"Mind invasion!"
Hage Borat snapped out the alarm as quickly as he could tongue his toothmike. And at almost the same instant, the other nineteen members of Lontastan Exploration Squad 4710Z were shouting the same words.
Their voices rang a ragged chorus in Borat's right ear.
"Does everybody feel that?" he asked. "Sound off if you don't!"
The squad was silent. Then Danta spoke. "I feel it, but I retract the word 'invasion'. Something's looking at my thoughts as I think them, but that's all."
"Same here," several chorused.
"O.K.," responded Borat, "does that hold for everybody? Good. Now, does anybody have a fix on whatever it is? Who can locate it?"
Again silence from the squad. Borat rotated his body slowly in space as his eyes scanned the planetary system in which they had broken out of warp less than fifteen seconds ago. It definitely was a system, not a planetless star. He could see two inners plus three more out at gas-giant range.
"Intelligent life, you suppose, after all these centuries?" grunted Orrson.
"It's a weirdy, whatever it is," piped up Baune in her whimsical little-girl voice. "A sure-nuff telepath! I'm not sure I believe in it!"
"It's a telepath all right," Borat said, "and it has quite a range." The squad members had come out of warp with an average separation of over three million miles, as was usual in approaching a previously unvisited star, which spread them over quite an area of interplanetary space. And the telepath was watching them . . . had started watching them, judging from their reactions, at practically the same instant.
"What I wonder," Baune was saying, "is, does a telepath have to think? We think but don't telepath. Maybe it doesn't think, but does."
Borat grinned. "Cagoline," he snapped, "report this to headquarters, and keep it terse."
"Right," replied the communications man.
"My guess," said Sherris, "is that anything alive in this system is on the outer of those two visible inners. It could be Earth-type."
Borat had been thinking the same thing. Should he order part of the squad to approach the planet, or should he . . .
"Welcome, thinkers!" came the powerful—but definitely pleasant—roar of thought. "Yes, I'm on the world you have in mind, Captain Borat, and any, or all, of you may come down if you like. Also, forgive the delay in my response to your presence. I had to learn your word-thought-symbols before I could address you."
"Who . . . What . . . Who are you?" asked Borat.
"I have no identity symbol," the telepath replied. "Presumably there must be two intelligent entities in association in order for the name-making process to begin."
"There's just you, in this whole system?"
"Yes, although my world has ample plant and lower animal life. Unfortunately, it never occurred to me to allow an intelligent animal species to develop here. Your existence, humans, is a lesson to me in enlightened self-interest. But without cognating the possibility of such beings as yourselves, how could I cognate their desirability?"
"In what manner do you find us desirable?" Borat asked cautiously.
"As fellow thinkers, as companions, as, perhaps, playmates," came the thought. "No, Baune, this is not a spider-and-the-fly ruse. From your thoughts concerning the chemical composition of your bodies, I do not think I would find you digestible. In actuality, Baune, the man called Orrson finds you far more appetizing than do I."
Baune giggled. "Naughty-minded Orry!" she chided. But her thoughts—suddenly perceptible to all—were wondering Why didn't old Tall-and-Tough tell me?
"I'm omnivorous," Orrson said with discomfited lightness while his thoughts ran: Old is right! Too old to rate with that delightful little bundle of youth.
From Baune: He means I'm too young for him. And he probably thinks I'm too silly, too.
From Orrson: No! She's not too young for me. I'm too old for her! Why's she saying things like that with the whole squad listening? I don't mind being kidded by her, but . . .
From Baune: Oh, damn, if I only were brazen enough to tell him! But he says I'm not too young, so maybe . . . I'm not saying anything! . . . Or kidding him, either! "Hey! What's happening to me?"
From Orrson: Thoughts! Our thoughts are communicating! That creature down on the planet . . . Glowing Baune! Could you possibly mean it?
From Baune: Oh, you big mighty monstrous marvelous old supermale . . . WOW!
From Orrson: Tremendous! But . . . nine nines are eighty-one, nine elevens are ninety-nine, nine thirteens are . . .
Suddenly the thoughts of Orrson and Baune were no longer perceptible to the others.
"You humans view mental communication as desirable," the telepath apologized, "but with certain limitations. I believe I have the hang of it now."
