"You give me very little credit. I plan to teach--"
"Forget Anvhar!" Ihjel cut him off with a chop of his hand. "This world will roll on quite successfully whether you are here or not. You must forget it, think of its relative unimportance on a galactic scale, and consider instead the existing, suffering hordes of mankind. You must think what you can do to help them."
"But what can I do--as an individual? The day is long past when a single man, like Caesar or Alexander, could bring about world-shaking changes."
"True--but not true," Ihjel said. "There are key men in every conflict of forces, men who act like catalysts applied at the right
instant to start a chemical reaction. You might be one of these men, but I must be honest and say that I can't prove it yet. So in order to save time and endless discussion, I think I will have to spark your personal sense of obligation."
"Obligation to whom?"
"To mankind, of course, to the countless billions of dead who kept the whole machine rolling along that allows you the full, long and happy life you enjoy[Pg 25] today. What they gave to you, you must pass on to others. This is the keystone of humanistic mor-als."
"Agreed. And a very good argument in the long run. But not one that is going to tempt me out of this bed within the next three hours."
"A point of success," Ihjel said. "You agree with the general argument. Now I apply it specifically to you. Here is the statement I in-tend to prove. There exists a planet with a population of seven million people. Unless I can prevent it, this planet will be completely destroyed. It is my job to stop that destruction, so that is where I am going now. I won't be able to do the job alone. In addition to others, I need you. Not anyone like you--but you, and you alone."
"You have precious little time left to convince me of all that," Brion told him, "so let me make the job easier for you. The work you do, this planet, the imminent danger of the people there--these are all facts that you can undoubtedly supply. I'll take a chance that this whole thing is not a colossal bluff, and admit that given time, you could verify them all. This brings the argument back to me again. How can you possibly prove that I am the only person in the galaxy who can help you?"
"I can prove it by your singular ability, the thing I came here to find."
"Ability? I am different in no way from the other men on my planet."
8
"You're wrong," Ihjel said. "You are the embodied proof of evolution. Rare individuals with specific talents occur constantly in any species, man included. It has been two generations since an empathetic was last born on Anvhar, and I have been watching carefully most of that time."
"What in blazes is an empathetic--and how do you recognize it when you have found it?" Brion chuckled, this talk was getting preposterous.
"I can recognize one because I'm one myself--there is no other way. As to how projective empathy works, you had a demonstration of that a little earlier, when you felt those strange thoughts about Anvhar. It will be a long time before you can master[Pg 26] that, but receptive empathy is your natural trait. This is mentally entering into the feeling, or what could be called the spirit of another
person. Empathy is not thought perception; it might better be described as the sensing of someone else's emotional makeup, feelings and attitudes. You can't lie to a trained empathetic, because he can sense the real attitude behind the verbal lies. Even your undeveloped talent has proved immensely useful in the Twenties. You can outguess your opponent because you know his movements even
as his body tenses to make them. You accept this without ever questioning it." "How do you know?" This was Brion's understood, but never voiced secret.
Ihjel smiled. "Just guessing. But I won the Twenties too, remember, also without knowing a thing about empathy at the time. On top of our normal training, it's a wonderful trait to have. Which brings me to the proof we mentioned a minute ago. When you said you would be convinced if I could prove you were the only person who could help me. I believe you are--and that is one thing I cannot lie about. It's possible to lie about a belief verbally, to have a falsely based belief, or to change a belief. But you can't lie about it to yourself.
"Equally important--you can't lie about a belief to an empathetic. Would you like to see how I feel about this? 'See' is a bad word-- there is no vocabulary yet for this kind of thing. Better, would you join me in my feelings? Sense my attitudes, memories and emotions just as I do?"
Brion tried to protest, but he was too late. The doors of his senses were pushed wide and he was overwhelmed.
"Dis ..." Ihjel said aloud. "Seven million people ... hydrogen bombs ... Brion Brandd." These were just key words, landmarks of association. With each one Brion felt the rushing wave of the other man's emotions.
There could be no lies here--Ihjel was right in that. This was the raw stuff that feelings are made of,[Pg 27] the basic reactions to the things and symbols of memory.
DIS ... DIS ... DIS ... it was a word it was a planet and the word thundered like a drum a drum the sound
of its thunder surrounded and was a wasteland a planet
of death a planet where living was dying and dying was very
better than living
crude barbaric backward miserable dirty beneath consideration
planet
hot burning scorching wasteland of sands
and sands and sands and sands that burned had burned will burn forever
the people of this planet so crude dirty miserable barbaric sub-human inhuman
9
less-than-human
DIS
but they were going to
be
DEAD
and DEAD they would be seven million blackened corpses that would blacken your dreams all dreams dreams
forever because those HYDROGEN BOMBS were waiting
to kill
them unless .. unless .. unless ..
you Ihjel stopped it you Ihjel (DEATH) you (DEATH)
you (DEATH) alone couldn't do it you (DEATH)
must have
BRION BRANDD wet-behind-the-ears-raw-untrained- Brion-Brandd-to-help-you he was the only one in the galaxy who could finish the job.................................. [Pg 28]
As the flow of sensation died away, Brion realized he was sprawled back weakly on his pillows, soaked with sweat, washed with the memory of the raw emotion. Across from him Ihjel sat with his face bowed in his hands. When he lifted his head Brion saw within his eyes a shadow of the blackness he had just experienced.
"Death," Brion said. "That terrible feeling of death. It wasn't just the people of Dis who would die. It was something more personal."
"Myself," Ihjel said, and behind this simple word were the repeated echoes of night that Brion had been made aware of with his newly recognized ability. "My own death, not too far away. This is the wonderfully terrible price you must pay for your talent. Angst is an inescapable part of empathy. It is a part of the whole unknown field of psi phenomena that seems to be independent of time. Death is so traumatic and final that it reverberates back along the time line. The closer I get, the more aware of it I am. There is no
exact feeling of date, just a rough location in time. That is the horror of it. I know I will die soon after I get to Dis--and long before the work there is finished. I know the job to be done there, and I know the men who have already failed at it. I also know you are the only person who can possibly complete the work