"The brain of a Newton or an Einstein, yes." Belle thought for a minute, then grinned at him impishly. "Now watch the brain of a Bellamy perform. Get into high gear, brain.... I wish I knew something about biochemical embryology; but I read somewhere that ova are sterile, so our galaxy is an ovum. Therefore our super-galooper is a gal--which incontrovertible fact accounts for and explains rigorously the long-known truth that women always have been, are now, and always will be vastly superior to men in every quality, aspect, and...." "Hold it!" Garlock snapped. His face hardened into intense concentration. Then: "Do you think you're kidding, Belle?" "Why, of _course_ I'm kidding, you big...." "Look here, then." He picked up a pencil and filled in blank after blank after blank. "I'm making one unjustifiable assumption--that the _Pleiades_ is the first intergalactic starship. The super-being is a female, and she is just becoming pregnant...." "Flapdoodle! There are no blood cells in a sperm, and I don't think there are any in an ovum." "I didn't mention either sperm or ovum. The analogy is so loose here that it holds only in the broadest, most general terms. The actual process of reproduction is unknowable. But wherever we went, we changed things. Not only by what we actually did, but also as a catalyst--no...." "No, not a catalyst. A hormone." "Exactly. Each of these changes would cause others, and so on. An infinite series. Calling the first three terms alpha, beta, and gamma, we operate like this...." Garlock's pencil was flying now. "Following me?" "On your tail." Belle was breathing hard; as the blank spaces became fewer and fewer her face began to turn white. "From this we get that ... and _that_ makes the whole bracket tie into the same conclusion I had before. So, except for that one assumption, it's solid." * * * "My Lord, Clee!" Belle studied the chart. "I mentioned Newton and Einstein ... add to that 'the brain of a Garlock, better than either.'" Then, seeing his reaction, "You're blushing. I didn't think...." "Cut the comedy. You know I couldn't carry either of their hats to a dog-fight." "And I would _never_ have believed that you are basically modest." "I said cut out the kidding, Belle." "I'm deadly serious. A brain that could do _that_," she waved at the chart, "... well, even I am not enough of a heel to belittle one of the most tremendous intuitions ever achieved by man. Not that I like it. It's horrible. It denies mankind everything that made him come up from the slime--everything that made him man." * * * "Not at all. Nothing is changed, in man's own frame of reference. It merely takes our thinking one step farther. That step, of course, isn't easy." "_That_ is the understatement of all time. What it will _do_, though, is set up an inferiority complex that would wipe out the whole human race."