Part 2

Jackson grinned. "Yes, slightly. Your manners as a guest have been very bad. You have been childishly annoyed by what you cannot understand and you will be childishly treated, all of you except the man who has been talking a little more sensibly to me." With that he easily picked the Commander up, fell back into a chair and turned Linder over to give him a few sharp whacks. While Stern looked on helplessly, others grabbed Barnes and the rest, in each case administering a brief spanking. Even as the Nodarians spanked away most of them continued to look toward the movie wall for a further supply of irrationality.

A minute later the red-faced visitors were set back on their feet while most of their mild assailants walked away, each laughing on one side of his face or the other. Jackson held two empty palms toward them. "You see--nothing else. You are free to go."

Linder struggled to reassert his dignity. "This isn't the end of the matter."

"Of course not, Commander. Some day we'll reestablish the contact you so ardently desire. Very peacefully too."

"Council will not wait _that_ long," Linder said over his shoulder as he stalked away.

* * * * *

They returned to the ship in silence and when those who had remained on board demanded to know what had happened Linder insisted they be told nothing. "The matter," he said ominously, "will be settled when we reach Terra. Stern, you're to keep silent too. Council is going to be very interested in finding out why you received such favored treatment."

"But, Commander, I think I have a slight idea what this is all about--"

"Not interested in your ideas," Linder said angrily, striding away. "Tell them to Council."

"I don't have the equipment in my cabin to work the analysis out."

"Silence!" Linder had turned at the door of Stern's cabin and was glaring at him. "I don't want to hear a word from you the rest of this voyage."

Stern sighed and calmly sat down at his desk to make some preliminary calculations. It would probably work out all right; after a few days in hyperspace Linder would come to him, more or less his old congenial self, and this prohibition would be quickly forgotten.

But it did not work out that way. Every time Stern started a conversation with the Commander or Barnes they stared unresponsively at him and even Crawford sometimes backed away, trying to exchange as few words as possible.

One day Linder approached the permaquartz window to find Stern, deep in thought, muttering to himself some ancient rhyme about _Patty cake, patty cake, baker man_. Oblivious to everything else about him, Stern was holding his right hand above his head and his left close to his stomach. The right hand, palm downward was moving in a clockwise direction while the other went anti-clockwise, but at the words _Baker man_ the movement of both hands was abruptly reversed. For a while Linder watched these reversals, sometimes inaccurately changed into both clockwise or both anti-clockwise movements. Finally he said "Hmmph!" and strode away, leaving Stern standing there in confusion at discovering he had been observed.

Following this embarrassing episode, Stern tried several times to explain what he had been doing but was perfunctorily rejected in each attempt. The days hung heavily as more and more crew members, deciding to play it safe, imitated their chief and treated him like a pariah. Most even refused to exchange brief comments about the _Probe's_ navigational progress across the Galaxy, the spaceman's polite equivalent of the landman's time-killing rehashes of the weather. Eventually Crawford alone was left among those indifferent to Linder's wrath and Barnes' prying.

* * * * *

"It's an utterly ridiculous situation," Stern protested one day when Crawford came by.

"I know it."

"What's he going to accuse me of when we reach Terra--secret communication with the enemy?"

"Practically. You'll be tried on suspicion of that possibility."

"And acquitted of it. He'll look plain silly after the hearings."

"I suspect that too. But don't forget he's been made to look very silly--a grown man getting spanked!"

"You went through the same indignity and still managed to be philosophical enough to talk to me."

"Stern, _you_ didn't have to be philosophical at all. Frankly, even I feel puzzled by their discriminating against the rest of us like that."

Stern shrugged. "I think they realized I already had a tiny inkling of what was up while the rest of you, Linder and Barnes especially, were arrogantly rubbing them the wrong way. You see, if there's any condescending to be done, they're the ones who've earned the privilege now."

Crawford's brow wrinkled thoughtfully. "You _do_ have some kind of inkling!" He considered the portable electromagnetic projector at Stern's elbow. "You were working that before I came in, weren't you?"

The older man strummed the arm of his chair. "It's not good enough for the final proof. I need the main projector in the Commander's quarters." He slammed the arm with sudden vehemence. "I've had enough--he's going to listen to me before it's too late for him! He's too good a spaceman to ruin his career the way he probably will if the hearing against me gets going. They'll put him down for an obstructive old fool and never let him make a solar system run again!"

Crawford considered him for a long second. "You're really serious, aren't you? What makes you so sure you could convince him?"

"I only suspect I can. But I'll need the projector for it."

