He had been talking while she considered these things. He seemed to be showing off his knowledge: bragging, now that he had the opportunity.
“No, you don’t comprehend at all.” Schön repeated. “So I’ll have to lecture you on the fine points, or you won’t appreciate any of it. Too bad you’re such a puny audience, but you’re the only part of it that’s real.”
Afra waited with one hand on the rope, ready to dive out of the ring the moment he entered. She knew she was in trouble, but she was also aware that unreasoned flight would get her nowhere she wanted to go. That had already been demonstrated. Somehow Schön had the power to form a setting that physically inhibited her — and she would be well advised to discover exactly how he did it. This time it had been a square formed of rope; next time it might be worse.
“The key,” Schön said, “is this tool of the galactics.” He held the instrument aloft, the one Ivo had played, and she realized that it must have been in his hand all the time. She had not noticed it before, since the ring. “And ‘key’ is exactly what I mean. The key to the inner sanctum; the key to history; the key to personality. Call it the symbolizer. SYMBOLIC = SYMBOL PRIME = S′. It transmutes reality to symbols and vice versa, and thereby makes plain the truth. I recognized it for what it was immediately, of course.” He snickered. “Ivo thought it was a flute! He tried to play Sidney Lanier on it!”
And succeeded, she thought, knowing better than to interrupt now. She was recovering confidence in herself; if she maintained the proper spirit, she would be supreme over this situation, somehow. Schön had been overrated.
“Actually, it is a teaching device,” he continued. “By bringing to life the symbolic essence of a situation or personality, it instructs the participant and viewer. Of course it is necessary to interpret the symbols correctly, but anyone with a smattering of — yet you lack even that, naturally.”
“Lack what?” she asked, wiling to cooperate in order to keep the dialogue going. He was teasing her, childishly; she knew that, but already she had a valuable hint. If she could get the galactic instrument — S prime — away from him—
“Astrology,” he said. “You have closed your mind to it, and that makes it ideal for my purpose. So the symbolic ascendant means nothing to you.”
She waited, refusing this time to rise to the bait. Schön, obviously, had dipped into Ivo’s memory and picked up her continuing debate with Harold. He was trying to annoy her — and that could mean that his power would be diminished if she refused to react. The sophisticated response to his exertions was best.
“The ascendant is the overall indication of personality; the rising sign for each individual. My own ascendant falls at Aries 21, and the symbol for that position is A PUGILIST ENTERING THE RING, as you can readily perceive if you concentrate. This indicates full confidence in my own powers — justified, of course — and a complete lack of personal sensitiveness. Thus the galactic machine has dramatized my basic personality and graphically illustrated the power inherent in me.”
“That isn’t the way Harold described astrology,” Afra murmured, wishing this time that she had taken the trouble to learn more about it, whether she believed in it or not. Its rules were evidently governing this game.
“Harold was an engineer, not an astrologer. His approach was too conventional and conservative, though last I saw of him he was getting disabused in a hurry. Those old galactics really had their sciences worked out.”
He was still toying with her. If she tried to defend Harold, she would be defending his hobby as well, and so be on exceedingly tenuous ground. “What about Ivo?”
Schön gazed at her speculatively across the ring, but did not challenge the shift in topic. “Ah yes, Ivo. There’s someone really confused, for all that I invented him. He oriented on something from each of you, not really knowing the proper use of S-prime, and came up with a mélange that must have made the galactic creators wince. Harold Groton’s astrology, Sidney Lanier’s poetry, darlin’ Afra Glynn’s supposed intellectual discrimination and Tryx Groton’s suicidal sympathy — all tied in with a galactic history text that the instrument put out as a kind of sideshow attraction. Fascinating juxtaposition, I admit. I was a fiery ram, ‘Aspiration’ astrologically, ‘Trade’ poetically, and the strings musically. I engaged in First Siege internecine power politics. I had a good thing going, too — until you torpedoed Ivo for me.”
