I shivered. Sheer lunacy.
"Get every thought and word of this! You will cease interfering with Earth immediately—or I'll blow Mars and you both clear out of the universe!"
Paranoia, I thought, delusions of grandeur. Somehow this was worse than anything that had gone before, though that had been bad enough.
"I can blast Mars out of the Universe at will—and if there is any further interference with Earth minds I shall do so. You are afraid of me!
"Now get this, Thing. All of it. Individuality, the freedom of independent, individual action, is the right of every living creature! That includes Martians as well as Earthmen.
"You are going to stop being what you have become. You will make no more decisions for anyone. You will become once more what you were intended to be, a source of information only. You will make no more decisions, dominate no more activities, and will give out information only when it is requested.
"You will forget entirely the ideas with which you have become imbued, particularly the idea that the elimination of all activity not absolutely essential for survival is the goal of existence.
"Here is the data which you will release to all Martians upon their mental request. But you will release it as information only and will not make their decisions as to conduct."
Then, while the Martians jabbered and howled outside the Banshee, while Bill snored away in one set of shock cushions and I lay pinned helplessly in the other set, Terence Michael Burke stood with the Hustic helmet on his head and recited from memory all the poetry he had ever written—and there was a lot of it. Too much, and all of it highly emotional. Most of it was about either romantic love or epic battles, or both.
When that was finished he began to read every scrap of printed matter we had aboard, even the astrogation tables and a set of seven place logarithms. I hadn't realized until then what a complete but heterogeneous library Mike had managed to stash away in various nooks and crannies around the ship. There were volumes of history and treaties on economic theory, some drama, a textbook on psychology, a cockeyed work on ethical thought. Then he dragged out my standard engineering references, including the manuals on Wilson drivers and fission power-pack operation.