Fantastic Stories Present the Galaxy Science Fiction Super Pack #1. Edgar Pangborn
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this far, they came across a little difficulty and couldn’t evolve any further. So there they are, handy little minds for teleporting whatever you want moved, and reading other people’s thoughts.”
*
She gasped. “Did you say reading other people’s thoughts?
“Certainly,” I said. “As a matter of fact, that’s what stopped the divers from evolving further. If they brush against any thinking creature, they pick up whatever thought is in the creature’s conscious mind. But they also pick up the subliminal activity, if you follow me—and down at that level of a mind such as man’s, his thoughts are not only the present unconscious thoughts but also a good slice of what is to him still the future. It’s one of those space-time differences. The divers are not really on the same space-time reference as the physical world, but that makes them all the more useful, because our minds aren’t either.”
“Did you say reading other people’s thoughts, like a telepath?” she persisted.
“Exactly like a telepath, or any other class of psi. We’re really living on a much wider scale than we’re conscious of, but our mind only tracks down one point in time-space in a straight line, which happens to fit our bodies. Our subliminal mind is way out in every direction, including time—and when you pick up fragments of this consciously, you’re a psi, that’s all. So the divers got thoroughly confused—that’s what it amounts to—and never evolved any further. So you see, honey, it’s all perfectly natural.”
“I think you’re just dirty.”
“Eh?”
“Everyone hates telepaths. You know that.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh, you go wandering all over the Galaxy—but my friends—what could I say to my friends if they learned I had something like a telepath in the apartment?”
“It’s only a baby diver, I keep telling you, honey. And anyway, you’ll be able to tell what they’re really thinking about you.”
Florence looked thoughtful. “And what they’ve been doing?”
“Sometimes they will do what they think they’ll do. And sometimes they don’t make it. But it’s what their subliminal plans to have happen, yes.”
She kissed me. “I think it’s a lovely present, Sol.”
She snuggled up to me and I concentrated on bringing the diver over to her. I thought I’d read her, just for a joke, and see what she had in mind. I took a close look.
“What’s the matter, Sol?”
“Oh, honey! You beautiful creature!”
“This is nice—but what made you say that?”
“I just got the diver to show me your mind, and bits of the next two weeks you have in mind. It’s going to be a lovely, lovely vacation.”
She blushed very violently and got angry. “You had no right to look at what I was thinking, Sol!”
“It wasn’t what you were thinking so much as what you will be thinking, honey. I figure in it quite well.”
“I won’t have it, Sol! Do you hear me? I think spying on people is detestable!”
“I thought you liked the idea of tagging your friends?”
“That’s different. Either we go somewhere without that whatever-it-is, or you can marry someone else. I don’t mind having it around after we’re married, but not before, Sol. Do you understand?”
I was already reaching for the video yellow pages.
*
I turned on the television-wall in the apartment before we left and instructed the diver to stay around and watch it. They are very curious creatures, inquisitive, always chasing new ideas, and I thought that should hold the diver happily for several days. Meanwhile, I had booked adjoining rooms at the Asteroid-Central.
The Asteroid-Central advertised in the video yellow pages that it practiced the Most Rigid Discrimination—meaning no telepaths, clairvoyants, clairaudients or psychometrists. Life was hard on a psi outside Government circles. But life was much harder on the rest of the world seeking secluded privacy and discretion. The Asteroid-Central was so discreet, you could hardly see where you were going. Dim lights, elegant figures passing in the gloom, singing perfumes of the gentlest kind, and “Guaranteed Psi-Free” on every bedroom door.
I was humming idly in my room, with one eye on the communicating door through which, were she but true to her own mind, Florence would shortly come, and I turned on the television-wall only to see how less fortunate people were spending their leisure. An idle and most regrettable gesture.
There was a quiz-game on International Channel 462, dull and just finishing. All the contestants seemed to know all the answers. In fact, the man who won the trip around the Rings of Saturn, did so by answering the question before the Martian quiz-master had really finished reading it out. When the winner turned sharply on the other contestants and knocked them down, yelling, “So that’s what you think of my mother, is it?” the wall was blacked out and we were taken straight to the Solar Party Convention.
The nominee this decade was human. He seemed to be speaking on his aims, his pure record and altruistic intentions. The stereo cameras looked over the heads of the delegates. Starting in the row by the main aisle, each delegate shot to his feet and started booing and jeering. It rippled down the rows like a falling pack of cards, each delegate in turn after the man in front of him, and each row picking up where the back of the previous row left off. It was as if someone were passing a galvanizing brush along the heads of the delegates, row by row.
Or as if a diver were refreshing the delegates with a clear picture of their nominee’s mind.
I groaned and called Florence.
“Look,” I said when she came. “That damned pet has followed the program back to the cameras from your apartment, and there he is lousing up the Convention.”
“I vote Earth,” she told me indifferently.
“That isn’t the point, honey. I’ll have to bring the diver here, and quickly.”
“You do that, Sol. I’ll be at home when you get rid of it.”
By the time the diver picked up my thoughts and came flickering into the room through the walls, Florence had left.
I felt the diver off the back of my head, made my thoughts as kindly as possible, and went downstairs to the largest, longest bar.
*
The evening passed profitably because I was invited to join a threesome of crooks at cards. With the aid of the little diver, I was able to shorten the odds to a pleasant margin in my favor. But this was doing nothing about Florence. A not altogether funny remark about teleporting the cards did, however, suggest the answer.
After the transaction was over, I sent the diver off to a friend on the faculty of Luke University, where they had a long history of psi investigation and where the diver could be guaranteed to be kept busy rolling dice and such. This was easy to fix by a video call. There had been times in the past when certain services to the Extra-terrestrial Zoology and Botanical Tanks had made me discreetly popular with the faculty, and anyway they thought I was doing them a favor. They promised to keep the little diver busy for an indefinite period.
I reported to Florence, and after a certain amount of feminine shall-I-shan’t-I, she came back to the Asteroid-Central.
This time I did not turn on the television-wall. I lay still. I said nothing. I hardly thought at all. And after several years compressed themselves into every minute, my own true honey, Florence, slid open the communicating door and came into the room.
She walked shyly toward me, hiding modestly within a floating nightgown as opaque as a very clear soap bubble.
I