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 foot-hold. 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?”
“I can’t get away from it, and it isn’t because I’m a woman and obsessed 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 cozy 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 at 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 XVIII
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 fulfilled4 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. Jobs4, businesses4, commerce4, and industry4 went on as usual, unaffected.
But Medury was affected: basically, fundamentally affected. The lime 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 millenia 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?”
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