End message. Signed Philip Strong. Repeat, please. We will relay reply.”
Cloud repeated. Then: “Reply. To Philip Strong, Vortex Control
Laboratory, Tellus. Begin message. Remess. Will leave Manarka fourteenth
Sol for Tellus. End of message. Signed Neal Cloud. Repeat, please.”
That done, he turned to his crew. “Now we’ll _have_ to go to work!”
With Vesta to translate, two days sufficed to rid Tominga of her loose
atomic vortices; and no one so much as suspected that the Patrol ship or
any of its crew had had anything to do with the upheaval in Mingia.
The trip to Manarka, a two-day flit, was uneventful. So was the
extinguishment of Manarka’s vortices.
When the job was done, Nadine’s mind and Cloud’s met briefly. No direct
reference was made to the unpleasantness on Tominga, nor to their
somewhat variant ideas concerning it. Nadine wanted to stay on. She
liked the job and she liked Cloud. He was somewhat impractical and
visionary, a bit too idealistic in his outlook at times; but a strong
and able man and a top-bracket commander, nevertheless.
And the Manarkan, in Cloud’s mind, was not only a top-bracket medico,
but also a _very_ handy hand to have around.
On the fourteenth of Sol, then, the good ship _Vortex Blaster I_ took
off for Tellus, with Cloud wondering more than a little as to what was
in the wind. He wasn’t the type to be unduly perturbed about being
called up on the carpet _per se_; but Phil didn’t go in for mystery
much—he explained things . . . He couldn’t possibly know anything about
that Mingian business so soon . . . and he was going to tell him all
about it anyway. . . .
There was plenty of Laboratory business that shouldn’t be relayed all
over space, and this was undoubtedly some of it. Whatever it was, it’d
have to keep until he got to Tellus, anyway, so he’d forget it until
then.
But he didn’t.
_Chapter 10_
▂▂▂▂▂▂JANOWICK
BACK ON TELLUS, Cloud took a fast copter to the Vortex Control
Laboratory, still wondering what it was all about.
“Go right in, Dr. Cloud,” Strong’s secretary told him, even before he
stopped at her desk. “He’s been gnawing his nails ever since you
landed.”
Cloud went in. The Lensman was not alone; a woman who had been seated
beside the desk was now standing, studying him eagerly.
“Hi, Phil,” the Blaster said. “Why all the haste, and why so cryptic?
I’ve been wondering if you found where I hid the body—and which body it
was.”
“Hi, Storm. Nothing like that!” Strong laughed. “Doctor Janowick, Doctor
Cloud—or rather, Joan, this is Storm. You know all about him that
anybody does.”
They shook hands, Cloud wondering all the more, and as he wondered he
studied the woman, just as she was studying him.
Janowick? _Janowick!_ He’d never heard of any female Janowick, so she
couldn’t be anybody much in nucleonics. Not exactly fat, but definitely
on the plump side. About a hundred and thirty-five pounds, he guessed;
and about five feet two. About his own age—no, a bit younger,
thirty-some, probably. Brown hair, with a few white ones showing;
wide-spaced gray eyes—slightly myopic, by the looks of her pixeyish,
you-be-damned spectacles. Smart and keen—all in all, a prime number.
“This is why I pulled you in, Storm,” the Lensman went on. “As you know,
we’ve been combing all Civilization, trying to find
somebody—anybody—with enough of the right qualities. She’s it. Head of
the Department of Semantics at the Galactic Institute for Advanced
Study. Doctor of Semantics, Ph.D. in cybernetics, D.Sc. in symbolic
logic, and so on for half the alphabet. She is also a very good
self-made telepath, and the only self-made perceiver I ever heard of.
She’s very good at that, too—she can outrange a Rigellian. And besides
all that, she’s a Past Grand Master at chess.”
“_Past_ Grand Master? Oh, I see—I don’t suppose it _would_ be quite _de
rigueur_ for a top-bracket telepath to win all the Grand Masters’
championships. Also, in view of the perception business, I imagine all
this is more than somewhat hush-hush?”
“Very much so. A few Lensmen and now you are all who are in on it. It’ll
have to stay top secret until we find out whether an ordinary mind can
be developed into one like yours, or whether her brain, like yours, is
something out of the ordinary.”
“Yes, it’d be very bad to have billions of people screaming for a
treatment that can’t be given.”
“Check. But to get back to Joan. She’s done some almost unbelievable
work and we think she’ll do. You know what we’re after, of course.”
