One and Wonder (13 page)

“Touché”
murmured Hoskins, and meant either Ives's remark or the flat, solid smack of the hand against the blackness.

In his sleep, Johnny uttered a high, soft, careless tinkle of youthful, happy laughter.

“Somebody's happy,” said Ives.

“Paresi,” said the Captain, “what happens when he wakes up?”

Paresi’s eyebrows shrugged for him. “Practically anything. He's reached down inside himself, somewhere, and found a way out. For him—not for any of the rest of us. Maybe he'll ignore what we see. Maybe he'll think he's somewhere else, or in some other time. Maybe he'll
be
someone else. Maybe he won't wake up at all.”

“Maybe he has the right idea,” said Ives.

“That's the second time you've made a crack like that,” said Paresi levelly. “Don't do it again. You can't afford it.”

“We
can't afford it,” the Captain put in.

“All right,” said Ives, with such docility that Paresi shot him a startled, suspicious glance. The big Communications man went to his station and sat, half-turned away from the rest.

“What are they after?” complained the Captain suddenly. “What do they want?”

“Who?” asked Paresi, still watching Ives.

Hoskins explained, “Whoever it was who said,
‘Welcome to our planet.”‘

Ives turned toward them, and Paresis 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. We've done it to ourselves.”

Ives looked at him scornfully. “We wrecked the un-wreckable controls, manufactured that case-hardened darkness, and talked to ourselves on an all-wave carrier with no source, about information no outsider could get?”

“I didn't say any of that.” Paresi paused to choose words. “Of course they're responsible for these phenomena. But the phenomena haven't hurt us. Our reactions to the phenomena are what have done the damage.”

“A fall never hurt anyone, they told me when I was a kid,” said Ives pugnaciously. “It’s the sudden stop.”

Paresi dismissed the remark with a shrug. “I still say that while we have been astonished, frightened, puzzled, and frustrated, we have not been seriously threatened. Our water and food and air are virtually unlimited. Our ability to live with one another under emergency situations has been tested to a fare-thee-well, and all we have to do is recognize the emergency as such
and that ability will rise to optimum.” He smiled suddenly. “It could be worse, Ives.”

“I suppose it could,” said Ives. “That blackness could move in until it really crowded us, or—”

Very quietly Hoskins said, “It
is
moving in.”

Captain Anderson shook his head. “No . . .” And hearing him, they slowly recognized that the syllable was not a denial, but an exclamation. For the darkness was no longer a half-meter deep on the bulkhead. No one had noticed it, but they suddenly became aware that the almost-square cabin was now definitely rectangular, with the familiar controls, the communications wall, and the thwartship partition aft of them forming three sides to the encroaching fourth,

Ives rose shaking and round-eyed from his chair. He made an unspellable animal sound and rushed at the blackness. Paresi leaped for him, but not fast enough. Ives collided sickeningly against the strange jet surface and fell. He fell massively, gracelessly, not prone but on wide-spread knees, with his arms crumpled beneath him and the side of his face on the deck. He stayed there, quite unconscious, a gross caricature of worship.

There was a furiously active, silent moment while Paresi turned the fat man over on his back, ran skilled fingers over his bleeding face, his chest, back to the carotid area of his neck. “He's all right,” said Paresi, still working; then, as if to keep his mind going with words to avoid conjecture, he went on didactically. “This is the other fear reaction. Johnny's was ‘flight,’ Ives's is ‘fight.’ The empirical result is very much the same.”

“I thought,” said Hoskins dryly, “that fight and flight were survival reactions.”

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?”

“Bunk him, I guess, and stand by to fix up that headache he'll wake up to. Give me a hand, will you?”

Hoskins went to the bulkhead and dropped a second acceleration couch. It took all three of them, working hard, to lift Ives's great bulk up to it. Paresi opened the first-aid kit clamped under the control console and went to the unconscious man. The Captain cast about him for something to do, something to say, and apparently found it. “Hoskins!”

“Aye.”

“Do you usually think better on an empty stomach?”

“Not me.”

“I never have either.”

Hoskins smiled. “I can take a hint. I'll rassle up something hot and filling.”

“Good man,” said the Captain, as Hoskins disappeared toward the after quarters. Anderson walked over to the Doctor and stood watching him clean up the abraded bruise on Ives's forehead.

Paresi, without looking up, said, “You'd better say it, whatever it is. Get it out.”

Anderson half-chuckled. “You psychic?”

Paresi shot him a glance. “Depends. If you mean has a natural sensitivity to the tension spectra coupled itself with some years of practice in observing people—then yes. What's on your mind?”

Anderson said nothing for a long time. It was as if he were waiting for a question, a single prod from Paresi. But Paresi wouldn't give it. Paresi waited, just waited, with his dark face turned away, not helping, not pushing, not doing a single thing to modify the pressure that churned about in the Captain.

“All right,” said the Captain irritably. “I'll tell you.”

Paresi took tweezers, a retractor, two scalpels, and a hypodermic case out of the kit and laid them in a neat row on the bunk. He then picked up each one and returned it to the kit. When he had quite finished Anderson said, “I was wondering,
who's next?”

Paresi nodded and shut the kit with a sharp click. He looked up at the Captain and nodded again. “Why does it have to be you?” he asked.

“I didn't say it would be me!” said the Captain sharply.

“Didn't you?” When the Captain had no answer, Paresi asked him, “Then why wonder about a thing like that?”