Borat's mind was working furiously. Occasional humans had shown vague telepathic abilities, but nothing like this! The creature had inspected the thoughts of Orrson and Baune, decided to put them in close communication, and then, after belatedly discovering that such communion sought privacy, had closed off their thoughts from the rest of the squad!
What other capabilities the creature had—and how it might decide to use them—could not be guessed. Certainly the squad faced dangerous unknowns here.
But also unknown rewards. Functional telepathy! The Lontastan Federation needed something like that very badly in its econo-war with the Primgran Commonality.
And in any event, the being was apparently friendly and well-intentioned. The squad's primary task, he decided, was to learn as much as possible about the creature and its telepathic ability.
He began by asking: "Are Orrson and Baune in permanent communication, or are you acting as a transceiver?"
"A difficult question," commented the telepath. "I am not consciously transceiving for them now, but when I establish a linkage, such as theirs, it continues unless I break it intentionally. Perhaps my awareness of their presence has something to do with it."
"You've linked minds before?" asked Borat.
"Not intelligent minds like yours, but life-flows of various types. That is one method of controlling the ecology of my world."
Borat considered this. "What would happen," he asked, "if Orrson and Baune traveled out of range of your awareness?"
"I have no idea," the creature responded.
"All right, we'll find out. Orrson! Baune!"
"Yes?"
"Warp away from this system in short jumps of increasing length. Start with light-minutes, and lengthen from there. If your telepathic linkage breaks down, report back, and in any case come back after you've gone out two lightyears."
"Right."
"Cagoline," Borat continued, "are you through to Nexal?"
"Sure am! My report's raising a stir in headquarters!"
"O.K. Remain in space, Cagoline, and inform headquarters of developments as they occur. Danta, take charge of Orrson's crew and make a prelim of all planetary objects except the telepath's. My crew will go there. Questions?"
There were none.
"Start, then!" he commanded.
The squad—minus Cagoline, Orrson and Baune—went through a sequence of microwarps to gather into crew clusters. When in formation, Borat's crew warped once more to achieve entry position twenty thousand miles above the telepath's world. At that point the crew went full-inert and plummeted downward.
"Your mobility is delightful to watch, and most educational," observed the telepath. "But I catch thought fragments to the effect that humans were once confined, as am I, to a single planet. Now, however, you identify yourselves with space itself, rather than as creatures of your planets of origin."
"Yes," said Borat. "We could not fly through space until we devised equipment—tiny machines—for propulsion and protection outside our ancestral planet's atmosphere."
"Please continue," requested the telepath. "Your thoughts on a subject become more ordered and complete when you speak of it."
"Very well. For propulsion we need devices for inertial control, which amounts to gravitational control, and a device to insert ourselves into warp vectors which take us out of normal space. For protection we need shielding and pressor fields surrounding us. And a variety of macromolecules have to be imbedded into our body tissues. For example, our nasal and throat passages are lined with molecules that absorb, convert and release gases, to recycle the air from our lungs while we're out of breathable atmosphere. Then we have a power unit, implanted in our bodies along with the other life-support packages, to provide the energy for all these processes."
"I catch the thought," commented the telepath, "that these devices were first used in large vessels rather than in your bodies. Why were ships abandoned?"
"Because of prime-field turbulence. We still use small, unmanned ships for freight transport. Space isn't empty. There's a little gas almost everywhere in the galaxy, and in places the gas is relatively dense. Also, there are scattered clouds of dust particles.
"We . . . or our earlier ships . . . don't collide with this material when we travel in warp at superlight velocities. The warp removes us from normal space-time. But there is a reality underlying every particle of matter, a reality we call prime-field, and we don't get away from that when we go into warp. Our own prime-fields are subjected to turbulence by the fields of every atom of gas, or dust that we warp through.
"Now, the more mass an object in warp has, the worse the turbulence. The prime-field of a hydrogen ion, passing through my body in warp, might displace the prime-fields of half a dozen of my atoms, and they in turn might displace to a lesser degree the fields of two dozen more atoms before the shockwave passed through my skin and dispersed. Very quickly, the prime-fields would snap back to their appropriate particles and no damage would be done.
"But if I had the size and mass of a ship, my field would collide with more particle fields, and the resulting turbulences would have more mass to work on. The turbulence would be violent and continuous if my mass were great enough.
