'Huh? Why not?'

'Because Vegians, especially young Vegians, like me, haven't got any sense when it comes to gambling,' Vesta explained, gravely. 'They can't tell the difference between their own money and the bank's. So everybody who amounts to anything in a bank makes a no-gambling declaration and if one ever slips the insurance company boots him out on his ear and he takes a blaster and burns his head off..."

Cloud flashed a thought at Joan. 'Is this another of your strictly Vegian customs?'

'Not mine; I never heard of it before,' she flashed back. 'Very much in character, though, and it explains why Vegian bankers are regarded as being very much the upper crust.'

'... so I am going to buy half of that bank. Thanks, chief, for helping me make up my mind. Good night, you two lovely people; I'm going to bed. I'm just about bushed.' Vesta, tail high and with a completely new dignity in her bearing, strode away.

'Me, too, Storm; on both counts,' Joan thought at Cloud. 'You ought to hit the hammock, too, instead of working half the night yet.'

'Maybe so, but I want to know how things came out, and besides they may want some quick figuring done. Good night, little chum.' His parting thought, while commonplace enough in phraseology, was in fact sheer caress; and Joan's mind, warmly intimate, accepted it as such and returned it in kind.

Cloud left the ship and rode a scooter across the field to a very ordinary-looking freighter. In that vessel's control room, however, there were three Lensmen and five Rigellians, all clustered around a tank-chart of a considerable fraction of the First Galaxy.

'Hi, Cloud!' Nordquist greeted him with a Lensed thought and introduced him to the others. 'All our thanks for a really beautiful job of work. We'll thank Miss Janowick tomorrow, when she'll have a better perspective. Want to look?'

'I certainly do. Thanks.' Cloud joined the group at the chart and Nordquist poured knowledge into his mind.

Thlasoval, the boss of Chickladoria, had been under full mental surveillance every minute of every day. The scheme had worked perfectly. As the club closed, Thlasoval had sent the expected message; not by ordinary communications channels, of

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course, but via long-distance beamer. It was beamed three ways; to Tominga, Vegia, and Palmer III. That proved that Fairchild wasn't on Chickladoria; if he had been, Thlasoval would have used a broadcaster, not a beamer.

Shows had been staged simultaneously on all four of Fair-child's planets, and only on Vegia had the planetary manager's message been broadcast. Fairchild was on Vegia, and he wouldn't leave it: a screen had been thrown around the planet that a microbe couldn't squirm through and it wouldn't be relaxed until Fairchild was caught.

'Simultaneous shows?' Cloud interrupted the flow of information. 'On four planets? He won't connect the Vortex Blaster with it, at all, then.'

'We think he will,' the Lensman thought, narrowing down. 'We're dealing with a very shrewd operator. We hope he does, anyway, because a snooper put on you or any one of your key people would be manna from heaven for us.'

'But how could he suspect us?' Cloud demanded. 'We couldn't have been on four planets at once.'

'You will have been on three of them, though; and I can tell you now that routing was not exactly coincidence."

'Oh ... and I wasn't informed?'

'No. Top Brass didn't want to disturb you too much, especially since we hoped to catch him before things got this far along. But you're in it now, clear to the neck. You and your people will be under surveillance every second, from here on in, and you'll be covered as no chief of state was ever covered in all history I

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15: Joan and Her Brains

The trip from Chickladoria to Vegia, while fairly long, was uneventful.

Joan spent her working hours, of course, at her regular job of rebuilding the giant computer. Cloud spent his at the galactic chart or in the control room staring into a tank; classifying, analyzing, building up and knocking down hypotheses and theories, wringing every possible drop of knowledge from all the data he could collect.

In their 'spare' time, of which each had quite a great deal, they worked together at their telepathy; to such good purpose that, when so working, verbal communication between them became rarer and rarer. And, alone or in a crowd, within sight of each other or not, in any place or at any time, asleep or awake, each had only to think at the other and they were instantly in full mental rapport.

And oftener and oftener there came those instaneously-fleet-ing touches of something infinitely more than mere telepathy; that fusion of minds which was so ultimately intimate that neither of the two could have said whether he longed for or dreaded its full coming the more. In fact, for several days before reaching Vegia, each knew that they could bring about that full fusion any time they chose to do so; but both shied away from its consummation, each as violently as the other.

Thus the trip did not seem nearly as long as it actually was.

The first order of business on Vegia, of course, was the extinguishment of its five loose atomic vortices—for which reason this was to be pretty much a planetary holiday, although that is of little concern here.

As the Vortex Blaster 11 began settling into position, the two scientists took their places. Cloud was apparently his usual self-controlled self, but Joan was white and strained—almost shaking. He sent her a steadying thought, but her block was up, solid.

'Don't take it so hard, Joanie,' he said, soberly. 'Margie'11 take 'em, I hope—but even if she doesn't, there's a dozen things not tried yet.'

'That's just the trouble—there aren't! We put just about

_

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everything we had into Lulu; Margie is only a few milliseconds better. Perhaps there are a dozen things not tried yet, but I haven't the faintest, foggiest smidgeon of an idea of what any of them could be. Margie is the last word, Storm—the best analogue computer it is possible to build with today's knowledge.'

'And I haven't been a lick of help. I wish I could be, Joan.'

'I don't see how you can be ... Oh, excuse me, Storm, I didn't mean that half the way it sounds. Do you want to check the circuitry? I'll send for the prints.'

'No, I couldn't even carry your water-bottle on that part of the job. I've got just a sort of a dim, half-baked idea that there's a possibility that maybe I haven't been giving you and your brains a square deal. By studying the graphs of the next three or four tests maybe I can find out whether ...'

'Lieutenant-Commander Janowick, we are in position,' a crisp voice came from the speaker. 'You may take over when ready, madam.'

'Thank you, sir.' Joan nipped a switch and Margie took control of the ship and its armament—subject only to Cloud's overriding right to fire at will.

'Just a minute, Storm,' Joan said then. 'Unfinished business. Whether what?'

