with offspring, either. How else _could_ your data fit that curve, and
what else fits it so exactly?”
Cloud frowned in concentration, but made no reply. Joan went on:
“Assume, as a working hypothesis, that the vortices are concerned, in
that exact relationship, with the increase in some kind of life. Since
the fewer assumptions we make, the better, we don’t care at the moment
what kind of life it is or whether it’s intelligent or not. To fit the
curve, just what would the vortices have to be? Not houses, certainly
. . . nor bedrooms . . . nor eggs, since they don’t hatch and the very
oldest ones are still there, or would have been, except for you. . . .
I’m about out of ideas. How about you?”
“Maybe. My best guess would be incubators . . . and one-shot incubators
at that. But with this new angle of approach I’ve got to re-evaluate the
data and see what it means now.”
He went over to the work-table, studied charts and diagrams briefly,
then thumbed rapidly through a book of tables. He whistled raucously
through his teeth. “This gets screwier by the minute, but it still
checks. Every vortex represents _twins_. Never singles or triplets,
_always_ twins. And the cycle is so long that the full span of our data
isn’t enough to even validate a wild guess at it. Now, Joan, you baby
expert, just what kind of an infant would be just comfortably warm and
cosy in the middle of a loose atomic vortex? Feed _that_ one to Margie,
chum, and let’s see what she does with it.”
“I don’t have to; I can work it in my own little head. An exceedingly
complex, exceedingly long-lived, exceedingly slow-growing baby of pure
force. What else?”
“Ugh! And Ugh! again. That’s twice you’ve slugged me right in the solar
plexus.” Cloud began again to pace the floor. “Up to now, I was just
having fun. . . . I’m mighty glad we don’t have to let anybody else in
on this, the psychs would be on our tails in nothing flat . . . and the
conclusion would be completely justifiable and we’ve both blown our
stacks. . . . I’ve been trying to find holes in your theory . . . still
am . . . but I can’t even _kick_ a hole in it. . . .
“When one theory, and only one, fits much observational data and does
not conflict with any, nor with any known or proven law or fact,” he
said finally, aloud, “that theory, however bizarre, _must_ be explored.
The only thing is, just how are we going to explore it?”
“That’s what we have to work out.”
“Just like that, eh? But before we start, tell me the rest of it—that
stuff you’ve been keeping behind a solid block down there in the
south-east corner of your mind.”
“QX. I was afraid to, before, but now that you’re getting sold on the
basic idea, I’ll tell all. First, the planet. There are two
possibilities about that. It could have been cold a long time ago and
this race of—of beings, entities, call them whatever you please—with
their peculiar processes of metabolism, or habits of life, or something,
could have liquefied it and then volatilized it. Or perhaps it started
out hot and the activities of this postulated race have kept it from
cooling; perhaps made it get hotter and hotter. Either hypothesis is
sufficient.
“Second, the Patrol couldn’t find anything because it wasn’t looking for
the right category of objects; and besides, it didn’t have the right
equipment to find these particular objects even if it had known what to
look for.
“Third, assuming that these beings once lived on that planet, or on or
in its sun, perhaps, they simply _must_ live there yet. Creatures of
that type, with such a tremendously long life-span as you have just
deduced and as methodical in thought as they must be, would not move
away except for some very solid reason, and nothing in our data
indicates any significant change in status. Tracking me so far?”
“On track to a micro, every millimeter.”
“And you don’t think I’ve got rooms for rent upstairs?”
“If you have, I have too. Now that I’m in, I’m going to follow this
thing to its logical conclusion, wherever that may be. You’ve buttoned
up the vortices themselves very nicely, but they were never the main
point at issue, Joan. That spherical surface was, and still is. _Why_ is
it? And why such a terrifically long radius? Those have always been the
stickers and they still are. If your theory can’t explain them, and it
hasn’t, so far, it fails.”
“I think you’re wrong, Storm. I don’t think they’ll turn out to be
important at all. They don’t _conflict_ with the theory in any way, you
know, and as we get more data I’m pretty sure everything will fit. It
fits too beautifully so far to fail the last test. Besides. . . .” her
thought died away.
“Besides what? Unblock, chum. Give.”
“I think those things fit in, already. You see, entities of pure energy
can’t be expected to think the way we do. When we meet them—if we can
understand them at all—that surface, radius and all, will undoubtedly
prove to be completely in accord with their mode of thought; system of
logic; their semantics; or whatever they have along those lines.”