"This would do no visible physical damage to me. An atom's prime-field can be disassociated from it without causing the atom to break down.
"But a mind is a prime-field phenomenon, as our first ship-warpers discovered. The turbulence in a large ship could push a man's mind . . . his identity . . . completely out of his body, perhaps to distances of billions of miles. Of course the ego-field as we term it would snap back at the first opportunity, but if that opportunity were delayed for several seconds the man's reality would be permanently impaired. He would, in short, be insane.
"So, we miniaturized the basic components of our spaceships to a point where they could be implanted in our bodies," Borat concluded, "and ceased flying in ships entirely. Also, we wear no more clothes, and carry no more massive equipment on our persons, than we consider necessary."
"Are you not now about to collide with the fields of this planet's atmospheric gases?" inquired the telepath.
"Yes, but field turbulence is noticeable only at superlight velocity. Our entry into your atmosphere is a purely physical problem and is handled by one of our protective force-screens which shields us from frictional heat and extends, like wings or a parachute, to brake our fall."
The other members of the crew were exclaiming to each other about the appearance of the planet below, and Borat noted that it was, without doubt, the healthiest looking world he had ever seen. Not a swath of dead vegetation was visible anywhere on the land mass below, and only a few high-elevation outcrops of raw stone stood bare of plant life.
"Thank you," came the telepath's thought. "I'm pleased that my ecologic control produces results you find attractive."
Borat thought with a touch of awe, He makes the whole world his garden! And evidently he did so without hoe and rake, but by thought processes alone—perhaps by "approving" a certain plant, or animal, in a certain place, in the manner of humans noted for their "green thumb," and by disapproving a plant that attempted to sprout, or an animal that attempted to forage, in an unsuitable area.
If this was the power of telepathy, then it was plainly a power the Lontastan Federation had to have!
Borat's crew landed some two hundred yards from the creature, and stood staring.
"We are," observed the telepath, "mutually appalled by one another's size."
"Is all of that you?" demanded Sherris.
"All of this and more," came the response. "Approximately one third of me is underground. My form is roughly spherical."
"Maybe we can name you Monte," Sherris murmured. "That meant mountain in one of our old languages."
"That will be satisfactory," the telepath replied.
The humans walked slowly toward the giant stony-looking ball that soared at least two hundred feet over the rolling grassland. To Borat, the creature . . . Monte . . . resembled nothing else as much as a colossal boulder, lying partially submerged in the soil.
"I had assumed," he said, "that you were basically animal in nature, with locomotive ability."
"I am," replied Monte. "If it became necessary for me to change my location, I could rock myself free of the soil deposited around me, and roll away. When my planet and I were younger, and I much smaller, frequent movements were necessary to escape being crushed, or deeply buried, by diastrophic processes.
"Once," the thought continued, "I overstayed in a spot that became the peak of a mountain, because of the nourishment I found there. When the nourishment was exhausted, the mountainsides were too steep for me to roll down without smashing myself."
"How did you get down?" asked Walver, one of the younger men in the crew.
"First I attempted to forest the slopes with a species of tree sturdy enough to brake my fall, but the climate was unfavorable for the trees. Eventually, I merely waited for erosion to lower the mountain."
"What nourishment was on the mountain?" asked Borat.
"Radioactive minerals. I am, as I told you, essentially animal, but one of my life-processes is similar to the photosynthesis of plant life. Only in my case the process is radiosynthesis. Ordinary light cannot penetrate to the depth of my synthesizing tissues. Thus, I always locate myself over the warmest radioactives I can find."
One of the crew's mineral specialists said to Borat, "There is hot ore under the surface deposits here: I'm getting a strong count."
Borat nodded, still looking at Monte. "You spoke of rolling yourself. How . . . ?"
"I breathe, of course," replied the massive sphere, "thus there is an air cavity inside me. By shifting this cavity I can shift my center of gravity and achieve motion."
"Like a man walking inside a barrel," giggled Baune.
Borat blinked. "Are you two back?" he asked.
"Right," came Orrson's voice. "I think we can put the limit of the telepath's range at seventy-eight light-hours. That's where our linkage faded, and where it began rebuilding on our way back."
