Science fiction; Space ships -- Fiction; Space warfare -- Fiction
"Thoughts. We're broadcasting them from a point midway between the two
vessels. They're keen on investigating any sixth-order impulses they
feel, you know--that's why we've kept all our stuff on tight beams
heretofore, so that they probably couldn't detect it--so we're sending
out a highly peculiar type of thought, that we are pretty sure will
bring them in from wherever they are."
"Let me listen to it, just for a minute?" she pleaded.
"W-e-l-l--I don't know." He eyed her dubiously. "Not for a minute--no.
Being of a type that not even a pure intellectual can resist, they'd
burn out any human brain in mighty short order. Maybe you might for
about a tenth of a second, though."
He lowered a helmet over her expectant head and snatched it off again,
but that moment had been enough for Dorothy. Her violet eyes widened
terribly in an expression commingled of amazedly poignant horror and of
dreadfully ecstatic fascination.
[Illustration: _Her whole body trembled violently. "Oh, Dick, Dick!"
she gasped. "How horrible!"_]
"Dick--Dick!" she shrieked; then, recovering slowly: "How horrible--how
ghastly--how perfectly, exquisitely damnable! What is it? Why, I
actually heard babies begging to be born! And there were men who had
died and gone to heaven and hell; there were minds that had lost their
bodies and didn't know what to do--were simply shrieking out their
agony, despair, and utter, unreasoning terror for the whole universe
to hear! And there were joys, pleasures, raptures, so condensed as
to be almost as unbearable as the tortures. And there were other
things--awful, terrible, utterly indescribable and unimaginable things!
Oh, Dick, I was sure that I had gone stark, staring, raving crazy!"
"'Sall right, dear," Seaton reassured his overwrought wife. "All those
things are really there, and more. I told you it was bad medicine--that
it would tear your brain to pieces if you took much of it."
* * * * *
Seaton paused, weighing in his mind how best to describe the really
indescribable signal that was being broadcast by the Brain, then went
on, choosing his words with care:
"All the pangs and all the ecstasies, all the thoughts and all the
emotions of all evolution of all things, animate and inanimate, are
there; of all things that ever have existed from the unknowable
beginning of infinite time and of all things that ever shall exist
until time's unknowable end. It covers all animate life, from the first
stirring of that which was to vitalize the first uni-cell in the slime
of the first world ever to come into being in the cosmos, to the last
cognition of the ultimately last intelligent entity ever to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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