Poul Anderson - Call Me Joe

Somatic tension traveled skyward; Anglesey jerked awake.

He swore. As he sat there beneath the helmet, the vividness of Jupiter faded with his scattering concentration, as if it grew transparent; the steel prison which was his laboratory strengthened behind it. He was losing contact. Rapidly, with the skill of experience, he brought himself back into phase with the neural currents of the other brain. He willed sleepiness on Joe, exactly as a man wills it on himself.

And, like any other insomniac, he failed. The Joe body was too hungry. It got up and walked across the compound toward its shack.

The K tube went wild and blew itself out.

The night before the ships left, Viken and Cornelius sat up late.

It was not truly a night, of course. In twelve hours the tiny moon was hurled clear around Jupiter, from darkness back to darkness, and there might well be a pallid little sun over its crags when the clocks said witches were abroad in Greenwich. But most of the personnel were asleep at this hour.

Viken scowled. “I don’t like it,” he said. “Too sudden a change of plans. Too big a gamble.”

“You are only risking—how many?—three male and a dozen female pseudos,” Cornelius replied.

“And fifteen J ships. All we have. If Anglesey’s notion doesn’t work, it will be months, a year or more, till we can have others built and resume aerial survey.”

“But if it does work,” said Cornelius, “you won’t need any I ships, except to carry down more pseudos. You will be too busy evaluating data from the surface to piddle around in the upper atmosphere.”

“Of course. But we never expected it so soon. We were going to bring more esmen out here, to operate some more pseudos—”

“But they aren’t needed, ” said Cornelius. He struck a cigar to life and took a long pull on it, while his mind sought carefully for words. “Not for a while, anyhow. Joe has reached a point where, given help, he can leap several thousand years of history—he may even have a radio of sorts operating in the fairly near future, which would eliminate the necessity of much of your esping. But without help, he’ll just have to mark time. And it’s stupid to make a highly trained human esman perform manual labor, which is all that the other pseudos are needed for at this moment. Once the Jovian settlement is well established, certainly, then you can send down more puppets.”

“The question is, though,” persisted Viken, “can Anglesey himself educate all those pseudos at once? They’ll be helpless as infants for days. It will be weeks before they really start thinking and acting for themselves. Can Joe take care of them meanwhile?”

“He has food and fuel stored for months ahead,” said Cornelius. “As for what Joe’s capabilities are—well, hm-m-m, we just have to take Anglesey’s judgment. He has the only inside information.”

“And once those Jovians do become personalities,” worried Viken, “are they necessarily going to string along with Joe? Don’t forget, the pseudos are not carbon copies of each other. The uncertainty principle assures each one a unique set of genes. If there is only one human mind on Jupiter, among all those aliens—”

“One human mind?” It was barely audible. Viken opened his mouth inquiringly. The other man hurried on.

“Oh, I’m sure Anglesey can continue to dominate them,” said Cornelius. “His own personality is rather—tremendous.”

Viken looked startled. “You really think so?”

The psionicist nodded. “Yes. I’ve seen more of him in the past weeks than anyone else. And my profession naturally orients me more toward a man’s psychology than his body or his habits. You see a waspish cripple. I see a mind which has reacted to its physical handicaps by developing such a hellish energy, such an inhuman power of concentration, that it almost frightens me. Give that mind a sound body for its use and nothing is impossible to it.”

“You may be right, at that,” murmured Viken after a pause. “Not that it matters. The decision is taken, the rockets go down tomorrow. I hope it all works out.”

He waited for another while. The whirring of ventilators in his little room seemed unnaturally loud, the colors of a girlie picture on the wall shockingly garish. Then he said slowly, “You’ve been rather close-mouthed yourself, Jan. When do you expect to finish your own esprojector and start making the tests?”

Cornelius looked around. The door stood open to an empty hallway, but he reached out and closed it before he answered with a slight grin, “It’s been ready for the past few days. But don’t tell anyone.”

“How’s that?” Viken started. The movement, in low gee, took him out of his chair and halfway across the table between the men. He shoved himself back and waited.

“I have been making meaningless tinkering motions,” said Cornelius, “but what I waited for was a highly emotional moment, a time when I can be sure Anglesey’s entire attention will be focused on Joe. This business tomorrow is exactly what I need.”

“ Why? ”

“You see, I have pretty well convinced myself that the trouble in the machine is psychological, not physical. I think that for some reason, buried in his subconscious, Anglesey doesn’t want to experience Jupiter. A conflict of that type might well set a psionic-amplifier circuit oscillating.”

“Hm-m-m.” Viken rubbed his chin. “Could be. Lately Ed has been changing more and more. When he first came here, he was peppery enough, and he would at least play an occasional game of poker. Now he’s pulled so far into his shell you can’t even see him. I never thought of it before, but . . . yes, by God, Jupiter must be having some effect on him.”

“Hm-m-m.” Cornelius nodded. He did not elaborate—did not, for instance, mention that one altogether uncharacteristic episode when Anglesey had tried to describe what it was like to be a Jovian.

“Of course,” said Viken thoughtfully, “the previous men were not affected especially. Nor was Ed at first, while he was still controlling lower-type pseudos. It’s only since Joe went down to the surface that he’s become so different.”

“Yes, yes,” said Cornelius hastily. “I’ve learned that much. But enough shop talk—”

“No. Wait a minute.” Viken spoke in a low, hurried tone, looking past him. “For the first time, I’m starting to think clearly about this. Never really stopped to analyze it before, just accepted a bad situation. There is something peculiar about Joe. It can’t very well involve his physical structure, or the environment, because lower forms didn’t give this trouble. Could it be the fact that Joe is the first puppet in all history with a potentially human intelligence?”

“We speculate in a vacuum,” said Cornelius. “Tomorrow, maybe, I can tell you. Now I know nothing.”

Viken sat up straight. His pale eyes focused on the other man and stayed there, unblinking. “One minute,” he said.

“Yes?” Cornelius shifted, half rising. “Quickly, please. It is past my bedtime.”

“You know a good deal more than you’ve admitted,” said Viken. “Don’t you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“You aren’t the most gifted liar in the universe. And then, you argued very strongly for Anglesey’s scheme, this sending down the other pseudos. More strongly than a newcomer should.”

“I told you, I want his attention focused elsewhere when—”

“Do you want it that badly?” snapped Viken.

Cornelius was still for a minute. Then he sighed and leaned back.

“All right,” he said. “I shall have to trust your discretion. I wasn’t sure, you see, how any of you old-time station personnel would react. So I didn’t want to blabber out my speculations, which may be wrong. The confirmed facts, yes, I will tell them; but I don’t wish to attack a man’s religion with a mere theory.”