The Vortex Blaster
Page 22
“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 part in the symbols of language, into usefully assimilable information.
And, such was the power of that fusion, it succeeded.
Then up and up and up the scale of thought the fused minds went; 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 gripping 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 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 millenia 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?”
“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.”
“Cloud. Mission accomplished. Return to Tellus, please, at full touring blast.”
“Very well, sir.”
And “Storm” Cloud, Vortex Blaster, was out of a job.
The End
1 For the explanation of these somewhat peculiar facts, which is too long to go into here, the student is referred to Transactions of the Planetographical Society; Vol. 283, No. 11, P. 2745. EES
2 Rough locations are expressed
in degrees of galactic longitude and hundredths of the distance from Centralis to the Arbitrary Rim of the galaxy. This convention ignores the galaxy’s thickness and is used only in first approximations. EES
3 A few months later, Joan did send him the full game, which white of course won. Thlasoval studied it in secret for over five years; and then, deciding correctly that he never would be able to understand its terrifically complex strategy, he destroyed the tape. It is perhaps superfluous to add that this game was never published. EES
4 The reader will please understand that I am doing the best I can with words we all know. EES