Part 21 (1/2)
”Yes. Tell 'em I said so.”
Tuly scanned. ”Yes, sir, we should have all three.”
”Get 'em, Larry.” Then, in the pause that followed: ”Sandy, remember yowling about too many sweeties on a team? What do you think of this business of all sweeties?”
”All that proves is that n.o.body can be wrong all the time,” she replied flippantly.
The three men arrived and were instructed. Tuly said: ”The great trouble is that each of you must use a portion of your mind that you do not know you have. You, this one. You, that one.” Tuly probed mercilessly; so poignantly that each in turn flinched under brand-new and almost unbearable pain. ”With you, Doctor Hilton, it will be by far the worst.
For you must learn to use almost all the portions of both your minds, the conscious and the unconscious. This must be, because you are the actual peyondixer. The others merely supply energies in which you yourself are deficient. Are you ready for a terrible shock, sir?”
”Shoot.”
He thought for a second that he _had_ been shot; that his brain had blown up.
He couldn't stand it--he _knew_ he was going to die--he wished he _could_ die--anything, anything whatever, to end this unbearable agony....
It ended.
Writhing, white and sweating, Hilton opened his eyes. ”Ouch,” he remarked, conversationally. ”What next?”
”You will seize hold of the energies your friends offer. You will bind them to yours and shape the whole into a dimensionless sphere of pure controlled, dirigible energy. And, as well as being the binding force, the cohesiveness, you must also be the captain and the pilot and the astrogator and the ultimately complex computer itself.”
”But how can I.... Okay, d.a.m.n it. I _will_!”
”Of course you will, sir. Remember also that once the joinings are made I can be of very little more a.s.sistance, for my peyondix is as nothing compared to that of your fusion of eight. Now, to a.s.semble the energies and join them you will, all together, deny the existence of the sum total of reality as you know it. Distance does not exist--every point in the reachable universe coincides with every other point and that common point is the focus of your attention. You can be and actually are anywhere you please or everywhere at once. Time does not exist. s.p.a.ce does not exist. There is no such thing as opacity; everything is perfectly transparent, yet every molecule of substance is perceptible in its relations.h.i.+p to every other molecule in the cosmos. Senses do not exist. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, sathura, endovix--all are parts of the one great sense of peyondix. I am guiding each of you seven--closer! Tighter! There! Seize it, sir--and when you work the Stretts you must fix it clearly that time does not exist. You must work in millionths of microseconds instead of in minutes, for they have minds of tremendous power. Reality does not exist! Compress it more, sir.
Tighter! Smaller! Rounder! There! Hold it! Reality does not exist--distance does not exist--all possible points are....
_Wonderful!_”
Tuly screamed the word and the thought: ”Good-by! Good luck!”
END OF PART ONE
PART TWO
They were the Masters, and they had only to choose: eternal life, as inhuman monsters--or death!
MASTERS OF s.p.a.cE
BY EDWARD E. SMITH & E. EVERETT EVANS