Page:Fantastic Universe (1956-10; vol. 8, no. 3).djvu/25

42 them upward. It was only in the first moment of stepping out into the control room that the foreign technician showed visible agitation. The control room was surrounded by visio-plates on walls and ceiling so that the effect was one of standing on the naked prow of the ship with nothing but empty space above and all around.

"We can turn these off," George suggested, "if it makes you uncomfortable—"

"No—" Sleth Forander said instantly. But George could detect the quivering of his arm tips in the tight fitting sleeves as one evidence of his inner agitation. "Men's ship," Sleth Forander continued. "Foolish design, but that men's way. You build better way for Ragalian. I ride ship your way until then."

But he stayed only an hour, although the intricate controlling mechanisms were worth a full day of the kind of interest he'd shown in other parts of the ship.

George returned again to the control room after accompanying Sleth Forander back to the hold. "That's it," he said. "Turn it around and let's go home. I think we've got the story we need."

"I don't see that we've got anything at all," said Mark Wilde pessimistically. "This whole thing has been a useless goose chase and we still aren't going to be able to deliver what they want the way they want at the price they want to pay, and when they want to pay it."

The trip had been a circular one about the Solar System and they were near enough home to land that same afternoon. George took the recording charts at once to the office of Nat Bergstrom.

The psychologist whistled with interest as he laid out the long tapes. "There's one nervous boy," he exclaimed. "What in the world did you do to him here at the last? I'd be willing to bet that he's suffering right now from one man-sized case of some Ragalian brand of psychosomatic illness."

"Took him up to the control room for an hour," said George.

"It looks more like the record of a kid who'd blundered into the spooky cellar of an abandoned house at midnight. He all but had the screeming meemies!"

"And nothing to cause it. That's what you'd call a pretty clear-cut neurotic reaction, isn't it?"

Nat Bergstrom smiled and shook his head. "I wouldn't call it anything, particularly. How can you possibly assign it as a neurotic reaction or not? You know nothing of the Ragalian norm, outside of the little you recorded before taking him up to the control room. That means nothing, relatively speaking. It may be completely normal to react in such a manner in such a place—if you're a Ragalian."

"It's neurotic if there's no adequate stimulus!" George protested.

"How do you know there wasn't?"