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. . . .”
“What of it?” she flared. “You do things fully as complex every time you blast a vortex. . . . Oh, that’s it! Treat it as though it were a problem in n-dimensional differential equations, but don’t let your subconscious do it alone—get right down there and work with it—do that and you’ll have it all!” She seized his hands, squeezed them hard, and spoke aloud, the better to drive home the intensity of her convictions. “Buckle down, Storm, and dig . . . you can do it, I know you can do it. I know you can . . . dig in, big fellow . . . you don’t have to pay too much attention to detail; get a chain started, like a zipper, and it’ll finish itself . . . dig, Storm, DIG!”
Storm dug. His jaw-muscles tightened into lumps. Sweat beaded his face and trickled down his chest under his shirt. And suddenly something happened. Not very much of anything, but something. Something more than mere contact, but not a penetration—more like a fusion—a fusion which, however instead of spreading rapidly to completion, as Joan had said it would, existed for the merest perceptible instant of time in an almost infinitesimal area and then vanished as instantaneously as it had come. But there was no doubt whatever that he had read, for an instant, a tiny portion of Joan’s mind; there was no chance whatever that she had sent him that thought—in fact, she had been thinking at herself, not at him. And as he perceived the tenor of that thought he let go all his mental holds; tried frantically to bury the stolen thought so deeply that Joan would never, never find out what it had been. . . .
No, not bury it, either. Flesh, rock, metal—any material substance was perfectly transparent to thought. What wasn’t? A thought-screen. He didn’t have one, of course, but he knew the formula, and if he thought about that formula hard enough it might create interference enough. The catch would be whether he could talk at the same time . . . he probably could, if the subject matter didn’t require concentration.
Joan, of course, knew instantly when Cloud pulled his mind away from hers; and, not waiting to ask why in words, drove in a probe to find out. Much to her surprise, however, her beam of mental force was stopped cold; she could not touch Cloud’s mind at all!
“A block!” she exclaimed unbelievingly. “A real dilly, too—as hard and tight as a D7M29Z screen! What did you do, anyway, Storm, and how? I didn’t feel you get in!”
He did not reply immediately. He was too busy; for, besides holding the screen-thought, he was also analyzing and studying the thought he had stolen from Joan: separating it out and arranging it into meaningful English words. It was amazing, how many words could be contained in one flashing, fleeting burst of thought.
“Joanie, my not-so-bright old friend,” she had been thinking, “you’ve simply got to cut out this silly damn foolishness and act your age. You must not fall in love with him; there’d be nothing in it for either of you. You are thirty-four years old and he has had his Jo.”
“Storm!” she snapped. “Answer me! Or did. . . .” Her tone changed remarkably: “. . . did something . . . happen to you?”
“No, Joanie.” He shook his head and wrenched his attention back to reality. “But first, is whatever I’m doing really a mind-block, and is it really holding?”
“Yes—to both—curse it! And ‘Joanie’, eh? You did get in. How did it go?”
“Not so good. Barely a touch. It didn’t spread after we got it started. Just one flash and it went out.”
“Hm . . . m . . . m. That’s funny. . . . Not the way it worked with me at all. However, I don’t see that it makes any difference whether you get it by drips and driblets or all at once, just so you get the full ability eventually. What was it you picked up the first time, Storm?”
“That’s one thing you’ll never know, if I have to hold this block forever.”
“Oh.” Joan blushed, vividly. “I know what it was, then, I think. But don’t you see. . . ?”
“No, I don’t see,” Cloud interrupted. “All I see is that it’s worse than being a Peeping Tom in a girls’ dormitory. I don’t like it. I don’t like any part of it.”
“You wouldn’t, of course—at first. Nevertheless, Storm, you and I have got to work together, whether either of us likes what happens or not. So let’s get at it. Bring it out and look at it—let’s see if it’s so bad, really. It was just that I was afraid maybe I was going to fall in love with you and get burned to a crisp around the edges, wasn’t it?”