Suddenly the goat image made sense to her, and the evocative music of the bassoon. These had been her symbols, in the combined context. And love — where the poem had specified Trade for him, it had specified Love for her. And she had felt it—
“What is my symbol?” she inquired, genuinely curious now. “My — ascendant.”
“You don’t want to know it, cutie. You are afraid of it, neurotic that you are.”
“Am I? Or is it that you are afraid to animate my symbol, instead of yours? Would that give me dominance?”
“Lady, I’ll gladly match symbols with you planet by planet. That would put us on an even footing, in spite of my inordinate superiority in overt life. But you would achieve parity only if you are able to face your own nature when you see it objectively — and you aren’t. Your ascendant controls you, and probably your planets do too. It is a contest you would lose by your own prejudice.”
“I’ll take that chance — if you will. I don’t think you know how to compete, on an even basis.”
He smiled, the vicious grin of the warrior tasting blood. “Calling my bluff, Glynn?”
She smiled back, as maliciously as he, though she was afraid of him. “Yes, prettyboy. And if you cheat, you lose.” She wasn’t sure what to expect, or whether Schön would really bind himself to the outcome of a fair competition, but if it nullified the advantage of his intellect…
“Take it, child,” he said, touching the instrument. “Your ascendant is Taurus 15 — A MAN MUFFLED UP, WITH A RAKISH SILK HAT.”
And she was back in the supermarket, the same one she had fled, and she was facing the man beside the checkout counter. She had asked for it — and she was terrified.
Something obscure happened. People backed away from the cash register. The muffled man looked up, around, pausing a moment as though considering. It seemed that he was looming over Afra, and she was very small, very fragile. Something remarkable was about to happen—
The large man moved.
There was the sound of a gun being fired.
She wrenched herself out of it — and was out of the rope enclosure and passing through the door she had originally been running toward. She had escaped one vision only to return to another — unless she could also escape Schön and the galactic, the demonic, S′ device.
This room was thoroughly finite, at least, and well lighted. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment stood against the walls, and there were a number of screens flashing what she took to be broadcast patterns. This was, by her reckoning, a communications center. That suggested some kind of occupation of the station, at least at intervals. Automatic machinery would not be set up for viewing like this.
Schön was there ahead of her. He sat on a podium in the center of the room, behind a table whose white cloth extended down to touch the floor. He wore a high turban and stared into a shiny crystal ball. “Man,” he said grandiosely, “has the capacity to bring the entire universe within the purview of his mind.”
She had either to retreat into the original chamber or to pass directly by him. Neither alternative appealed, so she temporized. “I thought you were supposed to be a pugilist.”
“That, my dear, as I so tediously explained, was the ascendant. Now we are with the sun, and it behooves us to be more acute. My sun is in Aries 19, and so I am as you see me: A CRYSTAL GAZER. So it is written in the most authoritative text.” He stared into the ball. “I see that the referee has graded the first round on the ten-point must system: ten points to Fire, no points to Earth, who washed out. An excellent start — though it would be more entertaining if you were to at le
ast put up some show of competition.”
So she hadn’t lost yet! “How do I know that’s an honest score?”
He shoved the ball in her direction. “Witness.”
She stepped up to look into it. Inside was a great-horned ram copulating with a frightened doe.
“Miscegenation is all I see,” she said. Then, saying it, she realized that the animals too were symbols: the ram of Aries and the goat of Capricorn. Schön had played his little prank on her. Two different species — somewhat as the two of them were of different races. A bald proposition, a dirty joke — or a threat. He had said that her own prejudice would cost her victory…
“Too bad nature forbids it,” she said in reply to his mocking gaze. She resented the implication that this was the only use for her — to submit to the sexual assault of the male — knowing it to be a conventional objection of womankind but still stirred by it. There was that about Schön that fascinated her in ways Ivo had not; yet she was not about to encourage his casual lewdness. In her mind was the remark Ivo had made about childhood sexual activity at their project: homo, hetero and group. She would contest the issue more fiercely in the coming rounds.
