"Sure of that?" countered Cantrell. "Are you sure it was from Earth that you got the vibrations?"
"Why?" snapped Boyle. "What did you receive?"
Cantrell told him, and Boyle sat quietly for a long time, rattling his fingernails on a tabletop. "Yeah," said Boyle at last. "I suspected something like that. Those women reacted in wholly unearthly fashion.
The anatomy of these broadcasters is similar, but they aren't Homo sapiens."
"Fourth dimension?" wildly hazarded Cantrell. "Could we have tuned in on that?"
"No. For the reason that waves from the fourth dimension would have to be vectorially sub-operative to the seventh power, at least, and the machine would register any abnormal strain like that. No—not the fourth or any dimension except this one. Are there any invisible planets floating around? That alone would explain everything."
"None that I know of, and I used to specialize in astronomy. Maybe—
maybe we've caught up with the thought-waves from Earth on a return trip from the end of space? That would explain the talk about rebels."
"And your six-legged horses, of course. Don't be silly. We have to push on and get so damned far away from this spot that we won't even remember where it is. I'm going to gun the ship hard and fast. You get on the polyphone and tell me when the thought-waves from the place begin to weaken and die out."
Boyle squared his jaw at the fuel gage and began to reckon how much they could allow for steerage and headway. How thin they could cut the corners for the return trip to Earth when the problem of the shakes was solved.
Cantrell donned the head set and turned on the machine again. Again he reached out probing fingers into the crazy planet where horses had six legs and you could kill a man because he was a rebel against someone or something unspecified.
On the screen of his mind things began to take shape. He had landed plumb in the brain of a lady who was waiting for a lover whom she pictured as tall and handsome. The lady turned slowly and surveyed a colossal city that rose about her. She was standing just outside its walls.
They were fine walls, solid and ponderous, fitted with gates able to withstand the charge of a battletank.
Her lover strolled up and there was a tender scene of greeting. Cantrell, feeling like a cad, reached out for another mind. He lighted on the brain of a person within the city; a person who considered himself as being of vast importance. All sorts of ponderous speculations were revolving through the important person's head, principally when he would eat next. A young man, clad in a sort of tunic, approached.
The important person smiled. "Ah," he cried. "My dear boy!"
The dear boy grinned briefly. "You'd better come. There's a strike on at the tubing works. They seized possession of the whole plant." The important person exploded with rage, swearing by strange gods.
Cantrell shut off power and looked up.
"When," he asked impatiently, "are you going to get going? It comes in as strong as ever." Boyle stared at him with a kind of sickly horror in his face. "Cantrell," he said, "since you put on that set we've gone half a million miles at right angles to our former course." "Lord," whispered his partner. "They're following us!"
From random snatches of thought and casual, everyday conversation it is not easy, it is almost impossible in fact, to reconstruct the politics, biology and economics of an entire planet. Yet that, essentially, was what Boyle and Cantrell had to do. For flee where they might, nearer to or farther from Earth, they could not escape the vibrations from the land where horses had six legs.
From long periods of listening in and comparing, they discovered one important fact: that evolution was proceeding on that planet at a staggeringly rapid pace; that in fact the two partners had started out with a violently mistaken notion of the place's tempo. It was swift, swifter than anything with which they were familiar.
But their eavesdropping made it seem close to normal, for the human brain can accommodate itself to any speed of delivery. It can assimilate and synthesize at a faster rate than either of the two had previously suspected. It was natural that this discovery should wait for a moment like this, for never before had the human mind been called on to deliver at that rate.
They discovered that the nameless land was tearing along at a scale of one to a million, approximately. When Cantrell had heard the horsemen curse the rebels, that had been the equivalent of the Puritan revolution in England, period of 1650 or thereabouts. A few minutes later he tuned in on a general strike that meant a lapse of about four hundred years.
In two weeks of voyaging through space the strange planet had arrived at a world state which Earth had not yet attained.
Boyle, irritably tuning in on the lunatic planet one day, drew a deep breath. "Cantrell!" he snapped. "Put your set on and follow my mind. I have a conference of astronomers!"
His partner grabbed the ponderous metal bowl and clapped it on, groping out for the familiar mind patterns of Boyle. He caught onto him in about three seconds, then switched to one of Boyle's mental hosts.
Through the eyes of that person he saw a sizable hall built up into a structure like the inside of a mushroom. As he studied the other persons in the hall he realized that physical evolution had progressed a few more steps since yesterday, when he had last tuned in on the place.
His host's mood was one of confusion; through it he was speaking to the large gathering: "This symposium has been called on a somewhat abstract question. You all know what it is, I presume; otherwise you would not be astronomers.
"As one looks back towards the glorious dawning days of our science, the names of those who were martyred in the cause of truth rise before us. Despots, with their piddling knowledge and tiny telescopes, maintained that the world was round, did they not? It remained for the genius of our clan to demonstrate that it was a truncated paraboloid.
"Jealous superstition preached that like all other worlds ours had a core of rock in the state of stress fluid; it remained for us to prove that no such thing was true of our world—that we alone of all planets lived upon a shell of rhodium, and that that shell, though inconceivably thick, was not solid, and that our planet was definitely hollow."
Cantrell looked up. "Lord," he said softly. "Oh, Lordy! Now I know where those six-legged horses came from."
"Yes," said Boyle as he turned off the machine. "That planet is our ship, and those people are an entire civilization living on the shell of the old Andros. No wonder we couldn't get away from them; they were being carried around with us."
"It's perfectly logical," argued Cantrell. "We carry Earth gravity for our own comfort; that's why we drew down a thin but definite atmosphere.
Also dust and organic particles which settled on the hull. There was warmth from the inside of the ship, and that wonderful old Swede Arrhenius long ago demonstrated that spores of life are always present in space, driven by light-pressure. They landed on our hull, went through evolutionary stages, a man-like form emerged and is rapidly reaching a more advanced civilization than our own."
"But," grunted Boyle, "that doesn't help us out with the shakes. If they're swarming out there, we'll never be able to probe each other.
How can we shake them off? Spray acid on the hull?"
"No!" barked Cantrell. "We couldn't do that—they have as much of a right to live as we. Perhaps—perhaps if we could communicate with them—?"
"Son," raved Boyle, "you've got it! The answer to our prayers! A super-race made to order for the purpose of solving our problems. We'll have to adapt the polyphone; that's the only equipment we have. Son, we're going to make this the most useful interference ever recorded!"
With bloodshot eyes and almost trembling fingers Cantrell tuned in the adapted polyphone. Then, through the eyes of a host he was surveying from an apparent altitude of twenty thousand feet a world enclosed in glass.