Part 16

“We are here.” Two close-linked minds linked themselves with the two already so closely linked. Each of the two visitors was grave, kindly, and old with an appalling weight of years; each mind bore an appalling freight of knowledge both mundane and esoteric. “We are here, fellow Master of Thought, to be of aid to you in the clarification of your newly-awakened mind, to the end that, in a future time, your superior powers will assist us along Paths of Truth which we could not otherwise traverse.”

“Will you please tell me what this is all about?” Cloud asked. “Starting at the beginning and using words of as few syllables as possible?”

“Gladly. It has been known for some time that Janowick is Type Three. Self-developed, partially-developed, under-developed, struggling against she knew not what, but still a Three. Now Threes as such, while eminently noteworthy, are by no means phenomenal. There are some hundreds of Threes now alive. Being noteworthy, she has been watched. In time she would have completed her development and would have taken her rightful place in the School of Thought.

“You, however, have been a complete enigma to our most penetrant minds. Since no mind of lower type than Three can be an instantaneous calculator, it was clear that you were, basically, at least a Three. However, unlike other Threes, you did nothing whatever to develop the latent, potential abilities of whatever type you might be. Instead and excepting only the small and unimportant item of computation, you used the tremendous powers of your mind, not for any constructive purpose whatever, but only for the application of such rigid controls and suppressions that all the tremendous abilities you should have shown remained completely dormant and inert.

“Nor could we do anything about it. We tried, but you have blocks that not even the full power of two linked Fives can crack; which fact showed that you are of a type higher than Five. We were about to come to you in person, to plead with you, when you met Three Janowick and opened to her your hitherto impregnably-sealed inner mind. She does not know, and you do not know, what you jointly did; which was, in effect, to break and to dissolve the bindings which had been shackling both your minds. That brings us to the present. It has now become clear that you have been Called.”

“Called?” Cloud winced, physically and mentally. No man likes to be reminded that he failed Lensman’s Exam. “You’re wrong. I didn’t make even the first round.”

“We did not mean the Call of the Lens. There are many Calls, of which that is only one. Nor is it the highest, as we have just discovered, in certain little-known aspects of that vast thing we call the mind. For, to the best of our knowledge, no Lensman of the present or of the past is or was of a type higher than Five. The exact nature of your Call is as yet obscure.”

“I’d like to buy that, but I’m afraid it’s. . . .” Cloud paused. Until he’d met Joan, he’d supposed his mind ordinary enough. Since then, however . . . all those extra barrels. . . .

“Exactly. We are specialists of the mind, young man. We perceive your mind, not as it is, but as it should be and will be. It should have and will have a penetrance, a range, a flexibility of directive force, and, above all, a scope of heights and depths we have never encountered before. It is eminently clear that you, and, very probably, Three Janowick as well, have been developed each for some specific Purpose in the Great Scheme of Things.”

“A _Purpose_?” Cloud demanded. “_What_ purpose? What could _I_ do? What could both of us together do?”

“We can not surely know.”

“Does that mean that you can make a well-informed guess? If so, let’s have it.”

“There is a very high probability that Three Janowick was developed specifically to develop you; to pierce and to dissolve those hampering barriers which were amenable to no other force. Concerning you, there are several possibilities, none of which have any very high degree of probability, since you are unique. The one we prefer at the moment is that you are to become the greatest living Master of Thought; the Prime Expounder of the Truth. But that is of no importance now, since in due time it will be revealed. Of present import is the fact that both your minds are confused, cloudy, and disorderly. We offer our services in reorienting and ordering them.”

“We’d like that very much; but first, if I am going to develop into a mental giant of some kind—frankly, I have my doubts—why did it wait this long to show up?”

“The answer to that question is plain and simple. There is a time for everything, and everything that happens does so in its exact time. Let us to work.”

They worked, and when it was done:

“We would like to dwell with you for long,” the ancient Fives said, “but the time for such a boon will not come until you are much emptier of cares and much fuller of years.”

The Fives split apart. “How do you type this new Master, brother? A full Six, I say.”

“A full Six he is, brother, beyond doubt.”

