Thus did Cornelius grumble to himself, all the long hyperbolic path to Jupiter. Then the shifting accelerations of approach to its tiny inner satellite left him too wretched for further complaint. And when he finally, just prior to disembarkation, went up to the greenhouse for a look at Jupiter, he said not a word. Nobody does, the first time.
Arne Viken waited patiently while Cornelius stared. It still gets me too, he remembered. By the throat. Sometimes I’m afraid to look.
At length Cornelius turned around. He had a faintly Jovian appearance himself, being a large man with an imposing girth. “I had no idea,” he whispered. “I never thought.… I had seen pictures, but…”
Viken nodded. “Sure, Dr. Cornelius. Pictures don’t convey it.”
Where they stood, they could see the dark broken rock of the satellite, jumbled for a short way beyond the landing slip and then chopped off sheer. This moon was scarcely even a platform, it seemed, and cold constellations went streaming past it, around it. Jupiter lay across a fifth of that sky, softly ambrous, banded with colors, spotted with the shadows of planet-sized moons and with whirlwinds as broad as Earth. If there had been any gravity to speak of, Cornelius would have thought, instinctively, that the great planet was falling on him. As it was, he felt as if sucked upward, his hands were still sore where he bad grabbed a rail to hold on.
“You live here…all alone…with this?” He spoke feebly.
“Oh, well, there are some fifty of us all told, pretty congenial,” said Viken. “It’s not so bad. You sign up for four-cycle hitches—four ship arrivals—and believe it or not, Dr. Cornelius, this is my third enlistment.”
The newcomer forbore to inquire more deeply. There was something not quite understandable about the men on Jupiter V. They were mostly bearded, though otherwise careful to remain neat; their low-gravity movements were somehow dreamlike to watch; they hoarded their conversation, as if to stretch it through the year and a month between ships. Their monkish existence had changed them—or did they take what amounted to vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience because they had never felt quite at home on green Earth?
Thirteen months! Cornelius shuddered. It was going to be a long, cold wait, and the pay and bonuses accumulating for him were scant comfort now, four hundred and eighty million miles from the sun.
“Wonderful place to do research,” continued Viken. “All the facilities, hand-picked colleagues, no distractions—and, of course…” He jerked his thumb at the planet and turned to leave.
Cornelius followed, wallowing awkwardly. “It is very interesting, no doubt,” he puffed. “Fascinating. But really, Dr. Viken, to drag me way out here and make me spend a year-plus waiting for the next ship—to do a job which may take me a few weeks…”
“Are you sure it’s that simple?” asked Viken gently. His face swiveled around, and there was something in his eyes that silenced Cornelius. “After all my time here, I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more complicated.”
They went through the ship’s air lock and the tube joining it to the station entrance. Nearly everything was underground. Rooms, laboratories, even halls, had a degree of luxuriousness—why, there was a fireplace with a real fire in the common room! God alone knew what that cost! Thinking of the huge chill emptiness where the king planet laired, and of his own year’s sentence, Cornelius decided that such luxuries were, in truth, biological necessities.
Viken showed him to a pleasantly furnished chamber which would be his own. “We’ll fetch your luggage soon, and unload your psionic stuff. Right now, everybody’s either talking to the ship’s crew or reading his mail.”
Cornelius nodded absently and sat down. The chair, like all low-gee furniture, was a mere spidery skeleton, but it held his bulk comfortably enough. He felt in his tunic, hoping to bribe the other man into keeping him company for a while. “Cigar? I brought some from Amsterdam.”
“Thanks.” Viken accepted with disappointing casualness, crossed long, thin legs and blew grayish clouds.
“Ah…are you in charge here?”
“Not exactly. No one is. We do have one administrator, the cook, to handle what little work of that type may come up. Don’t forget, this is a research station, first, last, and always.”
“What is your field, then?”
Viken frowned. “Don’t question anyone else so bluntly, Dr. Cornelius,” he warned. “They’d rather spin the gossip out as long as possible with each newcomer. It’s a rare treat to have someone whose every last conceivable reaction hasn’t been—no, no apologies to me. ’S all right. I’m a physicist, specializing in the solid state at ultra-high pressures.” He nodded at the wall. “Plenty of it to be observed—there!”
