we know they aren't humans, not even funny-looking humans. We wear ourselves out at times trying to work out what they are. Not because of any great curiosity on our part, but because we could work with them better if we knew. And we have no idea. You hear me? No idea whatsoever. Hal Rawlins is talking to someone he is convinced is a robot — a funny-looking robot, of course — but he can't even be sure of that. No one can be sure of anything at all. The point is that we don't really have to be. They accept us, we accept them. They are patient with us and we with them. They may be more patient than we are, for they know we are newcomers, new subscribers on this party line we share. None of them think like us, none of us think like them. We try to adapt ourselves to their way of thinking, they try to adapt themselves to our way of thinking. All we know for sure is that they are intelligences, all they know is that we are some outrageous kind of intelligent life form. We are, all of us, a brotherhood of intelligences, getting along the best we can, talking, gossiping, teaching, learning, trading information, laying out ideas.'
This is the kind of crap you're always talking,' said Russell, wrathfully. 'I don't give a damn about all your philosophizing. What I want is something to work on. The deal is that when you have something that is promising, you pass it on to us.'
'But the judgment is mine,' said Thomas, 'and rightly so. In some of the stuff we get here, there could be certain implications…'
'Implications, hell!'
'What are you doing with what we have given you? We gave you the data on artificial molecules. What have you done on that?'
'We're working on it.'
'Work harder, then. Quit your bellyaching and show some results on that one. You and I both know what it would mean. With it, we could built to order any material, put together any kind of structure we might wish. Could build the kind of world we want, to order. The materials we want to our own specifications — food, metal, fabrics, you name it.'
'Development,' Russell said, defensively, 'takes time. Keep your shirt on.'
'We gave you the data on cell replacement. That would defeat disease and old age. Carried to its ultimate degree, an immortal world — if we wanted an immortal world, and could control it and afford it. What are you doing with that?'
'We're working on that one, too. All these things take time.'
'Mary Kay thinks she has found what may be an ideal religion. She thinks that she may even have found God. At times, she says, she feels she's face to face with God. How about that one? We'll hand it over to you anytime you say.'
'You keep that one. What we want is FTL.'
'You can't have FTL. Not until we know more. As you say, we have mountains of data on it…'
'Give me that data. Let my boys get to work on it.'
'Not yet. Not until we have a better feel of it. To tell you the truth, Ben, there's something scary about it.'
'What do you mean, scary?'
'Something wrong. Something not quite right. You have to trust our judgment.'
'Look, Paul, we've gone out to Centauri. Crawled out there. Took years to get there, years to get back. And nothing there. Not a goddamn thing. Just those three suns. We might just as well not have gone. That killed star travel. The public wouldn't stand still for another one like that. We have to have FTL, or we'll never go to the stars. Now we know it can be done. You guys have it at your fingertips and you won't let us in on it.'
'As soon as we have something even remotely possible, we'll hand it over to you.'
'Couldn't we just have a look at it? If it's as bad, as screwed up as you say it is, we'll hand it back.' Thomas shook his head. 'Not a chance,' he said.
III
There were no words, although there was the sense of unspoken words. No music, but the sense of music. No landscape,butafeeloftallslendertrees, graceful in the wind; of park-like lawns surrounding stately houses; of a running brook glistening in an unseen sun, babbling over stones; of a lake with whitecaps racing in to shore. No actuality, but a compounded belief that a shattering actuality lurked just around the corner, waiting to burst out.
Mary Kay sank into it and let all of it enfold her. This time, she had thought, this time, please God, there will be something that I can understand. But once she had sunk into it, she no longer prayed there would be something to take back. This, in itself, was quite enough. This was all that anyone might want, or need. What was here filled the soul and wiped out the mind.
A stray, human thought intruded, but only momentarily:
Some day I'll have it; some day there will be data. Some day there'll be an inkling.
And then the thought snapped off. For there was no need to know. Being here was all.
She was no longer human. She was not anything at all. She simply existed. She was stripped of everything but the inner core of consciousness. She had no body and no mind. The intellectuality took in only the wonder and the breath-catching happiness, the innocent sensuality, the mindless well-being and the Tightness of it all — the Tightness of being here. Wherever here might be. She did not even wonder at the here. She simply did not care.
Duty and purpose struggled feebly with the carelessness.
— But? she cried, why show me only? Why not tell me, too? I'm an intelligence. I want to know. I have the right to know.
— Sh-h-h-h-h
A shushing, a lullaby. A compassion. A tenderness.
Then the holiness.
She surrendered herself wholly to the holiness.
IV
They looked to him, thought Thomas. That was the hell of it; they all looked to him for guidance, direction and comfort and he had none of these to give. They were out there on the firing line and he was sitting safely back and it would seem there should be something he could offer. But try as he might, he knew that he had nothing. Each of them a sensitive, for if they were not sensitives, they'd not be telepaths.
It took raw courage, he thought, a special kind of courage, to reach out into the cosmos, out into that place where time and space pressed close even if time and space were cancelled out. Even knowing this, knowing that space-time had been brushed aside, the consciousness of it must be always there, the fear of it always there, the fear of being snared and left and lost within the deepest gulf of it. A special courage to face up to another mind that might be only a few light-years distant or millions of light-years distant, and the alienness that the light-years conjured up and magnified. And, worst of all, the never-forgotten realization that one was a newcomer in this community of intelligence, a novice, a hick, the bottom of the totem pole. A tendency to be retiring and apologetic, even when there was no reason to be apologetic. A kindergartener in a school where high school seniors and college students reared to godlike heights.
Thomas rose from his desk and walked across the room to stand before a window. The desert lay outside, aloof and noncaring, a humped plain of sand and rock, sterile and hostile. Better judgment would have been to place this installation, he thought, in a kinder land where there would be friendly trees and purling streams and forest paths to walk in. But the desert, in the administrative mind, served a better purpose. Its long distances, its discomforts and its loneliness discouraged the curious who otherwise might come flocking in to stare. No secret project, in the usual sense, but one about which not too much was said, about which as little as possible was said
