"_It is a contact, Effulgent One!_"
"_Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the
threshold...._"
"_It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating
trough!_"
A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the
voices--yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably
intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had
concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought
against the intruding stimuli--then yielded under the relentless thrust
of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor
centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated
control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking
the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me--and then the
hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg.
My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as
the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought--and the
world-ending impact as I fell.
At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality
lashed out again--fighting the invader.
"_Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!_"
"_Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend
the last filament of your life-force!_"
Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention
are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction
followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in
my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its
passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering--at a conscious level.
Watching the Gool mind, I learned.
The insinuating probe--a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had
theorized--was no more than a pattern in emptiness....
But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had
been done to me.
Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping
and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin
crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning
themselves.
Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand
to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable
void--and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a
glistening dark shape.
There was a soundless shriek. "_Effulgence! It reached out--touched
me!_"
* * * * *
Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck,
stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the
obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy
of xenophobia--a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.
I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering.
Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact,
tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind....
I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There
was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner
source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its
rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a
more favorable position.
I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that
linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced
the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where
smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory
told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that
would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had
discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur
alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals--riches
beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe
cluster--those who remained of a once-great race--at a single feeding
trough. They would spread out across a galaxy--and beyond.
But not if I could help it.
The Gool had evolved a plan--but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.
In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among
the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough,
perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a
man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.
Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter
of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a
psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened
the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see
what I could steal.
A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and
white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts,
fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the
concepts of an alien mind.
I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within
pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.
I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its
meaning exploded in my mind.
From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in
its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of
their kind.
Matter across space.
* * * * *
"You've got to listen to me, Kayle," I shouted. "I know you think I'm
a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without
a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The
concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take
my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus
an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil--and a few other
things...."
I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was
getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my
screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now.