Chapter VIII

The involuntary start that shook the pine cone from his hand freed Phil’s nostrils of the anaesthetic. Rapidly clearing eyes watched the cone fall near his feet and roll a few inches. A hawk that had been wheeling in the sky at the edge of his vision was still wheeling. Only seconds had elapsed, but this time there remained a clear recall of all that had transpired in those few seconds of lost time--seconds in which he had lived another’s memories as though they were his own.

Reluctantly, impelled more by fascination than intent, he raised his head and faced his companion. The compassionate eyes that met his did hold certain childlike qualities of freedom from suspicion or hardness, but the gaze was not that of a simple child, nor was the bearing. Incongruity sparked a scarcely-controllable impulse to hysterical laughter. A small boy seated on a log, regarding his elder with gentle kindliness and understanding! Phil made a sound deep in his throat and swung his head away, afraid he was going to be sick. “Timmy” made no move. The silence endured, as it had to endure until one reaction or another prevailed. Gradually Phil worked to a conclusion.

“You call it a ‘blunder,’” Phil said thickly. “You made a freak of an unborn baby for your own ends, and you call it a blunder. Anyone else might be content with a little innocent butchery, but not you ... you take over children, body and soul!”

“No.”

“What we’ve been calling Timmy is a secondhand suit of clothes for you! And you claim you’re not a monster!”

“Nor am I.”

Phil struggled for violent words to match his feelings, then sighed heavily. “No,” he agreed, despite himself. “You are not. I know that. Maybe you’ve controlled me just as you tricked me into entering your mind and living your memories but, sickened as I am, I still can’t help believing you more implicitly than I’ve ever believed anyone. Nor do I see any reason to.”

“You’ve never known anyone as surely as you know me, now that our minds have been in phase. Emotional reactions stemming from a dozen hidden causes may mislead you, but at the back of your mind you know me.”

“And you know--me.”

“I know only what I need to know about you. Your private memories are your own and will always remain so unless you invite me to share them.”

“Yet you opened all yours to me?”

“Far from it. At this point it would give you too much to digest all at once. The major part of my concentration was required to maintain mental contact without any help from you, and to blanket the interference set up by the analytical part of your ego through its fixed, deep-rooted conviction equating the individual with mental isolation. Faced with absolute proof to the contrary, your analytical mind still tries to insist that what it has always believed to be true must still be true, otherwise everything is suspect and, therefore, anti-survival. In other words, on a survival level your mind tries to reject free telepathy as it would reject any other upsetting of the basic tenets of your existence. That and the disharmony existing in your mind is a large part of the ‘protecting’ aura of discordance that seals you off from me. The memories I shared with you I selected and edited for expediency. Unfortunately, your physical reaction to a startling thought caused you to break away before you had the full truth and left you with a false impression.”

“Either the memories you fed me were truth, or they were lies. Which is it?”

“The data was true, but your interpretation of it is false because you are still in a state of shock, still fighting for survival on a moronic level. What do you take me to be?”

“You name it. By your own admission, at best ‘you’ are a false personality forcibly impressed on a helpless mind that never had a ghost of a chance. In effect, you are a parasite living on a host, the reincarnation of an ego that should be eleven years dead.”

“Not eleven years dead--only eight.”

“What difference does... eight?”

“Eight years dead.”

Prickles crawled over Phil’s scalp and his mind raced. A series of memories snapped into place.

“Eight. And I laughed at Clancey!”

“I know--I heard. You were getting too close for comfort so I distracted you by giving you a headache.”

“Stop--let me get my breath!” His voice rose until it threatened to crack. What am I talking to! A dog?”

“Yes.”

“Homer? I don’t believe it!”

“Watch.” The boy slipped from the log and sat beside it on the ground, his back braced. “Timmy would simply fall on his face,” he explained, and with the words the face became empty and the mouth hung foolishly open. Control had been relinquished. The corner of Phil’s eye caught an answering movement that his senses wanted to reject, but he turned. Homer had raised his head painfully and was looking directly at him, unmistakable intelligence in the exhaustion-glazed eyes. The fringed lips curled back, the throat worked. Strange sounds were forced out, growling but not doglike.

“Ar-ro ... ar-rik.” It was a barely recognizable distortion of “Hello-Warwick.” “Ok-all ... orr ... ron.” Vocal-cords-wrong? “Im ... ork.” Tim-talk?

The gray-muzzled head sank back wearily. A scuffling sound drew Phil’s dazed eyes and he turned back in time to see Tim sit up again briskly, ignoring the old dog.

“I hate that mangled speech, don’t you, Uncle Phil? I’ll still call you that, if you don’t mind. You’re still as much my uncle as you ever were, and I’m the only Tim you’ve known.” He watched Phil anxiously. “Knocks the wind out of you, doesn’t it? But ordinary speech is painfully limited to begin with, without trying to force it from poor old Homer.” He chattered on nervously, giving Phil time to collect himself. “You see, Timmy is as mindless now as when he was born, three years before ‘my’ ship crashed in the swamp over there. Look back through your newspaper files and you’ll find a brief mention of a mysterious explosion reported during a night of heavy rain. That was us.” He wet his lips, watching the silent white face. “Look, I had nothing at all to do with Timmy being born an imbecile. He’s like a car that functions well enough if a driver takes over the physical controls that Timmy is incapable of handling for himself. Lacking a driver, the controls and the car stand idle. It is only the body that I manipulate, not the dormant, disconnected mind. For myself, although I can’t help identifying myself emotionally and subjectively as the Challon, Objective reason assures me that I am Homer, with a complete but false set of memories and an artificially stimulated intelligence.

