When the opportunity finally came, Starn didn't like it. The worst aspect of it was that he would have to use his wife Cytherni, without her knowledge or agreement. This would be far less forgivable than the use Higgins had made of him, to get rid of the telehypnotic megalomaniac Nagister Nornt. Although Starn had required a little coaxing along the way, he had been a willing weapon in the hands of the Olsapern Minister of Domestic Defense. Nornt had abducted Cytherni, and that gave Starn ample reason of his own for wanting the man killed. Nevertheless, while he liked Higgins well enough, Starn could not quite forget that the man had used him. This was a source of antagonism that lingered after five years of frequent association between the two men. Higgins had done his duty effectively by using Starn, and had to be respected for that. But Starn couldn't admire him for it.
How, then, could he ever hope for Cytherni to forgive her own husband if he pulled the scheme he had in mind?
The idea hit him late one afternoon when, feeling frustrated by the slowness of his research work, he had left his workshop and strolled through the house to visit Cytherni's studio. She was working on a large abstract piece of paint-sculpture, so he perched on a stool to chat with her while he watched.
Paint-sculpting was a highly sophisticated and effective art form, and the process of creating in this field was a fascinating one to observe. The "canvas" was a threedimensional matrix of menergy—stuff related to the solid force fields which formed the Hard Line defensive barrier along the Olsapern border—into which paint was injected and precisely located through slender needles of unwettable insulation. The elements of the menergy matrix were flexible enough to allow limited motion, which was powered like the matrix itself by a small nuclear source that usually wound up well concealed in the finished work of art.
The injected paint did not dry; it remained liquid and mobile, but confined by the matrix elements to its proper place in the composition. It could gleam with the wetness of life, of glowing lips or bedewed leaves. And depending on the motions of matrix elements, lips could smile, leaves could quake, sunlit waters could ripple.
The art form was one which Cytherni had mastered quickly after coming to Olsapern country. Because of her Pack upbringing, her works had an appeal for the Olsaperns that was both primitive and exotic, and were in much demand.
In a way this bothered Starn. In the austere society of the Packs, a husband who did not provide for his family was a worthless creature, deserving of little respect. Conditions were, of course, different among the Olsaperns. The necessity of "earning a living" was a concept that didn't apply where advanced technologies supplied an abundance of the necessities and luxuries of life. A person's worth was judged by criteria other than his earning power.
Yet, even from the Olsapern viewpoint, the fact was that Cytherni was providing something society found worthwhile, and Starn was not. She was the valuable member of the family. And Starn, who chose to devote himself to investigation of the Novo senses, was doing something the Olsaperns not only failed to appreciate, but refused to recognize as even having potential value. Starn was as philosophical as he could be about this, but couldn't help feeling like a squaw-man sometimes. His self-esteem had to suffer terrific punishment, and would have suffered still more if he hadn't been thoroughly convinced of the importance of his researches. But all in all, he was not an unhappy man. He could appreciate his work though nobody else could—except, of course, his young son Billy and to some extent Cytherni. And he had his wife and boy.
For a man who was grimly determined to rip up the fabric of human society, Starn was about as content as any man could possibly be.
* * *
"What do you think you're grinning at?" Cytherni mock-scolded. Starn chuckled. "Same thing as usual. Those busts of Billy." He motioned toward the two lifesize replicas of their son's head and shoulders sitting side by side on a nearby table. "Maybe they're not great art to the Olsaperns, but I think they're the most delightful work you've done!"
"You're as bad as Billy!" she complained, although she was obviously pleased. "It's not enough for him to stand giggling at them for ten minutes at a time. After lunch today he brought three of his playmates in to join him."
"Did they see the humor?"
"Yes indeed. The little Carsen boy nearly split his sides. They're not that funny!"
"I'm not so sure," said Starn, walking over to take another close look at the heads.
Unlike her usual work, these were strictly representational. Each of them looked enough like Billy to be a color triphoto. And at first glance, there was no difference at all between the pair. Only after looking at them for a few moments would someone who knew the boy's parents realize that one of the pieces grasped that which was his mother in the son while the other portrayed him as a reincarnation of his father. To a large degree, these separate resemblances were brought out not by form but by subtle differences in motion of the head, eyes, eyebrows, lips and chin. The movements were all slight, but they succeeded in capturing the special little individual mannerisms of each parent.
The wonder of it to Starn was that Cytherni had been able to portray herself with such amused objectivity.
Why had she done the pair of portraits? His guess was that they had a religious significance to her, that they were an apologetic memorial to a god she no longer worshiped: the Sacred Gene, deity of the Packs.
"I know who would like to have them, and wouldn't find them funny at all," she remarked.
"Who?"
"The grandparents. The one with you in it for your folks, and the one I'm in for mine."
Starn nodded thoughtfully. Yes, his own parents would cherish that lifelike representation of Billy, especially so since they had never been permitted to learn that Starn himself had survived the conflict with Nagister Nornt. So would Cytherni's people in Pack Diston. Continuity of genetic inheritance was all-important to Pack people. A concrete reminder of Billy's existence would mean much to his grandparents.
"Do you suppose we can send them the portraits?" asked Cytherni.
"We can ask Higgins about it tonight," said Starn. "It will be up to him to say if it's all right."
"You'll ask him?" Cytherni persisted.
"Yes, after supper when he's full of venison steak."
She nodded her satisfaction.
But Starn had little doubt that Higgins' answer would be negative. Because . . . well, he could imagine a number of reasons the Defense Minister might consider important.
That was when the idea struck him. He fought against it for a while, dismayed by the personal unhappiness it could bring to his wife—and also to himself and to Billy.
But he had a strong conviction his scheme would work, while nothing else would.
So, if Higgins did turn down their request, and if Cytherni's desire to get the portraits to the grandparents was as determined as Starn suspected, then . . .
"Why so silent, lover?" Cytherni asked.
"Oh . . . thinking about my work," said Starn, "trying to figure out how to make some progress with it." Which was true enough.
Cytherni smiled encouragingly. "Give yourself time, Starn. You'll do it."
"Maybe." He stood up. "I'll give it a little more effort before supper."
He walked back toward his workshop, but detoured into the flier port on the way. If he tried his scheme, there were preparations to be made, precautions to be taken, things to be checked.
He spent several minutes going over the flier, and examining the emergency supplies and equipment in its luggage compartment. He added a few more items from his workshop and the kitchen shelves. Then he stood in the port, gazing at the craft in momentary uncertainty. There would be at least one tracking device on the flier, probably several. Without question, he and Cytherni were kept under close surveillance by Higgins' department. Nothing less than that would make sense. While he and Cytherni had been welcomed into Olsapern society and given all the freedom of other Olsapern citizens, the fact remained that they were enemy aliens by birth and upbringing. The Minister of Domestic Defense would have had to be stupid indeed not to keep close tabs on their behavior.
So the ship contained trackers—and for that matter so doubtless did his own body, and Cytherni's, perhaps Billy's as well. And a tracker could do double duty as an auditory pickup, a bug. On his forays against Nagister Nornt, Starn's fortunes had been followed from a distance, through such devices in his body, by Olsapern observers and mop-up men.
The trackers in the flier, he decided, would have to be left undisturbed. But not those in himself, his wife, and son. They had to be put out of action when the proper time came.
And he wasn't at all sure he could knock out the trackers by the method he had in mind! If he failed, his scheme was doomed from the beginning—and the Olsaperns certainly would not allow him sufficient freedom afterward to try again.
A man had to be pretty desperate, he suddenly realized, to forge ahead with so risky an enterprise. But if he passed up the opportunity Cytherni had unwittingly provided, when, if ever, would he get another?
He couldn't back down.
After Higgins and Starn were settled down to the enjoyment of a couple of pre-supper drinks, the conversation was inconsequential for a while. Then Higgins asked in a slighting tone, "Well, lad, I suppose you're still trying to make sense out of the Novo senses?" Starn nodded. He had hoped Higgins would bring the subject up during this visit. "Yes, I'm still at it. In fact, I think I'm making some progress. There's something I'd like you to look at while you're here."
Higgins grimaced. "No thanks. Such things are out of my line. If you think you've discovered something worth consideration by others, take it up with some expert in the field."
"Such as who?" demanded Starn with a humorless grin. "You have no experts on the Novo senses—only experts in saying the field isn't worth studying."
Higgins shrugged. "Well, they ought to know! I wish, Starn, that you would get this pointless obsession out of your system, and devote yourself to valuable work. It's a shame for a creative talent such as yours to go to waste. I mean that! You've got one of the best minds on Earth, and one that has become well-educated since you left the Packs. Why can't you put it to work on one of the major unsolved mysteries of science, for instance?"
"Aside from the fact that I think what I'm doing is more important," Starn answered slowly, "there's also the point that I haven't lived with my Olsapern education long enough to use it with the ease a creative researcher needs. My memory's full of new information, but somehow that information is not wholly available to my thinking processes. For example, I've learned a great deal about microlek circuitry, but I don't think I'll ever be able to use that learning to discover a useful new circuit. In the work I'm doing now, when I need to devise a circuit, I seem to fall back on what I've known about basic electricity ever since I was a boy."
He shook his head and added, "Even if my mind is all you say it is, I can't compete with Olsapern scientists who grew up knowing things I've just learned for the first time. I wish I could. If I could really bring Olsapern science to bear on the problem of the Novo senses, well, I imagine the results would startle all of us! That's what gripes me, Higgins. You have people with the background and ability to break open a vast area of knowledge—knowledge about man himself!—but these people's minds are completely closed. Your so-called experts won't give the Novo senses the briefest attention!"
Higgins chuckled. "We've been over all this before, Starn. I've explained the limitations of Novo senses that make them a dead end. The human nervous system has to function within its structural boundaries. Your best telepaths, for instance, have a range of little more than half a mile. But through the use of his vocal chords, aided by languages and electronic devices conceived by his fertile imagination, the ordinary man can communicate over distances of millions of miles.
"So, when you start trying to develop Novo senses, you can't go very far before you come to an impassable barrier, erected by the limited size and power of the human brain. That stops you cold! Whereas, if you would forget these Novo senses, and put your bet on the unlimited ability of the imagination to devise means of extending and strengthening our natural abilities—means such as languages, telescopes, power tools, powered vehicles, and so on—no stopping place is ever reached!"
"But what you refuse to see," complained Starn, "is that the Novo senses are natural abilities, just waiting to be extended and strengthened! You're concentrating on aiding only a few of our senses while neglecting a vast unexplored range!"
Higgins frowned. Starn had never expressed his views in just that way before, and it gave the Defense Minister a thought to pause over. "In a way, that's true, Starn. But by its very nature, science has to be universally applicable. The results of an experiment must be verifiable by another experimenter, working under strictly specified and controlled conditions. And the products of science, therefore, must be useful to everyone. Even if telepathy were likely to survive as a human sense—which it is not, of course—the scientist could not afford to waste much of his energies trying to produce a . . . a pathoscope . . . to permit telepaths to read minds over great distances. Not unless telepathy became universal. At this time not even a majority of Pack men have it."
"We don't know that," objected Starn. "We only know that a minority of people have enough telepathy for it to be useful. Maybe everybody has a touch of it, waiting to be amplified and extended. That's one of the possibilities we ought to be investigating."
"However," grinned Higgins, "none of the regular senses are subliminal. We have enough sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch to use very well the way we're born with them. I can't take this idea of 'hidden senses' very seriously."
"What you say reminds me of what the common-sense folk said when inventors were working on the first aircraft," Starn remarked. " 'If God meant for man to fly, He would have given us wings."'
Higgins laughed. "Trying to win an argument with you, Starn, is a task I hope my life never depends upon!
You always have a comeback! Unfortunately, though, scientific discoveries aren't made by winning debates. Discoveries require demonstrable proof, not argument."
"And you or nobody else is about to look at what demonstrable proof I have," Starn finished sadly. "Oh, well. How's your own work going, Higgins?"
"Fine."
"The defense system's working like a well-oiled machine, huh?"
Higgins puckered his lips. "I wish you wouldn't bring up the word 'oil,"' he complained wryly. "That's one of my biggest headaches."
"Oil is?" asked Starn as if he didn't know.
"Yes."
"Isn't oil easy to produce?"
"Well, that depends on the oil. Some kinds are very difficult to synthesize out of vegetable products. We must still depend on natural petroleum deposits for those. The trouble is that the deposits were badly drained during the Science Age, to use as fuel, of all things!" He sipped his drink and added, "Of course we've located new deposits, but they're subject to strict conservation restrictions, which allow us to tap only twenty percent of known reserves at any time. As of right now, we've used sixteen percent, and no new oil has been discovered lately. I'd hate to see us forced by necessity to ease our conservation policy, and start plundering the planet the way our ancestors did."
