The Vortex Blaster

by Edward E Smith

And Vesta the Vegian strode away, purring contentedly to herself—tail high.

  Chapter XVII

  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 tete-a-tete 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 finetooth,” 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 Thlaskin 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 yon 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, as 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 vanBuskirk 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.”