fact, to reconstruct the politics, biology and economics of an entire planet. Yet that, essentially, was what Boyle and Cantrell had to do. For flee where they might, nearer to or farther from Earth, they could not escape the vibrations from the land where horses had six legs.
From long periods of listening in and comparing, they discovered one important fact: that evolution was proceeding on that planet at a staggeringly rapid pace; that in fact the two partners had started out with a violently mistaken notion of the place's tempo. It was swift, swifter than anything with which they were familiar.
But their eavesdropping made it seem close to normal, for the human brain can accommodate itself to any speed of delivery. It can assimilate and synthesize at a faster rate than either of the two had previously suspected. It was natural that this discovery should wait for a moment like this, for never before had the human mind been called on to deliver at that rate.
They discovered that the nameless land was tearing along at a scale of one to a million, approximately. When Cantrell had heard the horsemen curse the rebels, that had been the equivalent of the Puritan revolution in England, period of 1650 or thereabouts. A few minutes later he tuned in on a general strike that meant a lapse of about four hundred years.
In two weeks of voyaging through space the strange planet had arrived at a world state which Earth had not yet attained.
Boyle, irritably tuning in on the lunatic planet one day, drew a deep breath. 'Cantrell!' he snapped. 'Put your set on and follow my mind. I have a conference of astronomers!'
His partner grabbed the ponderous metal bowl and clapped it on, groping out for the familiar mind patterns of Boyle. He caught onto him in about three seconds, then switched to one of Boyle's mental hosts.
Through the eyes of that person he saw a sizable hall built up into a structure like the inside of a mushroom. As he studied the other persons in the hall he realized that physical evolution had progressed a few more steps since yesterday, when he had last tuned in on the place.
His host's mood was one of confusion; through it he was speaking to the large gathering: 'This symposium has been called on a somewhat abstract question. You all know what it is, I presume; otherwise you would not be astronomers.
'As one looks back towards the glorious dawning days of our science, the names of those who were martyred in the cause of truth rise before us. Despots, with their piddling knowledge and tiny telescopes, maintained that the world was round, did they not? It remained for the genius of our clan to demonstrate that it was a truncated paraboloid.
'Jealous superstition preached that like all other worlds ours had a core of rock in the state of stress fluid; it remained for us to prove that no such thing was true of our world—that we alone of all planets lived upon a shell of rhodium, and that that shell, though inconceivably thick, was not solid, and that our planet was definitely hollow.'
Cantrell looked up. 'Lord,' he said softly. 'Oh, Lordy! Now I know where those six-legged horses came from.'
'Yes,' said Boyle as he turned off the machine. 'That planet is our ship, and those people are an entire civilization living on the shell of the old Andros. No wonder we couldn't get away from them; they were being carried around with us.'
'It's perfectly logical,' argued Cantrell. 'We carry Earth gravity for our own comfort; that's why we drew down a thin but definite atmosphere.
Also dust and organic particles which settled on the hull. There was warmth from the inside of the ship, and that wonderful old Swede Arrhenius long ago demonstrated that spores of life are always present in space, driven by light-pressure. They landed on our hull, went through evolutionary stages, a man-like form emerged and is rapidly reaching a more advanced civilization than our own.'
'But,' grunted Boyle, 'that doesn't help us out with the shakes. If they're swarming out there, we'll never be able to probe each other.
How can we shake them off? Spray acid on the hull?'
'No!' barked Cantrell. 'We couldn't do that—they have as much of a right to live as we. Perhaps—perhaps if we could communicate with them—?'
'Son,' raved Boyle, 'you've got it! The answer to our prayers! A super-race made to order for the purpose of solving our problems. We'll have to adapt the polyphone; that's the only equipment we have. Son, we're going to make this the most useful interference ever recorded!'
With bloodshot eyes and almost trembling fingers Cantrell tuned in the adapted polyphone. Then, through the eyes of a host he was surveying from an apparent altitude of twenty thousand feet a world enclosed in glass.
'Come in,' he said to Boyle. 'Work toward the most powerful single person you can find.' Feeling his own mind augmented by his partner's, he probed deep into the glassed-in world, toward the highest building he could find.
He landed in the brain of a highly trained mathematician and felt a swirl of fantastically complicated figures and tables. Then the mathematician walked through an automatic door into the presence of a person whom he regarded with almost holy awe. Cantrell realized then how rapidly the acceleration of evolution had curved upward on this tiny world. The personage was small and weighed down with a staggering amount of braincells that could be seen pulsing and throbbing under a transparent dura mater. The skull had been wholly absorbed.
'Right,' snapped Cantrell to his partner. 'Push it out, son. Make it stick like glue.' The two psychologists united their minds in a staggering intellectual effort; there were visible sparks as they fused into one perfect sending outfit. Cantrell, only vaguely conscious of the personage and the mathematician, saw the former start with alarm and heard him ask as if from a distance: 'Do you feel anything?'
'No,' said Cantrell's host. 'This matter of geodesics—'
'Leave me for a while,' said the personage. 'I sense a message of great importance.' The mathematician exited, and Cantrell abruptly severed his mind from the host. For the first time he found himself to be a point of consciousness hanging before the personage, seeing, hearing and sending.
He raised his hand in a choppy gesture. Boyle nodded, and shut his eyes. Sweat stood out on his brow as he projected the message: 'Boyle and Cantrell speaking. Can you hear us?'
The personage jumped as if he had been shot at. He looked around cautiously and said: 'I can hear you. But who are you—where are you sending from?' In the language of the mind there is no need of translation; with the polyphone any two rational creatures can communicate.
The psychologists, now working as a perfect team, sent: 'Speaking from the inside of your planet. But it isn't a planet; it's our spaceship. We're from Earth—third planet around the sun. But let's skip the formalities.
What do you know about—' and they launched into a technical description of the shakes.
'Have you,' asked the important personage, 'tried polarizing the crystalline lens of the eye? That should do it. It is not, as you thought, a psychodeficiency lesion but—' In clear, concise thought images he gave a complete outline of the cause and cure of spastitis malignans. And he knew what he was talking about, for this personage later announced himself to be the Chief Assimilator of the planetary division. He was the one who received all the technical data and assembled it for reference and use. Specialization had raced ahead on this planet.
'Thanks,' said the psychologists at length. 'Thanks a lot. We'll be heading back to Earth now—' he broke off in dismay. 'If we do, that's the end of your people. Because as soon as our gravity plates switch off you get flung out into space, and we can't land without switching off the plates.'
'An interesting problem,' brooded the Assimilator. 'But not insoluble.
We can make our own plates if necessary. I advise you to set your ship—
my planet—into an independent orbit around the sun. In about twenty minutes of your time we will have developed to the point where we will have our enclosed cities reinforced against anything but collision with a major planet. We trust you to set the orbit so that that will not happen.
You must return to Earth by some makeshift means.' The Assimilator fell into a deep study, and the two psychologists withdrew.
Boyle glanced at a stop-watch. 'That whole interview,' he said disbelievingly, 'lasted exactly one one- thousandth of a second. That was thinking under pressure.' Cantrell was dashing onto paper what the Assimilator had told him about the shakes. And it made brilliant sense. He photographed his notes and handed a copy to Boyle.
'And now?' asked Boyle, carefully buttoning the data into a pocket.
