"So you think I need something done for me. Well! I'm glad you came right out and said this before we were married!"

The following series of "but—but—" from me and irrelevance from Florence occupied an hour, but hardly mentioned the diver. Eventually I got her back into my arms.

My urges for Florence were strictly biological, though intense. There were little chances for intellectual exchanges between us, but I was more interested in the broad probabilities of her as a woman. I could go commune with wild and exotic intelligences on foreign planets any time I had the fare. As a woman, Florence was what I wanted.

"Back on Antimony IX," I explained carefully, "life is fierce and rugged. So, to keep from being eaten, these little divers evolved themselves into little minds with no bodies at all, and they feed off solar radiation. Now, honey, minds are not made of the same stuff brains are made of, good solid tissue and gray matter and neural cortex—"

"Don't be dirty, Sol."

"There is nothing dirty about the body, honey. Minds are invisible but detectable in the micro-wavelengths on any sensitive counter, and look like little glass eggs when you can see them—as I can, by using these glasses. In fact, your diver is over by the window now. But, having evolved this far, they came across a little difficulty and couldn't evolve any further. So there they are, handy little minds for teleporting whatever you want moved, and reading other people's thoughts."

She gasped. "Did you say reading other people's thoughts?

"Certainly," I said. "As a matter of fact, that's what stopped the divers from evolving further. If they brush against any thinking creature, they pick up whatever thought is in the creature's conscious mind. But they also pick up the subliminal activity, if you follow me—and down at that level of a mind such as man's, his thoughts are not only the present unconscious thoughts but also a good slice of what is to him still the future. It's one of those space-time differences. The divers are not really on the same space-time reference as the physical world, but that makes them all the more useful, because our minds aren't either."

"Did you say reading other people's thoughts, like a telepath?" she persisted.

"Exactly like a telepath, or any other class of psi. We're really living on a much wider scale than we're conscious of, but 

 Prev. P 6/12 next