I took a deep breath. "You'll have to judge. I can't."

"Yes, I suppose so. Well, I'll tell you a bit and answer your questions-some of them-in exchange for a solemn promise never to bother your wife with it. You don't have the skill."

"Very well, sir. I promise."

"Well-there was a group of people, a cult you might call them, that got into disrepute."

"I know-the Whitmanites."

"Eh? How did you know? From Mary? No, she couldn't have; she didn't know herself."

"No, not from Mary. I just figured it out."

He looked at me with odd respect. "Maybe I've been underestimating you, son. As you say, the Whitmanites. Mary was one of them, as a kid in Antarctica."

"Wait a minute!" I said. "They left Antarctica in-" The wheels buzzed in my mind and the number came up. "-in 1974."

"Surely. What about it?"

"But that would make Mary around forty years old. She can't be."

"Do you care?"

"Huh? Why, no-but she can't be."

"She is and she isn't. Just listen. Chronologically her age is about forty. Biologically she is in her middle twenties. Subjectively she is even younger, because she doesn't remember anything, not to know it, earlier than about 1990."

"What do you mean? That she doesn't remember I can understand-she never wants to remember. But what do you mean by the rest?"

"Just what I said. She is no older than she is because-you know that room where she started to remember? She spent ten years and probably more floating in suspended animation in just such a tank as that."

Chapter 28

Time was when I was immune to emotional shocks. But as I get older, I don't get tougher; I get softer. Being in love has a lot to do with it, too. The thought of Mary, my beloved Mary, swimming in that artificial womb, neither dead nor alive but preserved like a pickled grasshopper, was too much for me.

I heard the Old Man saying, "Take it easy, son. She's all right."

I said, "Go ahead."

Mary's overt history was simple, although mystifying. She had been found in the swamps near Kaiserville at the North Pole of Venus-a little girl who could give no account of herself and who knew only her name-Allucquere. Nobody spotted the significance of the name and a child of her (apparent) age could not be associated with the Whitmanites debacle in any case; the 1980 supply ship had not been able to find any survivor of their "New Zion" colony. Its plantations had returned to the swamp; the dwellings were ruptured shells, hidden in rank growth. More than ten years of time and more than two hundred miles of jungle separated the little waif of Kaiserville from the God-struck colonists of New Zion.

At that time, an unaccounted-for Earth child on Venus was little short of incredible. Like finding the cat locked in the icebox, it called for explanation. But there was no one around with the intellectual curiosity to push the matter. Kaiserville still does not have a sweet reputation; in those days it was made up of miners, doxies, company representatives of the Two Planets Corporation-and nothing else. I don't suppose that shoveling radioactive mud in the swamps leaves much energy for wonder.

Apparently she grew up using poker chips for toys and calling every woman in crib row "mother" or "auntie". In turn they shortened her name to "Lucky". The Old Man did not go into detail about who paid her way back to Earth and why, and he avoided my questions. The real question was where she had been from the time New Zion was eaten up by the Venerian jungle and just what had happened to the colony.

The only record of those things was buried in Mary's mind, locked tight with terror and despair.

Sometime before 1980-about the same time as the flying saucer reports from Russo-Siberia, or a year or so earlier-the titans had discovered the New Zion colony. If you place it one Saturn year earlier than the invasion of Earth, the times fit fairly well. It does not seem likely that the titans were looking for Earthmen on Venus; more probably they were scouting Venus as they had long scouted Earth. Or they may have known just where to look; we know that they kidnapped Earthmen at intervals over the course of two or more centuries; they may have captured someone on Earth whose brain could tell them where to find the New Zion colony. Mary's dark memories could contain no clue to that.

Mary saw the colony captured, saw her parents turned into zombies who no longer cared for her. Apparently she herself was not possessed, or she may have been possessed and turned loose, the titans finding a weak and ignorant young girl an unsuitable slave. In any case, for what was to her baby mind an endlessly long time, she hung around the slave colony, unwanted, uncared for, but unmolested, scavenging like a mouse for her living. On Venus the slugs were moving in to stay; their principal slaves were Venerians and the New Zion colonists were only incidental. It is sure that Mary saw her parents being placed in suspended animation-for later use in the invasion of Earth? Probable, but not certain.

In due course she herself was grabbed and placed in the tanks. Inside a titan ship? At a titan base on Venus itself? More probably the latter, as when she awoke, she was still on Venus. There are many such gaps. Were the slugs that rode the Venerians identical with the slugs which rode the colonists? Possible-since both Earth and Venus have oxy-carbon economy. The slugs seem to be endlessly protean but they surely have to adapt themselves to the biochemistry of their hosts. Had Venus an oxy-silicon economy like Mars, or a fluorine economy, the same parasite type could not possibly have fed on both.

But the gist of the matter lay in the situation as it was when Mary was removed from the artificial incubator. The titan invasion of Venus had failed, or was failing. Almost certainly she was possessed as soon as they removed her from the tank-but Mary had outlived the slug that possessed her.

Why had the slugs died? Why had the invasion of Venus failed? It was for clues to these that the Old Man and Dr. Steelton had gone fishing in Mary's brain.

I said, "Is that all?"

He answered, "Isn't that enough?"

"It raises as many questions as it answers," I complained.

"Of course there is more," he told me, "a great deal more. But you aren't a Venerian expert of any sort, nor a psychologist, so you won't be called on to evaluate it. I've told you what I have so that you will know why we have to work on Mary and so that you won't question her about it. Be good to her, boy; she's had more than her share of grief."

I ignored the advice; I can get along or not get along with my own wife without help, thank you. "What I can't figure out," I answered, "is why you ever had Mary linked up with flying saucers in the first place? I can see now that you took her along on that first trip to Iowa on purpose. You were right, granted-but why? And don't give me any malarkey."

The Old Man himself looked puzzled. "Son, do you ever have hunches?"

"Lord, yes!"

"What is a 'hunch'?"

"Eh? It's a belief that something is so, or isn't so, without evidence. Or a premonition that something is going to happen-or a compulsion to do something."

"Sloppy definitions. I'd call a hunch the result of automatic reasoning below the conscious level on data you did not know you possessed."

"Sounds like the black cat in the coal cellar at midnight. You didn't have any data, not then. Don't tell me that your unconscious mind works on data you are going to get, next week. I won't believe it."

"Ah, but I did have data."

"Huh?"

"What's the last thing that happens to a candidate before he is certified as an agent in our section?"

"The personal interview with you."