sense when it comes to gambling,” Vesta explained, gravely. “They can’t
tell the difference between their own money and the bank’s. So everybody
who amounts to anything in a bank makes a no-gambling declaration and if
one ever slips the insurance company boots him out on his ear and he
takes a blaster and burns his head off. . . .”
Cloud flashed a thought at Joan. “Is this another of your strictly
Vegian customs?”
“Not mine; I never heard of it before,” she flashed back. “Very much in
character, though, and it explains why Vegian bankers are regarded as
being very much the upper crust.”
“. . . so I _am_ going to buy half of that bank. Thanks, chief, for
helping me make up my mind. Good night, you two lovely people; I’m going
to bed. I’m just about bushed.” Vesta, tail high and with a completely
new dignity in her bearing, strode away.
“Me, too, Storm; on both counts,” Joan thought at Cloud. “You ought to
hit the hammock, too, instead of working half the night yet.”
“Maybe so, but I want to know how things came out, and besides they may
want some quick figuring done. Good night, little chum.” His parting
thought, while commonplace enough in phraseology, was in fact sheer
caress; and Joan’s mind, warmly intimate, accepted it as such and
returned it in kind.
Cloud left the ship and rode a scooter across the field to a very
ordinary-looking freighter. In that vessel’s control room, however,
there were three Lensmen and five Rigellians, all clustered around a
tank-chart of a considerable fraction of the First Galaxy.
“Hi, Cloud!” Nordquist greeted him with a Lensed thought and introduced
him to the others. “All our thanks for a really beautiful job of work.
We’ll thank Miss Janowick tomorrow, when she’ll have a better
perspective. Want to look?”
“I certainly do. Thanks.” Cloud joined the group at the chart and
Nordquist poured knowledge into his mind.
Thlasoval, the boss of Chickladoria, had been under full mental
surveillance every minute of every day. The scheme had worked perfectly.
As the club closed, Thlasoval had sent the expected message; not by
ordinary communications channels, of course, but via long-distance
beamer. It was beamed three ways; to Tominga, Vegia, and Palmer III.
That proved that Fairchild wasn’t on Chickladoria; if he had been,
Thlasoval would have used a broadcaster, not a beamer.
Shows had been staged simultaneously on all four of Fairchild’s planets,
and only on Vegia had the planetary manager’s message been broadcast.
Fairchild was on Vegia, and he wouldn’t leave it: a screen had been
thrown around the planet that a microbe couldn’t squirm through and it
wouldn’t be relaxed until Fairchild was caught.
“_Simultaneous shows?_” Cloud interrupted the flow of information. “On
four planets? He won’t connect the _Vortex Blaster_ with it, at all,
then.”
“We think he will,” the Lensman thought, narrowing down. “We’re dealing
with a _very_ shrewd operator. We hope he does, anyway, because a
snooper put on you or any one of your key people would be manna from
heaven for us.”
“But how _could_ he suspect us?” Cloud demanded. “We couldn’t have been
on four planets at once.”
“You will have been on three of them, though; and I can tell you now
that routing was not exactly coincidence.”
“Oh . . . and I wasn’t informed?”
“No. Top Brass didn’t want to disturb you too much, especially since we
hoped to catch him before things got this far along. But you’re in it
now, clear to the neck. You and your people will be under surveillance
every second, from here on in, and you’ll be covered as no chief of
state was ever covered in all history.”
-----
[3] A few months later, Joan did send him the full game, which white of
course won. Thlasoval studied it in secret for over five years; and
then, deciding correctly that he never would be able to understand its
terrifically complex strategy, he destroyed the tape. It is perhaps
superfluous to all that this game was never published. E.E.S.
_Chapter 15_
▂▂▂▂▂▂JOAN AND HER BRAINS
THE TRIP FROM Chickladoria to Vegia, while fairly long, was uneventful.
Joan spent her working hours, of course, at her regular job of
rebuilding the giant computer. Cloud spent his at the galactic chart or
in the control room staring into a tank; classifying, analyzing,
building up and knocking down hypotheses and theories, wringing every
possible drop of knowledge from all the data he could collect.
In their “spare” time, of which each had quite a great deal, they worked
together at their telepathy; to such good purpose that, when so working,
verbal communication between them became rarer and rarer. And, alone or
in a crowd, within sight of each other or not, in any place or at any
time, asleep or awake, each had only to think at the other and they were
instantly in full mental rapport.