Starn nodded. "Cut down on your need for the oils you can't synthesize," he suggested.
"Oh, we've done that. But for certain types of heavy defense equipment—"
"That's what I mean. Cut down on your need for defense equipment. Make peace with the Packs." Higgins laughed. "Not only does it take two to make a fight, lad; it takes two to make peace once the fight has started. When I say 'defense' equipment I'm not employing a euphemism. You know as well as I that it is the Packs who really have the tradition of combat. You yourself were a warrior by profession! If we want to keep our land orderly, we have to keep Pack raiders out, and keep their conflicts among themselves down to a reasonable level. No, we need the defenses we have in operable condition, Starn."
"I suppose so," the younger man replied. "Tell me, Higgins, can you get the oil out of deep shale deposits?"
"Shale underground? Yes, a special sweating process was developed years ago for that. Why do you ask?"
"Because I know where such a deposit is," Starn replied casually, although this was the disclosure he had been building toward. "It's about thirty miles southwest of Norhog Mountain. The oil shale is seventy feet thick, lies about twenty-six hundred feet below the surface, and has an area of a little more than nine square miles." Higgins put his drink down so hard that some sloshed onto the table. "What . . . how . . . ?"
Starn got up and pulled a map from his desk. "This shows its outline, marked in red," he said, handing the map over.
Higgins clutched the paper and stared at the marked area. Finally he looked up. "Are you sure about this? Deep shale deposits aren't easy to detect, the oil experts tell me. Whose equipment did you use, and how did you happen to go looking for oil? I thought you were all wrapped up in this Novo sense business."
"This is Novo sense business," said Starn. "The equipment I used was some I made myself, based on the ancient dowsing rod. Only I didn't use the equipment myself. Billy was the operator. He seems to have a stronger perception sense. We hit upon that shale oil deposit by accident during a short camping trip I took him on in late spring. I made a game out of it for the boy. We crisscrossed the area in the flier for an hour or so while he mapped the deposit's boundaries."
Higgins threw the map down with a grunt of disgust.
"I should've guessed it would be something like that, coming from you!" he huffed. He finished the remains of his drink and stared angrily at the wall while Starn refilled his glass.
"I thought of drilling an exploratory well, to prove the oil is there," said Starn, "but decided to leave that up to you. If you need oil so badly, you can't afford not to send somebody out there to take a look."
"Nonsense! There's no oil there!"
"There might be, for all you know," Starn replied. "If you need an excuse, you can always say you were looking through some old geological studies and found previously ignored indications that the area might yield oil."
"Forget it, Starn! I'm not wasting anybody's time by sending them on a wild-goose chase!"
Starn shrugged and changed the subject. But he noticed that Higgins glanced sideways at the map several times before Cytherni called them to supper.
The venison steak quickly brought Higgins out of the grumpy mood Starn had gotten him into. "I'll leave it to others to gush over your paint-sculptures, Cytherni," he said when he finally pushed away from the table. "What you do in the kitchen is art enough for me!"
"Thank you," she murmured modestly.
"Cythie's done a couple of pieces since you were here before," Starn said, "that you might like. Come take a look at them, won't you?"
Higgins regarded him with friendly suspicion. "Nothing Novo-sensey about them, is there?"
"No," Starn laughed. "No more of that tonight."
"All right."
Cytherni led the way into her studio where Higgins admired the busts of Billy with genuine approval. At length Starn said, "We were thinking the boy's grandparents would enjoy these more than anybody else. Could you arrange to have one delivered at Foser Compound and the other at Diston Compound?"
Higgins thought about it for a moment, then shook his head regretfully. "I'm afraid not. It would be unwise to remind your families of yourselves, and especially of your son. Those portraits would be a constant source of agitation, I'm afraid. The Packs recognized you as a remarkable man, Starn, with an ability that was unheard of—your trick of acting swiftly, without an instant of forethought that a telepath could detect. If they were reminded by these portraits that you had a son who is in our hands, there's no telling what ridiculous lengths they would go to, trying to get him away from us. It's best for everybody, Starn, for them not to know for sure that Cytherni ever recovered from her trauma sufficiently to give birth to her child, or to have even the slightest suspicion—which one of these portraits might arouse—that you are alive."
He looked at them and saw the deep disappointment in Cytherni's face. "I'm really sorry," he said sincerely.
"I know the grandparents would love to have these, but . . . well, I'm sorry."
"That's O.K.," said Starn. "We know how it is."
But Cytherni said nothing, and had a stubborn glint in her eyes, Starn noticed.
As soon as Higgins'flier lifted away into the dark night Cytherni erupted. "Starn, I'm not going to just forget—" He put his hand over his mouth and looked meaningfully at her. She fell silent.
"Let's go inside," he said. "Did you see the drawings Billy brought home from school this morning?" he asked.
"They're over here. Maybe he's an artist, too. Come take a look."
"He didn't say anything to me—" Cytherni began in a puzzled tone, following Starn to the desk.
He picked up a note pad and wrote on it: "Don't answer out loud. How badly do you want the portraits delivered?"
She took the pad and scrawled in large angry letters:
"VERY!"
Starn wrote: "O.K., we'll deliver them ourselves."
Cytherni: "How and when?"
Starn: "By flier. We leave before dawn."
For a moment Cytherni seemed about to reject the idea. She wrote: "We can't leave Billy by himself." Starn: "We'll take him along."
Cytherni: "Higgins will throw a fit!"
Starn: "Let him." He was glad he was writing instead of saying all this. A frog of guilt was clogging his throat. Cytherni: "I'll go alone. You stay with Billy."
Starn: "We share everything including trouble. We all go, or nobody goes."
Cytherni's eyes moistened, and suddenly she kissed him. "All right," she wrote, "what do we have to do?" Starn: "Leave that to me. Let's get to bed." Aloud he said, "Well, what do you think of Billy's art?"
"Perhaps he takes more after you than me," she said. Starn chuckled.
At four a.m. Starn woke. He rose quietly and went into his workshop where he paused uncertainly, asking himself if, in the near-dawn of a new day, he really wanted to go through with this.
His determination overrode his misgivings. He sat down at the bench on which the small dowser machine was perched and picked up the sensor unit. Slowly, he explored his arms and legs with the device, moving it along his skin with only a fraction of an inch keeping it from touching him. He needed to practice that, because when he was through with himself he would have to search Cytherni and Billy the same way, but without waking them.
As he had expected, the machine told his perception of no device in arms or legs. Limbs can be lost in accidents, making them poor locations for tracker bugs. He was relieved when an examination of his head failed to wiggle the rod needles. He went on to explore his body.
The device was buried inside his rib cage, near the front and to the right. When he found it, he took readings on it from several directions, to pinpoint its location as finely as his not-too-precise machine would permit. Then came the crucial job: the destruction of the bug. With access to the proper Olsapern surgical equipment, the device could have simply been removed, painlessly and without leaving a scar. But Starn had no such equipment. He had to take the far less certain course of attempting to knock out the bug and leave its wreckage in place.
One of the difficulties was that he had no sample bug with which to experiment. He had to assume the device was similar in construction to other small microlek gadgets, and could be disrupted by a focused ultrasonic beam, which was the only tool at Starn's disposal that seemed remotely likely to do the job.
He had to use the beam cautiously. If the focus fell outside the bug rather than inside it, the ultrasonics could produce potentially dangerous internal injuries. He positioned the beamer with care, and triggered a three-second burst. He felt a tingle but no real pain, so the focus probably had been on target.
At any rate he had to assume that. Somewhere miles away, in some Domestic Defense installation, a point of light on a map had suddenly gone dark, he guessed. And perhaps, too, an alarm had gone off. He would have to move fast from now on.
He took his equipment into the bedroom where Cytherni was still sleeping soundly. Luckily for his purpose, she was lying on her back, and he quickly learned that her tracker bug was located similarly to his own. When he hit it with the ultrasonics she did not flinch, but stirred slightly. He quickly shoved his equipment under the bed and out of sight.
Cytherni opened her eyes and started to speak. He laid his fingers on her lips for an instant. She nodded, and he gestured the message that she should go prepare breakfast.
When she was in the kitchen Starn took his equipment to Billy's bedside. The boy didn't wake when Starn triggered the ultrasonics, which was all to the good. The longer he slept, the longer telltale conversation could be delayed.
Twenty minutes later, after a silent, hurried breakfast with Cytherni, Starn helped her place the portraits in cushioned cartons and load them into the flier. Then he carried the still-sleeping Billy aboard and bedded him comfortably on the long passenger seat. With Cytherni beside him, he sat down at the controls, turned on the engines, and lifted the craft out of its housing and into a steep, southward climb.
He didn't really expect immediate pursuit. What he was doing was far from an everyday occurrence. Whatever Olsapern defensemen were keeping vigil at this hour of the morning should, for a little while, be more puzzled than alarmed by whatever their instruments were telling them. By the time they swung into action, he hoped, he would be far to the south of the Hard Line. Then they could pursue him, but not intercept him.
As it turned out no pursuit at all materialized. Not once did another flier come within craft-radar range as Starn streaked south, high over the Hard Line and into Pack territory.
"Hey! Are we going camping?" Billy piped suddenly, waking up and staring around.
Starn turned in his seat and grinned at the boy. "Good morning, sleepy-head. We're delivering some presents."
"Oh. What happened to breakfast?"
"We brought yours along," said his mother, rising.
"Come sit up front with Daddy and I'll get it."
The boy took her place and stared out curiously. The sun was rising and he remarked knowingly, "We're going south!"
"That's right," said Starn. "We're taking presents to my mommy and daddy, and to Mommy's mommy and daddy."
Billy thought this over while Cytherni snapped his tray into the seat-rack. "Will we get to see them?" he asked.
"No. We'll drop their presents by chute."
Billy nodded thoughtfully and began eating.
"I'll put the chutes on now," said Cytherni.
"Better put one on yourself, for safety," said Starn carefully. "Unless you want to pilot while I toss them out."
"No, I'll do it." Cytherni strapped on a chute and busied herself with the packages.
"At this altitude we'd better put on helmets, too, before I open the hatch," said Starn.
"I will when I finish eating," said Billy.
Several minutes passed. "Coming up on Diston Compound in thirty seconds," Starn announced, mashing the hatch-control button.
Billy snorted as the air thinned and put on his helmet.
"Where?" he asked, craning his neck. "I want to see."
"There," Starn pointed.
Billy busied himself with the magniviewer, with which he was quite proficient, and studied the close-up appearance of his mother's home village with intense curiosity. Starn, meanwhile, was timing the drop and keeping an eye on Cytherni in the rearview mirror.
"About time now," he warned. "Be careful around that open hatch."
"O.K. Say when," Cytherni's voice sounded in his helmet phones over the roar of wind past the open hatch in front of her.
"Five seconds," replied Starn. "Two, one, now!" Cytherni pushed a carton out, and leaned forward to watch it fall, one hand grasping the edge of the opening while she needlessly shielded her goggle-protected eyes from the wind with the other.
"Chute's working fine," she reported, "Good. We're about two minutes from Foser Compound. Get the other one in position."
"Can I help?" asked Billy, stirring in his seat.
"No," said Starn tightly. "Stay where you are so you can see the Compound."
"In fact," said Starn, "I'd better strap you in to make sure you do." He leaned over and snapped the safety belt in place over the boy's middle.
"Good idea," approved Cytherni. "It's too windy back here for you, Billy."
"There's Foser Compound now, son," Starn pointed. The boy's attention was again glued on the magniviewer.
"See the river? I swam there when I was your age."
"How's the time?" demanded Cytherni.
"Eighteen seconds yet. No hurry," said Starn, hoping he did not sound as tight as he felt. "Five . . . Two, one, now!"
The second carton went through the hatch and again Cytherni leaned after it with her precarious onehanded grip.
Starn's teeth clenched as he gave the control wheel a sudden jerk. The flier rolled to the left and swerved to the right . . . and Cytherni was jerked through the hatch.
"Starn! I fell out!" Her voice yelped in his earphones.
"Your chute!" he snapped.
"It's working. I'm all right. We must have hit an air pocket! I was holding on, Starn!" she apologized. "Really I was!"
"Don't worry about it," said Starn. "I'll bring the flier down after you, and pick you up."
"No! Not here, with Billy aboard!" she objected.
"I'll try to make it quick," argued Starn.
"Absolutely no!" Cytherni ruled. "I won't permit our son to have contact with these telepaths! You know how I feel about that!"
