or he would have believed possible a few minutes before. And at its end
she laughed, shakily, and blushed again as she said, “I’ve got sort of
used to having you around, so be _sure_ and come back.”
They left the building and walked rapidly along a strangely quiet street
to the theater. Without a word they were ushered up a short flight of
stairs.
“Hold up, Vesta!” Cloud thought sharply. “We can’t see a thing—wait a
couple of minutes.”
They waited five minutes, during which time they learned exactly where
the enemy were and discussed every detail of the proposed attack.
“I _still_ can’t see well enough to shoot,” Cloud said then. “Can they
give us a little glow of light?”
They could. By almost imperceptible increments the thick, soft blackness
was relieved.
“That’s enough.” The light, such as it was, steadied.
“Ready?” Vesta’s voice was a savage growl, low, deep in her throat.
“Ready.”
“No more noise, then.”
They walked forward to the balcony’s edge, leaned over it, looked down.
Directly beneath Vesta’s head was seated a man in Centralian garb; four
others were behind, in front of, and at each side of, their chief.
“Now!” Vesta yelled, and flung herself over the low railing.
At her shout four Vegians ripped four Centralian shirts apart, seized
four hip-holstered blasters, and shouted with glee—but they shouted too
soon. For the real gun-slick, then as now, did not work from the hip,
but out of his sleeve; and these were four of the coldest, fastest
killers to be found throughout the far flung empire of Boskone. Thus,
all four flashed into action even before they began rising to their
feet.
But so did Storm Cloud; and his heavy weapon was already out and ready.
He knew what those hands were doing, in the instant of their starting to
do it, and his DeLameter flamed three times in what was practically one
very short blast. He had to move a little before he could sight on the
fourth guard—Vesta’s furiously active body was in the way—so Joe and
Bob each got a shot, too. Three bolts of lightning hit that luckless
wight at once, literally cremating him in air as he half-crouched,
bringing his blaster to bear on the catapulting thing attacking his
boss.
When Vesta went over the rail she did not jump to the floor below.
Instead, her hands locked on the edge; her feet dug into the latticework
of the apron. She squatted. Her tail flashed down, wrapping itself twice
around the zwilnik’s neck. She heaved, then, and climbed with everything
she had; and as she stood upright on the railing, eager hands reached
down to help her tail lift its burden up into the balcony. The man
struck the floor with a thud and Vesta jumped at him.
“Your fingers first—one at a time,” she snarled; and, seizing a hand,
she brought it toward her mouth.
She paused then as if thunderstruck; a dazed, incredulous expression
spreading over her face. Bending over, she felt, curiously, tenderly, of
his neck.
“Why, he . . . he’s _dead_!” she gasped. “His neck . . . it’s . . . it’s
_broken_! From such a little, tiny pull as _that_? Why, _anybody_ ought
to have a stronger neck than _that_!”
She straightened up; then, as a crowd of Vegians and the Tellurian women
came up, she became instantly her old, gay self. “Well, shall we all go
back and finish our dance?”
“What?” Cloud demanded. “After _this_?”
“Why certainly,” Vesta said, brightly. “I’m sorry, of course, that I
killed him so quickly, but it doesn’t make any real difference. Zamke is
avenged; he can now enjoy himself. We’ll join him in a few years, more
or less. Until then, what would you do? What you call ‘mourn’?”
“I don’t know . . . I simply don’t know,” Cloud said, slowly, his arm
tightening around Joan’s supple waist. “I thought I’d seen everything,
but . . . I suppose you can have somebody take that body out to the
ship, so they can check it for identity?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll do that. Right away. You’re sure you don’t want to dance
any more?”
“Very sure, my dear. _Very_ sure. All _I_ want to do is take Joan back
to the ship.”
“QX. I won’t see you again this trip, then; your hours are so funny.
I’ll send for my things. And I won’t say good-bye, Captain Nealcloud and
you other wonderful people, because we’ll see each other again, soon and
often. Just so-long, and thanks tremendously for all you have done for
me.”
And Vesta the Vegian strode away, purring contentedly to herself—tail
high.
_Chapter 17_
▂▂▂▂▂▂THE CALL
THE LENSMEN and their Patrolmen, having made sure that the body of
Zamke’s murderer was in fact that of the long-sought Fairchild, went
unostentatiously about their various businesses.