“Could be.” Cloud’s attitude changed sharply. “You’ve settled one moot
point. They’re intelligent.”
“Why, yes . . . of course they are! It’s funny I didn’t think of that
myself. And you’re really sold, Storm.”
“I really am. Up to now I’ve just been receptive; but now I really
believe the whole cockeyed theory. I suppose you’ve figured out an angle
of approach?”
“You flatter me. I’m not that good. But perhaps . . . in a very broad
and general way. . . . Heights and depths, remember? And superhuman
scope therein or thereat? But _we_ don’t do it, Storm. _You_ do.”
“Uh-uh. Nix. You and I are one. Let’s go!”
“I’ll come along as far as I can, of course, but something tells me it
won’t be very far. Lead on, Six Cloud!”
“Where’ll we start?”
“Now we’re right back where we were before. Do you still favor spectra?
Of vibration, say, for a start?”
“Nothing else but. So let’s slide ourselves up and down the frequencies,
seeing what we can see, hear, feel, or sense, and what we can do about
’em.”
_Chapter 18_
▂▂▂▂▂▂CAHUITA
ON THE PLANET CAHUITA, unreckonable years before this story opens, an
entity brooded.
This entity, Medury by symbol, was not even vaguely man-like; in fact,
he—the third person singular pronoun, masculine, is used very loosely
indeed; but since it is somewhat better than either “it” or “she” it
will have to do—was not even vaguely corporeal or substantial.
Man’s earliest ancestor, it is believed, came into being through the
interaction of energy and matter in the waters of the infant seas of
Earth. The first Cahuitans, however, originated in the unimaginably
violent, raw, crude energy-flare of an atomic explosion.
This explosion did not take place on Tellus, nor in any time known to
Tellurian history. The place of occurrence was a planet in the spiral
arm of the galaxy across the tremendous gulf of empty space which we now
call Rift Two Hundred Forty; the time, as has been said, was in the
unthinkably remote past.
Cahuitans are not, strictly speaking, immortal; but as far as mankind is
concerned, and except for exceedingly peculiar violences, they might as
well be.
Medury brooded. His problem was old; it had probably been considered,
academically, by every Cahuitan then alive. But only academically, and
no Cahuitan had ever solved it, for the philosophy of the race had
always been (and still is) the simple one of least action—no Cahuitan
ever did any job until it became necessary; but, conversely, once any
job was done it was done as nearly as possible for all time to come.
Medury was the first Cahuitan to be compelled, by one of the basic urges
of life, to deal with the problem as a concrete, not an abstract, thing.
The problem was, therefore, his. His alone.
His world, the only planet of its sun, was old, old. The last atoms of
its fissionables had been fissioned; the last atoms of its fusibles had
been fused; no more fires could be kindled.
The Cahuitans in general did not care. For the adolescents, the time of
need for a source of high-level quanta had not yet come. For those
already fulfilled^{A} it had passed. While entirely gaseous, the planet
would stay comfortably warm for a long time. Its energies, with the
outpourings of its parent sun, would feed billions of people instead of
the mere hundreds of thousands comprising its present population.
Jobs^{A}, businesses^{A}, commerce^{A}, and industry^{A} went on as
usual, unaffected.
But Medury was affected: basically, fundamentally affected. The time had
come when he should progress into completion, and without a new fire the
Change was impossible.
For a time which to a human race would have been fantastically long
Medury brooded, considering every aspect of the problem; then stirred
himself to action. Converting a tiny portion of his non-material being
into three filaments of energy, he constructed a working platform by
attaching the ends of these three filaments to the cores of three
widely-separated suns. Thus assured of orientation, he launched into
space a probing needle of pure force; a needle which, propagated in and
through the sub-ether, covered parsecs of distances in microseconds of
time. And thus for days, years, what might have been centuries and
millennia as we of Tellus know time he searched; and finally, he found.
Pulling in all his extensions, he shot a tight beam to a fellow-being,
Litosa by symbol, and tuned his mind precisely to hers. (“Hers” being
perhaps a trifle better than either “his” or “its”.)
“For some little time you too have felt the need of fulfillment,” he
informed his proposed complement in level, passionless thought. “You and
I match well; there being no duplications, no incompatibles, no
antagonistics in our twelve basics. Our fulfillment, Medosalitury, and
our products, Midora and Letusy, would all three be super-primes.”