“I see.” Cornelius smoked quietly for a while. Then: “I’m supposed to be the psionics expert, but, frankly, at present I’ve no idea why your machine should misbehave as reported.”
“You mean those, uh, K-tubes have a stable output on Earth?”
“And on Luna, Mars, Venus—everywhere, apparently, but here.” Cornelius shrugged. “Of course, psibeams are always persnickety, and sometimes you get an unwanted feedback when—no. I’ll get the facts before I theorize. Who are your psimen?”
“Just Anglesey, who’s not a formally trained esman at all. But he took it up after he was crippled, and showed such a natural aptitude that he was shipped out here when he volunteered. It’s so hard to get anyone for Jupiter V that we aren’t fussy about degrees. At that, Ed seems to be operating Joe as well as a Ps.D. could.”
“Ah, yes. Your pseudojovian. I’ll have to examine that angle pretty carefully, too,” said Cornelius. In spite of himself, he was getting interested. “Maybe the trouble comes from something in Joe’s biochemistry. Who knows? I’ll let you into a carefully guarded little secret, Dr. Viken: psionics is not an exact science.”
“Neither is physics,” grinned the other man. After a moment, he added more soberly: “Not my brand of physics, anyway. I hope to make it exact. That’s why I’m here, you know. It’s the reason we’re all here.”
Edward Anglesey was a bit of a shock the first time. He was a head, a pair of arms, and a disconcertingly intense blue stare. The rest of him was mere detail, enclosed in a wheeled machine.
“Biophysicist originally,” Viken had told Cornelius. “Studying atmospheric spores at Earth Station when he was still a young man—accident, crushed him up, nothing below his chest will ever work again. Snappish type, you have to go slow with him.”
Seated on a wisp of stool in the esprojector control room, Cornelius realized that Viken had been soft-pedaling the truth.
Anglesey ate as he talked, gracelessly, letting the chair’s tentacles wipe up after him. “Got to,” he explained. “This stupid place is officially on Earth time, GMT. Jupiter isn’t. I’ve got to be here whenever Joe wakes, ready to take him over.”
“Couldn’t you have someone spell you?” asked Cornelius.
“Bah!” Anglesey stabbed a piece of prot and waggled it at the other man. Since it was native to him, he could spit out English, the common language of the station, with unmeasured ferocity. “Look here. You ever done therapeutic esping? Not just listening in, or even communication, but actual pedagogic control?”
“No, not I. It requires a certain natural talent, like yours.” Cornelius smiled. His ingratiating little phrase was swallowed without being noticed by the scored face opposite him. “I take it you mean cases like, oh, re-educating the nervous system of a palsied child?”
“Yes, yes. Good enough example. Has anyone ever tried to suppress the child’s personality, take him over in the most literal sense?”
“Good God, no!”
“Even as a scientific experiment?” Anglesey grinned. “Has any esprojector operative ever poured on the juice and swamped the child’s brain with his own thoughts? Come on, Cornelius, I won’t snitch on you.”
“Well…it’s out of my line, you understand.” The psionicist looked carefully away, found a bland meter face and screwed his eyes to that. “I have, uh, heard something about…. Well, yes, there were attempts made in some pathological cases to, uh, bull through…break down the patient’s delusions by sheer force—”
“And it didn’t work,” said Anglesey. He laughed. “It can’t work, not even on a child, let alone an adult with a fully developed personality. Why, it took a decade of refinement, didn’t it, before the machine was debugged to the point where a psychiatrist could even ‘listen in’ without the normal variation between his pattern of thought and the patient’s—without that variation setting up an interference scrambling the very thing he wanted to study. The machine has to make automatic compensations for the differences between individuals. We still can’t bridge the differences between species.
“If someone else is willing to cooperate, you can very gently guide his thinking. And that’s all. If you try to seize control of another brain, a brain with its own background of experience, its own ego, you risk your very sanity. The other brain will fight back instinctively. A fully developed, matured, hardened human personality is just too complex for outside control. It has too many resources, too much hell the subconscious can call to its defense if its integrity is threatened. Blazes, man, we can’t even master our own minds, let alone anyone else’s!”
Anglesey’s cracked-voice tirade broke off. He sat brooding at the instrument panel, tapping the console of his mechanical mother.