The six Tellurians, although shaken no little by their climactic
experience on Vegia, returned soon to normal and resumed their
accustomed routines of life—with certain outstanding variations. Thus,
Helen and Joe flirted joyously and sparred dextrously, but neither was
ever to be found tête-à-tête with anyone else. And thus, Bob and
Barbara, neither flirting nor sparring, became quietly but
enthusiastically inseparable. And thus, between Joan and Cloud, so close
even before Vegia, the bonding became so tight that their two minds
were, to all intents and purposes, one mind.
The week on Vegia was over. The _Vortex Blaster II_ was loafing through
the void at idling speed. Cloud was pacing the floor in his office.
Joan, lounging in a deeply-cushioned chair with legs stuck out at an
angle of forty-five degrees to each other, was smoking a cigarette and
watching him, with her eyes agleam.
“Confound it, I wish they’d hurry up with that fine-tooth,” he said,
flipping his half-smoked cigarette at a receptacle and paying no
attention to the fact that he missed it by over a foot. “How can I tell
Captain Ross where to go when I don’t know myself?”
“That’s one thing I just _love_ about you, my pet,” Joan drawled.
“You’re so wonderfully, so superhumanly _patient_. You know as well as I
do that the absolutely irreducible minimum of time is twenty-six minutes
from now, and that they’ll probably find something they’ll want to study
for a minute or so after they get there. So light somewhere, why don’t
you, and unseethe yourself?”
“Touché, Joan.” He sat down with a thump. “Has Doctor Janowick a
prescription specific for the ailment?”
“Nothing else but, chum. That tight-linkage snooping that we’ve been
going to try, but never had time for. Let’s start on Helen and Barbara.
I’ve snooped them repeatedly, of course, but our fusion of minds,
theoretically, should be able to pick their minds apart cell by cell; to
tap their subconscious ancestral memories, even—if there are such
things—for a thousand generations back.”
He looked at her curiously. “You know, I think you must have some ghoul
blood in you somewhere? I tell you again, those girls are _friends_ of
ours!”
“So what?” she grinned at him, entirely unabashed. “You’ll have to get
rid of that squeamishness some day; it’s the biggest roadblock there is
on the Way of Knowledge. If not them, how would Nadine suit you?”
“Worse yet. She’s just as good at this business as we are, maybe better,
and she probably wouldn’t like it.”
“You may have something there. We’ll save her for last, and call on her
formally, with announcements and everything. Vesta, then?”
“_Now_ you’re squeaking, little mouse. But no deep digging for a while.
We’ll take it easy and light—we don’t want to do any damage we may not
be able to undo. As I told you before, my brain is firing on altogether
too damn many barrels that I simply don’t know what are doing. Let’s
go.”
They fused their minds—an effortless process now—and were at their
objective instantaneously.
Vesta was primping; enjoying sensuously the physical feel of her
physical body even as dozens of parts of speech of dozens of different
languages went through her racing mind. And, one layer down, she was
wishing she were old enough to be a newlywed; wishing she had a baby of
her own . . . babies were so cute and soft and cuddlesome. . . .
Then Tommie. Cloud and Joan enjoyed with her the strong, rank,
sense-satisfying flavor of a Venerian cigar and studied with her the
intricate electronic equations of a proposed modification of the
standard deep space drive. And, one layer down, the Tomingan engineer,
too, was thinking of love and of babies. What was all this space hopping
getting her, anyway? It didn’t stop the ache, fill the void, satisfy the
longing. As soon as this cruise was over, she was going back to Tominga,
tell Hanko she was ready, and settle down. A husband and a family did
tie a woman down something fierce—but what price freedom to wander when
you wake up in the middle of the night from dreaming of a baby in your
arms, only to find the baby isn’t there?
Then Thlaskan and Maluleme. They were seated, arms around each other, on
a davenport in their own home on Chickladoria. They were not talking,
merely feeling. They were deeply, truly, tremendously in love. In the
man’s mind there was a background of his work, of pilotry, of orbits and
charts and computations. There was a flash of sincere liking for Cloud,
the best boss and the finest figure-man he had ever known; but
practically all of his mind was full of love for the wonderful woman at
his side. In hers, at the moment, there were only two things; love of
her husband and longing for the child which she might already have
succeeded in conceiving. . . .
Cloud wrenched their linked minds away.
“This is monstrous, Joan!”
“What’s monstrous about it?” she asked, quietly. “Nothing. It isn’t.
Women _need_ children, Storm. All women, everywhere. Now that I’ve found
_you_, I can scarcely wait to have some myself. And listen, Storm,
please. Before we visit Nadine, you _must_ make up your mind to face
facts—_any_ kind of facts—without flinching and shying away and
getting mental goose-bumps all over your psyche.”