Indeed Starn did. He felt the same way himself, to some extent. As children, he and his wife had been obliged to try to channel their very thoughts into lines approved by Pack society, and enforced by Pack telepaths. Cytherni had never adjusted to these mental restrictions, and had not been truly happy until happenstance left her among the Olsaperns, who were not only nontelepathic but detested all the Novo senses.
In Starn's judgment, a brief encounter with the disapproval of Pack telepaths might be unpleasant for Billy, but would be a challenge that might actually do the boy more good than harm. After all, Billy was over six years old, and already had a self-confidence that was not easily shaken. But Cytherni could not take that rational view—in fact, Starn had counted on her reacting in just this manner.
"Besides," she was saying, "you should stay up beyond telepathic range. It's bad enough for them to learn what I know! Oh, Starn, why did I get us into this awful mess?"
"Easy, dearest!" he soothed. "It's not as awful as all that! Despite what the Olsaperns think, I don't believe a knowledge of the strength of Olsapern civilization will turn the Packs into jungle animals! A lot of Olsapern ideas about genetic history are pure rot, used to justify the Olsaperns' belief in their own superiority. The Packs aren't on the edge of a genetic collapse!"
"I hope you're right," responded Cytherni uncertainly.
"But just the same, you and Billy stay up there!"
"All right," agreed Starn. "It's too late to hope to keep this little jaunt a secret from Higgins, anyway. I'll circle till you're down safely. The Olsapern defensemen can come later to pick you up. Is that O.K.?"
"Yes."
"One thing, Cythie," Starn said hesitantly. "Whatever happens, remember that I love you . . . very much."
"I do, too, Mommy!" put in Billy, who had been sitting still, in shocked dismay, ever since his mother tumbled from the flier.
"Bless you both!" she sobbed.
When she was safely on the ground Starn returned the flier to a straight course.
"Mommy will be all right, won't she?" asked Billy.
"Yes, the Fosers will be nice to her," Starn assured him.
That satisfied the boy, and he again turned his attention to their flight. "We're still going south," he remarked.
"Southwest," said Starn.
"Not going home?" Billy asked.
"No . . . since your mommy's not there."
This made sense to Billy. He nodded. "Camping, then?"
"Yes, we're going camping."
"Will you let me shoot this time?"
Starn nodded. "Yes, I'll show you how to shoot."
"Oh boy!" exclaimed Billy in delight.
Starn put the controls on automatic, with the flight computer programmed to keep the southwest heading for eight hours and then bring the flier down for a landing. That would put the craft far south of the equator, and over the ocean. With the hatch left open, the flier would sink when it landed.
He left his seat and went into the back of the flier where he had stored the equipment and supplies. He bundled the stuff stoutly into two chute packs and placed them by the hatch. He strapped the one remaining chute to himself.
"Where are we going to camp?" asked Billy.
"That'll be a surprise. Somewhere you haven't been before." By now, Starn was certain, Olsapern ears were straining for every word of conversation detected by the flier's bugs. He wanted to say nothing that would tell more of his destination than the Olsaperns could learn from the path of the flier. In fact, he hoped to make them uncertain of the exact time he chuted out.
He went forward to stand by Billy's chair, and gazed down at the landscape for a moment. They were already well into the modest heights of the northern end of the mountain range. Packs were scattered through these hills, but not farther south, where the peaks soared high and discouragingly steep. In old times, Starn knew, even the tallest mountains felt the tread of man's boots, and the blades of his dozers. But now the heart of the range stood wrapped in lonely grandeur, unwanted by men too engrossed in other pursuits to expend their energies exploring territory that was, after all, thoroughly mapped by their ancestors. The dense cover of fir and pine now sheltered only such creatures as were there before men came, and after men left.
The taller peaks were coming into view as Starn watched. He unsnapped the breakfast tray from Billy's chair and helped the boy to his feet.
"Now," he said, "no more talking. I have a special reason. O.K.?"
Billy looked up at him with wide eyes, and nodded. Starn patted him approvingly on the head and led him back through the cabin. From some extra cargo straps he rigged a body-harness for the boy, and tied a strapend tightly around his own belt. He intended to chute out carrying the boy in his arms, but if the wind tore them apart the harness would enable him to pull the boy back.
As an afterthought he removed both their helmets, which were probably as trackable as bugs to the Olsaperns. And for the hundredth time since the trip started, he wondered if he had really succeeded in disrupting their body bugs. He shrugged. He would know in an hour or two. If the Olsapern defensemen came swarming down around them, the bugs would still be doing their job.
He leaned out the hatch from time to time to study the land below. The sun was now high enough for him to judge the roughness of terrain by the size, shape, and depth of shadows, without which the rugged hills would have appeared paper-flat from the flier's altitude.
At last he decided the mountains were as high and desolate as they were going to get. He motioned Billy to him, cradled the boy tightly against his chest, kicked the chute packs out the hatch, and jumped after them.
The flier was already out of sight when he thought to look for it. Billy was hammering his arm with a little fist.
"What is it, son?" he said.
"Can I talk now?" Billy asked.
Cytherni was, by nature, a blabber-brain. It was this trait that had made her childhood and adolescence in Pack Diston so miserable. Her mind simply refused self-censorship, and the very act of attempting to direct it into the channels prescribed by Pack mores was all too likely to trigger the forbidden thought-train she was trying hardest to avoid. Throughout her early years she had felt a cloud of disapproval hovering about her wherever she went.
Her marriage to Starn, and entry into Pack Foser, had partially dispersed this cloud, not due to any conscious effort on her part but simply because being Starn's wife preoccupied her mind with thoughts that were quite normal for a young married woman and, therefore, thoroughly acceptable.
But not until she had lived among the Olsaperns for a while did she come to appreciate that the untamable quality of her mind could be anything but a disastrous handicap, that it was indeed the kind of mind that creates most of the world's great art. A mind that accepts the discipline of form, but that insists on having its way about content.
Not surprisingly, after basking in Olsapern approval for several years, her mind was now less controllable than ever.
Thus, the people of Pack Foser had learned, within an hour after she chuted down in a nearby cabbage field, more about Olsapern civilization and Olsapern world views than any followers of the Sacred Gene had ever known before. The knowledge was greeted with shock, surprise, dismay, and some disbelief, but mostly with disdain.
And the news of it began to spread, in the usual erratic way, through telepathic farmers who lived within range of both the Compound and more distant telepaths. Also, a messenger on horseback was sent to carry the word of Cytherni's return to Diston Compound some thirty-five miles away.
"Please don't read me!" she had begged when the men had come running from Foser Compound to the spot where she landed. "It might hurt you!"
Of course her plea had no effect. They read, and talked, and read.
Her first encounter with Starn's old crony Rob, after she was brought into the Compound, was more or less typical. It began with surprise at the emblem of Raid Leader that adorned Rob's belt, and at hearing him addressed as "Foser." Later she learned that the old Foser had died quite recently, and Rob had been elevated to the Pack chieftainship but was retaining his old post until a new Raid Leader could be competitively selected.
She was surprised because she remembered Rob as a pleasant fellow for a telepath, but nevertheless a coward. Could he be a Raid Leader of Pack Foser, she wondered, after a man like Starn? But, she recalled, Rob had done one brave, almost foolhardy, thing: he had volunteered to go with some Olsapern defensemen on a mission across the Hard Line, to monitor and validate to Starn a lecture on genetic history by the Olsapern scientist Richhold. Starn had related the details of that meeting to her, and she recalled them well, including the fact that Rob's memory of the affair was erased before he was returned home.
"So that's what happened!" remarked Rob with a cold smile. "I've often wondered. And Starn says this Richhold had me halfway convinced, huh?"
Cytherni nodded. Richhold's lecture had been an eyeopener for both of the young Pack men, who knew of the infidel theories of the Olsaperns but had not previously been exposed to the evidence on which the theories were based. It was much later before Starn arrived at some theories of his own that accounted for the evidence at least as well as did the beliefs of the Olsaperns.
Starn had been "present" at the lecture through an artificial body, and Rob had been unable to read him because his brain was far away, in the hospital, directing the growth of a new normal body to replace the one damaged beyond repair when Starn and Huill made their first attack on Nagister Nornt . . .
"An artificial body I couldn't read?" Rob demanded in astonishment.
Yes. She recalled the one time she had seen that body, apparently bleeding from a dozen wounds but actually oozing red oil while it made its terrifying final assault on Nornt in his cavern hideaway. She had been pregnant with Billy then—Billy William Huill—and she had cowered until Nornt was frightened completely out of his mind and then she had shot him herself and what she thought was Starn was lying dead on the floor and . . .
"Stop!" grunted Rob. "You named your son after Huill?"
"We call him Billy. Huill was such a good friend—for a telepath—and so brave . . . the way he died. He was a real chum, he and Starn at ease together, but Rob here always uncomfortable . . . wanting to be a chum but . . . That's why he went to Richhold with the defensemen that time! Huill had been killed, which left him a live coward with his brave friends gone. So he was trying to—make up for it! Maybe he still is!"
"O.K.!" Rob rasped, his thin face showing red behind his beard. "So I know what fear is! I also have learned how to fight it, because a man does what he has to!"
"I'm sorry," murmured Cytherni.
"Never mind," Rob said in disgust. "You've turned Olsapern, that's for sure! I shouldn't expect anything better from the likes of you! What a man like Starn ever saw—" He strode angrily about the room in which he was interviewing her, trying to regain his composure.
"Did he admire Starn so much?" Cytherni wondered in surprise. She had never suspected it. But that would help explain . . .
"Look!" Rob yelped. "What about these theories of Starn's, and what's he up to?"
How was she supposed to answer that? She understood Starn's work about as well as he did her art—which wasn't much. Did Starn view her work with the same kind of fond but uninterested indulgence with which she viewed his? Let's see . . . His main idea was that the Packs and the Olsaperns each had a segment of the truth, but to get anywhere they would have to put these segments together. But since they would not, he was working alone, trying to apply what he had learned of Olsapern science to understanding and extending the Novo senses. He was making some progress, especially when he worked with Billy's perception sense. They had discovered a large oil deposit and he tried last night to interest Higgins in it . . . Starn took disappointment awfully well. He took Higgins' rejection so good-naturedly last night, even though she knew how determined he was to get his work accepted.
"Are you sure you have the right understanding of what Starn's trying to do?" Rob demanded in disbelief. Cytherni frowned. Well, she thought she understood it fairly well. A combining of science and the Novo senses . . .
"Sacrilege!" muttered Rob. Cytherni blinked. She had never thought of it that way, but it was true. In the view of the Packs, the gifts of the Sacred Gene would be profaned by contact with the cursed evils of the Science Age. And for that matter, she realized, the Olsaperns' objections amounted to the same thing, except that they saw the positions of good and evil reversed.
Thank heavens she hadn't let Starn land the flier here to pick her up! Not that his old friends in Pack Foser would have . . . have harmed him, but they would have made their condemnation plain. And luckily it was she, not he, who had fallen from the flier.
"Starn's changed in more ways than one," Rob commented sadly. "The man who was our Raid Leader would never have let his wife do the more dangerous of two tasks."
What did Rob mean by that? Oh, yes. Starn piloting the flier while she pushed the packs out the hatch. Well, she was on her feet, having got up to bring Billy his breakfast, and Starn was the better pilot, and she wanted to make sure the right pack was dropped at the right Compound, and . . .
Bob was shaking his head. "You don't think he's changed," he said, "but that still doesn't sound like Starn to me."
On second thought, it didn't sound like Starn to her, either. But . . . well, people are complicated. They don't stay in what we think is their character all the time. So this morning Starn's chivalry had slipped a little. Perhaps he was quietly annoyed with her for getting them involved in such a silly adventure "Then this trip was your idea?" asked Rob.
Yes . . . or . . . well . . . Starn had put the idea into actual words first, but he was just going along with her desire to get the portraits of Billy to the grandparents.
"You think he was just going along with your wishes,"
Rob corrected her. "You don't know that."
You crummy, prying telepaths do the knowing.
"And knowing's not the supreme pleasure you think it is," Rob commented sourly. He paused, either to think or to communicate with someone outside, then said, "If you don't understand Starn's work, you probably don't understand Olsapern science. You know some of the things it can do, but not how."
Yes. Starn understands it better, but he complains about how little he really comprehends. But Billy, starting as a child, will learn it all.
All I know is the products—menergy, artificial bodies and new bodies, fliers, power sources the size of peas that last for years, beautiful houses and clothing and . . . What am I doing to you!
Rob grunted. "What we're learning isn't hurting us! Don't be afraid of that! Knowledge of Olsapern science won't shock us into primitivism like they claim. How is it the Olsaperns I've seen—the trading-post men, the flier pilots and defensemen—don't know about all this?" Because they're not the bright ones. They don't care to learn, so they're not taught much. They're the only ones allowed in reading distance of Pack men. What they know won't hurt you.
