"Our present humanity was of course included, from before conception, through birth, through all of life, through death, and through the life beyond. It covers inanimate evolution from the ultimate particle and wave, through the birth, life, death, and re-birth of any possible manifestation of energy and of matter, up to and through the ultimate universe. "Neither Mart nor I could do it all. We carried everything as far as we could, then the Brain went through with it to its logical conclusion, which of course we could not reach. Then the Brain systematized all the data and reduced it to a concentrated essence of pure thought. It is that essence which is being broadcast and which will certainly attract the Intellectuals. In the brief flash you got of it you probably could understand at all only the human part--but maybe it's just as well." "I'll say it's just as well!" Dorothy emphatically agreed. "I wouldn't listen to that again, even for a millionth of a second, for a million dollars--but I wouldn't have missed it for another million, either. I don't know whether to beg you to listen to it, Peggy, or to implore you not to." "Don't bother," Margaret replied positively. "Anything that could throw you into such a hysterical tantrum as that did, I don't want any of at all. None at all, in fact, it would be altogether too much for--" "Got them, folks--all done!" Seaton exclaimed. "You can put on your headsets now." A signal lamp had flashed brightly and he knew that those two gigantic brains, working in perfect synchronism, had done instantaneously all that they had been set to do. "Are you dead sure that they got them all, Dick?" "Absolutely, and they got them in less time than it took the filament of the lamp to heat up. You can bank on it that all seven of them are in the can. I go off half cocked and make mistakes, but those Brains don't--they can't." Seaton was right. Though far away, even as universal distances go, the Intellectuals had felt that broadcast thought and had shot toward its source at their highest possible speed. For in all their long lives and throughout all their cosmic wanderings they had never encountered thoughts of such wide scope, such clear cogency, such tremendous power. The discarnate entities approached the amazing pattern of mental force which was radiating so prodigally and addressed it; and in that instant there were shot out curvingly from each of the mechano-electrical brains a gigantic, hemispherical screen. Developing outwardly from the two vessels as poles with the unimaginable velocity possible only to sixth-order forces, the two cups were barriers impenetrable to any sixth-order force, yet neither affected nor were affected by the gross manifestations which human senses can perceive. Thus Solar Systems, even the neutronium cores of stars, did not hinder their instantaneous development.