World Of Ptavvs   ::   Нивен Ларри

"

At nineteen thirty he said, "I hope the alien time field hasn't reinforced mine." He said it softly, in German.

At nineteen fifty the beer was almost gone. Dale Snyder was making threatening noises, and one of the technicians was soothing him. Jansky, not a diplomat, sat staring fixedly at the silvered cube. At long intervals he would remember the beer in his paper cup and pour it whole down his throat. His look was not reassuring.

At twenty hours the cube flickered and was transparent. There was a cheer as Jansky and Snyder hurried forward. As he got closer Jansky saw that the statue had fallen on its face, and was no longer under the contact helmet.

Snyder frowned. Jansky had done a good job of describing the experiment. Now the psychologist suddenly wondered: Was that sphere really where the alien kept its brain? If it wasn't, the experiment would be a failure. Even dolphins were — deceptive that way. The brains were not hi the bulging "forehead," but behind the blowhole; the «forehead» was a weapon, a heavily padded ram.

Larry Greenberg was sitting up. Even from here he looked bad. His eyes were glassy, unfocused; he made no move to stand up. He looks mad, thought Dorcas Jansky, hoping that Snyder wouldn't think so too. But Snyder was obviously worried.

Larry climbed to his feet with a peculiar rolling motion. He seemed to stumble, recovered, tottered to the edge of the wire curtain. He looked like he was walking on raw eggs, trying not to break them. He stooped like a weight lifter, bending his knees and not his back, and picked up something from where it lay beside the fallen statue. As Jansky reached the wire, Larry turned to him with the thing in his hands.

Jansky screamed. He was blind! And the skin of his face was coming apart! He threw his arms over his face, feeling the same torment in his arms, and turned to run. Agony lashed his back. He ran until he hit the wall.

A moment earlier she'd been sound asleep. Now she was wide awake, sitting straight up in bed, eyes searching the dark for she didn't know what. She groped for the light switch, but it wasn't in the right place; her swinging arm couldn't even find the bed control panel. Then she knew that she was on Larry's side of the bed. She found his panel on her right and turned on the lamp.

Where was he? She'd gone to sleep about seventeen, completely beat. He must be still at UCLA. Something had gone wrong, she could feel it!

Was it just a nightmare?

If it had been a nightmare she couldn't remember a single detail. But the mood clung, haunting her. She tried to go back to sleep and found she couldn't. The room seemed strange and awful. The shadows were full of unseen crawling monsters.

Kzanol bleated and threw both arms out to break his fall.

And went insane. The impressions poured riotously through his flinching senses and overwhelmed him. With the desperation of a drowning man trying to breathe water, he tried to sort them out before they killed him.

First and most monstrous were the memories of an unfamiliar breed of slave calling itself Larry Greenberg. They were more powerful than anything that had ever reached his Power sense. If Kzanol had not spent so many years controlling alien life forms, growing used to the feel of alien thoughts, his whole personality would have been drowned.

With a tremendous effort he managed to exclude most of the Greenberg mind from his consciousness. The vertigo didn't pass. Now his body felt weird, hot and malformed. He tried to open his eye, but the muscles wouldn't work. Then he must have hit the right combination and his eye opened. Twice! He moaned and shut it tight, then tried again. His eye opened twice, two distinct and separate motions, but he kept them open because he was looking down at his own body. His body was Larry Greenberg.

He'd had enough warning. The shock didn't kill him.

Gingerly Kzanol began to probe the Greenberg mind. He had to be careful to get only a little information at a time, or he would be swamped. It was very different from ordinary use of the Power; it was a little like practicing with an amplifier helmet. He got enough to convince him that he really had been teleported, or telepathed, or some ptavv-sired thing, into an alien slave body.

He sat up slowly and carefully, using the Greenberg reflexes as much as he dared because he wasn't used to the strange muscles. The double vision tended to confuse him, but he could see that he was in a sort of metal mesh enclosure. Outside… Kzanol got the worst shock of all, and again he went insane.

Outside the enclosure were slaves, of the same strange breed as his present self. Two of them were actually coming toward him. He hadn't sensed them at all and he still couldn't.

Powerless!

A thrint is not born with the Power. Generally it takes around two Thrintun years for the Power sense to develop, and another year before the young thrint can force a coherent order on a slave. In some cases the Power never comes. If a thrint reaches adulthood without the Power, he is called a ptavv. He is tattooed permanently pink and sold as a slave, unless he is secretly killed by his family. Very secretly. There is no better ground for blackmail than the knowledge that a wealthy family once produced a ptavv.

An adult thrint who loses the Power is less predictable. If he doesn't go thrint-catatonic he may commit suicide; or he may go on a killing spree, slaughtering either every slave or every thrint that crosses his path; or he may compulsively forget even the existence of a Power. The Powerloss is more crippling than going blind or deaf, more humiliating than castration. If a man could lose his intelligence, yet retain the memory of what he had lost, he might feel as Kzanol felt; for the Power is what separates Thrint from Animal.

Still daring to hope, Kzanol looked directly at the advancing aliens and ordered them to STOP! The sense wasn't working, but maybe…. The slaves kept coming.

They were looking at him! Helplessly he cast about for some way to stop them from looking. They were witnessing his shame, these undersized furry whitefoods who now considered him an equal. And he saw the disintegrator, lying near the abandoned Kzanol body's out-flung hand.

He got to his feet all right, but-when he tried to hop he almost fell on his face. He managed to walk over, looking like a terrified novice trying to move in low gravity. The nearest slave had reached the cage. Kzanol bent his funny knees until he could pick up the disintegrator, using both hands because his new fingers looked so fragile and delicate and helpless.