“All I’m afraid of is that you haven’t looked far enough,” the woman
said, shaking her head dubiously. “You know, though, what an appalling
job it was bound to be. I’ll do whatever I can.”
She did not state the problem, either. They all knew, too well, what it
was. As matters then stood, the life of one man—Neal Cloud—was all
that stood between Civilization and loose atomic vortices; and it was
starkly unthinkable that the Galactic Patrol would leave, for a second
longer than was absolutely necessary, that situation unremedied.
“I see.” Cloud broke the short silence. “Assuming that you haven’t been
sitting still doing nothing while I’ve been gone, brief me.”
“Smart boy!” Strong applauded. “The first thing Joan did was to figure
out that a nine-second prediction was out of the question for any
computer, digital or analogue, possible to build with today’s knowledge.
Asked us what we could do to cut the time and how far we could cut it.
With your little bombing flitter you have to have about nine seconds
because you have to build up your speed to the required initial velocity
of the bomb. That could be done away with, of course, by firing the bomb
out of a Q-gun or something. . . .”
“But you’d have to have a special ship, much bigger than a flitter!”
Cloud protested. “And special guns . . . and the special pointers for
those guns—or for the ship, if the guns were fixed-aligned—would be
ver_ee_ unsimple, believe me!”
“How right you are, Buster! Other things, too, that you haven’t thought
of yet, such as automatic compensation for air conditions and so on.
Very much worth while, however, and all done—we’ve had a lot of people
on this project. But to cut this short, the necessary ship turned out to
be a scout cruiser; the minimum safe distance—assuming worst possible
conditions and heaviest possible screening—is thirty two hundred
meters. . . .”
“Wait a minute!” Cloud broke in. “I’ve worked closer than that!”
“You got badly burned once, too, remember; and, according to the medics,
you’ve been taking some damage since. You won’t from here on. But to
resume; since the muzzle velocity we can use is limited, by the danger
of prematuring on impact, to nine hundred sixteen meters per second, the
time from circuit-closing to detonation is something over three and a
half seconds—how much over depending on atmospheric conditions. That’s
absolutely the best we can do, so we gave Joan a minimum of three point
six seconds of prediction to shoot at with her mechanical brains. She
isn’t quite there yet, but she’s far enough along so that she has to
work with you, on actual blasting, the rest of the way.”
“Why?” Cloud argued. “If she stayed on the high side there’d be no
danger of scattering; only of intensification, which wouldn’t do any
harm out in the badlands.”
“Too chancy.” The Lensman swept Cloud’s argument aside with a wave of
his hand. “So the quicker you get moved into your new ship, the _Vortex
Blaster Two_, and get your practicing done, the sooner the two of you
can be on your way to Chickladoria. Flit!”
“Just as you say, chief. Here’s my report in full. Some of the stuff
will jar you to the teeth; particularly Fairchild and the fact that
every blow-up that has ever happened has been deliberate, not
accidental.”
“Huh? _Deliberate!_ Have you blown your stack completely, Storm?”
“Uh-uh; but the proof is too long and involved to go into offhand.
You’ll have to get it from the tapes and it’ll take you at least a week
to check my math. Besides, you told us to flit. So come on, Joan—clear
ether, Phil!”
The Blaster and his new assistant left the laboratory; and in the
copter, en route to the field, Cloud wondered momentarily what it was
about the Lensman’s explanation that had not rung quite true. The first
sight of his new vessel’s control room, however, banished the unformed
thought from his mind before it had taken any real root.
* * * * *
The transformed scout cruiser _Vortex Blaster II_ hung poised and
motionless over the badlands. The optical systems and beam-antennae and
receptors of dozens of instruments, many of which were only months old,
were focused sharply upon the loose atomic vortex a scant two miles
distant.
A few of these instruments reported only to a small and comparatively
simple integrator which, after classifying and combining the incoming
signals, put out as end-product the thin, black, violently-fluctuating
line which was the sigma curve. Some others reported only to a massive
mechanism, too heavy for any smaller vessel to carry, upon whose
electronic complexities there is no need to dwell. Most of the
information-gathering instruments, however, reported to both integrator
and computer.
Not strapped down into a shock-absorber, but sitting easily in an
ordinary pilot’s bucket, quietly but supremely intent, “Storm” Cloud
concentrated upon his sigma curve; practically oblivious to everything
else. Without knowing how he did it he was solving continuously the
simultaneous differential equations of the calculus of warped surfaces;
extrapolating the sigma curve to an ever-moving instant of time three
and nine-tenths seconds—the flight-time of the bombs plus his own
reaction time—ahead of the frantic pen-point of the chart.