Borat frowned. "You lost it completely?"
"Afraid so," said Orrson. "But we have it back now."
"O.K. Come on down."
"Why the bugged expression, Hage?" asked Sherris.
"We need Monte's telepathy," he told her. "But we need it outside his field of awareness. If Orrson and Baune couldn't stay in communion with each other beyond that, I doubt if anyone else could."
"Oh," Sherris nodded. "You thought our people could visit here long enough to become telepathic, and from then on they would have a communication system far beyond anything the Primgranese can produce—except that it won't work."
"Right." Borat turned his gaze to Monte once more. "There is no way to make us permanently telepathic?" he asked.
"Regrettably not," replied the telepath. "Your thoughts concerning 'econo-war' are fascinating, and make me wish I could play on your side. You must find it thoroughly pleasurable."
"It was more fun while we were winning," Borat replied gruffly, "and we were until recent years. Then the Primgranese developed miniaturized emo-monitors—devices that enable one to read the emotional reactions of others—and included them in their standard life-support systems. The resulting gain in understanding gave their teamwork capabilities a tremendous boost, and modified their economic competition among themselves.
"We've been trying to close the emo-monitor gap," he added, "but duplicating what the Primgranese did is a slow, technically difficult task. If we could share your telepathy, we would have what the Primgranese have—and more. Otherwise, well, the way the competition has gone recently, the Lontastan Federation will probably be beaten beyond recovery before the end of the century."
The thought depressed all.
"But look!" protested Walver. "All we have to do to use Monte's telepathy is take him home with us!"
Borat grimaced. "Why do you think he remarked that we were mutually appalled by our relative sizes when we landed and he could make a comparison?"
"Oh, that," mumbled Walver. "He's too massive to warp."
"I would say he's more massive than the biggest starship man ever tried to fly," Borat responded.
"However," put in the telepath, "we have unknowns that might work in our favor. Perhaps I can defend myself against prime-field turbulence, though you cannot. Our minds have their differences. Could not that be one of them?"
"I doubt it," said Borat. "Prime-field turbulence is one of the most basic phenomena of the universe. No kind of matter is immune to it."
"I am willing to put that to a test," Monte insisted.
Borat thought it over. "Well, perhaps—but not until we've exhausted every other possibility."
"Hey!" came Danta's voice from whatever planet in the system she was examining at that moment. "Does he reproduce?"
Grinning, Borat asked, "What about it, Monte? A small offspring of yours—or several of them—could warp wherever they were needed in safety."
"That may be possible," Monte thought dubiously. "I have never tried reproducing because it never occurred to me. The durability of my body has been sufficient to perpetuate me without recourse to a reproductive process. I must give the idea some examination."
The whole crew felt Monte's mental withdrawal into solitary contemplation.
"Gad," breathed Walver, "when we finally found an alien intelligence, it was real alien! And he wants to join our war! Frankly, folks, I don't figure this at all!"
"It makes sense," retorted Borat. "Monte is super-intelligent, and obviously thoroughly sane. Thus he—"
"Why is he thoroughly sane? How do you know that?" demanded the younger man.
"The orderliness of his planet, for one thing," said Borat, "his enthusiasm for another, and his quick understanding of the nature of man, and of a multiple society, to cap it off. You notice he didn't inquire into the reasons for the econo-war. Was anybody doing any concentrated thinking on that subject, by the way?"
Nobody replied.
"Then he recognized our war, as we have only recently done ourselves, as a near-essential game for the progress of human society. He didn't have to have it explained to him."
"But why does he want to play the game with us?" asked Sherris. "Just for the sheer fun of mingling with other intelligences?"
"Partly, I think," Borat replied slowly. "But partly for his survival. He needs radioactives, and his planet is getting older. Diastrophism is slowing down here, and fewer and weaker radioactive ores are emerging on the surface. I think his basic purpose is to work out a mutual aid arrangement with us. He'll help with the econo-war in return for the availability of radioactives."
Monte rejoined them mentally at that instant. "Such a hope had indeed occurred to me," he told them. "However, the production of offspring by me will be of no assistance to you. I find that I can reproduce, but only after a gestation period of fourteen of your centuries. Also, I recall that the ability to communicate with other life forms did not come to me until I had attained one-fourth of my present massiveness. My offspring, with a plentiful supply of radioactives and other nutritive requirements, might attain that size in half a billion years."
