“Hold everything, Storm! You’re getting out beyond my depth. Anyway, what use are they in what we’re after?”
“None at all, that I can see; but it’s new knowledge. Nobody ever dreamed—correction, please: nobody ever published—anything about it, or I’d’ve heard of it. Maybe the Fives know all about it, though; I’ll check with them, first chance I get. QX, we’ll jump up to the radio band.”
“There wouldn’t be any radio waves out here, and you couldn’t understand the language if there were.”
“How do you know? We’ll go where there are some and find out. Maybe we can understand any kind of language now—maybe that’s one of the natural abilities of a Type Three-Six fusion. Who knows?”
In an instant they were receiving a short-wave broadcast at the Heaviside Layer of a distant planet. They could receive it, could de-louse it, could separate signal from carrier wave, could read the information; but they could not understand it.
“Well, that’s a relief,” Joan sighed. “I was getting more than half afraid that a Type Six mind would be omniscient.”
“If I’m a Six you needn’t worry; there’s altogether too much to know. Where do you want to go from here?”
“Let’s look at the infra-red and the ultra-violet. I’ve often wondered what colors they would be.”
The fusion looked, and saw things that made both participants gasp. That is, they did not really see, either. None of the six ordinary senses—of perception, sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch—were involved. Or rather, perhaps, all of them were involved, or merged with or into some other, brand-new sense possessed only by high-type minds in full action.
“As a semanticist, Joan, can you write a paper on that? That would make any kind of sense, I mean?”