“We’ve got it!” Deston yelled, aloud. “It is a new sense-a sixth sense-and what a sense!”
They could see-sense-perceive-every bit of copper in, under, and around the building; the
network of tubes and pipes stood out like the blood-vessels in a plastic model of the
human body. While the metal was not transparent in the optical sense, they could
perceive in detail the outside, the inside, and the ultimately fine structure of the material
of each component part of the whole gas-and-water-supply installation.
“Oh, you did it, Carl!”
“We did it-whatever it is. But I can do it alone now; I know exactly how it goes. This is
really terrific stuff.” He lost himself in thought, then went on, “And the cardinal principle of
semantics is that the map is not the territory. Let’s go in the library, roll out the big globe
of Newmars, and give this planet a going-over like no world ever got before.
“Oh, that’ll be fun! Let’s!”
“And you wouldn’t, by any chance, just happen to have samples of uranium oxide,
pitchblende, and so forth, on hand, would you?”
“Not by chance, no. I done it on purpose. Here they are.”
There is no need to go into detail as to the exact fashion in which they explored the
enormous volume of the planet, or as to exactly what they found. It is enough to say that
they learned; and that, having learned, the techniques became almost automatic and the
work itself became comparatively easy.
The next morning Deston made another suggestion. “Bobby, what do you say about
seeing what we can do with that forty-eight-inch globe of Tellus?”
“Tellus! Light-years and light-years from here? Are you completely out of your mind?”
“Maybe I’m a little mad with power, but listen. If the map actually is the territory it’s scale
that counts, not distance. It’s inconceivable, of course, that there isn’t a limit
somewhere-but where is it? I’ve got an urge to spread our wings a little.”
“A highly laudable objective, I’d say, but IT bet you a cookie that Tellus is ‘way beyond
that limit. Drag out the globe … ah, there you are, sweet mother world of the race! Now
watch out, Mom; ready or not, here we come!”
They went; and when they found out that they could scan and analyze the entire volume
of Earth, mile by plotted cubic mile, as easily and as completely as they could that of
Newmars on whose surface they were, they stared at each other, appalled.
“Well … I … that is . . .” Barbara licked her lips and gulped. “I owe you a cookie, I guess,
Carl.”
“Yeah.” But Deston was not thinking of cookies. “That tears it. It really does. Wide open.
Rips it up and down and sideways.”
“It does for a fact. But it makes the objective even more laudable than ever, I’d say. How
do you think we should go about it?”
“There’s only one way I can see. I said I’d never spend a dime of your money,
remember? I take it back. I think we’d better charter one of WarnOil’s fast subspacers
and buy all the off-Earth maps, star-charts, and such-like gear we can get hold of.”
“Charter? Pfooie! We own WarnOil, silly, subspacers and everything else. In fee simple.
So we’ll just take one. IT arrange that; so you can take off right now after your maps and
charts and whatever. Scoot!”
“Wait up a bit, sweet. We’ll have to have Doe Adams.” “Of course. He’ll be tickled silly to
go.”
“And Here Jones for captain.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Barbara nibbled at her lower lip. “A little premature, don’t
you think, to unsettle him and Bun-raise hopes that may very well turn out to be
false-before we find out what we can actually do?”
“Could be. Okay, fellow explorer-the count-down is on and all stations are in condition
GO.”
Of all the preparations for the first expedition into the unknown, only one is really
noteworthy; the interview with Doctor Adams in his home. For months he bad been
concentrating on the subether and his zeta field; and when he learned what the purpose
of the trip was, and that he would have a free hand and an ample budget, he became
enthusiastic indeed.
To a mind of such tremendous power and range as his, it was evident from the first that
his young friends had changed markedly since he had last seen them. This fact was of
course a challenge. Adams was tall and lean and gray; and, though he was sixty years
old, he almost never worked at a desk. He thought better, he said, on his feet. He had
always reminded Deston of a lean, gray tomcat on the prowl for prey. He was on his feet
now, pacing about.
Suddenly, be stopped, clasped his hands behind his back, and stared at Deston through
the upper sections of his gold-rimmed trifocals. “You two youngsters,” he said flatly, “are
using telepathy. Using it consciously, accurately, and completely informatively-a thing
that, to my knowledge, has never before been demonstrated.”
“Oh?” Barbara’s eyes widened. “When we thought we were talking did we sometimes
forget to?”
“Only in part. Mainly because of a depth of understanding-deduced, to be sure, but
actual nonetheless impossible to language.” Then, Adams-like, he went straight to the
point. “Will you try to teach it to me?”
“Why, of course!” Barbara exclaimed. “That, Uncle Andy, was very much on the agenda.”
“Thank you. And Stella, too, please? Her mind is of precisionist grade and is of greater
sensitivity than my own.”
“Certainly,” Deston assured him. “The more we can spread this ability around the better
it will be for everybody.”
Adams left the room then, and in a minute or so came back with his wife; a slender,
graceful, gray-haired woman of fifty-odd.
Both Andrew and Stella Adams had been students all their lives. They knew how to
study. They had the brain capacity-the blocked or latent cells-to learn telepathy and
many other things. They learned rapidly and thoroughly. Neither of them, however, could
or ever did learn how to “handle” any substance. In fact, very few persons of their time,
male or female, ever did learn more than an insignificant fraction of the Destons’ unique
ability to dowse.
In compensation, however, the Adamses had nascent powers peculiarly their own. Thus,
before they went to bed that night, Andrew and Stella Adams were exploring vistas of
reality that neither of the Destons would ever he able to perceive.
Out in deep space, the Destons worked slowly at first. They actually landed on Cerealia,
the most fully surveyed of all the colonized planets; and on Galmetia, only a little less so,
as it was owned in toto by Galactic Metals; and on Lactia, the dairy planet.
Deston worked first on copper; worked on it so long and so intensively that he could find
and handle and tridi any deposit of the free metal or of any of its ores with speed and
precision, wherever any such might be in a planet’s crust. Then he went on up the line of
atomic numbers, taking big jumps-molybdenum and barium and tungsten and bismuth-up
to uranium, which was what he was after.
Barbara did not work with him on metals very long; just long enough to be sure that she
could be of no more help. She didn’t really like metals, and she had her own work to do.
It was just as important to have on file all possible data concerning water, oil, gas, and
coal.
They worked together, however, at perfecting their techniques. Any thought of
determining the working limits of psionic abilities had been abandoned long since; they
were trying with everything they had to minimize the necessity of using maps and charts.
They succeeded. just as Barbara, while still a child, had become able to work without
samples; so both of them learned how to work without maps. All they had to know,
finally, was where a solar system was; they could fix their sense of perception upon any
star they could see, and hence could study all its planets. They tried to work
independently of star-charts-to direct their attention to any point in space at will-but it
was to be years before they were able to reach that peak of ability.
Deston found many deposits of copper, one of them very large, on the colonized planets;
but he was interested in copper only as a means, not as an end. What he wanted was a
mountain of uranium; and uranium was just as scarce on all ninety five colonized planets
as it was on Earth.
He knew that his sensitivity to his wife’s money was the only flaw in their happiness. He
knew what Barbara thought about his attitude, with the sure knowledge possible only to
full mental rapport. She did not like it; and she, who had never had a money problem in