Fire Pattern

CHAPTER 6

The period of adjustment was uneven.

There were times when all Jerome could do was gaze into a mirror and make random movements with his head and limbs. Occasionally the movements would be rapid and unpremeditated, as though the image in the glass might be tricked into making a slow response and thus betray an elaborate practical joke.

His new face stared back at him all the while, preoccupied and solemn. It was a comparatively youthful face, more square of chin than the one he had always known, and with a black stubble of beard which contrasted with his former sparseness of facial hair. The features were regular, if unremarkable, and had he been able to think in such terms he would have felt he had done quite well out of the exchange. It was, he sensed, the kind of face which would have found favour with Anne Kruger—but she was part of another existence and her sexual preferences were now a matter of complete indifference to him.

As the drugs migrated from his system he experienced mood swings, alternating between outrage and passive acceptance of all that had happened. And between spells of drowsiness he tried to recall and assimilate his first long interview with Pirt Sull Conforden. With hindsight he understood that his confrontation with the man from the filling station—the man referred to by the Dorrinians as Prince Belzor—had involved an unseen third party. It had also been even more dangerous than he had realized at the time.

The body Jerome now inhabited had belonged to a Dorrinian supertelepath called Orkra Rell Blamene, who had volunteered to make the transfer which was necessary to silence Jerome. It appeared that the Dorrinians on Mercury had been aware that Pitman was in trouble, but had been left ignorant of the circumstances because of the difficulty of mental communication over interplanetary distances. Mortally wounded, rapidly approaching dissolution, Pitman had been unable to send any kind of warning about what had happened to him. And as a result Blamene had arrived on Earth, had assumed Jerome’s physical form, just in time to be overwhelmed by the awesome powers of the Prince.

“Are you quite certain that’s what happened?” Jerome had asked, while still lost in a chemical fog. “The man I shot looked like he was dying.”

“That particular body was dying, but Prince Belzor cannot be killed so easily,” Conforden had replied. “We know that Blamene survived the transfer by less than a minute. He would have been extremely vulnerable at that point, and it is almost certain that the Prince, needing a new incarnation, simply displaced him.”

Later, with the partial return of acuity, Jerome had brooded on the new levels of meaning invested for him in the term “displaced’. The mundane word now had dark associations. It conjured up visions of the bizarre scene at Parson’s Lake…the alien superman slumped against a tree, incapacitated and hideously wounded…requiring a fresh vehicle for his inhuman personality…fixing that single remaining eye, that evil eye (the evil eye!) upon the fleeing figure of Jerome/Blamene…effortlessly and mercilessly compelling that figure to halt, to stand still, to submit to…displacement.

Having admitted the reality of displacement, Jerome was forced to go further and acknowledge the disquieting idea that his own familiar body now housed an alien being. Millions of kilometres away, back on Earth, there was a man who appeared to be Rayner Jerome, who was possibly living in Rayner Jerome’s house, who was accepted by Rayner Jerome’s colleagues—but who was in fact an interloper from another world. The thought was intensely distasteful to Jerome, filling him with helpless resentment. His body had been a troublesome organic machine, marred by faults and threatening the final breakdown, but it had been his. Displacement was a supremely unnatural event, and Jerome did not have the emotional repertoire to deal with it and all its implications, but he knew that nobody should ever have been violated the way he had been violated. The deed had a sulphurous tang of evil about it, one which was intensified in his drug-shadowed mind by the mystery which surrounded the Dorrinians.

In spite of all he had garnered from Pitman and Conforden, when it came to understanding their racial motivations he felt rather like an ancient Greek pondering on the meaning of lightning flashes over Mount Olympus. The Dorrinians had God-like powers, that much was certain, but was there something genuinely Manichean in the battle they were conducting on Earth? Jerome believed he had rid himself of all traces of religious conviction, and yet his fuddled consciousness insisted on building fantasy edifices out of puns, quasi-facts and wild associations, many of them connected with the satanic figure of the man from the filling station—Prince…Prince of Darkness…Belzor…Beelzebub…helios…heliac…Hell…

He had been told that the surreptitious invasion of Earth, the invasion of privacy, had been going on for more than three millennia. What was the point of it all?