'Whether there's anything I can do—or fail to do—that might help; but I've got to have a lot more data.'

Cloud turned to his chart, Joan to hers; and nothing happened until Cloud blew out the vortex himself.

The same lack of something happened in the case of the next vortex, and also the next. Then, as the instruments began working in earnest on the fourth, Cloud reveiwed in his mind the figures of the three previous trials. On the first vortex, a big toughie, Margie had been two hundred fifty milliseconds short. On the second, a fairly small one, she had come up to seventy-five. On Number Three, middle-sized, the lag had been one twenty-five. That made sense. Lag was proportional to activity and it was just too bad for Margie. And just too damn bad for Joanie—the poor kid was just about to blow her stack ...

But wait a minute! What's this? This number four's a little bit of a new one, about as small as they ever come. Margie ought to be taking it, if she's ever going to take anything ... but she isn't! She's running damn near three hundred mils behind!

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Why? Oh—amplitudes—frequencies extreme instability ... Lag isn't proportional only to activity, then, but jointly to activity and to instability.

That gives us a chance—but what in all nine of Palain's purple hells is that machine doing with that data?

He started to climb out of his bucket seat to go around to talk to Joan right then, but changed his mind at his first move. Even if Margie could handle mis little one it wouldn't be a real test, and it'd be a crying shame to give Joan a success here and then kick her in the teeth with a flat failure next time. No, the next one, the only one left and Vegia's worst, would be the one. If Margie could handle that, she could snuff anything the galaxy had to offer.

Hence Cloud extinguished this one, too, himself. The Vortex Blaster II darted to its last Vegian objective and lined itself up for business. Joan put Margie to work as usual; but Storm, for the first time, did not take his own place. Instead, he came around and stood behind Joan's chair.

'How're we doing, little chum?' he asked.

'Rotten!' Joan's block was still up; her voice was choked with tears. 'She's come so close half a dozen times today—why —why can't I get that last fraction of a second?'

'Maybe you can.' As though it were the most natural thing in the world—which in fact it was—Cloud put his left arm around her shoulders and exerted a gentle pressure. 'Bars down, chum—we can think a lot clearer than we can talk.'

'That's better,' as her guard went down. 'Your differential 'scope looks like it's set about one centimeter to the second. Can you give it enough vertical gain to make it about five?'

'Yes. Ten if you like, but the trace would keep jumping the screen on the down-swings.'

'I wouldn't care about that—closest approach is all I want. Give it full gain."

'QX, but why?' Joan demanded, as she made the requested adjustment. 'Did you find out something I can't dig deep enough in your mind to pry loose?'

'Don't know yet whether I did or not—I can tell you in a couple of minutes,' and Cloud concentrated his full attention upon the chart and its adjacent oscilloscope screen.

One pen of the chart was drawing a thin, wildly-wavering red line. A few seconds behind it a second pen was tracing the

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red line in black; tracing it so exactly that not the tiniest touch of red was to be seen anywhere along the black. And on the screen of the differential oscilloscope the fine green saw-tooth wave-form of the electronic trace, which gave continuously the instantaneous value of the brain's shortage in time, flickered insanely and apparently reasonlessly up and down; occasionally falling clear off the bottom of the screen. If that needle-pointed trace should touch the zero line, however briefly, Margie the Brain would act; but it was not coming within one full centimeter of touching.

'The feeling that these failures have been partly, or even mostly, my fault is growing on me,' Cloud thought, tightening his arm a little: and Joan, if anything, yielded to the pressure instead of fighting away from it. 'Maybe I haven't been waiting long enough to give your brains the leeway they need. To check: I've been assuming all along that they work in pretty much the same way I do; that they handle all the data, out to the limit of validity of the equations, but aren't fast enough to work out a three-point-six-second prediction.

'But if I'm reading those curves right Margie simply isn't working that way. She doesn't seem to be extrapolating anything more than three and a half seconds ahead—'way short of the reliability limit—and sometimes a lot less than that. She isn't accepting data far enough ahead. She acts as though she can gulp down just so much information without choking on it —so much and no more.'

'Exactly. An over-simplification, of course, since it isn't the kind of choking that giving her a bigger throat would cure, but very well put.' Joan's right hand crept across her body, rested on Cloud's wrist, and helped his squeeze, while her face turned more directly toward the face so close to hers. 'That's inherent in the design of all really fast machines ... and we simply don't know any way of getting away from it ... Why? What has that to do with the case?'

'A lot—I hope. When I was working in a flitter I had to wait up to half an hour sometimes, for the sigma curve to stabilize enough so that the equations would hold valid and give a longer valid prediction.'

'Stabilize? How? I've never seen a sigma curve flatten out. Or does "stabilize" have a special meaning for you vortex experts?'

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'Could be. It's what happens when a sigma becomes a little more regular than usual, so that a simpler equation will give a longer valid prediction.'

'I see; and a difference in wave-form that would be imperceptible to me might mean a lot to you.'

'Right. It just occurred to me that a similar line of reasoning may hold for this seemingly entirely different set of conditions. The less unstable the curve, the less complicated the equations and the smaller the volume of actual data ...'

'Oh!' Joan's thought soared high. 'So Margie may work yet, if we wait a while?'

'Check. Browning can't take the ship away from you, can he?'

'No. Nobody can do anything until the job is done or I punch that red "stop" button there. D'you suppose she can do it, Storm? How long can we wait?'

'Half an hour, I'd say. No, to settle the point definitely, let's wait until I can get a full ten-second prediction and see what Margie's doing about the situation then.'

'Wonderful! But in that case, it might be a good idea for you to be looking at the chart, don't you think?' she asked, pointedly. His eyes, at the moment, were looking directly into hers, from a distance of approximately twelve inches.

'I'll look at it later, but right now I'm ...'

The ship quivered under the terrific, the unmistakable triphammer blow of propellant heptadetonite. Unobserved by either of the two scientists most concerned, the sigma curve had, momentarily, become a trifle less irregular. The point of the sawtooth had touched the zero line. Margie had acted. The visiplate, from which the heavily-filtered glare of the vortex had blazed so long, went suddenly black.

