The Hard Way Up - A. Bertram Chandler [23]
Grimes sent for Spooky Deane, the psionic communications officer. He had the bottle and the glasses ready when the tall, fragile young man seeped in through the doorway of his day cabin, looking like a wisp of ectoplasm decked out in Survey Service uniform. He sat down when invited, accepted the tumbler of neat gin that his captain poured for him.
"Here's looking up your kilt," toasted Grimes coarsely.
"'A physical violation of privacy, Captain," murmured Deane. "I see nothing objectionable in that."
"And just what are you hinting at, Mr. Deane?"
"I know, Captain, that you are about to ask me to break the Rhine Institute's Privacy Oath. And this knowledge has nothing to do with my being a telepath. Every time that we carry passengers it's the same. You always want me to pry into their minds to see what makes them tick."
"Only when I feel that the safety of the ship might be at stake." Grimes refilled Deane's glass, the contents of which had somehow vanished. "You are . . . frightened of our passenger?" Grimes frowned. "Frightened" was a strong word. And yet mankind has always feared the robot, the automaton, the artificial man. A premonitory dread? Or was the robot only a symbol of the machines—the mindless machines—that with every passing year were becoming more and more dominant in human affairs?
Deane said quietly, "Mr. Adam is not a mindless machine."
Grimes glared at him. He almost snarled, "How the hell do you know what I'm thinking?"—then thought better of it. Not that it made any difference.
The telepath went on, "Mr. Adam has a mind, as well as a brain."
"That's what I was wondering."
"Yes. He broadcasts, Captain, as all of you do. The trouble is that I haven't quite got his . . . frequency."
"Any . . . hostility towards us? Towards humans?"
Deane extended his empty glass. Grimes refilled it. The telepath sipped daintily, then said, "I . . . I don't think so, but, as I've already told you, his mind is not human. Is it contempt he feels? No . . . Not quite. Pity? Yes, it could be. A sort of amused affection? Yes . . ."
"The sort of feelings that we'd have towards—say—a dog capable of coherent speech?"
"Yes."
"Anything else?"
"I could be wrong, Captain. I most probably am. This is the first time that I've eavesdropped on a non-organic mind. There seems to be a strong sense of . . . mission . . ."
"Mission?"
"Yes. It reminds me of that priest we carried a few trips back—the one who was going out to convert the heathen Tarvarkens . . ."
"A dirty business," commented Grimes. "Wean the natives away from their own, quite satisfactory local gods so that they stop lobbing missiles at the trading post, which was established without their consent anyhow . . ."
"Father Cleary didn't look at it that way."
"Good for him. I wonder what happened to the poor bastard?"
"Should you be talking like this, Captain?"
"I shouldn't. But with you it doesn't matter. You know what I'm thinking, anyhow. But this Mr. Adam, Spooky. A missionary? It doesn't make sense."
"That's just the feeling I get."
Grimes ignored this. "Or, perhaps, it does make sense. The robots of Mr. Adam's class are designed to be able to go where Man himself cannot go. In our own planetary system, for example, they've carried out explorations on Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn. A robot missionary on Tarvark would have made sense, being impervious to poisoned arrows, spears, and the like. But on Delacron, an Earth colony? No."
"But I still get that feeling," insisted Deane.
"There are feelings and feelings," Grimes told him. "Don't forget that this is non-organic mind that you're prying into. Perhaps you don't know the code, the language . . ."
"Codes and languages don't matter to a telepath." Deane contrived to make his empty glass obvious.