Doorways in the Sand (17 page)

They raised the limp members and manipulated them, massaged them. Ragma tore off into the next room and returned with what appeared to be an elaborate lamp, which he plugged into an outlet and focussed on the nasty shrub. Producing an atomizer, he sprayed its vicious leaves. He stirred the slime. He dumped some chemicals into it.

"What could have gone wrong?" Nadler said.

"I have no idea," Ragma replied. "There! I think he is coming around!"

The tentacles began to twitch, like shocked serpents. Then the leaves opened and closed, slowly. A series of shudders shook the thing. Finally, it reared itself upright once again, extended all its members, let them go slack, extended them again, relaxed again.

"That's better," Ragma said

"Anybody care how I'm feeling?" I asked.

Ragma turned and glared at me.

"You!" he said. "Just what did you do to poor Doctor M'mrm'mlrr, anyway?"

"Come again? My hearing seems to have been affected."

"What did you do to Doctor M'mrm'mlrr?"

"Thank you. That is what I thought you said. Damned if I know. Who is Doctor Murmur?"

"M'mrm'mlrr," he corrected. "Doctor M'mrm'mlrr is the telepathic analyst I brought to examine you. We made a good connection and got him here ahead of schedule. Then the first thing you do when he tries to examine you is incapacitate him."

"That thing," I inquired, gesturing at the tub and its occupant, "is the telepath?"

"Not everyone is a member of the animal kingdom, as you define it," he said. "The doctor is a representative of a totally different line of life development than your own. Anything wrong with that? Are you prejudiced against plants or something?"

"My prejudice is against being seized, squeezed and waved about in the air."

"The doctor practices a technique known as assault therapy."

"Then he should make allowance for the occasional patient who is not a pacifist. I don't know what I did, but I am glad that I did it."

Ragma turned away, cocked his head as if studying a gramophone horn, then announced, "He is feeling better. He wishes to meditate for a time. We are to leave the light on. It should not be overlong."

The vines stirred, moved to bunch themselves near the special lamp. Doctor M'mrm'mirr grew still.

"Why does he want to assault his patients?" I asked. "It seems somewhat counterproductive to the building up of a good practice."

Ragma sighed and turned my way again.

"He does not do it to alienate his patients," he said. "He does it to help them. I guess that it is asking too much to expect you to appreciate the centuries of subtle philosophizing his people have devoted to this sort of thing."

"Yes," I replied.

"The theory is that any primary emotion can be used as a mnemomolecular key. Its skilled induction provides a telepath of his species with access to all of an individual's life experiences with resonance in that area. Now, it has been found that fear is a significant component of the problems most of his patients bring to him. Therefore, by inducing a flight response and frustrating it, he is able to sustain the emotion and keep the patient within range of therapy simultaneously. That way, he can review the emotive field in a single session."

"Does he eat his mistakes?" I asked.

"He has no control over his ancestry," Ragma replied. "Do you brachiate?" Then: "Never mind," he said. "You do. I forgot."

I turned to Nadler, who had just approached, and Paul, who was standing nearby, smirking.

"I take it all this sounds proper to you," I said, addressing them both.

Paul shrugged and Nadler said, "If it gets the job done."

I sighed.

"I suppose you are right," I said. Then: "Paul, what are you doing here?"

"Fellow employee," he replied. "I was recruited around the same time as yourself. By the way, I am sorry about that day back at your place. It was a matter of life and death, you know. Mine."

"Forget it," I said. "In what capacity have they got you on the payroll?"

"He is our expert on the stone," Nadler said. "He knows more about it than any other man alive."

"You've given up on the crown jewels, then?" I asked.

Paul winced. He nodded.