Was it possible that occasional rents in the Dorrinian veil of secrecy had linked them to the terrible spectacle of the fire death and had been the genesis of certain elements in Terran mythologies and religions?

And why were the other members of the Dorrinian race engaged in a deadly struggle with the Prince?

Too many questions, Jerome told himself as the drifts of sleep gathered in his brain. Too much to think about…

“Come on, lad—you can’t lie in your pit for ever!”

The man whose words had aroused Jerome had the button eyes, wide mouth and protruding circular ears of a storybook gnome, but the most remarkable things about him, as far as Jerome was concerned, were his short hair and Earth-style shirt and slacks. Still not properly awake, Jerome allowed himself to be deceived by the irrational hope that he had escaped from a protracted and vivid nightmare. He sat upright on the couch, eagerly, then realized he was in the same circular room as before, a chamber carved into the rock strata of Mercury. The clarity of his unaided vision was confirmation enough.

“Name’s Joe Thwaite,” the stranger said. “Spinster of this parish for the last eleven years, but before that resident in the beautiful township of Barrow-in-Furness.”

“Barrow-in-Furness?” Jerome began to feel lost. “Isn’t that in England?”

“Certainly is. Best town in the whole ruddy country.”

Jerome was still adrift between two worlds. “But you don’t have an English accent.”

“And you don’t have an American one. Not any more.” Thwaite produced a gnomish grin. “Accents are mainly a matter of muscle development, and you’ve got Dorrinian speech centres now, so you speak with a good Dorrinian twang—just like everybody else around here.”

“I…I don’t understand.”

Thwaite peered closely into Jerome’s face. “You must have been drugged to the eyeballs, lad. Don’t you remember anything of what Pirt told you about the colony?”

“The colony? It’s all so…”

“Look, the main thing to remember is that transfers work both ways,” Thwaite said. “We’ve got more than a hundred Terrans here. Everybody the Dorrinians swapped places with in the last few decades—even the ones who burned up.”

Jerome struggled to encompass what the other man was saying. It had been explained to him that each personality transfer was a reciprocal event, but he had been too stupefied to take the thought to its logical conclusion.

He was not the only one of his kind on Mercury.

There had to be a colony of reluctant exiles—men and women who had shared the devastating experience of losing consciousness on Earth and awakening on a distant planet. According to Thwaite, even those individuals who had attracted the public’s interest by “dying’ of spontaneous combustion were members of the colony—in which case he could actually dredge many of his fellow exiles’ names out of his memory.

Jerome felt a coolness on his spine as he considered the idea. His capacity for wonder had been overloaded by the events of the recent past, but there was a singular and disquieting strangeness in the thought of walking into a room and being introduced to a series of people whose names he associated with the horrific photographs in the Examiner’s files. How was he supposed to relate to a man or woman who had first registered on his consciousness as an image of a mound of ash terminating in a pair of slippered feet? And that was not to be the worst of his tribulations…

“Is there somebody called Sammy?” he said warily. “Sammy Birkett?”

“Yes, he was brought in just a few hours before…” Thwaite broke off, his narrow brow contracting. “How did you know?”

“I was there when the transfer went wrong. I saw him…his body…burn up.”

“You mean you were actually there!” The black cabochons of Thwaite’s eyes glinted with malicious pleasure. “That sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen. Belzor must have got them buggers running around in the proverbial ever-decreasing circles. Come on, lad—on your feet! The others have got to hear about this.” Thwaite picked up a small draw-neck bag which had been lying beside the couch and produced from it a shirt, slacks and underwear which he handed to Jerome. Although the garments bore no labels they were of commercial quality and could have passed as being made on Earth.

“Where am I supposed to go?” Jerome said.

“You’ll soon get clued in. For starters, this bag contains all your worldly goods—which means a spare set of clothes and a toothbrush,” Thwaite said. “The Dorries supply you with that much free of charge. They say it’s out of the goodness of their hearts. Don’t you believe it! The Marks and Sparks look is supposed to help us feel more at ease, but it’s actually to set us apart and make us easy to keep an eye on. Same with our hair. When you see anybody who isn’t done up like an Armenian poofter you know he’s a transplant from Earth.”