'She did it, Storm!' Joan's thought was a mental shriek of joy. 'She really worked!'

Whether, when the ship went free, Joan pulled Storm down to her merely to anchor him, or for some other reason; whether Cloud grabbed her merely in lieu of a safety-line or not; which of the two was first to put arms around the other; these are moot points impossible of decision at this date. The fact is, however, that the two scientists held a remarkably unscientific pose for a good two minutes before Joan thought that she ought to object a little, just on general principles. Even then,

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she did not object with her mind; instead she put up her block and used her voice.

'But, after all, Storm,' she began, only to be silenced as beloved women have been silenced throughout the ages. She cut her screen then, and her mind, tender and unafraid, reached out to his.

'This might be the perfect time, dear, to merge our minds? I've been scared to death of it all along, but no more ... let's?' 'Uh-huh,' he demurred. 'I'm still afraid of it. I've been thinking about it a lot, and doing some drilling, and the more I play with it the more scared I get. It's dangerous. It's like playing with duodec. I've just about decided that we'd better let it drop.'

'Afraid? For yourself, or for me? Don't try to lie with your mind, Storm; you can't do it. You're afraid only for me, and you needn't be. I've been thinking, too, and digging deep, and I know I'm ready.' She looked up at him then, her quick, bright, impish grin very much in evidence. 'Let's go.'

'QX, Joanie, and thanks. I've been wanting this more than I ever wanted anything before in my life. But not holding hands, this time. Heart to heart and cheek to cheek.' 'Check—the closer the better.'

They embraced, and again mind flowed into mind; this time with no thought of withholding or reserve on either side. Smoothly, effortlessly, the two essential beings merged, each fitting its tiniest, remotest members into the deepest, ordinarily most inaccessible recesses of the other; fusing as quickly and as delicately and as thoroughly as two drops of water coalescing into one.

In that supremely intimate fusion, that ultimate union of line

and plane and cellule, each mind was revealed completely to the

other; a revealment which no outsider should expect to share.

Finally, after neither ever knew how long, they released each

other and each put up, automatically, a solid block.

'I don't know about you, Storm,' Joan said then, 'but I've had just about all I can take. I'm going to bed and sleep for one solid week.'

'You and me both,'  Storm agreed, ungrammatically, but feelingly. 'Good night, sweetheart ... and this had all better be strictly hush-hush, don't you think?' 'I do think,' she assured him. 'Can't you just imagine the

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field-day the psychs would have, taking us apart?'

In view of the above, it might be assumed that the parting was immediate, positive, and undemonstrative; but such was not exactly the case. But they did finally separate, and each slept soundly and long.

And fairly early the next morning—before either of them got up, at least—Cloud sent Joan a thought.

'Awake, dear?'

'Uh-huh. Just. 'Morning, Storm.'

'I've got some news for you, Joanie. My brain is firing on ten times as many barrels as I ever thought it had, and I don't know what half of 'em are doing. Among other things, you made what I think is probably a top-bracket perceiver out of me.'

'So? Well, don't peek at me, please ... but why should I say that, after having studied in Rigel Four for two years? Women are funny, I guess. But, for your information, I have just extracted the ninth root of an eighteen-digit number, in no time at all and to the last significant decimal place, and I know the answer is right. How do you like them potatoes, Buster?'

'Nice. We really absorbed each other's stuff, didn't we? But how about joining me in person for a soupcon of ham and eggs?'

'That's a thought, my thoughtful friend; a cogent and right knightly thought. I'll be with you in three jerks and a wiggle.' And she was.

Just as they finished eating, Vesta breezed in. 'Well, you two deep-sleepers finally crawled out of your sacks, did you? It is confusing, though, that ship's time never agrees with planetary time. But I live here, you know, in this city you call "Vegiaton", so I went to bed at noon yesterday and I've got over half a day's work done already. I saw my folks and bought half of my uncle's bank and made the no-gambling declaration and I want to ask you both something. After the Grand Uproar here at the 'port in your honor, will you two and Helen and Joe and Bob and Barbara come with me to a little dance some of my friends are having? You've been zo good to me, and I want to show you off a little.'

'We'll be glad to, Vesta, and thanks a lot,' Joan said, flashing a thought at Cloud to let her handle this thing her own way, 'and I imagine the others would be, too, but ... well, it's

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for you, you know, and we might be intruding ...'

'Why, not at all!' Vesta waved the objection away with an airy flirt of her tail. 'You're friends of mine! And everybody's real friends are always welcome, you know, everywhere. And it'll be small and quiet; only six or eight hundred are being asked, they say ...' she paused for a moment: '... of course, after it gets around that we have you there, a couple of thousand or so strangers will come in too; but they'll all smell nice, so it'll be QX.'

'How do you know what they'll smell like?' Cloud asked.

'Why, they'll smell like our crowd, of course. If they didn't they wouldn't want to come in. It's QX, then?'

'For us two, yes; but of course we can't speak for the others.'

'Thanks, you wonderful people; I'll go ask them right now.'

'Joan, have you blown your stack completely?' Cloud demanded. 'Small—quiet—six or eight hundred invited—a couple of thousand or so gate-crashers—what do you want to go to a brawl like that for?'

'The chance is too good to miss—it's priceless ...' She paused, then added, obliquely: 'Storm, have you any idea at all of what Vesta thinks of you? You haven't snooped, I'm sure.'

'No, and I don't intend to.'

'Maybe you ought to,' Joan snickered a little, 'except that it would inflate your ego too much. It's hard to describe. It's not exactly love—and not exactly worship, either god-worship or hero-worship. It isn't exactly adoration, but it's very much stronger than mere admiration. A mixture of all these, perhaps, and half a dozen others, coupled with a simply unbelievable amount of pride that you are her friend. It's a peculiarly Vegian thing, that Tellurians simply do not feel. But here's why I'm so enthused. It has been over twenty years since any non-Vegian has attended one of these uniquely Vegian parties except as an outsider, and a Vegian party with outsiders looking on isn't a Vegian party at all. But we Storm, will be going as insiders!'

