Cold Fire

"It doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the insanity set in after it got here. Or maybe it didn't have to pilot the ship, maybe the ship is essentially automatic, an entirely robotic mechanism. Or maybe there were others of its kind aboard who piloted it, and maybe they're all dead now. Jim, it's never mentioned a crew, only The Enemy. And assuming you buy its extraterrestrial origins, does it really ring true that only two individuals would set out on an intergalactic exploration? Maybe it killed the others.”

Everything she was theorizing could be true, but then anything she theorized could be true. They were dealing with the Unknown, capital "U," and the possibilities in an infinite universe were infinite in number.

He remembered reading somewhere-even many scientists believed that anything the human imagination conceived, regardless of how fanciful, could conceivably exist somewhere in the universe, because the infinite nature of creation meant that it was no less fluid, no less fertile than any man's or woman's dreams.

Jim expressed that thought to Holly, then said, "But what bothers me is that you're doing now what you rejected earlier. You're trying hard to explain it in human terms, when it may be too alien for us to understand it at all. How can you assume that an alien species can even suffer insanity the way we can, or that it's capable of multiple personalities? These are all strictly human concepts.”

She nodded. "You're right, of course. But at the moment, this theory's the only one that makes sense to me. Until something happens to disprove it, I've got to operate on the assumption that we're not dealing with a rational being.”

With his free hand, he reached out and increased the gas flow to the wicks in the Coleman lantern, providing more light. "Jesus, I've got a bad case of the creeps," he said, shivering.

"Join the club.”

"If it is schizo, and if it slips into the identity of The Enemy and can't get back out. what might it do to us?" "I don't even want to think about that," Holly said. "If it's as intellectually superior to us as it seems to be, if it's from a long-lived race with experience and knowledge that makes the whole of the human experience seem like a short story compared to the Great Books of the Western World, then it sure as hell knows some tortures and cruelties that would make Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot look like Sunday-school teachers.”

He thought about that for a moment, even though he tried not to.

The chocolate doughnuts he had eaten lay in an undigested, burning wad in his stomach.

Holly said, "When it comes back-" "For God's sake," he interrupted, "no more adversarial tactics!" "I screwed up," she admitted. "But the adversarial approach was the correct one, I just carried it too far. I pushed too hard. When it comes back, I'll modify my technique.”

He supposed he had more fully accepted her insanity theory than he was willing to acknowledge. He was now in a cold sweat about what The Friend might do if their behavior tipped it into its other, darker identity.

"Why don't we jettison confrontation altogether, play along with it, stroke its ego, keep it as happy as we-" "That's no good. You can't control madness by indulging it. That only creates more and deeper madness. I suspect any nurse in a mental institution would tell you the best way to deal with potentially violent paranoid is to be nice, respectful, but firm." He withdrew his hand from hers because his palms were clammy. He blotted them on his shirt.

The mill seemed unnaturally silent, as if it were in a vacuum where sound could not travel, sealed in an immense bell jar, on display in a museum in a land of giants. At another time Jim might have found the silence disturbing, but now he embraced it because it probably meant The Friend was sleeping or at least preoccupied with concerns other than them.

"It wants to do good," he said. "It might be insane, and it might be violent and even evil in its second identity, a regular Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde. But like Dr. Jekyll it really wants to do good. At least we've got that going for us.”

She thought about it a moment. "Okay, I'll give you that one. And when it comes back, I'll try to pry some truth out of it.”

"What scares me most-is there really anything we can learn from it that could help us? Even if it tells us the whole truth about everything, if it's insane it's going to turn to irrational violence sooner or later.”

She nodded. "But we gotta try.”

They settled into an uneasy silence.

When he looked at his watch, Jim saw that it was ten minutes past one in the morning. He was not sleepy. He didn't have to worry about drifting off and dreaming and thereby opening a doorway, but he was physically drained. Though he had not done anything but sit in a car and drive, then sit or stand in the high room waiting for revelations, his muscles ached as if he had put in ten hours of heavy manual labor.

His face felt slack with weariness, and his eyes were hot and grainy.