Part 3 (1/2)
”Okay. I'll give it the good old college try.”
He tried it. He tried over and over again. For half an hour he put everything he had into the effort. Then, coming out of his near-trance, he wiped his sweating face and said, ”I can't swing it alone, pet. There must be some way for you to show me how the d.a.m.n thing goes-if I've got what it takes.”
”Of course you have!” she snapped. ”Don't think for a single second you haven't-I know you have, I tell you!” ”If you know it, it's so and I believe it. But the question still is-how? But say, you can read my mind, can't you?”
Her eyes widened. ”Why, I don't know. I never tried to, of course... but what good would that do?”
”Just a hunch. With that close a contact, maybe some of your knowledge will rub off onto me. Especially if you push.”
”I'll push, all right; but remember, no resistance. With such a chilled-steel mind as yours, nothing could get through.”
”No resistance. Just the opposite. I'll pull you in with every tractor I can bring to bear. Across a table?” ”Uh-uh, this is better. Closer.”
They gripped hands and stared into each other's eyes. For a long two minutes nothing happened; then Barbara broke contact. ”I got a little,” she said. ”You were fighting with a boy twice your size. A red-haired boy with a lot of freckles.”
”Huh? Spike McGonigle-that was twelve or fifteen years ago and I haven't thought of the guy since! But I got something, too. You were at a party, wearing a red dress cut down to here and emerald ear-rings. You put a slightly pie-eyed chicken colonel flat on his face because be wouldn't take no' for an answer.”
”Not on his face, surely... oh, yes, I remember. But this isn't what we wanted, at all. However, it's something; so let's keep on with it, shall we?”
They kept it up until bed-time, and went at it again immediately after breakfast next morning. Progress was maddeningly slow, but it was progress. Progress marked by a succession of stabbing, fleeting pains, each of which was followed by the opening of an entire vista of one-ness. They (lid not complete the operation that day, or in three more, or in a week; but finally, the last vista opened, they sat for minutes in what was neither ecstasy nor consternation, but something having the prime elements of both. For full mental rapport is the ultimate intimacy; more intimate by far than any other union possible.
Barbara licked her bloodless lips and said, not in words but purely in thought, ”Oh, Carl! So this is what telepathy really is!”
”Must be.” He was not speaking aloud, either. ”What the people who talk about telepathy don't know about it!” ”Oh, this is wonderful! But it isn't what we were after at all.”
”But it may very well be a prerequisite, hon. I won't be just watching you do it now; we'll be doing it as one. So break out your bottle of crude oil.”
”Oh, that won't be necessary. I know oil so well that we won't need a sample, not even a map. Look-it goes like this... see?”
”See! Listen, Bobby. How could anybody ever learn such an incredibly complex technique as that all by himself? How did you ever learn it?”
”Looked at that way... I guess maybe I didn't. I must have been born with it.”
”'That makes sense. Now let's link up and take that copper atom apart clear down to whatever makes up its theta, mu, and pi mesons.”
But they didn't. Much to the dismayed surprise of both, their combined attack was no more effective than Deston's alone had been. He frowned at the sample in thought, then said, ”Okay. The thing's beginning to make sense.”
”What sense?” she demanded. ”Not to me, it isn't. Is this another of your hunches?”
”No. Logic. I'm not sure yet, but one more test and I will be. Water. You won't need a sample?”
”No more than with oil. It's just about the same technique. Like this... there. But it doesn't get me anywhere. Does it you?”
”Definitely. Look, Bobby. Water, gas, oil, and coal. Oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. Oxygen, the highest, is atomic number eight. Maybe you can-what'll we call it? Handle'?-handle the lower elements, but not the higher ones. So maybe both of us together can handle 'em all. If this hypothesis is valid, you already know helium, lithium, beryllium...”
”Wait up!” she broke in. ”I wouldn't recognize any one of them if it should stop me on the street and say h.e.l.lo.”
”You just think you wouldn't. How about boron, as in boric acid? Eve-wash, to you?”
Her mind flashed to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. ”I do know it, at that. I've never handled it, but I can.”
”Nice. How about sodium, as in common salt?” ”Can do.”
”Chlorine, the other half of salt?”
”That hurt a little-took a little time,-but I made it” ”Fine! The hypothesis begins to look good. Now we'll tackle calcium together. In bones-my thick skull, for instance.”
”Ouch! That really hurt, Carl. And you did it. I couldn't have, possibly, but I followed you in and I know it now. But golly, it felt like... like it was stretching my brain all out of shape. Like giving birth to a child, something. I told you you're stronger than I am, Carl, but I want to learn it all. So go right ahead, but take it a little slower, please.”
”Slow it is, sweetheart,” and they went ahead.
And in a couple of days they could handle as the elements of the periodic table.
Then and only then did they go back to what they had started out to do. Seated side by side, each grasping the short length of metal, they stared at the blueprint and allowed-or, rather, impelled-their perception to pervade the entire volume of the house.
”We've got it!” Deston yelled, aloud. ”It is a new sense-a sixth sense-and what a sense!”
They could see-sense-perceive-every bit of copper in, under, and around the building; the network of tubes and pipes stood out like the blood-vessels in a plastic model of the human body. While the metal was not transparent in the optical sense, they could perceive in detail the outside, the inside, and the ultimately fine structure of the material of each component part of the whole gas-and-water-supply installation.
”Oh, you did it, Carl!”
”We did it-whatever it is. But I can do it alone now; I know exactly how it goes. This is really terrific stuff.” He lost himself in thought, then went on, ”And the cardinal principle of semantics is that the map is not the territory. Let's go in the library, roll out the big globe of Newmars, and give this planet a going-over like no world ever got before.
”Oh, that'll be fun! Let's!”
”And you wouldn't, by any chance, just happen to have samples of uranium oxide, pitchblende, and so forth, on hand, would you?”
”Not by chance, no. I done it on purpose. Here they are.”
There is no need to go into detail as to the exact fas.h.i.+on in which they explored the enormous volume of the planet, or as to exactly what they found. It is enough to say that they learned; and that, having learned, the techniques became almost automatic and the work itself became comparatively easy.
The next morning Deston made another suggestion. ”Bobby, what do you say about seeing what we can do with that forty-eight-inch globe of Tellus?”
”Tellus! Light-years and light-years from here? Are you completely out of your mind?”
”Maybe I'm a little mad with power, but listen. If the map actually is the territory it's scale that counts, not distance. It's inconceivable, of course, that there isn't a limit somewhere-but where is it? I've got an urge to spread our wings a little.”
”A highly laudable objective, I'd say, but IT bet you a cookie that Tellus is 'way beyond that limit. Drag out the globe... ah, there you are, sweet mother world of the race! Now watch out, Mom; ready or not, here we come!”
They went; and when they found out that they could scan and a.n.a.lyze the entire volume of Earth, mile by plotted cubic mile, as easily and as completely as they could that of Newmars on whose surface they were, they stared at each other, appalled.
”Well... I... that is...” Barbara licked her lips and gulped. ”I owe you a cookie, I guess, Carl.”
”Yeah.” But Deston was not thinking of cookies. ”That tears it. It really does. Wide open. Rips it up and down and sideways.”
”It does for a fact. But it makes the objective even more laudable than ever, I'd say. How do you think we should go about it?”