‘Deign?’ Cloud demanded. ‘What kind of a thought is that Nadine, from you to me?’
‘Deign,’ Nadine repeated, firmly. Deeply moved, she was feeling and sending a solemnity of respect Cloud had never before experienced. ‘My powers are ordinary, since I am of Type One. The two greatest Masters of Manarka are Fives, and have been the greatest Masters of the past. This is the first time I have ever encountered a mind of a type higher than Five. Come in, sir, I plead.”
Cloud went in, and his first flash of comparison was that it was like diving into the pellucid depths of a clean, cool, utterly transparent mountain lake. This mind was so different from Joan’s! Joan’s was rich, warmly sympathetic, tender and emphatic, yet it was full of dark corners, secret nooks, recesses, and automatic blocks … Huh? He had thought her mind as open as a book, but it wasn’t … On the other hand, Nadine’s was wide open by nature. It was cool, poised—although at the moment uncomfortably worshipful—and utterly, shockingly open!
His second thought was that Joan was no longer with him. She was there, in a sense, but outside, some way; she wasn’t in Nadine’s mind the way he was.
‘I’ll say I’m not!’ Joan agreed, fervently. ‘Thank God! I don’t know what you did or how you did it, but when you went in you peeled me off like the skin of a banana, and I was clinging like a leech, too. I’m on the outside, looking in. Did you see how he did it, Nadine?’
‘No, but since I am only a One, such insight would not be expected. I have called the Fives, and they come.’
‘We are here.’ The close-linked minds linked themselves with the two already so closely linked. Each of the two visitors was
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grave, kindly, and old with an appalling weight of years; each mind bore an appalling freight of knowledge both mundane and esoteric. ‘We are here, fellow Master of Thought, to be of aid to you in the clarification of your newly-awakened mind, to the end that, in a future time, your superior powers will assist us along Paths of Truth which we could not otherwise traverse.’
‘Will you please tell me what this is all about?’ Cloud asked. ‘Starting at the beginning and using words of as few syllables as possible?’
‘Gladly. It has been known for some time that Janowick is Type Three. Self-developed, partially developed, under-developed, struggling against she knew not what, but still a Three. Now Threes as such, while eminently noteworthy, are by no means phenomenal. There are some hundreds of Threes now alive. Being noteworthy, she has been watched. In time she would have completed her development and would have taken her rightful place in the School of Thought.
‘You, however, have been a complete enigma to our most penetrant minds. Since no mind of lower type than Three can be an instantaneous calculator, it was clear that you were, basically, at least a Three. However, unlike other Threes, you did nothing whatever to develop the latent, potential abilities of whatever type you might be. Instead and excepting only the small and unimportant item of computation, you used the tremendous powers of your mind, not for any constructive purpose whatever, but only for the application of such rigid controls and suppressions that all the tremendous abilities you should have shown remained completely dormant and inert.
‘Nor could we do anything about it. We tried, but you have blocks that not even the full power of two linked Fives can crack; which fact showed that you are of a type higher than Five. We were about to come to you in person, to plead with you, when you met Three Janowick and opened to her your hitherto impregnably-sealed inner mind. She does not know, and you do not know, what you jointly did; which was, in effect, to break and to dissolve the bindings which had been shackling both your minds. That brings us to the present. It has now become clear that you have been Called.’
‘Called?’ Cloud winced, physically and mentally. No man likes to be reminded that he failed Lensman’s Exam. ‘You’re wrong. I didn’t make even the first round.’
‘We did not mean the Call of the Lens. There are many Calls, of which that is only one. Nor is it the highest, as we have just discovered, in certain little-known aspects of that vast thing we call the mind. For, to the best of our knowledge, no Lensman of the present or of the past is or was of a type higher than Five. The exact nature of your Call is as yet obscure.’
‘I’d like to buy that, but I’m afraid it’s …’ Cloud paused. Until he’d met Joan, he’d supposed his mind ordinary enough. Since then, however … all those extra barrels …
‘Exactly. We are specialists of the mind, young man. We perceive your mind, not as it is, but as it should be and will be. It should have and will have a penetrance, a range, a flexibility of directive force, and, above all, a scope of heights and depths we have never encountered before. It is eminently clear that you, and, very probably, Three Janowick as well, have been developed each for some specific Purpose in the Great Scheme of Things.’
‘A Purpose?’ Cloud demanded. ‘What purpose? What could /do? What could both of us together do?’
‘We can not surely know.’
‘Does that mean that you can make a well-informed guess? If so, let’s have it.’
‘There is a very high probability that Three Janowick was developed specifically to develop you; to pierce and to dissolve those hampering barriers which were amenable to no other force. Concerning you, there are several possibilities, none of which have any very high degree of probability, since you are unique. The one we prefer at the moment is that you are to become the greatest living Master of Thought; the Prime Expounder of the Truth. But that is of no importance now, since in due time it will be revealed. Of present import is the fact that both your minds are confused, cloudy, and disorderly. We offer our services in reorienting and ordering them.’
‘We’d like that very much; but first, if I am going to develop into a mental giant of some kind—frankly, I have my doubts— why did it wait this long to show up?’
‘The answer to that question is plain and simple. There is a time for everything, and everything that happens does so in its exact time. Let us to work.’
They worked, and when it was done:
‘We would like to dwell with you for long,’ the ancient Fives
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said, ‘but the time for such a boon will not come until you are much emptier of cares and much fuller of years.’
The Fives split apart. ‘How do you type this new Master, brother? A full Six, I say.’ ‘A full Six he is, brother, beyond doubt.’ They fused. ‘In a time to come, Six Cloud, we will, with your help and under your guidance, explore many and many a Path of Truth which without you would remain closed. But we observe that there is about to arrive a message which is to you of some present concern. Until a day, then.’
The Fives disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and Cloud began to test and exercise the new capabilities of his mind; in much the same fashion as that in which a good belly-dancer exercises and trains each individual muscle of her torso. ‘But what … I didn’t … How did they ,.. ?’ Joan shook her head violently and started all over again. ‘What did they do to us, Storm?’
‘I don’t know. It was over my head like a lunar dome. But it—whatever it was—was exactly what the doctor ordered. I can handle all those extra barrels now like van-Buskirk handles a space-axe. How about you?’
‘Me, too—I think.’ She hugged his arm. ‘It shocked me speechless for a minute, but it’s all settling into place fast … But that message? They could get it from your mind that you expected that fine-tooth pretty soon, but how could they know it’s coming in right now? We don’t—in fact, we know it can’t get here for a good ten minutes yet.’
‘I wish I knew. I’d like to think they were bluffing, but I know they weren’t.’
‘Hi Storm and Joan!’ Philip Strong’s face appeared upon a screen, his voice came from a speaker. ‘The Survey ship has just reported. Technical dope is still coming in. Communications is buzzing you a tape of the whole thing, but to save time I thought I’d call you and give you the gist. To make it short and unsweet, there’s nothing there.’
‘Nothing there!’
‘Nothing for you. They gave it the works, and all there is to that sytem, Cahuita, they call it, is one red dwarf with one red microdwarf circling it planetwise.’