And oftener and oftener there came those instantaneously-fleeting
touches of something infinitely more than mere telepathy; that fusion of
minds which was so ultimately intimate that neither of the two could
have said whether he longed for or dreaded its full coming the more. In
fact, for several days before reaching Vegia, each knew that they could
bring about that full fusion any time they chose to do so; but both
shied away from its consummation, each as violently as the other.
Thus the trip did not seem nearly as long as it actually was.
The first order of business on Vegia, of course, was the extinguishment
of its five loose atomic vortices—for which reason this was to be
pretty much a planetary holiday, although that is of little concern
here.
As the _Vortex Blaster II_ began settling into position, the two
scientists took their places. Cloud was apparently his usual
self-controlled self, but Joan was white and strained—almost shaking.
He sent her a steadying thought, but her block was up, solid.
“Don’t take it so hard, Joanie,” he said, soberly. “Margie’ll take ’em,
I hope—but even if she doesn’t, there’s a dozen things not tried yet.”
“That’s just the trouble—there _aren’t_! We put just about everything
we had into Lulu; Margie is only a few milliseconds better. _Perhaps_
there are a dozen things not tried yet, but I haven’t the faintest,
foggiest smidgeon of an idea of what any of them could be. Margie is the
last word, Storm—the best analogue computer it is possible to build
with today’s knowledge.”
“And I haven’t been a lick of help. I wish I could be, Joan.”
“I don’t see how you can be. . . . Oh, excuse me, Storm, I didn’t mean
that half the way it sounds. Do you want to check the circuitry? I’ll
send for the prints.”
“No, I couldn’t even carry your water-bottle on that part of the job.
I’ve got just a sort of a dim, half-baked idea that there’s a
possibility that maybe I haven’t been giving you and your brains a
square deal. By studying the graphs of the next three or four tests
maybe I can find out whether. . . .”
“Lieutenant-Commander Janowick, we are in position,” a crisp voice came
from the speaker. “You may take over when ready, madam.”
“Thank you, sir.” Joan flipped a switch and Margie took control of the
ship and its armament—subject only to Cloud’s overriding right to fire
at will.
“Just a minute, Storm,” Joan said then. “Unfinished business. Whether
what?”
“Whether there’s anything I can do—or fail to do—that might help; but
I’ve got to have a lot more data.”
Cloud turned to his chart, Joan to hers; and nothing happened until
Cloud blew out the vortex himself.
The same lack of something happened in the case of the next vortex, and
also the next. Then, as the instruments began working in earnest on the
fourth, Cloud reviewed in his mind the figures of the three previous
trials. On the first vortex, a big toughie, Margie had been two hundred
fifty milliseconds short. On the second, a fairly small one, she had
come up to seventy-five. On Number Three, middle-sized, the lag had been
one twenty-five. That made sense. Lag was proportional to activity and
it was just too bad for Margie. And just too _damn_ bad for Joanie—the
poor kid was just about to blow her stack. . . .
But wait a minute! What’s this? This number four’s a little bit of a new
one, about as small as they ever come. Margie ought to be taking it, if
she’s ever going to take anything . . . but she isn’t! She’s running
damn near three hundred mils behind! Why? Oh—amplitudes—frequencies
extreme instability. . . . Lag isn’t proportional _only_ to activity,
then, but jointly to activity and to instability.
That gives us a chance—but what in all nine of Palain’s purple _hells_
is that machine _doing_ with that data?
He started to climb out of his bucket seat to go around to talk to Joan
right then, but changed his mind at his first move. Even if Margie
_could_ handle this little one it wouldn’t be a real test, and it’d be a
crying shame to give Joan a success here and then kick her in the teeth
with a flat failure next time. No, the next one, the only one left and
Vegia’s worst, would be the one. If Margie could handle _that_, she
could snuff anything the galaxy had to offer.
Hence Cloud extinguished this one, too, himself. The _Vortex Blaster II_
darted to its last Vegian objective and lined itself up for business.
Joan put Margie to work as usual; but Storm, for the first time, did not
take his own place. Instead, he came around and stood behind Joan’s
chair.
“How’re we doing, little chum?” he asked.
“Rotten!” Joan’s block was still up; her voice was choked with tears.
“She’s come so close half a dozen times today—why—_why_ can’t I get
that last fraction of a second?”
“Maybe you can.” As though it were the most natural thing in the
world—which in fact it was—Cloud put his left arm around her shoulders
and exerted a gentle pressure. “Bars down, chum—we can think a lot
clearer than we can talk.”