“Yes.” What a freight of rebellion against fate was carried by that
monosyllable! “But why discuss it? Why reach for the unattainable? From
now on we die—we _all_ die—unfulfilled and without product. All life
in this universe—in this galaxy, at least—ends with us now here.”
“I hope not. I think not. There are many solar systems. . . .”
“To what end?” Litosa broke in, her thought a sneer. “Can you kindle
utterly frigid fuel? Can you work in a sun’s core? Or can you, perhaps,
take a piece of star-core stuff through empty space to a cold planet
and. . . .” The thought changed in tone, became what would have been on
Earth a schoolgirl’s squeal of rapture:
“You CAN! Or you wouldn’t have brought up such a harrowing subject. You
REALLY CAN!”
“Not that, exactly, but something just as good. I found sparks and
kindling on a cold, solid planet.”
“NO!” The thought was ecstasy. “You DIDN’T!”
“I did. Whenever you’re ready, we’ll go.”
“I’ve been ready for CYCLES!”
The two beings linked themselves together in some fashion unknowable to
man and shot away through the airless, heatless void. Heatless, but by
no means devoid of energy; the travelers could draw sustenance enough
for their ordinary needs from the cosmic radiation pervading all space.
Across Rift Two Hundred Forty they flew and on through interstellar
space. They reached our solar system. On the third planet, our Earth,
they found several atomic power plants. There were no loose atomic
vortices—then.
“Hold on! Wait!” Litosa exclaimed, and the strangely-linked pair stopped
just short of the glowing bit of warmth—the ragingly incandescent,
furiously radiating reactor in the heart of one of Earth’s largest
generating stations—which was its goal. “There’s something funny about
this. How could there possibly be even one little spark like this, to
say nothing of so many, on such an utterly frigid planet, unless some
intelligent being started it and is maintaining it for some purpose?
There MUST be intelligence on this planet and we must be intruding
shamefully. Have you scanned? Scanned. CAREFULLY?”
“I have scanned. Carefully, completely. Not only on this planet’s
surface, but throughout its depths. I have scanned, area by area and
volume by volume, this sun and its every planet, satellite, and
asteroid. There is no intelligence here. More, there is no sign whatever
of any kind of life, however rudimentary, latent, or nascent. I have
been able to find nothing whatever to modify our conclusion of long and
long ago that we are the only life, intelligent or otherwise, in
existence. Scan for yourself.”
Litosa scanned. She scanned the sun, the planets, the moons and
moonlets, the asteroids down to grains of sand and particles of dust.
Still unsatisfied, she scanned all neighboring solar systems, from
Centralia to Salvador. Then, and only then, did she accept Medury’s
almost unacceptable conclusion that these providential sparks were in
fact accidental and were in fact, by some process as yet unknown to
Cahuitan science, self-balancing and self-sustaining.
Medury and Litosa, woven into a fantastically intricate and complex
sphere of ultra-microscopic filaments, flashed into the heart of the
reactor, which thereupon went instantaneously and enthusiastically out
of control.
And from the pleasant warmth of the incubator-womb—to us of Earth the
ravening fury of the first loose atomic vortex—there emerged the
fulfillment Medosalitury. This entity, grave and complete and serene as
an adult Cahuitan should be, wafted itself (there is no question as to
which pronoun is to be used here) sedately back to its home planet.
And in the pleasant warmth of that same incubator-womb the two products,
Midora and Letusy, began very slowly to gestate.
* * * * *
Joan and Storm, minds in fusion, set out to regions never before
explored by man. Downward first. One cycle per second. One per minute.
One per hour; per day; per year; per century. . . .
“Hold everything, Storm! You’re getting out beyond my depth. Anyway,
what _use_ are they in what we’re after?”
“None at all, that I can see; but it’s _new knowledge_. Nobody ever
dreamed—correction, please: nobody ever published—anything about it,
or I’d’ve heard of it. Maybe the Fives know all about it, though; I’ll
check with them, first chance I get. QX, we’ll jump up to the radio
band.”
“There wouldn’t be any radio waves out here, and you couldn’t understand
the language if there were.”
“How do you know? We’ll go where there are some and find out. Maybe we
can understand _any_ kind of language now—maybe that’s one of the
natural abilities of a Type Three-Six fusion. Who knows?”
