‘I certainly am, Clee. Honestly. Screens down flat, if you say so.’
‘Halfway’s enough, I think – we’ll know when we get down there.’ Her mind joined his and he went on, ‘Ignore the machines themselves completely. Consider only the fields. Feel around with me – keep tuned! – see if there’s anything at all here that we can grab hold of and manipulate, like an Op field except probably very much finer. I’ll be completely damned if I can see how this type of Gunther generator can put out a manipulable field, but it must. That’s the only – AAAIIII!’
The last was a yell of pure mental agony. Both hands flew to his head, his face turned white, sweat poured, and he slumped down unconscious.
He came to, however, as the other three were stretching him out on a davenport. Belle was mopping his face with a handkerchief.
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‘What happened, Clee?’
‘I found my manipulable field, but a bomb went off in my brain when I straightened it out.’ He searched his mind anxiously, then smiled. ‘But no damage done – just the opposite. It opened up a Gunther cell I didn’t know I had. Didn’t it sock you, too, Belle?’
‘No,’ she said, more than half bitterly. ‘I must not have one. That makes you a super-Prime, if I may name a new classification.’
‘Nonsense! Of course you’ve got it. Unconscious, of course, like me, but without it you couldn’t have conditioned the field. But why – oh, what bit me must have been the one conditioned
to me.’
‘Oh, nice!’ Belle exclaimed. ‘Come on, Clee, let’s go get
mine!’
‘Do you want a bit of knowledge that badly, Belle?’ Lola asked. ‘Besides, wait, he isn’t strong enough yet.’
‘Of course he’s strong enough. A little knock like that? Want it I’d give my right leg and … and almost anything for it It didn’t kill him, so it won’t kill me.’
‘There may be an easier way,’ Garlock said. ‘I wouldn’t wish a jolt like that onto my worst enemy. But that had two hundred kilovolts and four hundred kilogunts behind it. Since I know now where and what the cell is, I think I can connect it up for you without being quite so rough.’
‘Oh, lovely – come in, quick!’
Garlock went in, and wrought. It took longer – half an hour, in fact – but it was very much easier to take. ‘What did it feel like, Belle?’ Lola asked eagerly. ‘You winced like he was drilling teeth and struck a couple of nerves.’
‘No. It was more like being stretched all out of shape. Like having a child, maybe, in a small way. Let’s go, Clee!’
They joined up and went. And they got what they were after.
Breaking connection, Belle said, Thanks a million, Clee; you’re tall, solid gold. Do you want to run some more tests, to see which of us is the intergalactic transporter?’
‘Not unless you do.’
‘Who, me? I’ll be tickled to death not to. Back to Tellus, then?’
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‘Tellus here we come,’ Garlock said. ‘Jim, what are the Tellurian figures for exactly five hundred miles up?’
‘I’ll punch ’em – got ’em in my head.’ James did so. ‘Shall Brownie and I set our blocks?’
‘No,’ Belle said. ‘Nothing can interfere with us now.’
‘Ready.’ Garlock sat down in the pilot’s seat. ‘Cluster ’round, Belle.’
Belle leaned against the back of the seat and put both arms around Oarlock’s neck. ‘I’m clustered.’
‘The spot we’re shooting at is exactly over the precise center of the middle blast-pit at Port Gunther. In sync?’
‘I’m exactly on the locked. Shoot.’
‘Now, you sheet-iron bucket of nuts and bolts, JUMP!’ said Garlock, and snapped the red switch.
Earth lay beneath them. So did Port Gunther.
‘Whew!’ Oarlock’s huge sigh held much more of relief than of triumph.
‘They did it! We’re home!’ Lola shrieked; and, breaking into unashamed and unrestrained tears, went into her husband’s extended arms.
‘Cry ahead, sweet,’ James said. Then, extending his right hand to Garlock and to Belle: ‘I was scared to death you couldn’t make it except by backtracking. Good going, you two Primes.’ But his thoughts said vastly more than his words.
Belle’s eyes, too, were wet. She looked at Clee and said, ‘Judging from that sigh of yours, you weren’t as sure as you looked, that we could do it the hard way. I was a quivering mass of jelly inside, myself.’