Rob chuckled caustically. "Or won't let us learn anything that could hurt the Olsaperns! What a pack of idiots!" He prowled restlessly about the room for a moment, then added, "But perhaps more dangerous, and less idiotic, than their dull-witted front men led us to believe. Unwittingly, Cytherni, you've done the Packs a great service today. We've been underestimating the power of the evil forces in the world. We know those forces better now, and can deal with them accordingly." He hesitated for several seconds before saying, "If the other Packs share the views of the men of Foser, there will be no more trading with—or raiding of—the Olsapern trading posts, for one thing. No further association at all."
"But the Olsaperns want friendship eventually," Cytherni protested aloud. "They want the peoples to come together!"
"Not while Pack men have their Novo senses, they don't," Rob contradicted.
This, Cytherni had to admit, was true. Obviously, her unplanned visit to Foser Compound had done more damage to Pack-Olsapern relations than could be repaired in a dozen generations. Every thought that passed through her head only seemed to make matters worse. She had to get out of Pack country!
"A flier landed several minutes ago, to dicker for your release," Rob informed her. "But I don't know if we'll let them have you. It's true you're more Olsapern than Pack woman now, but perhaps you're not beyond rehabilitation. Perhaps you can still be reclaimed for some worthy purpose of the Sacred Gene. Why haven't you and Starn had any children since Billy? Were you Treated?"
No. We could have children but . . . but—
"You're not sure of the answer," said Rob. "Maybe it was Starn's doing."
No. Why? Birth control is so simple there that . . . No, that's not it. I used to want children, but then I didn't.
Yes, I did, too, but I didn't want Starn to feel confined by a large family "Starn wanted children, too," said Rob. He studied her intently, attempting to ferret out thoughts that had never been fully conscious with her. At last he asked, "Did you feel, perhaps, that Starn was not ready to settle down to family life, that his work or something would require him, sooner or later, to take action that would be made more difficult for him by a large family?"
That sounded almost right. "I felt that he wasn't quite . . . domesticated," she said slowly.
Rob frowned and grunted. "I think maybe you were right. I'm having those Olsapern defensemen invited in. They won't know much, but maybe I can learn something from just what they don't know."
Let me go home with them. Please. I belong with Starn and Billy.
Rob shrugged impatiently and said nothing.
When the two defensemen were brought in a few minutes later, one was carrying an audiovisual transceiver equipped with droplegs. On its screen was the face of Higgins. Cytherni was relieved to see this trusted friend taking a personal hand in obtaining her release. Rob ignored the transceiver, and snapped a question at the defensemen. "Where's the flier she fell from?" The Olsaperns looked startled and remained silent.
"I suggest you direct your questions at me, Foser,"
Higgins' cross voice came from the speaker. "I'm—"
"I know who you are, Higgins," said Rob coldly. "I'll talk to you, but let it be understood that I take your failure to come dicker in person as an admission of your inferiority. We have Cytherni's knowledge now, so your old alibi of shielding us from damaging information no longer holds up. From now on you'll have to admit to yourselves that you're avoiding contact with us out of fear."
"Think what you please, Foser," retorted Higgins.
"I'm not parleying with you to argue that matter, but to obtain the return of Cytherni. I assume you know my offer—two special shipments of tropical fruits per winter to Foser Compound for a period of fifteen years, with the . . . "
"Your offer is rejected," said Rob. "The Pack's conditions for the release of Cytherni is that she will be exchanged for her son Huill—Billy to you—when and if you capture Starn and the boy."
"Capture?" demanded Higgins innocently.
"Don't play games, Higgins!" Rob growled. "Don't try to pretend that Starn came dashing back to you for help after Cytherni fell out of the flier! That's what Starn led her to believe he'd do, but I don't buy it! Now, my deal is this: You catch Starn and the boy, turn the boy over to the Pack, with which he belongs, and Cytherni can either go or stay as she wishes. The boy is only six, and has the Novo sense of a Pack man. Even if his parents have turned Olsapern it's not too late to save him. That's the deal, Higgins. The only deal I'm offering."
Higgins' face stared threateningly for a moment before he grated, "Cytherni's misadventure has lifted the lid in more ways than one, Foser! We can recover her, whether you like it or not. We can flood Foser Compound with a sleep gas, for instance, that will knock all of you out. Our men could then safely remove Cytherni and, as an object lesson, sterilize every man, woman and child in the Pack!"
Rob laughed at him. "I imagine you could do that, Higgins, but I don't imagine you will. Not while Starn is on the loose you won't! You want Cytherni back, but that's not your primary objective. What damage she could do you was done during the first half hour after she landed. Except as bait for Starn, she's no longer important enough to warrant drastic action. And since Starn dumped her here, you can't really be sure she's attractive bait!"
"I wasn't dumped!" cried Cytherni, dismayed by the implications of the word, and by Rob's stubbornness.
"I fell!"
Rob turned to her and said in a more gentle tone than he had used before, "You were dumped, Cytherni. I'm sorry, but that's the way it was. Starn's flier didn't just happen to hit an air pocket, in the middle of a smooth flight, at the precise instant when you were hanging out the hatch. And it didn't just happen that you were unloading the chute packs instead of him. Or that he proposed starting the trip at an hour when Billy would have to be taken along. Or that Higgins isn't disputing my statement that Starn hasn't returned." He glanced at Higgins and said, "Cytherni believes this whole trip was her doing, not Starn's. There were some portraits of the boy she wanted delivered to the grandparents, you know. If you had agreed to deliver them last night, you would have wrecked Starn's scheme."
Higgins cursed angrily. "Why didn't you ask me to do it, Cytherni?" he demanded. "I'd have found a way. But Starn had me annoyed over one of his ridiculous arguments, and . . . well, when he asked me, I turned him down."
"Maybe he had that figured, too," said Rob.
Higgins glared at him. "There's a clever brain in that throw-back skull of yours, Foser. Maybe you can figure out what Starn's purpose is in all this, since you're so smart."
Rob shrugged. "Isn't that obvious to you, Higgins? He's continuing his work in isolation, where neither you, nor I, nor Cytherni can stop him! One thing I can agree with you about, Higgins, is that Starn is engaged in an evil pursuit. He's a bigger threat to the safety of the world than Nagister Nornt could've ever become!"
His voice grew wrathful as he continued, "But you, Higgins, are the guilty party in all this! Starn was a fine man, one who would have been long honored in the legends of Pack Foser, until you subverted him! You made him the madman he is today, a man with a freakish mind that is neither Pack nor Olsapern! That's what comes from an unnatural mingling between Pack men and Olsaperns! And that's why we will have no future associations with you, once this matter is ended. You may as well close down your stupid trading posts, Higgins. We won't even bother to raid them hereafter!"
After a frigid silence, Higgins said formally, "Your proposal to exchange Cytherni for the boy Billy will be discussed in our council, Foser. You will be advised of our decision. Let's go, men!"
The defensemen took the transceiver and marched out of the room.
"But . . . " murmured Cytherni, "if Starn did that, why didn't he take me along?"
Rob did not seem to hear her for a moment, but sat with a distracted look. At last he roused himself and looked at her. "Because your attitudes are pretty typically Olsapern. You disapprove of his work, although you try not to. In fact, you're jealous of his work, which has kept him from being the kind of man you want for a father of the children you haven't had."
"Oh," gulped Cytherni in a small voice. Then she turned and ran from the room, in search of some spot where her grief could be suffered in a semblance of privacy—though she knew there was no privacy to be had in Foser Compound.
Four days passed before an Olsapern flier again landed near the Compound. Once more the transceiver was brought into Rob's quarters, and Cytherni was invited to attend the parley.
Rob gave the image of Higgins a hard look and demanded, "Well?"
"The council has considered your proposal," Higgins said, "and while we don't like it we are willing to accept your terms."
"All right. Bring us the boy."
"The problem is," Higgins continued uncomfortably, "that we haven't yet located Starn and Billy. We know, in general, where they are, but that is a mountainous area of sizable extent, a strip two hundred and fifty miles long and we would estimate twenty miles wide."
"The offer," said Rob, "was for you to turn the boy over after he and his father were captured. If you haven't caught them yet, what are we talking about?"
"As you remarked yourself at our last meeting," said Higgins, "Starn is a grave threat to the safety of the world—to your people as well as our own. I agree with that, and as for my own role in making him the danger he is, well, let me assure you that this strengthens my resolve to compensate for past errors. However, the crucial fact is that we have not found him, and he must be found! Under the circumstances, we think a cooperative effort, a joint search, is justified."
Rob lifted an eyebrow. "Do I detect a more worried tone in your voice, Higgins? Perhaps you've checked that oil deposit Starn and Billy mapped. Was oil there?" Higgins' mouth tightened. "The map was accurate," he admitted.
"Anything else to shake you up?" asked Rob.
"Well . . . yes. We have means of locating lost persons, small tracking devices implanted in the body. In some manner, Starn found where these implants were in himself and his wife and son. Minutes before leaving, he put them out of action, probably with a focused ultrasonic beam. Those implants are small, and made intentionally hard to locate. Starn once returned to Foser Compound with such implants in him. Did any of your people know they were there?"
"No. I remember the time of which you speak," said Rob. "With these tracker devices not working, then, you have no way of locating Starn and Billy?"
"That's correct. The devices on his flier were not disturbed, however, and we have a plot of its course from the time it took off until it came down and sank in the ocean some nine hours later."
"Oh!" moaned Cytherni.
"But Starn and Billy chuted out long before then. Unfortunately, we cannot pinpoint the time they did so much closer than ten minutes, which leaves us with a considerable stretch of the flier's course to search. And we assume that Starn would not hike, with the boy, more than ten miles east or west, probably not that much.
"Anyway, he's already had four days for whatever it is he's doing. And I'll admit, Foser, that I'm now more convinced that he is . . . on the track of something that could be most unsettling to us all. If you're really convinced of your own statement that he is a serious threat, you must help us find him."
"That sort of entanglement with you," glowered Rob, "is exactly what we are determined to avoid."
"The feeling is mutual," flared Higgins, "but this is a task that has to be done!"
Rob said slowly, "I don't know just how we could help you, anyway. What did you have in mind?"
"We comb the territory with fliers, as we've been doing, but this time with one or more of your telepaths aboard each craft to detect Starn's mind when a flier comes in range."
Rob shook his head. "I guessed it was something like that. It won't work. The rub would be to come in range. And stay there long enough for a telepath to pick up and even start to identify Starn's thoughts. Keep in mind that maximum telepathic range is half a mile, and in the High Mountains, which I presume are the ones you're talking about, there are valleys over a quarter of a mile below the ridges. You couldn't cover the area so thoroughly as to be sure a flier would pass directly over Starn; each telepath would have to scan a strip of, say, a quarter of a mile on each side of the flier. The air can be rough over mountains, can't it? So your fliers would have to stay a couple of hundred feet above the ridgetops if they move with any speed at all.
"Maybe you've taken all that into account, all except the time it takes a telepath to detect a mind. It isn't instantaneous, Higgins. And it isn't certain. The detected mind has to be thinking thoughts the telepath can readily distinguish from his own. If Starn and the boy were down in a valley, they would be within extreme telepathic range of a flier passing low above the ridges for a very few seconds, unless the flier was moving extremely slow. So, unless you've got enough fliers, and we can round up enough telepaths, to creep through those mountains at treetop level, following the terrain up and down, we would have to be plain lucky to find Starn by that method. You could probably do as well with your infrared detectors as with our telepaths."
"You're sure of that?" asked Higgins.
"Yes." Rob frowned and added, "I've given some thought to a joint search myself since we last talked, because I guessed you wouldn't find Starn."
"Well, if my plan won't work, what will?" Higgins demanded.
"I'm not sure. We've got to remember that Starn's too much of a hunter not to know all the tricks of the hunted." Rob's eyes studied Cytherni. "There's one possibility I can think of, but that involves the active assistance of Starn's wife, and she isn't in a helpful frame of mind."
"Oh? How are you, Cytherni?" asked Higgins.
"Very well, thank you," she said.
"Why won't you help us bring Starn back to you, dear?" asked Higgins.
Rob laughed dryly. "Sweet talk will get you nowhere," he said. "Cytherni's torn up by all this, and blames herself for what she thinks was a disloyal attitude toward her husband's work. Anyhow, she's determined to be on his side from now on."
"And she could help us, if she would?" Higgins asked.
