"Get 'em, Larry." Then, in the pause that followed: "Sandy, remember
yowling about too many sweeties on a team? What do you think of this
business of all sweeties?"
"All that proves is that nobody can be wrong all the time," she replied
flippantly.
The three men arrived and were instructed. Tuly said: "The great trouble
is that each of you must use a portion of your mind that you do not know
you have. You, this one. You, that one." Tuly probed mercilessly; so
poignantly that each in turn flinched under brand-new and almost
unbearable pain. "With you, Doctor Hilton, it will be by far the worst.
For you must learn to use almost all the portions of both your minds,
the conscious and the unconscious. This must be, because you are the
actual peyondixer. The others merely supply energies in which you
yourself are deficient. Are you ready for a terrible shock, sir?"
"Shoot."
* * * * *
He thought for a second that he _had_ been shot; that his brain had
blown up.
He couldn't stand it--he _knew_ he was going to die--he wished he
_could_ die--anything, anything whatever, to end this unbearable
agony....
It ended.
Writhing, white and sweating, Hilton opened his eyes. "Ouch," he
remarked, conversationally. "What next?"
"You will seize hold of the energies your friends offer. You will bind
them to yours and shape the whole into a dimensionless sphere of pure
controlled, dirigible energy. And, as well as being the binding force,
the cohesiveness, you must also be the captain and the pilot and the
astrogator and the ultimately complex computer itself."
"But how can I.... Okay, damn it. I _will_!"
"Of course you will, sir. Remember also that once the joinings are made
I can be of very little more assistance, for my peyondix is as nothing
compared to that of your fusion of eight. Now, to assemble the energies
and join them you will, all together, deny the existence of the sum
total of reality as you know it. Distance does not exist--every point in
the reachable universe coincides with every other point and that common
point is the focus of your attention. You can be and actually are
anywhere you please or everywhere at once. Time does not exist. Space
does not exist. There is no such thing as opacity; everything is
perfectly transparent, yet every molecule of substance is perceptible in
its relationship to every other molecule in the cosmos. Senses do not
exist. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, sathura, endovix--all are
parts of the one great sense of peyondix. I am guiding each of you
seven--closer! Tighter! There! Seize it, sir--and when you work the
Stretts you must fix it clearly that time does not exist. You must work
in millionths of microseconds instead of in minutes, for they have minds
of tremendous power. Reality does not exist! Compress it more, sir.
Tighter! Smaller! Rounder! There! Hold it! Reality does not
exist--distance does not exist--all possible points are....
_Wonderful!_"