the intellectuals. In the brief flash you got of it you probably could understand only the
human part-but maybe it’s just as well.”
“I’ll say it’s just as well!” Dorothy emphatically agreed. “I wouldn’t listen to that again,
even for a millionth of a second, for a million dollars-but I wouldn’t have missed it for
another million, either. I don’t know whether to beg you to listen to it, Peggy, or to
implore you not to.”
“Don’t bother,” Margaret replied positively. “Anything that could throw you into such a
hysterical tantrum as that did, I don’t want any of at all. None at all, in fact, would be
altogether too much for . . .”
“Got them, folks-all done!” Seaton exclaimed “You can put on your headsets now.”
A signal lamp had flashed brightly and he knew that those two gigantic brains, working in
perfect synchronism, had done instantaneously all that they had been set to do.
“Are you dead sure that they got them all, Dick?”
“Absolutely, and they got them in less time than it took the filament of the lamp to heat
up. You can bank on it that all seven of them are in the can. I go off half cocked and
make mistakes, but those Brains don’t-they can’t.”
Seaton was right. Though far away, even as universal distances go, the Intellectuals had
felt that broadcast thought and had shot toward its source at their highest possible
speed. For in all their long lives and throughout all their cosmic wanderings they had
never encountered thoughts . of such wide scope; such clear cogency, such tremendous
power.
The discarnate entities approached the amazing pattern of mental force which was
radiating so prodigally and addressed it; and in that instant there shot out curvingly from
each of the mechano-electrical brains a gigantic, hemispherical screen.
Developing outwardly from the two vessels as poles with the unimaginable velocity
possible only to sixth-order forces, the two cups were barriers impenetrable to any sixth-
order force, yet neither affected nor were affected by the gross manifestations which
human senses can perceive. Thus solar systems, even the neutronium cores of stars, did
not hinder their instantaneous development.
Hundreds of light-years in diameter though they were, the open edges of those
semiglobes of force met in perfect alignment and fused smoothly, effortlessly,
instantaneously together to form a perfect, thought-tight sphere. The violently radiating
thought-pattern which had so interested the Intellectuals disappeared, and at the same
instant the ultrasensitive organisms of the entities were assailed by the, to them,
deafening and blinding crash and flash of the welding together along its equator of the
far-flung hollow globe.
These simultaneous occurrences were the first intimations that everything was not what it
appeared, and the disembodied intelligences flashed instantly into furious activity, too
late by the smallest possible instant of time. The trap was sprung, the sphere was
impervious at its every point, and, unless they could break through that wall, the
Intellectuals were incarcerated until Seaton should release his screens.
Within the confines of the globe there were not a few suns and thousands of cubic
parsecs of space upon whose stores of energy the Intellectuals could draw. Wherefore
they launched a concerted attack upon the wall, hurling against it all the force they could
direct. But they were not now contending against the power of any human, organic, finite
brain. For Seaton’s mind, powerfully composite though it was of the mightiest intellects of
the First Galaxy, was only the primary impulse which was being impressed upon the
grids of, and was being amplified to any desirable extent by, the almost infinite power of
those two cubic miles of coldly emotionless, perfectly efficient, mechano-electrical
artificial Brains.
Thus against every frantic effort of the Intellectuals within it the sphere was contracted
inexorably, and as it shrank, reducing the volume of space from which the prisoners
could draw energy, their struggles became weaker and weaker. When the ball of force
was only a few hundred miles in diameter and the two vessels were relatively at rest,
Seaton erected auxiliary stations around it and assumed full control.
Rapidly then the prisoning sphere, little larger now than a toy balloon, was brought
through the inoson wall of the Skylark and held motionless in the air above the Brain
room. A complex structure of force was built around it, about which in turn there
appeared a framework of inoson, supporting sixteen massive bars of uranium.
Seaton took off his helmet and sighed. “There, that’ll hold them for a while, I guess.”
“What are you going to do with them?” asked Margaret.
“Darned if I know, Peg,” he admitted ruefully. “That’s been worrying me ever since we
figured out how to catch them. We can’t kill them and I’m afraid to let them go, because
they’re entirely too hot to handle. So in the meantime, pending the hatching out of a
feasible method of getting rid of them permanently, I have put them in jail.”
“Why, Dick, how positively brutal!” Dorothy exclaimed.
“Yeah? There goes your soft heart again, Red-Top, instead of your hard head. I suppose
it would be positively O.K. to let them loose, so that they can dematerialize all four of us?
But it isn’t as bad as it sounds, because I’ve got a stasis of time around them. We can
leave them in there for seventeen thousand million years and even their intellects won’t
know it, because for them no time at all shall have lapsed.”
“No-o-o-of course we can’t let them go scot-free,” Dorothy admitted, “but we-I should-
well, maybe couldn’t you make a bargain with them to give them their liberty if they will
go away and let us alone? They’re such free spirits, surely they’d rather do that than stay
bottled up forever.”
“Since they are purely intellectual and hence immortal, I doubt very much if they’ll dicker
with us at all,” Seaton replied. “Time doesn’t mean a thing to them, you know; but since
you insist I’ll check the stasis and talk it over with them.”
A tenuous projection, heterodyned upon waves far below the band upon which the
captives had their being, crept through the barrier screen and Seaton addressed his
thoughts to the entity known as “One”.
“Being highly intelligent, you have already perceived that we are vastly more powerful
than you are. Living in the flesh possesses many advantages over an immaterial
existence. One of these is that it permitted us to pass through the fourth dimension,
which you cannot do because your patterns are purely three-dimensional and
inextensible. While in hyperspace we learned many things. Particularly we learned much
of the really fundamental natures and relationship of time, space, and matter, gaining
thereby a basic knowledge of all nature which is greater, we believe, than any that has
ever before been possessed by any three-dimensional being.
“Not only can we interchange matter and energy as you do in your materializations and
dematerialization, but we can go much farther than you can, working in levels which you
cannot reach. For instance, I am projecting myself through this screen, which you cannot
do because the carrier wave is far below your lowest attainable level.
“With all my knowledge, however, I admit that I cannot destroy you, since you can shrink
as nearly to a mathematical point as I can compress this zone, and its complete
coalescence would of course liberate you. Upon the other hand, you realize your
helplessness inside that sphere. You can do nothing since it cuts off your sources of
power.
“I can keep you imprisoned therein as long as I choose. I can set upon it forces which will
keep you imprisoned until this two-hundred-kilogram ingot of uranium has dwindled down
to a mass of less than one milligram. Knowing that the half-life period of that element is
approximately five times ten to the ninth years, you can calculate for yourself bow long
you shall remain incarcerated.
“My wife, however, has a purely sentimental objection to confining you thus, and wishes
to make an agreement with you whereby we may set you at liberty without endangering
our own present existences. We are willing to let you go if you will agree to leave this
universe forever. I realize, of course, that you are beyond either sentiment or passion
and are possessed of no emotions whatever. Realizing this, I give you a choice, upon
purely logical grounds, thus:
“Will you leave us and our universe alone, to work out our own salvation or our own
damnation, as the case may be, or shall I leave you inside that sphere of force until its
monitor bars are exhausted? Think well before you reply; for, know you, we all prefer to
exist for a short time as flesh and blood rather than for all eternity as fleshless and
immaterial intelligences. Not only that-we intend so to exist and we shall so exist!”
“We shall make no agreements, no promises,” One replied. “Yours is the most powerful