"Yes. It's. . .it's rather complicated to explain to somebody who doesn't understand the Novo senses. But there is an emotional tie between parent and child, Higgins, that stays intact even when they're miles apart. It's something quite different from telepathy, and only serves as a line of communication in moments of great stress. But there are some of us who can help others use this linkage. That's the way we locate lost children who have wandered or have been carried out of telepathic range.
"But for it to work, the parent must actively desire the recovery of the child. In our case, Cytherni refuses to cooperate. She is willing to leave the boy with Starn."
"Well, I'm glad you're a reasonable enough man, Foser, to consider cooperation, even if Cytherni is not. Perhaps we can think of some other approach, if your people share your viewpoint."
"They do."
"Good. I'll leave these men and their flier near your Compound, if that meets your approval, while all of us give this matter more thought. I suggest that you try to convince Cytherni to help us, Foser, since she offers the only prospect we know of right now."
"That won't be easy," grumbled Rob.
The next day Rob sent for Cytherni.
"I'm not going to try to talk you into anything," he said, "but I want you to know of a thought that has come to me. You asked the other day why Starn left you here, and I said because you oppose him. That wasn't a very satisfactory, or true, answer, I realize now. You have your doubts about his work, but you are his wife, and in a pinch you would stand with him. You've been proving that. What's more, I think Starn would have known it all along.
"Then why did he leave you here? A number of us have been thinking about that, Cytherni, people who knew Starn well in the old days, and understand the kind of person he is, and how grim he can be when he's determined to do something.
"We've thought about it at length," he said, watching her face, "and the conclusion we've reached is more disturbing than anything else in this whole affair. He dumped you here, Cytherni, because his plans involve something you couldn't possibly approve. Something you would have to fight to prevent, even against your own husband.
"As to what that could be—well, Billy is the subject in Starn's experiments, the only subject with a strong Novo sense available to him. Now I'm sure Starn wouldn't do anything which he was convinced would be harmful to the boy, but he must have had something in mind that would be risky, at least. He's working in unexplored fields, where nobody knows what is and is not dangerous. So—"
"Stop it!" cried Cytherni, a wild look in her eyes. Rob's mouth twisted in an unhappy little smile of victory. He rose and led her across the Compound to the hut of Virnce, Starn's father, where the Pack's finder, an old man named Harnk, joined them very quickly. "She's ready?" Harnk asked.
Rob nodded. "She's ready." Harnk pointed to the paint-sculptured portrait of Billy. "Look at that," he told Cytherni. "You want to find your son? Yes . . . yes . . . indeed you do." He was silent for a moment, then looked up at Rob. "I need pen and paper."
Virnce produced the writing equipment and Harnk began sketching. "This is the aspect of a mountainside which catches the morning light. The boy can see it across a narrow valley. See how the rocks tilt in this double row of cliffs. The trees cover everything else. He sees a crestline that humps here and here, and dips here. He is sitting—or will be sitting when you find him—on a rock by a tent of Olsapern stuff, tall trees all around. The tent must be straight across the valley from this point on the mountain."
"Excellent, Harnk!" Rob applauded, looking over the old man's shoulder at the scrawly sketch. "Good work! Now, where's the mountain?"
Harnk shook his head. "I get no other impressions," he said.
Rob grunted in disappointment. "It's somewhere in the High Mountains, but you have no idea where?"
"No."
"Then how are we supposed to find the boy?"
Harnk lifted his shoulders. "Find the mountain, and the boy will be there."
"Yeah, find the mountain," parroted Rob in annoyance. "But who knows where a mountain that looks like that is located?"
Cytherni moved forward hesitantly and looked at the sketch. She did not recognize the mountain, of course, but its shape interested her as an artist. She recalled the massive triphoto geographical survey albums the Olsaperns had developed over the years, and which she had examined as part of her preparation to do landscapes. Probably the very mountainside Harnk had sketched was included in those albums.
Rob sighed. "I'd hoped we could handle this without the Olsaperns," he said, "but we'll need flier transportation, anyway. Somebody go tell the defensemen to bring the Higgins box in again."
"When are we going hunting, Daddy?" asked Billy.
"This afternoon," Starn replied. It was the day after they had chuted from the flier. Starn was relaxing in a folding chair while the boy played around the camp. He grinned at his son. "For someone who put in a hard day yesterday, you're awfully eager to start chasing coons."
"Oh, you did most of the work," Billy replied. "Are you tired today?"
"No, I'm just thinking."
"Oh. What about?"
"How to make your perception work better."
"It works good now, Daddy, with the needle rods. Can I take them along when we go hunting? I think I can find a coon with them. What does a coon look like?" Starn described the raccoon's appearance, and asked, "Does knowing what a coon looks like help you percept it?"
The boy thought about this before shaking his head.
"I don't think so. But that'll let me know what I've found when I've found one." Starn chuckled, and the boy said, "While you're thinking, let me take the needle rods and practice. Maybe there's a coon close by."
"O.K., but don't go far." Starn had misgivings about letting Billy out of sight in such wild country, but memories of himself running loose at the boy's age kept him from being too restrictive during outings such as this. He settled back into his chair, and his brow creased in a concentrated effort to think the problem out.
The trouble was that his unconscious just wasn't producing. Despite his reading of everything in Olsapern literature that pertained even slightly to the Novo senses, and his own numerous experiments with Billy and himself, his unconscious still seemed to lack the clues necessary to produce that sudden burst of insight. This meant that he was missing some basic point, he guessed, some key concept that had to be fed to his unconscious before the problem would be solvable. What was it?
About an hour later Billy returned, a little winded from climbing about the steep mountainside. "I didn't find a coon," he reported, "but I found two chipmunks. The needle rod works good for animals, even when I stand still and don't move it."
Starn nodded. Perception worked only in the presence of motion. The object could be moving, or the perceptor, or the percepting device in the perceptor's hands. The more motion the better. Probably that was why dowsing rods had traditionally been used more often to find underground water than for any other purpose. The water was moving, the dowser was walking more often than not, and when water was detected the rods moved. But this was a line of thought Starn had pursued often before, to no new conclusion. Motion might be basic to perception, but it didn't seem to be—at least not in any gross form—to the other Novo senses. That made it unlikely to offer the opening he seemed to need.
Billy got a drink of water, puttered about the camp for a few minutes, and sat down at last by Starn's chair.
"Can I help think, Daddy?" he asked.
"Maybe so, son," Starn smiled. "I could certainly use some help."
Billy nodded gravely, and wrinkled his brow in imitation of his father. But in short order he looked up to complain, "I have to know how percepting works before I can think about it."
"If I knew how it worked—" Starn began. He stopped and began trying to explain. "Perception is a sense, Billy, like seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling. But not everybody has perception. That's the main reason it's called a Novo sense. There are others like it, such as being able to know what somebody else is thinking, called telepathy, or to know things that haven't happened yet, which is premonating.
"Now, people have all sorts of contrivances to extend their ability to see and hear—telescopes, microscopes, sound amplifiers, radios, infrared viewers, and so on. They have done less with smell, taste, and touch. They have made mechanical feelers that can tell a lot more about the feel of something than you could with your fingers, but these machines report their findings to our eyes and ears, so they're extensions of our sense of touch only indirectly. As for smell and taste, what they do with those is mostly to control what we smell and taste, to give us the ones we like and get rid of the ones we don't like.
"What I want to do is find ways to extend the Novo senses, the way telescopes and radios extend seeing and hearing. That's what the dowsing machine with the needle rods does for perception, but it doesn't do it very well. I want something much better than that."
Billy was silent for a while after Starn finished. Then he asked, "How do the regular senses work, Daddy?" Hiding a touch of impatience, Starn said, "Well, there are thousands of tiny nerve ends at the back of our eyeballs, and in our ears, and in our skin. When we open our eyes, light reflected from the things around us goes in and excites our eye nerves in different ways, and this pattern of excitements go to our brain which interprets them as an image of whatever we're looking at. Or a sound we hear is a vibration of the air in our ears, which makes little membranes and bones vibrate, too, and the ear nerves take the message of those vibrations to the brain. Or when we press a finger against something, like this piece of bark, for example, the nerves in our skin are excited, and the pattern of excitements tells the brain if we're feeling something smooth or rough, hard or soft, or cold or hot."
"That makes perception a lot like feeling and hearing," said Billy, "but not much like seeing, don't it?"
Starn blinked. "How is that?"
"Well, you got to move to touch something, or the air's got to move for you to hear something. But nothing has to move for you to see something."
"That's right," Starn grinned with amusement. "But seeing requires light, which is moving, although much too rapidly for you to be aware of it as motion. Light, like air vibrations, is energy, and all the senses, even smell and taste, need energy to make them work."
"Yeah, you need to breathe in the air to smell," agreed Billy wisely, "or put something in your mouth to taste it."
"I wasn't thinking of that, exactly," said Starn. "The food in your mouth and the smelly molecules in your nose have to undergo a chemical reaction with the liquid on your tongue or your nasal passage. They give up chemical energy to work your senses. In fact—"
Starn hesitated. It was not a new thought, exactly, that stopped him. It was an old one that had never come through to him quite so vividly before. "In fact," he repeated slowly, "it is energy, and not substance, that all our senses detect."
His mind was a whirl of activity. No wonder perception required motion, which was itself an aspect of energy. But what about telepathy? Brainwaves? Energy in the electromagnetic spectrum? That was hardly likely, or the Olsaperns would have devised a means of telepathic jamming long ago. Even a flash of lightning would create telepathic static if that were the case, and lightning did no such thing.
Also, gross motion could not be the only energy involved in perception. The motion had to set up an energy field of some sort; otherwise the motion could not be percepted at a distance. Whether or not this field was the same kind of energy that powered telepathy he couldn't guess. It could be the same, or it could be as different as a light photon is from a sound vibration.
And what about the energy that premonating would require—an energy that went backward through time? Well, weren't some subatomic particles time-reversible? He seemed to recall reading that they were, but that was an area of science that he knew little about.
The trouble was, he thought with frustration, there was precious little he understood about any science at all. Take the medium Cytherni used for her paint-sculptures, for instance: menergy. He understood what it was only in a very general, and, therefore, highly uninformative, way. Matrices of "solid" energy, or self-containing energy.
And that, he had a hunch, was something he definitely should understand, because as he had finally realized, the key to the secret of the Novo senses was hidden in the concept of energy, which made that a subject he couldn't know too much about!
Billy had to repeat his question before Starn heard him.
"Where are the perception nerve ends, Daddy?"
"Huh?"
"The seeing nerve ends are in the eyeballs, and the feeling nerve ends are in the skin. Where are the perception nerve ends?"
"Oh. I don't know. Perhaps all through us. Or perhaps those nerves end inside the brain, with no external sense organs. Maybe that's the difference between Novo and regular senses."
In which case Novo energy would have to be of a kind that passed readily through flesh and bone, like a ghostly type of X-ray.
Starn got up and went into the tent, where he rummaged around in the bottom of the chutepacks for several minutes before he found what he thought would be there somewhere. A pack of collapsed menergy matrices, of the small size used by Cytherni for quick outdoor sketches. He took one out and activated it, watching and feeling the way it expanded in his hand from a tiny gray wafer to a clearly transparent, slightly shimmering cube with eight-inch sides. Inside, near the center, he could see the pea-sized black sphere that powered the matrix. An eight-inch cube of energy . . . but what kind of energy? Starn's comprehension stopped far short of the answer to that. "Pure energy," one of the Olsaperns had told him, but what did "pure" mean when applied to energy? Wasn't light pure? Or relative motion? Obviously "pure" in this context had a specialized meaning that was a mystery to him.
Still carrying the menergy matrix, he went back to his chair. "Did you get an idea, Daddy?" Billy asked.
"Maybe the start of one. Let's let it rest a while and see. Right now, how about some lunch, then I'll show you how to handle a gun, and we'll do a little hunting."
"Oh, boy!" Billy exclaimed.
The next day Starn had enough tentative ideas to try some experiments. They were failures. Working from the analogy between ancient crystal-radio receivers versus powered electron-tube receivers—which had the advantage of being understandable to him—he tried to apply power to his dowsing machine circuit. The hope was to amplify the output, thus extending the device's range.
Not that he hadn't tried that before, but previously he had tried to energize the circuit with electricity. This time, working on the assumption that there might be something truly fundamental about the "pure" energy of a menergy matrix, he used a matrix as his power source. He tried every circuit arrangement he could imagine. Using techniques he had learned from watching his wife work, he even built a needle rod device completely inside a matrix, hoping to saturate it with the energy present there. It worked no better or worse than before.