"Well, I still don't see how, Stern. You ought to hear him talking about finding you playing some kind of kid's game, moving your hands like crazy. What do I say if he brings that up again?"

"All right." Stern rose from his chair, placed his left hand horizontally above his head, his right vertically against his stomach, and started reciting the nonsense words. Each time he came to _baker man_, he changed the rotational direction of one or both hands. Then he reversed the placement of the hands themselves. Unsmiling, after about a dozen changes, he said: "Now you try it, Crawford. No, I'm not kidding around. Every time I reach _baker_ there'll be a change. If I say _left baker man_ only your left will reverse its rotation. Or I may say _right baker man_. Or I may not indicate a hand and then you'll reverse rotation for both. Then when I say _change baker man_, put the right hand where the left is and vice versa and continue the same rotation as before the command--that is, if the right hand was above your head, going clockwise, when I say _change_, your left hand, as soon as it's shifted above your head, will turn clockwise."

Crawford hesitantly got up, crowding the little cabin until Stern sat down. He held his hands just as Stern had at the start of the exercise. "Makes me feel a little silly," he grinned, rolling his eyes upward to the raised hand.

"Maybe it is in itself--but not in its implications. Okay, _Patty cake, patty cake, baker man_. And now _Patty cake, patty cake, left baker man_. And _Patty cake, patty cake, change baker man!_"

As the last instruction was given, Crawford, hopelessly tangled, flailed his arms about. "Can't keep them turning in the right direction!" Annoyed with himself, he stopped altogether. "Let's start again. I'll get it yet."

"No, I think the point's been made. After a while you might learn to do it right but it would take practice."

"A matter of coordination, isn't it?" Stern nodded. "Then those hand-wrigglings of the Nodarians were actually purposeful exercises."

"Right. And now that they've mastered really complex maneuvers, the hand-wrigglings are probably games, too, a part of play."

"Why should they have bothered at all with something like that?"

"Because it's one tiny part of a much wider set of disciplines. They have made themselves _totally_ ambidextrous, not a trace of left- or right-handedness left. Not just physical exercise and disciplines, though, _all_ processes dealing with attention are involved."

Crawford's eyes widened. "That would mean both halves of the brain are _equally_ used! They might be able to do twice the thinking we do."

"No, my friend, the difference is much greater because it has gone far beyond questions of handedness. Just tell the Commander what I've told you. And say the change probably extends to the very nature of consciousness itself but I'll need the best projector to prove that."

Crawford bewilderedly considered his two hands. "Complete control--can you beat that! The Commander'll have to listen all right."

* * * * *

After he was gone, though, Stern, gloomy and impatient, wondered whether the younger man's optimism was justified. Suppose the Commander refused and he had to wait more than three months, cooped up and in coventry, before he could find out whether he was right? This project had turned out to be one of psychology rather than semantics but everything, absolutely everything, would be affected if he--.

The intercom speaker grated in response to someone's breath. "Stern to Commander's quarters on the double!" shouted Linder.

Grinning with relief, he jumped up, at the same time unlocking a reel of magnetic tape from the projector housing. He hurried along the catwalk to the bow where the Commander was waiting, scowl and all.

"No time for apologetic chit-chat," Linder snapped. "Crawford here has spoken to me and I'm interested. Not convinced, just interested. What do you propose doing?"

"I need the projector to test out my wider conclusions, sir."

"You have one in your cabin, don't you? Your inventory statement should show you do."

"It can't project a reel at slow enough speed, sir. It wasn't designed for the kind of analysis I'm suggesting."

"Oh," he muttered half-mockingly, glancing toward Barnes, "so you have a reel with you?"

"Yes, and several more back in the cabin. They're blur pictures, garbles we picked up when we were hovering above Nodar."

"You're wasting the Commander's valuable time," Barnes shouted. "All nonsense if you ask me!"

"Only because you have a one-tracked mind." Stern laughed at his own remark. "That may turn out to be very funny in the next few minutes."

"Get on with it, Stern, before I change _my_ mind," ordered the Commander.

"Yes, sir!"

He quickly slipped the reel onto the projector and, setting it for a very slow speed, turned the machine on. The screen showed the usual Nodarian television blur.

"There you are," Barnes said, "a complete waste of time!"

Disregarding him, Stern twisted the speed dial into slower and slower positions; all the while watching the screen. Suddenly, as projection speed came down to six percent of the speed at which it had originally been received, they all gasped. They seemed to be looking at the performance of some kind of drama with perfectly normal human characters but the figures were sufficiently transparent for another set of characters with another distinctive background to be seen behind them and these seemed to be acting out a separate drama. All the while equally transparent complex equations, charts and diagrams were pouring across the screen.

