Party Line

Mary Kay sank into it and let all of it enfold her. This time, she had thought, this time, please God, there will be something that I can understand. But once she had sunk into it, she no longer prayed there would be something to take back. This, in itself, was quite enough. This was all that anyone might want, or need. What was here filled the soul and wiped out the mind.

A stray, human thought intruded, but only momentarily:

Some day I'll have it; some day there will be data. Some day there'll be an inkling.

And then the thought snapped off. For there was no need to know. Being here was all.

She was no longer human. She was not anything at all. She simply existed. She was stripped of everything but the inner core of consciousness. She had no body and no mind. The intellectuality took in only the wonder and the breath-catching happiness, the innocent sensuality, the mindless well-being and the Tightness of it all — the Tightness of being here. Wherever here might be. She did not even wonder at the here. She simply did not care.

Duty and purpose struggled feebly with the carelessness.

— But? she cried, why show me only? Why not tell me, too? I'm an intelligence. I want to know. I have the right to know.

— Sh-h-h-h-h

A shushing, a lullaby. A compassion. A tenderness.

Then the holiness.

She surrendered herself wholly to the holiness.

IV

They looked to him, thought Thomas. That was the hell of it; they all looked to him for guidance, direction and comfort and he had none of these to give. They were out there on the firing line and he was sitting safely back and it would seem there should be something he could offer. But try as he might, he knew that he had nothing. Each of them a sensitive, for if they were not sensitives, they'd not be telepaths.

It took raw courage, he thought, a special kind of courage, to reach out into the cosmos, out into that place where time and space pressed close even if time and space were cancelled out. Even knowing this, knowing that space-time had been brushed aside, the consciousness of it must be always there, the fear of it always there, the fear of being snared and left and lost within the deepest gulf of it. A special courage to face up to another mind that might be only a few light-years distant or millions of light-years distant, and the alienness that the light-years conjured up and magnified. And, worst of all, the never-forgotten realization that one was a newcomer in this community of intelligence, a novice, a hick, the bottom of the totem pole. A tendency to be retiring and apologetic, even when there was no reason to be apologetic. A kindergartener in a school where high school seniors and college students reared to godlike heights.

Thomas rose from his desk and walked across the room to stand before a window. The desert lay outside, aloof and noncaring, a humped plain of sand and rock, sterile and hostile. Better judgment would have been to place this installation, he thought, in a kinder land where there would be friendly trees and purling streams and forest paths to walk in. But the desert, in the administrative mind, served a better purpose. Its long distances, its discomforts and its loneliness discouraged the curious who otherwise might come flocking in to stare. No secret project, in the usual sense, but one about which not too much was said, about which as little as possible was said in the unspoken but devout hope that in time it might disappear from the public mind.

A spooky thing — too spooky to be thrown open. A shuddery business, this reaching out to other minds across the universe. Not something which the public comfortably could sleep with. And what was the matter with the public? Thomas asked himself. Did they not realize that the project was mankind's greatest hope? For thousands of years, mankind had staggered along on its own, coddling its prejudices, making its mistakes, then multiplying rather than correcting them, slipping into a too-human groove that had brought, in its turn, untold misery and injustice. New blood was needed, a new mentality, and the one place to get it was from those cultures far among the stars. A cross-pollination process that could improve the texture and might revise the purpose of mankind's stumbling destiny.

The box on his desk chirped at him. He strode from the window and snapped down the toggle.

'What is it, Evelyn?'

'Senator Brown is on the phone.'

'Thank you,' said Thomas.

There was no one he wanted to talk with less than the senator.

He leaned back in his chair and pressed the button to activate the visor. The visor lighted to reveal the hatchet-face of the senator — ascetic, thin, wrinkled, but with a tightness to the wrinkles.

'Senator,' he said, 'how kind of you to call.'

'I thought to pass the time of day,' said the senator. 'It has been a long time since we have had a chat.'

'Yes, it has.'