'Are you sure of that?'

'Positive. Oh, I know it isn't us she wants, but you; but that won't make any difference. As Vesta's friend—"friend" in this case having a very special meaning—you're in the center of the inner circle. As friends of yours, the rest of us are in, too. Not in the inner circle, perhaps, but well inside the outside circle, at least. See?'

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'Dimly. "A friend of a friend of a friend of a very good friend of mine," eh? I've heard that ditty, but I never thought it meant anything.'

'It does here. We're going to have a time. See you in about an hour?'

'Just about. I've got to check with Nordquist.'

'Here I am, Storm,' the Lensman's thought came in. Then, as Cloud went toward his quarters, it went on: 'Just want to tell you we won't have anything for you to do here. This is going to be a straight combing job.'

'That won't be too tough, will it? A Tellurian, sixty, tall, thin, grave, distinguished-looking ... or maybe ...'

'Exactly. You're getting the idea. Cosmeticians and plastic surgery. He could look like a Crevenian, or thirty years old and two hundred pounds and slouchy. He could look like anything. He undoubtedly has a background so perfectly established that fifteen thoroughly honest Vegians would swear by eleven of their gods that he hasn't left his home town for ten years. So every intelligent being on Vegia who hasn't got a live tail, with blood circulating in it, is going under the Lens and through the wringer if we have to keep Vegia in quarantine for a solid year. He is not going to get away from us this time.'

'I'm betting on you, Nordquist. Clear ether!'

The Lensman signed off and Cloud, at the end of the specified hour, undressed and redressed and went to the computer room. All the others except Joe were already there.

'Hi, peoples!' Cloud called; then did a double-take. 'Wow! And likewise, Yipes! How come the tri-di outfits didn't all collapse, Joan, when those two spectaculars took up cybernetics?'

'I'll never know, Storm.' Joan shook her head wonderingly, then went on via thought; and Cloud felt her pang of sheer jealousy. 'Why is it that big girls are always so much more beautiful than little ones? And the more clothes they take off the better they look? It simply isn't fair!'

Cloud's mind reached out and meshed with hers. 'Sure it is, sweetheart. They're beauties; you can't take that away from them ...'

And beauties they certainly were. Helen, as has been said, was lissom and dark. Her hair was black, her eyes a midnight blue, her skin a deep, golden brown. Barbara, not quite as tall —five feet seven, perhaps—was equally beautifully propor-

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tioned, and even more striking-looking. Her skin was tanned ivory, her eyes were gray, her hair was a shoulder-length, carefully-careless mass of gleaming, flowing, wavy silver.

'... they've got a lot of stuff: but believe me, there are several grand lots of stuff they haven't got, too. I wouldn't trade half of you for either of them—or both of them together.'

'I believe that—at least, about both of them,' Joan giggled mentally, 'but how many men ...' 'Well, how many men do you want?' Cloud interrupted. 'Touche, Storm ... but do you really ...' What would have developed into a scene of purely mental lovemaking was put to an end by the arrival of Joe Mackay, who also paused and made appropriate noises of appreciation.

'But there's one thing I don't quite like about this deal,' he said finally. 'I'm not too easy in my mind about making love to a moll who is packing a Mark Twenty Eight DeLameter. The darn thing might go off.'

'Keep your distance, then, Lieutenant Mackay!' Helen laughed. 'Well, are we ready?'

They were. They left the ship and walked in a group through the throng of cheering Vegians toward the nearby gaily-decorated stands in which the official greetings and thank-you's were to take place. Helen and Babs loved it; just as though they were parading finalists in a beauty contest. Bob and Joe wished that they had stayed in the ship and kept their clothes on. Joan didn't quite know whether she liked this kind of thing or not. Of the six Tellurians, only Neal Cloud had had enough experience in public near-nudity so that it made no difference. And Vesta?

Vesta was fairly reveling—openly, unashamedly reveling—in the spotlight with her Tellurian friends. They reached the center stand, were ushered with many flourishes to a reserved section already partly filled by Captain Ross and the lesser officers and crewmen of the good-will-touring Patrol ship Vortex Blaster II. Not all of the officers, of course, since many had to stay aboard, and comparatively few of the crew; for many men insist an wearing Tellurian garmenture and refuse to tan their hides under ultra-violet radiation—and no untanned white Tellurian skin can take with impunity more than a few minutes of giant Vega's blue-white fury. Of the ceremonies themselves, nothing need be said; such

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things being pretty much of a piece, wherever, whenever, of for whatever reason held. When they were over, Vesta gathered her six friends together and led them to the edge of the roped-off area. There she uttered a soundless (to Tellurian ears) whistle, whereupon a group of Vegian youths and girls formed a wedge around the seven and drove straight through the milling crowd to its edge. There, by an evidently pre-arranged miracle, they found enough copters to carry them all.

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16:  Vegian Justice

The nearer they got to the destination the more fidgety Vesta became. 'Oh, I hope Zambkptkn could get away and be there by now—I haven't seen him for over half a year!'

'Who?' Helen asked.

'My brother. Zamke, you'd better call him, you can pronounce that. The police officer, you know.'

'I thought you saw him this morning?' Joan said.

'I saw my other brothers and sisters, but not him—he was tied up on a job. He wasn't sure just when he could get away tonight."

The copter dropped sharply. Vesta seized Cloud's arm and pointed. 'That's where we're going; that big building with the landing-field on the roof. The Caravanzerie. Zee?' In moments of etnotion or excitement, most of Vesta's sibilants reverted to Z's.

'I see. And this is your Great White Way?'

It was, but it was not white. Instead, it was a blaze of red, blue, green, yellow—all the colors of the spectrum. And crowds! On foot, on bicycles, on scooters, motorbikes, and motortricyeles, in cars and in copters, it seemed impossible that anything could move in such a press as that. And as the air-cab approached its destination Neal Cloud, space-hardened veteran and skillful flyer though he was, found himself twisting wheels, stepping on pedals, and cutting in braking jets, none of which were there.

