The tendril came to a stop before his face and the tip curved interrogatively. Mardin squirmed back against the metal chair back.
I wont! This time I don’t have to! You can’t make me — this time you re our prisoner — you can’t make me — you can’t make me —
“Mardin!” Billingsley’s voice bellowed in his headphones. “Put the damn thing on and let’s get going! Move, man, move!”
And almost before he knew he had done it, as automatically as he had learned to go rigid at the sound of attenshun! Mardin’s hand reached out for the tendril and placed the tip of it against the old scar on his forehead.
There was that anciently familiar sensation of inmost rapport, of new-found completeness, of belonging to a higher order of being. There were the strange double memories; a river of green fire arching off a jet-black trembling cliff hundreds of miles high, somehow blending in with the feel of delighted shock as Dave Weiner’s baseball hit the catcher’s mitt you’d gotten two hours ago for a birthday present; a picture of a very lovely and very intent young female physicist explaining to you just how somebody named Albert Fermi Vannevar derived E=mc 2, getting all confused with the time to begin the many-scented dance to the surface because of the myriad of wonderful soft spots you could feel calling to each other on your back.
But, Mardin realized with amazement in some recess of autonomy still left in his mind, this time there was a difference. This time there was no feeling of terror as of thorough personal violation, there was no incredibly ugly sensation of tentacles armed with multitudes of tiny suckers speeding through his nervous system and feeding, feeding, greedily feeding…This time none of his thoughts were dissected, kicking and screaming, in the operating theater of his own skull while his ego shuddered fearfully at the bloody spectacle from a distant psychic cranny.
This time he was with —not of.
Of course, a lot of work undoubtedly had been done on the Jovian question-machine in the past decade. The single tendril that contained all of the intricate mechanism for telepathic communion between two races had probably been refined far past the coarse and blundering gadget that had gouged at his mind eighteen years ago.
And, of course, this time he was the interrogator. This time it was a Jovian that lay helpless before the probe, the weapons, the merciless detachment of an alien culture. This time it was a Jovian, not Igor Mardin, who had to find the right answers to the insistent questions—and the right symbols with which to articulate those answers.
All that made a tremendous difference. Mardin relaxed and was amused by the feeling of power that roared through him.