In his flitter, where he had required a nine- or ten-second prediction,
he had always seized the first acceptable match that appeared. Now,
however, needing only to extrapolate to less than four seconds, his
technique was entirely different. He was now matching, from instant to
instant, the predicted value of the curve against one or another of the
twelve bombs lying in the firing chambers of heavy guns whose muzzles
ringed the cruiser’s needle-sharp nose.
And, as he had been doing ever since beginning to work with Joan and her
mechanical brains, he was passing up match after match, waiting to see
whether or not the current brain could deliver the goods. There had been
a long succession of them—Alice, Betty, Candace, Deirdre, and so on.
This one was Lulu, and it didn’t look as though she was any good,
either. He waited a while longer, however; then fined down his figures
and got ready to blast.
The flight-time of the bomb, under present atmospheric conditions, would
be three point five nine eight seconds, plus or minus point zero zero
one. His reaction time was point zero eight nine. . . .
“Storm!” Joan broke in sharply, “Can you hold up a minute.”
“Sure.”
“That reaction time. I never spotted that before. Why didn’t I?”
“I don’t know. Never thought of it. Lumped it in, you know. Separated it
now, I suppose, because I’m working so slowly, to give Lulu more of a
chance. Why?”
“Because I’ve _got_ to know all the odd things about you, and that isn’t
merely odd; it’s superhuman.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Chickladorians average about point zero eight,
and Vegians are still faster, about point zero seven. I checked up on
that because they always test me three times when I renew my driver’s
license and always pull a wise crack about me having a lot of cat blood
in me. S’pose I could have?”
“Um . . . m . . . m. Probably not . . . I don’t know for sure, but I
don’t believe that a Tellurian-Vegian cross would be possible; and even
if possible, such a hybrid couldn’t very well be fertile. But the more I
find out about you, my friend, the more convinced I become that you’re
either a mutant or else have some ancestors who were most decidedly
_not_ Tellurians. But excuse this interruption, please—go ahead.”
Cloud went. The flight time of the bomb, under present atmospheric
conditions, would be three point five nine two seconds, plus or minus
point zero zero two. His reaction time was point zero eight nine. In
three point six eight one seconds the activity of the vortex would match
bomb number eleven to within one-tenth of one percent.
His left hand flashed out, number eleven firing stud snapped down. The
vessel shuddered as though struck by a trip-hammer as the
precisely-weighed charge of propellant heptadetonite went off. The bomb
sped truly, in both space and time. There was a detonation that jarred
the planet to its core, a flare of light many times brighter than the
sun at noon, a shock-wave that wrought havoc for miles.
But the scout cruiser and her occupants were unharmed. Completely
inertialess, invulnerable, the vessel rode effortlessly away.
Neal Cloud glanced into his plate; turned his head.
“Out,” he said, seemingly unnecessarily. “How’d Lulu work, Joan?”
“Better, but not good enough. She was on track all the way, but three
point three was the best she could get . . . and I was _sure_ we had it
licked this time . . . oh, _damn_!” The voice broke, ending almost in a
wail.
“Steady, Joan!” Cloud was surprised at his companion’s funk. “Only three
tenths of a second to get yet, is all.”
“_Only_ three tenths—what d’you mean, _only_?” the woman snapped.
“Don’t you know that those three tenths of a second are just about in
the same class as the three thousandths of a degree just above zero
absolute?”
“Sure I do, but I know you, too. You’re really blasting, little chum.
Both Jane and Katy, you remember, were just as apt to be off track as
on. You’ll get it, Joan. As Vesta says, ‘Tail high sister!’”
“Thanks, Storm. I needed that. You see, to keep her on track we had to
put in more internal memory banks and that slowed her down . . . we’ll
have to dream up some way of getting the information out of those banks
faster. . . .”
“Can you tinker her—what’ll the next version be? Margie?—up en route,
or do you want to keep this ship near Sol while you work on it? Phil
tells me I’ve got to flit for Chickladoria—and chop-chop, like quick.”
“Oh . . . Thlaskin and Maluleme have been crying in his beer, too, as
well as yours?”
“I guess so, but that wasn’t it. It’s next on the list, an
urgent—they’ve been screaming bloody murder for months. So, with or
without a brain, I’ve got to blast off.”
“Start blasting as soon as you like, just as we are,” she decided
instantly. “Much more important, at this stage, to work with you than to
have Earth’s resources close by. Besides, I think everything we’re apt
to need is already aboard—machine shop, electronics labs, materials,
and experts.”