“That’s better,” as her guard went down. “Your differential ’scope looks
like it’s set at about one centimeter to the second. Can you give it
enough vertical gain to make it about five?”
“Yes. Ten if you like, but the trace would keep jumping the screen on
the down-swings.”
“I wouldn’t care about that—closest approach is all I want. Give it
full gain.”
“QX, but why?” Joan demanded, as she made the requested adjustment. “Did
you find out something I can’t dig deep enough in your mind to pry
loose?”
“Don’t know yet whether I did or not—I can tell you in a couple of
minutes,” and Cloud concentrated his full attention upon the chart and
its adjacent oscilloscope screen.
One pen of the chart was drawing a thin, wildly-wavering red line. A few
seconds behind it a second pen was tracing the red line in black;
tracing it so exactly that not the tiniest touch of red was to be seen
anywhere along the black. And on the screen of the differential
oscilloscope the fine green saw-tooth wave-form of the electronic trace,
which gave continuously the instantaneous value of the brain’s shortage
in time, flickered insanely and apparently reasonlessly up and down;
occasionally falling clear off the bottom of the screen. If that
needle-pointed trace should touch the zero line, however briefly, Margie
the Brain would act; but it was not coming within one full centimeter of
touching.
“The feeling that these failures have been partly, or even mostly, my
fault is growing on me,” Cloud thought, tightening his arm a little: and
Joan, if anything, yielded to the pressure instead of fighting away from
it. “Maybe I haven’t been waiting long enough to give your brains the
leeway they need. To check: I’ve been assuming all along that they work
in pretty much the same way I do; that they handle all the data, out to
the limit of validity of the equations, but aren’t fast enough to work
out a three-point-six-second prediction.
“But if I’m reading those curves right Margie simply isn’t working that
way. She doesn’t seem to be extrapolating _anything_ more than three and
a half seconds ahead—’way short of the reliability limit—and sometimes
a lot less than that. She isn’t _accepting_ data far enough ahead. She
acts as though she can gulp down just so much information without
choking on it—so much and no more.”
“Exactly. An over-simplification, of course, since it isn’t the kind of
choking that giving her a bigger throat would cure, but very well put.”
Joan’s right hand crept across her body, rested on Cloud’s wrist, and
helped his squeeze, while her face turned more directly toward the face
so close to hers. “That’s inherent in the design of all really fast
machines . . . and we simply don’t know any way of getting away from
it. . . . Why? What has that to do with the case?”
“A lot—I hope. When I was working in a flitter I had to wait up to half
an hour sometimes, for the sigma curve to stabilize enough so that the
equations would hold valid will give a longer valid prediction.”
“Stabilize? How? I’ve never seen a sigma curve flatten out. Or does
‘stabilize’ have a special meaning for you vortex experts?”
“Could be. It’s what happens when a sigma becomes a little more regular
than usual, so that a simpler equation will give a longer valid
prediction.”
“I see; and a difference in wave-form that would be imperceptible to me
might mean a lot to you.”
“Right. It just occurred to me that a similar line of reasoning may hold
for this seemingly entirely different set of conditions. The less
unstable the curve, the less complicated the equations and the smaller
the volume of actual data. . . .”
“Oh!” Joan’s thought soared high. “So Margie may work _yet_, if we wait
a while?”
“Check. Browning can’t take the ship away from you, can he?”
“No. Nobody can do anything until the job is done or I punch that red
‘stop’ button there. D’you suppose she _can_ do it? Storm? How long can
we wait?”
“Half an hour, I’d say. No, to settle the point definitely, let’s wait
until I can get a full ten-second prediction and see what Margie’s doing
about the situation then.”
“Wonderful! But in that case, it might be a good idea for you to be
looking at the chart, don’t you think?” she asked, pointedly. His eyes,
at the moment, were looking directly into hers, from a distance of
approximately twelve inches.
“I’ll look at it later, but right now I’m. . . .”
The ship quivered under the terrific, the unmistakable trip-hammer blow
of propellant heptadetonite. Unobserved by either of the two scientists
most concerned, the sigma curve had, momentarily, become a trifle less
irregular. The point of the saw-tooth wave had touched the zero line.
Margie had acted. The visiplate, from which the heavily-filtered glare
of the vortex had blazed so long, went suddenly black.
“_She did it_, Storm!” Joan’s thought was a mental shriek of pure joy.