“I see what you mean. In a fully telepathic race there couldn’t be any
real privacy without a continuous block, and that probably wouldn’t be
very feasible.”
“No, you _don’t_ see what I mean. You aren’t even on the right
road—your whole _concept_ is wrong. There couldn’t be any _thought_,
even of privacy, no _conception_ of such a thing. _Think_ a minute! From
birth—from the very birth of the whole race—full and open meetings of
minds must have been the norm of thought. That kind of thing is—must
be—what Nadine is accustomed to at home.”
“Hm . . . I never thought . . . you go see her, Joan, and I’ll stay
home.”
“What good would _that_ do? Whatever you may be, my dear, I know darn
well you’re _not_ stupid.”
“Not exactly stupid, maybe, but I haven’t thought this thing through the
way you have . . . of course, if she’s half as good as we know she is,
she’s read us both already, clear down to the footings of our
foundations . . . but this thing of a _full_ meeting of minds with
anybody but you. . . .”
“You haven’t a thing to hide, you know. At least, _I_ know, whether you
do or not.”
“No? How do you figure that? Maybe _you_ think so, but . . . I’ve tried,
of course, but I’ve failed a lot oftener than I succeeded.”
“Who hasn’t? You’re not unique, my dear. Shall we go?”
“We might as well, I guess . . . I’m as ready as I ever will be. . . .
I’ll try, but. . . .”
“Please do, Master,” came Nadine’s quiet, composed thought, in a vein
completely foreign to her usual attitude of self-sufficient aloofness.
“I have been observing; studying with awe and with wonder. If you will
so deign, revered Master, come fully into my mind.”
“Deign?” Cloud demanded. “What kind of a thought is that, Nadine, from
you to me?”
“Deign.” Nadine repeated, firmly. Deeply moved, she was feeling and
sending a solemnity of respect Cloud had never before experienced. “My
powers are ordinary, since I am of Type One. The two greatest Masters of
Manarka are Fives, and have been the greatest Masters of the past. This
is the first time I have ever encountered a mind of a type higher than
Five. Come in, sir, I plead.”
Cloud went in, and his first flash of comparison was that it was like
diving into the pellucid depths of a clean, cool, utterly transparent
mountain lake. This mind was _so_ different from Joan’s! Joan’s was
rich, warmly sympathetic, tender and emphatic, yet it was full of dark
corners, secret nooks, recesses, and automatic blocks. . . . Huh? He had
thought her mind as open as a book, but it wasn’t. . . . On the other
hand, Nadine’s was wide open by nature. It was cool, poised—although at
the moment uncomfortably worshipful—and utterly, _shockingly_ open!
His second thought was that Joan was no longer with him. She was there,
in a sense, but _outside_, some way; she wasn’t in Nadine’s mind the way
he was.
“I’ll say I’m not!” Joan agreed, fervently. “Thank God! I don’t know
what you did or how you did it, but when you went in you peeled me off
like the skin of a banana, and I was clinging like a leech, too. I’m on
the outside, looking in. Did you see how he did it, Nadine?”
“No, but since I am only a One, such insight would not be expected. I
have called the Fives, and they come.”
“We are here.” Two close-linked minds linked themselves with the two
already so closely linked. Each of the two visitors was grave, kindly,
and old with an appalling weight of years; each mind bore an appalling
freight of knowledge both mundane and esoteric. “We are here, fellow
Master of Thought, to be of aid to you in the clarification of your
newly-awakened mind, to the end that, in a future time, your superior
powers will assist us along Paths of Truth which we could not otherwise
traverse.”
“Will you please tell me what this is all about?” Cloud asked. “Starting
at the beginning and using words of as few syllables as possible?”
“Gladly. It has been known for some time that Janowick is Type Three.
Self-developed, partially-developed, under-developed, struggling against
she knew not what, but still a Three. Now Threes as such, while
eminently noteworthy, are by no means phenomenal. There are some
hundreds of Threes now alive. Being noteworthy, she has been watched. In
time she would have completed her development and would have taken her
rightful place in the School of Thought.
“You, however, have been a complete enigma to our most penetrant minds.
Since no mind of lower type than Three can be an instantaneous
calculator, it was clear that you were, basically, at least a Three.
However, unlike other Threes, you did nothing whatever to develop the
latent, potential abilities of whatever type you might be. Instead and
excepting only the small and unimportant item of computation, you used
the tremendous powers of your mind, not for any constructive purpose
whatever, but only for the application of such rigid controls and
suppressions that all the tremendous abilities you should have shown
remained completely dormant and inert.
