"Not--a Jupiter diamond, Sol?"
"Much rarer than that, and more useful."
"Oh. Useful."
"Something to help you in the house when we're married, honey. Now,
don't pout so prettily, or I'll never get around to showing you."
My homecoming was not developing quite as I planned, but I put this
down to womanly, if not exactly maidenly, quirks. When she found out
what I had brought her, I was sure she would be all over me again. I
put on my dark glasses so that I could see where the diver was.
"Would you like a drink, honey?" I asked.
"I don't mind," she said sulkily.
* * * * *
I looked at the diver, concentrated hard on the thought of a bottle
from the cabinet, two glasses and a pitcher of ice from the kitchen. He
went revolving through the air obediently and the items came floating
out neatly. Florence nearly shattered the windows with her screams.
"Now calm down, honey," I said, catching her. "Calm down. It's just a
little present I brought you."
The bottle, glasses and pitcher dropped gently onto the table beside us.
"See?" I said. "Service at a thought. Remote control. The end of
housework. Kiss me."
She didn't.
"You mean you did that, Sol?"
"Not me, exactly. I've brought you a little baby diver, honey, all the
way from Antimony IX, just for you. There isn't another one on Earth.
In fact, I doubt if there's another one outside Antimony IX. I had a
lot of trouble securing this rare and valuable present for you."
"I don't like it. It gives me the creeps."
"Honey," I said carefully, "this is a little baby. It couldn't hurt a
mouse. It's about six inches in diameter, and all it is doing is to
teleport what you want it to teleport."
"Then why can't I see it?"
"If you could see it, I wouldn't have been allowed to bring it for you,
honey, because a whole row of nasty-minded Solar Civil Servants would
have seen it too, and they would have taken it from your own sweet Sol."
"They can have it."
"Honey, this is a _rare_ and _valuable_ pet! It will _do_ things for
you."
"So you think I need something done for me. Well! I'm glad you came
right out and said this before we were married!"
The following series of "but--but--" from me and irrelevance from
Florence occupied an hour, but hardly mentioned the diver. Eventually I
got her back into my arms.
My urges for Florence were strictly biological, though intense. There
were little chances for intellectual exchanges between us, but I was
more interested in the broad probabilities of her as a woman. I could
go commune with wild and exotic intelligences on foreign planets any
time I had the fare. As a woman, Florence was what I wanted.
"Back on Antimony IX," I explained carefully, "life is fierce and
rugged. So, to keep from being eaten, these little divers evolved
themselves into little minds with no bodies at all, and they feed off
solar radiation. Now, honey, minds are not made of the same stuff
brains are made of, good solid tissue and gray matter and neural
cortex--"
"Don't be dirty, Sol."
"There is nothing dirty about the body, honey. Minds are invisible
but detectable in the micro-wavelengths on any sensitive counter, and
look like little glass eggs when you can see them--as I can, by using
these glasses. In fact, your diver is over by the window now. But,
having evolved this far, they came across a little difficulty and
couldn't evolve any further. So there they are, handy little minds
for teleporting whatever you want moved, and reading other people's
thoughts."
* * * * *
She gasped. "Did you say reading other people's thoughts?
"Certainly," I said. "As a matter of fact, that's what stopped the
divers from evolving further. If they brush against any thinking
creature, they pick up whatever thought is in the creature's conscious
mind. But they also pick up the subliminal activity, if you follow
me--and down at that level of a mind such as man's, his thoughts are
not only the present unconscious thoughts but also a good slice of what
is to him still the future. It's one of those space-time differences.
The divers are not really on the same space-time reference as the
physical world, but that makes them all the more useful, because our
minds aren't either."
"Did you say reading other people's thoughts, like a telepath?" she
persisted.
"Exactly like a telepath, or any other class of psi. We're really
living on a much wider scale than we're conscious of, but our mind only
tracks down one point in time-space in a straight line, which happens
to fit our bodies. Our subliminal mind is way out in every direction,
including time--and when you pick up fragments of this consciously,
you're a psi, that's all. So the divers got thoroughly confused--that's
what it amounts to--and never evolved any further. So you see, honey,
it's all perfectly natural."
"I think you're just dirty."
"Eh?"
"Everyone _hates_ telepaths. You know that."
"I don't."
"Oh, you go wandering all over the Galaxy--but my friends--what could
I say to my friends if they learned I had something like a telepath in
the apartment?"
"It's only a baby diver, I keep telling you, honey. And anyway, you'll
be able to tell what they're really thinking about you."