“Thanks for telling me,” Jerome said, deriving some slight comfort from identification of a familiar character-type. Thwaite’s homely presence made Mercury appreciably less alien. Jerome stood up, put on the proffered underpants and winced as the rayon-like material came in contact with his groin.

“That’s something else they give us for nothing,” Thwaite commented. “Free vasectomies. When a supertele comes near his transfer time he gets snipped. Prevents the Terrans from producing hybrids.”

“Hybrids?”

“Maybe that isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean. Would the offspring of two Terries in Dorrie bodies be classified as Terries or Dorries?”

“Good question,” Jerome said, finding unexpected difficulty in dealing with a shirt button.

“Damn right it’s a good question!” Thwaite tugged thoughtfully at one of his protuberant ears. “Have to give the Dorries their due, though—they could have de-balled us instead. Know something, lad? I’d been finished with the old how’s-your-father for five or six years when I got transferred. Sixty-six I was. There I was…sat there in The Globe in Ulverston, downing a pint of Hartley’s best…Used to take the bus through to Ulverston every Thursday, “cause it’s market day and the pubs stay open right through…Next thing I knew I was awakening up in this very room…just where you are now…”

Jerome looked up, momentarily abandoning the attempt to button his shirt. “A shock to the system.”

Thwaite’s lips developed a wry quirk. “You never spoke a truer word, lad. I’m used to most things around here after eleven years, but I can’t get used to doing without my beer. You know, I sometimes think they could keep all their free love if I could just have a few pints of Hartley’s best every now and then.”

“Can’t you brew your own beer?”

“The Dorries don’t go in for alcohol, and the air in this place is so well scrubbed there aren’t any wild yeasts.”

“There’s something wrong with the buttons on this shirt,” Jerome said.

“It’s your Dorrie fingers that’s wrong—they’ve never dealt with buttons before.”

“But surely I can exercise full control over them.”

“Think so? Just wait till you try using a knife and fork. It’ll be a week before you can eat your dinner properly.” Thwaite came closer and efficiently buttoned Jerome’s shirt. “You’ll have to manage the trousers yourself, lad—nobody’s going to start rumours about me being a poofter.”

“I should hope not.” Jerome remained silent for a moment as he concentrated on the task of clothing his younger, slimmer body, then the sheer abnormality of his circumstances overwhelmed him one more, like tidal waters that had been only temporarily checked. “I keep expecting to find it’s all a dream.”

“It’s no dream, lad. You’re on the planet Mercury and, from what Pirt told me, you had some advance knowledge of the set-up to cushion the shock for you. Others weren’t so lucky.”

“All right,” Jerome said. “Exactly where am I on Mercury?”

“At the north pole. About sixty feet down.”

Jerome had to convert the distance to metric units before he could think about it. “Is that all? What about the heat from the Sun?”

“There isn’t much heat at the poles,” Thwaite said. “The Dorries are always moaning about how unlucky they were, but—if you swallow their mythology about the big comet—they got off pretty light.”

“Mythology? Pirt said it was history.”

Thwaite shrugged. “In that case they were bloody lucky to end up with zero axial tilt. Their twilight zone disappeared, but at least they were left with a static twilight spot at each pole. If Mercury’s axis had tilted the twilight spots would be roaming around in circles and none of us would be here.”

“You sound pretty sceptical,” Jerome said as he succeeded in overcoming his last button.

“It’s the way I was brought up, lad. Mercury also has what they call spin-orbit resonance, with one of its days being exactly equal to two of its years. I daresay it’s possible that the comet gave it an axial spin very close to the right value, and tidal friction with the Sun made the final adjustments—but I have a feeling that would take more than a few thousand years.”

“Were you a professional astronomer?”

“In Barrow?” Thwaite snorted his amusement. “No, I’m just a keen amateur. Being transported to another world in mid-pint gives you an interest in these things, if you know what I mean. Are you ready to go?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The sooner you get out and mingle with the others the better you’ll feel,” Thwaite said. “It’s amazing how quickly you adapt. Look at me—I even got used to having a face like one of the Seven Dwarves. Let’s go.”