“Nor could we do anything about it. We tried, but you have blocks that
not even the full power of two linked Fives can crack; which fact showed
that you are of a type higher than Five. We were about to come to you in
person, to plead with you, when you met Three Janowick and opened to her
your hitherto impregnably-sealed inner mind. She does not know, and you
do not know, what you jointly did; which was, in effect, to break and to
dissolve the bindings which had been shackling both your minds. That
brings us to the present. It has now become clear that you have been
Called.”
“Called?” Cloud winced, physically and mentally. No man likes to be
reminded that he failed Lensman’s Exam. “You’re wrong. I didn’t make
even the first round.”
“We did not mean the Call of the Lens. There are many Calls, of which
that is only one. Nor is it the highest, as we have just discovered, in
certain little-known aspects of that vast thing we call the mind. For,
to the best of our knowledge, no Lensman of the present or of the past
is or was of a type higher than Five. The exact nature of your Call is
as yet obscure.”
“I’d like to buy that, but I’m afraid it’s. . . .” Cloud paused. Until
he’d met Joan, he’d supposed his mind ordinary enough. Since then,
however . . . all those extra barrels. . . .
“Exactly. We are specialists of the mind, young man. We perceive your
mind, not as it is, but as it should be and will be. It should have and
will have a penetrance, a range, a flexibility of directive force, and,
above all, a scope of heights and depths we have never encountered
before. It is eminently clear that you, and, very probably, Three
Janowick as well, have been developed each for some specific Purpose in
the Great Scheme of Things.”
“A _Purpose_?” Cloud demanded. “_What_ purpose? What could _I_ do? What
could both of us together do?”
“We can not surely know.”
“Does that mean that you can make a well-informed guess? If so, let’s
have it.”
“There is a very high probability that Three Janowick was developed
specifically to develop you; to pierce and to dissolve those hampering
barriers which were amenable to no other force. Concerning you, there
are several possibilities, none of which have any very high degree of
probability, since you are unique. The one we prefer at the moment is
that you are to become the greatest living Master of Thought; the Prime
Expounder of the Truth. But that is of no importance now, since in due
time it will be revealed. Of present import is the fact that both your
minds are confused, cloudy, and disorderly. We offer our services in
reorienting and ordering them.”
“We’d like that very much; but first, if I am going to develop into a
mental giant of some kind—frankly, I have my doubts—why did it wait
this long to show up?”
“The answer to that question is plain and simple. There is a time for
everything, and everything that happens does so in its exact time. Let
us to work.”
They worked, and when it was done:
“We would like to dwell with you for long,” the ancient Fives said, “but
the time for such a boon will not come until you are much emptier of
cares and much fuller of years.”
The Fives split apart. “How do you type this new Master, brother? A full
Six, I say.”
“A full Six he is, brother, beyond doubt.”
They fused. “In a time to come, Six Cloud, we will, with your help and
under your guidance, explore many and many a Path of Truth which without
you would remain closed. But we observe that there is about to arrive a
message which is to you of some present concern. Until a day, then.”
The Fives disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and Cloud began to
test and to exercise the new capabilities of his mind; in much the same
fashion as that in which a good belly-dancer exercises and trains each
individual muscle of her torso.
“But what. . . . I didn’t. . . . How did they. . . ?” Joan shook her
head violently and started all over again. “What did they _do_ to us,
Storm?”
“I don’t know. It was over my head like a lunar dome. But it—whatever
it was—was exactly what the doctor ordered. I can handle all those
extra barrels now like van Buskirk handles a space-axe. How about you?”
“Me, too—I think.” She hugged his arm. “It shocked me speechless for a
minute, but it’s all settling into place fast. . . . But that message?
They could get it from your mind that you expected that fine-tooth
pretty soon, but how could they know it’s coming in right now? We
don’t—in fact, we know it _can’t_ get here for a good ten minutes yet.”
“I wish I knew. I’d like to think they were bluffing, but I know they
weren’t.”
“Hi Storm and Joan!” Philip Strong’s face appeared upon a screen, his
voice came from a speaker. “The Survey ship has just reported. Technical
dope is still coming in. Communications is buzzing you a tape of the
whole thing, but to save time I thought I’d call you and give you the
gist. To make it short and unsweet, there’s nothing there.”
“_Nothing there!_”
“Nothing for you. They gave it the works, and all there is to that
system, Cahuita, they call it, is one red dwarf with one red microdwarf
circling it planetwise.”