“As the Challon, I realized that the embryo Homer was of low actual intelligence, but high potential intelligence. The dangerous peculiarity of this planet is that several of the higher species have no known or recognized function for the most important portion of their brain. It lies fallow, unused, blocked off much as Timmy’s whole mind is blocked off from his service. In eight years I have done no more than form the mere skeleton of a theory to account for that, but the means of correction was obvious from the start. Like the appendix that floats free at one end and serves no known purpose, the brain has an incomplete neural path of an unusual nature that has effectively camouflaged its true purpose. The intended function of the connection was the energizing of that prime center which you have not yet discovered and without which you differ from Timmy only in degree, for you cannot realize more than a fragment of your incredible potential.

“The same condition exists among the higher mammals. Releasing Homer’s blocked potential placed at his service the intellectual capacity of a very clever human--according to your false standards--but not of a human genius. If I had not imposed my ego on him ... you see, I cannot help thinking of myself as the Challon, although I know I am Homer ... if I had not robbed Homer of his identity and self-will, of his right to possess and control himself, he would have developed personality, characteristics and aptitudes of his own, appropriate to a canine of high intelligence. As it is, there are false memories of aptitudes Homer never had nor could have. Physical limitations alone make some of them impossible. How could a dog tinker with machinery, for example? Yet I ‘remember’ working on machines of my own design. Homer’s mind, in other words, remembers as first-person data experiences it never had.

“In actual fact, ‘I’ who speak to you now am no more than the record contained in a book. In terms of personality, Homer is the hidden structure giving strength and substance to a false facade. ‘I’ am the false facade, faithfully copied from another structure. ‘I’ am a superimposure of ephemeral data, governing its own employment by a mind that has been restricted from developing its own data. The ‘I’ that speaks to you has no real existence, though its pattern is being subtly and continuously altered by that which it cloaks. If you put a drop of intense stain and a drop of powerful scent into a large tank of distilled water, you change the superficial character of the water, make it seem to be other than what it is. But it remains essentially a tank full of water, now containing an obtrusive trifle of alien matter in addition to the hydrogen and oxygen that decide its most significant properties. That is what the Challon did to Homer--he released the potential, then accidentally but indelibly stained it with his own personality.

“To me, now, it merely seems as though I first suffered death and then an unwelcome resurrection, awakening in despair to find myself usurping the helpless body of an almost new-born animal. Nothing physical or spiritual of the Challon survived, but the embryo mind had been fed a ready-made identity and so believed that it had already existed as a Challon before re-birth as a dog. Its brain received instantly all ‘my’ training, so that it became at once ‘mature.’ What I have endured in these eight years--the isolation of mind and inadequacy of body--have been a blunderer’s reward visited upon his victim as a further injury. Now that Homer lies near death--and ‘I’ with him, of course--I welcome ‘our’ approaching release from an unhappy situation.

“Wait--let me finish. Your main concern is what will happen to Timmy when ‘we’ die, but it will be simpler to understand if I explain as much as I can first. Finding myself to be a rational mind in the helpless, immature body of an animal, I thought I was isolated forever. In choosing the embryo to begin with, I was driven by the need for haste and had not understood the limitations of a canine in a human world, nor would I have had any alternative if I had fully understood. When it was too late, it was not difficult to predict my future. I had no means of communicating with the dominant species, Man. In time, if I survived the hazards a puppy is exposed to, I could reveal my unusual intelligence--could even learn to communicate in some hopelessly labored manner. By using my store of inherited knowledge I could, if anyone would take a dog seriously, advance your science. But I could do nothing toward my main goals without exposing myself as an imitation Challon, and that I must never do lest I loose terrible consequences.

“I knew that the life span of my new body was pitifully short. The female had suffered repeated convulsions that affected the formation of the embryos and we were an ugly litter of little mongrels, doomed by our physical imperfections to a shorter-than-normal life if we were allowed to live and exposed to early drowning if we could not quickly charm ourselves into a home.

“The remainder of the litter--my brothers and sisters, if I could think of them as such--were callously placed in a weighted sack and tossed in the swamp, but by that time I had found a home. The Douglas home. Their child, Timmy, was an imbecile whose short-circuited mind lay open to me. I found by hasty experiments that Homer’s mind was capable of controlling and manipulating the imbecile, like a puppeteer. The difficulties of controlling two bodies at once are tremendous, which is why Homer always struck you as clumsy and almost half-witted--he had to receive the absolute minimum of concentration so that his exhaustion at climbing the bluff this afternoon, for example, was not recognized in time. Well, there it is. I took over Timmy’s helpless body eight years ago--too abruptly and with many errors--but it insured my survival for a short time at least. Now that time is at an end and the greater part of what I must do is still to be done--”

Phil sat with his face averted, his hands clenched between his knees. “The instinct to survive,” he said in a muffled voice. “I can’t blame you for what you did, but it was cruel! What a damnable trick to play on the parents!”

