His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"Come in," he said to Boyle. "Work toward the most powerful single person you can find." Feeling his own mind augmented by his partner's, he probed deep into the glassed-in world, toward the highest building he could find.

He landed in the brain of a highly trained mathematician and felt a swirl of fantastically complicated figures and tables. Then the mathematician walked through an automatic door into the presence of a person whom he regarded with almost holy awe. Cantrell realized then how rapidly the acceleration of evolution had curved upward on this tiny world. The personage was small and weighed down with a staggering amount of braincells that could be seen pulsing and throbbing under a transparent dura mater. The skull had been wholly absorbed.

"Right," snapped Cantrell to his partner. "Push it out, son. Make it stick like glue." The two psychologists united their minds in a staggering intellectual effort; there were visible sparks as they fused into one perfect sending outfit. Cantrell, only vaguely conscious of the personage and the mathematician, saw the former start with alarm and heard him ask as if from a distance: "Do you feel anything?"

"No," said Cantrell's host. "This matter of geodesics—"

"Leave me for a while," said the personage. "I sense a message of great importance." The mathematician exited, and Cantrell abruptly severed his mind from the host. For the first time he found himself to be a point of consciousness hanging before the personage, seeing, hearing and sending.

He raised his hand in a choppy gesture. Boyle nodded, and shut his eyes. Sweat stood out on his brow as he projected the message: "Boyle and Cantrell speaking. Can you hear us?"

The personage jumped as if he had been shot at. He looked around cautiously and said: "I can hear you. But who are you—where are you sending from?" In the language of the mind there is no need of translation; with the polyphone any two rational creatures can communicate.

The psychologists, now working as a perfect team, sent: "Speaking from the inside of your planet. But it isn't a planet; it's our spaceship. We're from Earth—third planet around the sun. But let's skip the formalities.

What do you know about—" and they launched into a technical description of the shakes.

"Have you," asked the important personage, "tried polarizing the crystalline lens of the eye? That should do it. It is not, as you thought, a psychodeficiency lesion but—" In clear, concise thought images he gave a complete outline of the cause and cure of spastitis malignans. And he knew what he was talking about, for this personage later announced himself to be the Chief Assimilator of the planetary division. He was the one who received all the technical data and assembled it for reference and use. Specialization had raced ahead on this planet.

"Thanks," said the psychologists at length. "Thanks a lot. We'll be heading back to Earth now—" he broke off in dismay. "If we do, that's the end of your people. Because as soon as our gravity plates switch off you get flung out into space, and we can't land without switching off the plates."

"An interesting problem," brooded the Assimilator. "But not insoluble.

We can make our own plates if necessary. I advise you to set your ship—

my planet—into an independent orbit around the sun. In about twenty minutes of your time we will have developed to the point where we will have our enclosed cities reinforced against anything but collision with a major planet. We trust you to set the orbit so that that will not happen.

You must return to Earth by some makeshift means." The Assimilator fell into a deep study, and the two psychologists withdrew.

Boyle glanced at a stop-watch. "That whole interview," he said disbelievingly, "lasted exactly one one-thousandth of a second. That was thinking under pressure." Cantrell was dashing onto paper what the Assimilator had told him about the shakes. And it made brilliant sense. He photographed his notes and handed a copy to Boyle.

"And now?" asked Boyle, carefully buttoning the data into a pocket.

"Now we take the lifeboat," said Cantrell. He gestured distastefully at the little bullet of metal lugged to the wall. "It's said to be the least pleasant way of travel known to man." He turned to the control panel and set a simple course around the sun that would maintain itself after the fuel was wholly gone.

Jammed into the little craft, cans of food floating about their ears and a hammering roar of exhausts in their heads, they strained to see through the little port that was the only communication from the outside. Boyle yelled something inaudible.

"What?" shrieked Cantrell into his ear.

Boyle drew a great breath and pointed with one thumb at the little crescent of light behind them—the Andros. "I said," he shrieked, "that it's a good thing we got away from those submicroscopic Einsteins.

They gave me an inferiority complex."