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  Even so, Sam was going to have to take his chances. After all, the Central Computer couldn’t have sent him here just to do energy physics. There was nothing in his record that made sense out of that.

  As far as looks were concerned, the planet might have been Earth, some part of Earth anyway, some place where there were a few trees and low bushes and lots of tall grass.

  There were no paths and with every cautious step, the grass swayed, and tiny flying creatures whirred upward with a soft, hissing noise of wings.

  One of them landed on his finger and Sam looked at it curiously. It was very small and, therefore, hard to see in detail, but it seemed hexagonal, bulging above and concave below. There were many short, small legs so that when it moved it almost seemed to do so on tiny wheels. There were no signs of wings till it suddenly took off, and then four tiny, feathery objects unfurled.

  What made the planet different from Earth, though, was the smell. It wasn’t unpleasant, it was just different. The plants must have had an entirely different chemistry from those on Earth; that’s why they tasted bad and were inedible. It was just luck they weren’t poisonous.

  The smell diminished with time, however, as it saturated Sam’s nostrils. He found an exposed bit of rocky ledge he could sit on and considered the prospect. The sky was filled with lines of clouds, and the Sun was periodically obscured, but the temperature was pleasant and there was only a light wind. The air felt a bit damp, as though it might rain in a few hours.

  Sam had brought a small hamper with him and he placed it in his lap and opened it. He had brought along two sandwiches and a canned drink so that he could make rather a picnic of it.

  He chewed away and thought: Why should there be hallucinations?

  Surely those accepted for a job as important as that of taming a neutron star would have been selected for mental stability. It would be surprising to have even one person hallucinating, let alone a number of them. Was it a matter of chemical influences on the brain?

  They would surely have checked that out.

  Sam plucked a leaf, tore it in two and squeezed. He then put the torn edge to his nose cautiously, and took it away again. A very acrid, unpleasant smell. He tried a blade of grass. Much the same.

  Was the smell enough? It hadn’t made him feel dizzy or in any way peculiar.

  He used a bit of his water to rinse off the fingers that had held the plants and then rubbed them on his trouser leg. He finished his sandwiches slowly, and tried to see if anything else might be considered unnatural about the planet.

  All that greenery. There ought to be animals eating it, rabbits, cows, whatever. Not just insects, innumerable insects, or whatever those little things might be, with the gentle sighing of their tiny feathery wings and the very soft crackle of their munch, munch, munchings of leaves and stalks.

  What if there were a cow—a big, fat cow—doing the munching? And with the last mouthful of his second sandwich between his teeth, his own munching stopped.

  There was a kind of smoke in the air between himself and a line of hedges. It waved, billowed, and altered: a very thin smoke. He blinked his eyes, then shook his head, but it was still there.

  He swallowed hastily, closed his lunch box, and slung it over his shoulder by its strap. He stood up.

  He felt no fear. He was only excited—and curious.

  The smoke was growing thicker, and taking on a shape. Vaguely, it looked like a cow, a smoky, insubstantial shape that he could see through. Was it a hallucination? A creation of his mind? He had just been thinking of a cow.

  Hallucination or not, he was going to investigate.

  With determination, he stepped toward the shape.

  Part Two

  Sam Chase stepped toward the cow outlined in smoke on the strange, far planet on which his education and career were to be advanced.

  He was convinced there was nothing wrong with his mind. It was the “hallucination” that Dr. Gentry had mentioned, but it was no hallucination. Even as he pushed his way through the tall rank grasslike greenery, he noted the silence, and knew not only that it was no hallucination, but what it really was.

  The smoke seemed to condense and grow darker, outlining the cow more sharply. It was as though the cow were being painted in the air.

  Sam laughed, and shouted, “Stop! Stop! Don’t use me. I don’t know a cow well enough. I’ve only seen pictures. You’re getting it all wrong.”

  It looked more like a caricature than a real animal and, as he cried out, the outline wavered and thinned. The smoke remained but it was as though an unseen hand had passed across the air to erase what had been written.

  Then a new shape began to take form. At first, Sam couldn’t quite make out what it was intended to represent, but it changed and sharpened quickly. He stared in surprise, his mouth hanging open and his hamper bumping emptily against his shoulder blade.

  The smoke was forming a human being. There was no mistake about it. It was forming accurately, as though it had a model it could imitate, and of course it did have one, for Sam was standing there.

  It was becoming Sam, clothes and all, even the outline of the hamper and the strap over his shoulder. It was another Sam Chase.

  It was still a little vague, wavering a bit, insubstantial, but it firmed as though it were correcting itself, and then, finally, it was steady.

  It never became entirely solid. Sam could see the vegetation dimly through it, and when a gust of wind caught it, it moved a bit as if it were a tethered balloon.

  But it was real. It was no creation of his mind. Sam was sure of that.

  But he couldn’t just stand there, simply facing it. Diffidently, he said, “Hello, there.”

  Somehow, he expected the Other Sam to speak, too, and, indeed, its mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. It might just have been imitating the motion of Sam’s mouth.

  Sam said, again, “Hello, can you speak?”

  There was no sound but his own voice, and yet there was a tickling in his mind, a conviction that they could communicate.

