forbearing enough to let me keep on living long enough to grow up, which will surprise
him a megabuck’s worth, I’ll be a gorgeous hunk of woman some day.” She executed a
rather awkward pirouette. “I can’t do this anywhere near like Paula does yet, but I’m
going to sometime, just see if I don’t.”
“I’d hate to bet one buck against Horse’s megabuck that you won’t.” Deston agreed. The
girl was certainly under fourteen, but the promise was there. Unmistakably there. “Or
that you won’t live to break a hundred, either.
“Oh, thanks, Babe. Oh, I just can’t wait! I’m going to be a femme fatale, you know-all
slinky and everything-but you prob’ly didn’t come all the way out here just to chatter-I
think Tite’s word `natter’ is cute, don’t you?-so maybe before Horse bats my ears down
again I’d better keep still awhile. S’pose?”
“Could be-we’re in a jam,” Deston said, and told them what the jam was. “So you see, to
get anywhere at all, we’ve got to do some really intensive spying, and the only way to do
that is to learn how to read non-psionic minds, and the poop is that if anybody in total
space can deliver the goods on that order, you four are most apt to be the ones.”
“Oh?” May exclaimed. “That’s a really funny one, Babe-we must really be psychic. . . .”
She broke off with a giggle as the others began to laugh. “No, I mean really-much more
so even than we thought-because that’s exactly what we’ve just been working on-not to
be just snoopy stinkers, either-or stinky snoopers?-but just to find out why nobody could
ever do it before we aren’t very good at it yet, but it goes like this-no, let’s all link up and
we’ll show you. Oh, this is going to really be fun!”
The four linked up and went to work, and the Destons tuned themselves in; very slowly at
first; more as observers than as active participants in the investigation. The subject this
time was a middle-echelon executive, the traffic manager of one division of far-flung War-
ner Oil. He was a keen-looking young man, sharp-featured, with a very good head for
figures. His king-size desk was littered with schedules, rate-books, and revision sheets.
From time to time his fingertips flicked rapidly by touch over the keys of a desk-type
computer.
The four were getting a flash of coherent thought once in a while, but that was all.
The Destons watched, studied, analyzed, and compared notes until their fusion finally
said, in thought, “Okay, Effeff, come up for air and take a break. Time out for
discussion.” They emerged as individuals and Deston said, “You aren’t making contact
and I think I know why. Horse, do either you or Paula know consciously that you’re trying
to work the Fourth Nume?”
“My Cod, no,” Paula said. “We were exposed to that stuff a long time ago, but it didn’t
take.”
“You weren’t ready, so Doc wouldn’t have tried to give it to you, so who did?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Throckmorton.”
“They would,” Barbara said then. “Fortunately, they’ve learned better now.”
“But you two can give it to us.”
“We could make a stab at it, but we’d rather not. We need more practice. We’ll call
Adams and Stella and watch.”
The Adamses came in, and wrought; and this time, since the pupils were ready, the
lesson “took.”
“Now we’ll git ‘im!” May exclaimed. “Come on, what’s holding us up?”
“I am,” Deston said. “Don’t go off half-cocked; we’ve got a lot to do yet. Before anyone
can do a job he has to know exactly what the job is and exactly how to do it, and we
don’t know either one. So let’s examine your four-ply entity-the tools you’re using. There’s
no three-dimensional analogy, but we can call Horace and Paula an engine, with two vital
parts missing-the spark-plug and the flywheel. . . .”
“But I want to learn that fourth-nume stuff now!” May declared. She was, as usual, ‘way
out ahead. “I don’t want to wait until I’m old and decrepit and . . .
“Tut-tut, youngsters.” Fleming reached out and put his hand lightly over the girl’s mouth.
“That attitude is precisely what makes you the spark-plug; but if you and I had the
abilities we lack instead of the ones we have, neither of us would be in this particular
engine at all.” “That’s right,” Deston said. “Now as to what this engine does. Postulating a
two-dimensional creature, you could pile a million of him up and still have no thickness at
all. Similarly, no three-dimensional material body can be compressed to zero thickness.