They fused. “In a time to come, Six Cloud, we will, with your help and under your guidance, explore many and many a Path of Truth which without you would remain closed. But we observe that there is about to arrive a message which is to you of some present concern. Until a day, then.”

The Fives disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and Cloud began to test and to exercise the new capabilities of his mind; in much the same fashion as that in which a good belly-dancer exercises and trains each individual muscle of her torso.

“But what. . . . I didn’t. . . . How did they. . . ?” Joan shook her head violently and started all over again. “What did they _do_ to us, Storm?”

“I don’t know. It was over my head like a lunar dome. But it—whatever it was—was exactly what the doctor ordered. I can handle all those extra barrels now like van Buskirk handles a space-axe. How about you?”

“Me, too—I think.” She hugged his arm. “It shocked me speechless for a minute, but it’s all settling into place fast. . . . But that message? They could get it from your mind that you expected that fine-tooth pretty soon, but how could they know it’s coming in right now? We don’t—in fact, we know it _can’t_ get here for a good ten minutes yet.”

“I wish I knew. I’d like to think they were bluffing, but I know they weren’t.”

“Hi Storm and Joan!” Philip Strong’s face appeared upon a screen, his voice came from a speaker. “The Survey ship has just reported. Technical dope is still coming in. Communications is buzzing you a tape of the whole thing, but to save time I thought I’d call you and give you the gist. To make it short and unsweet, there’s nothing there.”

“_Nothing there!_”

“Nothing for you. They gave it the works, and all there is to that system, Cahuita, they call it, is one red dwarf with one red microdwarf circling it planetwise.”

“Huh?” Cloud demanded. “Come again, chief.”

“How could a micro-sun like that exist?” Strong laughed. “That had me bothered, too, but they’ve got a lot of cosmological double-talk to cover it. It’s terrifically radioactive, they say. And even so, it’s temporary. In the cosmological sense, that is; a hundred million years or so either way don’t matter.”

“No solid planets at all? Not even one?”

“Not one. Nothing really liquid, even. Incandescent, very highly radioactive gas. Nothing solid bigger than your thumb within twelve parsecs.”

“And so it never has been solid, and won’t be for millions of years. . . . Oh, _Damn_! Well, thanks, chief, a lot.”

Then, as the Lensman signed off: “Joan, that puts us deeper in the dark than ever. We had twice too many unknowns and only half enough knowns before, and this really tears it. Well, it was a very nice theory while it lasted.”

“It’s _still_ a very nice theory, Storm.”

“Huh? How do you figure that?”

“I don’t have to figure it. Listen! First, that point is significant, with a probability greater than point nine nine nine. Second, no other point in space has a probability as great as point zero zero one. Whoever or whatever was—is—there, the Survey ship missed. We’ve got to go there ourselves, Storm. We simply _must_.”

“‘Was’ is probably right. Whatever used to be there is gone . . . but that doesn’t make sense, either . . . that planet has _never_ been solid, Joan. . . .” Cloud got up and began to pace the floor. “Dammit, Joan, _nothing_ can live on a planet like that.”

“Life as we know it, no.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only that I am trying to keep an open mind. We simply haven’t enough data.”

“Do you think you and I have got jets enough to find data that the Patrol’s best experts missed?”

“I don’t know. All I am sure of, Doctor Neal Cloud, is this: If we _don’t_ go, we’ll both wish we had, to the day we die.”

“You’re probably right . . . but I haven’t got a glimmering of an idea as to what we’re going to look for.”

“I don’t know whether I have or not, but we’ve simply _got_ to go. Even if we don’t find anything, we will at least have tried. Besides, your most pressing work is done, so you can take the time . . . and besides that . . . well, something those Fives said is bothering me terribly . . . the Purpose, you know . . . do you think. . . ?”

“That my Purpose in Life is to go solve the mystery of the Red Dwarf and its Enigmatic Microcompanion?” he gibed. “Hardly. Furthermore, the coincidence of the Fives getting here just one jump ahead of the fine-tooth is much—_very_ much—too coincidental.”

Joan caught her breath and, if possible, paled whiter than before. “You may _think_ you’re joking, Storm, but you aren’t. Believe me, you aren’t. That’s one of the things that are scaring me witless. You see, if I learned anything at all in my quite-a-few years of semantics, philosophy, and logic, it was that coincidence has no more reality than paradox has. Both are completely meaningless terms. Neither does or can exist.”

