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he shouted silently.
"Mirni! . . . ! Mirni! . . . !"
But the blank remained blank.
When he again noticed the conversation, the captain was saying impatiently,
"Let me review for your benefit, Bolinski. First, we're out in the Periphery,
where the friends of Earth are few and questionable.
Second, we receive a distress call and home in on a survival capsule
containing this whoever-he-is Mirni.
Instead of a sick, scared castaway, he comes aboard as assured and beamish as
a Vegan princeling yet he claims to have been separated from 'real' humanity
(whatever that means!) since he was four. And he says he can't identify his
home planet, so we have to send out the standard identification-query call,
meaning we inform the universe at large that we have picked up a man named
Dalton Mirni whose description is such-and-such.
"Now, after all this, our assured young princeling abruptly displays a lapse
of memory and goes zombie on us. You can offer what explanation you like,
Bolinski, but one alone sticks in my mind:
We're being had!
Somebody's playing a tricky game with us, and with no friendly intent. So why
not use your investigatory drugs on this jerk and get to the bottom of it?"
"If you'll make that an order, Captain Devista, O.K.," the medic replied
stubbornly. "But you know the restrictions on those drugs. Besides, if
somebody is trying to sucker us, maybe they expect us to shoot the kid with a
quizzer. But, if you'll give me a direct order "
"You're getting close to insubordination, Bolinski!" the captain flared.
"I'm ready to obey orders, sir," the medic returned tightly.
Dalton Mirni struggled part way out of the depths to say: "The drugs . . . may
help."
His speaking startled the two men. "You'll volunteer to take them?" the
captain demanded.
"Yes."
"Get his authorization on a sealed tape, Bolinski, and proceed," the captain
snapped.
* * *
The medic led Mirni across the room to a small, seamless metal box. "Hold this
grip," he said, "and answer this question: Do you, Dalton Mirni, voluntarily
agree to submit to interrogation under medication?"
"Yes."
"All right, you can turn loose, and sign your name through this slot."
Mirni accepted the pencil and signed. Captain Devista was watching over his
shoulder.
"You speak and write Anglo-Ruski like an adult," the captain remarked. "That
must have been part of your training."
"No. I was taught language by the play-people. Language, history, the arts,
physical sciences, planetography . . . I remember all those."
"Who are the play-people?"
"They were the . . . the projections I lived among outside of school hours."
Having started talking, Mirni found the conversation a comforting distraction
from his mental turmoil. He continued as Bolinski placed an applicator against
his bare arm and squeezed the trigger. "I don't know the mechanics of the
play-people projections how the teachers made them. They seemed like real
people, like you or me, and I was supposed to treat them as real, even though
they weren't."
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"How do you know they weren't?" asked Devista.
"Because when I was fourteen, going through a goofy stage, I got angry one day
and told the play-people they were nothings, that I was the only real person
and they should do as I told them. They became statues! Their bodies turned
slick and hard, and I couldn't budge any of them, not even my baby cousin. It
was spooky! That lasted all day and night, but everything was back to normal
when I came home from school the next morning."
"You had a cousin there?"
"A play-cousin, of course, and an aunt and uncle I lived with. You see, the
teachers didn't want me to become alienated from humanity, so they supplied a
normal play-home and community for me to live in."
Talking grew increasingly easier for Mirni as the drugs took effect, and the
thought of his loss was less disturbing.
"Then your teachers were not human?" the captain asked.
"Oh no! Nor any of the other students, either."
"What were the teachers like?"
"I don't know. They never showed me. Sometimes a teacher would appear as a
human, sometimes like one of the other students, and sometimes we wouldn't see
him at all. We would just know he was there talking to us."
"Talking about what?"
There was no hint of an answer in Mirni's memory. "I don't know. That's gone."
"Why did you stop talking when Bolinski asked you a similar question?"
"Because I didn't realize until I tried to answer him that I had forgotten. It
was a shock to learn that."
"Is it still a shock?"
"Yes, but the drug seems to help."
The ship's intercom buzzed and the captain answered, "Yes?"
"Mirni identified, sir," the speaker said. "He's a citizen of Earth and the
only located survivor of the CES
Gorman which was lost beyond Antares in 2709. He was on board with his
parents."
"Acknowledged," growled Devista.
"That fits with what I remember," said Mirni, "and what the teachers told me.
They said the ship blew up, and I was the only one they rescued."
Bolinski remarked to the captain with evident enjoyment, "It's hard to see how
anybody could embarrass an Earth ship by planting an Earth citizen aboard,
sir."
The captain ignored the jibe. "Does that drug ever fail to elicit the truth?"
he demanded.
"Not when handled properly, sir. Mirni's telling you the truth as he knows
it."
"As he knows it," the captain grunted. "He could have been fed a cock-and-bull
story under hypnosis.
Would that fool your drug?"
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