"Ah. I see. Yes, of course." Samms, intensely interested, leaned forward. "Yet your present personality is adequately, splendidly integrated. How could you possibly have overcome—reconciled—a situation so full of conflict?"
"You are, I think, familiar with my parentage?" Samms, keen as he was, did not consider it noteworthy that the big Norwegian answered his question only by asking one of his own.
"Yes ... oh, I'm beginning to see ... but Commissioner Kinnison has not had access to your dossier. Go ahead."
"My father is Dr. Hjalmar Bergenholm. My mother, before her marriage, was Dr. Olga Bjornson. Both were, and are, nuclear physicists—very good ones. Pioneers, they have been called. They worked, and are still working, in the newest, outermost fringes of the field."
"Oh!" Kinnison exclaimed. "A mutant? Born with second sight—or whatever it is?"
"Not second sight, as history describes the phenomenon, no. The records do not show that any such faculty was ever demonstrated to the satisfaction of any competent scientific investigator. What I have is something else. Whether or not it will breed true is an interesting topic of speculation, but one having nothing to do with the problem now in hand. To return to the subject, I resolved my dilemma long since. There is, I am absolutely certain, a science of the mind which is as definite, as positive, as immutable of law, as is the science of the physical. While I will make no attempt to prove it to you, I know that such a science exists, and that I was born with the ability to perceive at least some elements of it.
"Now to the matter of the meteor of the Patrol. That emblem was and is purely physical. The pirates have just as able scientists as we have. What physical science can devise and synthesize, physical science can analyze and duplicate. There is a point, however, beyond which physical science cannot go. It can neither analyze nor imitate the tangible products of that which I have so loosely called the science of the mind.
"I know, Councillor Samms, what the Triplanetary Service needs; something vastly more than its meteor. I also know that the need will become greater and greater as the sphere of action of the Patrol expands. Without a really efficient symbol, the Solarian Patrol will be hampered even more than the Triplanetary Service; and its logical extension into the Space Patrol, or whatever that larger organization may be called, will be definitely impossible. We need something which will identify any representative of Civilization, positively and unmistakably, wherever he may be. It must be impossible of duplication, or even of imitation, to which end it must kill any unauthorized entity who attempts imposture. It must operate as a telepath between its owner and any other living intelligence, of however high or low degree, so that mental communication, so much clearer and faster than physical, will be possible without the laborious learning of language; or between us and such peoples as those of Rigel Four or of Palain Seven, both of whom we know to be of high intelligence and who must already be conversant with telepathy."
"Are you or have you been, reading my mind?" Samms asked quietly.
"No," Bergenholm replied flatly. "It is not and has not been necessary. Any man who can think, who has really considered the question, and who has the good of Civilization at heart, must have come to the same conclusions."