He had to conclude that he was going about his job the wrong way. His device was not a detector like a radio receiver; the detector system was within the human perceptor. That, he realized with annoyance, should have been clear to him all along. The needle rod device was . . . well, an auxiliary device, an extension of the human "antenna" perhaps, plus a visual read-out unit. Or maybe it was analogous to a tuning coil. Or perhaps a tuned antenna.
There was a thought! If it were a tuning device, perhaps something very like it could be used to "tune" energy, not for itself but for the central perception circuitry in the human brain!
Billy's restlessness and his own uncertainty of how to proceed caused him to put off further tests until the next day, and to go exploring with the boy. This was something he had to do, anyway, to familiarize himself quite thoroughly with the neighboring terrain. If, by some chance, the Olsaperns and/or the Pack men located him sooner than his scheme called for, he would have to know every possible route of escape from his camp area.
That night as he and Billy ate supper, the boy asked, "How long are we going to camp, Daddy?"
"I'm not sure," said Starn. Realizing that this was an insufficient answer he added, "You see, Billy, we're playing a game like hide-and-seek with Higgins, and with my old friends in Pack Foser. So we have to stay hidden until some of them find us. I don't know how long that will take."
"Oh," said Billy, obviously pleased to be playing a game with grown-ups, and as his father's teammate. "Do you guess they're hunting us right now?"
Starn smiled. "I'm quite sure they are, son," he said, "quite sure, indeed."
But, he wondered silently, are they hunting together or separately?
When he woke the following morning the solution was waiting for him. It unfolded in his conscious, rough-hewn to be sure, but complete. And as one often does when a simple answer finally dawns, he wondered why he had missed it before.
As soon as breakfast was over and Billy was off in pursuit of whatever mountain fauna he could scare up, Starn got to work again. Energy could be tuned to supplement that normally available to the perceptive circuitry in the human nervous system! The needle rod device could do it. His trouble before was that he had been trying to go in the wrong direction. The device was essentially a . . . not a filter, exactly, but something like that. The Olsaperns would have a proper descriptive word for it, but Starn was less interested in words than results. A filter took out what was not wanted, but his device catalyzed what was not wanted into what was. What he had to do was surround an energy source with this pseudo-filtering effect. The job was a tricky one for his amateur hands. It involved reshaping a cubical, leak-proof menergy matrix into one that was spherical and, therefore, thoroughly leaky, and enclosing the sphere with his pseudofilter. Actually, the effective circuitry surrounded not the sphere but the small central power source, and that made the fabrication process much simpler.
An hour of painstaking effort produced a carefully trimmed wafer of unactivated menergy with a knot of microlek components at its center, with two raw-ended wires trailing away from the knot. Starn took a deep breath, stood back, and touched the wire ends together. The sphere expanded to a nine-inch diameter, glittering with escaping energy, then over a period of seconds dimmed and shrunk to the size of a tennis ball. As it did so a soundless "noise" poured into Starn's brain, a noise that made. him whirl and crouch reflexively, alert for whatever monstrous danger was creeping up behind him. In his alarm, he dropped the wires and their ends fell apart. The tennis ball collapsed into a wafer, the noise vanished, and with it the monstrous danger.
A bearlike bellow of protest came dimly to his ears from some distance away. Closer at hand he heard Billy's alarmed screech, "Daddy!"
Starn galloped down the mountain slope in the boy's direction, filled with puzzled concern. If his experiment had harmed the boy he . . . !
Billy came in sight legging it hard toward the camp. He slowed when he saw his father and his fright diminished.
"There was an awful loud noise, Daddy!" he exclaimed, wide-eyed. "Do you know what made it?"
"I made it, son, with a gadget I was working on. Did it hurt you?"
"No, I guess it didn't," said Billy. "It just scared me. A little bit. It was such a funny kind of noise."
Starn took the boy's hand and walked back toward the camp. "You mean it wasn't a noise you heard, but one you percepted?"
"That's right!" said the boy. "It was like . . . like perception-stuff was packed tight all around me, and making an awful racket! Gosh, you made a gadget that really works, this time, Daddy!"
Starn nodded slowly. "Looks like I did at that, son. But it doesn't work the way I meant it to."
"What was it supposed to do?"
"It was supposed to be a . . . a kind of light for perception, to let your perception see better. But instead of lighting up things, it shined in your eyes instead, and blinded you."
"You don't see when you percept, you hear, kind of," the boy objected. "But it did make a kind of light, too. But the light wasn't as much as the noise."
Noise and light? Starn considered this. Telepaths always spoke of "reading" thoughts, as if the process were related to seeing. And for Billy, with perhaps an unusably weak telepathic sense, the gadget had made a light that was, to him, minor compared to the noise. Probably a telepath would have experienced a blinding flash of "light" accompanied by a slight noise.
But it was not strange for an energy source to produce signals that reached more than one sense. A dynamite explosion, for instance, was quite evident to ears and eyes—and if close enough it could also be smelled, tasted and felt! Quite possibly, then, the gadget was an undiscriminating transmitter of Novo energy. Just how it could be used, and what effect it would have on the Novo senses . . .
Careful to hide his sudden worry, Starn said, "What can you find with your needle rods here, Billy?"
The boy got the sensor unit out of his pocket and held it in front of him as they trudged up the mountainside. He watched it a moment, then slapped it against the palm of his other hand. "It's stopped working, Daddy. It don't show anything at all."
"What can you percept without it?"
After a moment of concentration, Billy replied in consternation: "Nothing. Nothing at all!"
Starn nodded grimly. "I'm afraid that noise deafened your perception, Billy," he said.
The boy's face puckered. "Forever?" he asked after a moment.
"We can hope not. We'll have to wait and see."
Lunch was a sober affair for both of them. Afterward Starn sat in his chair, glumly puzzling over what had happened to Billy, and why. The boy stretched out on the dead leaves where a spot of sunlight came through the trees and was soon napping.
An hour and a half later he sat up suddenly. "Daddy, I can percept again! Just as good as ever!"
Starn heaved a mighty sigh of relief and grinned. "That's fine, son, just fine!"
The boy went to the water jug and drank thirstily.
"What are you going to try now?" he asked.
"Nothing," said Starn. "That gadget proved that this is too risky to fool with."
"Aw," said Billy. "It wasn't that bad! It was like looking at a bright light, and then looking at something else and not being able to see it right off. But it went away in a little while!"
"Yes," said Starn, "but if a person looks directly at the sun too often, or too long, he can blind himself permanently."
Billy thought this over. "Could you make the noise dimmer, so it wouldn't hurt? Or maybe aim it so it would hit what I was trying to percept instead of hitting me?"
"I've been trying to think of a way to shield it in specific directions," replied Starn, "but I don't believe it can be shielded. Once this energy is generated, there's no stopping it."
"But do you have to generate it every which way?" asked Billy insistently.
"I don't know," replied Starn, eyeing the boy curiously. "You seem awfully eager about this," he remarked.
"Gosh, yes!" exclaimed Billy. "If you could make something that would percept for miles and miles, through mountains and everything, that'd be the best thing you've ever made for me! It would be a lot of fun!" A toy! That's what it would be to Billy. What would it be to others? If others unbent from their prejudices sufficiently to accept it? To Higgins, a way to find needed oil and other resources, or a means of spying on the Pack men. To the Pack men, a weapon to be used in their feuds with each other, and perhaps against Olsaperns. Certainly as a weapon against anyone employing a Novo sense. In fact, the transmitter Starn had already made was that. Whatever else he did, he decided he would produce a supply of such transmitters before nightfall, and keep them handy just in case.
But a Novo energy transmitter that could be aimed at the thing to be sensed, without overloading the mind's sensors with a flood of energy . . . The only way was to create a directional radiation of the energy at the beginning, instead of attempting to provide directional shielding after it was created. And the amount of energy should be far less than the transmitter had produced. The spherical menergy matrix leaked entirely too much . . .
And there was the answer, of course, neatly packaged for him by Olsapern technology, which was as it should be. The cubical matrix leaked no energy at all. So all he had to do, really, was make another transmitter like the first, but housed in a matrix flat on five faces and bulging only the slightest amount on the sixth. Only as the energy leaked away from the matrix was it converted into the medium that impinged on the Novo senses, and it would leak away in one direction only, from the one, bulged face of the cube.
"All right, Billy," said Starn, "I'll have another go at it."
The boy wandered off to a nearby spring while Starn worked. The beam was finished before he returned. Starn aimed it straight up as he activated the matrix, which in appearance at least was little different from those into which Cytherni injected paint. The curvature of the bulged side was too slight to be visible, and the energy escapage was too minor to gray it noticeably. It differed from the other sides only in appearing to be covered with a light film.
Holding his breath, Starn aimed the Novo beam at himself. A sound? Yes, perhaps, it could be called that. It was barely noticeable. The sense was definitely there, though, that something was creeping up behind him. It was less powerful than the real thing. Perhaps with the beam generator at an appreciable distance, the effect would not come through at all.
He pointed the beam in front of him and slowly turned around. It was as if he had been blind all his life and someone had suddenly supplied him with eyes. There was Billy down by the spring. Does he know the beam is on him? Apparently not. Hey, Billy, what are you doing? That made him jump! He's looking up here and grinning. Now he's coming this way.
Starn continued to turn. There's a family of bears, over on the next mountain. One roared this morning. Minerals? Yes, but I don't know how to identify them from what I sense.
"Let me try it, Daddy," pleaded Billy, dashing up panting.
Starn handed it over with the admonition, "You will probably be able to reach farther than I can with it, son. If you reach any people, don't call to them, or you'll give our presence here away, and we're still in that hide-andseek game."
"All right, Daddy." The boy seized the beam and began avidly studying his surroundings, exclaiming excitedly over the results. Starn stood watching, feeling that supreme exaltation that comes only in a moment of high discovery.
"Hey, there's Mommy!" yelled Billy.
"What? Where?"
"She's at Foser Compound. That's hundreds of miles away! But it's her all right."
"What is she doing?" asked Starn, feeling a pang of guilt.
"Nothing much. Just sitting around. I think she's mad at somebody, but I can't tell why." He held the beam steady for several seconds before moving on around. Starn, momentarily distraught by his regrets concerning Cytherni, was not aware of Billy swinging the beam toward him until his danger sense alerted him. He jumped.
Billy had lowered the beam and was staring at him in hurt surprise. "Gosh, Daddy! If you flipped her out of the flier, no wonder she's mad!"
After a stunned moment, Starn asked, "Did you see that in my mind?"
"I guess so," said Billy. "It was there when I pointed the beam at you."
"Don't point it at me again while we're here, son," said Starn. "Did you see that I didn't really want to do that to your mother?"
"Yes. You didn't want to but you had to, but you didn't think why."
"Good. I don't want you to know why just yet, Billy. If you know I regret that I—"
"It's all right, Daddy. I'm not mad or anything. And maybe Mommy's mad about something else. She's so far away that all I could tell was that she was mad."
Starn nodded, greatly relieved at the way Billy was taking his discovery. "What do you say we quit working and go exploring?" he asked.
"Hot dog!" Billy shouted, and thoughts of his angry mother were forgotten.
But every few hours after that, Billy would reactivate the beam and aim it northeast for a few minutes, to see what his mother was doing. Starn was glad he did, because Billy reported on what he saw and, in a way, kept Starn in touch with his wife.
It was two days later before Billy reported anything unusual. "She's awful worried and scared," he said half tearfully. "She's running somewhere with somebody—Now she's looking at me! No, not at me, at one of her paint things of me! Gosh, I thought for a second there that I'd showed her—Now somebody else is looking at me, Daddy! He's an old man, kind of scrawny, and he's looking at Mommy and seeing me! He sees that mountain over there, and our tent, and me sitting on that big rock, but I'm not on the rock! How come he sees me like that?"
It took Starn a moment to figure out what was happening. "Old Harnk, the finder," he muttered. "I'd forgotten about him. We'll have to—" He stopped. What should he do now? This was an unexpected development that would destroy his scheme before it had a chance to bear fruit.
Obviously, he had to get away from the camp immediately—and leave Billy behind. With old Harnk in the picture, the boy would be found anywhere he went, and if he stayed with his father, then Starn could be found, too. That is, if—
"Are the Olsaperns going to help them come and get you?" he asked.
"I guess so. They're talking about it."
"Then they'll be here soon, Billy. Our game is half over. They've found you, but not me. You'll have to stay here and wait for them, and I'll go hide somewhere else." He began putting together a light pack, taking nothing but what he had to have, or didn't dare leave behind.
"Did you watch me close enough, Billy, to see how I made the energy transmitter, or the beam?"
"No, I don't guess so. But, if you'll show me how, I'll remember it, all right."
