"Now take something really new, like the original work on gravitation or relativity. No possible computer would be of any use. That takes a brain!"
"The brain of a Newton or an Einstein, yes." Belle thought for a minute, then grinned at him impishly. "Now watch the brain of a Bellamy perform. Get into high gear, brain.... I wish I knew something about biochemical embryology; but I read somewhere that ova are sterile, so our galaxy is an ovum. Therefore our super-galooper is a gal—which incontrovertible fact accounts for and explains rigorously the long-known truth that women always have been, are now, and always will be vastly superior to men in every quality, aspect, and...."
"Hold it!" Garlock snapped. His face hardened into intense concentration. Then: "Do you think you're kidding, Belle?"
"Why, of course I'm kidding, you big...."
"Look here, then." He picked up a pencil and filled in blank after blank after blank. "I'm making one unjustifiable assumption—that the Pleiades is the first intergalactic starship. The super-being is a female, and she is just becoming pregnant...."
"Flapdoodle! There are no blood cells in a sperm, and I don't think there are any in an ovum."
"I didn't mention either sperm or ovum. The analogy is so loose here that it holds only in the broadest, most general terms. The actual process of reproduction is unknowable. But wherever we went, we changed things. Not only by what we actually did, but also as a catalyst—no...."
"No, not a catalyst. A hormone."
"Exactly. Each of these changes would cause others, and so on. An infinite series. Calling the first three terms alpha, beta, and gamma, we operate like this...." Garlock's pencil was flying now. "Following me?"
"On your tail." Belle was breathing hard; as the blank spaces became fewer and fewer her face began to turn white.