“Very well.” Jerome felt timid and apprehensive, but he forced himself to keep abreast of Thwaite as they left the circular chamber and turned left into a long corridor which was illuminated by white globes attached to the ceiling. He judged himself to be slightly taller than in his previous incarnation and suddenly was very much aware of the mechanics of walking. His body was an ungainly and precariously balanced structure, the proper control of which demanded more skill and strength than he seemed to possess. After only a few paces he began steadying himself by touching the curving wall.

“Don’t worry about the weakness,” Thwaite said. “Superteles don’t eat or drink for two or three days before a transfer shot. Once you get a couple of steaks down your neck you’ll be as right as rain.”

The realization that he was hungry turned Jerome’s thoughts towards the problems of food supply in a totally hostile environment. “Where does the steak come from?”

“They grow them like giant mushrooms and keep slicing bits off. The Dorries are good at that kind of thing. They’ll never do a decent Cumberland sausage, though.”

Thwaite began to reminisce about the various items of British food and drink he missed most, but Jerome was distracted by the sight of other men and women walking in the corridor. Most were dressed in Earth-style clothing, but a few had the ribbon-blouses and skirts which proclaimed them to be Dorrinians. Almost without exception the people were tall and slimly built, and Jerome decided it was an effect of the lesser gravity of Mercury. He felt no lighter than he had ever done, but that had to be because his inherited body was accustomed to the conditions. A number of the Terrans gave Jerome amiable nods and murmured welcomes, but it was only after he had received a particularly warm smile from a young brunette that he realized he was drawing much more attention from the women than from the men.

“You’re going to be all right here, lad,” Thwaite said, glancing back appreciatively at the brunette. “That’s Donna Sinclair. She had her eye on Blamene for a couple of years, but he was too wrapped up in a Dorrie woman to pay her any heed. Now that you’ve stepped into his shoes, so to speak, you’ll be able to play substitute—you lucky bugger.”

Jerome was unable to think about what had become trivia. “Did you say lucky?”

“I did. I don’t know what you were like back in the USA, but now you’re a fine-looking—”

“Where are we going?” Jerome cut in, noticing that the corridor had widened into the semblance of a busy underground street. “What is this place?”

“You’re near the centre of the Precinct,” Thwaite said. “The Terrans all live and work within a couple of hundred yards of here. This is our territory. Any Dorries you see are mostly supertelepaths getting used to Earth languages and customs. If you’re lucky you might land a teaching job.”

“Does everybody work?”

“There’s no serious compulsion, but most people would rather have something to do. If anybody absolutely refuses to work we just leave them to themselves and let them stew. In the end they generally decide they’d like to join in. The only ones who stay apart permanently are the old-time-religion types who refuse to believe they haven’t died, but they’re very rare birds these days and we don’t mind carrying them. They wouldn’t be much use, anyroad. You can’t get much work out of some silly sod who’s convinced he’s in Purgatory.”

“It’s not hard to see how they get that idea,” Jerome said, scanning his surroundings. The floor, walls and ceiling of the tunnel-corridor were of a uniform grey and there was a quality of sterile cheerlessness to the light emitted by the overhead globes. The thought of having to spend the rest of his life in such an environment inspired him with a mixture of sadness, claustrophobia and despair.

“It’s not so bad here,” Thwaite replied. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Think so?”

“You haven’t much choice.” Thwaite halted at an unmarked doorway, one of many in the curving walls. “You go in here for your placement interview. There’s nothing much to it. You talk to a panel of three and they work out how you can best be fitted into the community. I’m one of the three, because I’m the equivalent of the town clerk for the Precinct. The others are Mel Zednik, our Mayor, and Pirt Conforden, who’s the Dorrinian Director responsible for Terran affairs. He’s the one who was talking to you in the recovery room while you were still groggy, and he’s a decent enough bloke—for a Dorrie, that is.”

Jerome studied his companion’s face. “Why do I get the impression you’re praising him with faint damns?”

“Couldn’t tell you, lad.” Thwaite’s dark eyes twinkled, qualifying his protest. “They tell me I was about to peg out, back there in Barrow in ’85, so I’ve had eleven extra years and a lot more to come. Nobody in his right mind could complain about a bargain like that. Could they?”

