"It's a matter outside our field," said Dr. Howard Sprinnell carefully, "and a matter of choice as to name. But mystical evidence seems to point that way." One of the girls laughed. "You're embarrassing the Solar Government, Fred. They are not supposed to have any sectarian views. But that's what we Divers think the This is. My name's Milly. This is Pat, and Joan, Bill, Ed, Al, John, Anthony, Ricardo and Mitch. Welcome to the Divers, Fred."
Fred Williams smiled around. The women were attractive, all brown-haired and nicely shaped. The seven men were just regular guys you might meet anywhere. But then, he wasn't anything to win a prize himself.
"So far as we are concerned, Fred," Dr. Howard Sprinnell said, "and this is official, there is the normal conscious mind, the subliminal mind of which we are not usually conscious but which is apparently a parcel of regional physical minds and the mind you roam in, and there is the unconscious mind, which does not seem to belong to any one person, although everyone has it, and which you people embarrass me by referring to as the This.
"All we know, officially, is that the This is the natural or original home of the universe, and the only reason we know that is because we don't want Divers to disappear into it and not come out. You're all too rare. I gather it is almost unbearable to come out of. But you'll just have to avoid the temptation to go home, as it were. After all, it has taken several million years to get man out here where he is and what he is. And the second reason is that the entire Solar Government depends on the people in this room for information."
Fred Williams looked at the others. They were serious. The smallest of the girls, Pat, caught him looking and smiled.
She turned to the doctor. "Can I tell Fred?"
"You followed him, so you may as well. I don't know what you Divers feel. But the Defense Council is waiting for the rest of you and we must hurry along."
Dr. Howard Sprinnell patted Fred on the shoulder as he passed. He stood aside for the other Divers to leave the room, nodded to Pat and Fred, and shut the door behind him.
Fred Williams levered his body off the dentist's chair and stood unsteadily. The girl took his arm. She was smaller than he, the top of her head reaching to his mouth, small, delicate and scented with heather.
"There's a lounge next door—you may not have noticed it on the way out—and there's always a bowl of fruit and some cheese and biscuits there. Let's go in."
He followed her.
Even the short walk helped accustom himself to his body again. And the room was large and airy, overlooking the central park of the city and the clouds beyond the tall buildings in the distance.
He stood looking out at the view and eating an apple while she sliced cheese and laid the pieces on a plate with some biscuits for him. Then she sat down, folded her hands in her lap and looked at him. She was wearing a white-and-blue-check dress. She looked young and fresh and alive. The room was clean and fresh. He could not think of Elsie and that apartment as being in the same world.
"Did the doc say you followed me?" Fred asked eventually.
"One of us always goes with a new Diver on the first trip."
"What did I look like? I mean was there anything to see?"
"Oh, yes." Pat laughed. "As a matter of fact, our minds look like the inside of eggs out there."
"But a plane went through me. And I shot for some reason into the Sun."
He turned and looked disbelievingly up into the sky.
The Sun made him blink and his eyes watered.
"Now I can't even look at it," he said, "any more than I could before."
"Show me your mind," she said simply. "Where is it?"
"Well ..."
"That's the whole point of the Divers. A mind is not in space-time. It is connected with a body which is—or, to be exact, it is associated with—a physical brain, which in turn can work a mouth and hands to communicate what the mind has seen. The Solar Government has the problem in reverse. They can send ships through hyper-space; otherwise, as you know, we could never have populated the Galaxy. Why, Polaris, which you visited, is over a thousand light-years from Earth! They can make matter shift in and out of hyper-space. But they can't communicate that far away. Radiation won't take the shift. So the government can either send radio waves out and wait a couple of thousand years for the answer, or it has to shuttle whole ships to and fro just to get a simple message.
"Worse, from a defense viewpoint, there are times when they must have information fast and when the nature of the news means that no ship will be either available or allowed to become available to carry the news. Suppose you are an intelligent life-form off Canopus and you think up a magnificent way of taking over the Solar System. You're six hundred and fifty light-years away, but time is no problem because either you live longer than that or you have a tribe-culture. Even if the system had a billion police ships, which it hasn't, it could never be sure of catching Canopus preparing, or intercepting whatever horror they sent off. And even if it were lucky, the ship would have to come back itself to get the news to the Solar Government.