The analogy holds in three and four dimensions. However, there are discontinuities,
incompatibilities, and sheer logical impossibilities. Hence, ordinarily, a four-dimensional
mind, which all psionic minds are, cannot engage any three-dimensional, non-psionic mind
at all. All possible points of contact are of zero dimensions……
“But wait up, Babe,” French broke in. “We can see three dimensional objects, so why
can’t we . . .”
“We can’t really see ’em,” Deston said, flatly. “We can see what and where they are, but
they’re absolutely immaterial to us. So forces, already immaterial, become imperceptible.
Clear?” ” As mud,” French said, dubiously. “There’s a .
Paula broke in. “I see! The Fourth-they just showed us-remember?
Manipulate-immaterial . . . non-space-non-time?”
“Oh, sure.” French’s face cleared. “What we were doing, Babe, was blundering around in
the Fourth, making a contact once in a blue moon by luck?”
That’s about it. Now, another analogy. Consider transformation of coordinates-polar into
Cartesian, three-dimensional into two-dimensional, and so on. What a competent
operator in the Fourth actually does is manipulate non-space-non-time attributes in such
a way as to construct a matrix that is both three- and four-dimensional. Analogous to
light-particle and/or wave. You follow?”
“Perfectly,” the Frenches said in unison. “Four on our side, three on the non-psi’s side,
with perfect coupling.”
“You lost May and me there,” Fleming said. “However, you would, of course . . . but I
understand much better now why we four work together so well. I’ll venture an
analogy-poor, perhaps-May scouts out ahead, in a million directions at once. I follow
behind, sometimes pushing and sometimes putting on the brakes.”
“And steering the sled!” May exclaimed. “I see, now, too-that’s the way it works!”
“Close enough,” Deston said. “Now. Thought patterns are as individual as fingerprints or
the shape of one snowflake or one instantaneous pattern in a kaleidoscope. What two
telepaths do is not tune one mind to the other. Instead, each one of a very large number
of filaments of thought-all under control, remember-touches its opposite number, thus
setting up a pattern that has never existed before and will never exist again. . . .”
“I get it!” French exclaimed. “Reading a non-psi’s mind will be a strictly one-way street.
Well have to go through the matrix-which doesn’t exist in telepathy -and match whatever
pattern we find on the other side -which won’t change.”
“That’s right-we hope! Now you can go.”
They went; and this time the traffic-manager’s mind was wider open to inspection than
any book could possibly be. To be comparable, every page of such a book would have
to be placed in perfect position to read and all at once!
Paula stood it for something over one second, then broke the linkage with what was
almost a scream. “Stop it!”
She drew a deep breath and went on, more quietly, “I’m glad it’s you who will have to do
that, Babe, not I. That was a worse thing than anything a Peeping Tom could ever do.
It’s shameful-monstrous-it’s positively obscene to do a thing like that to anyone, for any
reason.”
“Why, Paula, that was fun!” May exclaimed.
“But Babe,” Paula said, “that was nothing like telepathy … but of course if wouldn’t be.”
“Of course. In telepathy the exchange of information is voluntary and selective. This way,
the poor devil doesn’t stand a chance. He doesn’t even know it’s happening.”
Paula frowned. ” `Poor devil’ is the exactly correct choice of words. Are you going to
have to use us like that on the other poor devils you are going to . . . I can’t think of a
word bad enough.”
“No. I just tried it. I can do it alone now, perfectly. But that’s the way it is; opening new
cells and learning new techniques. I had the latent capabilities. You others did, too.”
“I can, but if you think I ever will you’re completely out of your mind,” Barbara declared,
and Paula agreed vigorously.
But I want to and I can’t/” May wailed. “Why oh why can’t I grow up faster!”
“We don’t want you to grow up at all, sweetie,” French said. “We don’t want to lose our
spark-plug. Ever think of that angle?”
“Babe, will I really have to leave this Funny Four then?”
“You’ll not only have to, you’ll want to,” Deston replied, soberly. “That is one of the