“Believe me, I know what you feel but there was no other way.”

“No other!” He swung around, his face mottled and his breathing heavy. “Whatever you are, you made a Machiavellian puppet-master out of a lousy, flea-bitten mongrel! Was it beyond those powers to heal Timmy’s mind?”

“I am not a psychopathic criminal.”

“Do you imply that healing Timmy would involve repeating the swindle you worked on Homer?”

“No. I could have by-passed the simple neural block that was leaving Timmy helpless, and so have given him what to you would have seemed his normal intelligence. In addition, I could have completed the work that nature left incomplete in all of you, and so have released his full, enormous capabilities. I could have done all this--can still do it--and still leave Timmy’s ego untouched, to develop in its own way, among its own kind, knowing nothing of me for what I am.”

“But you haven’t done so. Why? Why!”

“I dared not.”

“Danger? From a small boy?”

“Deadly danger--danger of infection that might threaten every intelligent race in the galaxy and even spread across the great gulfs of space beyond--”

“All this from poor little Timmy?”

“From what he might thereby become.”

“I’m licked.” Phil threw out his hands angrily. “I try to get a straight answer and all I get is implications. You tell me an outrageous story, and I believe you. You tell me you’ve neatly arranged to break the hearts of two of my best friends, and I respect your good intentions in doing so. Why? I love you like a brother, but I’m ready to take a rock and crush your skull in for a monster. I mean it! I could kill Homer with a single kick! I could--”

“I know, and I’m afraid of that hysterical impulse. I know the nature of the struggle going on in your mind better than you do, but only you can fight for control. I must wait for the outcome. When you have control of yourself--”

“You’re so bloody sane and smug you with your secondhand suit and hand-me-down knowledge!” He jumped up in a fury and turned his back on Timmy, addressing himself directly to Homer whose patient, pain-filled eyes held undeniable understanding. “Look at you! The telepathic genius with personal immortality--at a price only you could stomach! Too bad you got caught short and had to live in a cur! Tough, isn’t it, having to wait for a mere moron to get control of himself! You know all the answers--why don’t you control the situation?”

“Because the hand-me-down knowledge is no longer backed by the mental capacity of a Challon.”

Phil stiffened as Tim’s answering voice sounded behind him, quiet and friendly. Against his will, he turned back to the boy and seated himself again on the log. The boy’s eyes caught and held his.

“The morality and outlook of the Challon are my morality and outlook, whether I wish it so or not.” Tim might have been making a pleasantly inconsequential remark about the weather for all the importance he seemed to attach to his statement, yet his eyes held the strained, tight-lipped face. “The insight and understanding bequeathed by the Challon are sufficient to keep Homer’s mind sane under long stress, and of course--”

His soothing voice went on and on, and presently his lungs expelled a soft breath of relief as Phil relaxed a trifle, still breathing raggedly. Alert eyes watched him mop his damp forehead but the quiet words flowed in an unhurried stream, soothing, distracting, keeping the thread intact. At last the crises seemed behind them. “ ... So I can only wait for you to absorb the emotional impact of what I’ve told you. I had planned to prepare you, to break it gently if I could, but ... you understand?” The voice paused, then repeated gently and insistently, “You understand, don’t you?”

“Uh ... yes. Homer--”

“He can’t last much longer, and so of course I can’t. I’ve landed one kick after another right smack in your emotional solar plexus and you’re trying to catch your wind.” Tim’s hand casually struck a match for the cigarette Phil had put unlit in his mouth and the man leaned forward automatically, puffed, and automatically muttered a word of thanks. The quiet voice went on, taking an even more casual note. “What with trying to examine the implications of everything at once, you’ve stirred up a fine old Irish stew of fears, resentments and envies, all of them trying to reconcile the certain knowledge that I can be trusted and the essentially neurotic fear that I’m playing you for an almighty sucker.

“Remember, it has been even harder for me to reconcile myself to you human beings than it can possibly be for you to accept the existence of the Challon. The concept of telepathy is not a completely new or alien one to you, but the concept of a nontelepathic civilization was dismissed by the Challon ages ago as a simple contradiction of terms, a self-evident absurdity such as lifting oneself by one’s bootstraps.

“It seemed so obvious that a civilized society could not develop without the capacity for intelligent coöperation, and intelligent coöperation of any real complexity was impossible without adequate communication. What means of communication could adequately replace the direct linking of mind and mind? Failing any answers short of fantasy, the proposition always remained a sort of classroom joke with us. In fact, several classic satires exist on the subject and one of the least successful--because it seemed too ridiculous--suggested an elaborately coded system of vocalizing. We have a very elementary spoken language and a more complex code of inscriptions for essential records, but neither the written nor the spoken system could possibly be called an adequate means of communication.