“_She really worked!_”
Whether, when the ship went free, Joan pulled Storm down to her merely
to anchor him, or for some other reason; whether Cloud grabbed her
merely in lieu of a safety-line or not; which of the two was first to
put arms around the other; these are moot points impossible of decision
at this date. The fact is, however, that the two scientists held a
remarkably unscientific pose for a good two minutes before Joan thought
that she ought to object a little, just on general principles. Even
then, she did not object with her mind; instead she put up her block and
used her voice.
“But, after all, Storm,” she began, only to be silenced as beloved women
have been silenced throughout the ages. She cut her screen then, and her
mind, tender and unafraid, reached out to his.
“This might be the perfect time, dear, to merge our minds? I’ve been
scared to death of it all along, but no more . . . let’s?”
“Uh-huh,” he demurred. “I’m _still_ afraid of it. I’ve been thinking
about it a lot, and doing some drilling, and the more I play with it the
more scared I get. It’s dangerous. It’s like playing with duodec. I’ve
just about decided that we’d better let it drop.”
“Afraid? For yourself, or for me? Don’t try to lie with your mind,
Storm; you can’t do it. You’re afraid only for me, and you needn’t be.
I’ve been thinking, too, and digging deep, and I know I’m ready.” She
looked up at him then, her quick, bright, impish grin very much in
evidence. “Let’s go.”
“QX, Joanie, and thanks. I’ve been wanting this more than I ever wanted
anything before in my life. But not holding hands, this time. Heart to
heart and cheek to cheek.”
“Check—the closer the better.”
They embraced, and again mind flowed into mind; this time with no
thought of withholding or reserve on either side. Smoothly,
effortlessly, the two essential beings merged, each fitting its tiniest,
remotest members into the deepest, ordinarily most inaccessible recesses
of the other; fusing as quickly and as delicately and as thoroughly as
two drops of water coalescing into one.
In that supremely intimate fusion, that ultimate union of line and plane
and cellule, each mind was revealed completely to the other; a
revealment which no outsider should expect to share.
Finally, after neither ever knew how long, they released each other and
each put up, automatically, a solid block.
“I don’t know about you, Storm,” Joan said then, “but I’ve had just
about all I can take. I’m going to bed and sleep for one solid week.”
“You and me both,” Storm agreed, ungrammatically, but feelingly. “Good
night, sweetheart . . . and this had all better be strictly hush-hush,
don’t you think?”
“I _do_ think,” she assured him. “Can’t you just imagine the field-day
the psychs would have, taking us apart?”
In view of the above, it might be assumed that the parting was
immediate, positive, and undemonstrative; but such was not exactly the
case. But they did finally separate, and each slept soundly and long.
And fairly early the next morning—before either of them got up, at
least—Cloud sent Joan a thought.
“Awake, dear?”
“Uh-huh. Just. ’Morning, Storm.”
“I’ve got some news for you, Joanie. My brain is firing on ten times as
many barrels as I ever thought it had, and I don’t know what half of ’em
are doing. Among other things, you made what I think is probably a
top-bracket perceiver out of me.”
“So? Well, don’t peek at me, please . . . but why should I say that,
after having studied in Rigel Four for two years? Women are funny, I
guess. But, for your information, I have just extracted the ninth root
of an eighteen-digit number, in no time at all and to the last
significant decimal place, and I _know_ the answer is right. How do you
like _them_ potatoes, Buster?”
“Nice. We really absorbed each other’s stuff, didn’t we? But how about
joining me in person for a soupcon of ham and eggs?”
“That’s a thought, my thoughtful friend; a cogent and right knightly
thought. I’ll be with you in three jerks and a wiggle.” And she was.
Just as they finished eating, Vesta breezed in. “Well, you two
deep-sleepers finally crawled out of your sacks, did you? It is
confusing, though, that ship’s time never agrees with planetary time.
But I live here, you know, in this city you call ‘Vegiaton,’ so I went
to bed at noon yesterday and I’ve got over half a day’s work done
already. I saw my folks and bought half of my uncle’s bank and made the
no-gambling declaration and I want to ask you both something. After the
Grand Uproar here at the ’port in your honor, will you two and Helen and
Joe and Bob and Barbara come with me to a little dance some of my
friends are having? You’ve been _zo_ good to me, and I want to show you
off a little.”
“We’ll be _glad_ to, Vesta, and thanks a lot,” Joan said, flashing a
thought at Cloud to let her handle this thing her own way, “and I
imagine the others would be, too, but . . . well, it’s for _you_, you
know, and we might be intruding. . . .”
