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His face showed no change but I thought I sensed a growing excitement within
him. "Cortland," he said, "I want to enter your mind again. I think "
XX LAST DEFENSE
APPARENTLY he thought I might object not that that would have made any
difference for the next thing I knew the quicksilver eyes were growing larger
and the next instant they had changed and refocused so that I saw them, as it
were, behind my own eyes. I could see the motionless body of
Belem standing before me but bis face was blanker than ever.
Within my head, he spoke to me. "Remember. It's all there, in your memory. The
right associations will recall it. The unconscious never forgets anything.
Robinson. The University of "
"California," I thought and something clicked and swung open and I saw a page
open before me a page I had first read thousands of years ago and the fine
print swam into remembered visibility.
'Professor Raphael M. Robinson of the University of California now shows that
it is possible to divide a solid sphere into a minimum of five pieces and
reassemble them to form two spheres of the same size and the original one. Two
of the pieces are used to form one of the new spheres and three to form the
other.
" 'Some of the pieces must necessarily be of such complicated structure that
it is impossible to assign volume to them. Otherwise the sum of the volumes of
the five pieces would have to be equal both to the volume of the original
sphere and to the sum of the volumes of the two new spheres, which is twice as
great.' "
That was all. It wasn't as much as Belem would have liked I could feel his
impatience and the way he seemed to be shaking my mind over for more details
but I couldn't give him what I didn't have. After awhile the metallic mind
unlinked from mine and in a moment the motionless figure before me stirred,
turned without a word and began making tentative drawings on the corner of a
chart convenient upon the wall.
When I asked him questions he told me remotely to go away.
That was how it started. There's no use in my trying to tell you how it ended.
I didn't understand. It would be ridiculous for me even to pretend I know how
it was done in concrete fact before my eyes. But it was done.
Not easily. Not quickly. In fact it came dangerously close to not being done
at all, simply because it took so long.
I was able to watch the first stages of Belem's experiments. He knocked down
the problem of lenses and lights upon which he'd spent so much time and began
setting up theoretical paradoxes in three dimensions, following the
Banach-Tarski geometric plan. I watched him playing with ghostly spheres and
angles of light until my head began to ache from following the changing
shapes. What he was attempting was clearly impossible. I wandered away after
awhile and watched the play of lights outside. The display had recently become
a lot more spectacular and more interesting to watch but that was not good.
Even I could see that, though nobody would answer my questions. The methodical
machine-men were not panicky but you could see they had accelerated their
pace. They were recognizing the need for hurry.
The second-stage Mechandroid on its table had changed, too. The brilliant
neural webbing above it had simplified. Light ran now only in the main
channels, letting the finer nerve-wires run very pale, but the synapse-points
glowed like stars along the major lines.
And there was a pale glow hanging like a cocoon of radiance low over the
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motionless figure.
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I watched little groups of workers cluster around it, bending their heads
together over the table, and I had the impression that they were communicating
with their new-born super-kinsman. I even got the idea that he was advising
them, for those who left the group went directly to work with a fresh impetus.
It was a little like what must go on in a hive as the workers cluster around
the queen-mother.
They were very definitely working against time now perhaps against hours,
even minutes.
It was when the black lightning opened a second rift in the wall of shielding
light that the last galvanic spasm of activity before the end stirred the
workers to their final tasks. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]