“What if you’d only been fifty and had nothing much wrong with you?”

“Expediency transfers like yours are rare.”

“That doesn’t alter the facts of my case.”

“You should talk to Pirt about it,” Thwaite said, giving an exaggerated flourish which invited Jerome to precede him into the room. “I’m sure he’ll be most sympathetic.”

Doubtful about the other man’s sincerity, Jerome entered a small room which was uncomfortably warm and stuffy. The furniture consisted of four simple chairs equally spaced at a circular table. Already seated were the Dorrinian with whom Jerome had first conversed and a grey-blond man in Terran dress. The latter, who had to be Zednik, had bushy eyebrows and a deeply lined face, and he might have been very old, although his body was slim and held upright with evident lack of effort. Jerome was reminded that the Mercurian gravity was much less inimical than Earth’s. Thwaite brusquely performed unnecessary introductions, took a seat and invited Jerome to do likewise. Jerome considered refusing, then decided it would be a stereotyped reaction. He sat down, fixed his gaze on the Dorrinian—who was directly opposite—and waited, his face carefully impassive.

Conforden gave him a wry smile. “Well, Rayner, one doesn’t need to be a telepath to tell that you are not happy here on Dorrin.”

“Does that surprise you?” Jerome refused to return the smile. “Why should I be anything other than outraged?”

“We saved your life.”

“From one of your own kind. I’m not impressed.”

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re impressed or not,” Zednik put in, speaking with the kind of mildness often used by those who enjoy the exercise of authority. “The fact is that you’re here and you’ll just have to adapt—like everybody else.”

“No, Rayner made a legitimate point.” Conforden said. “The circumstances of his transfer were far from normal, and I—on behalf of the people of Dorrin—have to apologize. Prince Belzor is a renegade and has been disowned by all Dorrinians, but we still have a certain amount of responsibility for his actions.”

“And that’s another thing! I’m sick of all this gobbledegook, all the verbal white noise.” Jerome could hear his voice rising, but he felt no obligation to keep himself in check. “What the hell is going on here? You sit around and condemn this Belzor character, but what right have any of you to interfere with people’s lives on Earth? Who told you you could butt in?”

“We’re not alien beings,” Conforden said quietly. “You can see that for yourself. We’re from common stock. Nobody can say why our joint ancestors chose to put a colony on a world as uninhabitable as Dorrin. Perhaps in the beginning it was only a scientific research team—it was all too long ago for the evidence to have survived—but they did it. The peoples of Earth and Dorrin are brothers, and are mutually obligated to each other.”

Jerome sighed. “Perhaps I’m still under the influence of your drugs, but was that meant to be an explanation of why Belzor is roaming around my world murdering people?”

“I think you should show a little more respect,” Zednik said to Jerome, his tones no longer light. “You’ll have to learn to…

Conforden silenced him by raising a hand. “It’s all right, Mel—Rayner has been under a great deal of stress.” He returned his attention to Jerome. “You know that Dorrinians are bound by a very strict code of ethics?”

“That’s what Pitman kept telling me.”

“After a successful transfer takes place the Dorrinian improves the health of the Terran body by direct mental control of its biological processes. That is a simple procedure for us, and it allows the Dorrinian to get many useful years out of the body. Physical ageing has to continue, however, and inevitably there comes a time when the Terran body weakens and begins to die. At that stage, with the resources of our mind science available to him, and working at close range, the Dorrinian could easily force a transfer with another Terran who was young and healthy. The temptation must be considerable. Any Dorrinian who transfers to Earth has effective immortality within his grasp—but our ethic forbids any further transfers. The Dorrinian always dies with the host body.”

Not always,” Jerome said, almost to himself, as a curtain rolled back in his mind.

“As you say.” Conforden sounded like a man who had been personally shamed. “Prince Belzor has been living on Earth for more than two thousand of your years. He has committed many crimes against your people.”

Jerome was silent for a moment, “I was afraid of him.”

“You had every right to be. Over the centuries the Prince has developed his powers to an unprecedented level. Even the strongest Dorrinians dare not go against him alone.”

“In that case the smart thing would be to stay out of his way.”

