"Daughter, I can't." For the first time in Kathryn's experience, Mentor the Arisian was unsure. "It is certain that we have been on time; but since the Eddorians have minds of power little, if any, inferior to our own, there are many details which we cannot derive with certainty, and to advise you wrongly would be to do you irreparable harm. All I can say is that if my visualization in that respect is sound, and I am practically sure that it is, sufficient warning will be given by your learning, with no specific effort on your part and from some source other than myself, that there does in fact exist a planet named 'Ploor'—a name which to you is now only a meaningless symbol. Go now, daughter Kathryn, and work."
Kathryn went; knowing that the Arisian had said all that he would say. In truth, he had told her vastly more than she had expected him to divulge; and it chilled her to the marrow to think that she, who had always looked up to the Arisians as demigods of sorts, would from now on be expected to act as their equal—in some ways, perhaps, as their superior! As her speedster tore through space toward distant Klovia she wrestled with herself, trying to shake her new self down into a personality as well integrated as her old one had been. She had not quite succeeded when she felt a thought.
"Help! I am in difficulty with this, my ship. Will any entity receiving my call and possessing the tools of a mechanic please come to my assistance? Or, lacking such tools, possessing a vessel of power sufficient to tow mine to the place where I must immediately go?"
Kathryn was startled out of her introspective trance. That thought was on a terrifically high band; one so high that she knew of no race using it, so high that an ordinary human mind could not possibly have either sent or received it. Its phraseology, while peculiar, was utterly precise in definition—the mind behind it was certainly of precisionist grade. She acknowledged upon the stranger's wave, and sent out a locator. Good—he wasn't far away. She flashed toward the derelict, matched intrinsics at a safe distance, and began scanning, only to encounter a screen around the whole vessel! To her it was porous enough—but if the creature thought that his screen was tight, let him keep on thinking so. It was his move.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" The thought fairly snapped. "Come closer, so that I may bring you in."
"Not yet," Kathryn snapped back. "Cut your screen so that I can see what you are like. I carry equipment for many environments, but I must know what yours is and equip for it before I can come aboard. You will note that my screens are down."
"Of course. Excuse me—I supposed that you were one of our own"—there came the thought of an unspellable and unpronounceable name—"since none of the lower orders can receive our thoughts direct. Can you equip yourself to come aboard with your tools?"
"Yes." The stranger's light was fierce stuff; ninety-eight percent of its energy being beyond the visible. His lamps were beam-held atomics, nothing less, but there was very little gamma and few neutrons. She could handle it easily enough, she decided, as she finished donning her heat-armor and a helmet of practically opaque, diamond-hard plastic.
As she was wafted gently across the intervening space upon a pencil of force, Kathryn took her first good look at the precisionist himself—or herself. She—it—looked something like a Dhilian, she thought at first. There was the squat, powerful, elephantine body with its four stocky legs; the tremendous double shoulders and enormous arms; the domed, almost immobile head. But there the resemblance ended. There was only the one head—the thinking head, and that one had no eyes and was not covered with bone. There was no feeding head—the thing could neither eat nor breathe. There was no trunk. And what a skin!