Journey Into Terror by E. C. Tubb

Author:E. C. Tubb [Tubb, E. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575107342
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2014-01-30T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Alien life

THE light spun and sparkled, sending little flashes of brilliance into his eyes, lulling with its regular pattern of darting motes. Carmodine rested on the therapy couch, the pneumatic cushions moulding to his body, his head supported so that he could look into the light without physical strain. Ilraya stood beside him, together with Mason.

The engineer moved restlessly.

“Are you certain you need me here?” he asked. “There’s work I could be doing. The engines—”

“—will not be used for landing unless we can clear the captain’s mental blockage,” interrupted Illraya sharply. “Please don’t be negative. You want the expedition to be a success, and you want Jules to fill in the missing portion of his memory.” She smiled, the warmth of her expression taking the sting from her reproof. “And you are a friend,” she reminded. “As such, you are a valuable ally.”

She pushed the hair from her eyes, adjusting the golden fíllet that kept it in place.

“You know what we are doing,” she said quietly. “The use of hypnotism is somewhat primitive but, even in this day and age, it can be extremely effective. The one essential, full cooperation of the subject, we now have. Until Jules really wanted to regain his memory, we could only attack it from the edges, as it were. We fought a continuous battle in which ground was only yielded after a struggle. Even so, the nexus of the problem remains. We must find out what made him wish to forget.”

“Something nasty,” suggested Mason. “Something too bad to be remembered.”

“Possibly, but not necessarily so,” said Illraya. “Memory is the characteristic of living organisms in virtue of what they experience leaving behind effects which modify future experiences and behaviour. That characteristic underlies all learning, the essential feature of which is retention…in a narrow sense, it covers recall and recognition. This we call remembering. Now Jules is suffering from amnesia, which is an inability to remember. This can be total or partial. His amnesia is localized; that is, it is restricted to a special time and place, but complicated by also being retroactive. The inability is extended to events immediately preceding a trauma.

“The problem is to bring to the surface those events so that we may learn what the shock really was. The task has been made unnecessarily difficult by the careless use of psychoprobes, which have driven the incident even deeper into the subconscious. However, the therapy has been so far successful in that he can now think of his crew, the journey and other basically irrelevant matters without suffering automatic psychosomatic withdrawal symptoms.”

She smiled at the engineer. “Are you able to follow?”

“I think so,” said Mason slowly. “Up until now, if you mentioned something he wanted to forget he’d show physical signs of distress. Get an ache, maybe, or a pain, or even black out if you pressed too hard.”

“Exactly.” Ilraya picked up a hypogun from a tray and checked the setting. “The light had thrown Jules into a superficial hypnotic trance. He

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