Poul Anderson - The Long Way Home

One of the guards swung up his gun, nervously. It had a nonstandard look about it: probably a smoothbore, designed and built for this one job, but no less dangerous. “Take it easy, son,” said Langley. “I don’t bite... often.”

“We have strict orders,” said the Thorian. He was young, a little frightened, and it thickened the rough accent. “If anything at all goes wrong, whether it seems to be your fault or not, you’re both to be shot. Remember that.”

“Taking no chances, huh? Well, suit yourselves.” Langley leaned on the bars. It wasn’t hard to act relaxed and companionable—not any more, now when nothing mattered. “I was just wondering what you boys were getting out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I suppose you came here along with the diplomatic mission, or maybe in a later consignment. When did you hit Earth?”

“Three years ago,” said the other guard. “Outplanet service is normally for four.”

“But that don’t include transportation time,” pointed out Langley. “Makes about thirteen years you’re gone. Your parents have gotten old, maybe died; your girl friend has married someone else... Back where I come from, we’d consider that a long term.”

“Shut up!” The answer was a bit too stiff and prompt.

“I’m not talking sedition,” said Langley mildly. “Just wondering. Suppose you get paid pretty well, eh, to compensate?”

“There are bonuses for outplanet service,” said the first guard.

“Big ones?”

“Well—”

“I kind of thought so. Not enough to matter. The boys go off for a couple of decades; the old folks have to mortgage the farm to keep going; the boys come back without money to get out of hock, and spend the rest of their lives working for somebody else—some banker who was smart enough to stay at home. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Happened on Earth seven thousand years ago. Place called Rome.”

The heavy, blunt faces—faces of stolid, slow-thinking, stubborn yeomen—screwed up trying to find a suitably devastating retort; but nothing came out.

“I’m sorry,” said Langley. “Didn’t mean to needle you. I’m just curious, you see. Looks as if Centauri’s going to be top dog, so I ought to learn about you, eh? I suppose you personally figure on getting a nice piece of land in the Solar System. But why is Thrym backing you?”

“Thrym is part of the League,” said one of the men. Langley didn’t miss the reluctance in his tone. “They go along with us... they simply have to.”

“But they have a vote, don’t they? They could have argued against this adventure. Or have they been promised Jupiter to colonize?”

“They couldn’t,” said the guard. “Some difference in the air, not enough ammonia I think. They can’t use any planet in this system.”

“Then why are they interested in conquering Sol? Why are they backing you? Sol never hurt them any, but Thor fought a war with them not so long ago.”

“They were beaten,” said the guard.

“Like hell they were, son. You can’t beat a unified planet larger than all the others put together. The war was a draw, and you know it. The most Earth and Thor together could do, I’ll bet, is mount guard on Thrym, keep the natives down there where they belong. Thor alone could only compromise, and take the short end of the stick at that. The Thrymans did win their point, you know; there aren’t any human colonies on the Proximan planets.

“So I still wonder what Thrym’s getting out of this deal.”

“I don’t want to talk about it any longer!” said the guard angrily. “Go on back.”

Langley stood for a moment, considering the situation. There were no soldiers in the cell block except these two. The door was held by an electronic lock, Saris could open it with a mere effort of will. But the two young men were keyed to an almost hysterical pitch; at the first sign of anything unforeseen, they’d open up on their prisoners. There didn’t seem to be any way out of here.

He turned back to Saris. “Got your thoughts uncoiled?” he asked.

“Somewhat.” The Holatan gave him a sleepy look. “You may be astonished at certain t’ingss I hawe to say.”

“Go ahead.”

“I cannot read the human mind—not its actual t’oughtss, only its pressence and its emotional state. Giwen time, I could learn to do more, but there iss not been time yet, ewen wit” you. But the T’rymanss hawe a very long time had to study your race.”

“So they can read our thoughts, eh? Hm-m-m—bet Chanthavar doesn’t know that! Then that inspection here they mentioned would have been via the superintendent’s mind, I suppose—But are you sure?”

“Yess. It iss a certainty. Let me explain.”

The exposition was short and to the point. Every living nervous system radiates energy of several kinds. There are the electrical impulses, which encephalography had discovered in man even before Langley’s time; there is a little heat; there is the subtler and more penetrating emission in the gyromagnetic spectrum. But the pattern varies: each race has its own norms. An encephalographer from Earth would not find the alpha rhythm of the human brain in a Holatan; he would have to learn a whole new ‘language’.

On most planets, including Earth, there is little or no sensitivity to such emissions. The evolving life develops reactions to such vibrations as light and sound and, these being sufficient for survival purposes, does not go on to an ability to “listen in” on nervous impulses. Except for a few dubious freaks—to this day, the subject of ESP in man was one for debate and bafflement—humanity is telepathically deaf. But on some planets, through a statistically improbable series of mutations, ESP organs do develop and most animals have them: including the intelligent animals, if any. In the case of Holat, the development was unique—the animal could not only receive the nervous impulses of others, but could at short range induce them. This was the basis of Holatan emotional empathy; it was also the reason Saris could control a vacuum tube. As if following some law of compensation, the perceptive faculty was poor on the verbal level; the Holatans used sonic speech because they could not get clear ideas across telepathically.

Thryman telepathy was of the “normal” sort—the monsters could listen in, but could not influence, except via the specialized nerve endings in their joined feelers.

But a telepathic listener does not perceive pure thought. “Thought” does not exist as part of the real world; there is only the process of thinking, the flow of pulses across synapses. The Thryman did not read a man’s mind as such, but read the patterns of subvocalization. A man thinking on the conscious level talks to himself: the motor impulses go from brain to throat as if he were speaking aloud, but are suppressed en route. It was these impulses that the Thryman sensed and interpreted.

So to read the thoughts of another being, they had to know that being’s language first. And Saris and Langley habitually thought in languages unknown to them. What they detected was gibberish.

“I... see.” The man nodded. “It makes sense. I read about a case once which happened some hundred years before my time. An alleged telepath was demonstrating before the Pope—that was a religious person back then. He got confused, said he couldn’t understand, and the Pope answered he’d been thinking in Latin. Yes, that may have been the same thing.” He smiled, grimly. “Keeping our mental privacy is one consolation, at least.”

There iss otherss,” replied the Holatan. “I hawe a warning to giwe you. There iss soon to be an attack.”

“ Huh? ”

“Act not so alarmed. But the female you hawe—Marin iss her name? In her I hawe detected an electronic circuit.”