It was amazing what a difference the mind made. Schön did not resemble Ivo at all, though the body was the same.
“Yes, you would lecture on nature,” he remarked, as though that proved something. “Your symbol for Capricorn 12 is A STUDENT OF NATURE LECTURING.”
“How do you know?” she demanded, nettled again in spite of her disbelief in the personal relevance of such things.
“Dear little Ivo studied your horoscope. Now all that information is mine.” He grinned. “You are, you see, in my power. That chart has you laid out and nakedly displayed, and I can sample any part of you I desire. Fortunately I don’t desire your mind.”
She controlled her mounting irritation. “How much do you expect to accomplish, depending on astrology?” Again, she had to keep him talking, while waiting for an opportunity to gain some advantage. Genius he might be, but his youthful arrogance might defeat him yet.
“There are many ways to view existence,” Schön said. “Symbols are useful for minds of any potential, and astrology is an organized system of symbols as valid as any. I would accept it as readily as, say, religion. Of course, no symbol has validity apart from the values and qualities assigned to it by the user. What alternative would you prefer for your nuptial?”
“What makes you think the ram is so damned attractive to the doe?”
“What makes you think the ram is trying to be?”
“You imagine your word is my command?”
“Sister, there is no other functioning homo-sapiens man within fifty thousand light-years, and you can’t penetrate the destroyer field by yourself. I can. The question is, am I to be obliged, however clumsily, on my way home, or do I travel alone?”
Could he travel alone? Even if he turned off the destroyer broadcast — a thing he might not be able to do, assuming it had safeguards against interference — he would not succeed in freeing the spaceways of its effect. Earth was in the field of another station, and in any event it would require at least fifteen thousand years for the destroyer to clear itself, limited as it was by light velocity.
Yet he was in control of his body and Ivo’s experience now. That meant he had found a way around the destroyer memory — and, therefore, the destroyer itself.
Or so he wanted her to believe.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “I don’t think you can go home without my help. Otherwise you wouldn’t be chasing me now, or trying so hard to impress me.”
“Or winning rounds against you. Maybe I’m too softhearted to leave you here alone. Are you calling my bluff again?” he inquired scornfully.
Suddenly she was afraid again, and could not answer. Ivo’s body had been possessed by a demon. How important was this peculiar contest, and how badly was she losing? Evidently the verbal interchange was part of it, and she was at a disadvantage there. Brad had always been able to twist around her statements and confuse her, and Schön had the same ability.
On the other hand, if she should somehow win — and theoretically she had an equal chance to do so, if she could only marshal her complete resources — what would be her victory? A liaison with Schön?
“You always were slow to get the message,” he said. “I sent you an obvious one as soon as Brad lost out, but naturally you fouled it up.”
“You sent me a message!”
“Surely you didn’t think I needed to send Ivo one? I had to borrow his hand to type it.”
Her curiosity had been aroused, and she didn’t care that this was what he had intended. “Then why didn’t you just tell him what you wanted?”
“He wouldn’t listen.”
That simple? That all the mystery and confusion engendered by the obscure missives had been Ivo’s fault? Again, she doubted it.
“Why, you wonder, did I not address the message to you? And, I explain — for you are exceedingly interested in explanations at the moment, your symbol says — I found it necessary to be circumspect. Ivo was almost always on guard, and only in rare moments of negligence was I able to assume control of so much as a single limb. He happened to pass the teletype section while in a condition of shock from the Senator’s demise and Brad’s discommodation, and I froze him unaware and set up the message. But I didn’t dare to do it in any style he comprehended, or mention you at all, or he would have snapped right out of it then. I had very little time, so I just jotted down the opening line of Lanier’s “The Marshes of Glynn” in polyglot, sticking to languages you could interpret. I thought you’d be smart enough to follow that up and get the real message.”