"Then telepathy is a function of brain-mass?" suggested Sherris.
"Possibly so."
"O.K., reproduction is out," said Borat. "What are the other possibilities?"
Cagoline spoke up, "Several Council of Commerce members on Nexal are urging a full-scale research project to investigate Monte's mind. They say if the telepathic synapse—whatever that is—can be isolated . . ."
"Tell them telepathy seems to be a function of brain-mass," Borat replied a trifle crossly. "The trouble is that research of that kind takes time . . . not as much as Monte's reproduction, but more time than we've got. Look how long it's taking our labs to duplicate the work of the Primgranese on life-support emo-monitors!"
"You might add," put in Monte, "that my participation in such a project does not strike me as fun."
"Tell them that, too, Cagoline," said Borat. "Now, if there are no other suggestions, let's start equipping Monte for the warp test."
"I don't have a suggestion," said Orrson. He and Baune had landed a short distance away and now walked up to join the group beside Monte. The man was frowning. "But I think we should be sure of what we're doing—and why. Maybe Baune and I feel a stronger attachment for Monte than the rest of you, and have a special stake in his well-being. But just the same, it's good sense not to go off half-cocked."
"O.K.," said Borat. "What do you question?"
"Well, as you said yourself, we can't really expect Monte to be able to nullify prime-field turbulence. It's too basic. And it's too akin to the stuff thoughts are made of to be cancelled by thought. All we can reasonably expect is that Monte will prove more able than ourselves to endure turbulence."
"No mind can endure it long," said Sherris.
"Right," said Orrson. "Just a split-second knockout of your egofield, and you have to get the help of a psych-releaser to clean up the resulting trauma. And, if it lasts two or three seconds, you get a trauma that can't be cleaned up at all—the one form of insanity that doesn't yield. And I'd hate to share the same universe with an insane mentality of Monte's power."
He paused, and the others were silent as the thought sank in. He continued, "If we let Monte make the test, we should keep it extremely brief . . . certainly no more than a second. Now, let's say we find that he can endure brief periods of turbulence, followed by periods in which he heals the resulting traumas, with or without human assistance. Over a span of several months or a few years, he could travel into the center of the Federation, to Nexal perhaps, by making several thousand of these minimal warp jumps. It would be risky for him, and probably unpleasant, but chances are he would make it.
"Now, here's my question. Once he was there, what use would he serve that would be worth the risk he had taken? And I'm not asking for a glowing generality, but for a highly specific answer. His telepathic range will cover only one planetary system. It can't have the Federation-wide application we need, to serve the same purpose as the Commonality's emo-monitors. So, how do we justify risking his sanity in a test?"
Cagoline's voice sounded in their ears: "Hage, let me take a crack at that one."
"Go right ahead," said Borat.
"O.K., here it is, Orrson," said the communications man. "Nexal's the place . . . the only place . . . we need Monte's services. I'm speaking as a guy who's stuck with a job that keeps him in touch with all too many of those Council of Commerce gabfests back home. The time those brass hats consume arguing! Makes me wonder sometimes if we're as sane as we say we are!"
"Sanity has nothing to do with differences of opinion, only with the manner in which they are settled," Borat put in. "The settling requires the exchange of sufficient information between the disputing parties to provide a basis for agreement. And the most desirable course to follow in dealing with the complexities of the econo-war can't be arrived at without considering a vast multitude of factors."
"And even then the brass comes up with a lot of wrong answers," Cagoline retorted sourly. "But that's what I'm getting at, anyway. With Monte on hand to put all those CofC brains in communion with each other, that information-exchanging routine would go a lot faster and surer. And the same process is needed at lower levels of government, and in corporation boardrooms. Most of our corporations have their main offices on Nexal, and that's where they do their planning and get in their licks against each other. If Monte goes to Nexal, we won't need him anywhere else! Not much."
"Could you do what Cagoline has described, Monte?" asked Borat.
"Yes, indeed," came the eager answer. "I am now providing communion channels numbering in the trillions . . . at a sub-rational level, of course . . . among life specimens on this planet. Certainly I could do the same for the mere billions of persons on your capital planet."