"A Diver can send his mind instantaneously from one end of the universe to the other, he can examine atomic particles or survey galaxies, he can see through matter as if it were full of holes—which it is—he can patrol sectors and report exactly what he found there. He can dive into deep space and be free."
"Yes," Fred Williams said. "That's it. Free. That's exactly how we feel, isn't it?"
"Never mind. You'll be going out again. Regularly. With me at first until you get patroling under control. And then on your own."
"Are we always hungry?" asked Fred Williams, taking another apple.
"It helps. The government would like us to be permanently at the point of death, but that is fortunately impractical. The less hold our bodies have, the easier it is to go out. There's one other point, though. And since you're coming with me on your training, I'd prefer you to know—no matter what the rules say. Whenever you go near another living being in a Dive, your mind can see the other mind, and you can read it from the pictures in it. It's difficult to describe, but you'll see for yourself. And if the mind you are looking at is connected up to a body, as we are now, and if the pictures don't seem to fit the situation, you can take it that they refer to events still in the future as far as that body is concerned. The mind has a different space-time existence from the body, obviously, and quite often it is ahead in time. That's why we have to be negative Psi. Anyone can Dive, but only a negative Psi can remain objective about other beings' minds. A Psi would collect other minds' contents and get them confused with his own—future and present all messed up, full of symbols—take a look at a Psi's mind sometime on the way back. There are a lot of accidental roamers around on Earth."
"If we can read other minds," Fred Williams said thoughtfully, "then we Divers could have a hell of a lot of power."
He was surprised when Pat laughed.
"We all think of that," she said, "but so did the Solar Government. We have a bunch of Psis and Security troops tracing us all the time when we're in the body. But the real hold on us is not that. How would you feel if you were told you could never Dive again?"
"I—I wouldn't like that."
"You see? And you've only been on the first experimental Dive. Imagine when it is your whole life."
Fred Williams nodded slowly.
Then he asked: "Where do you live?"
"Oh, no. Divers never mix. Our existence is a top-secret. And the risk of losing two Divers in a single accident would keep the Defense Council awake at night."
"But everyone was here today."
"To welcome you. That's a big occasion to us."
"It's the biggest thing that ever happened to me," Fred Williams said.
"I know," Pat answered quietly. "I saw your mind. But I'll change that, Fred."
She stood up and brushed her hands over her dress.
"Where will I see you again?" he asked.
"You never will."
He stood up to protest.
"Not in the body," she amended.
He looked so mournful that she walked over and kissed him.
"There's a good-by present, Diver. But we will meet regularly."
Finding him sitting with a pile of apple cores beside him, the doctor clicked his tongue reprovingly.
"Tell me, Doc, how could you stop me Diving?" asked Fred worriedly.
"Fill you full of vitamins and carbohydrates and alcohol and send you on a pleasure-cruise with a lot of accomplished women," said Dr. Howard Sprinnell promptly. "Or allow you to stuff yourself with apples, for a start. Now come along or I'll bar you from the exercise room."
Fred Williams followed him thoughtfully.
"By the way," the doctor said over his shoulder, "your wife thinks you're under arrest. You've been here four days so far and we can keep you another ten or so. After that you'll have to go back. You're on our payroll now, but you'd better keep your job. Or we can find you a heavier one, if you're not tired enough. We'll seal a miniature transmitter into your larynx under the skin before you leave, so that you can report audibly from wherever you are. Diving has the same effect on the body as sleep, you'll find, so you can do both at once. I'll grade off the injections before you leave here. Now this is the political field as we know it...."
They stood in a large lecture hall, filled with spaced models of the Solar System, set in the Milky Way and surrounded by the related galaxies.
"Here's the spiral in Andromeda," said the doctor, using a long pointer. "I understand you went there...."
He took Fred Williams on a general tour of the hall.
