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“No human action can be purely random,” Svirsky agreed. “Causality is structured very basically into our wiring diagram, perhaps as far back as the Permian. We can’t even perceive pure randomness in our world.”

They talked around the subject. “I want to help,” McPherson said finally, “but I can’t make out how we’re going to come to grips with this business. What’s the Protean wiring diagram like?”

“I have a notion, from work on lower life-forms,” Svirsky said. “I should dissect that fellow in the cage.”

“No,” Chalmers said. “He’s para-human, at the least. How about depth photos?”

Svirsky agreed that might do. They decided to anesthetize the Protean, make depth photos for analysis on Earth, and lift out. Chalmers thought neuralin might not work well in Protean biochemistry and said he would persuade Onderdonck and Minelli to come along and help if restraint were needed. It was one o’clock, ship-time.

“If neuralin works too well, they can help carry back the body,” he said. “I wouldn’t object to taking a dead Protean back to Earth.”

Onderdonck and Minelli carried pistols to the cage. Gard went in alone with the neuralin gun. The red-bearded Protean moved to one side, not looking at Gard, and suddenly ran for the door. Gard flung out his powerful left arm and the Protean ran through it.

The men at the door jumped aside. Onderdonck aimed his pistol and Svirsky struck it up. Gard came out, pale and shuddering.

“I can’t describe it,” he said. “Like being violated in a secret place I couldn’t know existed. God! My flesh crawls! I’ll go home now, Onderdonck.”

“Too late,” Onderdonck said, pointing his pistol.

They saw a file of naked Proteans emerging from shrubbery between them and the ship, cutting them off, bearing down obliquely. Minelli cursed and drew his pistol.

“Not yet, Pete,” Svirsky said gently. “Into the cage, my brothers.”

Inside the closed cage they watched the Proteans, led by a huge, red-bearded male, circle them on a ten-yard radius. When the leader cut through the incoming file to close the circle the Proteans set up an uncadenced howling.

The leader led the file through itself and into a second circle of greater radius. Women and half-grown children spaced randomly with men kept coming in on the long secant. They stepped high and deliberately, arms hanging, howling from expressionless faces. The leader drew a third loop and then a fourth that lost itself in far trees and hollows. Still they came in on the long slant.

Gard climbed the cage wall to look over their heads. “It looks like a logarithmic spiral,” he shouted down. On-derdonck cursed steadily. Svirsky and Chalmers talked into each other’s ear against the howling.

After nearly an hour the incoming file ended. The spiral unwound out of sight and the howling died away. The men left the cage.

Minelli laughed uncertainly. “Well, that didn’t hurt much,” he said.

“God, things seem still and silent after that war dance,” McPherson said. “Let’s go home, men.”

He led off, the others at his heels. After a few steps Chalmers cried “Stop!”

“Things don’t look right,” he said. “See those trees ahead.”

“Blurry and jumping a little,” Gard agreed. “Easy now.”

“Twisting in circles,” McPherson murmured. “It’s scary.”

“Danger,” Chalmers said quietly. “Back by the cage.”

From the cage everything looked all right again. It was Protean midaftemoon, with a few cumulus clouds overhead. No breeze stirred the gray-green leaves, no birds flew.

“What kind of danger, Hank?” Gard asked.

“Ignorance is danger now. All we know yet is that some influence unstructures our perception, makes the world look like an impressionist painting.”

“Monet sweated to achieve that vision. Where’s the danger?”

“Van Gogh had that vision thrust upon him,” Chalmers said crisply, “and it ended by killing him. Let’s map out the boundary and mark it with twigs. We’ll be our own instruments.”

The boundary was a rough circle. The men looked at Gard.

“Now what, Hank?” McPherson asked Chalmers.

“We need more data,” Gard said. “Have to know how bad it gets. Maybe it’s a belt that lets up again. I’ll go out alone, a little further. You watch me, but don’t come after me whatever happens.”

He walked into the zone like a boxer into the ring, his symmetrical athlete’s torso gleaming in the sun.

Gard screamed and threshed as they dragged him in by the cage.

“Come out of it, Ed!” Chalmers barked, slapping him. “You’re all right.”

Gard sat up and shook his head. The others bent above him.

“You wandered like a tapeless robot out there,” McPherson said. “When you stumbled back in you flopped and screamed. What happened?”

“First the blur and the vibration of visual things,” Gard said slowly. “Then everything came alive and the sky was a big face and I couldn’t bear it any more and then snap— the dream.”

“What did you dream?” Chalmers asked.

“A true thing, Hank, out of my past. When I was ten I fell from a concrete bomb ruin. Part way down rusty rods caught me under the left arm pit and shoulder blade, tore up the brachial plexus—that’s how I got this lopsided look and the gimp arm. I hung there—Christ it was awful, living that again!”

He stroked his withered left arm with a wry smile, then stood up.

“Well,” Chalmers said. “Disintegration of the worldgestalt. Sudden hypermnesic regression to an earlier personality configuration at a point of trauma. No physical harm, but the subject is incapacitated for rational behavior in present time. I generalize from one instance, as I shouldn’t. Words are comforting, but these are only whats. Who’ll offer a how?”

“I’ll try,” Svirsky said. “The Proteans may have a kind of action-space inconceivable to us and probably not conceptual with them. They have thrown a barrier around this island of our own action-space—”

“Blank nonsense!” Onderdonck broke in. “Gard is a brainsick fool, that’s what and how both. He’ll take Webb Onderdonck no further!”

The fat man held a stick from the cage and he shook it toward the ship.

“I can see the ship,” he said. “This is some kind of optical razzle-dazzle, but where this stick can go Webb Onderdonck can follow. I’ll close my damned eyes!”

He strode off, jabbing the stick angrily into the ground ahead of him with each step.

“There walks a man braver than he is able to know,” Svirsky said softly.

They drew together and watched him go, stick jabbing, undeviating, and tension rose and gripped them in a great collective shudder.

“Their action-space overpowers our own, limits us and frees us in ways inconceivable.”

“But how? There’s danger, God knows we all five feel it now, but let’s put a finger on it,” Chalmers said.

“Death, maybe,” Gard said. “When I fell, I caught a ledge with my fingers. It seemed to me I deliberately let go. When I hung on those rods I screamed as much in frustration as in pain.”

“So?”

“So maybe the thing that says ‘I’ can’t bear disintegration of the symbol system. Maybe it is the symbol system, something emergent at a high level of abstraction and integration, oh dammit, something modulated onto the body’s life like information on a carrier wave, a thing of words only—don’t mind me, people. I’m talking in tongues.”