How that jockey landed his heap and got it into the air again all in one piece without dismembering a single Vegian, Cloud never did quite understand. Blades were scant fractional inches from blades and rotors; people were actually shoved aside by the tapering bumpers of the cab as it hit the deck; but nothing happened. This, it seemed, was normal!

The group re-formed and in flying-wedge fashion as before, gained the elevators and finally the ground floor and the ballroom. Here Cloud drew his first full breath for what seemed like hours. The ball-room was tremendous—and it was less than three-quarters filled.

Just inside the doorway Vesta paused, sniffing delicately. 'He is here—come on!' She beckoned the six to follow her and

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rushed ahead, to be met at the edge of the clear space in head-on collision. Brother and sister embraced fervently for about two seconds. Then, reaching down, the man broke his sister's grip and flipped her around sidewise, through half of a vertical circle, so that her feet pointed straight up. Then, with a sharp 'Blavzkt!' he snapped into a back flip.

'Blazkt—Zemp!' she shouted back, bending beautifully into such an arch that, as his feet left the floor, hers landed almost exactly where his had been an instant before. Then for a full minute and a half the joyous pair pinwheeled, without moving from the spot; while the dancers on the floor, standing still now, applauded enthusiastically with stamping, hand-clapping, whistles, cat-calls, and screams.

Vesta stopped the exhibition finally, and led her brother toward Cloud and Joan. The music resumed, but the dancers did not. Instead, they made a concerted rush for the visitors, surrounding them in circles a dozen deep. Vesta, with both arms wrapped tightly around Cloud and her tail around Joan, shrieked a highly consonantal sentence—which Cloud knew meant 'Lay off these two for a couple of minutes, you howling hyenas, they're mine'—then, switching to English: 'Go ahead, you four, and have fun!'

The first two men to lay hands on the two tall Tellurian beauties were, by common consent and without argument, their first partners. Two of the Vegian girls, however, were not so polite. Both had hold of Joe, one by each arm, and stood there spitting insults at each other past his face until a man standing near by snapped a few words at them and flipped a coin. The two girls, each still maintaining her grip, leaned over eagerly to see for themselves the result of the toss. The loser promptly relinquished her told on Joe and the winner danced away with him.

'Oh, this is wonderful, Storm!' Joan thought. 'We've been accepted—we're the first group I ever actually knew of to really break through the crust.'

The Vegians moved away. Vesta released her captives and turned to her brother.

'Captain Cloud, Doctor Janowick, I present to you my brother Zamke,' she said. Then, to her brother: 'They have been very good to me, Zambktpkn, both of them, but especially the captain. You know what he did for me.'

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'Yes, I know.' The brother spoke the English 'S' with barely a trace of hardness. He shook Cloud's hand firmly, then bent over the hand, spreading it out so that the palm covered his face, and inhaled deeply. Then, straightening up: 'For what you have done for my sister, sir, I thank you. As she has said, your scent is pleasing and will be remembered long, enshrined in the Place of Pleasant Odors of our house.'

Turning to Joan, and omitting the handshake, he repeated the performance and bowed—and when an adult male Vegian sets out to make a production of bowing, it is a production well worth seeing.

Then, with the suddenest and most complete change of manner either Cloud or Joan had ever seen he said: 'Well, now that the formalities have been taken care of, Joan, how about us hopping a couple of skips around the floor?'

Joan was taken slightly aback, but rallied quickly. 'Why, I'd love it ... but not knowing either the steps or the music, I'm afraid I couldn't follow you very well.'

'Oh that won't make any ...' Zamke began, but Vesta drowned him out.

'Of course it won't make any difference, Joan!' she exclaimed. 'Just go ahead and dance any way you want to. He'll match your steps—and if he so much as touches one of your slippers with his big, fat feet, I'll choke him to death with his own tail!'

'And I suppose it is irrefutable that you can and will dance with me with equal dexterity, aplomb, and insouciance?' Cloud asked Vesta, quizzically, after Joan and Zamke had glided smoothly out into the throng.

'You zaid it, little chum!' Vesta exclaimed, gleefully, 'And I know what all those words mean, too, and if I ztep on either one of your feet I'll choke my zelf to death with my own tail, zo there!'

Snuggling up to him blissfully, Vesta let him lead her into the crowd. She of course was a superb dancer; so much so that she made him think himself a much better dancer than he really was. After a few minutes, when he was beginning to relax, he felt an itchy, tickling touch—something almost impalpable was creeping up his naked back—the fine, soft fur of the extreme tip of Vesta's ubiquitous tail!

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He grabbed for it, but, fast as he was, Vesta was faster, and she shrieked with glee as he missed the snatch.

'See here, young lady,' he said, with mock sternness, 'if you don't keep your tail where it belongs I'm going to wrap it around your lovely neck and tie it into a bow-knot.'

Vesta sobered instantly. 'Oh ... do you really think I'm lovely, Captain Nealcloud—my neck, I mean?'

'No doubt about it,' Cloud declared. 'Not only your neck— all of you. You are most certainly one of the most beautiful things I ever saw.'

'Oh, thanks ... I hadn't ...' she stared into his eyes for moments, as if trying to decide whether he really meant it or was merely being polite; then, deciding that he did mean it, she closed her eyes, let her head sink down onto his shoulder, and began to purr blissfully; still matching perfectly whatever motions he chose to make.

In a few minutes, however, they heard a partially-stifled shriek and a soprano voice, struggling with laughter, rang out.

'Vesta!'

'Yes,Babs?'

'What do you do about this tail-tickling business? I never had to cope with anything like that before!'

'Bite him!' Vesta called back, loudly enough for half the room to hear. 'Bite him good and hard, on the end of the tail, if you can't catch the tail, bite his ear. Bite it good.'

'Bite him? Why, I couldn't—not possibly/'

'Well, then give him the knee, or clout him a good, solid tunk on the nose. Or better yet; tell him you won't dance with him any more—he'll be good.'

