How easy it was to leap across the light-years! In wonder and awe my mind roved the galaxy. I felt impulses of thought rising toward me here, there, bright glints of light lancing through the darkness as other TPs wondered who this stranger was. I touched the mind of Nachman Ben-Dov, the Israeli Buddhist, on Higby V. Who’s that? he demanded. What’s your signal? Who are you?
— Tom Rice, I told him.
— But how — ?
I opened my mind and let him see how, and our minds touched, and I felt the strength of him, that rock-steady man. I sensed another mind near his, and probed, and it was that of Marge Hotchkiss; and somehow that unpleasant woman did not seem unpleasant now, for I saw beyond her irritability, her laziness, her selfishness, to the — well, call it the soul — beneath. From Marge I moved to the mind of Ron Santangelo, who greeted me in surprise and amazement, and then a whole chorus of TPs erupted, voices out of every corner of the universe, asking how it was that someone not born to the TP power was able to touch minds to them, and for one breathtaking moment I was in contact with thousands of TPs at once; I was plugged into the entire TP net.
And then I picked up the voice I had been waiting for.
— Tom, how wonderful! I never thought this would happen!
— Neither did I, Lorie. Neither did I.
My mind went forth fully to my sister, and hers to me, and the other TPs dropped away, enclosing us in a sphere of silence, leaving the two of us in undisturbed contact. We opened our minds to one another, and there came pouring out of Lorie across hundreds of light-years such a flood of love and warmth that I nearly had to break contact to keep from drowning in it; and then she moderated her output, and we adjusted frequencies as I was learning moment by moment to do, and our minds merged.
Merged. Totally.
In that instant of union we learned all that there was to learn from one another. She drew from me every detail that has gone onto these message cubes, everything from the boredom of the ultradrive voyage to Higby V through the finding of Dihn Ruuu to the moment when I had donned the thought amplifier. Lorie will not have to play the cubes; she knows the whole story of my adventures.
And I drew from her, in that first excited burst of contact, the essence of the paralyzed girl who is my sister, and I realized that I had never really known her before. It had been foolish of me to pity her and coddle her, to try to shield her from my own happinesses so she would suffer no envy. She is anything but pitiful, anything but envious. She is strong, perhaps the strongest person in the universe, and her paralysis means nothing to her, for she has friends everywhere and envies no one, least of all me. In the meeting of our minds I discovered that it was I, deprived of the TP power, who had been the real cripple. Lorie had pitied me even while I had pitied her, and her pity had been far more intense and with much better reason. There was an end to pity now. — This is Jan, I said, and transmitted an image. — She’s beautiful, Tom. I know you’ll be happy together. But why don’t you give her the amplifier too?
— Yes. Yes, I will. Right — now —
But I felt a fierce wrenching sensation, and my contact with Lorie broke, and I was alone, terribly alone, once more locked into my skull.
“He’s coming out of it!” Dr. Schein’s voice said. “He’s all right!”
I opened my eyes. I lay sprawled on the cold stone floor of the long room. Everyone stood clustered anxiously about me. Saul had taken the amplifier from my head. Jan, frightened, clung to Pilazinool. I tried to get up, swayed dizzily, and made it on my second try.
“Give that to me!” I yelled, reaching for the amplifier.
Saul held it back. Dr. Schein said, “Tom, that thing can be dangerous! You don’t know—”
“You don’t know,” I shouted, and lunged at Saul, who yielded the amplifier. I suppose I must have seemed like a madman to the others. They backed away, frightened. I gestured at Dihn Ruuu and ordered the robot to get me a second amplifier. The robot obeyed, inserting the activator plaques itself. “Here,” I said to Jan. “Put it on your head!”
“No, Tom, please — I’m afraid—”
“PUT IT ON,” I said, and she put it on before anyone could stop her, and I donned my own amplifier again and closed my eyes and felt hardly any pain at all as my mind broke free of my body, and I reached out, and there was Jan.
— Hello, I said.
— Hello, she replied, and our minds met and became one.
And that is how eleven archaeologists set out to dig up some broken old artifacts, and ended by changing the whole nature of human life. Not only human, either. The thought amplifiers work for all organic life-forms, and so for the first time aliens will enter the TP net. There are enough amplifiers on Mirt alone to supply the populations of a dozen worlds. Later, we can manufacture our own.
And so it is the end of secrecy and suspicion, of misunderstanding, of quarrels, of isolation, of flawed communication, of separation. As the amplifiers go into use, anyone will be able to contact anyone else, instantaneously, over a gulf of half the universe if need be, and achieve a full meeting of souls. What has been the special province of a few thousand TPs is now open to everyone, and nothing will ever be quite the same again.
We leave Mirt tomorrow. We may never come back; others may finish what we have begun here, while we go on to other sites. We can’t pretend that we’re doing anything but sightseeing now. For a month we’ve roamed this sphere of miracles, simply staring, making no systematic examination. We can’t. There’s too much here.
We need to go away, to take stock, to gain the long view of what we’ve already found, before we can push on with the job of penetrating the mysteries of the civilization of the Mirt Korp Ahm. Things have happened much too swiftly; we have to regain our balance.
This afternoon Jan and I will make a somber little pilgrimage. It was her idea. “We have to thank them,” she said.
“How can we? They’re beyond any kind of communication.”
“Even so. We owe them so much, Tom.”
“I say we ought to leave them in peace.”
“Are you afraid to go down there?”
“Afraid? No.”
“Then come with me. Because I’m going.”
“I’ll go too, then. After lunch?”
“After lunch, yes.”
Jan will be here soon. We will go down into the depths of Mirt. She’s right: we owe them so much. This sharing of minds, my new ability to reach out to Lorie … so much. One final visit, then, to bid farewell to the Mirt Korp Ahm, and try to thank them for what they have left to us. We’ll stand before a crystal wall and peer at some incredibly ancient High One, lost in its dreams of an era of greatness, and we’ll tell it that we’re the new people, the ones now filling the universe they once owned, the busy little seekers. And I think we’ll ask it to pray for us, if there’s anything that High Ones ever prayed to, because I have a feeling we’re going to make plenty of mistakes before we know how to handle these powers we’ve so strangely acquired.
Jan is here now. Down to the High Ones we go.
End of cube. End of more than that: end of a whole era. We don our amplifiers. We touch minds. I sense the presence of Lorie and say hello to her. She responds warmly.
— Stay in touch, I say. We’ll show you something interesting, in a weird way. We’ll show you the oldest living things in the universe. Our benefactors, but they’ll never know it.
Down we go to say good-bye to the Mirt Korp Ahm.