Conforden lowered his gaze. “That is what we have always done. It was a cowardly policy, and a mistaken one, because in the beginning the Prince could have been quickly overcome by a determined effort on our part. But we were few in number and there was always so much work to be done. It was always easier to let the Prince go his own way…unmolested…through all his successive incarnations…

And now, to use one of your Terran metaphors, the chickens are coming home to roost. The Prince has begun seeking us out.”

“Why?” Jerome sensed he was nearing the edge of yet another conceptual precipice. “Why does he do that?”

Conforden raised his head, and his eyes locked with Jerome’s. “Because he fears his reign is coming to an end. When we arrive on Earth in force, thousands of us in a single migration, the Prince will be required to answer for all his crimes.”

The silence which descended on the room lasted perhaps twenty seconds, but for Jerome it seemed to go on a long time. He became aware of the muted breathing of the air supply system.

“May I presume,” he said, holding his voice steady, “that you’re going to expand on that?”

Conforden nodded. “We have no secrets here, Rayner. I can tell you that shortly before the Days of the Comet our ancestors had realized that extreme measures would be necessary to preserve the vital core of the Dorrinian culture. It was apparent that a huge proportion of the race was about to perish; therefore the ancients assembled four thousand of their most gifted individuals and devised a survival plan. The kalds of the Four Thousand were translated into an imperishable crystal matrix.

“I am a Dorrinian, but even I cannot fully comprehend the mind–matter interactions that were involved, so I can guess how difficult this concept must be for you. Telepathy is partly a physical process, involving the mental apportation of energies. Perhaps you can accept that if a personality can be impressed upon the molecular structure of a target brain, it can also be impressed on any other suitably complex structure. Let us say, for simplicity’s sake, that the kald of each of the Four Thousand was transmogrified to become a unique giant molecule.

“It was, of course, necessary for the Four Thousand to abandon their biological forms in the process—but they did not die. On the contrary, their kalds have been safely preserved for more than three millennia and are merely awaiting reincarnation.”

Conforden paused and looked solemnly at Jerome. “Are you with me thus far?”

“I think I may be moving ahead of you,” Jerome replied. The excessive heat of the room was unable to combat the coldness which had been growing in him since he had made the intuitive leap and had begun to understand why, since Biblical times, strangers had walked in secret amid the peoples of Earth.

“Possibly you are, but I’m obliged to make the historical facts clear to you,” Conforden said. “The Dorrinian word for the repository of the kalds of the Four Thousand is Thabbren, and that is how I shall refer to it. No Terran word could come near to expressing what the Thabbren means to Dorrinians. It is numinous beyond words, the ultimate sacred object, the soul of our race, the embodiment of our past and future. Any Dorrinian would unhesitatingly give his life to protect it—indeed the greatest honour to which a member of my race can aspire is that of becoming a Guardian. That is how we refer to them, simply as Guardians, because all else in our existence is subordinate to their single task.”

“Are you a Guardian?” Jerome said.

“I have that honour.”

“But there’s more to the job than just keeping guard over the Thabbren, isn’t there?” Jerome glanced at the other Terrans as he spoke. “There wouldn’t be much point in preserving it for ever in this petrified warren. Correct?”

“Perfectly correct,” Conforden said. “The Guardians were charged with the additional responsibility of getting the Thabbren to Earth.”

“Quite a responsibility.”

“As you say.” Conforden seemed unaware of the irony Jerome had employed. “Our lack of resources made it impossible for us to develop our own means of transporting the Thabbren across space. Instead, we began working undercover on Earth, placing Dorrinians in key positions, at first guiding Earth’s racial consciousness towards astronomy and the idea of exploring space, then helping steer your science and technology in the appropriate direction. We were working towards one all-important event—the dispatch of a manned ship to Mercury.”

Jerome sat up straighter. “You’re not talking about the Quicksilver, are you? The ship that’s already on its way?”

“I am,” Conforden said. “One of the crew is a Dorrinian, one of a number we have placed in astronaut training programmes. His assignment is to pick up the Thabbren at a prearranged point on the surface.”

“But how will you know where…?” Jerome paused, his thoughts racing. “So there isn’t any crashed ship from Outside?”

