Dalen wanted to see a species evolve that could temper intelligence with sentiment.
Dalen’s belief was that intelligence alone, even the unusually high forms developed by certain Arachnids and some Centipods, was not the most pleasing form of life. He believed that sentiment—even though unsupported in logic—had a definite place in the cosmic aim of finally conjunctive symbiosis, because it provided the most comfortable form of relationship, and there no longer was any argument even among the gods that comfort was the Ultimate Aim.
So Dalen wished to give such an entity an opportunity to evolve. He knew there would be definite limitations. For one thing, there could be only two forms: avian or mammalian.
The birds and the mammals were the only two forms that developed a great deal of conjunctive feeling, and so his choice was necessarily limited to them. He preferred avian for its ability to leave a solid surface, but he liked mammalian for its inevitable eagerness to develop an opposed thumb. And the opposed thumb, Dalen believed, was the quickest answer to any sort of technical progress.
Some of the gods held that technical progress was undesirable, that any form of life would more quickly evolve into the abstract forms such as pure energy, thought-force, and so on, if they should lack technical ability. But Dalen saw desirable things in technics, as he saw desirable things in sentiment, and he had been determined for several ages that he would some day put his theory into effect.
Just now Dalen hesitated, not because he was afraid, but from caution stirred by his knowledge of Mogar’s ancient shrewdness. Mogar mistook his hesitation for weakness, and his next thought rolled powerfully and triumphantly from the Magellanic Galaxy, across the intervening vacuum, back to the IX and through its length to Bootes again:
“Then, perhaps, you will challenge me.”
Dalen perceived the note of condescension. He knew that Mogar had challenged many ambitious young gods, and had never lost a test, but still Dalen did not rise to the taunt.
“No, sire, I am not at this time going to challenge you,” Dalen answered evenly.
Mogar’s guffaw thundered across the intergalactic void.
But Dalen had not been elected to the council from the committeeship of the Constellation Hercules for his caution. At once he reached out to the other galaxy with his sensitive perceptory faculties and probed lightly at Mogar’s mind.
Dalen recently had begun to suspect that the elder god had retained some of the lower mind-centers that were distinctly ungodlike. Now was a chance to find out. But almost as soon as Dalen tried, he was chagrined. He touched one of the intricately convoluted hyper-centers, but it was shielded.
That was embarrassing. Mogar would know that he had tried, and by evening every god on the council would know that the newcomer from the LIII Constellation Committee had tried to probe old Mogar’s mind and had failed. But Dalen was not a god to back away from his chosen course.
He felt that his power was somewhat diminished by the unusual distance, for Mogar was visiting outside his own galaxy today. Dalen channeled his energy through the fifth-dimension space-warp, which offered zero resistance, and in traversing the long parsecs of the galaxy, he gained six years in time before he reached the point in the galaxy nearest Mogar in the Cloud. There he halted and struck suddenly and with all the normal power of his faculties at the depths of Mogar’s mind.
He hit first the reflexive center, but there he met a solid wall of force, and then, because he could shift his probing lance faster than Mogar could erect shields, he stabbed at what would have been Mogar’s instinctive level. He was astounded to find that, too, protected.
Dalen had expected to find the lower centers unguarded, because it required untold trillions of macro-ergs of energy to erect a single shield, and Mogar would spend centuries replenishing that energy from atomic dissolution. But also because attempting to probe an elder god’s mind was an audacious thing, and Dalen had not expected Mogar would anticipate it.
But Mogar had, and was taking no chance. Dalen did not hesitate. He had committed himself, so he stabbed again, and this time with tremendous power. He funneled his probing force through the spiral timewarp of the sixth dimension, to give it infinitely compounded power, and with all this inconceivable kinetic momentum he stabbed repeatedly at successively lower layers of the elder’s mind, far past the instinctive and even into the inanimate—but without success.
By now he was ashamed. The newcomer was now only a smart aleck. But Dalen had not finished. How the elder god at his age could endure the awful energy-drain of completely shielding himself was more than Dalen could understand. What Dalen did understand by now was that Mogar definitely would not allow anyone to penetrate his mind.
That was a shock as Dalen realized the implications. Why should a god shield his mind-centers at such a frightful cost of energy? There could be but one answer, and it frightened Dalen a little. It meant that Mogar did have disjunctive thoughts and perhaps even feelings. It meant that even if Mogar should withdraw his opposition nominally, he would be glad to see the experiment fail, and he might even help it to fail.
That would be a vicious handicap for Dalen. The evolution of a race was subject to many perils; evolving a particular species was a hothouse sort of process that would take several billion years and much careful nurturing. If another god should be opposed, he could destroy the entire experiment, for instance, by dropping a spore of some malignant virus into the midst of the species—a virus for which the race would be unprepared and against which it would have no resistance. That was only one of infinite ways to eliminate an undesirable species.
So now it was obvious to Dalen that his only recourse was to break down the barriers to
