Gaynor choked. It was rarely that this happened—but when it did something usually came of it. The first of these near-trances he had witnessed had come when Clair, in the middle of the Nobel Prize award, had glazed his eyes and stood like a log, leaving Gaynor to make a double speech of acceptance. And all the way back to America he had been in a trance, mumbling vaguely when spoken to, or not answering at all.
A dot appeared in the sky—two dots. As they swooped down Gaynor recognized, with a jumping heart, the Prototype being towed by what looked like the Archetype, but really was, of course, the Protean who had forced the favor on him.
Gently they landed, almost at his feet. And then the Ark turned into the whale-like creature again, and the mouth remarked, "Is there anything else I can do for you?"
"Yes. How do we get back to Earth?"
"Ha!" laughed the creature. "You can think up some funny ones. Please visualize the planet for my benefit. I'll have to explore your mind a little for this. Have I your permission to do so?"
"Certainly!" cried Gaynor.
"Thank you," said the Protean, as the man began to concentrate on the more salient features of his native planet.
"I said thank you," repeated the creature to the expectantly waiting Gaynor. "It's all over. You didn't have too much of a mind to explore."
Gaynor was disappointed—the Gaylen mind-teachers had been a lot more spectacular, and a lot less insulting. "Well," he asked, "funny as it may seem to you, how do we get back to the place?"
"You know already," said the Protean. "At least, your colleague does. Why don't you ask him? Now will you leave?"
"Certainly," said Gaynor, puzzled but eager. "And all our thanks to you for your kindness."
"Just being neighborly," said the Protean. Whereupon it dwindled into a tiny worm-like thing which slipped down an almost imperceptible hole in the ground, Gaynor looked blankly at Clair, wondering how best to broach the subject of getting back, but, before he could inaugurate a campaign to return the mental marvel to the world of cold realities, the door of the Prototype swung open wide, and Jocelyn Earle stepped out.
"The trip didn't do you any good," said Gaynor, inspecting her face. "Whose idea was it?"
"Are you being stern, Pavlik?" she asked, flinging herself into his arms. When they had disentangled she explained, indicating Ionic Intersection who stood smiling in the doorway, "Her idea, really—she couldn't stomach the idea of turning into a lizard to avoid the nova. She even preferred floating around in space—have you heard about the creeping quivers that space travel gives these sissified Gaylens?— well, she was even willing to face that instead."
"I felt," explained Ionic Intersection, "that I have something to live for now, since—well, something to live for. And I find that space travel isn't fractionally as bad as I'd expected—I almost like it now, in a way."
As if to punctuate her sentence, Jocelyn emitted a yelp. "Ye gods and little fishes!" she screamed. "Look at the sun!"
The others looked—it was worth looking at. Probably no human had ever seen a sun like that before at closer range than half a thousand parsecs—and lived. Great gouts of flame, and relatively miniature new suns composed of pure, raw, naked energy were spouting from it; rapidly and violently the heat and light from it were increasing, becoming uncomfortable even on this distant planet. It was becoming a nova by cosmic leaps and vast bounds.
"This is no place for us, friends—not while we've got what it takes to get away. So let's go—fast. I wouldn't put it past our Gaylen pals—with all due respect to you, Ionic Intersection—to have forgotten a decimal point or neglected a surd in their calculations. This planet may be as safe as they claimed—or it may not. I don't choose to take chances."
Shooing the ladies along ahead of him, Gaynor gently took Clair's elbow and walked him into the Prototype. "He's got a theory," he explained to the girls, neither of whom had ever seen him that way before. "It gets him at times like these, always. You'll have to bear with him; it's just another reason why he shouldn't marry."
Once they were all arranged in the Prototype and sufficient stores had been transferred from the Archetype, left to rust or melt on the planet of the Proteans, they took off and hovered in space far away from the wild sun.
"Now," said Gaynor, "we'll go home." So speaking, he took Clair by the arm once more, shaking him gently. "Theory-Protean-idea-home-theory-HOME!" he whispered in the entranced one's ear, in a sharp crescendo.
Clair came out of it with a start. "Do you know," he said quickly, "I've found the governing principle of our little mishaps and adventures?"
"Yes," said Gaynor, "I know. The Protean told me. He also told me that you knew how to apply that principle so as to get us home."
"Oh, yes. Home. Well, in order to get us home, I'll need your cooperation—all of your cooperation. I'll have to explain.
"I said a while ago that nothing was liable to hurt us in this universe. Well, nothing is. And the reason is that every stick, stone, proton, and mesotron in this universe is so placed and constructed that we can't get hurt. Don't interrupt—it's true. Listen.
"Let me ask a rhetorical question: How many possible universes are there? Echo answers: Plenty. An infinity of them, in fact. And the funny thing about it is that they all exist. You aren't going to argue that, are you, Paul? Because everybody knows that, in eternity, everything that is possible happens at least once, and the cosmos is eternal.... I thought you'd see that.
"There being so many universes, and there being no directive influence in the Prototype, there is absolutely no way of knowing, mathematically a provable point, just which universe we'll land in. But there has to be some determining factor, unless the law of cause-and-effect is meaningless, and all of organized science is phoney from the ground up.
"Well, there is a determining factor. It's—thought.
"Thought isn't very powerful, except when applied through such an instrument as the human mind, or rather through such a series of step-up transformers as the mind, the brain, the body, and the machines of humanity. But there are so many possible continua that even the tiny, tiny pressure of our thought-waves is plenty to decide which.
"What did we want before we hit the universe of the Gaylens? I don't know exactly what was in your minds, but I'll bet it was:' food, human companionship, supplies, and SAFETY. And we got all of them.
"So—the rest becomes obvious. To get home: Think of home, all of us, each preferably picking a different and somewhat unusual object to concentrate upon, so as to limit the number of possible universes that fit the description—you, Ionic, will try not to think of anything, because you come from a different universe; then throw in the switch to the protolens—you're home."
They had made five false starts, and had spent a full week in one deceptive home-like universe before they'd got the correct combination of factors to insure a happy landing, but this one indubitably was it.
Clair was at the controls—had been for days of searching, and now that they had identified their solar system was driving every fragment of power from the artificial-gravity units.
Jocelyn and Gaynor approached him with long, sad faces. "Well, kiddies?"'
"I love Jocelyn," said Gaynor unhappily.
"So," he said, not taking his eyes from the plate which mirrored stars and sun.
"And that's not the worst of it," said the girl directly. "I love Pavlik, too. Do you mind?"
"Bless you, my children," said Clair agreeably. "But don't you mind?" cried Jocelyn indignantly. "We want to get married."
"A splendid idea. I'm all for marriage, personally."