"No. I'm saying I don't believe in miracles. I don't believe in coincidence—that concept is as meaningless as that of paradox. I certainly do not believe that we hit this planet by chance against odds of almost infinity to one. So I've been looking for a reason. I found one. It goes against my grain—against everything I've ever believed—but, since it's the only possible explanation, it must be true. The only possible director of the Gunther Drive must be the mind."
"Hell's blowtorches—Now you're insisting that the damn thing's alive."
"Far from it. It's Brownie who's alive. It was Brownie who got us here. Nothing else—repeat, nothing else—makes sense."
James pondered for a full minute. "I wouldn't buy it except for one thing. If you, the hardest-boiled skeptic that ever went unhung, can feed yourself the whole bowl of such a mess as that, I can at least take a taste of it. Shoot."
"Okay. You know that we don't know anything really fundamental about either teleportation or the drive. I'm sure now that the drive is simply mechanical teleportation. If you tried to 'port yourself without any idea of where you wanted to go, where do you think you'd land?"
"You might scatter yourself all over space—no, you wouldn't. You wouldn't move, because it wouldn't be teleportation at all. Destination is an integral part of the concept."
"Exactly so—but only because you've been conditioned to it all your life. This thing hasn't been conditioned to anything."
"Like a new-born baby," Lola suggested.
"Life again," James said. "I can't see it—too many bones in it. Pure luck, even at those odds, makes a lot more sense."
"And to make matters worse," Garlock went on as though neither of them had spoken. "Just suppose that a man had four minds instead of one and they weren't working together. Then where would he go?"