"That's what _we_ find to be a blur!" observed Stern.

"They speed up their picture signal during transmission," Linder said, "and slow it down at the receiving end." He stopped, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "No, that can't be it. In the Reception Center Building and at their Central, too, they were looking _directly_ at such blurs!"

"Exactly, sir. They can _see_ the components of what we find a blur--if we unscrambled the sound track squeaks we'd undoubtedly find the same thing there. The question is, _How can they do it?_ and the answer is very frightening--and encouraging."

"You said something about a change of consciousness."

"A radical change. They've been developing it during their isolation period and there's no reason why they won't teach us when the preparatory period's over. They're developing a special kind of inward power that would make it silly for them to want primitive control over other men. _They're_ the next stage in _our_ evolution."

"ESP!" Barnes broke in. "They sensed our antagonism so they humiliated us."

* * * * *

"No, they _saw_ your antagonism." Stern snapped off the machine. "They saw it because their powers of direct observation are so complete, catching every slightest, revealing movement of the face. Look, gentlemen, what have been the evolutionary stages until now? First, self-perpetuating and replicating crystals. Then conditioned-reflex life, followed by the growth of consciousness which in turn gave rise to the development of social consciousness. For the last few centuries we've been in this phase and it has given us the power to spread across the Galaxy and assure one common level of humanity everywhere. Individual and social consciousness interacting--what, we have wondered, would be the next stage to arise from it? But we have done everything to prevent the next stage because we feared any one planet developing along unique lines, lines that might end in a threat to the rest of us. Nodar deliberately isolated itself to be temporarily unique."

"What kind of consciousness could there be besides individual and social as we know them?" Crawford wondered uneasily.

"Nodarian--and if you had it your ten billion brain cells could store up so much knowledge you wouldn't need thinking machines, just purely physical robots!"

"Let's get down to cases," Linder said, for once politely restrained in his impatience.

"All right, Commander, here's a case. You're standing at the entrance of a darkened room which contains a thousand objects. A light flicks on and off, barely revealing the room's contents. Then you are asked to describe as much of the crowded room as you can remember seeing in that brief flash. Your description covers only a small percentage of the room's contents. The percentage may increase with practice but it will still be small."

"But haven't you really seen more than that?" Crawford protested. "Neurosurgery--"

"Certainly," Stern agreed. "If the neuro-surgeon manages to touch precisely the right point in your brain while you're under a local anaesthetic, you'll start describing details of that room you had not realized you had seen. That's unconscious knowledge and it's much vaster than what you consciously acquire. Still though, you find that, even with this additional description, you've only covered a small percentage of the facts about that room. Now, if you're permitted to look into such a mystery room for, say, five minutes, you have a chance to move your eyes from point to point, to become aware of more things--and the neuro-surgeon's work will show your unconscious knowledge has also grown from longer viewing. Conscious and unconscious knowledge feed each other."

"I can just barely follow you now," Linder protested. "This is getting awfully complicated."

"Because we're dealing with an awfully complicated--and important--phenomenon. I'll get to the big point in just a moment but, first, one more case--a little simpler to follow, I hope. You enter a well-lighted room. In one corner two men are seated, playing chess. In another corner two men are repairing a machine. When you look at the chess players the machine repairers are barely visible in the corner of your eye. If you concentrate on the chess situation, you learn close to nothing about the repair work. And when you concentrate on the repair work the chess game fades out."

"So what?" Linder demanded. "You merely move your eyes back and forth and follow both things if you want to!"

"Exactly the point I was hoping to make, sir. This constant moving back and forth gives us the impression that our conscious attention is on two things at the very same time. Actually, though, it's only one thing at a time. Now, imagine you lose interest in both situations while a radio starts playing some music. A second radio comes in with other music. By shifting attention back and forth you may manage to identify both but you're really not hearing either one very well. And imagine what would happen if a third stream of music started up at the same time!"

"That's right, you can only consciously follow one thing at a time," Crawford nodded. His eyes widened with horror. "They don't think that way at all! They were listening at the spaceport to musics and they see all these different things happening on the screen at the same time and follow it, don't they?"

"Which gives them the capacity to learn anything at tremendous speed," said Stern. "Take manually driving a ground vehicle. We learn one operation until we can do it automatically, _un_thinkingly, then we learn another operation to the same point, reinforcing our first knowledge with the new acquirement, and so on. For all practical purposes _they_ could learn almost everything about such a matter at the same time, instantly!"

Stern stared at the star chart on the Command Room's wall, and wondered whether the inward side of man was equally vast.

THE END