Part 17

Litosa scanned. She scanned the sun, the planets, the moons and moonlets, the asteroids down to grains of sand and particles of dust. Still unsatisfied, she scanned all neighboring solar systems, from Centralia to Salvador. Then, and only then, did she accept Medury’s almost unacceptable conclusion that these providential sparks were in fact accidental and were in fact, by some process as yet unknown to Cahuitan science, self-balancing and self-sustaining.

Medury and Litosa, woven into a fantastically intricate and complex sphere of ultra-microscopic filaments, flashed into the heart of the reactor, which thereupon went instantaneously and enthusiastically out of control.

And from the pleasant warmth of the incubator-womb—to us of Earth the ravening fury of the first loose atomic vortex—there emerged the fulfillment Medosalitury. This entity, grave and complete and serene as an adult Cahuitan should be, wafted itself (there is no question as to which pronoun is to be used here) sedately back to its home planet.

And in the pleasant warmth of that same incubator-womb the two products, Midora and Letusy, began very slowly to gestate.

* * * * *

Joan and Storm, minds in fusion, set out to regions never before explored by man. Downward first. One cycle per second. One per minute. One per hour; per day; per year; per century. . . .

“Hold everything, Storm! You’re getting out beyond my depth. Anyway, what _use_ are they in what we’re after?”

“None at all, that I can see; but it’s _new knowledge_. Nobody ever dreamed—correction, please: nobody ever published—anything about it, or I’d’ve heard of it. Maybe the Fives know all about it, though; I’ll check with them, first chance I get. QX, we’ll jump up to the radio band.”

“There wouldn’t be any radio waves out here, and you couldn’t understand the language if there were.”

“How do you know? We’ll go where there are some and find out. Maybe we can understand _any_ kind of language now—maybe that’s one of the natural abilities of a Type Three-Six fusion. Who knows?”

In an instant they were receiving a short-wave broadcast at the Heaviside Layer of a distant planet. They could receive it, could de-louse it, could separate signal from carrier wave, could read the information; but they could not understand it.

“Well, _that’s_ a relief,” Joan sighed. “I was getting more than half afraid that a Type Six mind would be omniscient.”

“If I’m a Six you needn’t worry; there’s altogether too much to know. Where do you want to go from here?”

“Let’s look at the infra-red and the ultra-violet. I’ve often wondered what colors they would be.”

The fusion looked, and saw things that made both participants gasp. That is, they did not really _see_, either. None of the six ordinary senses—of perception, sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch—were involved. Or rather, perhaps, all of them were involved, or merged with or into some other, brand-new sense possessed only by high-type minds in full action.

“As a semanticist, Joan, can you write a paper on that? That would make any kind of sense, I mean?”

“I’ll say I can’t,” Joan breathed. “_Especially_ as a semanticist, I can’t. No words, no symbology, in any language. But weren’t they _beautiful_, Storm? And wonderful, and . . . and awful?”

“All of that. I’d like to write it up, or make a tri-di of it . . . or something . . . but of course we can’t. What next? Shall we flirt a bit with the cosmics and ultras, or had we better jump right into the channels of thought?”

“Thought, by all means; the more practise we get, the better, and they’d be on a terrifically high band, don’t you think?”

“Bound to be. The logical conclusion of this whole fantastically cockeyed set-up is that they’ve simply never even suspected that we exist; any more than we have that they do.”

“Would the . . . the bodies, if I can call them that, radiate of themselves, or just thoughts?”

“Not of themselves, I don’t think . . . no. An entity of pure energy would have to be held together by forces of magnitudes we can’t even guess at; much too intense to permit bodily radiation. Something like the binding energies of particles, I imagine; but different and very probably even more so.”

The fusion leaped then to the bands of thought. It sought out and seized the thoughts of various of the ship’s personnel; gripping, molding, working, analyzing. Joan and Cloud were not reading minds now, at all; they were studying the fundamental mechanisms of the thoughts themselves. How they were generated; upon what, if anything, they were heterodyned; how they were transmitted; and, above all, exactly how they were received and exactly how they were converted from pure thought, couched at least in part in the symbols of language, into usefully assimilable information.

And, such was the power of that fusion, it succeeded.

Then up and up and up the scale of thought the fused minds went; seeking, finding, mastering. And up and up and up, into regions where no thoughts at all were to be found. And up and up, and up. . . .

“Stop it! Let me go! I’m burning out!” Joan shrieked aloud. “My God, Storm, is there no limit at all to your ceiling?”

Cloud stopped; loosed her mind. “I’m sorry, chick, but I was just getting nicely organized. We’ve got a long ways to go yet, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sorry, too, Storm, sorrier than you’ll ever know, but I simply can’t take it. Three seconds more of that and I’d’ve gone stark, raving mad. And when we get to Cahuita I don’t know what I’ll do. I may blow up completely.”

“You may think so, but you won’t. You’re not the type. And we aren’t going to Cahuita—at least, not in the flesh. When we hit that band we’ll be there automatically.”

