"Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!"
"Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force!"
Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering—at a conscious level.
Watching the Gool mind, I learned.
The insinuating probe—a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized—was no more than a pattern in emptiness....
But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me.
Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves.
Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void—and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape.
There was a soundless shriek. "Effulgence! It reached out—touched me!"