“Huh?” Cloud demanded. “Come again, chief.”
“How could a micro-sun like that exist?” Strong laughed. “That had me
bothered, too, but they’ve got a lot of cosmological double-talk to
cover it. It’s terrifically radioactive, they say. And even so, it’s
temporary. In the cosmological sense, that is; a hundred million years
or so either way don’t matter.”
“No solid planets at all? Not even one?”
“Not one. Nothing really liquid, even. Incandescent, very highly
radioactive gas. Nothing solid bigger than your thumb within twelve
parsecs.”
“And so it never has been solid, and won’t be for millions of
years. . . . Oh, _Damn_! Well, thanks, chief, a lot.”
Then, as the Lensman signed off: “Joan, that puts us deeper in the dark
than ever. We had twice too many unknowns and only half enough knowns
before, and this really tears it. Well, it was a very nice theory while
it lasted.”
“It’s _still_ a very nice theory, Storm.”
“Huh? How do you figure that?”
“I don’t have to figure it. Listen! First, that point is significant,
with a probability greater than point nine nine nine. Second, no other
point in space has a probability as great as point zero zero one.
Whoever or whatever was—is—there, the Survey ship missed. We’ve got to
go there ourselves, Storm. We simply _must_.”
“‘Was’ is probably right. Whatever used to be there is gone . . . but
that doesn’t make sense, either . . . that planet has _never_ been
solid, Joan. . . .” Cloud got up and began to pace the floor. “Dammit,
Joan, _nothing_ can live on a planet like that.”
“Life as we know it, no.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Only that I am trying to keep an open mind. We simply haven’t enough
data.”
“Do you think you and I have got jets enough to find data that the
Patrol’s best experts missed?”
“I don’t know. All I am sure of, Doctor Neal Cloud, is this: If we
_don’t_ go, we’ll both wish we had, to the day we die.”
“You’re probably right . . . but I haven’t got a glimmering of an idea
as to what we’re going to look for.”
“I don’t know whether I have or not, but we’ve simply _got_ to go. Even
if we don’t find anything, we will at least have tried. Besides, your
most pressing work is done, so you can take the time . . . and besides
that . . . well, something those Fives said is bothering me terribly
. . . the Purpose, you know . . . do you think. . . ?”
“That my Purpose in Life is to go solve the mystery of the Red Dwarf and
its Enigmatic Microcompanion?” he gibed. “Hardly. Furthermore, the
coincidence of the Fives getting here just one jump ahead of the
fine-tooth is much—_very_ much—too coincidental.”
Joan caught her breath and, if possible, paled whiter than before. “You
may _think_ you’re joking, Storm, but you aren’t. Believe me, you
aren’t. That’s one of the things that are scaring me witless. You see,
if I learned anything at all in my quite-a-few years of semantics,
philosophy, and logic, it was that coincidence has no more reality than
paradox has. Both are completely meaningless terms. Neither does or can
exist.”
Cloud paled, then. “You believe that _is_ my purpose in life?” he
demanded.
“Now it’s you who are extrapolating.” Joan laughed, albeit shakily. “To
quote you, ‘I merely stated a fact,’ et cetera.”
“Facts hurt, when they hit as hard as that one did.” Cloud paced about,
immersed in thought, for minutes.
“I can’t find any point of attack,” he said, finally. “No foothold. No
finger-hold, even. But what you just said rocked me to the foundations
. . . you said, a while back, that you believe in God.”
“I do. So do you, Storm.”
“Yes . . . after a fashion . . . yes, I do. . . . Well, anyway, now I
know what to tell Ross.”
He called the captain and issued instructions. The _Vortex Blaster II_
darted away at full touring blast.
“Now what?” Cloud asked.
“We practise.”
“Practise what?”
“How should I know? Everything, I guess. Oh, no, the Fives emphasized
‘scope,’ whatever that means. ‘Scope in heights and depths.’ Does that
ring any bells?”
“Not loud ones, if any. All it suggests to me is spectra of some kind or
other.”
“It could, at that.” Joan caught her lower lip between her teeth. “But
before we start playing scales, let’s see if we can deduce anything
helpful—examine our points of contact and so on. What have we got to go
on?”
“We have one significant point in space. That’s all.”
“Oh no, it isn’t. You’re forgetting one other highly significant fact.
The data fitted the growth-of-population curve _exactly_, remember.”
“You mean to say you _still_ think the things _breed_?”