The lock in the side of the dome opened and Towser came tumbling out – at least he thought it must be Towser.
He started to call to the dog, his mind shaping the words he meant to say. But he couldn't say them. There was no way to say them. He had nothing to say them with.
For a moment his mind swirled in muddy terror, a blind fear that eddied in little puffs of panic through his brain.
How did Jovians talk? How Suddenly he was aware of Towser, intensely aware of the
bumbling, eager friendliness of the shaggy animal that had followed him from Earth to many planets. As if the thing that was Towser had reached out and for a moment sat within his brain.
And out of the bubbling welcome that he sensed, came words.
"Hiya, pal."
Not words, really, better than words. Thought symbols in his brain, communicated thought symbols that had shades of meaning words could never have.
"Hiya, Towser," he said.
"I feel good," said Towser. "Like I was a pup. Lately I've been feeling pretty punk. Legs stiffening up on me and teeth wearing down to almost nothing. Hard to mumble a bone with teeth like that. Besides, the fleas give me hell. Used to be I never paid much attention to them. A couple of fleas more or less never meant much in my early days."
"But... but-" Fowler's thoughts tumbled awkwardly. "You're talking to me!"
"Sure thing," said Towser. "I always talked to you, but you couldn't hear me. I tried to say things to you, but I couldn't make the grade."
"I understood you sometimes," Fowler said.
"Not very well," said Towser. "You knew when I wanted food and when I wanted a drink and when I wanted out, but that's about all you ever managed."
"I'm sorry," Fowler said.
"Forget it," Towser told him. "I'll race you to the cliff."
For the first time, Fowler saw the cliff, apparently many miles away, but with a strange crystalline beauty that sparkled in the shadow of the many-coloured clouds.
Fowler hesitated. "It's a long way-"
"Ah, come on," said Towser and even as he said it he started for the cut.
Fowler followed, testing his legs, testing the strength in that new body of his, a bit doubtful at first, amazed a moment later, then running with a sheer joyousness that was one with the red and purple sward, with the drifting smoke of the rain across the land.
As he ran the consciousness of music came to him, a music that beat into his body, that surged throughout his being, that lifted him on wings of silver speed. Music like bells might make from some steeple on a sunny, springtime bill.
As the cliff drew nearer the music deepened and filled the universe with a spray of magic sound. And he knew the music came from the tumbling waterfall that feathered down the face of the shining cliff.
Only, he knew, it was no waterfall, but an ammonia-fall and the cliff was white because it was oxygen, solidified.
He skidded to a stop beside Towser where the waterfall broke into a glittering rainbow of many hundred colours.
Literally many hundred, for here, he saw, was no shading of one primary to another as human beings saw, but a clear-cut selectivity that broke the prism down to its last ultimate classification.
"The music," said Towser. "Yes, what about it?"
"The music," said Towser, "is vibrations. Vibrations of water falling."
"But, Towser, you don't know about vibrations."
"Yes, I do," contended Towser. "It just popped into my head."
Fowler gulped mentally. "Just popped!"
And suddenly, within his own head, he held a formula – a formula for a process that would make metal to withstand pressure of Jupiter.
He stared, astounded, at the waterfall and swiftly his mind took the many colours and placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum. Just like that. Just out of blue sky. Out of nothing, for he knew nothing either of metals or of colours.
"Towser," he cried. "Towser, something's happening to us!"
"Yeah, I know," said Towser.
"It's our brains," said Fowler. "We're using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way."
And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colours in a waterfall or metals that would resist the pressure of Jupiter. He sensed other things, things not yet quite clear. A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination. Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning. Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.
"We're still mostly Earth," he said. "We're just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know – a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge."
He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.
Back there were men who couldn't see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the planet's face. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storm. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.
Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another's mind as he could reach out and touch Towser's mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.
He, Fowler, had expected terror inspired by alien things out here on the surface, had expected to cower before the threat of unknown things, had steeled himself against disgust of a situation that was not of Earth.
But instead he had found something greater than Man had ever known. A swifter, surer body. A sense of exhilaration, a deeper sense of life. A sharper mind. A world of beauty that even the dreamers of the Earth had not yet imagined.
"Let's get going," Towser urged.
"Where do you want to go?"
"Anywhere," said Towser. "Just start going and see where we end up. I have a feeling... well, a feeling-"
"Yes, I know," said Fowler.
For he had the feeling, too. The feeling of high destiny. A certain sense of greatness. A knowledge that somewhere off beyond the horizons lay adventure and things greater than adventure.
Those other five had felt it, too. Had felt the urge to go and see, the compelling sense that here lay a life of fullness and of knowledge.
That, he knew, was why they had not returned.