In an instant they were receiving a short-wave broadcast at the
Heaviside Layer of a distant planet. They could receive it, could
de-louse it, could separate signal from carrier wave, could read the
information; but they could not understand it.
“Well, _that’s_ a relief,” Joan sighed. “I was getting more than half
afraid that a Type Six mind would be omniscient.”
“If I’m a Six you needn’t worry; there’s altogether too much to know.
Where do you want to go from here?”
“Let’s look at the infra-red and the ultra-violet. I’ve often wondered
what colors they would be.”
The fusion looked, and saw things that made both participants gasp. That
is, they did not really _see_, either. None of the six ordinary
senses—of perception, sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch—were
involved. Or rather, perhaps, all of them were involved, or merged with
or into some other, brand-new sense possessed only by high-type minds in
full action.
“As a semanticist, Joan, can you write a paper on that? That would make
any kind of sense, I mean?”
“I’ll say I can’t,” Joan breathed. “_Especially_ as a semanticist, I
can’t. No words, no symbology, in any language. But weren’t they
_beautiful_, Storm? And wonderful, and . . . and awful?”
“All of that. I’d like to write it up, or make a tri-di of it . . . or
something . . . but of course we can’t. What next? Shall we flirt a bit
with the cosmics and ultras, or had we better jump right into the
channels of thought?”
“Thought, by all means; the more practise we get, the better, and they’d
be on a terrifically high band, don’t you think?”
“Bound to be. The logical conclusion of this whole fantastically
cockeyed set-up is that they’ve simply never even suspected that we
exist; any more than we have that they do.”
“Would the . . . the bodies, if I can call them that, radiate of
themselves, or just thoughts?”
“Not of themselves, I don’t think . . . no. An entity of pure energy
would have to be held together by forces of magnitudes we can’t even
guess at; much too intense to permit bodily radiation. Something like
the binding energies of particles, I imagine; but different and very
probably even more so.”
The fusion leaped then to the bands of thought. It sought out and seized
the thoughts of various of the ship’s personnel; gripping, molding,
working, analyzing. Joan and Cloud were not reading minds now, at all;
they were studying the fundamental mechanisms of the thoughts
themselves. How they were generated; upon what, if anything, they were
heterodyned; how they were transmitted; and, above all, exactly how they
were received and exactly how they were converted from pure thought,
couched at least in part in the symbols of language, into usefully
assimilable information.
And, such was the power of that fusion, it succeeded.
Then up and up and up the scale of thought the fused minds went;
seeking, finding, mastering. And up and up and up, into regions where no
thoughts at all were to be found. And up and up, and up. . . .
“Stop it! Let me go! I’m burning out!” Joan shrieked aloud. “My God,
Storm, is there no limit at all to your ceiling?”
Cloud stopped; loosed her mind. “I’m sorry, chick, but I was just
getting nicely organized. We’ve got a long ways to go yet, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry, too, Storm, sorrier than you’ll ever know, but I simply
can’t take it. Three seconds more of that and I’d’ve gone stark, raving
mad. And when we get to Cahuita I don’t know what I’ll do. I may blow up
completely.”
“You may think so, but you won’t. You’re not the type. And we aren’t
going to Cahuita—at least, not in the flesh. When we hit that band
we’ll be there automatically.”
“Not quite automatically, of course, but we’ll be there, yes. I want to
stay with you, more than I ever wanted anything before in my whole life,
and I want to help you . . . couldn’t we loosen the fusion just a
little, so that I can pull away when the going gets too rough for me?
Just enough to keep away from a burnout, but close enough to see and
perhaps to help a little?”
“I don’t know why not . . . sure, like this.” He showed her.
Again the fusion went up and up and up, and this time it did not stop at
Joan’s ceiling. She pulled away a little, but not enough so that she
could not sense and understand, in a way, what was going on.
Cloud, every muscle set and eyes closed tight, sat in a chair, his hands
gripping fiercely its arms. Joan lay face down upon a davenport, her
face buried in a pillow, her fists tight-clenched.
And the linked minds—linked now, not fused—went up . . . and up . . .
and up. . . .
And, finally, they reached the band upon which a Cahuitan fulfillment
was thinking.
It would probably be too much to say that the fulfillment was surprised.
