio, everything. Earth-type planet or no, we're not fooling with alien viruses. Johnny, I want you to survey this valley in every way you can and plot a minimum of three take-off vectors.”
The crew fell to work, Ives and Hoskins intently, Johnny off-handedly, as if he were playing out a ritual with some children. Paresi bent over a stereomicroscope, manipulating controls which brought in samples of air-borne bacteria and fungi and placed them under its objective. Captain Anderson ranged up beside him. ”

“ Hoskins' helmet was obviously buttoned up.
The two men came shuffling into the cabin, looking like gleaming ghosts in their chameleon-suits, which repeated the color of the walls. “Someday,” growled Johnny, “there'll be a type suit where you can scratch your—”
“Scratch when you get back,” said the Captain. “Now hear this. Johnny, you can move fastest. You go out first. Wait in the airlock for thirty seconds after the outer port opens. When Ives gives you the beep, jump out, run around the bows and plant your back against the hull directly opposite the port. ”

“ Come into your own home when everyone is gone, when the lights are out and the furniture rearranged—there I will show you the strange and frightening ghosts that are the shapes left over when reality superimposes itself upon the images of memory. ”

“ Don't fire without orders. There's nothing you can get with a blaster that we can't get first with a projector—unless it happens to be within ten meters of the hull and we can't depress to it. Even then, describe it first and await orders to fire except in really extreme emergency. A single shot at the wrong time could set us back a thousand years with this planet. Remember that this ship isn't called Killer or Warrior or even Hero. It's the Earth Ship Ambassador. Go to it, and good luck.”
Hoskins stepped back and waved Johnny past him. ”

“ Paresi shook his head. “Johnny was afraid, and fled. Ives was afraid, and fought. There's only one fear that's a real fear, and that's the one that brings you to your breaking point. Any other fear is small potatoes compared with a terror like that. Small enough so no one but me has to worry about it.”
“Why you, then?”
Paresi swatted the first-aid kit as he carried it back to its clamp. “I'm the M. O., remember? Symptoms are my business. Let me watch 'em, Captain. Give me orders, but don't crowd me in my specialty.”
“You're insubordinate, Paresi,” said Anderson, “and you're a great comfort.” ”

“ View a familiar place under new conditions—a deserted and darkened theater, an empty night club by day—and you will find yourself more influenced by the emotion of strangeness than by any number of unseen places. ”

“ The bung disappeared explosively inside the keg, and was replaced by a gout of white foam. Paresi shrieked.
“Ah, shaddup,” growled Anderson. He rummaged until he found a tube-shield. He stripped off a small length of self-welding metal tape and clapped it over the terminal-hole at the closed end of the shield, making it into an adequate mug. He waited a moment while the weld cooled, then tipped the keg until solid beer began to run with the foam. He filled the improvised mug and extended it toward Paresi.
“Good ol' Ives,” he said sentimentally. “Come on, Paresi. Have a drink on Ives.” ”

“ He lumbered to his feet and went aft, where he rolled to the couch and was almost instantly asleep.
The others congregated far forward around the controls, and for a long moment stared silently at the sleeping pilot.
“I don't get it,” murmured Ives.
“He really thought he flew us out, didn't he?” asked Hoskins.
Paresi nodded. “Had to. There isn't any place in his cosmos for machines that don't work. Contrary evidence can get just so strong. Then, for him, it ceased to exist. A faulty cigarette lighter irritated him, a failing airlock control made him angry and sullen and then hysterical. ”

“ For man's sense is falsely asserted to be the standard of things: on the contrary, all the perceptions, both of the senses and the mind, bear reference to man and not to the universe; and the human mind resembles those uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects ... ”

“ Hoskins—are those landing suits ready?”
“All but,” rapped Hoskins. He scooped up the oxygen bottle and disappeared.
Paresi said, “We'll tell them something if we don't answer.”
The Captain set his jaw. “We do what we can, Nick. We do the best we can. Got any better ideas?”
Paresi shrugged easily and smiled. “Just knocking, skipper. Knock everything. Then what's hollow, you know about.”
“I should know better than to jump salty with you,” said the Captain, all but returning the doctor's smile. “Johnny. Hoskins. Prepare for exploratory patrol.”
“I'll go,” said Paresi. ”

“ But not chess. No matter who your opponent might be, every time he does something to you, it's your move.”
“Very comforting. Have you any idea of how we move now?”
Hoskins looked at him, a gentle surprise on his aging face. “You missed my point, Skipper. We don't move.”
“Oh,” the Captain whispered. His face tautened as it paled, “I ... I see. We pushed the airlock button to get out. Countermove: It wouldn't work. We tried the manual. Countermove: It broke off. And so on. Now we've tried to fly the ship out. Oh, but Hoskins—Johnny broke. Isn't that countermove enough?” ”

“ Point nine-eight earth gravity, Earth-type atmosphere—”
“Argon-rich,” said, Ives, from the panel. “Very rich.”
“That'll make no real difference,” Hoskins went on. “Temperature, about normal for an early summer back home ... looks as if there's a fiendish plot afoot here to make things easy for us.”
Paresi said, as if to himself, “I worry about easy things.”
“Yeah, I know,” snorted Johnny, rising to stretch. “The head-shrinker always does it the hard way. You can't just dislike rice pudding; it has to be a sister-syndrome. ”