“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.
It was the Milky Way as a whole that was being cultivated. The Traveler beneficence resembled that of the destroyer: it seemed cruel, but actually fostered an acceleration of maturity. Species might suffer, but galaxies were prodded into growth. Those galaxies that achieved control over their immature elements — so strikingly defined by their actions in the face of jumpspace temptation — were on their way to success. The Milky Way, after several failures, had finally gained that self-control, and was on the verge of true maturity — as an entity. This was the gift of the Traveler: the passport to the universe, and to universal civilization.
“The white man bringing his god to the ignorant natives,” Schön muttered. “Big deal.” He stepped into the next chamber.
“It is a big deal, even if you’re too immature to admit that extragalactic aliens can do things you can never hope to do,” she cried, pursuing him. “And mankind, too, may share in that distinction, if it survives its own adolescence. Not by becoming smarter, but by maturing. We—”
Schön was in a soldier’s uniform, unkempt, and in his hand was a bottle of cheap whisky. If he had a post to guard, he was derelict in duty. Somewhere he had made an error, a nondiscriminating decision, and the consequence was upon him.
Afra was in a glorious gown, a golden-haired goddess, as she swept into the room. She observed banks of computerlike machinery, and took it for the sensitive, quality-control mechanism of the station, but she was intent on her personal opportunity. Schön’s deviation was her reward, his faithlessness to the common welfare her good fortune — so long as she proceeded with confidence.
He lifted the bottle to her in a drunken salute. “My candle burneth over,” he said. “You won again.”
Then that elusive special memory unlocked itself and emerged from its dungeon of security: something Bradley Carpenter had told her. In times of stress it had pushed up, only to retreat before scrutiny. Now at last she had it. “Schön is dangerous — make no mistake about that. He has no scruples. But there is a way to bring him under control, if the need exists and the time is proper. Now I’m going to describe it to you, but I want you to tell no one — particularly not Ivo.”
“Who is Ivo?” she had inquired, for this was before it all had started.
“He’s my contact with Schön. But this is the one thing about Schön he doesn’t know. I’m going to implant in you a hypnotic block against divulgence.”
And he had done so, skilled as he had been in such matters. She had not remembered it until this moment — this moment of discovering Schön in his weakness, knowing that his vulnerability was temporary, dictated only by transitory animation of symbols. Schön still led her in points, and she knew what tremendous resources he possessed; she would never overcome him if she did not finish him now. Uranus or Neptune might swing the pendulum back to him, and with it the initiative and the final victory.