Starn smiled. "No. It'll be more fun to make the Pack men and Olsaperns hunt me without knowing how to make such gadgets, and if you knew, the telepaths could find out from you."
Starn was careful to gather up all the needle rods, transmitters, and beam projectors he had made in his experiments and stuff them into his pack. "Sorry our camping trip has to end so quickly, son," he said to the glum-faced boy. "But they'll be here to get you in an hour or two, and then they'll take you to Mother. You'll like being with her again, won't you?"
The boy nodded.
Starn strapped on the pack, then knelt and gave the boy a squeeze. "Give her my love, won't you?"
"O.K., Daddy."
Rising hurriedly, Starn strode away from the camp and Billy sat down on the big rock to wait.
The two fliers were manned by a mixture of Olsapern defensemen and Foser raiders. Men from both sides were lowered into the camp from the craft that hovered over the trees, while the other began circling in search of Starn's telepathic scent.
He had not been able to go far over such difficult terrain in so short a time. Soon they had him located. Both fliers hovered near the spot and the Pack men swarmed down the droplines.
Peering upward, Starn guessed that the Olsapern defensemen were, very wisely, being held in reserve. This kind of action was not their meat. He had to guard his thoughts carefully with so many telepaths within range . . . think only of the immediate problem of escape and nothing else.
He fitted an arrow to which a—No! Don't think it!—was tied into his bow and shot it high into the trunk of a large oak. When the arrow struck a glowing ball lit up, dangling from it. The ball dimmed, and a confusion of shouts arose from the Pack men.
Every one of the Foser raiders would doubtless be strongly Novo-sensed, he assumed. The transmitter would do more than blind their special senses; the flood of "static" would drive them half out of their wits. He took the opportunity to change his position and pass between his would-be captors.
The difficulty was that on board the fliers were instruments such as infrared detectors that would not be confused by the Novo transmitter. As long as he stayed near Foser raiders, who were now stumbling about aimlessly and almost drunkenly, the Olsapern instruments would probably be unable to single him out. But if he began moving away, the action would identify him. Not that the defensemen could expect to come down the droplines and capture him where the Pack men had failed, but they could kill him very easily, if they wished, without leaving the fliers.
He crouched out of sight in a bush-covered crevice for several minutes, listening to the raiders call to each other and thrash about, trying to get themselves organized. If it were only dark, he thought with annoyance, he could mingle freely with the Pack men, even join their search for him, and if they dispersed to scout the surrounding mountains he could get out of range of Olsapern instruments. But darkness was hours away. Long before that someone would succeed in silencing his transmitter. Novo senses would remain blinded for a while, but with the static stopped the raiders would be less confused and—
Another sound joined the voices of the Pack men. It was distant but coming closer: the growls of bears, sounding extremely annoyed over something. The big animals had made themselves scarce in the vicinity of his camp, their old and well-learned distrust of man augmented by the barkings of his and Billy'srifles when they went hunting. Only once during their stay had Starn even heard a bear, and that one in the distance just after he had briefly activated his first Novo energy transmitter.
And that had been a roar of protest!
Whether or not bears were Novo-sensed was a question for later investigation. But obviously there was something about the radiations from a Novo transmitter that bothered them, and bothered them bad! Right now they were heading toward the scene of the search from several directions, with the evident intent of laying heavy paws on the source of those irksome energies.
"Bears!" a Foser man bellowed. More yells followed, then rifle shots, and roars of pain from wounded animals. Starn eased out of hiding in time to see a large female bear, dripping blood from a flesh wound in her flank, retreating in his direction. He stepped aside and behind a tree to let her lumber past.
What annoyance the transmitter caused the animals was not enough to make them brave a barrage of rifle fire. They were leaving the scene, and scattering.
Starn joined them.
Relationships were strained at Foser Compound.
The Olsaperns were angry and suspicious over Starn's escape from the party of raiders. The Pack had Billy, under the agreement between Rob and Higgins, but the Olsaperns did not have Starn, who was to have been theirs. Therefore, they argued, the agreement was invalid, and Cytherni and the boy should be turned over to them.
And there was the embarrassing and somewhat dismaying fact that Starn's Novo "flare" had not only rendered the Foser raiders practically helpless; it had had similar if less drastic effects on a few of the Olsapern defensemen who had been in the fliers. Though the Olsaperns owned no usable Novo senses, it seemed hard to deny that some of them had the inherent ability for such senses.
Also, recriminations were harsh the next day, when it was realized that Starn's "flare" device should have been brought back for study, and a second visit to the mountain site discovered the flare was gone. There were claw marks on the tree in which it had been lodged, and the ground was covered with bear tracks. But except for a broken arrow, a few strands of wire, and the shredded remains of a de-energized menergy wafer, nothing was there to be found.
The strain was not eased by the Packs' failure to inform the Olsaperns of what they learned from Billy about the Novo energy beam device until after Higgins had figured out—from the fact that Starn had known to desert the camp and leave Billy behind—that the fugitive had devised some means of learning that the camp had been located.
"There is such a thing as good faith," his image glowered at Rob. "At least there is among civilized men. You have shown little evidence of good faith in this whole affair, Foser."
"Don't talk to me about honor, Olsapern!" the Pack chief snapped back. "You can't regard us as animals and still expect us to give you the respect due to equals! Certainly we're not fools enough to tell you anything about a weapon you would delight in using against us!"
"We have no intention of using any weapon against you!" stormed Higgins. "We never have! All we've ever done has been protect ourselves against your childish attacks—attacks that were aimed more often than not at posts we established solely to assist you!"
Rob replied coldly, "We've learned from Cytherni that Starn had a more likely explanation for your trading posts."
"You're citing Starn as an authority?" sneered Higgins.
"But never mind answering that. We're getting away from the basic point I'm trying to make, that we've never fought an aggressive battle with Pack men. On the record, you don't have the slightest excuse for withholding information about weapons developed by a man who is a danger to us all!"
"But on the other hand," retorted Rob, "I notice you are deadly afraid of letting any knowledge of Olsapern weapons fall in Pack hands. Not once has an engineer or a scientist come south of the Hard Line."
"Aren't we justified in that?" Higgins demanded.
"Haven't we been given every reason to expect that better weapons would make the Packs bigger and bloodier nuisances?"
"Not if you would drop that silly attitude of superiority!" blared Rob. "Close down those insulting trading posts! Ask our permission when you want to dig a mine in Pack country! And when you have to deal with us at all, stop sending your village idiots as envoys! It's no skin off our noses if you don't follow the Sacred Gene; neither do the animals of the forest! We don't fight you because of religion, but because you're so despicable!"
Higgins looked startled. "That's a surprising revelation, if true."
Rob was silent for a moment, then said, "The members of Pack Foser, as well as the travelers from other Packs who are here at the moment, agree that it is true. Although we have perhaps thought otherwise in the past."
"Very well," said Higgins. "If it's your price for cooperation in the present emergency, we'll be glad to withdraw our trading posts and have no more dealings with the Packs than are absolutely essential in the future. You can starve when a drought ruins your primitive agriculture, or die in an epidemic for lack of decent medicine. To use your own phrase, that's no skin off our noses."
Rob frowned but did not speak.
Higgins continued: "As for quelling the danger that Starn poses, my scientists and engineers can do the job if you'll give us what you've learned about those devices of his. Unfortunately, he left nothing at his home to give us a clue to his approach. So, if you will tell us what you've learned from Cytherni and Billy about the construction of his inventions, we'll get busy."
Rob shrugged. "They don't know. Cytherni wasn't interested enough to learn, and Starn sidetracked Billy when the boy became curious about the structural details of the gadgets. About all we know is that he used that menergy stuff in the things he made in the mountains. Billy has some vague ideas about other details, but I can't make enough sense out of them to describe them." He stared thoughtfully at Higgins' image. "If you want to make some headway on Starn," he said, "you'd better send a team of scientists down here. Maybe they'll know what kind of questions to ask Billy, to bring out what he does know.
"And besides, Higgins, the Packs will be able to see cooperating with you much easier if the work is done here, where we can be sure we know what's being accomplished, and that you're not preparing any unpleasant surprises for us. You'll have close access to Billy, and to other persons with well-developed Novo senses. It's not going to help you to build extensors for those senses unless you have the senses to apply them when they're complete."
Higgins fidgeted unhappily. "Sending scientists down there is out of the question," he said with a lack of conviction, "and it has been demonstrated that we normals often have touches of these senses."
"Touches is about all," said Rob.
"Damn!" cursed Higgins. "I wouldn't listen to such a nonsensical proposal for a minute if these new devices of Starn's didn't have such a disturbing potential!"
"Nor would I have suggested it," came Rob's tart reply. "We have no stomach for the close association with Olsaperns this emergency is forcing on us. But the point is that if we put our differences aside temporarily, and solve this problem quickly, the association can be kept brief. The way things are going, it could drag on for months—even years if Starn comes up with something new! Let's take the bitter pill quick, Higgins, and quit agonizing over it!"
Finally Higgins nodded grudgingly. "I'll take it up with our council and let you know," he agreed.
At first Starn traveled by night and slept by day, staying in deep valleys as much as possible. His reason for this was to elude telepathic detection if Pack-Olsapern teams were continuing the search for him.
Most of the searching, he assumed, would be done during daylight hours, and a sleeping mind is harder to detect, and still harder to identify, than one that is awake.
He tried to push himself severely enough during each night's trek to be dog-tired by dawn, so that he would sleep soundly until nightfall.
The pace began to tell on him in less than a week, and he eased off a bit. By then he was far from the spot where Billy had been taken, and could feel reasonably safe from anything except chance discovery or a massive search . . . or, of course, a search conducted with strongly extended Novo senses.
By now, he guessed, the Packs and the Olsaperns would be working hard—and together—on sense extensions, if they were ever going to work together at all. He had tried to leave nothing behind that would be too helpful to them; he had even risked returning to the scene of his escape from the Foser raiders, after he saw the fliers lifting away, to retrieve the Novo energy transmitter from the oak tree, but found that the bears had returned ahead of him and had left little to worry about.
He kept moving southward at a leisurely, cautious rate. Movement itself brought some risk of discovery, but summer was drawing to a close and he had no real idea how long he could remain untaken. Months, perhaps, in which case he wanted to seek winter quarters in a warm southern clime.
But the mountains were petering out, and at last he was forced to halt by the near certainty that Packs were living in the foothills ahead. In fact, he retreated northward a long march, to get out of range of winter hunting parties. There, in a cove that was both secluded and sheltered, he threw up a tight lean-to and settled down to wait.
It was with some wonder that he realized that matters which had been of vital concern to him only a few weeks ago now seemed distant, and of little pressing interest. This, he mused, was probably what happened when people went "back to nature." The draining demands of extracting food, shelter, and other bodily comforts from a primitive environment left little energy for other pursuits.
Thus, he thought a little about improving upon his menergy-powered devices, but no ideas came, so he did nothing more than think. His creative unconscious was not presented with an urgent need to produce new ideas, so it failed to produce.
Also, in his imagination he could see joint teams of Olsapern scientists and strong-sensed Pack men hard at work, exploring avenues that he—neither scientific nor strongly-sensed—could not even be aware of. What was the point of trying to compete with something like that? More often his thoughts were of Cytherni. Of course she had learned from Billy, if she hadn't guessed before, that what had happened was not the result of an accidental fall from the flier. What would she be thinking of her loving husband now? Even a full explanation of the reasons for his actions, Starn fretted, might sound awfully empty to her. The point would still remain, as he had known it would from the beginning, that he had used her, not with her knowing compliance, but as an unwitting tool. How could any explanation make that right?
The weeks dragged by and summer faded. The mountain forest flamed with autumn reds and yellows. Starn eyed the empty sky with growing impatience. With every passing day the guessed-at activities of Pack men and Olsaperns seemed less important, and the need to see Cytherni and settle things with her one way or the other grew more insistent.
When the shadow of a hovering flier passed over him at last he almost yelled and waved, like a stranded castaway at the first sight of a rescuer. Before he recovered from this reaction he realized he had given his true feelings away to such an extent that it would be silly to make a pretense of trying to escape again, or to do battle with his captors. Indeed, it was also too late to activate a Novo transmitter to blind any telepaths aboard to his thoughts. His game was over. He waited quietly.
A dropline snaked from the flier and one man came down. Starn walked forward. When he saw who it was, he said, "Hello, Rob."
Rob's feet touched the ground and he stood glaring angrily at Starn. Without trying to control his thoughts, Starn waited patiently while the telepath learned what he wanted to know.
"I'm usually called Foser now," Rob said rather stiffly. Then: "So you were never a threat, after all."