“QX.” He gave orders. Then:
“As for me, I’m going to hit the sack. I’m just about pooped.”
“I don’t wonder. That kind of stuff takes a lot of doing. ’Night,
Storm.”
_Chapter 11_
▂▂▂▂▂▂JOAN THE TELEPATH
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, en route to the planet of the pink humanoids,
Cloud was studying a scratch-chart of the First Galaxy. He had been
working on the thing for weeks; had placed several hundred crossed
circles, each representing a loose atomic vortex. He was scrawling
weird-looking symbols and drawing freehand connecting lines when Joan
came swishing into the “office.”
“Good morning, Effendi of Esoterica!” she greeted him gaily. “How’s the
massive intellect? Firing on all forty barrels, I hope and trust?”
“Missing on all forty is more like it. Ideas are avoiding me in droves.”
He looked her over amiably, in what he hoped she would think was a
casual way.
He’d found himself doing quite a lot of that, lately . . . but she was
_such_ a swell egg! Why hadn’t she ever married? What a waste _that_
was! Face a bit on the strong side for vapid calendar-girl prettiness,
but. . . .
“But kind of attractive, at that, in her own gruesome way, eh?” she
finished the thought for him.
“Huh?” Cloud gulped, and, for the first time in years, blushed scarlet;
flushed to the tips of his ears.
“I’m sorry, Storm, believe me. I don’t think I was supposed to tell
you—in fact, I know very well I wasn’t—but I’ve simply got to. It
isn’t fair not to; besides, I’ve thought all along that Lensman Strong
was wrong—that we’d go faster and farther if you knew than if you
didn’t.”
“Oh—_that’s_ what Phil was holding out on me back there? I thought
there was something fishy, but couldn’t spot it.”
“I was sure you did. So was Phil. You told me what the Tomingans call
telepaths—snoopers? I _like_ that word; it’s so beautifully
appropriate. Well, I’m snooping all the time. Not only while we’re
working, as you thought, but _all_ the time, especially when you’re
relaxed and . . . and off-guard, so to speak. I’ve been doing it ever
since I first met you.”
Cloud blushed again. “So you knew exactly what I was thinking just then?
You gave me a remarkably poor play-back.”
“The portrait was much too flattering. But we’ll skip that. Part of my
job is to make a telepath out of you, so that you can show me with your
mind—it can’t be done in words or symbols—what it is that makes a
mathematical prodigy tick.”
“How are you figuring on going about it?”
“I don’t know—yet.”
“Phil tried, and so did a couple of Gray Lensmen, and I wasn’t holding
back a thing . . . oh, he emphasized that you’re a _self-made_ telepath.
A different angle of approach? How did you operate on yourself?”
“I don’t know that, either; but I hope to find out through you. I read,
and studied, and tried, and all of a sudden—bang!—there it was. But
words are useless; I’m coming into your mind. Now watch me closely,
concentrate: _really_ concentrate, as hard as you possibly can. Ready?
It goes like this . . . did you get it?”
“No. I couldn’t follow the details—it seemed like an instantaneous
transition. Didn’t you have more to begin with than I’ve got?”
“I don’t think so . . . pretty sure I didn’t. I could receive—I think
it’s impossible for anyone to become a telepath who can’t—but I
couldn’t send a lick. My psi rating was a flat zero zero zero. Now try
it again. Take a good, solid grip on a thought and _throw_ it at me.”
“QX. I’ll try.” Cloud’s forehead furrowed, his muscles tensed in effort.
“Since you already know I’ve been wondering why you never married—why?
Standards too high?”
“You might call it that.” It was the woman’s turn to blush, but her
thought was clear and steady. Cloud was working with her better than he
had ever worked with either Luda or Nadine. “Since the days of my
teen-age crushes on tri-di idols I simply haven’t been able to develop
any interest in a man who didn’t have as much of a brain as I have, and
the only such I met were either already married or didn’t have anything
_except_ a brain—which wouldn’t do, either, of course.”
“Of course not.” Cloud felt something stirring inside him that he
thought completely dead, and tried, in near-panic fashion, to kill it
again. He changed the subject abruptly. “No luck—I’m not getting
through to you at all. We’d better start all over, at the bottom. What’s
the first thing I’ve got to do to learn to be a snooper?”
“You must learn how to concentrate—intensively and in a very special
way. You’re very good at ordinary concentration—especially mathematical
stuff—now; but this kind is different—so much so as to be a difference
in kind, not merely of degree.”
“Check. Point one, a new kind of concentration. Next?”
