“Um-m-m.” Mirabile dictu, Anglesey remained calm. He rubbed his chin with one skeletal hand. “Can you be more explicit?”

“Only in a rough way,” replied Cornelius. “Your conscious mind sends a motor impulse along the psibeam to Joe. Simultaneously, your subconscious mind, being scared of the whole business, emits the glandular-vascular-cardiac-visceral impulses associated with fear. These react on Joe, whose tension is transmitted back along the beam. Feeling Joe’s somatic fear symptoms, your subconscious gets still more worried, thereby increasing the symptoms. Get it? It’s exactly similar to ordinary neurasthenia, with this exception, that since there is a powerful amplifier, the K tube, involved, the oscillations can build up uncontrollably within a second or two. You should be thankful the tube does burn out—otherwise your brain might do so!”

For a moment Anglesey was quiet. Then he laughed. It was a hard, barbaric laughter. Cornelius started as it struck his eardrums.

“Nice idea,” said the esman. “But I’m afraid it won’t fit all the data. You see, I like it down there. I like being Joe.”

He paused for a while, then continued in a dry impersonal tone; “Don’t judge the environment from my notes. They’re just idiotic things like estimates of wind velocity, temperature variations, mineral properties—insignificant. What I can’t put in is how Jupiter looks through a Jovian’s infrared-seeing eyes.”

“Different, I should think,” ventured Cornelius after a minute’s clumsy silence.

“Yes and no. It’s hard to put into language. Some of it I can’t, because man hasn’t got the concepts. But…oh, I can’t describe it. Shakespeare himself couldn’t. Just remember that everything about Jupiter which is cold and poisonous and gloomy to us is right for Joe.”

Anglesey’s tone grew remote, as if he spoke to himself. “Imagine walking under a glowing violet sky, where great flashing clouds sweep the earth with shadow and rain strides beneath them. Imagine walking on the slopes of a mountain like polished metal, with a clean red flame exploding above you and thunder laughing in the ground. Imagine a cool wild stream, and low trees with dark coppery flowers, and a waterfall—methanefall, whatever you like—leaping off a cliff, and the strong live wind shakes its mane full of rainbows! Imagine a whole forest, dark and breathing, and here and there you glimpse a pale-red wavering will-o’-the-wisp, which is the life radiation of some fleet, shy animal, and…and…”

Anglesey croaked into silence. He stared down at his clenched fists then he closed his eyes tight and tears ran out between the lids, “Imagine being strong!”

Suddenly he snatched up the helmet, crammed it on his head and twirled the control knobs. Joe had been sleeping, down in the night, but Joe was about to wake up and—roar under the four great moons till all the forest feared him?

Cornelius slipped quietly out of the room.

* * *

In the long brazen sunset light, beneath dusky cloud banks brooding storm, he strode up the hill slope with a sense of day’s work done. Across his back, two woven baskets balanced each other, one laden with the pungent black fruit of the thorn tree and one with cable-thick creepers to be used as rope. The ax on his shoulder caught the waning sunlight and tossed it blindingly back.