‘Afterward, you mean. You were solid as Gibralter when I fired the charge. You’re the kind of woman a man wants with him when the going’s tough. Slide around here a little, so I can get hold of you.’
Garlock released Belle – finally – and turned to the pilot, who was just pulling a data-sheet from the computer. ‘How far did we miss target. Jim?”
James held up his right hand, thumb and forefinger forming a circle. ‘You’re one point eight seven inches high, and off-center point five three inches to the north north east by east. I hereby award each of you the bronze medal of Marksman First. Shall I take her down now or do you want to check in
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from here first?’
•Neither… I think. What do you say, Belle?’
‘Right. Not until you-know-what.’
‘Check. Until we decide whether or not to let them know just yet that we can handle the ship – and, if we do, how many of our taped reports we turn in and how many we toss down the chute.’
‘I get it!’ James exclaimed, with a spreading grin. ‘That, my dear people, is something I never expected to live long enough to see – our straightlaced Doctor Garlock applying the Bugger Factor to a research problem!’
‘I prefer the term “Monk’s Coefficient”, myself,’ Garlock said, ‘from the standpoint of mathematical rigor.’
‘At Polytech we called it “Finagle’s Formula”,’ Belle commented. ‘The most widely applicable operator known.’
‘Have you three lost your minds?’ Lola demanded. ‘That’s nothing to joke about – you wouldn’t destroy official reports! All that astronomy and anthropology that nobody ever even dreamed of before? You couldn’t! Not possibly!’
‘Each of us knows just as well as you do how much data we have, exactly how new and startling it is; but we’ve thought ahead farther than you have. None of us likes the idea of destroying it a bit more than you do. We won’t, either, without your full, unreserved, wholehearted consent; nor without your fixed, ironclad, unshakeable determination never to reveal any least bit of it.’ Oarlock’s voice was hard and cold.
‘That language is far too strong for me. I’d like to be able to go along with you, but on those terms I simply can’t.’
‘I think you can, when you’ve thought it through. You’ve met Alonzo P. Ferber, haven’t you? Read him?’
‘One glimpse; that was all I could stand. He pawed me mentally and wanted to paw me physically, the very first time I ever met him.’
‘Check. So I’m going to ask you two questions, which you may answer as an anthropologist, as Lola Montandon, as Mrs. James James James the Ninth, as a member of our team, or as any other character you choose to assume. Remembering that Ferber’s a Gunther First – and pretends to be an Operator whenever he can get away with it – should he, or anyone like him, ever be allowed to visit Hodell? Second question: if there
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is any possible way for him to get there, can he be made to stay away?’
‘Oh … Grand Lady Neldine and that perfectiy stunning Grand Lady Lemphi they picked out for Jim … they’re such nice people … and the Gunther genes…’ As Lola thought on, her expressive face showed a variety of conflicting emotions before it hardened into decision. ‘The only possible answer to both questions is no. I subscribe – on the exact terms you stipulated. And you don’t believe, Clee, that my thesis had anything to do with my holding out at first?’ ‘Certainly I don’t. Besides…’ ‘What thesis?’ Belle asked.
‘For my Ph.D. in anthropology. I thought I had it made, but it just went down the chute. And I don’t know if any of you realize just how nearly impossible it is to make a really worthwhile original contribution to science in that field.’
‘As I started to tell you, Brownie,’ Garlock said, ‘I don’t think you’ve lost a thing. There’s a bigger and better one coming up.’ ‘What?’
‘He’s got a theory,’ Belle explained. ‘It’s such a weirdie that he won’t talk about it to anybody.’
‘It isn’t a theory yet – at least, not ripe enough to pick – but it’s something more than a hunch,’ Garlock said.
‘But what could possibly make as good a thesis as those extra-galactic tapes?’ Lola wailed. They would have made it a summer breeze.’
‘More like a hurricane – the hottest thing since doctorate disputations first started,’ Garlock said. ‘However, as I started to say twice before, it still will be. Intra-galactic tapes will be just as good. In this case, better.’