"You know, then," he said. "Yes, it was a belated youthful geste that got out of hand. Mea culpa. We had not anticipated the involvement of criminals to this extent. After I recovered from their abuse, I realized the mistake we had made and set out to put things right. I told the UN people everything I knew. Had a hard time convincing them but finally did. They were decent enough not to have me locked away somewhere. Even filled me in a bit concerning your difficulties down home. But making a clean breast of it was still not enough for me. I wanted to help recover the thing. You had just returned to the States, and I figured that they would try for you again. So I decided to keep an eye on you till they did, then spike their guns on the spot. I got onto your trail at Hal's and followed you as far as the Village, but I lost you in a bar there. Didn't catch up with you again till you were back home. You know the rest."

"Yes. Another small mystery resolved. Then you were hired in the hospital, too?"

"Correct. Ted here said that if I was that concerned about the way things were going, I might as well save some wasted motion and get paid for it, too. On the books, though, I am an XT-mineralogist."

"It seems to me," I said, addressing all of them, "that my being brought here tonight represents more than the mere avoidance of a couple of thugs. I would guess that you have something else in mind, only just beginning with the telepathic probe."

"Nor would you be incorrect," said Ragma. "However, since it is all contingent on the results of the analysis, it would be an exercise in redundancy to detail the various hypotheses which may have to be discarded."

"In other words, you are not going to tell me?"

"That pretty well sums it up."

Before I could submit my resignation or comment on any of a number of likely subjects that had occurred to me, I was distracted by a movement from across the room. Doctor M'mrm'mlrr was stirring again.

We all watched as he raised his snaky appendages and began his setting-up exercises. Stretch, relax . . . Stretch, relax...

Two or three minutes of this-it was kind of hypnotic-and I realized that he was stalking me again, only with a much greater delicacy than he had previously employed.

I felt the touch again, within my head, as an unnatural stirring beneath my basal thoughts. Only this time there was no accompanying pain. It was just a sort of dizzy feeling and a sense of process not unlike the awareness of something being done under a local anesthetic. I guess that the others had somehow been made aware of this also, for they maintained their positions and their silence.

All right. If M'mrm'mlrr was going to be a little more civilized about it, he could have my cooperation, I decided.

So I sat there and let him rummage about.

Then, quite abruptly, he must have come across the big switchboard somewhere down there and pulled a plug, because I blacked out, instantly and without pain. Blink.

Blink again.

Weary, thirsty and with a feeling of having been broken down and reconstituted incorrectly, I raised my hand to rub my eyes and glimpsed the face of my watch as I did so. Then I swung it up and listened for ticks. As I already suspected, it was still tossing them off. Ergo . . .

"Yes, about three hours," said Ragma.

I heard Paul snore, snort short, cough and sigh. He had been dozing in the armchair. Ragma was sprawled on the floor, smoking. M'mrm'mlrr was still upright and stirring. Nadler was nowhere in sight.

I stretched, unkinking muscle after muscle, hearing my frame creak like a floor that has been walked on overmuch.

"Well, I hope that you learned something useful," I said.

"Yes, I would say that we have," Ragma replied. "How do you feel?"

"Wrung out."

"Understandable. Yes. Very. You were something of a battleground for a while there."

"Tell me about it."

"To begin with," he said, "we have located the starstone."

"Then you were right? Everyone was? I had the knowledge-somewhere?"

"Yes. The memory should even be accessible now. Want to try for it yourself? A party. A broken glass. The desk..."

"Wait a minute. Let me think."

I thought. And it was there. The last time that I had seen the star-stone. . .

It was the bachelor party I had given for Hal the week before his wedding. The apartment was crowded with our friends, the booze flowed, we made a lot of noise. It went on till around two or three in the morning. All in all I would have to say that it was an effective party. At least, it seemed that everyone went home laughing and there were no injuries.

Except for one small accident of my own.

Yes. A glass was elbowed off a side table, shattered. It was empty, though. Nothing to mop up. And it was right near the end of things. People were saying good night, leaving. So I left the pieces where they had fallen. Later. Manana maybe.

Still, I knew that I had had too much to drink, could guess how I would feel the next morning and what I would doubtless do.

I would growl and curse and bid the day depart. When it persisted, I would roll out of bed, stagger off to the kitchen to put the coffee over-my first act on any day-then lumber back to the bathroom for standard maintenance while it brewed. Invariably barefoot. Certainly not remembering that my path was strewn with shards. At least for a brief while I would not remember.

