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ship as far as Kator's private intentions were concerned. And
Kator had his own plans to consider.
So had Jase. In the Ruml's body, he was swept along by Kator's feelings and
imagination. In his own body, surrounded now by the eyes of not only the board
but Swanson, Coth, the man from the United Nations and their assistants, he
tried to wall out everything else but his recording of what he experienced as
Kator and his personal search for the meanings behind it.
Secretly, he had lost part of his earlier confidence. It was one of the
reasons he had blown up when he found the door of his room locked, and later
when he found Swanson and the others attempting to take over upstairs. Swanson
and the rest wore like open badges on their coat fronts the belief that Jase
was falling-if he had not already fallen-under the domination of Kator's alien
personality. The unspoken implication roused Jase to fury. Such domination
would e as fantastic as superstition.
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But, he was no longer sure it was impossible.
This he kept to himself. From the beginning there had been a side of
Kator he could not translate to the board members or any other earthly
observer. This was the whole area of Kator's feelings as a Ruml. It began
with, Kator's pride in himself as a member of the Ruml race-a pride that was
comparable to the unconscious and unstated feeling of superiority in a human
when he thought of himself in comparison to an animal. But it went on-far
on-from there. Into an area of the Ruml racial personality for which there
were no human equivalents. And it was all completely unconscious. The Rumls
did not put it into words even among themselves. Why should they? It was a
part of the unconscious knowledge of all of them.
As a race, they assumed certain things. They took for granted certain
things-things no human would imagine, let alone take for granted.
Where the human mind and personality was duplicated by the Ruml, there was no
danger that Jase might be disturbed by the contact. But in this other, this
truly alien area. . . . Jase had begun to feel the first stirrings of fear.
For the first time he admitted to himself that Kator, without knowing even
that Jase was there, might by simply existing be able to attack and destroy
certain human elements in Jase. It might be that Kator's personality could
infect and conquer Jase's personality unconsciously.
It was the duel that had brought Jase finally to this conclusion. Up until
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then, he had been approaching the truth without seeing it, as a man might be
going up a mountain without realizing he was already on its lower slopes. The
essential difference between the human and the Ruml was something that Jase
had appreciated from the beginning in a way no one else could do. But even he,
he thought now, might have been led astray. He had realized how different were
the Rumls-but even he had thought of that difference as the sort of difference
that there is between- say-a man and an intelligent black bear.
He had forgotten that where there was intelligence, there had to be a
history-and a culture-even a soul.
Both man and Ruml were such that they would fight and die for certain
concepts. What if those concepts were not understandable by each other?
What if they were diametrically opposed?
Men and Ruml could rush at each other in mutual self-destruction. Both utterly
convinced of their right-ness, both committed to fighting to the death with no
compromise-over a difference of unconscious opinion they could not verbalize
to themselves, let alone to each other.
And there was only one person on either side who could do anything to avert
this Armageddon of two races. Jase. If only, somewhere in the books and
technical and professional journals through which he searched, he could
uncover some mutually understandable concept in this unconscious area.
Something non-human, non-Ruml, but recognizable by both. Something in biology
or zoology that both races could understand.
Meanwhile, since the duel, the sneaking fear of infection in him by
Kator's personality stayed always in the back of his mind. There was no way of
resolving it into concrete terms, any more than there seemed to be of getting
rid of it. Once he could have used Mele for a touchstone.
But now there was a wall between them. Since that day in the library
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en%20Way.txt room with Swan-son and the others, she had carried what was
almost a fear of him, a conviction of his unreasonableness. She seemed,
thought
Jase bitterly, to feel that he was being arbitrary out of sheer love of power.
She did not, thank heaven, share the feeling that Kator might be infecting
him. But the fear rode Jase in spite of this. It was his fear and his secret.
In the duel, for the first time, he had found himself sharing Kator's point of
view when that point of view was exactly opposite to his own.
Kator had not disliked Horaag Adoptedson. But he had joyfully, pride fully,
almost gleefully killed him when Horaag could have been defeated short of
death. Doing so had made Kator feel noble in his own eyes, successful, and
admirable. And for a moment there, Jason had felt so too.
And that trace of an alien attitude had been part of what had been behind him
in the library room where he had faced down Swanson and the rest, after
breaking the door and bulling his way upstairs. That had not been the way Jase
Barchar would normally act-he did not think so now, afterward.
But it had been very like the way Kator Second-cousin would have acted, if he
had woken to find himself locked against his will in a room. Was
Jase becoming alien in the way he thought?
Searching the stacks of the Foundation building late in the night, under the
swinging, bare sixty-watt bulbs below their halo-like reflectors, Jase asked
that question of himself as he caught sight of his face reflected in the
night-black windows between the shelves.
And his image had no answer to give him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The ship of the Expedition carried fifty-eight Expedition members, including
Captain and Keysman. Shortly after they lifted from the Ruml
Homeworld, Jase addressed all Expedition members over the intercom system of
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the ship. He stood in the controls room up in front of the ship, with the
quarters of Captain and Keysman opening off from it The
Captain stood beside him.
"Expedition members," he said, speaking into the intercom pickup screen.
"You all know that we are engaged in an effort together to bring this
Expedition successfully to the world of the Muffled People and Home again with
information that will allow us to successfully settle that world. For all of
us it is a great opportunity. As members of the expedition, once the world is
open for settlement, all of us will be able to colonize there and Found
Families of our own. Just so was each of our six worlds, other than Homeworld,
colonized and its leading
Families Founded."
He paused. He could imagine them, all about the ship, standing honorably erect
and listening.
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