“Well, I wasn’t and I didn’t,” she snapped. “So what was the ‘real message’?”
“The terminal couplet of the poem, stupid. ‘And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the tide comes in / On the length and the breadth of the marvelous marshes of Glynn.’ Anybody with a note of savvy could see that what swam below Ivo’s Glynn was Schön, and of course a Georgia girl would be familiar with the poem. Once you fluttered your pale pink eyelashes and told him to give over—”
“What makes you so sure I would have told him?”
“Back in that hour you fancied you were enamored of Brad Carpenter. You thought Schön would help you get him back. You were charmingly naïve. Still are, too.”
She remembered. Had she known the truth then, she would have sacrificed Ivo… foolishly. It had taken the phenomenal chain of events of the ensuing period to change her thinking — and her values.
“After that, Ivo was on to the polyglot dodge, so I had to try other stuff. He wasn’t exactly bright, but he did know enough not to get taken twice on the same boat, and he was stubborn as hell. The problem was to identify him without alerting him, and there were not many opportunities. Fortunately he never did catch on to the fact the messages were not intended for him, so the arrow-address gimmick got through.”
“So you made a Neptune-symbol to send us so far out we’d be dependent on you to get us home again—”
“Obliged to cry uncle, yes. Neptune is the planet of obligation, if we accept the view of your engineer’s main authority on the subject. Traditionally, of course, Neptune is allied with liquids, gases, mystery, illusion, dreams, deceit — but that simple hint passed you by, naturally. At least Groton, duffer that he was, began to catch on that—”
“And a shorthand message once we were there,” she said, cutting him off. She was furious with herself for not delving beyond the superficial, at the time of that message. Liquids and gases — as in the melting process? Could Schön actually have foreseen that? Mystery, illusion — as in the whereabouts of Schön behind the illusion of Ivo. A multileveled communiqué indeed, and she had missed it. Brad would have grasped all of it…
“But why did you want to take over if you couldn’t help Brad?” she asked him then. “Surely you didn’t care about the world crisis?
”
“There was an entertaining situation developing. Why else?”
She stared at him, aghast at his indifference, but he met her gaze levelly. “Brad’s mind gone and a United States Senator dead, the very future of the macroscope project in peril — and you found it amusing?”
“Entertaining. There’s a distinction, had you but the wit to grasp it, chick. The challenge of a signal from space that could stupefy and kill—”
“Why did the Senator die? No one else did.”
“The rules of the game require me to remind you that every serious question I answer seriously is gaining me points.”
“And any you can’t or won’t answer will gain me points.” She hoped.
He shrugged. “More people would have died had more been exposed. Your others were all mature, sedate, pacifistic scientists who had largely come to terms with reality. The destroyer activates a neural feedback that varies directly with intelligence and inversely with maturity. Thus an intelligent mature person is unaffected, or an unintelligent immature person. But an intelligent immature one is hit with all the voltage of the disparity between those qualities. The Senator was a primitive genius (I use the term loosely) — so he died. Brad was a medium-mature genius, as were the other scientists.”
“And what are you?” she inquired bitterly.
“I’m like the Senator, only more so. I’m smarter and less mature than he was. That was part of the challenge: to handle that alien signal, when its direct impact on me would have fried my brain — almost literally. I dare say I’m the brightest primitive ever to be spawned on Earth.”
She was not going to debate that. “You plan to do a lot of maturing in the next few hours — or whenever you decide to toddle off home?”
“Hardly. I’m happy the way I am. No point in going the way Brad did. I could, incidentally, have saved his life, there on Triton, had I been on hand. Not that you would have wanted me to.”
“What?” Afra knew that he was trying to shock her again. He was succeeding. He was also leading her on to more questions and so eroding her competitive position farther. Yet her recognition of this process did not halt it; she had to know. She was hooked on the bits of knowledge he injected.
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