So I fetched the wastebasket from beneath the desk, got down into a hunker and began policing the area.

Naturally, I cut myself. I leaned too far forward at one point, lost my balance, extended a hand to maintain it and located another shard as my palm struck the floor.

I began bleeding, but I wrapped my handkerchief around it and continued with the cleanup. I knew that if I stopped right then to take care of my hand I would be tempted to let things go afterward. I was very sleepy.

So I got up all the pieces that I could see and wiped over the area with damp cocktail napkins. That done, I returned the wastebasket to its usual spot and dropped back into the desk chair because it was right there and I wanted to.

I unwrapped my hand and it was still bleeding. No sense doing anything at all until my thrombin earned its keep. So I leaned back and waited. My eyes did rest for a moment on the model of the star-stone we used for a paperweight. In fact, I reached out and turned it slowly, deriving a certain semisober satisfaction from the shifting light patterns it displayed. Then I stretched out my arm full length on the blotter because my head was heavy and it occurred to me that my biceps would do nicely for a pillow. Resting that way, eyes still open, I continued to play with the stone, feeling a small regret at having gotten blood on it, then deciding that it was all right, as it made for amusing contrasts here and there. Goodbye, world.

It was a couple of hours later that I awoke, thirsty and possessed of a few muscle aches from the way I had been sleeping. I got to my feet, headed for the kitchen, where I drank a glass of water, then passed back through the apartment, switching off lights. When I got to my bedroom, I undressed slowly, sitting on the edge of the bed, letting my clothes lie where they fell, crawled in and did the rest of my night's sleeping properly.

And that was the last time I had seen the star-stone. Yes.

"I remember," I said. "I have to hand it to the doctor. It comes back now. It was misted over by booze and fatigue, but I've got it again."

"Not just beverage and fatigue," Ragma said.

"What else, then?"

"I said that we had found the stone."

"Yes, you did. But no memories on that count have been shaken loose for me. I just recall the last time that I saw it, not where it went."

Paul cleared his throat. Ragma glanced at him.

"Go ahead," he said.

"When I worked with that thing," Paul told me, "I had to proceed along lines that were somewhat less than satisfactory. I mean that I was not about to knock a piece off a priceless artifact for purposes of analysis. Aside from purely aesthetic reasons, it might be detected. I had no idea as to how detailed any alien analyses of its surface might be. Almost anything I did that would alter it might have caused trouble. Fortunately, though, it passed light readily. So I concentrated on its optical effects. I did an extremely minute topological light-mapping of its entire surface. With that and its weight, I developed some ideas as to its composition. Now, although I was not especially concerned at the time with anything other than duplicating it, it did strike me that the thing seemed like a mass of strangely crystallized protein-"

"I'll be damned," I said. "But . . ."

I looked at Ragma.

"Organic, all right," he said. "Paul did not really discover anything new in that, as this fact had been known for some time elsewhere. However, what nobody had realized was that it was still living, somehow. It was simply dormant."

"Living? Crystallized? You make it sound like a massive virus."

"I suppose that I do. But viruses are not noted for their intelligence, and that thing-in its own way-is intelligent."

"I do see what you are leading up to, of course," I said. "What do I do now? Reason with it? Or take two aspirins and go to bed?"

"Neither. I am going to have to speak for Doctor M'mrm'mirr now, as he is occupied and you deserve an immediate explanation as to what he discovered. The first time that he attempted to penetrate your memories, he was thrown into a state of shock by an encounter with a totally unexpected form of consciousness coexistent with your own. In the course of his practice he has treated representatives of just about every known race in the galaxy, but he never encountered anything like this before. He said that it was something unnatural."

"Unnatural? In what way?"

"In a strictly technical fashion. He believes it to be an artificial intelligence, a synthetic being. Such things have been produced by a number of our contemporaries, but all of them are fairly simple compared to this."