"You, of course," the voice agreed, "but it's still no way to fight.”
They sensed the mind withdraw, grumbling to itself.
Gary grinned at Caroline. "Not gory enough to suit him," he said.
Caroline had sat down in a chair and was staring at him, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hands.
"We haven't much to work with," she declared. "No electricity. No power. No nothing. This ship is deader than a doornail. It's lucky the lock worked manually or we'd been goners before we even started.”
Gary nodded in agreement. "That voice bothers me the most," he said. "It has power, a strange sort of power. It can stop a spaceship dead in its tracks. It can fix guns so that they won't work. It can blanket out electricity; Lord knows what else it can do.”
"It can reach into the unknown of space and time," said Caroline. "Into a place no one else could even find and it did that to bring us here.”
"It's irresponsible," said Gary. "Back on Earth we'd call it insanity but what you and I would term insanity may be normal here.”
"There's no yardstick," said Caroline. "No yardstick to measure sanity. No way in which one can establish a norm for correct behavior or a correct mentality. Maybe the voice is sane. Maybe he has a purpose and a method of arriving at that purpose we do not understand and for that we call him crazy. Every race must be different, must think differently… arrive at the same conclusion and the same result, perhaps, but arrive at them differently. You remember all those beings that came to confer with the Engineers. All of them were capable, perhaps more capable than we.
Independently they might have been able to arrive at the same solution as we and perhaps much more easily and more effectively… and yet the Engineers sent them home again, because the Engineers could not work with them. Not because they were not capable, but because they thought so differently, because their mental processes ran at such divergent tangents that there was no basis for co-operation.”