“How do you get the atoms lined up?” Phil asked eagerly.
“Temperature near absolute zero and an electric field,” Opperly said, touching a button beside the doorway. “Simplest thing in the world. The new insulators can hold a gun magazine at one degree Kelvin for weeks, and carry enough fissionable pellets to give rapid fire, with the effect of a steady beam, for more than a minute. Planning to make yourself an ortho in your home workshop, Phil? I’m afraid they don’t sell that kit. Everything I’ve been telling you is top security, death penalty and all that. But I’m getting so senile I don’t understand security regulations. I’m apt to babble anything. I keep telling Bobbie T. he’ll have to have me orthocuted some day, but like everyone else he refuses to take me seriously. That’s the trick they used on me in WW3 and they’ve never forgot it.”
“Bobbie T.?”
Opperly made another of his apologetic grimaces. “Barnes. President Robert T. Barnes. We were charter members of the Midwest Starship Society. Of course he was just a shaver then and now he’s a besotted, scripture quoting fox, but shared dreams have a way of linking people permanently. I drop in on him now and then and flash my Starship badge. He’s one of my pipelines to what’s happening in the world, though the security services don’t tell him too much. That’s how I learned about the green cat.”
Phil was nerving himself to ask Opperly just what he’d learned, when he heard footsteps behind him.
The man who looked like a brother of the girl with hoofs was standing in the gateway.
Just then the door of the mansion opened, revealing a scholarly appearing man whose face was twitching with excitement and nervousness. His coat had two bulging brief case pockets, while his vest was crammed with enough microbooks to make up a dozen encyclopedias, plus two micronotebooks with stylus, and a fountain pen besides. His hair was graying and thin, and he wore ancient pince-nez that twitched with his nose.
“Dr. Opperly!” He greeted in a high-pitched voice that expressed both fluster and delight. “You come at a whirling moment!”
“That’s the way I like them, Hugo,” Opperly told him. “Where’s Garnett?”
But the other was looking at Phil, who decided the twitch was permanent. At the moment its owner was using it to express inquiry and mild apprehension.
“Oh,” Opperly said casually, “this is Phil Gish of the press.” His eyes twinkled. “Of the U. S. Newsmoon, in fact. Phil, this is Hugo Frobisher, Ph.Ch. – Chancellor of Philosophy, you know, the new higher degree. I’m just a lowly Ph.D. myself.”
But Frobisher was beaming at Phil as if he were a donor with a $100,000 check. “This is most gratifying, Mr. Gish,” he breathed. Then he whipped out a micronotebook and poised on its white field the stylus whose movements would be reproduced on one ten thousandth of the space on the tape inside. “The U. S. Newsmoon, you say?”
At that moment the man at the gate came clumping up behind them. Phil felt a gust of uneasiness, but the newcomer merely treated them all to a big, innocent grin that brought out all the handsomeness of the faun-like face.
“Me press, too,” he announced happily. “Introducing to each you Dion da Silva. Much delight.”
Frobisher seemed about to melt with gratification, though da Silva’s gaiety was undoubtedly generally contagious. “What paper?” Frobisher asked.
Phil noted that Opperly was studying the newcomer intently. The latter was having trouble with Frobisher’s question.
“Mean what?” he countered, drawing his shaggy eyebrows together in a frown.
“ La Prensa ,” Opperly supplied suddenly. “Mr. da Silva representsLa Prensa. ”
“Is so. Thank you,” da Silva confirmed.
Phil could have sworn that Opperly had never seen da Silva before and that da Silva had never heard ofLa Prensa.
However, Frobisher seemed to accept the explanation. “Come in, come in, gentlemen,” he urged, fluttering backward. “I’m sure you’ll first want to tour our little establishment and have a peek at all our projects. Story background, you know.”
“I’m sure they’ll want to go straight to Garnett and get the story itself,” Opperly assured him. “Where is Winston anyway, Hugo?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t the faintest idea of Dr. Garnett’s whereabouts,” Frobisher replied with prim satisfaction. “Things have been popping everywhere since this morning. In every project. We’d have to tour the Foundation to find him in any case.”
Opperly flashed Phil a look of humorous resignation. Dion da Silva pressed past Phil, flashing his wide white teeth at everyone and saying, “Is fine, fine.” Phil’s spirits rose. He felt certain that he was getting nearer to Lucky.
XV
INSIDE, the Humberford Foundation was a gloomy Edwardian mansion to which had been sketchily grafted a pleasantly disorganized scientific enterprise. Glassed shelves of leatherbound books that hadn’t been opened for decades were elbowed by trim microfilm files. Blackened portraits of John Junius Humberford and his ancestors looked down on machines for shuffling the eternal Rhine cards and on fluorescent screens-in-depth that blended a dozen recordings of a brain wave made from different angles into the shadowy semblance of a human thought. Stately drawing rooms that set one thinking of bustles and teacups instead held solemn faced, scantily clad girls with electrodes attached to twenty parts of their bodies. Laboratory technicians in loose smocks caught their heels in stair carpets a hundred years old.
But today there was an excitement that pushed the Edwardian half of the place far into the background and brightened the very grime on the walls. Chancellor Frobisher and his little train of visitors were not even noticed. Girls triumphantly calling Rhine cards stared past them unseeingly. Clairvoyants sketching objects being imagined by someone else three floors away didn’t look up from their blackboards. A technician darted out with a large syringe and took air samples under their very noses without seeming to be aware of their presence. Correlating engines hummed and spat cards.
Phil was so busy peering about for his green cat that he heard little of what Frobisher was telling them.
Occasional high pitched explanatory phrases floated back to Phil: “… her 117,318thrun through the cards… telepathic communion with lower animals… perhaps some day share the thoughts of an amoeba… No, I really don’t know where Dr. Garnett is, I’m busy with important visitors, Miss Ames… telekinesis will make handies obsolete…”
Plodding behind da Silva up the stairs to the top floor, Phil started to listen to Frobisher consecutively. The Chancellor of Philosophy was saying, “Now in the room I’m about to show you, an experiment incomplete telepathy is underway. When telepathy is perfected, it will be possible for two individuals to lay their minds side by side and compare all their thoughts and feelings in the raw, as it were.”
“Is good!” da Silva interjected.
Frobisher frowned at the interruption before remembering it was a journalist talking. He went on smilingly, “In this case, however, we have only a preliminary stage: two individuals, by means of prolonged speech, writing, sketching, musical expression and so forth, are attempting to share their inmost thoughts to such an extent that they will tend to become telepathic, as seems to be the case with some husbands and wives.” As they came to the top of the stairs, Frobisher continued a bit breathlessly, “Incidentally, the young man in this experiment is one of our most consistent espers, while the young lady is a handie bit player who graciously devotes her leisure time to science.”
He paused with his hand on an ancient brass doorknob.
“Let’s not disturb them, Hugo,” Opperly suggested a bit faintly, leaning against the wall though he showed no other effects of the climb. “Sounds like rather an intimate experiment.”