“Not quite automatically, of course, but we’ll be there, yes. I want to stay with you, more than I ever wanted anything before in my whole life, and I want to help you . . . couldn’t we loosen the fusion just a little, so that I can pull away when the going gets too rough for me? Just enough to keep away from a burnout, but close enough to see and perhaps to help a little?”

“I don’t know why not . . . sure, like this.” He showed her.

Again the fusion went up and up and up, and this time it did not stop at Joan’s ceiling. She pulled away a little, but not enough so that she could not sense and understand, in a way, what was going on.

Cloud, every muscle set and eyes closed tight, sat in a chair, his hands gripping fiercely its arms. Joan lay face down upon a davenport, her face buried in a pillow, her fists tight-clenched.

And the linked minds—linked now, not fused—went up . . . and up . . . and up. . . .

And, finally, they reached the band upon which a Cahuitan fulfillment was thinking.

It would probably be too much to say that the fulfillment was surprised. An adult, fulfilled Cahuitan is so serene, so sedate, so inherently stable at any possible level of stress, that it is probably impossible for it to feel any such sensation or emotion as surprise, even at the instantaneous unveiling of a whole new universe of thought. It was, however, in a calm, passionless, and scholarly way, interested. Not what could be called intensely interested, perhaps, but really interested, nevertheless.

As had been foreseen, the modes of thought of the Cahuitan and the linked Tellurians were different indeed. As has been shown, however, there were some points—the fulfillment could remember the emotions of its component products, even though it could no longer feel them—upon which even such divergent minds as those could find common ground. Also, it must be borne in mind that the Cahuitan was an able and seasoned thinker, trained for many millennia in the art, and that Neal Cloud was a Type Six mind; the only such mind then to be found in all Civilization. Hence, while it would serve no useful purpose here to go into detail as to how it was accomplished, a working understanding was at last attained.

Cloud came to understand, as well as any being of material substance ever could, the beings of pure energy. The Cahuitan learned, and broadcast, that intelligent life could and did exist in intimate association with ultimately frigid matter. While the probability was small that there would ever be any considerable amount of fruitful intercourse between the two kinds of life, some live-and-let-live arrangement should be and would be worked out. There were thousands, yes, millions, of planets absolutely useless to anybody or anything known to man; planets harboring no life of any kind. The Patrol would be glad to set up, on any desired number of these barren planets, as many atomic power plants as the Cahuitans wanted; with controls set either to let go in an hour or to maintain stability for twenty five thousand Galactic Standard years.

The Cahuitans would immediately extinguish all vortices not containing products, and would move all living products to the new planets as soon as the promised incubators were ready.

“_Products_ indeed—they’re _babies_!” Joan insisted, when Cloud stepped the information down to her level. “And how can they possibly move them?”

“Easily enough,” the fulfillment told Cloud. “Blankets of force will retain the warmth necessary for such short trips, provided each new incubator is waiting, warm, and ready.”

“I see. But there’s one question I want to ask for myself,” and Cloud went on to explain about the unbelievably huge sphere that crossed Civilization’s vast expanse of space. “What’s the _reason_ for it?”

“To save time and effort. The product Medury devoted much of both to the evaluation of a sufficiently productive, esthetically satisfying, and mathematically correct construction. It would not be logical to waste time and labor in seeking a variant or an alternate, especially since Medury’s work showed, almost conclusively, that his was in fact the most symmetrical construction possible. Now symmetry, to us, is what you might, perhaps, call a ruling passion in one of your own races.”

“Symmetry? The first twelve vortices were symmetrical, of course, but from there on—nothing.”

“Ah—that is due to the differences between our thinkings; particularly in our mathematical and philosophical thinkings. The circle, the sphere, the square, the cube—all such elementary forms—are common to both but the likenesses are few. The differences are many; so many that it will require several thousands of your Galactic Standard years for certain of my fellows and me to tabulate them and to make whatever may be possible of reconciliation.”

“Well . . . thanks. One more question . . . maybe I shouldn’t ask it, but . . . this that we have laid out is a wide-reaching and extremely important program. Are you sure that you are able to speak for all the Cahuitans who will be affected?”

“I am sure. Since we are a logical race we all think alike—logically. On the other hand, your race does not seem to me at the moment to be at all a logical one. Can you speak for it?”

“In this matter I can; and you, in my mind, will know that I can,” and in this case Cloud could indeed speak for the Patrol. Philip Strong, after one glance in Cloud’s mind, would issue the necessary orders himself and would explain later—to anyone capable of accepting the true explanation.

“Very well. We will destroy the empty incubators at once, and will go ahead with the rest of the project whenever you are ready.”

The Cahuitan broke contact and vanished.

In the ship, Cloud got up. So did Joan. Without exchanging a word or a thought they went hungrily into each other’s arms.

After a time, and still keeping one arm around his Joan, Cloud reached out and punched a button on his intercom.

“Captain Ross?”

“Ross speaking.”

“Cloud. Mission accomplished. Return to Tellus, please, at full touring blast.”

“Very well, sir.”

And “Storm” Cloud, Vortex Blaster, was out of a job.

^{A} The reader will please understand that I am doing the best I can with words we all know. E.E.S.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.