  Sam frowned. What made him so sure of that? The thought seemed to pop into his mind.

  He said, “Is this what has appeared to other people, human people—my kind—on this world?”

  No answering sound, but he was quite sure what the answer to his question was. This had appeared to other people, not necessarily in their own shape, but something. And it hadn’t worked.

  What made him so sure of that? Where did these convictions come from in answer to his questions?

  Yes, of course, they were the answers to his questions. The Other Sam was putting thoughts into his mind. It was adjusting the tiny electric currents in his brain cells so that the proper thoughts would arise.

  He nodded thoughtfully at that thought, and the Other Sam must have caught the significance of the gesture, for it nodded, too.

  It had to be so. First a cow had formed, when Sam had thought of a cow, and then it had shifted when Sam had said the cow was imperfect. The Other Sam could grasp his thoughts somehow, and if it could grasp them, then it could modify them, too, perhaps.

  Was this what telepathy was like, then? It was not like talking. It was having thoughts, except that the thoughts originated elsewhere and were not created entirely of one’s own mental operations. But how could you tell your own thoughts from thoughts imposed from outside?

  Sam knew the answer to that at once. Right now, he was unused to the process. He had never had practice. With time, as he grew more skilled at it, he would be able to tell one kind of thought from another without trouble.

  In fact, he could do it now, if he thought about it. Wasn’t he carrying on a conversation in a way? He was wondering, and then knowing. The wondering was his own question, the knowing was the Other Sam’s answer. Of course it was.

  There! The “of course it was,” just now, was an answer.

  “Not so fast, Other Sam,” said Sam, aloud. “Don’t go too quickly. Give me a chance to sort things out, o
r I’ll just get confused.”

  He sat down suddenly on the grass, which bent away from him in all directions.

  The Other Sam slowly tried to sit down as well.

  Sam laughed. “Your legs are bending in the wrong place.”

  That was corrected at once. The Other Sam sat down, but remained very stiff from the waist up.

  “Relax,” said Sam.

  Slowly, the Other Sam slumped, flopping a bit to one side, then correcting that.

  Sam was relieved. With the Other Sam so willing to follow his lead, he was sure good will was involved. It was! Exactly!

  “No,” said Sam. “I said, not so fast. Don’t go by my thoughts. Let me speak out loud, even if you can’t hear me. Then adjust my thoughts, so I’ll know it’s an adjustment. Do you understand?”

  He waited a moment and was then sure the Other Sam understood.

  Ah, the answer had come, but not right away. Good!

  “Why do you appear to people?” asked Sam.

  He stared earnestly at the Other Sam, and knew that the Other Sam wanted to communicate with people, but had failed.

  No answer to that question had really been required. The answer was obvious. But then, why had they failed?

  He put it in words. “Why did you fail? You are successfully communicating with me.”

  Sam was beginning to learn how to understand the alien manifestation. It was as if his mind were adapting itself to a new technique of communication, just as it would adapt itself to a new language. Or was Other Sam influencing Sam’s mind and teaching him the method without Sam even knowing it was being done?

  Sam found himself emptying his mind of immediate thoughts. After he asked his question, he just let his eyes focus at nothing and his eyelids droop, as though he were about to drop off to sleep, and then he knew the answer. There was a little clicking, or something, in his mind, a signal that showed him something had been put in from outside.

  He now knew, for instance, that the Other Sam’s previous attempts at communication had failed because the people to whom it had appeared had been frightened. They had doubted their own sanity. And because they feared, their minds…tightened. Their minds would not receive. The attempts at communication gradually diminished, though they had never entirely stopped.

  “But you’re communicating with me,” said Sam.

  Sam was different from all the rest. He had not been afraid.

  “Couldn’t you have made them not afraid first? Then talked to them?”

  It wouldn’t work. The fear-filled mind resisted all. An attempt to change might damage. It would be wrong to damage a thinking mind. There had been one such attempt, but it had not worked.

  “What is it you are trying to communicate, Other Sam?”

  A wish to be left alone. Despair!

  Despair was more than a thought; it was an emotion; it was a frightening sensation. Sam felt despair wash over him intensely, heavily—and yet it was not part of himself. He felt despair on the surface of his mind, keenly, but underneath it, where his own mind was, he was free of it.

  Sam said, wonderingly, “It seems to me as though you’re giving up. Why? We’re not interfering with you.”

  Human beings had built the Dome, cleared a large area of all planetary life and substituted their own. And once the neutron star had its power station—once floods of energy moved outward through hyperspace to power-thirsty worlds—more power stations would be built and still more. Then what would happen to Home.(There must be a name for the planet that the Other Sam used but the only thought Sam found in his mind was Home and, underneath that, the thought: ours—ours—ours—)

  This planet was the nearest convenient base to the neutron star. It would be flooded with more and more people, more and more Domes, and their Home would be destroyed.

  “But you could change our minds if you had to, even if you damaged a few, couldn’t you?”

  If they tried, people would find them dangerous. People would work out what was happening. Ships would approach, and from a distance, use weapons to destroy the life on Home, and then bring in People-life instead. This could be seen in the people’s minds. People had a violent history; they would stop at nothing.

