‘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.’