She was still gaining strength, riding the crest of her victory in Mercury and her release from the continuing repression of the ascendant. She was ready to expand her horizons even more, to encompass the ultimate information and profit thereby.
“Did you consider,” she demanded of Schön, “the essential paradox of the Traveler? The single fact that makes it distinct from all other broadcasts, and makes its very existence proof that its Type III technology is qualitative as well as quantitative?”
“Certainly,” he said — but there had been a fractional hesitation that betrayed his oversight. He had missed the obvious, as had they all, and worked it out only in this instant of her challenge. Another point for her side! “The Traveler, as an impulse moving at light velocity, could never supervise so complex a chronological process as melting and reconstitution of an unfamiliar creature, since no memory of prior experience could exist in a pattern traveling past the subject at the ultimate velocity. The portion of the Traveler that directed the reduction of the epidermis would be twenty-four light-minutes beyond, by the time the heart dissolved. And the portion that finished the job would not have been advised when the process started — not when it couldn’t, relativistically, catch up for that same twenty-four minutes. Information cannot travel through the material universe faster than light. So the Traveler could not handle the job — yet did. Paradox.”
“You’ve missed it!” she cried. “Genius, you’re blind to the truth. You don’t understand the Traveler any more than the early galactics did.”
“Ridiculous,” he said, irritated. “I can tell you how the melting cycle is accomplished within that limitation. Do I have to draw you a picture?”
“This won’t fit on any picture, stupid.”
Schön intercepted a carbon-cube — one of the tremendous diamonds — on its way to some display and set it on top of one of the art-machines. He trotted down the hall to procure something resembling chalk, and returned to make a sketch on his improvised blackboard. A chalk sketch on a diamond!
“The beam originates at point A, strikes the subject at point B and goes on to point C, never to return,” he said, drawing a cartoon figure. She had no doubt he could turn out a work of art if he chose, but the chalk was clumsy, the surface slick, and he was preoccupied by the reversal of their competitive fortunes.
“For the sake of simplicity,” he continued, “we’ll ignore such refinements as the manufactured melt-beam that actually does the work; that’s merely an offshoot produced ad hoc when triggered by a suitable situation. The point is, the Traveler only touches once and moves on at light velocity. It doesn’t stay to see the job finished, any more than a river stays to watch the wader crossing it. There’s always new water.”
“You’re still all wet,” she said.
“But an object in water will set up a stationary ripple,” he continued, seemingly unperturbed. She knew he had to make his point — or lose points. “Because the impulse is not confined to one direction. In the case of our Traveler, the interaction at point B initiates a feedback that meets and prepares the oncoming impulses. So an extended interaction is feasible.” He drew another figure on a second face of the cube. “Call point D that secondary interaction, though it occurs at no fixed place. It does alert the oncoming signal in advance, making a type of memory and planning possible.
“So the melting is actually a function of B — the A-beam modified by the BD feedback. The only time the A-beam is encountered directly is during the introduction; and this is the reason for that introduction. Without that BD feedback, the melting would be a simple chaotic reduction of flesh leading inevitably to death. As it is, when a critical point approaches — such as the need to close down one lung while preserving the other — the Traveler knows, and modifies its program accordingly. The same holds for the reconstitution, which is hardly the natural reformulation of evolution it appears. It doesn’t matter where it occurs, so long as the Traveler is present; the beam is geared to react to a given stimulus in the proper way. A very sophisticated program, particularly since no part of its component is solid, liquid or even gaseous; but effective, as we know.”
“You’re talking about details and missing the whole, just as the galactics did,” she said. “The old trees/forest ignorance. You know what? I think you can’t comprehend the Traveler by yourself. You blocked it off along with the destroyer-memory! The truth is out of your reach!”
His face was calm, but she was sure he was furious. “What can you do with your alleged comprehension that I can’t do with mine? Show me one thing.”
“I can talk to the Traveler,” she said.
“To be sure. I can even talk to my foot. But what kind of a reply do you get?”
She concentrated all her attention and will-power on this one effort, knowing that her thesis, her one superiority over Schön, depended for its proof on the performance. “Traveler,” she cried, “Traveler, can you hear me?”
Nothing happened. Schön gazed at her with a fine affectation of pity.
Was she wrong? She had been so certain—
“Traveler,” she repeated urgently, “do you hear me? Please answer—”
Y E S
It came from every direction, that godlike response. It assaulted her senses, scorched her fingers, swelled her tongue, blasted her eardrums, lanced into her eyeballs with letters of fire. Was this what Moses had experienced on the mountain?
Schön stood dazed. He had received it.
“What are you?” she asked, frightened herself but aware that this might be her only opportunity to make this contact. Only while she rode the crest—
And it came at her again, a torrent of information, projected into her mind in the same fashion the melting cycle had acted on the cells of her body. The passing portions of the Traveler beam triggered nerve synapses in her brain and spoke to her in true telepathy.
In essence, this: Just as interstellar travel required the reduction of solid life to liquid life, and thence to gaseous life, so true intergalactic travel required one further stage: radiation life. The Traveler was not a broadcast beam; it was a living, conscious creature. Originally it had evolved from mundane forms, but its technology and maturity had enabled it to achieve this unforeseeable level, freeing it of any restraint except the limitation of the velocity of radiation through space. Even that could be circumvented by using the jumpspace technique — once space had been cartographically explored by lightspeed outriders.
There was nowhere in the universe this species could not range.
But very few life-forms ever achieved this level. Why? The Travelers investigated and discovered that in the confined vicious cauldron that was the average life-bearing galaxy, the first species to achieve gaseous-state jumpspace capacity acted to suppress all others — then stagnated for lack of stimulus. The problem was that technology exceeded maturity. Only if more species could be encouraged to achieve true maturity could universal civilization become a fact. They needed time — time to grow.
And so the Travelers became missionaries. Each individual jumped to a set spot in space and underwent the transposition to radiation, retaining awareness throughout. Physical synapses became wave-synapses, thought occurring from the leading edge backwards, but lucidly. And each individual personally brought jumpspace capacity to Type II technologies resident in individual galaxies.