“That was part of it. You were wrong in two things, though. No matter how much I loved Jo—and I really did love her, you know. . . .”
“I know, Storm.” Her voice was very gentle. “Everybody knows you did. Not only did—you still do.”
“Yes. So much so that I thought I’d never be able to talk about her without going off the deep end. But I can, now. I’m beginning to think that perhaps Phil Strong was right. Perhaps a man can love twice in his life, in exactly the same way.”
The woman caught her breath and started to say something, then changed her mind. The man went on:
“The second point in error is that a woman at age thirty-four is not necessarily a doddering wreck with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.”
“Oh . . . I’m so glad, Storm!” she breathed; then changed mood with an almost audible snap. “There! It’s done and your guard is down. It wasn’t too bad, was it?”
“Not a bit.” Cloud was surprised at how easily the thing had been ironed out. “You’re a prime number, Joanie—a slick, smooth operator. As smooth as five feet and two inches of tan velvet.”
“Uh-uh. Not me, so much; it’s just that we’re a very nicely-matched pair. But I think we’d better lay off a while before trying it again, don’t you?”
“Check. Let our minds—mine, anyway—get over the jitters and collywobbles.”
“Mine, too, brother; and I’ve got a sort of feeling that what that mind of yours is going to develop into, little by little, is something slightly different from ordinary telepathy. But in the meantime, you’d better get back to work.”
“I don’t know whether I can work up much enthusiasm for work right now or not.”
“Sure you can, if you try. What were you doing to that chart when I came in? What have you got there, anyway?”
“Come on over and I’ll show you.” They bent over the work-table, heads almost touching. “The pink area is the explored part of the First Galaxy. The marks represent all the loose vortices I know of. I’ve been applying all the criteria I can think of to give me some kind of a toe-hold, but up to the present moment I’m completely baffled.”
“Have you tried chronology yet? Peeling ’em off in layers—by centuries, say?”
“Not exactly, although I did run a correlation against time. Mostly been studying ’em either singly or en masse up to now. Might be worth a fling, though. Why? Got a hunch?”
“No. And no particular reason; just groping for more detailed data. Before you can solve any problem, you know, you must know exactly what the problem is—must be able to state it clearly. You can’t do that yet, can you?”
“You know I can’t. I’ve got some colored pins here somewhere . . . here they are. Read me the dates and I’ll stick colors accordingly.”
They soon ran out of colors; then continued with numbered-head thumb-tacks.
The job finished, they stood back and examined the results.
“See anything, Joan?”
“I see something, but before I mention it, give me a quick briefing on what you know already.”
Cloud thought for a minute. “Well, the distribution in space is not random, but there is no significant correlation with location, age, size, power, load-factor, or actual number of power plants. Nor with nature, condition, or age of the civilization of any planet. Nor with anything else I’ve been able to dream up.
“They aren’t random in time, either; but there again there’s no correlation with the age of the power-plant affected, the age-status of atomic power of any particular planet, or any other thing except one—there is an extremely high correlation—practically unity—with time itself.”
“I thought so,” Joan nodded. “That was what I noticed. The older, the fewer.”
“Exactly. But with your new classification, Joan, I think I see something else.” Cloud’s mathematical-prodigy’s mind pounced. “And how! Until very recently, Joan, the data will plot exactly on the ideal-growth-of-population curve.”
“Oh, they breed, some way or other. Nice—that gives us a. . . .”
“You said that, woman, I didn’t. I stated a fact; if you wish to extrapolate it, that’s your privilege—but it’s also your responsibility.”
“Huh! Don’t go pedantic on me. Haven’t you got any guesses?”
“Except for this recent jump, which we can probably ascribe to Fairchild and explosives, nary a guess. I can’t see any possible point of application.”
“Neither can I. But if that’s the only positive correlation you can find, and it’s just about unity, it must mean something.”
“Check. It’s got to mean something. All we have to do is find out what . . . I think maybe I see something else.” Bending over, he sighted across the chart from various angles. “Too many pins. Let’s clear a belt through here.” They did so. “Will you read ’em to me in order, beginning with the oldest?”
