Part 38 (2/2)
”You remember it,” said Pilch, ”now. You never saw her again after that summer. Your father had good sense. He didn't marry her, as he apparently intended to do before he saw how she was going to be with you. You went back to your old mud pond just once more, on your next vacation. She wasn't there. What had you done? You waded around, feeling pretty sad. And you stepped on a sharp stick and cut your foot badly. Sort of a self-punishment.”
She flipped over a few pages of some record on her desk. ”Now before you start asking what's interesting about that, I'll run over a few crossed-in items. Age twelve. There's that Maccadon animal like a dryland jellyfish--a mingo, isn't it?--that swallowed your kitten.”
”The mingo!” Trigger said. ”I remember that. I killed it.”
”Right. You kicked it apart and pulled out the kitten, but the kitten was dead and partly digested. You bawled all day and half the night about that.”
”I might have, I suppose.”
”You did. Now those are two centering points. There's other stuff connected with them. No need to go into details. As cla.s.ses--you've stepped now and then on things that squirmed or squashed. Bad smells.
Etcetera. How do you feel about plasmoids?”
Trigger wrinkled her nose. ”I just think they're unpleasant things. All except--”
Oops! She checked herself.
”--Repulsive,” said Pilch. ”It's quite all right about Repulsive. We've been informed of that supersecret little item you're guarding. If we hadn't been told, we'd know now, of course. Go ahead.”
”Well, it's odd!” Trigger remarked thoughtfully. ”I just said I thought plasmoids were rather unpleasant. But that's the way I used to feel about them. I don't feel that way now.”
”Except again,” said Pilch, ”for that little monstrosity on the s.h.i.+p. If it was a plasmoid. You rather suspect it was, don't you?”
Trigger nodded. ”That would be pretty bad!”
”Very bad,” said Pilch. ”Plasmoids generally, you feel about them now as you feel about potatoes ... rocks ... neutral things like that?”
”That's about it,” Trigger said. She still looked puzzled.
”We'll go over what seems to have changed your att.i.tude there in a minute or so. Here's another thing--” Pilch paused a moment, then said, ”Night before last, about an hour after you'd gone to bed, you had a very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you experienced on that plasmoid station.”
”While I was asleep?” Trigger said, startled.
”That's right. Comparatively very light, very brief. Five or six minutes. Dream activity, etcetera, smooths out. Some blocking on various sense lines. Then, normal sleep until about five minutes before you woke up. At that point there may have been another minute touch of the same pattern. Too brief to be actually definable. A few seconds at most. The point is that this is a continuing process.”
She looked at Trigger a moment. ”Not particularly alarmed, are you?”
”No,” said Trigger. ”It just seems very odd.” She added, ”I got rather frightened when Commissioner Tate was first telling me what had been going on.”
”Yes, I know.”
20
Pilch was silent for some moments again, considering the wall-screen as if thinking about something connected with it. ”Well, we'll drop that for now,” she said finally. ”Let me tell you what's been happening these months, starting with that first amnesia-covered blankout on Harvest Moon. The Maccadon Colonial School has sound basic psychology courses, so there won't be much explaining to do. The connection between those incidents I mentioned and your earlier feeling of disliking plasmoids is obvious, isn't it?”
Trigger nodded.
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