Cloud paled, then. “You believe that _is_ my purpose in life?” he demanded.

“Now it’s you who are extrapolating.” Joan laughed, albeit shakily. “To quote you, ‘I merely stated a fact,’ et cetera.”

“Facts hurt, when they hit as hard as that one did.” Cloud paced about, immersed in thought, for minutes.

“I can’t find any point of attack,” he said, finally. “No foothold. No finger-hold, even. But what you just said rocked me to the foundations . . . you said, a while back, that you believe in God.”

“I do. So do you, Storm.”

“Yes . . . after a fashion . . . yes, I do. . . . Well, anyway, now I know what to tell Ross.”

He called the captain and issued instructions. The _Vortex Blaster II_ darted away at full touring blast.

“Now what?” Cloud asked.

“We practise.”

“Practise what?”

“How should I know? Everything, I guess. Oh, no, the Fives emphasized ‘scope,’ whatever that means. ‘Scope in heights and depths.’ Does that ring any bells?”

“Not loud ones, if any. All it suggests to me is spectra of some kind or other.”

“It could, at that.” Joan caught her lower lip between her teeth. “But before we start playing scales, let’s see if we can deduce anything helpful—examine our points of contact and so on. What have we got to go on?”

“We have one significant point in space. That’s all.”

“Oh no, it isn’t. You’re forgetting one other highly significant fact. The data fitted the growth-of-population curve _exactly_, remember.”

“You mean to say you _still_ think the things _breed_?”

“I can’t get away from it, and it isn’t because I’m a woman and obsessed with offspring, either. How else _could_ your data fit that curve, and what else fits it so exactly?”

Cloud frowned in concentration, but made no reply. Joan went on: “Assume, as a working hypothesis, that the vortices are concerned, in that exact relationship, with the increase in some kind of life. Since the fewer assumptions we make, the better, we don’t care at the moment what kind of life it is or whether it’s intelligent or not. To fit the curve, just what would the vortices have to be? Not houses, certainly . . . nor bedrooms . . . nor eggs, since they don’t hatch and the very oldest ones are still there, or would have been, except for you. . . . I’m about out of ideas. How about you?”

“Maybe. My best guess would be incubators . . . and one-shot incubators at that. But with this new angle of approach I’ve got to re-evaluate the data and see what it means now.”

He went over to the work-table, studied charts and diagrams briefly, then thumbed rapidly through a book of tables. He whistled raucously through his teeth. “This gets screwier by the minute, but it still checks. Every vortex represents _twins_. Never singles or triplets, _always_ twins. And the cycle is so long that the full span of our data isn’t enough to even validate a wild guess at it. Now, Joan, you baby expert, just what kind of an infant would be just comfortably warm and cosy in the middle of a loose atomic vortex? Feed _that_ one to Margie, chum, and let’s see what she does with it.”

“I don’t have to; I can work it in my own little head. An exceedingly complex, exceedingly long-lived, exceedingly slow-growing baby of pure force. What else?”

“Ugh! And Ugh! again. That’s twice you’ve slugged me right in the solar plexus.” Cloud began again to pace the floor. “Up to now, I was just having fun. . . . I’m mighty glad we don’t have to let anybody else in on this, the psychs would be on our tails in nothing flat . . . and the conclusion would be completely justifiable and we’ve both blown our stacks. . . . I’ve been trying to find holes in your theory . . . still am . . . but I can’t even _kick_ a hole in it. . . .

“When one theory, and only one, fits much observational data and does not conflict with any, nor with any known or proven law or fact,” he said finally, aloud, “that theory, however bizarre, _must_ be explored. The only thing is, just how are we going to explore it?”

“That’s what we have to work out.”

“Just like that, eh? But before we start, tell me the rest of it—that stuff you’ve been keeping behind a solid block down there in the south-east corner of your mind.”

