“I’ll say I can’t,” Joan breathed. “Especially as a semanticist, I can’t. No words, no symbology, in any language. But weren’t they beautiful, Storm? And wonderful, and . . . and awful?”
“All of that. I’d like to write it up, or make a tri-di of it . . . or something . . . but of course we can’t. What next? Shall we flirt a bit with the cosmics and ultras, or had we better jump right into the channels of thought?”
“Thought, by all means; the more practise we get, the better, and they’d be on a terrifically high band, don’t you think?”
“Bound to be. The logical conclusion of this whole fantastically cockeyed set-up is that they’ve simply never even suspected that we exist; any more than we have that they do.”
“Would the . . . the bodies, if I can call them that, radiate of themselves, or just thoughts?”
“Not of themselves, I don’t think . . . no. An entity of pure energy would have to be held together by forces of magnitudes we can’t even guess at; much too intense to permit bodily radiation. Something like the binding energies of particles, I imagine; but different and very probably even more so.”
The fusion leaped then to the bands of thought. It sought out and seized the thoughts of various of the ship’s personnel; gripping, molding, working, analyzing. Joan and Cloud were not reading minds now, at all; they were studying the fundamental mechanisms of the thoughts themselves. How they were generated; upon what, if anything, they were heterodyned; how they were transmitted; and, above all, exactly how they were received and exactly how they were converted from pure thought, couched at least in part in the symbols of language, into usefully assimilable information.
And, such was the power of that fusion, it succeeded.
Then up and up and up the scale of thought the fused minds went; seeking, finding, mastering. And up and up and up, into regions where no thoughts at all were to be found. And up and up, and up. . . .
“Stop it! Let me go! I’m burning out!” Joan shrieked aloud. “My God, Storm, is there no limit at all to your ceiling?”