“Oh . . . I see what you mean. When you start to be afraid, you start to be unsure—not of anyone else's weaknesses, but of your own. That what you mean?”

“Yup.” His dark-framed grin flashed suddenly. “But you're not afraid, Cap'n.”

“The hell I'm not.”

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.” His slight smile faded, and horizontal furrows appeared over his eyes. “Tell me why I had that nasty little phase of doubt about myself.”

“You think I can?”

“Yes.” He was certain.

“That's half the reason. The other half is Hoskins.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Johnny broke. Ives broke. Your question was, ‘Who's next?’ You doubt that it will be me, because I'm
de facto
the boy with all the answers. You doubt it will be Hoskins, because you can't extrapolate how he might break—or even if he would. So that leaves you.”

“I hadn't exactly reasoned it out like that—”

“Oh yes you had,” said Paresi, and thumped the Captains shoulder. “Now forget it. Confucius say he who turn gaze inward wind up cross-eyed. Can't afford to have a cross-eyed Captain. Our friends out there are due to make another move.”

“No they're not.”

The Doctor and the Captain whirled at the quiet voice. “What does
that
mean, Hoskins?”

The Engineer came into the cabin, crossed over to his station, and began opening and closing drawers. “They've moved.” From the bottom drawer he pulled out a folded chessboard and a rectangular box. Only then did he look directly at them. “The food's gone.”

“Food? . . . gone where?”

Hoskins smiled tiredly. “Where's the port? Where's the outboard bulkhead? That black stuff has covered it up—heading units, foodlockers, disposal unit, everything.” He pulled a couple of chairs from their clips on the bulkhead and carried them across the cabin to the sheet of chairs. On the seat of one he placed the chessboard. He sat on the other and pushed the board close to the darkness. “The scuttlebutt's inboard, and still available.” His voice seemed to get fainter and fainter as he talked, as if he were going slowly away from them. “But there's no food. No food.”

He began to set up the pieces, his face to the black wall.

IV

The primary function of personality is self-preservation, but personality itself is not a static but a dynamic thing. The basic factor in its development is integration; each new situation calls forth a new adjustment which modifies or alters
the personality in the process. The proper aim of personality, therefore, is not permanence and stability, but unification. The inability of a personality to adjust to or integrate a new situation, the resistance of the personality to unification, and its efforts to preserve its integrity are known popularly as insanity.

—
Morgan Littlefield
,
NOTES ON PSYCHOLOGY.

“Hoskins!”

Paresi grabbed the Captain's arm and spun him around roughly. “Captain Anderson! Cut it!” Very softly, he said, “Leave him alone. He's doing what he has to do.”

Anderson stared over his shoulder at the little Engineer. “Is he, now? Damn it, he's still under orders!”

“Got something for him to do?” asked the Doctor coolly.

Anderson looked around, at the controls, out at the sleeping mountains. “I guess not. But I'd like to know he'd take an order when I have one.”

“Leave him alone until you have an order. Hoskins is a very steady head, Skipper. But just now he's on the outside edge. Don't push.”

The Captain put his hand over his eyes and fumbled his way to the controls. He turned his back to the Pilot’s chair and leaned heavily against it. “Okay,” he said. “This thing is developing into a duel between you and those . . . those colleagues of yours out there. I guess the least we . . . I . . . can do is not to fight you while you're fighting them.”

Paresi said, “You're choosing up sides the wrong way. They're fighting us, all right. We're only fighting ourselves. I don't mean each other; I mean each of us is fighting himself. We've got to stop doing that, Skipper.”

The Captain gave him a wan smile. “Who has, at the best of times?”

Paresi returned the smile. “Drug addicts . . . catatonics . . . illusionaries . . . and saints. I guess it's up to us to add to the category.”

“How about dead people?”

“Ives! How long have you been awake?”

The big man shoved himself up and leaned on one arm. He shook his head and grunted as if he had been punched in the solar plexus. “Who hit me with what?” he said painfully, from between clenched teeth.

“You apparently decided the bulkhead was a paper hoop and tried to dive through it,” said Paresi. He spoke lightly but his face was watchful.

“Oooh . . .” Ives held his head for a moment and then peered between his fingers
at
the darkness. “I remember,” he said in a strained whisper. He looked around him, saw the Engineer huddled against his chessboard. “What's he doing?”

They all looked at the Engineer as he moved a piece and then sat quietly.

“Hey, Hoskins!”

Hoskins ignored Ives's bull-voice. Paresi said, “He's not talking just
now. He’s . . . all right, Ives. Leave him alone. At the moment, I'm more interested in you. How do you feel?”

“Me? I feel great. Hungry, though. What's for chow?”

Anderson said quickly, “Nick doesn't want us to eat just now.”

“Thanks,” muttered Paresi in vicious irony.

“He's the Doctor,” said Ives good-naturedly. “But don't put it off too long, huh? This furnace needs stoking.” He fisted his huge chest.

“Well, this is encouraging,” said Paresi.

“It certainly is,” said the Captain. “Maybe the breaking point is just the point of impact. After that the rebound, hm?”

Paresi shook his head. “Breaking means breaking. Sometimes things just don't break.”

“Got to pass,” said a voice. Johnny, the Pilot, was stirring.

“Ha!” Anderson's voice was exultant. “Here comes another one!”

“How sure are you of that?” asked the Doctor. 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. “That's supposed to be the keystone of all vector analysis, the man says, and you don't get to be a pilot without vector analysis. And it makes no sense to me. What am I going to do?”