A sentience produced in a humanoid body on a remote planet and mentally
hurled into a human brain will change the human to an alien in thought
and deed--but capable of living as a human! There is nothing in
thought that is inimical as there would be in the sheer complexity of
biochemistry.
Thoughts, even nasty vagrant thoughts, do not kill. But how large is
the lethal dose of polio virus or potassium cyanide or unmatched blood?
* * * * *
An autopsy they might some day perform, but unless they could read her
thoughts, they would find nothing! How then to identify the alien?
_Nay! How then to prove that there were aliens!_
There were both excitement and suspicion when Carroll built the
teleport in his asylum laboratory. It was too much like incarcerating a
man who had the ability to walk out of the place without half-trying.
In fact, as one of the guards put it, that's exactly what it was.
It was Majors who smiled and shook his head. He pointed out that so
far there were but two of them, one in the office of the psychologist
Pollard and the other in the Wisconsin home of the inmate himself. Both
were turned off.
Majors, not really understanding the principle of the things, had
them both placed in a sealed room. Whether Carroll could turn on an
inert machine from a remote place he did not know and he was taking no
chances.
But Carroll's experiments with his new teleport seemed innocuous
enough. For several days he fiddled with the tuning and synchronizing
controls that were used to tune one teleport to the other.
He kept constantly 'ON' the switch that remotely operated any distant
teleport that his own happened to be tuned to but his work did very
little good. He found the two that were sealed in the tiny room and
knew them for what they were. Carroll was seeking the teleports of the
aliens.
For days he searched the--subspace?--for the alien teleports and found
none. Then in a desperate measure, Carroll finally went through to the
room in the Lawson Laboratory and, using some of his store of tools,
broke the sealed door.
Brashly Carroll stole an automobile. Equally rash, he drove at
breakneck speed along the roads that led him up into the Virginia
mountains along the back-path that he had traversed only once before
in a conscious condition, and then from the opposite direction with
Rhinegallis pointing out the way.
It took many hours before he came to the little side-road that led
like a mountain goat's retreat up into the top hills. It changed from
a side-road to a mere trail and then branched from a mere trail to an
unkempt, rutted footpath that jounced the automobile terribly.
Miles along this rocky path, Carroll turned into a clearing--a
well-remembered clearing, and he looked across it--in surprise. The
building itself was gone! No wonder he could find no teleports!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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