World Of Ptavvs   ::   Нивен Ларри

I've been using it for years. All I get is another person's memories, and a little insight into how he thinks. Even then they're damped a little so I have to think hard to remember something that didn't happen to me personally.

"Two. My experience with dolphins has given me experience with unhuman minds. Right?"

"Right. And you always want to play practical jokes after a session with Charley. Remember when you hypnotized Mrs. Grafton and made her-"

"Nuts. I've always liked practical jokes. Third point is that the time field doesn't matter at all. It's just to kill the field around the statue. You can forget it.

"Four. Janaky won't take any chances with my life. You know that, you can see it. Okay?"

"All that scuba diving last summer-"

"That was your idea."

"Uh? I guess it was." She smiled and didn't mean it. "Okay. I thought you'd be practicing next on bandersnatchi, but I guess this is the acid test. And I'm still worried. You know I'm prescient."

"Well- oh, well. I'll call you as soon as I can." He got into the cab and dialed the address of the UCLA physics school level.

"Mark will be back with the coffee in a minute," said Dorcas Jansky. "Let me show you how the time-retarding field works." They were in a huge room whose roof contained two of those gigantic electrodes which produce ear-splitting claps of artificial lightning to impress groups of wide-eyed college students. But Jansky didn't seem concerned with the lightning maker. "We borrowed this part of the building because it has a good power source," he said, "and it was big enough for our purposes. Do you see that wire construction?"

"Sure." It was a cube of very fine wire mesh, with a flap in one side. The wire covered the top and floor as well as the sides. Busy workmen were testing and arranging great and complex-looking masses of machinery, which were not as yet connected to the wire cage.

"The field follows the surface of that wire. The wire side boundary between slow, inside time and fast, outside time. We had some fun making it, let me tell you!" Janaky ran his fingers through his beard, meditating on the hard work to which he had been put. "We think the field around the alien must be several quantum numbers higher than ours. There is no telling how long he has been in there except by the method we will use."

"Well, he might not know either."

"Yes, I suppose so. Larry, you will be in the field for six hours of outer time. That will be one second of your time. I understand that the thought transfer is instantaneous?"

"Not instantaneous, but it does take less than a second. Set things up and turn on the contact machine before you turn on the time field, and I'll get his thoughts as soon as he comes to life. Until he does that I won't get anything." Just like the dolphins, Larry told himself. It's just like contacting a Tursiops truncatus.

"Good. I wasn't sure. Ahh." Janaky went to tell Mark where to put the coffee. Larry welcomed the interruption, for suddenly he was getting the willies. It wasn't nearly as bad as it had been the night before his first session with a dolphin, but it was bad enough. He was remembering that his wife was sometimes uncomfortably psychic. He drank his coffee gratefully.

"So," Jansky gasped, having drained his cup at a few gulps. "Larry, when did you first suspect that you were telebaddic?"

"College," said Larry. "I was going to Washburn University it's in Kansas and one day a visiting bigwig gave the whole school a test for psi powers. We spent the whole day at it. Telepathy, esper, PK, prescience, even a weird test for teleportation which everybody flunked. Judy came up high on prescience, but erratic, and I topped everyone on telepathy. That's how we met. When we found out we both wanted to go starhopping…"

"Surely that wasn't why you two married?"

"Not entirely. And it sure as hell isn't why we haven't gotten divorced." Larry grinned a feral grin, then seemed to recollect himself. "Telepathy makes for good marriages, you know."

"I wouldn't know," Janaky smiled.

"I might have made a good psychologist," Larry said without regret. "But it's a little late to start now. I hope they send out the Lazy Eight III," he said between his teeth. "They can't desert the colonies anyway. They can't do that."

Jansky refilled both cups. The workmen wheeled something through the huge doorway, something covered by a sheet. Larry watched them as he sipped his coffee. He was feeling completely relaxed. Jansky drained his second cup as fast as he had finished the first. He must either love it, Larry decided, or hate it.

Unexpectedly Jansky asked, "Do you like dolphins?"

"Sure. Very much, in fact."

"Why?"

"They have so much fun," was Larry's inadequate sounding reply.

"You're glad you entered your profession?"

"Oh, very. It would have surprised my father, though. He thought I was going to be a pawnbroker. You see, I was born with…" His voice trailed off. "Hey! Is that it?"

"Um?" Jansky looked where Larry was looking. "Yes, that is the Sea Statue. Shall we go and look at it?"

The three men carrying the statue took no notice of them. They carried it into the cubical structure of fine wire mesh and set it under one of the crystal-iron helmets of the contact machine. They had to brace its feet with chocks of wood. The other helmet, Larry's end of the contact link, was fixed at the head of an old psychoanalyst's couch. The workmen left the cage, single file, and Larry stood in the open flap and peered at the statue.

The surface was an unbroken, perfect mirror. A crazy mirror. It made the statue difficult to see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.

The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head was downright eerie. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse, hands.

"I notice he's armed," was Larry's first, slightly uneasy comment. "And he seems to be crouching."

"Crouching? Take a closer look," Jansky invited genially. "And look at the feet."

A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was ready to deal death. But-

"I still don't see what you're driving at, but I can see his feet aren't straight. They don't lie flat to the ground.