  “But what can I do?” said Sam. “I’m just an apprentice. I’ve just been here a few days. What can I do?”

  Fear. Despair.

  There were no thoughts that Sam could work out, just the numbing layer of fear and despair.

  He felt moved. It was such a peaceful world. They threatened nobody. They didn’t even hurt minds when they could.

  It wasn’t their fault they were conveniently near a neutron star. It wasn’t their fault they were in the way of expanding humanity.

  He said, “Let me think.”

  He thought, and there was the feeling of another mind watching. Sometimes his thoughts skipped forward and he recognized a suggestion from outside.

  There came the beginning of hope. Sam felt it, but wasn’t certain.

  He said doubtfully, “I’ll try.”

  He looked at the time-strip on his wrist and jumped a little. Far more time had passed than he had realized. His three hours were nearly up. “I must go back now,” he said.

  He opened his lunch hamper and removed the small thermos of water, drank from it thirstily, and emptied it. He placed the empty thermos under one arm. He removed the wrappings of the sandwich and stuffed it in his pocket.

  The Other Sam wavered and turned smoky. The smoke thinned, dispersed and was gone.

  Sam closed the hamper, swung its strap over his shoulder again and turned toward the Dome.

  His heart was hammering. Would he have the courage to go through with his plan? And if he did, would it work?

  When Sam entered the Dome, the Corridor-Master was waiting for him and said, as he looked ostentatiously at his own time-strip, “You shaved it rather fine, didn’t you?”

  Sam’s lips tightened and he tried not to sound insolent. “I had three hours, sir.”

  “And you took two hours and fifty-eight minutes.”

  “That’s less than three hours, sir.”

  “Hmm.” The Corridor-Master was cold and unfriendly. “Dr. Gentry would like to see you.”

  “Yes, sir. What for?”

  “He didn’t tell me. But I don’t like you cutting it that fine your first time out, Chase. And I don’t like your attitude either, and I don’t like an officer of the Dome wanting to see you. I’m just going to tell you once, Chase—if you’re a troublemaker, I won’t want you in this Corridor. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir. But what trouble have I made?”

  “We’ll find that out soon enough.”

  Sam had not seen Donald Gentry since their one and only meeting the day the young apprentice had reached the Dome. Gentry still seemed good natured and kindly, and there was nothing in his voice to indicate anything else. He sat in a chair behind his desk, and Sam stood before it, his hamper still bumping his shoulder blade.

  Gentry said, “How are you getting along, Sam? Having an interesting time?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sam.

  “Still feeling you’d rather be doing something else, working somewhere else?”

  Sam said, earnestly, “No, sir. This is a good place for me.”

  “Because you’re interested in hallucinations?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve been asking others about it, haven’t you?”

  “It’s an interesting subject to me, sir.”

  “Because you want to study the human brain?”

  “Any brain, sir.”

  “And you’ve been wandering about outside the Dome, haven’t you?”

  “I was told it was permitted, sir.”

  “It is. But few apprentices take advantage of that so soon. Did you see anything interesting?”

  Sam hesitated, then said, “Yes, sir.”

  “A hallucination?”

  “No, sir.” He said it quite positively.

 
Gentry stared at him for a few moments, and there was a kind of speculative hardening of his eyes. “Would you care to tell me what you did see? Honestly.”

  Sam hesitated again. Then he said, “I saw and spoke to an inhabitant of this planet, sir.”

  “An intelligent inhabitant, young man?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gentry said, “Sam, we had reason to wonder about you when you came. The Central Computer’s report on you did not match our needs, though it was favorable in many ways, so I took the opportunity to study you that first day. We kept our collective eye on you, and when you left to wander about the planet on your own, we kept you under observation.”

  “Sir,” said Sam, indignantly. “That violates my right of privacy.”

  “Yes, it does, but this is a most vital project and we are sometimes driven to bend the rules a little. We saw you talking with considerable animation for a substantial period of time.”

  “I just told you I was, sir.”

  “Yes, but you were talking to nothing, to empty air. You were experiencing a hallucination, Sam!”

  Part Three

  Sam Chase was speechless. A hallucination? It couldn’t be a hallucination.

  Less than half an hour ago, he had been speaking to the Other Sam, had been experiencing the thoughts of the Other Sam. He knew exactly what had happened then, and he was still the same Sam Chase he had been during that conversation and before. He put his elbow over his lunch hamper as though it were a connection with the sandwiches he had been eating when the Other Sam had appeared.

  He said, with what was almost a stammer, “Sir—Dr. Gentry—it wasn’t a hallucination. It was real.”

  Gentry shook his head. “My boy, I saw you talking with animation to nothing at all. I didn’t hear what you said, but you were talking. Nothing else was there except plants. Nor was I the only one. There were two other witnesses, and we have it all on record.”

  “On record?”

  “On a television cassette. Why should we lie to you, young man? This has happened before. At the start it happened rather frequently. Now it happens only very rarely. For one thing, we tell the new apprentices of the hallucinations at the start, as I told you, and they generally avoid the planet until they are more acclimated, and then it doesn’t happen to them.”