“Correct again, Rayner. We built a metal structure which looks as though it could be part of the hull of a large spacecraft, placed it on the surface and ensured that Earth would discover it. Eighteen Dorrinians lost their lives in that operation, but they understood the risks and we do not begrudge the sacrifice.”

Jerome’s eidetic memory was suddenly galvanized, producing an image of a semi-circular stamp on a discarded envelope. “When I was in Pitman’s office back in Whiteford I noticed some mail for him from CryoCare…”

“Movik was right when he decided that you should be transferred,” Conforden said. “Yes, CryoCare is largely a Dorrinian enterprise.”

“And do you have the four thousand bodies?”

“We do. It was a major task—finding that number of people who had no relations to complicate the issue, and who were dying of diseases we knew we could eliminate after the reincarnations. The need for total secrecy made things even more difficult, but we succeeded.”

“Secrecy has always been a big thing with you people,” Jerome said, voicing a minor criticism as a camouflage for the deep revulsion the Dorrinian’s words had inspired in him. The calmly enunciated sentences were predicated on scenes of purest horror.

Conforden shook his head. “It doesn’t come naturally to us. We have been forced to work in secret because of certain prejudices which are prevalent on Earth.”

“Against body-snatching!”

“Your words prove my point, Rayner. Just think how much more extreme your reaction would have been had you lived in more ignorant and more superstitious times. The connection with human combustion alone would have been enough to brand all Dorrinians as emissaries of the Devil. As things are, we already have too many obstacles and dangers to face.”

“Space flight itself is risky,” Jerome said. “With the…ah…Thabbren being so important to you, is it wise to try getting it to Earth on what is, after all, a fairly primitive kind of ship? Shouldn’t you hang on another fifty or hundred years until space travel is routine and safe?”

“That point has received a great deal of discussion.” Conforden’s eyes had a sad candour. “You have been away from your world for only three days. Have you already forgotten how things were’? Do you really feel that Earth is entering the kind of period of enlightenment and stability which is necessary for interplanetary development?”

“It’s hard to…”

“Don’t delude yourself, Rayner. As things are, the Quicksilver may well be the last ship Earth will send into space. Even if another civilization succeeds the present one, it could take tens of centuries for it to develop a space technology. We Dorrinians have the patience to wait that long—after all, time no longer exists for the Four Thousand—but we do not have the resources. No, my friend, the Thabbren goes to Earth on the Quicksilver.”

“Out of the solar frying pan into the nuclear fire?”

“That aspect of the situation has also been debated,” Conforden said, speaking with his wordy precision. “We are confident of our ability to inject positive new elements into the Terran culture and reverse its downward trend. An overt Dorrinian presence on Earth will have tremendous potential for good. Indeed, that is one of the prime moral justifications for our involvement with your world.”

“You’re a highly ethical people,” Jerome commented drily.

“As you say.” Conforden’s gaze hunted over Jerome’s face. “Now, Rayner, you are more-or-less in possession of the full facts. The purpose of these placement interviews is to ascertain how each new arrival can best be fitted into the society of the Precinct, to optimize his contribution—but first we want your promise of co-operation. We want willing workers.”

“I’ve been through this bit already, with Pitman,” Jerome said. “And I told him I didn’t like the idea of betraying everybody on Earth. I don’t like what you’ve done to me personally—and I’m not going to work for you.”

“That’s not the way of it, lad,” Thwaite put in, speaking for the first time since the start of the meeting. “We’re working for ourselves. It’s our only chance of getting back home.”

“I think you’ve lost me somewhere,” Jerome said, unable to accept Thwaite’s words at their face value. “Home is a long way off.”

“Getting the Thabbren to Earth will be only the first stage of a larger migration,” Conforden said. “When the Four Thousand have been reincarnated and a Dorrinian nation established on Earth, the next step will be to build a new generation of spacecraft and begin the work of rescuing our entire population. The idea may sound hopelessly impracticable and visionary, but it can become a reality—and, naturally, Terrans who have been transferred to Dorrin will have a high priority when it comes to assigning places on the ships.

“We are the last generation of humans who will be forced to live underground on this planet.” Conforden paused, then addressed himself directly to Jerome. “And you, my friend, could be back on Earth within ten years.”