"Of course there are others not shown here," he concluded. "The Coma-Virgo system of galaxies, for one example. But these are the ones politically important at this time. In Sagittarius, we have a problem. There's a human colony there—a very early one, as a matter of fact—which we're sending an envoy to. But we don't know what sort of an envoy they are expecting, whether he should be a technical agronomist, a sociologist, a radiation expert, or a plain folksy reminder of Earth, or what. A simple problem really, but a mistake will cost us several billion credits to correct. So your first assignment, under Pat's tuition, will be to find out and report. When you get back, you'll rank officially as a Diver. Rendezvous is over the Peninsula, above San Francisco; you can't miss it. Take your mind there before you leave and come back there on the way in. Around fifteen thousand feet is the recommended height, but that, like your mind, is immaterial, if you'll pardon the pun. And now I suggest you go down to the police gym and take some good strong exercise so that you feel properly tired for the journey."
Dr. Howard Sprinnell put his hands in his pockets and gazed at his polished shoes.
"I don't quite know how to say this, Fred," he continued, "but I'm responsible for you Divers. You're entitled to your own forms of amusement, of course, but please remember you are being watched by Psis. No dropping in on the President's bedroom. Other people's bedrooms, all right, though I trust you'll keep out of mine. But do nothing that could make you be considered a security risk. That is the only thing that would worry us."
Fred Williams assured him and left the hall to go down to the police gym. He did not understand why the warning should be necessary. On the other hand, you could take it as a delicate permission to do anything that was not a security risk. He passed the police canteen and restrained himself from going in to order a doughnut with Martian syrup. It would keep him from Diving.
He rose into the atmosphere above the city and headed across America to the rendezvous above the West Coast. The Earth spun away from beneath him. He had time to be surprised that in the few hours back on Earth he had forgotten the unburdened clarity of mind in a Dive. He knew who he was. He was unquestionably Fred Williams up here, as much as he was Fred Williams down there. But here he felt different, free, while down there he was embedded and obscured in a shell of a body. Here, this time, his vision was not limited to a forward cone but extended in a complete sphere around him.
He saw the large nick in the coast ahead and came down to meet his tutor Diver.
Pat had said he looked like the inside of an egg, but he was not prepared for the great ovoid poised there below him. He came up to her with a rush and found he was even bigger by comparison. When they touched, he heard her voice. There was a slight resistance as his mind met hers and then she slipped inside his, so that he enclosed her mind within his ovoid mind.
"One of the disadvantages of a Diver," she said quietly within him, "is that we can only talk to each other by contact. A Psi could see our thoughts radiating out like an aurora, but we can't. We travel this way when two Divers are together, which isn't often, so that we both think of going to the same place. If we do get separated, come back here immediately and we'll start again."
"Fine."
"Please. The very gentlest suggestion of vocalizing will do. That was like a cannon."
"Sorry."
"Much better. Now, gently, out. Think of rising slowly.... That's right."
They rose away from the Earth.
"Over there," she prompted, "is the galactic spiral arm we are in. See, running from Orion? The Solar System is out here on a limb. Over here is where we're going, deep into the Galaxy, our own galaxy. You'll soon pick up the main roads. See that fan-shaped arch? That's a T-Tauri variable, signposts to us. Think of being just off that one now."
He did—and there they were, in a dark lane of the Milky Way.
"Now you can imagine what would happen if we were moving separately and turned our minds to different points. You have to go back and start again then. Now, we're going down this dark lane."
They moved through the splendor of the Milky Way, through vast lanes of fine dark nebulae, across a giant rift, past glowing clouds of hydrogen and oxygen and bright expanding shells, rings within rings, flowing out from intense stars in their center as if the star were a pebble dropped in a pond of burning space, the planetary nebulae.
The Sagittarian region was well known to Pat and she commented on the Lagoon, and Omega and Trifid Nebula suspended around them. The local system they sought lay off a loose globular star cluster, one of a crowd here deep in toward the center of the Galaxy, the bright core around which the spiral arms of the entire Milky Way ponderously swung.
