James and Lola left the ship; Garlock and Belle went into the library.
"If I didn"t know you were impotent, Clee," Belle shivered affectedly and began to laugh, "I"d be scared to death to be alone with you in this great big s.p.a.ceship. Lola hasn"t realized yet what she really hatched out--the screamingest screamer ever pulled on anybody!"
"It isn"t _that_ funny. You have got a savage sense of humor."
"Perhaps." She shrugged her shoulders. "But you were on the receiving end, which makes a big difference. She"s a peculiar sort of duck.
Brainy, but impersonal--academic. She knows all the words and all their meanings, all the questions and all the answers, but she doesn"t apply any of them to herself. She"s always the observer, never the partic.i.p.ant. Pure egg-head ... pure? _That"s_ it. She looks, acts, talks, and thinks like a _virgin_.... Well, if that"s all, she isn"t any--or is she? Even though you"ve started calling her "Brownie," like my now-tamed tomcat, you might not...." She stared at him.
"Go ahead. Probe."
"Why waste energy trying to crack a Prime"s shield? But just out of curiosity, are you two pairing, or not?"
"Tut-tut; don"t be inurbane. Let"s talk about Jim instead. I thought he"d be gibbering."
"No, I"m working under double wraps--full dampers. I don"t want him in love with me. You want to know why?"
"I think I know why."
"Because having him mooning around underfoot would weaken the team and I want to get back to Tellus."
"I was wrong, then. I thought you were out after bigger game."
Belle"s face went stiff and still. "What do you mean by that?"
"Plain enough, I would think. Wherever you are, you"ve got to be the Boss. You"ve never been in any kind of a party for fifteen minutes without taking it over. When you snap the whip everybody jumps--or else--and you swing a wicked knife. For your information I don"t jump, I am familiar with knives, and you will never run this project or any part of it."
Belle"s face set; her eyes hardened. "While we"re putting out information, take note that I"m just as good with actual knives as with figurative ones. If you"re still thinking of blistering my f.a.n.n.y, don"t try it. You"ll find a rawhide haft sticking up out of one of those muscles you"re so proud of--clear enough Mr. Garlock."
"Why don"t you talk sense, instead of such yak-yak?"
"Huh?"
"I know you"re a Prime, too, but don"t let it go to your head. I"ve got more stuff than you have, so you can"t Gunther me. You weigh one thirty-five to my two seventeen. I"m harder, stronger, and faster than you are. You"re probably a bit limberer--not too much--but I"ve forgotten more judo than you ever will know. So what"s the answer?"
Belle was breathing hard. "Then why don"t you do it right now?"
"Several reasons. I couldn"t brag much about licking anybody I outweigh by eighty-two pounds. I can"t figure out your logic--if any--but I"m pretty sure now it wouldn"t do either of us any good. Just the opposite."
"From your standpoint, would that be bad?"
"What a _h.e.l.l_ of a logic! You have got the finest brain of any woman living. You"re stronger than Jim is by a lot more than the Prime-to-Operator ratio--you"ve got more initiative, more drive, more guts. You know as well as I do what your brain may mean before we get back. Why in all h.e.l.l don"t you start _using_ it?"
"_You_ are complimenting _me_?"
"No. It"s the truth, isn"t it?"
"What difference does that make? Clee Garlock, I simply can"t understand you at all."
"That makes it mutual. I can"t understand a geometry in which the crookedest line between any two given points is the best line. Let"s get to work, shall we?"
"Uh-huh, let"s. One more bit of information, though, first. Any such idea as taking the Project away from you simply _never_ entered my mind!" She gave him a warm and friendly smile as she walked over to the file-cabinets.
For hours, then, they worked; each scanning tape after tape. At mid-day they ate a light lunch. Shortly thereafter, Garlock put away his reader and all his loose tapes. "Are you getting anywhere, Belle? I"m not making any progress."
"Yes, but of course planets are probably pretty much the same everywhere--Tellus-type ones, I mean, of course. Is all the Xenology as c.o.c.keyed as I"m afraid it must be?"
"Check. The one basic a.s.sumption was that there are no human beings other than Tellurians. From that they derive the secondary a.s.sumption that humanoid types will be scarce. From there they scatter out in all directions. So I"ll have to roll my own. I"ve got to see Atterlin, anyway. I"ll be back for supper. So long."
At the Port Office, Grand Lady Neldine met him even more enthusiastically than before; taking both his hands and pressing them against her firm, almost-bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She tried to hold back as Garlock led her along the corridor.
"I have an explanation, and in a sense an apology, for you, Grand Lady Neldine, and for you, Governor Atterlin," he thought carefully. "I would have explained yesterday, but I had no understanding of the situation here until our anthropologist, Lola Montandon, elucidated it very laboriously to me. She herself, a scientist highly trained in that specialty, could grasp it only by referring back to somewhat similar situations which may have existed in the remote past--so remote a past that the concept is known only to specialists and is more than half mythical, even to them."
He went on to give in detail the s.e.xual customs, obligations, and limitations of Lola"s purely imaginary civilization.
"Then it isn"t that you don"t want to, but you _can"t_?" the lady asked, incredulously.
"Mentally, I can have no desire. Physically, the act is impossible," he a.s.sured her.
"What a shame!" Her thought was a peculiar mixture of disappointment and relief: disappointment in that she was not to bear this man"s super-child; relief in that, after all, she had not personally failed--if she couldn"t have this perfectly wonderful man herself, no other woman except his wife could ever have him, either. But what a shame to waste such a man as that on _any_ one woman! It was really too bad.
"I see ... I see--wonderful!" Atterlin"s thought was not at all incredulous, but vastly awed. "It is of course logical that as the power of mind increases, physical matters become less and less important. But you will have much to give us; we may perhaps have some small things to give you. If we could visit your Tellus, perhaps...?"
"That also is impossible. We four in the _Pleiades_ are lost in s.p.a.ce.
This is the first planet we have visited on our first trial of a new method--new to us, at least--of interstellar travel. We missed our objective, probably by many millions of pa.r.s.ecs, and it is quite possible that we four will never be able to find our way back. We are trying now, by charting the galaxies throughout billions of cubic pa.r.s.ecs of s.p.a.ce, to find merely the direction in which our own galaxy lies."
"What a concept! What stupendous minds! But such immense distances, sir ... what can you possibly be using for a s.p.a.ce-drive?"
"None, as you understand the term. We travel by instantaneous translation, by means of something we call "Gunther".... I am not at all sure that I can explain it to you satisfactorily, but I will try to do so, if you wish."
"Please do so, sir, by all means."
Garlock opened the highest Gunther cells of his mind. There was nothing as elementary as telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, or the like; it was the pure, raw Gunther of the Gunther Drive, which even he himself made no pretense of understanding fully. He opened those cells and pushed that knowledge at the two Hodellian minds.
The result was just as instantaneous and just as catastrophic as Garlock had expected. Both blocks went up almost instantly.
"Oh, no!" Atterlin exclaimed, his face turning white.
The girl shrieked once, covered her face with her hands, and collapsed on the floor.
"Oh, I"m _so_ sorry ... excuse my ignorance, please!" Garlock implored, as he picked the girl up, carried her across the room to a sofa, and a.s.sured himself that she had not been really hurt. She recovered quickly. "I"m very sorry, Grand Lady Neldine and Governor Atterlin, but I didn"t know ... that is, I didn"t realize...."