'Now you tell us what to do about tail-ticklers,' Cloud said then. 'S'pose I'd take a good bite at your ear?'

Td bite you right back,' said Vesta, gleefully, 'and I bet you'd taste just as nice as you smell.'

The dance went on, and Cloud finally, by the aid of both Vesta and Zamke, did finally manage to get one dance with Joan. And, as he had known he would, he enjoyed it immensely. So did she.

'Having fun, chum? I never saw you looking so starry-eyed before.'

'Oh, brother!' she breathed. 'To say that I was never the belle of the ball in my schooldays is the understatement of the

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century, but here ... can you imagine it, Storm, me actually outshining Barbara Benton and Helen Worthington both at once?'

'Sure I can. I told you ...'

'Of course it's probably because their own women are so big that I'm a sort of curiosity,' she rushed on, 'but whatever the reason, this dance is going down in my memory book in great big letters in the reddest ink I can find!'

'Good for you—hail the conquering heroine!' he applauded. 'It'll do you good to have your ego inflated a little. But what do you do about this tail-tickling routine?'

'Oh, I grab their tails'—with her sense of perception she could, of course—'and when they try to wiggle them free I wiggle back at them, like this,' she demonstrated, 'and we have a perfectly wonderful time.'

'Wow! I'll bet you do—and when I get you home, you shameless..."

'Sorry, Storm, my friend,' the big Vegian who cut in wasn't sorry at all, and he and Cloud both knew it. 'You can dance with Joan any time and we can't. So loosen all clamps, friend. Grab him, Vzelkt!'

Vzelkt grabbed. So, in about a minute, did another Vegian girl; and then after a few more minutes, it was Vesta's turn again. No other girl could dance with him more than once, but Vesta, by some prearranged priority, could have him once every ten minutes.

'Where's your brother, Vesta?' he asked once. 'I haven't seen him for an hour.'

'Oh, he had to go back to the police station. They're all excited and working all hours. They're chasing Public Enemy Number One—a Tellurian, they think he is, named Fairchild— why?' as Cloud started, involuntarily, in the circle of her arm. 'Do you know him?'

'I know of him, and that's enough.' Then, in thought: 'Did you get that, Nordquist?'

'I got it.' Cloud was, as the Lensman had said that he would be, under surveillance every second. 'Of course, this one may not be Fairchild, since there are three or four other suspects in other places, but from the horrible time we and the Vegians both are having, trying to locate this bird, I'm coming to think he is.'

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The dance went on until, some hours later, there was an unusual tumult and confusion at the door.

'Oh, the police are calling Vesta—something has happened!' his companion exclaimed. 'Let's rush over—oh, hurry!'

Cloud hurried; but, as well as hurrying, he sent his sense of perception on ahead, and meshed his mind imperceptibly with Vesta's as well.

Her mind was a queerly turbid, violently turbulent mixture of emotions: hot with a furiously passionate lust for personal, tooth-and-claw revenge; at the same time icily cold with the implacable, unswervable resolve of the dedicated, remorseless, and merciless killer.

'Are you sure, beyond all doubt, that this is the garment of my brother's slayer?' Vesta was demanding.

'I am sure,' the Vegian policeman replied. 'Not only did Zambkptkn hold it pierced by the first and fourth fingers of his left hand—the sign positive, as you know—but an eyewitness verified the scent and furnished descriptions. The slayer was dressed as an Aldebaranian, which accounts for the size of the garment your brother could seize before he died; his four bodyguards as Tellurians, with leather belts and holsters for their blasters.'

'QX.' Vesta accepted a pair of offered shears and began to cut off tiny pieces of the cloth. As each piece began to fall it was seized in mid-air by a Vegian man or girl who immediately ran away with it. And in the meantime other Vegians, forming into a long line, ran past Vesta, each taking a quick sniff and running on, out into the street. Cloud, reaching outside the building with his perceptors, saw that all vehicular traffic had paused. A Vegian stood on the walk-way, holding a bit of cloth pinched between thumb and finger-nail. All passersby, on foot or in any kind of vehicle, would pause, sniff at the cloth, and—apparently —go on about their business.

But Cloud, after reading Vesta's mind and the policeman's, turned as white as his space-tan would permit. In less than an hour almost every Vegian in that city of over eight million would know the murderer by scent and would be sniffing eagerly for him; and when any one of them did find him ...

Except for the two Vegians and the six Tellurians, the vast hall was now empty. Vesta was holding a pose Cloud had never

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before seen—stiffly erect, with her tail wrapped tightly around her body.

'Can they get a scent—a reliable scent, I mean—that fast?' Cloud asked.

'Zertainly,' Vesta's voice was cold, level, almost uninfleeted. 'How long would it take you to learn that an egg you started to eat was rotten? The man who wore this shirt is a class A Triple Prime stinker—his odor is recognizable instantly and anywhere.'

'But as to the rest of it—don't do this thing, Vesta! Let the law handle it.'

'The law comes second. He killed my brother; it is my right and my privilege to kill him ...'

Cloud became conscious of the fact that Joan was in his mind. 'You been here all along?' he flashed.

'In or near. You and I are one, you know,' and Vesta's voice went on:

'... and besides, the law is merciful. Its death is instant. Under my claws and teeth he will live for hours—for a full day, I hope.'

'But officer, can't you do something?'

'Nothing. The law comes second. As she has said, it is her right and her privilege.'

'But it's suicide, man—sheer suicide. You know that, don't you?'

'Not necessarily. She will not be working alone. Whether she lives or dies, however, it is still her right and her privilege.'

Cloud switched to thought. 'Nordquist, you can stop this if you want to. Do it.'

'I can't, and you know I can't. The Patrol does not and cannot interfere in purely planetary affairs.'

'You intend, then,' Cloud demanded furiously, 'to let this girl put her naked hands and teeth up against four trigger-happy gunnies with DeLameters?'

'Just that. There's nothing else I or any other Patrolman can do. To interfere in this one instance would alienate half the planets of Civilization and set the Patrol back five hundred years.'

