If only there were some way of transmitting that bit of information to Lirld’s little group: Maybe they’d realize that the current flefnobe version of The Mindless Horror from Hyperspace had a few redeeming intellectual qualities, and maybe they could work out a method of sending him back. If they wanted to.
Only he couldn’t transmit information. All he could do, for some reason peculiar to the widely separate evolutionary paths of man and flefnobe, was receive. So former Assistant Professor Clyde Manship sighed heavily, slumped his shoulders yet a further slump—and stolidly set himself to receive.
He also straightened his pajamas about him tenderly, not so much from latent sartorial ambition as because of agonizing twinges of nostalgia: he had suddenly realized that the inexpensive green garment with its heavily standardized cut was the only artifact he retained of his own world. It was the single souvenir, so to speak, that he possessed of the civilization which had produced both Tamerlane and terza rima; the pajamas were, in fact, outside of his physical body, his last link with Earth.
“So far as I’m concerned,” Glomg’s explorer son was commenting—it was obvious that the argument had been breezing right along and that the papery barrier didn’t affect Manship’s “hearing” in the slightest—“I can take these alien monsters or leave them alone. When they get as downright disgusting as this, of course, I’d rather leave them alone. But what I mean—I’m not afraid of tampering with the infinite, like Pop here, and on the other side, I can’t believe that what you’re doing, Professor Lirld, will ever lead to anything really important.”
He paused, then went on. “I hope I haven’t hurt your feelings, sir, but that’s what I honestly think. I’m a practical flefnobe, and I believe in practical things.”
“How can you say—nothing really important?” In spite of Rabd’s apology, the professor’s mental “voice” as it registered on Manship’s brain positively undulated with indignation. “Why, the greatest concern of flefnobe science at the moment is to achieve a voyage to some part of the outer galaxy where the distances between stars are prodigious compared to their relative denseness here at the galactic center.
“We can travel at will between the fifty-four planets of our system and we have recently achieved flight to several of our neighboring suns, but going so far as even the middle areas of the galaxy, where this specimen originates, remains as visionary a project today as it was before the dawn of extra-atmospheric flight over two centuries ago.”
“Right!” Rabd broke in sharply. “And why? Because we don’t have the ships capable of making the journey? Not on your semble-swol, Professor! Why, since the development of the Bulvonn Drive, any ship in the flefnobe navy or merchant marine, down to my little three-jet runabout, could scoot out to a place as far as astronomical unit 649-301-3—to name just one example—and back without even hotting up her engines. But we don’t. And for a very good reason.”
Clyde Manship was now listening—or receiving—so hard that the two halves of his brain seemed to grind against each other. He was very much interested in astronomical unit 649-301-3 and anything that made travel to it easier or more difficult, however exotic the method of transportation employed might be by prevailing terrestrial standards.
“And the reason, of course,” the young explorer went on, “is a practical one. Mental dwindle. Good old mental dwindle. In two hundred years of solving every problem connected with space travel, we haven’t so much as pmbffed the surface of that one. All we have to do is go a measly twenty light-years from the surface of our home planet and mental dwindle sets in with a bang. The brightest crews start acting like retarded children and, if they don’t turn back right away, their minds go out like so many lights: they’ve dwindled mentally smack down to zero.”
It figured, Manship decided excitedly, it figured. A telepathic race like the flefnobes…why, of course! Accustomed since earliest infancy to having the mental aura of the entire species about them at all times, dependent completely on telepathy for communication since there had never been a need for developing any other method, what loneliness, what ultimate magnification of loneliness, must they not feel once their ships had reached a point too far from their world to maintain contact!
And their education now—Manship could only guess at the educational system of a creature so different from himself, but surely it must be a kind of high-order and continual mental osmosis, a mutual mental osmosis. However it worked, their educational system probably accentuated the involvement of the individual with the group. Once the feeling of involvement became too tenuous, because of intervening barrier or overpowering stellar distance, the flefnobe’s psychological disintegration was inevitable.
But all this was unimportant. There were interstellar spaceships in existence! There were vehicles that could take Clyde Manship back to Earth, back to Kelly University and the work-in-progress he hoped would eventually win him a full professorship in Comparative Literature: Style vs. Content in Fifteen Representative Corporation Reports to Minority Stockholders for the Period 1919-1931.
For the first time, hope sprang within his breast. A moment later, it was lying on its back and massaging a twisted knee. Because assume, just assume for the sake of argument, his native intelligence told him, that he could somehow get out of this place and pick his way about what was, by every indication, a complete oddity of a world, until he found the spaceships Rabd had mentioned—could it ever be believed by any imagination no matter how wild or fevered, his native intelligence continued, that he, Clyde Manship, whose fingers were all thumbs and whose thumbs were all knuckles, whose mechanical abilities would have made Swanscombe Man sneer and Sinanthropus snicker, could it ever be believed, his native intelligence inquired sardonically, that he’d be capable of working out the various gadgets of advanced spaceship design, let alone the peculiarities that highly unusual creatures like the flefnobes would inevitably have incorporated into their vessels?
Clyde Manship was forced to admit morosely that the entire project was somewhat less than possible. But he did tell his native intelligence to go straight to hell.
Rabd now, though. Rabd could pilot him back to Earth if (a) Rabd found it worthwhile personally and if (b) Rabd could be communicated with. Well, what interested Rabd most? Evidently this Mental Dwindle ranked quite high.
“If you’d come up with an answer to that, Professor,” he was expostulating at this point, “I would cheer so hard I’d unship my glrnk. That’s what’s kept us boxed up here at the center of the galaxy for too many years. That’s the practical problem. But when you haul this Qrm-forsaken blob of protoplasm out of its hole halfway across the universe and ask me what I think of it, I must tell you the whole business leaves me completely dry. This, to me, is not a practical experiment.”
Manship caught the mental ripples of a nod from Rabd’s father. “I’m forced to agree with you, son. Impractical and dangerous. And I think I can get the rest of the council to see it my way. Far too much has been spent on this project already.”
As the resonance of their thoughts decreased slightly in volume, Manship deduced they were leaving the laboratory.
He heard the beginnings of a desperate, “But—but—” from Lirld. Then, off in the distance, Councilor Glomg, evidently having dismissed the scientist, asked his son a question, “And where is little Tekt? I thought she’d be with you.”