"Yes. Tell "em I said so."
Tuly scanned. "Yes, sir, we should have all three."
"Get "em, Larry." Then, in the pause that followed: "Sandy, remember yowling about too many sweeties on a team? What do you think of this business of all sweeties?"
"All that proves is that n.o.body can be wrong all the time," she replied flippantly.
The three men arrived and were instructed. Tuly said: "The great trouble is that each of you must use a portion of your mind that you do not know you have. You, this one. You, that one." Tuly probed mercilessly; so poignantly that each in turn flinched under brand-new and almost unbearable pain. "With you, Doctor Hilton, it will be by far the worst.
For you must learn to use almost all the portions of both your minds, the conscious and the unconscious. This must be, because you are the actual peyondixer. The others merely supply energies in which you yourself are deficient. Are you ready for a terrible shock, sir?"
"Shoot."
He thought for a second that he _had_ been shot; that his brain had blown up.
He couldn"t stand it--he _knew_ he was going to die--he wished he _could_ die--anything, anything whatever, to end this unbearable agony....
It ended.
Writhing, white and sweating, Hilton opened his eyes. "Ouch," he remarked, conversationally. "What next?"
"You will seize hold of the energies your friends offer. You will bind them to yours and shape the whole into a dimensionless sphere of pure controlled, dirigible energy. And, as well as being the binding force, the cohesiveness, you must also be the captain and the pilot and the astrogator and the ultimately complex computer itself."
"But how can I.... Okay, d.a.m.n it. I _will_!"
"Of course you will, sir. Remember also that once the joinings are made I can be of very little more a.s.sistance, for my peyondix is as nothing compared to that of your fusion of eight. Now, to a.s.semble the energies and join them you will, all together, deny the existence of the sum total of reality as you know it. Distance does not exist--every point in the reachable universe coincides with every other point and that common point is the focus of your attention. You can be and actually are anywhere you please or everywhere at once. Time does not exist. s.p.a.ce does not exist. There is no such thing as opacity; everything is perfectly transparent, yet every molecule of substance is perceptible in its relationship to every other molecule in the cosmos. Senses do not exist. Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, sathura, endovix--all are parts of the one great sense of peyondix. I am guiding each of you seven--closer! Tighter! There! Seize it, sir--and when you work the Stretts you must fix it clearly that time does not exist. You must work in millionths of microseconds instead of in minutes, for they have minds of tremendous power. Reality does not exist! Compress it more, sir.
Tighter! Smaller! Rounder! There! Hold it! Reality does not exist--distance does not exist--all possible points are....
_Wonderful!_"
Tuly screamed the word and the thought: "Good-by! Good luck!"
END OF PART ONE
PART TWO
They were the Masters, and they had only to choose: eternal life, as inhuman monsters--or death!
MASTERS OF s.p.a.cE
BY EDWARD E. SMITH & E. EVERETT EVANS
Ill.u.s.trated by BERRY
_What has gone before: The crew of the starship Orion found themselves in the middle of a great s.p.a.ce war between the creatures called Stretts and the lost android servants of their own human ancestors. Helped by the androids, the Earthmen formed themselves into the powerful telepathic linkage called "peyondix" to invade the Strett planet itself. As their minds joined they heard the android Tuly cry out, "Good...." And then their minds were out in interstellar s.p.a.ce._
VIII
Hilton did not have to drive the peyondix-beam to the planet Strett; it was already there. And there was the monstrous First Lord Thinker Zoyar.
Into that mind his multi-mind flashed, its every member as responsive to his will as his own fingers--almost infinitely more so, in fact, because of the tremendous lengths of time required to send messages along nerves.
That horrid mind was scanned cell by cell. Then, after what seemed like a few hours, when a shield began sluggishly to form, Hilton transferred his probe to the mind of the Second Thinker, one Lord Ynos, and absorbed everything she knew. Then, the minds of all the other Thinkers being screened, he studied the whole Strett planet, foot by foot, and everything that was on it.
Then, mission accomplished, Hilton snapped his attention back to his office and the multi-mind fell apart. As he opened his eyes he heard Tuly scream: "... Luck!"
"Oh--you still here, Tuly? How long have we been gone?"
"Approximately one and one-tenth seconds, sir."
"WHAT!"
Beverly Bell, in the haven of Franklin Poynter"s arms, fainted quietly.
Sandra shrieked piercingly. The four men stared, goggle-eyed. Temple and Teddy, as though by common thought, burrowed their faces into brawny shoulders.
Hilton recovered first. "So _that"s_ what peyondix is."
"Yes, sir--I mean no, sir. No, I mean yes, but ..." Tuly paused, licking her lips in that peculiarly human-female gesture of uncertainty.
"Well, what _do_ you mean? It either is or isn"t. Or is that necessarily so?"
"Not exactly, sir. That is, it started as peyondix. But it became something else. Not even the most powerful of the old Masters--n.o.body--ever did or ever could _possibly_ generate such a force as that. Or handle it so fast."
"Well, with seven of the best minds of Terra and a ..."
"Chip-chop the chit-chat!" Karns said, harshly. "What I want to know is whether I was having a nightmare. Can there _possibly_ be a race such as I thought I saw? So utterly savage--ruthless--merciless! So devoid of every human trace and so h.e.l.l-bent determined on the extermination of every other race in the Galaxy? G.o.d d.a.m.n it, it simply doesn"t make sense!"
Eyes went from eyes to eyes to eyes.
All had seen the same indescribably horrible, abysmally atrocious, things. Qualities and quant.i.ties and urges and drives that no words in any language could even begin to portray.