"But he's asleep, surely, by this time," Dorothy protested.
"Sure he is, or he wouldn't be thinking that kind of thoughts. It's his subconscious—he's contented enough when he's awake."
"How did you work it out?" asked Crane. "You said, yourself, that it might well take lifetimes of research."
"It would, ordinarily. Partly a hunch, partly dumb luck, but mostly a combination of two brains that upon Norlamin would ordinarily never touch the same subject anywhere. Rovol, who knows everything there is to be known about rays, and Drasnik, probably the greatest authority upon the mind that ever lived, both gave me a good share of their knowledge; and the combination turned out to be hot stuff, particularly in connection with this fifth-order keyboard. Now we can really do something!"
"But you had a sixth-order detector before," Margaret put in. "Why didn't we touch it off by thinking?"
"Too coarse—I see that, now. It wouldn't react to the extremely slight power of a thought-wave; only to the powerful impulses from a bar or from cosmic radiation. But I can build one now that will react to thought, and I'm going to; particularly since there was a little interference on that picture that I couldn't quite account for." He turned back to the projector.
"You're coming to bed," declared Dorothy with finality. "You've done enough for one day."
She had her way, but early the next morning Seaton was again at the keyboard, wearing a complex headset and driving a tenuous fabric of force far out into the void. After an hour or so he tensed suddenly, every sense concentrated upon something vaguely perceptible; something which became less and less nebulous as his steady fingers rotated micrometric dials in infinitesimal arcs.
"Come get a load of this, folks!" he called at last. "Mart, what would a planet—an inhabited planet, at that—be doing 'way out here, Heaven only knows how many light-centuries away from the nearest Galaxy?"