'Well, even though I'm a Patrolman—of sorts—/ can do something about it!' Cloud blazed, 'and by God, I will!'

'We will, you mean, and we will, too.' Joan's thought came

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forcibly at first, then became dubious:   'That is, if it doesn't mean getting you blasted, too.'

'Just what?' Nordquist's thought was sharp. 'Oh, I see ... and, being a Vegian, as well as a Patrolman, and the acknowledged friend of both the dead man and his sister ...'

'Who's a Vegian?' Cloud demanded.

'You are, and so are the other five of your group, as you would have been informed if the party had not been broken up so violently. Honorary Vegians, for life."

'Why, I never heard of such a thing!' Joan exclaimed, 'and I studied them for years!'

"No, you never did,' Nordquist agreed. 'There haven't been many honorary Vegians, and to my certain knowledge, not one of them has ever talked. Vegians are very strongly pyschic in picking their off-world friends.'

'You mean to tell me that that bleached blonde over there won't spill everything she knows fifteen minutes after we leave here?' Cloud demanded.

'Just that. You can't judge character by hair, even if it were bleached, which it isn't. You owe her an apology, Storm."

'If you say so, I do, and I hereby apologize, but...'

'But to get back to the subject,' the Lensman went on, narrowing his thought down so sharply as to exclude Joan, 'You can do something. You're the only one who can. Such being the case, and since you are no longer indispensable, I withdraw all objections. Go ahead.'

Cloud started a thought, but Joan blanked him out. 'Lensman, has Storm been sending—can he send information to you that 7 can't dig out of his mind ?'

'Very easily. He is an exceptionally fine tuner.'

'I'm sorry, Joanie,' Cloud thought, hastily, 'but it sounded too much like bragging to let you in on. However, you're in from now on.'

Then, aloud, 'Vesta, I'm staying with you,' he said, quietly.

'I was sure you would,' she said, as quietly. "You are my friend and Zamke's. Although your customs are not exactly like ours, a man of your odor does not desert his friends.'

Cloud turned then to the four lieutenants, who stood close-grouped. 'Will you four kids please go back to the ship, and take Joan with you?"

'Not on Thursdays, Storm,' Joe said, pointing to an incon-

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spicuous bronze button set into a shoulder-strap. "We both rate Blaster Expert First. Count us in,' and Bob added:

'Joan has been telling us an earful, and what she didn't tell us a couple of Vegian boys did, The Three Honorary Vegian Musketeers; that's us. Lead on, d'Artagnan!' 'Bob and Joe are staying, too, Vesta.' Cloud said then. 'Of course. I'm sorry I didn't tell you myself about being adopted, but  I knew  somebody would.  But you, Joan and Barbara and Helen, you three had better go back to the ship. You can be of no use here.'

Two of them were willing enough to go, but: 'Where Neal Cloud goes, I go,' Joan said, and there was no doubt whatever that she meant exactly that.

'Why?' Vesta demanded. 'Commander Cloud, the fastest gunman in all space, is necessary for the success of this our mission. He can, from a cold, bell-tone start, at thirty yards, burn the centers out of six irregularly-spaced targets ...'

'Nordquist! Lay off! What in hell do you think you're doing?' Cloud thought, viciously.

'I don't think—I know' came instant reply. 'Do you want her hanging on your left arm when the blasting starts? This is the only possible way Joan Janowick can be handled. Lay off yourself!' and Vesta's voice went calmly on:

'... in exactly two hundred and forty nine mils. Lieutenant Mackay and Lieutenant Ingalls, although perhaps not absolutely necessary, are highly desirable. They are fast enough, and are of deadly accuracy. When either of them shoots a man in a crowd, however large, that one man dies, and not a dozen bystanders. Now just what good would you be, Lieutenant-Commander Janowick? Can you fire a blaster with any one of these men? Or bite a man's throat out with me?'

For probably the first time in her life, Joan Janowick stood mute.

'And suppose you do come along,' Vesta continued relentlessly. 'With you at his side, in the line of fire, do you suppose ...'

'Just a minute—shut up, Vesta!' Cloud ordered, roughly. 'Listen, all of you. The Lensman is doing this, not Vesta, and I'll be damned if I'll let anybody, not even a Lensman, bedevil my Joan this way. So, Joan, wherever we go, you can come along. All I ask is, you'll keep a little ways back?'

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'Of course I will, Storm,' and Joan crept into the shelter of his arm.

'Ha—I thought you'd pop off at about this point,' Nordquist's thought came chattily into Cloud's mind. 'Good work, my boy; you've consolidated your position no end.'

'Well, what do we do now?' Joe Mackay broke the somewhat sticky silence that followed.

'We wait," Vesta said, calmly. 'We wait right here until we receive news.'

They waited; and, as they waited the tension mounted and mounted. Before it became intolerable, however, the news came in, and Cloud, reading Vesta's mind as the ultra-sonic information was received, relayed it to other Tellurians. The murderer and his four bodyguards were at that moment entering a theater less than one city block away ...

'Why, they couldn't be!' Helen protested. 'Nobody could be that stupid ... or ... I wonder ...?'

'I wonder, too.' This from Joan. "Yes, it would be the supremely clever thing to do; the perfect place to hide for a few hours while the worst of the storm blows over and they can complete their planned getaway. Provided, of course, they're out-worlders and thus don't know what we Vegians can do with our wonderful sense of smell. Of course they aren't an Aldebarian and four Tellurians any more, are they?'

'No, they are five Centralians now. Perfectly innocent. They think their blasters are completely hidden under those long over shins, but now and again a bulge shows—they've still got blasters on their hips. The theater's crowded, but the five friends want to sit together. The manager thinks it could be arranged, by paying a small gratuity to a few seat holders who would like to make a fast credit that way ... he'll place them and it's almost time for us to go. 'Bye, Joanie—stay back, remember !' and she was in his arms.

'How about it, Helen?' Joe asked. 'Surely you're going to kiss your Porthos goodbye, aren't you?'

