Then, suddenly, she was in touch not only with Rolf but with the buried
thoughts in the unconscious girl’s mind, as released through the
necro-recorder. Inexplicably, she understood the machine itself. She
flashed a _steady the horizontal--give the vertical another turn_, and
was rewarded when Rolf flashed her a silent _thanks_, VINRAL in return.
Quickly he obeyed her thought-order and the screen flickered to clarity.
There were the two of them--Rana and Juan Olsen, sitting side by side,
working in telepathic tandem in the blasted Rec Room. She felt the
urgent excitement that had gripped them course through her. The room
faded and again there was confusion--but this time it was in Rana’s
and Juan’s thoughts, rather than in the machine. There were pictures
of love-making, of birth, of pain, of spiritual worship of a God that
blurred between a celestial image and that of an eight-armed Hindu God.
It was amazing, Lynne thought vagrantly, how the supposedly long-buried
religious symbols survived, leaving a technically enlightened humanity
chained to the creations of its own early priesthoods. She felt a surge
of such primitive belief herself.
They were in touch with something, through the mind of the unconscious
girl, but what? Lynne glanced at Rolf, and saw that beads of sweat were
studding his brow as he pondered the visual-grid. Then, suddenly, they
were following the trail of a skyrocket through space--a rocket that
sped endlessly out against the dusty brilliance of the Milky Way to a
spot on a suddenly expanding globe, whose sky was blazoned with the
bulk of a monstrous cloudy planet, like an immense bladder that filled
the very heavens themselves.
Lynne was about to cry out with fear when she saw the immense red
lozenge high up on the curve of the huge world and heard herself cry
aloud, “_Jupiter!_ It comes from one of the moons of Jupiter!”
“Callisto,” said Rolf. The screen went blank and he flicked it off.
Moments later, the girl was wheeled from the room by an anxious
orderly, with the practitioner in watchful attendance. Rolf put the
necro-recorder on _rerun_ and played it back. When it was finished,
he turned to Lynne and said, “_Vinral_, think you can be packed in an
hour? We’re going out there and run this down.”
Lynne was horrified. She cried, “But, Rolf, darling--we can’t go to
Callisto. All traffic to the Jovian moons is strictly under Earth
Interplanetary Administration. They aren’t open to other traffic yet.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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