Mrs Ellis straightened suddenly and looked pained. She put a hand to her head for a moment and murmured, ‘Goodness! The queerest pain.’
‘Do you think he’s hungry?’ asked Laura.
‘Lord,’ said Mrs Ellis, the trouble in her face fading, ‘they let you know when they’re hungry soon enough. There’s nothing wrong with him. I’ve had three children, my dear. I know.’
‘I think I’ll ask the stewardess to warm up another bottle.’
‘Well, if it will make you feel better . . . ’
The stewardess brought the bottle and Laura lifted Walter out of his bassinet. She said, ‘You have your bottle and then I’ll change you and then—’
She adjusted his head in the crook of her elbow, leaned over to peck him quickly on the cheek, then cradled him close to her body as she brought the bottle to his lips—
Walter screamed!
His mouth yawned open, his arms pushed before him with his fingers spread wide, his whole body as stiff a11d hard as though in tetany, and he screamed. It rang through the whole compartment.
Laura screamed too. She dropped the bottle and it smashed whitely.
Mrs Ellis jumped up. Half a dozen others did. Mr Ellis snapped out of a light doze.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mrs Ellis blankly.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Laura was shaking Walter frantically, putting him over her shoulder, patting his back. ‘Baby, baby, don’t cry. Baby, what’s the matter? Baby—’
The stewardess was dashing down the aisle. Her foot came within an inch of the cube that sat beneath Laura’s seat.
Walter was threshing about furiously now, yelling with calliope intensity.
6
Roi’s mind flooded with shock. One moment he had been strapped in his chair in contact with the clear mind of Gan; the next (there was no consciousness of separation in time) he was immersed in a medley of strange, barbaric, and broken thought.
He closed his mind completely. It had been open wide to increase the effectiveness of resonance, and the first touch of the alien had been—
Not painful – no. Dizzying, nauseating? No, not that, either. There was no word.
He gathered resilience in the quiet nothingness of mind closure and considered his position. He felt the small touch of the Receiving Station, with which he was in mental liaison. That had come with him. Good!
He ignored his host for the moment. He might need him for drastic operations later, so it would be wise to raise no suspicions for the moment.
He explored. He entered a mind at random and took stock first to the sense impressions that permeated it. The creature was sensitive to parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and to vibrations of the air, and, of course, to bodily contact. It possessed localized chemical senses—
That was about all. He looked again in astonishment. Not only was there no direct mass sense, no electro-potential sense, none of the really refined interpreters of the Universe, but there was no mental contact whatever.
The creature’s mind was completely isolated.
Then how did they communicate? He looked further. They had a complicated code of controlled air vibrations.
Were they intelligent? Had he chosen a maimed mind? No, they were all like that.
He filtered the group of surrounding minds through his mental ten-drils, searching for a Tech, or whatever passed for such am ng these crippled semi-intelligences. He found a mind which thought of itself as a controller of vehicles. A piece of information flooded Roi. He was on an air-borne vehicle.
Then even without mental contact, they would build a rudimentary mechanical civilization. Or were they animal tools of real intelligences elsewhere on the planet? No . . . Their minds said no.
He plumbed the Tech. What about the immediate environill:ent? Were the bugbears of the ancients to be feared? It was a matter of mterpretation. Dangers in the environment existed. Movements of air. Change of temperature. Water falling in the air, either as liquid .or solid. Electncal discharges. There were code vibrations of each phenomenon but that meant nothing. The connection of any of these with the names given to phenomena by the ancestral surface folk was a matter of conjecture.
No matter. Was there danger now? Was there danger here? Was there any cause for fear or uneasiness?
No! The Tech’s mind said no.
That was enough. He returned to his host mind and rested a moment, then cautiously expanded . . .
Nothing!
His host mind was blank. At most, there was a vague sense of warmth, and a dull flicker of undirected response to basic stimuli.
Was his host dying after all? Aphasic? Decerebrate?
He moved quickly to the mind nearest, dredging it for information about his host and finding it.
His host was an infant of species.
An infant? A normal infant? And so undeveloped?
He allowed his mind to sink into and coalesce for a moment with what existed in his host. He searched for the motor areas of the brain and found them with difficulty. A cautious stimulus was followed by an erratic motion of his host’s extremities. He attempted finer control and failed.
He felt anger. Had they thought of everything after all? Had they thought of intelligences without mental contact? Had they thought of young creatures as completely undeveloped as though they were still in the egg? ‘