"How could I be?" shrugged Starn. "If I were both a gifted Novo and a knowledgeable scientist, maybe I could have hid out somewhere and developed the means of producing a revolution. But I was neither of those things. All I could do, with Billy's help, was make a start. That was enough, I hope, to get you and the Olsaperns into action, to produce the revolution I couldn't."
He grinned at the glowing Pack chief. "Looks like I succeeded. You've found me, at any rate. And what's that strange-looking helmet you're wearing?"
"A defense against your energy transmitter. A shield, but one I can read through."
"Sounds impressive," approved Starn. "Do you have much more stuff like that?"
"Too much more!" snapped Rob. "If you have anything to pack, pack it! If not, let's be on our way."
The dozen or so Pack men and Olsaperns on the flier watched Starn with various shades of silent disapproval as he climbed in and took a seat. Rob settled down near him as the flier headed north.
"Where are we going?" Starn asked.
"To the Compound," was Rob's short reply. In a moment he relented slightly and added, "The Olsaperns take you from there, according to our agreement. I don't know where. Don't care either."
"Are Cytherni and Billy at the Compound?"
Rob nodded. "They'll be staying there . . . or . . . well, the Olsaperns can have them, too, as far as I'm concerned! I'm fed up with the lot of you!"
The discovery of the manner in which he had been had by Starn was plainly annoying to Rob, despite the fact that the Olsaperns had been had just as thoroughly. Starn's antics had forced both peoples to spend months in unwilling—and to them unnatural—association and cooperation, and to learn now that he had been developing no monstrous weapons must come as a blow. They had been collaborating against a nonexistent danger.
"I'm sorry, Rob," Starn said softly. "It had to be done, and there was no other way I could do it."
"It didn't have to be done!" snarled Rob. "Things were going fine the way they were! Now you've got everyone confused and upset—and I might add you've caused your old father more heartbreak than any father deserves, much less a fine, gentle man like Virnce! You've undermined the faith of the Packs disastrously!"
The reference to his father stung Starn. He had known it would grieve Virnce, the Speaker at the Tenthday Services, to learn his own son had turned iconoclast. But it was a grief that had to be borne.
"If the faith of the Packs can be undermined by a few new facts," he said slowly, "it isn't much of a faith. Just as the science of the Olsaperns has already proved it isn't much of a science," he went on with a glance at the defensemen, "by rejecting new facts until they were shoved down its throat.
"The point is that, separately, the Packs and the Olsaperns were both wrong. Together they might be right—or at least closer to right. Both sides claim to love the truth. All right. Think of all the truth you've learned while working together! That helmet you're wearing. Whatever kind of gadget you used to locate me. Probably a lot of other things I don't know about. You understand your Novo senses better, and can use them more effectively. And Olsapern science has been broadened immeasurably. These are the fruits—"
"Bitter, unhealthy fruits!" hissed Rob.
"You don't know that," said Starn. "I'm not sure you even think it. You've merely been thrown off-balance because the world is changing after all these centuries, and you're not used to change. Nobody is."
"The world has always been changing," Rob argued.
"We've been progressing steadily toward the Ultimate Novo."
"At a snail's pace, maybe we have. The Packs don't have to lose that goal of the ideal, fully-sensed man. But with the help of Olsapern science, which you've ignored up to now, don't you think you might reach your goal much quicker?"
"Ugh!" Rob grunted in disgust, and turned away. Talk, Starn realized, would not make much impact on Rob's feelings—or, for that matter, on the course of events his actions had set in motion. What had been accomplished had been accomplished, and that was irretrievably that. His scheme had worked, and would open human horizons to undreamed-of breadth.
Also, it was a source of annoyance to a lot of people, including Rob, and of genuine personal grief to some, such as Starn's father, and to Cytherni—and thus in all likelihood to Starn himself.
The successful revolutionist sat in silence, lost in glum thoughts, for the remainder of the flight.
A large prefabricated building had risen in Smirth's meadow not far from the Compound, to house the joint research projects of Pack men and Olsapern scientists. It was surrounded by smaller sheds and numerous tents. The flier landed in a cleared area near the main building's entrance.
"Follow me," Rob ordered, and led Starn inside. There a heated discussion was in progress among a sizable group of people from both sides of the Hard Line. Rob entered right into it, but Starn, not being telepathic, spent several minutes trying to figure out what was being debated. Meanwhile he was largely ignored by everyone present, including the image of Higgins which, after a passing angry glare at him, returned its attention to the argument.
These people, thought Starn, with a left-out feeling, are all experts—some for what they know and some for what they are—and I'm a mere layman. A troublesome layman, at that.
They used terms he couldn't guess the meaning of, but he kept trying to follow the argument until he finally caught on.
Word of his capture, and of his harmless recent activities, had of course been radioed ahead of the flier. So the people in the research center were discussing ways and means of concluding their joint project, now that the reason for it had been removed.
Starn laughed rather loudly, a derisive bark that brought all eyes on him.
"Nonsense!" snapped Rob, and several other telepaths grumbled.
"What's he thinking?" a scientist demanded.
"I'm thinking you'll never make it," Starn replied.
"Now that you've started researching together, neither of you will dare break off the relationship. The Pack men have learned too much science to be trusted to work alone by the Olsaperns, and the Olsaperns could do too much with their own Novo senses to be trusted by the Packs!
"All you have to do to end your collaboration is learn to trust each other completely," he finished with a grin.
"But if you could do that you wouldn't object to working together in the first place!"
Higgins' voice rumbled from a speaker: "I suppose you counted on this, too, didn't you?"
Starn shook his head slowly. "No. I never thought it through quite to this point. Other things could have happened. For one thing, you might have learned before now to like each other, because basically you're all pretty good folk.
"All I tried to do," he continued, "was to enable both sides to change their minds just enough to start working together, and to take the potentials of extended Novo senses seriously. You could have avoided all this, Higgins, if you hadn't refused to see plain facts when they were laid before you. Before any of you would look at the facts, the facts had to become a threat. That's what I made them. I don't believe either of you was afraid of what I, personally, would do with whatever I discovered, but you were afraid of what either of you would do to the other if just one of you got your hands on my gadgets.
"Something slightly like this happened back in the Science Age, you know. Everybody who was supposed to have good sense thought space travel was absurd, until a madman named Hitler started using giant rockets to carry weapons. Hitler was beaten too quickly for his enemies to team up and outdo him at building space rockets. After the war they started competing rocket programs, and explored separately because they were afraid to let any one nation take full control of space.
"If Hitler had lasted longer, and his enemies had gotten started in space on a cooperative basis, probably they wouldn't have dared to split up when the war ended. That's why I couldn't let you catch me too soon, and why I had to have something new and frightening to show you when you came after Billy. You had seen the threat by then, and that was enough of a mind-changer to start you working separately, just as the old nations did on space travel. I had to keep the threat going long enough after that to make you change your minds about working together as well. And now that you've—"
"Oh, shut up and get out of here!" roared Higgins.
"We're going to work out a sensible plan to discontinue this project, young man, and we don't intend to be disrupted by your defeatist propagandizing! Get him out of there, won't you, Foser?"
"Scram, Starn!" snapped Rob. "We'll have no more troublemaking from you!"
Starn shrugged and wandered out of the building, feeling thoroughly deflated. He was no sooner outside than a small boy, belted with an assortment of unlikely gadgets and festooned with dangling wires, streaked up to him.
"Daddy!" the boy howled joyfully.
"Billy!" exclaimed Starn, hugging the boy close.
"How's—"
"She'll be here in a minute. I run faster than she does. She don't want me to say anything about her."
"Oh." The boy was obviously rigged for telepathy and . . . probably Cytherni was right in not wanting the boy to try to act as a telepathic peacemaker. What was between her and Starn was best dealt with in their own modes of communication. "Why all the gadgets?" he asked to change the subject.
"So I can play with the Pack kids," said Billy. "Of course, I can do a lot of things they can't, with all this stuff of mine, and their folks won't let them use gadgets—most of 'em, anyway. And they can't sneak and do it, because their folks know everything they do! I'm sure glad we don't live here all the time!"
Before Starn could frame a reply to that, Cytherni came in sight. He put Billy down and walked toward her. The boy watched them for a moment, and then dashed away.
When they reached each other, Starn said, "I love you, Cythie. I hope you can still believe that."
"I've never doubted it, Starn," she replied softly. "And I love you."
"But I used you!" he said. "That's not something to forgive!"
"Not for you to forgive yourself for, but . . . you're forgiven by me." She looked curiously into his pained eyes and said, "If you can't use someone you love, and who loves you, when you have to, then who can you use?" Starn puzzled over this line of reasoning, and shook his head. But things were going to be all right between them, and that was the important thing.
"I suppose I should visit my parents," he said after a moment, "if I will be welcome in my father's hut."
"You won't be welcome," she said, "but you must go, anyway. They will be more injured if you don't come. Then we can go home, the three of us. Everybody here will be glad to see us leave, Billy tells me."
"And I'll be glad to go," Starn said fervently.
But after two months of cozy, anticlimactic inactivity Starn grew dissatisfied with himself. There were compensations, certainly, such as Cytherni's announcement that she was pregnant, but Starn was a man whose goal had been attained, and he was left without a new aim, a motive for purposeful activity.
Cytherni had attacked her art with a strong burst of renewed inspiration, and Billy was busy with schooling, and the boy had also taken over the workshop Starn no longer cared to use. The boy apparently was brilliant, and his weeks of getting underfoot at the joint research center had left him, Starn thought at times, knowing as much as all the scientists and Pack men together.
But Starn was at loose ends, and getting miserable. Finally he risked a call to Higgins, and was pleased to find that the Defense Minister's anger with him had faded.
"Sure, I can find a job for you!" Higgins responded to his request. "There are plenty of administrative problems in our relations with the Packs—things you ought to know how to deal with. But don't expect any key positions, boy, not for a long time! You've made too many people too mad for that! But this is an expanding field, what with all the research and increased trade and what not. Come by tomorrow afternoon and we'll talk."
Starn thanked him and hung up in better spirits than he had been for days. If he, a revolutionary, could be of some value to the new world he had opened . . . well, so far as most historical precedents were concerned that would be a unique contribution in itself!
Billy came into his study, having detected, Starn guessed, his improved mood.
"Daddy, I know how to think things in a way that telepaths can't read, without using a shield or anything," the boy announced.
Starn considered this thoughtfully, and without much surprise. At last he said, "But aren't you giving the trick away in telling me about it? If others find out from me that you can have secret thoughts they'll know at least not to trust the thoughts they think are all you are having."
"I know that, Daddy," the boy said gravely. "So I want to show you how to think secret, too, so you can hide this."
"It would be a good ability to have in this job I was talking to Higgins about," Starn mused. "O.K."
He followed the boy into the workshop, and half an hour later he had learned the trick—plus a lot about the working of the human mind that he had never suspected.
"How did you get onto this?" he asked.
"By turning the gadgets on myself, instead of the environment," the boy replied. "Mommy thinks I have a Narcissus complex, and I guess I have a little. Anyway, I wanted to look at me, and when I did, one of the things I learned was how to think secret."
Starn chuckled and regarded the boy proudly. "Anything else important in you?" he asked.
Billy nodded. "I guess I can tell you, now that you can hide it: That theory about a communication line between the unconscious and the genes is right, only the line don't work very well, or very often. I found how to make it work good, in me or in anybody."
"You mean," asked Starn through a suddenly dry throat, "that you can order genetic changes of any kind you wish?"
"Uh-huh," the boy nodded.
"Billy," Starn began tightly, "you haven't meddled—"
"Oh, no. You and Mommy wouldn't like that! My baby sister will be pretty much like me, I guess. But my own children—"
Starn's knees felt weak, so he sank into a chair, staring at his seven-year-old son.
At least the boy wasn't going off half-cocked, testing his new-found ability of genetic manipulation. Maybe by the time he was old enough to have children of his own he also would have the wisdom.
Or would he? Did anybody ever get that wise? Wise enough and knowledgeable enough to make balanced and desirable genetic changes? Capable of deciding that which generations beyond count had puzzled over with total lack of success—what, precisely, should be the nature of the man who followed man?
Could any human, with his finite knowledge, ever answer a question that posed such infinite possibilities and complexities? Why have a god, such as the Great Gene, if you did not mean to leave such matters in his hands?
Billy was looking at him with a slight smile. "Gosh, Daddy, you're an awful alarmist!" he said soothingly and with a touch of amusement. "It won't be that hard to do." Starn, a revolutionary who had ripped the status quo asunder and filled countless complacent lives with the uncertain gales of change, continued to stare at his son, shocked to the core of his being by the realization that his own grandchildren would be Ultimate Novo!
Or . . . something!