.
“A highly laudable objective, I’d say, but I’ll bet you a cookie that Tellus is ’way beyond that limit. Drag out the globe,... ah, there you are, sweet mother world of the race! Now watch out, Mom; ready or not, here we come!”
They went; and when they found out that they could scan and analyze the entire volume of Earth, mile by plotted cubic mile, as easily and as completely as they could that of Newmars on whose surface they were, they stared at each other, appalled.
“Well... I... that is... ” Barbara licked her lips and gulped. “I owe you a cookie, I guess, Carl.”
“Yeah.” But Deston was not thinking of cookies. “That tears it. It really does. Wide open. Rips it up and down and sideways.”
“It does for a fact. But it makes the objective even more laudable than ever, I’d say. How do you think we should go about it?”
“There’s only one way I can see. I said I’d never spend a dime of your money, remember? I take it back. I think we’d better charter one of WarnOil’s fast subspacers and buy all the off-Earth maps, star-charts, and such-like gear we can get hold of.”
“Charter? Pfooie! We own WarnOil, silly, subspacers and everything else. In fee simple. So we’ll just take one. I’ll arrange that; so you can take off right now after your maps and charts and whatever. Scoot!”
“Wait up a bit, sweet. We’ll have to have Doc Adams.”
“Of course. He’ll be tickled silly to go.”
“And Herc Jones for captain.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Barbara nibbled at her lower lip. “A little premature, don’t you think, to unsettle him and Bun—raise hopes that may very well turn out to be false—before we find out what we can actually do?”
“Could be. Okay, fellow explorer—the count-down is on and all stations are in condition GO.”
* * * *
Of all the preparations for the first expedition into the unknown, only one is really noteworthy; the interview with Doctor Adams in his home. For months he had been concentrating on the subether and his zeta field; and when he learned what the purpose of the trip was, and that he would have a free hand and an ample budget, he became enthusiastic indeed.
To a mind of such tremendous power and range as his, it was evident from the first that his young friends had changed markedly since he had last seen them. This fact was of course a challenge. Adams was tall and lean and gray; and, though he was sixty years old, he almost never worked at a desk. He thought better, he said, on his feet. He had always reminded Deston of a lean, gray tomcat on the prowl for prey. He was on his feet now, pacing about.
Suddenly, he stopped, clasped his hands behind his back, and stared at Deston through the upper sections of his gold-rimmed trifocals. “You two youngsters,” he said flatly, “are using telepathy. Using it consciously, accurately, and completely informatively—a thing that, to my knowledge, has never before been demonstrated.”
“Oh?” Barbara’s eyes widened. “When we thought we were talking did we sometimes forget to?”
“Only in part. Mainly because of a depth of understanding—deduced, to be sure, but actual nonetheless—impossible to language.” Then, Adams-like, he went straight to the point. “Will you try to teach it to me?”
“Why, of course!” Barbara exclaimed. “That, Uncle Andy, was very much on the agenda.”
“Thank you. And Stella, too, please? Her mind is of precisionist grade and is of greater sensitivity than my own.”
“Certainly,” Deston assured him. “The more we can spread this ability around the better it will be for everybody.”
Adams left the room then, and in a minute or so came back with his wife; a slender, graceful, gray-haired woman of fifty-odd.
Both Andrew and Stella Adams had been students all their lives. They knew how to study. They had the brain capacity—the blocked or latent cells—to learn telepathy and many other things. They learned rapidly and thoroughly. Neither of them, however, could or ever did learn how to “handle” any substance. In fact, very few persons of their time, male or female, ever did learn more than an insignificant fraction of the Destons’ unique ability to dowse.
In compensation, however, the Adamses had nascent powers peculiarly their own. Thus, before they went to bed that night, Andrew and Stella Adams were exploring vistas of reality that neither of the Destons would ever be able to perceive.
* * * *
Out in deep space, the Destons worked slowly at first. They actually landed on Cerealia, the most fully surveyed of all the colonized planets; and on Galmetia, only a little less so, as it was owned in toto by Galactic Metals; and on Lactia, the dairy planet.
Deston worked first on copper; worked on it so long and so intensively that he could find and handle and tri-di any deposit of the free metal or of any of its ores with speed and precision, wherever any such might be in a planet’s crust. Then he went on up the line of atomic numbers, taking big jumps—molybdenum and barium and tungsten and bismuth—up to uranium, which was what he was after.
Barbara did not work with him on metals very long; just long enough to be sure that she could be of no more help. She didn’t really like metals, and she had her own work to do. It was just as important to have on file all possible data concerning water, oil, gas, and coal.
They worked together, however, at perfecting their techniques. Any thought of determining the working limits of psionic abilities had been abandoned long since; they were trying with everything they had to minimize the necessity of using maps and charts. They succeeded. Just as Barbara, while still a child, had become able to work without samples; so both of them learned how to work without maps. All they had to know, finally, was where a solar system was; they could fix their sense of perception upon any star they could see, and hence could study all its planets. They tried to work independently of star-charts—to direct their attention to any point in space at will—but it was to be years before they were able to reach that peak of ability.
Deston found many deposits of copper, one of them very large, on the colonized planets; but he was interested in copper only as a means, not as an end. What he wanted was a mountain of uranium; and uranium was just as scarce on all ninety five colonized planets as it was on Earth.
He knew that his sensitivity to his wife’s money was the only flaw in their happiness. He knew what Barbara thought about his attitude, with the sure knowledge possible only to full mental rapport. She did not like it; and she, who had never had a money problem in her whole life, could not fully understand it. He should be big enough, she thought deep down and a little disappointedly, not to boggle so at such an unimportant thing as money.
But that attitude was innate and so much a part of Deston’s very make-up that he could not have changed it had he tried, and he would not try. Almost everyone who knew them had him labelled as a fortune-hunter, and that label irked him to the core. It would continue to irk him as long as it stuck, and the only way he could unstick it was to do something—or make money enough—to make him as important as she was. A mountain of uranium—even a small mountain—would do it two ways. It would make him a public benefactor and a multi-millionaire. So—by the living God!—he would find uranium before he went back to civilization.
Adams and his scientists and engineers had developed an ultra-long-range detector for zeta fields, and they had not been able to find any other hazards to subspace flight. Hence they had been constantly stepping up their vessel’s speed. Originally a very fast ship, she was now covering in hours distances that had formerly required days.
On and on, then, faster and faster, deeper and deeper into the unexplored immensities of deep space the mighty flyer bored; and Deston finally found his uranium. They landed upon a mountainous, barren continent of a lifeless world. They put on radiation armor and labored busily for nineteen hours.
Then