“QX. I was afraid to, before, but now that you’re getting sold on the basic idea, I’ll tell all. First, the planet. There are two possibilities about that. It could have been cold a long time ago and this race of—of beings, entities, call them whatever you please—with their peculiar processes of metabolism, or habits of life, or something, could have liquefied it and then volatilized it. Or perhaps it started out hot and the activities of this postulated race have kept it from cooling; perhaps made it get hotter and hotter. Either hypothesis is sufficient.

“Second, the Patrol couldn’t find anything because it wasn’t looking for the right category of objects; and besides, it didn’t have the right equipment to find these particular objects even if it had known what to look for.

“Third, assuming that these beings once lived on that planet, or on or in its sun, perhaps, they simply _must_ live there yet. Creatures of that type, with such a tremendously long life-span as you have just deduced and as methodical in thought as they must be, would not move away except for some very solid reason, and nothing in our data indicates any significant change in status. Tracking me so far?”

“On track to a micro, every millimeter.”

“And you don’t think I’ve got rooms for rent upstairs?”

“If you have, I have too. Now that I’m in, I’m going to follow this thing to its logical conclusion, wherever that may be. You’ve buttoned up the vortices themselves very nicely, but they were never the main point at issue, Joan. That spherical surface was, and still is. _Why_ is it? And why such a terrifically long radius? Those have always been the stickers and they still are. If your theory can’t explain them, and it hasn’t, so far, it fails.”

“I think you’re wrong, Storm. I don’t think they’ll turn out to be important at all. They don’t _conflict_ with the theory in any way, you know, and as we get more data I’m pretty sure everything will fit. It fits too beautifully so far to fail the last test. Besides. . . .” her thought died away.

“Besides what? Unblock, chum. Give.”

“I think those things fit in, already. You see, entities of pure energy can’t be expected to think the way we do. When we meet them—if we can understand them at all—that surface, radius and all, will undoubtedly prove to be completely in accord with their mode of thought; system of logic; their semantics; or whatever they have along those lines.”

“Could be.” Cloud’s attitude changed sharply. “You’ve settled one moot point. They’re intelligent.”

“Why, yes . . . of course they are! It’s funny I didn’t think of that myself. And you’re really sold, Storm.”

“I really am. Up to now I’ve just been receptive; but now I really believe the whole cockeyed theory. I suppose you’ve figured out an angle of approach?”

“You flatter me. I’m not that good. But perhaps . . . in a very broad and general way. . . . Heights and depths, remember? And superhuman scope therein or thereat? But _we_ don’t do it, Storm. _You_ do.”

“Uh-uh. Nix. You and I are one. Let’s go!”

“I’ll come along as far as I can, of course, but something tells me it won’t be very far. Lead on, Six Cloud!”

“Where’ll we start?”

“Now we’re right back where we were before. Do you still favor spectra? Of vibration, say, for a start?”

“Nothing else but. So let’s slide ourselves up and down the frequencies, seeing what we can see, hear, feel, or sense, and what we can do about ’em.”

_Chapter 18_ ▂▂▂▂▂▂CAHUITA

ON THE PLANET CAHUITA, unreckonable years before this story opens, an entity brooded.

This entity, Medury by symbol, was not even vaguely man-like; in fact, he—the third person singular pronoun, masculine, is used very loosely indeed; but since it is somewhat better than either “it” or “she” it will have to do—was not even vaguely corporeal or substantial.

Man’s earliest ancestor, it is believed, came into being through the interaction of energy and matter in the waters of the infant seas of Earth. The first Cahuitans, however, originated in the unimaginably violent, raw, crude energy-flare of an atomic explosion.

This explosion did not take place on Tellus, nor in any time known to Tellurian history. The place of occurrence was a planet in the spiral arm of the galaxy across the tremendous gulf of empty space which we now call Rift Two Hundred Forty; the time, as has been said, was in the unthinkably remote past.

Cahuitans are not, strictly speaking, immortal; but as far as mankind is concerned, and except for exceedingly peculiar violences, they might as well be.

Medury brooded. His problem was old; it had probably been considered, academically, by every Cahuitan then alive. But only academically, and no Cahuitan had ever solved it, for the philosophy of the race had always been (and still is) the simple one of least action—no Cahuitan ever did any job until it became necessary; but, conversely, once any job was done it was done as nearly as possible for all time to come.