An adult, fulfilled Cahuitan is so serene, so sedate, so inherently
stable at any possible level of stress, that it is probably impossible
for it to feel any such sensation or emotion as surprise, even at the
instantaneous unveiling of a whole new universe of thought. It was,
however, in a calm, passionless, and scholarly way, interested. Not what
could be called intensely interested, perhaps, but really interested,
nevertheless.
As had been foreseen, the modes of thought of the Cahuitan and the
linked Tellurians were different indeed. As has been shown, however,
there were some points—the fulfillment could remember the emotions of
its component products, even though it could no longer feel them—upon
which even such divergent minds as those could find common ground. Also,
it must be borne in mind that the Cahuitan was an able and seasoned
thinker, trained for many millennia in the art, and that Neal Cloud was
a Type Six mind; the only such mind then to be found in all
Civilization. Hence, while it would serve no useful purpose here to go
into detail as to how it was accomplished, a working understanding was
at last attained.
Cloud came to understand, as well as any being of material substance
ever could, the beings of pure energy. The Cahuitan learned, and
broadcast, that intelligent life could and did exist in intimate
association with ultimately frigid matter. While the probability was
small that there would ever be any considerable amount of fruitful
intercourse between the two kinds of life, some live-and-let-live
arrangement should be and would be worked out. There were thousands,
yes, millions, of planets absolutely useless to anybody or anything
known to man; planets harboring no life of any kind. The Patrol would be
glad to set up, on any desired number of these barren planets, as many
atomic power plants as the Cahuitans wanted; with controls set either to
let go in an hour or to maintain stability for twenty five thousand
Galactic Standard years.
The Cahuitans would immediately extinguish all vortices not containing
products, and would move all living products to the new planets as soon
as the promised incubators were ready.
“_Products_ indeed—they’re _babies_!” Joan insisted, when Cloud stepped
the information down to her level. “And how can they possibly move
them?”
“Easily enough,” the fulfillment told Cloud. “Blankets of force will
retain the warmth necessary for such short trips, provided each new
incubator is waiting, warm, and ready.”
“I see. But there’s one question I want to ask for myself,” and Cloud
went on to explain about the unbelievably huge sphere that crossed
Civilization’s vast expanse of space. “What’s the _reason_ for it?”
“To save time and effort. The product Medury devoted much of both to the
evaluation of a sufficiently productive, esthetically satisfying, and
mathematically correct construction. It would not be logical to waste
time and labor in seeking a variant or an alternate, especially since
Medury’s work showed, almost conclusively, that his was in fact the most
symmetrical construction possible. Now symmetry, to us, is what you
might, perhaps, call a ruling passion in one of your own races.”
“Symmetry? The first twelve vortices were symmetrical, of course, but
from there on—nothing.”
“Ah—that is due to the differences between our thinkings; particularly
in our mathematical and philosophical thinkings. The circle, the sphere,
the square, the cube—all such elementary forms—are common to both but
the likenesses are few. The differences are many; so many that it will
require several thousands of your Galactic Standard years for certain of
my fellows and me to tabulate them and to make whatever may be possible
of reconciliation.”
“Well . . . thanks. One more question . . . maybe I shouldn’t ask it,
but . . . this that we have laid out is a wide-reaching and extremely
important program. Are you sure that you are able to speak for all the
Cahuitans who will be affected?”
“I am sure. Since we are a logical race we all think alike—logically.
On the other hand, your race does not seem to me at the moment to be at
all a logical one. Can you speak for it?”
“In this matter I can; and you, in my mind, will know that I can,” and
in this case Cloud could indeed speak for the Patrol. Philip Strong,
after one glance in Cloud’s mind, would issue the necessary orders
himself and would explain later—to anyone capable of accepting the true
explanation.
“Very well. We will destroy the empty incubators at once, and will go
ahead with the rest of the project whenever you are ready.”
The Cahuitan broke contact and vanished.
In the ship, Cloud got up. So did Joan. Without exchanging a word or a
thought they went hungrily into each other’s arms.
After a time, and still keeping one arm around his Joan, Cloud reached
out and punched a button on his intercom.
“Captain Ross?”
“Ross speaking.”
“Cloud. Mission accomplished. Return to Tellus, please, at full touring
blast.”
“Very well, sir.”
And “Storm” Cloud, Vortex Blaster, was out of a job.
-----
^{A} The reader will please understand that I am doing the best I can
with words we all know. E.E.S.
TRANSCRIBER NOTES