“We might as well, I guess . . . I’m as ready as I ever will be. . . . I’ll try, but. . . .”
“Please do, Master,” came Nadine’s quiet, composed thought, in a vein completely foreign to her usual attitude of self-sufficient aloofness. “I have been observing; studying with awe and with wonder. If you will so deign, revered Master, come fully into my mind.”
“Deign?” Cloud demanded. “What kind of a thought is that, Nadine, from you to me?”
“Deign.” Nadine repeated, firmly. Deeply moved, she was feeling and sending a solemnity of respect Cloud had never before experienced. “My powers are ordinary, since I am of Type One. The two greatest Masters of Manarka are Fives, and have been the greatest Masters of the past. This is the first time I have ever encountered a mind of a type higher than Five. Come in, sir, I plead.”
Cloud went in, and his first flash of comparison was that it was like diving into the pellucid depths of a clean, cool, utterly transparent mountain lake. This mind was so different from Joan’s! Joan’s was rich, warmly sympathetic, tender and emphatic, yet it was full of dark corners, secret nooks, recesses, and automatic blocks. . . . Huh? He had thought her mind as open as a book, but it wasn’t. . . . On the other hand, Nadine’s was wide open by nature. It was cool, poised—although at the moment uncomfortably worshipful—and utterly, shockingly open!
His second thought was that Joan was no longer with him. She was there, in a sense, but outside, some way; she wasn’t in Nadine’s mind the way he was.
“I’ll say I’m not!” Joan agreed, fervently. “Thank God! I don’t know what you did or how you did it, but when you went in you peeled me off like the skin of a banana, and I was clinging like a leech, too. I’m on the outside, looking in. Did you see how he did it, Nadine?”
“No, but since I am only a One, such insight would not be expected. I have called the Fives, and they come.”
“We are here.” Two close-linked minds linked themselves with the two already so closely linked. Each of the two visitors was grave, kindly, and old with an appalling weight of years; each mind bore an appalling freight of knowledge both mundane and esoteric. “We are here, fellow Master of Thought, to be of aid to you in the clarification of your newly-awakened mind, to the end that, in a future time, your superior powers will assist us along Paths of Truth which we could not otherwise traverse.”
“Will you please tell me what this is all about?” Cloud asked. “Starting at the beginning and using words of as few syllables as possible?”