Medury was the first Cahuitan to be compelled, by one of the basic urges of life, to deal with the problem as a concrete, not an abstract, thing. The problem was, therefore, his. His alone.

His world, the only planet of its sun, was old, old. The last atoms of its fissionables had been fissioned; the last atoms of its fusibles had been fused; no more fires could be kindled.

The Cahuitans in general did not care. For the adolescents, the time of need for a source of high-level quanta had not yet come. For those already fulfilled^{A} it had passed. While entirely gaseous, the planet would stay comfortably warm for a long time. Its energies, with the outpourings of its parent sun, would feed billions of people instead of the mere hundreds of thousands comprising its present population. Jobs^{A}, businesses^{A}, commerce^{A}, and industry^{A} went on as usual, unaffected.

But Medury was affected: basically, fundamentally affected. The time had come when he should progress into completion, and without a new fire the Change was impossible.

For a time which to a human race would have been fantastically long Medury brooded, considering every aspect of the problem; then stirred himself to action. Converting a tiny portion of his non-material being into three filaments of energy, he constructed a working platform by attaching the ends of these three filaments to the cores of three widely-separated suns. Thus assured of orientation, he launched into space a probing needle of pure force; a needle which, propagated in and through the sub-ether, covered parsecs of distances in microseconds of time. And thus for days, years, what might have been centuries and millennia as we of Tellus know time he searched; and finally, he found.

Pulling in all his extensions, he shot a tight beam to a fellow-being, Litosa by symbol, and tuned his mind precisely to hers. (“Hers” being perhaps a trifle better than either “his” or “its”.)

“For some little time you too have felt the need of fulfillment,” he informed his proposed complement in level, passionless thought. “You and I match well; there being no duplications, no incompatibles, no antagonistics in our twelve basics. Our fulfillment, Medosalitury, and our products, Midora and Letusy, would all three be super-primes.”

“Yes.” What a freight of rebellion against fate was carried by that monosyllable! “But why discuss it? Why reach for the unattainable? From now on we die—we _all_ die—unfulfilled and without product. All life in this universe—in this galaxy, at least—ends with us now here.”

“I hope not. I think not. There are many solar systems. . . .”

“To what end?” Litosa broke in, her thought a sneer. “Can you kindle utterly frigid fuel? Can you work in a sun’s core? Or can you, perhaps, take a piece of star-core stuff through empty space to a cold planet and. . . .” The thought changed in tone, became what would have been on Earth a schoolgirl’s squeal of rapture:

“You CAN! Or you wouldn’t have brought up such a harrowing subject. You REALLY CAN!”

“Not that, exactly, but something just as good. I found sparks and kindling on a cold, solid planet.”

“NO!” The thought was ecstasy. “You DIDN’T!”

“I did. Whenever you’re ready, we’ll go.”

“I’ve been ready for CYCLES!”

The two beings linked themselves together in some fashion unknowable to man and shot away through the airless, heatless void. Heatless, but by no means devoid of energy; the travelers could draw sustenance enough for their ordinary needs from the cosmic radiation pervading all space.

Across Rift Two Hundred Forty they flew and on through interstellar space. They reached our solar system. On the third planet, our Earth, they found several atomic power plants. There were no loose atomic vortices—then.

“Hold on! Wait!” Litosa exclaimed, and the strangely-linked pair stopped just short of the glowing bit of warmth—the ragingly incandescent, furiously radiating reactor in the heart of one of Earth’s largest generating stations—which was its goal. “There’s something funny about this. How could there possibly be even one little spark like this, to say nothing of so many, on such an utterly frigid planet, unless some intelligent being started it and is maintaining it for some purpose? There MUST be intelligence on this planet and we must be intruding shamefully. Have you scanned? Scanned. CAREFULLY?”

“I have scanned. Carefully, completely. Not only on this planet’s surface, but throughout its depths. I have scanned, area by area and volume by volume, this sun and its every planet, satellite, and asteroid. There is no intelligence here. More, there is no sign whatever of any kind of life, however rudimentary, latent, or nascent. I have been able to find nothing whatever to modify our conclusion of long and long ago that we are the only life, intelligent or otherwise, in existence. Scan for yourself.”