"I have." He unrolled a sheet of drafting paper covered with diagrams, symbols, and equations. "But before I go into this stuff, consider the human body. How many red cells are there in your blood stream?"
"Billions, I suppose."
"And there are billions of human beings on billions of planets; each having red blood cells identical, as far as we know, with yours and mine. Also white cells. Also, sometimes, various kinds of pathogenic micro-organisms, such as staphs, streps, viruses, spiros, and so on.
"Okay. My thought is that the Lemarts, Ozobes, and the like are a.n.a.logous to disease-producing organisms. We saw the full range of effects--from none at all up to death itself."
"But they--the Ozobes and so on--died, too."
"How long do disease germs live in a human body after they"ve killed it?"
"But that horrible Dilipic--the golop. They don"t seem to fit."
"Try that on for size as cancer. Also, the Arpalones typed us before they"d let us land on any planet. Why didn"t we blast them out of the way and land anyway?"
"Why, we didn"t want to. It wasn"t worth while."
"We couldn"t. Psychic block. And if we had, we would have died.
Different blood-types don"t mix."
"So you and I are merely two red cells in the bloodstream of a super-dooper-galactic super-monster? Phooie!" she jeered. "That chestnut was propounded a thousand years ago. Are you trying to take me for a ride on _that_ old sawhorse?"
"That"s the att.i.tude I had at first. So now we"re ready for the chart."
He pointed to a group of symbols. "We start with symbolic logic; manipulating like so to get this." There was a long mathematical dissertation; a mind-to-mind, rigorous, point-by-point proof.
"Q. E. D." Garlock concluded.
"I see your math, and if I believed half of it I"d be scared witless.
Those few pieces fit, but they"re scattered around in vast areas of blankness and you"re jumping around like the Swiss miss leaping from Alp to Alp. And how about our own galaxy, the most important piece of all?
It"s different, and we"re different, mentally. That wrecks your whole theory."
"No. I told you I need a lot more data. Also, beyond a certain point the a.n.a.logy appears to get looser."
"_Appears_ to! It"s as loose as a goose!"
"Think a minute. Is it actually loose, or are we getting up into concepts that no human mind can grasp? That might be the case, you know."
"Oh.... You"re quite a salesman, Clee, but I"m still not buying."
"Our galaxy is a bit of specialized tissue--part of a ganglion, maybe.
Over here, see? I"ll have to leave it dangling until we find some more like it."
"I see. But anyway, you haven"t a tenth"s worth of real material on that whole sheet. Feed everything you have there into a computer and it"d just laugh at you."
"Sure it would. The great advantage of the human brain is its ability to arrive at valid conclusions from incomplete data. For instance, what would your computer do with the figures you shot at me the day we started out? "Thirty-nine, twenty-two, thirty-nine. Five seven. One thirty-five." Yet they"re completely informative."
"To anyone interested in that kind of figures, yes."
"Which includes practically all adults. Then take the figure three point one four one five nine. Compy would still be baffled; but, unlike the first set, most people would be, too."
"Yes. Perhaps two out of ten would get your message."
"Now take something really new, like the original work on gravitation or relativity. No possible computer would be of any use. That takes a _brain_!"
"The brain of a Newton or an Einstein, yes." Belle thought for a minute, then grinned at him impishly. "Now watch the brain of a Bellamy perform.
Get into high gear, brain.... I wish I knew something about biochemical embryology; but I read somewhere that ova are sterile, so our galaxy is an ovum. Therefore our super-galooper is a gal--which incontrovertible fact accounts for and explains rigorously the long-known truth that women always have been, are now, and always will be vastly superior to men in every quality, aspect, and...."
"Hold it!" Garlock snapped. His face hardened into intense concentration. Then: "Do you think you"re kidding, Belle?"
"Why, of _course_ I"m kidding, you big...."
"Look here, then." He picked up a pencil and filled in blank after blank after blank. "I"m making one unjustifiable a.s.sumption--that the _Pleiades_ is the first intergalactic starship. The super-being is a female, and she is just becoming pregnant...."
"Flapdoodle! There are no blood cells in a sperm, and I don"t think there are any in an ovum."
"I didn"t mention either sperm or ovum. The a.n.a.logy is so loose here that it holds only in the broadest, most general terms. The actual process of reproduction is unknowable. But wherever we went, we changed things. Not only by what we actually did, but also as a catalyst--no...."
"No, not a catalyst. A hormone."
"Exactly. Each of these changes would cause others, and so on. An infinite series. Calling the first three terms alpha, beta, and gamma, we operate like this...." Garlock"s pencil was flying now. "Following me?"
"On your tail." Belle was breathing hard; as the blank s.p.a.ces became fewer and fewer her face began to turn white.
"From this we get that ... and _that_ makes the whole bracket tie into the same conclusion I had before. So, except for that one a.s.sumption, it"s solid."
"My Lord, Clee!" Belle studied the chart. "I mentioned Newton and Einstein ... add to that "the brain of a Garlock, better than either.""
Then, seeing his reaction, "You"re blushing. I didn"t think...."
"Cut the comedy. You know I couldn"t carry either of their hats to a dog-fight."
"And I would _never_ have believed that you are basically modest."
"I said cut out the kidding, Belle."
"I"m deadly serious. A brain that could do _that_," she waved at the chart, "... well, even I am not enough of a heel to belittle one of the most tremendous intuitions ever achieved by man. Not that I like it.
It"s horrible. It denies mankind everything that made him come up from the slime--everything that made him man."
"Not at all. Nothing is changed, in man"s own frame of reference. It merely takes our thinking one step farther. That step, of course, isn"t easy."
"_That_ is the understatement of all time. What it will _do_, though, is set up an inferiority complex that would wipe out the whole human race."
"There might be some slight tendency. Also, since my basic a.s.sumption can"t be justified, the whole thing may be fallacious. So I"m not going to publish it." He glanced at the chart and it vanished.