"Come in," he said to Boyle. "Work toward the most powerful single person you can find." Feeling his own mind augmented by his partner's, he probed deep into the glassed-in world, toward the highest building he could find.
He landed in the brain of a highly trained mathematician and felt a swirl of fantastically complicated figures and tables. Then the mathematician walked through an automatic door into the presence of a person whom he regarded with almost holy awe. Cantrell realized then how rapidly the acceleration of evolution had curved upward on this tiny world. The personage was small and weighed down with a staggering amount of braincells that could be seen pulsing and throbbing under a transparent dura mater. The skull had been wholly absorbed.
"Right," snapped Cantrell to his partner. "Push it out, son. Make it stick like glue." The two psychologists united their minds in a staggering intellectual effort; there were visible sparks as they fused into one perfect sending outfit. Cantrell, only vaguely conscious of the personage and the mathematician, saw the former start with alarm and heard him ask as if from a distance: "Do you feel anything?"
"No," said Cantrell's host. "This matter of geodesics—"
"Leave me for a while," said the personage. "I sense a message of great importance." The mathematician exited, and Cantrell abruptly severed his mind from the host. For the first time he found himself to be a point of consciousness hanging before the personage, seeing, hearing and sending.
He raised his hand in a choppy gesture. Boyle nodded, and shut his eyes. Sweat stood out on his brow as he projected the message: "Boyle and Cantrell speaking. Can you hear us?"
The personage jumped as if he had been shot at. He looked around cautiously and said: "I can hear you. But who are you—where are you sending from?" In the language of the mind there is no need of translation; with the polyphone any two rational creatures can communicate.
The psychologists, now working as a perfect team, sent: "Speaking from the inside of your planet. But it isn't a planet; it's our spaceship. We're from Earth—third planet around the sun. But let's skip the formalities.
What do you know about—" and they launched into a technical description of the shakes.
"Have you," asked the important personage, "tried polarizing the crystalline lens of the eye? That should do it. It is not, as you thought, a psychodeficiency lesion but—" In clear, concise thought images he gave a complete outline of the cause and cure of spastitis malignans. And he knew what he was talking about, for this personage later announced himself to be the Chief Assimilator of the planetary division. He was the one who received all the technical data and assembled it for reference and use. Specialization had raced ahead on this planet.
"Thanks," said the psychologists at length. "Thanks a lot. We'll be heading back to Earth now—" he broke off in dismay. "If we do, that's the end of your people. Because as soon as our gravity plates switch off you get flung out into space, and we can't land without switching off the plates."
"An interesting problem," brooded the Assimilator. "But not insoluble.
We can make our own plates if necessary. I advise you to set your ship—
my planet—into an independent orbit around the sun. In about twenty minutes of your time we will have developed to the point where we will have our enclosed cities reinforced against anything but collision with a major planet. We trust you to set the orbit so that that will not happen.
You must return to Earth by some makeshift means." The Assimilator fell into a deep study, and the two psychologists withdrew.
Boyle glanced at a stop-watch. "That whole interview," he said disbelievingly, "lasted exactly one one-thousandth of a second. That was thinking under pressure." Cantrell was dashing onto paper what the Assimilator had told him about the shakes. And it made brilliant sense. He photographed his notes and handed a copy to Boyle.
"And now?" asked Boyle, carefully buttoning the data into a pocket.
"Now we take the lifeboat," said Cantrell. He gestured distastefully at the little bullet of metal lugged to the wall. "It's said to be the least pleasant way of travel known to man." He turned to the control panel and set a simple course around the sun that would maintain itself after the fuel was wholly gone.
Jammed into the little craft, cans of food floating about their ears and a hammering roar of exhausts in their heads, they strained to see through the little port that was the only communication from the outside. Boyle yelled something inaudible.
"What?" shrieked Cantrell into his ear.
Boyle drew a great breath and pointed with one thumb at the little crescent of light behind them—the Andros. "I said," he shrieked, "that it's a good thing we got away from those submicroscopic Einsteins.
They gave me an inferiority complex."
Cantrell grinned briefly and strained his eyes to see until the world they had made was quite invisible in the black of space.
Forgotten Tongue
"Hands up, scum," grated a voice. "You're going for a jump."
Pepper raised his hands and coughed drily. "Forget it," he said. "You can't get away with this." He felt a knee jolt the small of his back in answer.
"Walk," said the voice.
The street was narrow, and the buildings flanking it had no lights. This was the Industrial, one of the three great divisions of New York Sector.
Plants were resting their machinery for two hours out of the twenty-four, Pepper realized. As he walked along, as slowly as he dared, the clopping of metal soles against the pavement sounding behind him, he cursed himself for an imbecile, coming alone and unarmed through this bleak part of town.
"How long," he asked tentatively, "have you been gunning for me?" He wanted to find out how many of them there were.
"Keep moving," said the voice. "You don't get news out of us, scum."
He kept moving. They were headed in the direction of the Industrial Airport. That meant, probably, that he'd be crated like a gross of drills and accidentally dropped from a mile or so in the air. There would be protests; threats, recriminations. Then the customary jeering retort from the Optimus Press: "If a Lower wishes to disguise himself for purposes of his own and is damaged in the process, we fail to see how this is any reflection on the present able administration. Honi soit—"
Not daring to give way to panic, knowing that it would mean an immediate and ugly death, Pepper walked on and tried to keep his knees from buckling.
"Look," he began again. "We can make a deal—"
"Shut up!" snarled someone. "And stay shut. I'd like to—"
"Let him talk, Captain," said another voice. Pepper stiffened as he heard it, for the dialect was unmistakably the throaty whine affected by the Optimus as the "pure" speech.
"Never mind," Pepper said. The sound of that voice was his death-warrant, he knew. Loyalists had been known to take bribes and deliver, their masters never. "How do you like this part of town, Cedric?" he demanded. "How does it strike you?"
"Why Cedric?" the voice of the Optimus asked one of the Loyalists, ignoring Pepper. "Supposed to be funny, Mr. Fersen," said the Loyalist.
Then Pepper heard a blow and cry. "I'm sorry, Mr.—sir—please—"
"Let that be a lesson," said Pepper. "Never tell the name. But don't worry, Mr. Fersen—I never heard of you."
"I'm just in," said the voice of the Optimus with a note of strain and disgust. "I'm just in from Scandinavia."
"In that case," said Pepper, "you'd do well to get back there. Because here comes a gang of Lowers that mean you ill."
Approaching them were people he knew. There was Marty who worked in a glass plant, Pedro who managed an autokafe; hard faces gleaming under the wide-spread street lights.