“Why, not at all!” Vesta waved the objection away with an airy flirt of
her tail. “You’re friends of mine! And everybody’s real friends are
always welcome, you know, everywhere. And it’ll be small and quiet; only
six or eight hundred are being asked, they say. . . .” she paused for a
moment: “. . . of course, after it gets around that we have _you_ there,
a couple of thousand or so strangers will come in too; but they’ll all
smell nice, so it’ll be QX.”
“How do you know what they’ll smell like?” Cloud asked.
“Why, they’ll smell like our crowd, of course. If they didn’t they
wouldn’t _want_ to come in. It’s QX, then?”
“For us two, yes; but of course we can’t speak for the others.”
“Thanks, you wonderful people; I’ll go ask them right now.”
“Joan, have you blown your stack completely?” Cloud demanded.
“Small—quiet—six or eight _hundred_ invited—a couple of thousand or
_so_ gate-crashers—what do you want to go to a brawl like _that_ for?”
“The chance is too good to miss—it’s priceless. . . .” She paused, then
added, obliquely: “Storm, have you any idea at all of what Vesta thinks
of you? You haven’t snooped, I’m sure.”
“No, and I don’t intend to.”
“Maybe you ought to,” Joan snickered a little, “except that it would
inflate your ego too much. It’s hard to describe. It’s not exactly
love—and not exactly worship, either god-worship or hero-worship. It
isn’t exactly adoration, but it’s very much stronger than mere
admiration. A mixture of all these, perhaps, and half a dozen others,
coupled with a simply unbelievable amount of _pride_ that you are her
friend. It’s a peculiarly Vegian thing, that Tellurians simply do not
feel. But here’s why I’m so enthused. It has been over twenty years
since any non-Vegian has attended one of these uniquely Vegian parties
except as an outsider, and a Vegian party with outsiders looking on
isn’t a Vegian party at all. But we Storm, will be going as insiders!”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Positive. Oh, I know it isn’t _us_ she wants, but _you_; but that won’t
make any difference. As Vesta’s friend—‘friend’ in this case having a
very special meaning—you’re in the center of the inner circle. As
friends of yours, the rest of us are in, too. Not in the inner circle,
perhaps, but well inside the outside circle, at least. See?”
“Dimly. ‘A friend of a friend of a friend of a very good friend of
mine,’ eh? I’ve heard that ditty, but I never thought it meant
anything.”
“It does here. We’re going to have a time. See you in about an hour?”
“Just about. I’ve got to check with Nordquist.”
“Here I am, Storm,” the Lensman’s thought came in. Then, as Cloud went
toward his quarters, it went on: “Just want to tell you we won’t have
anything for you to do here. This is going to be a straight combing
job.”
“That won’t be too tough, will it? A Tellurian, sixty, tall, thin,
grave, distinguished-looking . . . or maybe. . . .”
“Exactly. You’re getting the idea. Cosmeticians and plastic surgery. He
could look like a Crevenian, or thirty years old and two hundred pounds
and slouchy. He could look like anything. He undoubtedly has a
background so perfectly established that fifteen thoroughly honest
Vegians would swear by eleven of their gods that he hasn’t left his home
town for ten years. So every intelligent being on Vegia who hasn’t got a
live tail, with live blood circulating in it, is going under the Lens
and through the wringer if we have to keep Vegia in quarantine for a
solid year. He is _not_ going to get away from us this time.”
“I’m betting on you, Nordquist. Clear ether!”
The Lensman signed off and Cloud, at the end of the specified hour,
undressed and redressed and went to the computer room. All the others
except Joe were already there.
“Hi, peoples!” Cloud called; then did a double-take. “Wow! And likewise,
Yipes! How come the tri-di outfits didn’t all collapse, Joan, when those
two spectaculars took up cybernetics?”
“I’ll never know, Storm.” Joan shook her head wonderingly, then went on
via thought; and Cloud felt her pang of sheer jealousy. “Why is it that
big girls are always so much more beautiful than little ones? And the
more clothes they take off the better they look? It simply isn’t
_fair_!”
Cloud’s mind reached out and meshed with hers. “Sure it is, sweetheart.
They’re beauties; you can’t take that away from them. . . .”
And beauties they certainly were. Helen, as has been said, was lissom
and dark. Her hair was black, her eyes a midnight blue, her skin a deep,
golden brown. Barbara, not quite as tall—five feet seven, perhaps—was
equally beautifully proportioned, and even more striking-looking. Her
skin was tanned ivory, her eyes were gray, her hair was a
shoulder-length, carefully-careless mass of gleaming, flowing, wavy
silver.