"How long do disease germs live in a human body after they've killed it?"
"But that horrible Dilipic—the golop. They don't seem to fit."
"Try that on for size as cancer. Also, the Arpalones typed us before they'd let us land on any planet. Why didn't we blast them out of the way and land anyway?"
"Why, we didn't want to. It wasn't worth while."
"We couldn't. Psychic block. And if we had, we would have died. Different blood-types don't mix."
"So you and I are merely two red cells in the bloodstream of a super-dooper-galactic super-monster? Phooie!" she jeered. "That chestnut was propounded a thousand years ago. Are you trying to take me for a ride on that old sawhorse?"
"That's the attitude I had at first. So now we're ready for the chart." He pointed to a group of symbols. "We start with symbolic logic; manipulating like so to get this." There was a long mathematical dissertation; a mind-to-mind, rigorous, point-by-point proof.
"Q. E. D." Garlock concluded.
"I see your math, and if I believed half of it I'd be scared witless. Those few pieces fit, but they're scattered around in vast areas of blankness and you're jumping around like the Swiss miss leaping from Alp to Alp. And how about our own galaxy, the most important piece of all? It's different, and we're different, mentally. That wrecks your whole theory."