"All right. But as a precaution you'd better close your eyes and bring your thoughts down to a six power level. She isn't too bright. It takes her nearly half a second to calculate the distance in inches from here to Andromeda and return via Pegasus—that is, unless you give her a clue to the problem. She's a plain dumbbell but fantastically beautiful. Tall as you are and weighs less than sixty pounds. What a shape! She turned down a billion-dollar contract to dance three minutes in a spot on one of the planets in the Milky Way. Plain dumb! But looks! And the clothes she wears! Dazzling! Imported from Eureka. Must have cost her two-bits or more for one dress with upward of sixty yards of material in it. Made my wife gape. Nearly bankrupted me, my wife did, buying clothes after that. Spent four dollars on her in less than six years. Ten thousand separate items. But, of course, she never found anything like that imported by my secretary. I doubt if there's another in the solar system, and I know there isn't another woman able to afford twenty-five cents for a single dress. I wonder where she gets her money! Her salary here is only seven hundred dollars a day, two days a month. I'll bet she hasn't got a million dollars to her name saved up. Spends every last cent she earns, probably. Ninety cents a quarter she pays for that seventeen room apartment of hers. My wife and I have only eighteen rooms between us, her twelve rooms in China and my six rooms here. Not large either. My six rooms cover only two acres of ground and extend a mere hundred feet in the air. Cramped! I can't afford anything better, not and save anything. I've got less than a billion put aside right now, hardly enough to invest in an enterprise outside the solar system. Poverty! How that secretary of mine lives so high on her pittance, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if she isn't consorting mentally with somebody on some planet on the edge of space. Not that I'm narrow-minded. A woman with looks like hers deserves the best, but allowing a man on the edge of space to think about her is going pretty far, and I'm a stickler for the convention.
"Hells bells. I didn't mean to run on like this. But it upsets me to think about her loose morals when I have to work the seat of my pants to the bone over a hot chair in order to earn a bare living. And my wife throwing money around for clothes, and both my boys getting ready to enter college and not in a position to earn anything."
"I can see you're upset. Better have your mind erased."
"I would, but there isn't a good Ducktor closer than Venus. Could find a doctor, of course, but they're unreliable. They style themselves doctors because it sounds like Ducktor. Plain disgrace. Ducktor comes from the word Quack. Ages old. Even in the dark ages there were plenty of quacks. They had all sorts of diseases then. Yes, sir. Diseases! Little crawley things working around in their blood and flesh. And these quacks would feed these diseases all sorts of medicine! Finally the diseases up and died. Not having any intelligence to burn them out, the people of those days could live as long as they wished. Or at least that's the way it's figured. Once in a while, about every two or three weeks, just as we erase our minds so we won't burn up too quick, those people would get together and begin killing one another. Think of it! We try to live, but they tried to die. Seems they couldn't die fast enough, so they used a lot of fissionable material and burned up everybody that way. Even that didn't satisfy them, so they used fusing material, which was more deadly, and finally completed everything to their total satisfaction. At least they left very little trace of themselves. Man had to begin all over again from the sea, beginning with the amoeba. I wonder if we're going to wind up like that a million years hence."
"Not likely," Fillmore said. "Besides, you're wrong. Man didn't begin all over again. The amoeba would have worked in another direction, seeing what a mess man made of things. What actually happened was that quite a few people were left after the hydrogen chain was set off. They lived on one of the nearer planets and returned after earth had cooled again. Then they set up things, or so they claimed, very much like they were before, with the exception that they changed their philosophy. Developed their minds first and everything else naturally followed."
"I think it's a mistake," the bald man persisted, "to develop the mind too early. As I mentioned, my two boys are just now entering college. Of course they knew a few things before, such as how to fuel themselves when in the presence of food, and how to walk, and the older one could even speak a few words, and even the younger one could change his own diaper—had been doing it since he was forty-nine—but my wife and I saw to it that they didn't learn too much too fast. That's the reason my people live so long. Don't burn ourselves up in infancy thinking. But that doesn't mean you may not be right in teaching your children, when you have them tomorrow, everything right at the start. With a fourteen power intelligence, your people are by nature compelled to do a lot of thinking, and it's your duty, as a citizen, to begin early. Had any startling thoughts lately?"
Fillmore sighed. "Just the normal ones. Figured out a simple method, just before dozing off to sleep last night, to transfer this planet to an orbit about another sun. Not that it will be of much use. A sun is a sun and it would take thirty seconds solid thought to improve on it, and I don't know anybody capable of that much sustained thought, and there's not much point in transferring this planet, now that we know how to renew the sun whenever it cools too much."
"But it's interesting," the bald man pointed out. "It gets sort of dull staying in the same old orbit. I'm in favor of moving to another universe. Why don't you bring the matter before the Council?"
"They wouldn't listen. They don't like change. Most of them are aged, and they still think in terms of light and energy. Imagine that in a modern world! Men content to travel at the mere speed of light! Can't get over the idea that breaking through the energy barrier was just like breaking through the sound barrier."