larger matters your further development is in your own hands.”
Kathryn shivered. “I realize that, and it scares me clear through . . . especially
this coming conflict, at which you hint so vaguely. I wish you’d tell me at least something
about it, so I can get ready for it!”
“Daughter, I can’t.” For the first time in Kathryn’s experience, Mentor the Arisian
was unsure. “It is certain that we have been on time; but since the Eddorians have
minds of power little if any inferior to our own, there are many details which we cannot
derive with certainty, and to advise you wrongly would be to do you irreparable harm. All
I can say is that sufficient warning will be given by your learning, with no specific effort
on your part and from some source other than myself, that there does in fact exist a
planet named ‘Floor*—a name which to you is now only a meaningless symbol. Go
now, daughter Kathryn, and work.”
Kathryn went; knowing that the Arisian had said all that he would say. In truth, he
had told her vastly more than she had expected him to divulge; and it chilled her to the
marrow to think that she, who had always looked up to the Arisians as demi-gods of
sorts, would from now on be expected to act as their equal—in some ways, perhaps, as
their superior! As her speedster tore through space toward distant Klovia she wrestled
with herself, trying to shake her new self down into a personality as well integrated as
her old one had been. She had not quite succeeded when she felt a thought.
“Help! I am in difficulty with this, my ship. Will any entity receiving my call and
possessing the tools of a mechanic please come to my assistance? Or, lacking such
tools, possessing a vessel of power sufficient to tow mine to the place where I must
immediately go?”
Kathryn was startled out of her introspective trance. That thought was on a
terrifically high band; one so high that she knew of no race using it, so high that an
ordinary human mind could not possibly have either sent or received it. Its phraseology,
while peculiar, was utterly precise in definition —the mind behind it was certainly of
precisionist grade. She, acknowledged upon the stranger’s wave, and sent out a locator.
Good—he wasn’t far ‘away. She flashed toward the derelict, matched intrinsics at a safe
distance, and began scanning, only to encounter a spy-ray block around the whole
vessel! To her it was porous enough—but if the creature thought that his screen was
tight, let him keep on thinking so. It was his move.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” The thought fairly snapped. “Come close, so
that I may bring you in.”
“Not yet,” Kathryn snapped back. “Cut your block so that I can see what you are
like. I carry equipment for many environments, but I must know what yours is and equip
for it before I can come aboard. You will note that my screens are down.”
“Of course. Excuse me—I supposed that you were one of our own”—there came
the thought of an unspellable and unpronounceable name—”since none of the lower
orders can receive our thoughts direct. Can you equip yourself to come aboard with
your tools?”
“Yes.” The stranger’s light was fierce stuff; ninety-eight percent of its energy
being beyond the visible. His lamps were beam-held atomics, nothing less: but there
was very little gamma and few neutrons. She could handle it easily enough, she
decided, as she finished donning her heat-armor and a helmet of practically opaque,
diamond-hard plastic.
As she was wafted gently across the intervening space upon a pencil of force,
Kathryn took her first good look at the precisionist himself—or herself. She—it—looked
something like a Dhilian, she thought at first. There was a squat, powerful, elephantine
body with its four stocky legs; the tremendous double shoulders and enormous arms;
the domed, almost immobile head. But there the resemblance ended. There was only
one head—the thinking head, and that one had no eyes and was not covered with bone.
There was no feeding head—the thing could neither eat nor breathe. There was no
trunk. And what a skin!
It was worse than a hide, really—worse even than a Martian’s. The girl had never
seen anything like it. It was incredibly thick, dry, pliable; filled minutely with cells of a
liquid-gaseous something which she knew to be a more perfect insulator even than the
fibres of the tegument itself.
“R-T-S-L-Q-P.” She classified the creature readily enough to six places, then
stopped and wrinkled her forehead. “Seventh place—that incredible skin—what? S? R?
T? It would have to be R . . .
“You have the requisite tools, I perceive,” the creature greeted Kathryn as she
entered the central compartment of the strange speedster, no larger than her own. “I
can tell you what to do, if . . .”
“I know what to do.” She unbolted the cover, worked deftly with wrenches and
cable and splicer and torch, and in ten minutes was done. “It doesn’t make sense that a
person of your obvious intelligence, manifestly knowing enough to make such minor
repairs yourself, would go so far from home, alone in such a small ship, without any
tools. Burnouts and shorts are apt to happen any time, you know.”
“Not in the vessels of the . . .” Again Kathryn felt that unpronounceable symbol.
She also felt the stranger stiffen in offended dignity. “We of the higher orders, you
should know, do not perform labor. We think. We direct. Others work, and do their work
well, or suffer accordingly. This is the first time in nine full four-cycle periods that such a
thing has happened, and it will be the last. The punishment which I shall mete out to the
guilty mechanic will ensure that. I shall, at end, have his life.”
“Oh, come, now!” Kathryn protested. “Surely it’s no life-and-death mat. . .”
“Silence!” came curt command. “It is intolerable that one of the lower orders
should attempt to . . .”
“Silence yourself!” At the fierce power of the riposte the creature winced,
physically and mentally. “I did this bit of dirty work for you because you apparently
couldn’t do it for yourself. I did not object to the matter-of-course way you accepted it,
because some races are made that way and can’t help it. But if you insist on keeping
yourself placed five rungs above me on any ladder you can think of, I’ll stop being a
lady—or even a good Girl Scout—and start doing things about it, and I’ll start at any
signal you care to call. Get ready, and say when!”
The stranger, taken fully aback, threw out a lightning tentacle of thought; a feeler
which was stopped cold a full foot from the girl’s radiant armor. This was a human
female— or was it? It was not. No human being had ever had, or ever would have, a
mind like that. Therefore:
“I have made a grave error,” the thing apologized handsomely, “in thinking that
you are not at least my equal. Will you grant me pardon, please?”
“Certainly—if you don’t repeat it. But I still don’t like the idea of your torturing a
mechanic for a thing . . .” She thought intensely, lip caught between white teeth.
“Perhaps there’s a way. Where are you going, and when do you want to get there?”
‘To my home planet,” pointing out mentally its location in the galaxy. “I must be
there in two hundred G-P hours.”
“I see.” Kathryn nodded her head. “You can—if you promise not to harm him.
And I can tell whether you really mean it or not.”
“As I promise, so I do. But in case I do not promise?”
“In that case you’ll get there in about a hundred thousand G-P years, frozen stiff.
For I shall fuse your Bergenholm down into a lump; then, after welding your ports to the
shell, I’ll mount a thought-screen generator outside, powered for seven hundred years.
Promise, or that. Which?”
“I promise not to harm the mechanic in any way.” He surrendered stiffly, and
made no protest at Kathryn’s entrance into his mind to make sure that the promise
would be kept.
Flushed by her easy conquest of a mind she would previously have been unable
to touch, and engrossed in the problem of setting her own tremendously enlarged mind
to rights, why should it have occurred to the girl that there was anything worthy of
investigation concealed in the depths of that chance-met stranger’s mentality?
Returning to her own speedster, she shed her armor and shot away; and it was
just as well for her peace of mind that she was not aware of the tight-beamed thought
even then speeding from the flitter so far behind her to dread and distant Floor.
“. . . but it was very definitely not a human female. I could not touch it. It may very