Still—there was something else. This time he was dealing with a totally different personality.
There was a pleasant, undefinable quality to this individual from a world whose gravity could smear Mardin across the landscape in a fine liquid film. A character trait like—no, not simple tact—certainly not timidity—and you couldn’t just call it gentleness and warmth—
Mardin gave up. Certainly, he decided, the difference between this Jovian and his jailer on Mars was like the difference between two entirely different breeds. Why, it was a pleasure to share part of his mental processes temporarily with this kind of person! As from a distance, he heard the Jovian reply that the pleasure was mutual. He felt instinctively they had much in common.
And they’d have to—if Billingsley were to get the information he wanted. Superficially, it might seem that a mechanism for sharing thoughts was the ideal answer to communication between races as dissimilar as the Jovian and Terrestrial. In practice, Mardin knew from long months of squeezing his imagination under orders in Three Watertanks, a telepathy machine merely gave you a communication potential. An individual thinks in pictures and symbols based on his life experiences—if two individuals have no life experiences in common, all they can share is confusion. It had taken extended periods of desperate effort before Mardin and his Jovian captor had established that what passed for the digestive process among humans was a combination of breathing and strenuous physical exercise to a creature born on Jupiter, that the concept of taking a bath could be equated with a Jovian activity so shameful and so overlaid with pain that Mardin’s questioner had been unable to visit him for five weeks after the subject came up and thenceforth treated him with the reserve one might maintain toward an intelligent blob of fecal matter.
But mutually accepted symbols eventually had been established—just before Mardin’s rescue. And ever since then, he’d been kept on ice in Intelligence, for a moment like this…
“Mardin!” Old Rockethead’s voice ripped out of his earphones. “Made contact yet?”
“Yes. I think I have, sir.”
“Good! Feels like a reunion of the goddamn old regiment, eh? All set to ask questions? The slug’s cooperating? Answer me, Mardin! Don’t sit there gaping at him!”
“Yes, sir,” Mardin said hurriedly. “Everything’s all set.”
“Good! Let’s see now. First off, ask him his name, rank and serial number,”