“At your service, sir. Sol.”
Cloud stuck a pin in Sol.
“Galien—Salvador—DuPont—Eastman—Mercator—Centralia— Tressilia—Chickladoria—Crevenia—DeSilva—Wynor—Aldebaran. . . .”
“Hold it! Don’t want Aldebaran—can’t use it. Take a look at this!” For this first time Cloud’s voice showed excitement.
She looked, and saw a gently curving line of pins running three-quarters of the way across the chart. “Why—that’s a smooth curve—looks as though it could be the arc of a circle—clear across all explored space!” she exclaimed.
Cloud’s mind pounced again. “It is a circle—pretty close, that is, according to these rough figures. Will you read me the exact coordinates—spatial—from the book?”
She did so, and through Cloud’s mind there raced the appropriate equations of solid analytic geometry.
“Even closer. Now let’s apply a final refinement. From their proper motions we can put each star back to where it was at the vortex date. It’ll take a little time, but it may be worth it.”
It was. Cloud’s mien was solemn as he announced his final figures. “Those twelve suns all lay on the surface of a sphere. Radius, 53,327 parsecs, with a probable error of one point three zero parsecs—which, since the average density of the stars along that line is about point zero four five per cubic parsec, makes it as perfect a spherical surface as it is physically possible for it to be. The center of that sphere is almost exactly on the ecliptic; its coordinates are: Theta, 225°—12′—31.2647″; distance, 107.2259.”
“Good heavens! It’s that exact? And that far outside the Rim? That spoils my original idea of radiation from a center. But all of the twelve oldest vortices are on that surface, and none of them are anywhere else!”
“So they are. Which gets us where, lady?”
“Nowhere that I can see, with a stupendous velocity.”
“You and me both. Another thing, why that particular time-space relationship in the first twelve? I can accept Tellus being first, because we had atomics first, but that logic doesn’t follow through. Instead, the time order goes from Sol through Galien and so on to Eastman—to the very edge of unexplored territory along that arc—then, jumping back to the other side of Sol, goes straight on to the edge of Civilization in the opposite direction. Can you play that on any one of your brains, from Alice to Margie?”
“I don’t see how.”
“I don’t, either. That relationship certainly means something, too, but I’m damned if I can make any sense out of it. And what sense is there in a spherical surface that big? And why so ungodly accurate? Alphacent, there, is less than one parsec outside the surface, but it didn’t have a blow-up for over seven hundred years. How come? Anybody or anything capable of traveling that far could certainly travel half a parsec farther if he wanted to. And look at the time involved—over a thousand years! Assuming some purpose, what could it be? Human operations, or any other kind I know anything about, simply are not geared up to that kind of scope, either in space or in time. None of it makes any kind of sense.”
“So you consider it purely fortuitous that this surface is as truly spherical as the texture of the medium will permit?” she asked, loftily.
“No, I don’t, and you know I don’t—and don’t misquote me, woman! It’s too fantastically accurate to be accidental. And that ties right in with the previous paradox—that vortices can’t possibly be either accidental or deliberate.”
“From a semantic viewpoint, your phraseology is deplorable. The term ‘paradox’ is inadmissible—meaningless. We simply haven’t enough data. I simply can’t believe, Storm, that those horrible things were set off on purpose.”
“Deplorable phraseology or not, I’ve got enough data to put the probability out beyond the nine-sigma point—the same probability as that an automatic screw-machine running six-thirty-two brass hex nuts would accidentally turn out a thirty-six-inch jet-ring made of pure titanite, diamond-ground, finished, and fitted. We’re getting nowhere faster and faster—with an acceleration of about 12 G’s instead of any simple velocity.”
He fell silent; remained silent so long that the woman spoke. “Well . . . what do you think we’d better do next?”
“All I can think of is to find out what’s out there at the center of that sphere . . . and then to see if we can find any other leads in this mess on the chart. I’ll call Phil.”