snooper?”
‘You must learn how to concentrate—intensively and in a very special way. You’re very good at ordinary concentration—
especially mathematical stuff—now; but this kind is different— so much so as to be a difference in kind, not merely of degree.’ ‘Check. Point one, a new kind of concentration. Next?’ ‘No next. That’s all. When you get so you can concentrate correctly—I’ll coach you mind to mind on that, of course—we’ll concentrate together, first on one gateway, then another. Something will click into place, and there you’ll be.’
‘I hope. But suppose it doesn’t? Can’t it be worked out? You’re on record as saying that the mind is simply a machine.’
‘No, it can’t. The mind is a machine; just as much a machine as one of your automatic pilots or one of my computers. The troubles are that it is almost infinitely more complex and that we do not understand its basic principles—the fundamental laws upon which it operates. We may never understand them … the mind may very well be so tied in with the life-principle —or soul; call it whatever you please—as to be knowable only to God.’
‘I’m glad you said that, Joan. I’m not formally religious, I suppose, but I do believe in a First Cause.’
‘One must, who knows as much about the Macrocosmic All as you do. But it’s too early in the morning for very much of that sort of thing. What are you doing to that chart besides doodling all over it?’
‘Those aren’t doodles, woman!’ he protested. ‘They’re equations. In short-hand.’
‘Equations, I apologize. Doctor Cloud, elucidate.’ ‘Doctor Janowick, I can’t. This is where you came in. I had just pursued an elusive wisp of thought into what turned out to be a cul de sac. I whammed my head against a solid concrete wall.’ His light mood vanished as he went on:
‘In spite of what everybody has always believed, I’ve proved that loose atomic vortices are not accidental. They’re deliberate, every one of them, and …’
‘Yes, I heard you tell Phil so,’ she interrupted. ‘I wanted to start screaming about your hypothesis then, and it’s taken superhuman self-control to keep me from screaming about it ever since. That kind of math, though, of course is ‘way over my head … For a long time I expected Phil to call up and blast you to a cinder, but he didn’t … you may be—must be, I suppose—right.’ ‘I am right,’ Cloud said, quietly. ‘Unless all the mathematics
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I know is basically, fundamentally fallacious, they’ve got to be deliberate; they simply can’t be accidental. On the other hand, except for a few we know about which don’t change the general picture in the least, I can’t see any more than you can how they can possibly be deliberate, either.’ ‘Are you trying to set up a paradox?’
‘No. It’s already set up. I’m trying to knock it down.’ Cloud’s thought died away; his mind became a mathematical wilderness of such complexity that the woman, able mathematician that she was and scan as she would, was lost in seconds.
He finally shrugged himself out of it. ‘Another blind alley,’ he reported, sourly.
‘With sufficient knowledge, any possible so-called paradox can be resolved,’ Joan mused, her mind harking back to the, to her, starkly unbelievable hypothesis Cloud had stated so baldly. ‘But I simply can’t believe it, Storm!’
‘I can’t, either, hardly. However, it’s easier for me to believe that than that all our basics are false. So that makes it another part of our job to find out what, or who, or why.’
‘Ouch! With a job of that magnitude on your mind, I’ll make myself scarce. When you come up for air sometime give me a call on the squawk-box and we’ll study concentration. “Bye.” She turned, started for the door.
‘Wait a minute, Joan—why not start the ground-work now?’
‘That’s a thought—why not? But get away from that big
table.’ She placed two chairs and they sat down knee to knee;
almost eye to eye. ‘Now, Storm, come in. Really come in, this
time; the first time you didn’t really even half try.”
‘I did so!’ he protested. ‘I tried then and I’m trying now. Just how do I go about it?’
‘I can’t tell you that, Storm; nobody can tell you that.’ She was thinking now, not talking. ‘There are no words no sym-bology, even in the provinces of thought. And I can’t do it for you: you must do it yourself. But if you can’t—and you really can’t be expected to, so soon—I’ll come into your mind and try to show you what I mean.’
She did so. There was a moment of fitting; of snuggling … there was a warmly intimate contact, much warmer and much more intimate than anything telepathic that either had ever experienced before; but it was not what they were after. Joan tried a different approach.
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‘Well, if that won’t work, let’s try this. Just imagine, Storm, that every cell of my brain—no, let’s keep it on the immaterial level; every individual ultimate element of my mind—is a lock, but you can see exactly what the key must be like. You must make every corresponding unit of your mind into the appropriate key … No? We’ll try again. Imagine that each element of my mind is half of a jigsaw puzzle—make yours fill out each picture . . . ‘
‘I can’t. Don’t you know, Joan, how many thousands of millions of . . .’
‘What of it?’ she flared. ‘You do things fully as complex every time you blast a vortex … Oh, that’s it! Treat it as though it were a problem in n-dimensional differential equations, but don’t let your subconscious do it alone—get right down there and work with it—do that and you’ll have it all!’ She seized his hands, squeezed them hard, and spoke aloud, the better to drive home the intensity of her convictions. ‘Buckle down, Storm, and dig … you can do it, I know you can d6 it. I know you can … dig in, big fellow … you don’t have to pay too much attention to detail; get a chain started, like a zipper, and it’ll finish itself … dig, storm, DIG!’
Storm dug. His jaw-muscles tightened into lumps. Sweat beaded his face and trickled down his chest under his shirt. And suddenly something happened. Not very much of anything, but something. Something more than mere contact, but not a penetration—more like a fusion—a fusion which, however, instead of spreading rapidly to completion, as Joan had said it would, existed for the merest perceptible instant of time in an almost infinitesimal area and then vanished as instantaneously as it had come. But there was no doubt whatever that he had read, for an instant, a tiny portion of Joan’s mind; there was no chance whatever that she had sent him that thought—in fact, she had been thinking at herself, not at him. And as he perceived the tenor of that thought he let go all his mental holds; tried frantically to bury the stolen thought so deeply that Joan would never never find out what it had been …
No, not bury it, either. Flesh, rock, metal—any material substance was perfectly transparent to thought. What wasn’t? A thought-screen. He didn’t have one, of course, but he knew the formula, and if he thought about that formula hard enough it might create interference enough. The catch would be whether
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he could talk at the same time … he probably could, if the subject matter didn’t require concentration.
Joan, of course, knew instantly when Cloud pulled his mind away from hers; and, not waiting to ask why in words, drove in a probe to find out. Much to her surprise, however, her beam of mental force was stopped cold; she could not touch Cloud’s
mind at all!
‘A block!’ she exclaimed unbelievingly. ‘A real dilly, too— as hard and tight as a D7M29Z screen! What did you do, anyway, Storm, and how? I didn’t feel you get in!’
He did not reply immediately. He was too busy; for, besides holding the screen-thought, he was also analyzing and studying the thought he had stolen from Joan; separating it out and arranging it into meaningful English words. It was amazing, how many words could be contained in one flashing, fleeting
burst of thought.
‘Joanie, my not-so-bright old friend,’ she had been thinking, ‘you’ve simply got to cut out this silly damn foolishness and act your age. You must not fall in love with him; there’d be nothing in it for either of you. You are thirty-four years old and he has had his Jo.’
‘Storm!’ she snapped. ‘Answer me! Or did …’ Her tone changed remarkably: ‘… did something … happen to you?’
‘No, Joanie.’ He shook his head and wrenched his attention back to reality. ‘But first, is whatever I’m doing really a mind-block, and is it really holding?’