'Of a surety, m'enfant!' she exclaimed, and did so with enthusiasm. 'But it's more like Aramis, I think—he kissed everybody, you know—and since I'm not hooked like Joan is—yet— don't think that this is establishing a precedent.'

'Well, Babs, that leaves you and me.' Bob reached out—she was standing beside him—and pulled her close. 'QX ?'

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'Why, I ... I guess so.' Barbara blushed furiously. "But Bob ... is it really dangerous?' she whispered.

'I don't know. Not very, really, I don't think. At least I certainly hope not. But blasters are not cap-pistols, you know, and whenever one goes off it can raise pure hell. Why? Would you really miss me?'

'You know I would, Bob,' and her kiss had more fervor than either she or he would have believed possible a few minutes before. And at its end she laughed, shakily, and blushed again as she said, 'I've got sort of used to having you around, so be sure and come back.'

They left the building and walked rapidly along a strangely quiet street to the theater. Without a word they were ushered up a short flight of stairs.

'Hold up, Vesta!' Cloud thought sharply. 'We can't see a thing—wait a couple of minutes.'

They waited five minutes, during which time they learned exactly where the enemy were and discussed every detail of the proposed attack.

'I still can't see well enough to shoot,' Cloud said then. 'Can they give us a little glow of light?'

They could. By almost imperceptible increments the thick, soft blackness was relieved.

'That's enough.' The light, such as it was, steadied. 'Ready?' Vesta's voice was a savage growl, low, deep in her throat. 'Ready.'

'No more noise, then.'

They walked forward to the balcony's edge, leaned over it, looked down. Directly beneath Vesta's head was seated a man in Centralian garb; four others were behind, in front of, and at each side of, their chief.

'Now!' Vesta yelled, and flung herself over the low railing. At her shout four Vegians ripped four Centralian shirts apart, seized four hip-holstered blasters, and shouted with glee—but they shouted too soon. For the real gun-slick, then as now, did not work from the hip, but out of his sleeve; and these were four of the coldest, fastest killers to be found throughout the far flung empire of Boskone. Thus, all four flashed into action even before they began rising to their feet.

But so did Storm Cloud; and his heavy weapon was already

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out and ready. He knew what those hands were doing, in the instant of their starting to do it, and his DeLameter flamed three times in what was practically one very short blast. He had to move a little before he could sight on the fourth guard—Vesta's furiously active body was in the way—so Joe and Bob each got a shot, too. Three bolts of lightning hit that luckless wight at once, literally cremating him in air as he half-crouched, bringing his blaster to bear on the catapulting thing attacking his boss.

When Vesta went over the rail she did not jump to the floor below. Instead, her hands locked on the edge; her feet dug into the latticework of the apron. She squatted. Her tail flashed down, wrapping itself twice around the zwilnik's neck. She heaved, then, and climbed with everything she had; and as she stood upright on the railing, eager hands reached down to help her tail lift its burden up into the balcony. The man struck the floor with a thud and Vesta jumped at him.

'Your fingers first—one at a time,' she snarled; and, seizing a hand, she brought it toward her mouth.

She paused then as if thunderstruck; a dazed, incredulous expression spreading over her face. Bending over, she felt, curiously, tenderly, of his neck.

'Why, he ... he's dead!' she gasped. 'His neck ... it's ... it's broken! From such a little, tiny pull as that? Why, anybody ought to have a stronger neck than that!'

She straightened up; then, as a crowd of Vegians and the Tellurian women came up, she became instantly her old, gay self. 'Well, shall we all go back and finish our dance?' 'What?' Cloud demanded. 'After this?'

'Why certainly,' Vesta said, brightly. 'I'm sorry, of course, that I killed him so quickly, but it doesn't make any real difference. Zamke is avenged; he can now enjoy himself. We'll join him in a few years, more or less. Until then, what would you do? What you call "mourn"?'

'I don't know ... I simply don't know,' Cloud said, slowly, his arm tightening around Joan's supple waist. 'I thought I'd seen everything, but ... I suppse you can have somebody take that body out to the ship, so they can check it for identity?'

'Oh, yes. I'll do that. Right away. You're sure you don't want to dance any more?'

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'Very sure, my dear. Very sure. All / want to do is take Joan back to the ship.'

'QX I won't see you again this trip, then; your hours are so funny. I'll send for my things. And I won't say good-bye, Captain Nealcloud and you other wonderful people, because we'll see each other again, soon and often. Just so-long, and thanks tremendously for all you have done for me.'

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

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17:  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 sparced 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 puposes, 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 an 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 fine-tooth,' 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?'

'Touche, 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

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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 racing through her mind. And, one layer down, she was wishing she were old enough to be a newly-wed; 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?

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Then   Thlaskan  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 telephathic 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 you 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, / know, whether you do or not.'

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'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, and 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.' The close-linked minds linked themselves with the two already so closely linked. Each of the two visitors was

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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 /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

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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 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 van-Buskirk 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 sytem, 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 ourslves, 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

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__«.~miS 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. 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.'

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 foothold. 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?'

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'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 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

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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—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

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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.'

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18: Cahuita

On the planet Cahuita, unreckonable years before this story opens, an entity brooded.

This entity, Medury by symbol, was not even vaguely manlike; 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' 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 on 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* it had passed. While entirely gaseous, the planet would stay comfortably warm for a long

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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*, businesses*, commerce*, and industry* 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 into 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

* The reader will please understand that I am doing the best I can with words we all know. E.E.S.

rss

BC/

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 raging 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?'

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'Let's look at the infra-red and the ultra-violet. I've often wondered what colours 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 pan in the symbols of language, into usefully assimilable information.

And, such was the power of that fusion, it succeeded.

Then up and up the scale of thought the fused minds went;

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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 gripped 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

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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?'

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'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.'

191

'Cloud. Mission accomplished. Return to Tellus, please, at full touring blast." 'Very well, sir.' And 'Storm' Cloud, Vortex Blaster, was out of a job.

'\

X

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