A great swirl of ceremonial music rose from the immense spaceport, the cathedral-like architectonics weaving intricate patterns upwards to the skies as if to receive in an ocean of melody the arriving delegates.
Bill Nardon sighed, his task was about to begin. With a slight movement of his right hand, he touched the controls gleaming on the desk before him, and the scene at the spaceport rushed with vertiginous speed into close focus; still he was not satisfied, but continued to manipulate the Ethero-solidograph controls until the emerging occupants of the Venusian ship grew on the screen to life-size. With infinite care he studied and analyzed their faces, their exquisite fragile bodies with the long, membranous wings; noted the almost imperceptible shadow of baffled apprehension beneath the mask of imperturbability, and found—nothing. But that was to be expected. After all, of all the planets, Venus was the least warlike, which was fortunate indeed.
The tall, rangy Europans, offspring of Terran colonists, with their strange, silver-furred Panadur co-rulers, came next. Bill lingered over the Panadur leader, so strangely human in his four feet of upright, slender body, completely furred in gleaming silver fur to the very throat-line, with the delicate triangular face dominated by immense beryl eyes. Strange creatures of a world within a world, drawing their sustenance from the eerie radio-active caverns of their great Jupiterian satellite. The Neptunians were descendants of Earthmen too, but subtly changed by the awesome environment of their gigantic world.
The Mercurians were a problem in themselves. For of all the planets, theirs was a ruthless Matriarchy. The striding, uncompromising Amazons that emerged from that blunt, utilitarian-looking ship, were in themselves a promise of trouble. They gazed around them out of blazing dark eyes, and their metallic complexions seemed to flow oddly like quicksilver with their movements, as if their features were fluid. Only the eyes, hard, suspicious, expecting the worst, retained their unyielding character. When the Martians emerged, tall, tawny-haired, with their immense violet eyes and exaggeratedly narrow waists, that contrasted with their broad shoulders, it occurred to Bill that the least accident would precipitate an holocaust that would end in the most gigantic hecatomb the universe had ever seen. He shuddered to think what would happen if the least delegate were to meet with harm. From the very beginning, he had protested against this inter-planetary meeting on Terra, and great as his influence was, profound as the respect was in which his unique powers were held, the Council vote had been against him.
Still, Bill Nardon could not rid himself of the feeling that this was a wild goose chase, that nothing would be accomplished by a meeting of the highest dignitaries of the Inter-Planetary League—in short, that the great danger of an accident that was being incurred was not only unnecessary—but futile, which was far worse.
Asprawl in the great hetero-plastic chair, his long legs extended, his superb torso completely relaxed, he looked as if even his great muscles would never again lift that magnificent body upright. But all the while his unique mind was absorbed in assembling multitudes of details and facts, coordinating and correlating psychological factors and psychic coordinates with the speed of thought into a clear picture which in the end proved—absolutely nothing. He was baffled. To the tragic problem which would soon be under discussion in the stupendous Universarium, expressly built for that momentous purpose, he would be able to bring precisely nothing.
For once he had failed. And Bill damned the cold efficiency of the Master Neurograph machine that had unerringly summarized his strange mental coordinates. For Bill's mind had the peculiar gift of being able to grasp a series of basic facts and from them deduce with supernal accuracy the individual answer to any human problem. What took the great Philosophers in Psychiatry VI days, and weeks, and even months to solve, Bill Nardon could coordinate and give the correct answer to in hours, sometimes minutes.
There was nothing mysterious about it. Given enough time, Bill Nardon could have explained in detail how he could solve a particular problem in human equations—if he cared to, which he never did—it was merely a mental ratio of activity in the upper part of his brain, where the most involved and difficult thinking is done, many times greater than that of the normal human brain. To this was added an intensity and scope of awareness surpassing any Neurographic records known. The result was the coordination of details, the synchronizing of factors—nay, nuances so tenuous that they were non-existent to even the philosophical minds.
As a result, Bill Nardon had been immediately removed from his job as an explorer and transferred to Security I, answerable only to the very head of the Supreme Council itself.