“No next. That’s all. When you get so you can concentrate
correctly—I’ll coach you mind to mind on that, of course—we’ll
concentrate together, first on one gateway, then another. Something will
click into place, and there you’ll be.”
“I hope. But suppose it doesn’t? Can’t it be worked out? You’re on
record as saying that the mind is simply a machine.”
“No, it can’t. The mind _is_ a machine; just as much a machine as one of
your automatic pilots or one of my computers. The troubles are that it
is almost infinitely more complex and that we do not understand its
basic principles—the fundamental laws upon which it operates. We may
_never_ understand them . . . the mind may very well be so tied in with
the life-principle—or soul; call it whatever you please—as to be
knowable only to God.”
“I’m glad you said that, Joan. I’m not formally religious, I suppose,
but I do believe in a First Cause.”
“One must, who knows as much about the Macrocosmic All as you do. But
it’s too early in the morning for very much of that sort of thing. What
are you doing to that chart besides doodling all over it?”
“Those aren’t doodles, woman!” he protested. “They’re equations. In
shorthand.”
“Equations, I apologize. Doctor Cloud, elucidate.”
“Doctor Janowick, I can’t. This is where you came in. I had just pursued
an elusive wisp of thought into what turned out to be a cul de sac. I
whammed my head against a solid concrete wall.” His light mood vanished
as he went on:
“In spite of what everybody has always believed, I’ve _proved_ that
loose atomic vortices are not accidental. They’re deliberate, every one
of them, and. . . .”
“Yes, I heard you tell Phil so,” she interrupted. “I wanted to start
screaming about your hypothesis then, and it’s taken superhuman
self-control to keep me from screaming about it ever since. That kind of
math, though, of course is ’way over my head. . . . For a long time I
expected Phil to call up and blast you to a cinder, but he didn’t . . .
you may be—_must_ be, I suppose—right.”
“I am right,” Cloud said, quietly. “Unless all the mathematics I know is
basically, fundamentally fallacious, they’ve _got_ to be deliberate;
they simply _can’t_ be accidental. On the other hand, except for a few
we know about which don’t change the general picture in the least, I
can’t see any more than you can how they can possibly be deliberate,
either.”
“Are you trying to set up a paradox?”
“No. It’s already set up. I’m trying to knock it down.” Cloud’s thought
died away; his mind became a mathematical wilderness of such complexity
that the woman, able mathematician that she was and scan as she would,
was lost in seconds.
He finally shrugged himself out of it. “Another blind alley,” he
reported, sourly.
“With sufficient knowledge, any possible so-called paradox can be
resolved,” Joan mused, her mind harking back to the, to her, starkly
unbelievable hypothesis Cloud had stated so baldly. “But I simply
_can’t_ believe it, Storm!”
“I can’t, either, hardly. However, it’s easier for me to believe that
than that all our basics are false. So that makes it another part of our
job to find out what, or who, or why.”
“Ouch! With a job of that magnitude on your mind, I’ll make myself
scarce. When you come up for air sometime give me a call on the
squawk-box and we’ll study concentration. ’Bye.” She turned, started for
the door.
“Wait a minute, Joan—why not start the ground-work now?”
“That’s a thought—why not? But get away from that big table.” She
placed two chairs and they sat down knee to knee; almost eye to eye.
“Now, Storm, come in. _Really_ come in, this time; the first time you
didn’t really even half try.”
“I did so!” he protested. “I tried then and I’m trying now. Just _how_
do I go about it?”
“I can’t tell you that, Storm; _nobody_ can tell you that.” She was
thinking now, not talking. “There are no words, no symbology, even in
the provinces of thought. And I can’t do it for you: you _must_ do it
yourself. But if you can’t—and you really can’t be expected to, so
soon—I’ll come into your mind and try to _show_ you what I mean.”
She did so. There was a moment of fitting; of snuggling . . . there was
a warmly intimate contact, much warmer and much more intimate than
anything telepathic that either had ever experienced before; but it was
not what they were after. Joan tried a different approach.
“Well, if that won’t work, let’s try this. Just imagine, Storm, that
every cell of my brain—no, let’s keep it on the immaterial level; every
individual ultimate element of my mind—is a lock, but you can see
exactly what the key must be like. You must make every corresponding
unit of your mind into the appropriate key. . . . No? We’ll try again.
Imagine that each element of my mind is half of a jigsaw puzzle—make
yours fill out each picture. . . .”
“I can’t. Don’t you know, Joan, how many thousands of millions
of. . . .”