He was part engrossed in the technique of moving his mind, part awed by the variety and beauty of the Galaxy, and part lost in the beauty of the mind within him. She moved with deft, clear thought like the chime of crystals. The sensory images of Earth were gross and distorted projections of the way he saw her, but she was at once the beating rhythm beneath rock-and-roll and the abstracted clarity of Chopin, the summer wind and the warmth of a wine. He held her mind within his in a new union so complete that anything else was mere fumbling.
"Thank you," he heard her voice say gently, and they sank down toward the rings of small planets they had come to visit.
A colony from Earth implied an atmosphere, and several planets in the group indeed looked fuzzy. The two Divers skimmed rapidly from one to another in a general survey, selected the largest of those which might support man, and sank down through its belts of radiation.
The central mass of land lay beneath thin clouds, through which the local sun shone in drifting spotlights over the cultivated areas and irregular groups of cities.
"When we get closer," her voice said, "you'll see them walking about inside their minds, which to us will be cloudy colored eggs around them. They cannot see this, of course, any more than a non-Psi or we ourselves on Earth. If it isn't obvious what they are thinking, we'll have to go close enough to touch their minds with ours. But be very careful before you do that. If they are very empty-minded, there is a risk that their body magnetism will polarize your mind in temporarily. You can get out again, but it's messy and unpleasant while it lasts. And it's almost impossible to avoid being sucked into a medium's mind, so I hope they haven't got any."
They were now over the main city and headed toward a large domed building, apparently modeled on the Capitol.
"How did they get here?" he asked.
"We don't really know. The contacts so far have been by radio to a very early investigating fleet. Obviously they must have come out after the hyper-space drive was invented—we're over twenty thousand light-years from Earth, here, I'm told—but they don't seem to realize the difficulties of sending them the envoy they asked for. Assuming these are the people that wanted one."
"Look, an old landcar—down there on the street!" he exclaimed.
The colony apparently still used ground vehicles. As they came closer, they could see people walking in the streets and moving in and out of doorways. There were no moving sidewalks, personal vertijets, anti-gravs. It was cleaner but otherwise as old-fashioned as the quarter in which Fred Williams lived on Earth.
"Imagine coming so far—to find this," he said, disappointed.
"You'll find colonies are usually several generations behind, but let's not be too hasty," she said. "We can have a look around later. First, let's see if we have the right planet and get this envoy matter out of the way. Down through the dome, here."
They passed through the weather sheathing and curved girders of the dome into an assembly hall full of human beings, seated around a central dais. The colonists had apparently been inspired by Congress. A quick glance at their minds showed they were politicians, no better and no worse than the Earth variety, intent on compromise and the exchange of benefits between the groups of interests they seemed to represent. Several carried visibly in their minds one fixed interest and a quick count showed that agriculture was, in one form or another, the main business of the colony.
"I think that answers it," she said. "We'll have to check on the other planets, but farm problems seem to be what they're most concerned about."
He felt dissatisfied. "Shouldn't we touch one of their minds to see if this is really the political center? It may only be a village meeting."
It seemed incongruous to use the wonderful reach of Diving to gather little facts like this and to depart knowing nothing else. Then again, he recalled the doctor describing it as a simple problem.
He felt her mind move understandingly within his. "All right, let's touch the Speaker and see how far his authority goes. He'd be very conscious of a superior Congress if there is one."
They moved together to the dais and brushed against the Speaker's mind. The short, bald man sitting impressively in the center of the bubble immediately leaned forward and banged his gavel. The entire assembly rose to their feet and stood still. The Speaker slouched in his chair. His mind shook off the influences of his body and rose up to touch the two of them.
"Welcome, at last," he said.
"You have been expecting us?"
"Of course. Though why do you say 'us'?"
They moved partly from each other, overlapping only at the extreme limit of their own minds, so that he could see there were two of them together.
A gasp sounded in the Speaker's mind like an echo and there was a movement throughout the assembly.
"Can they hear us?" Pat asked.
"Naturally. Psi capacity is a minimum requirement for the Senate. Can't you hear us?"
"Only by mental contact."
"How odd," the Speaker replied. "Still, we ourselves cannot merge in each other, only into housings."
"Housings?"
"But surely.... You mu............