"But your beautiful ecology!" mourned Baune. "If you come to Nexal with us, it'll go to pot!"
"That possibility does not disturb me," the telepath replied. "Your econo-war interests me more."
Borat eyed his second-in-command. "Satisfied, Orrson?" he asked.
"I suppose so," Orrson shrugged. "Yes."
"Then let's go to work."
The squad's equipment included several inertial-control packs, warp units, and power modules, brought along for use in the shipment home of discovered items that merited full study. For two days, most of the humans busied themselves around Monte, drilling holes through his tough shell, installing the necessary devices, and working out with him the means by which he could control their operation.
The latter was no serious problem. Monte had ample nerve-ends under his shell, plus sufficient musculature and muscle-control.
When the job was done, Borat said, "On this trial run, Monte, let's keep the warp jump as short as possible. It has to be long enough for you to see what you can do about the turbulence, but not long enough to do you any harm. I would say a one-second jump . . ."
"A tenth of a second should suffice," responded the telepath. "A full second will be better, of course."
"Fine. Be sure to set the warp breakout on automatic, just in case. Go ahead whenever you're ready, and good luck."
Slowly, Monte's mountain-sized bulk lifted free of the grassy surface and drifted upward, semi-inert.
"If no more than this is achieved," the telepath commented happily, "this means of transportation is far superior to rolling."
"Fine. Don't try to warp before you're three planetary diameters up," said Borat.
Monte drifted on upward and out of sight of the members of the squad who were remaining on the ground. They settled down to wait.
An hour later he called, "I'm in position, and here I go!"
Then immediately: "That . . . was . . . bad!"
"You couldn't fight it?" asked Borat.
"No. As you said, Hage Borat, prime-field turbulence is exceedingly fundamental. A quarter of a second was all I could tolerate."
"O.K. Come on back."
"Very well, but my return will be slow. I do not care to warp again."
The humans looked at the disappointment in each other's faces. "Well, that's that," Borat said inanely.
Cagoline called, "Hage, the Council of Commerce on Nexal is in a tizzy. I've told them the bad news."
"Do they have any bright ideas?"
"No, people in tizzies seldom get bright ideas," the communications man contributed. "They had their hopes way up. They were counting on gaining something important from our discovery of Monte, or his discovery of us. They still aren't reconciled to taking a licking on this."
"They may as well accept it," growled Borat, "and put some more push behind emo-monitor development." After a moment he added, "Tell them we're staying here to study Monte and mine some radioactives for him . . . and tell them to try to come up with a workable idea."
Monte was four days getting down from interplanetary space, and was appreciative of the concentrated uranium ore that awaited him.
"This is most generous of you," he told the squad, "in view of my inability to assist in the econo-war."
"You tried," shrugged Borat. "After all, we're supposed to be the experts on mobility, and it's no fault of yours if we can't find a way to transport you."
"Hey, I just thought of something!" yelped young Waiver. "If we have an insoluble problem here, why don't we stick the Primgranese with it? We simply let word of Monte leak out and they'll tie up thousands of their best spies, saboteurs and sundry infiltrators on him! Monte could spot them as fast as they arrived, and we could capture them."
Borat frowned. "I hate to admit the problem is insoluble, and that our only use for Monte is a largely negative one such as that. At best it would give us only a short-term victory, and at worst, well, the Primgranese might solve the problem." He paused and shrugged. "Although I'm coming to the conclusion that no solution exists. There's no way to get Monte to Nexal."
"Well, frankly, I'm glad!' chirped Baune. "Not that I want us to lose the econo-war, but it would be such a shame for Monte to go away and let his beautiful ecology fall apart! If those old tycoons and bureaucrats on Nexal want Monte's help so bad, they can come to him instead of him going to them."
There was an instant of stunned silence. Then Borat leaped to his feet.
"That's it!" he bellowed jubilantly. "You've hit it, Baune!"
"An excellently suitable solution!" came Monte's thought.
The whole squad was suddenly swarming around Baune, everybody trying to hug her at once. "But . . . but—" she tried to protest amid the hubbub, "think what a mess those billions of people will make of Monte's ecology!"
"Not with Monte running things," said Borat happily.
A few months later Monte's world had become the new and bustling capital of the Lontastan Federation.