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And then I understand that it is not a violin I hear; I am sobbing up there in the dark. Enraged, I
swallow a mouthful of sour, and stop the noise.
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Chapter 5
So whaddaya want?
The Medusa told him what it wanted, incredulously, as one explaining the utter and absolute
obvious, and drew a blank from Gurlick. There was a moment of disbelief, and then a forceful repetition
of the demand.
And Gurlick still did not understand. Few humans would, for not many have made the effort to
comprehend the nature of the hive-mind what it must be like to have such a mind, and further, to be
totally ignorant of the fact that any other kind of mind could exist.
For in all its eons of being, across and back and through and through the immensities of space it
occupied, the Medusa had never encountered intelligence except as a phenomenon of the group. It was
aware of the almost infinite variations in kind and quality of the gestalt psyche, but so fused in its
experience and comprehension were the concepts intelligence and group that it was genuinely
incapable of regarding them as separable things. That a single entity of any species was capable of so much
as lucid thought without the operation of group mechanisms, was outside its experience and beyond its
otherwise near-omniscience. To contact any individual of a species was or had been until now to
contact the entire species. Now, it pressed against Gurlick, changed its angle and pressed again, paused to
ponder, came back again and, puzzling, yet again to do the exploratory, bewildered things a man might do
faced with the opening of, and penetration through, some artifact he did not understand. There were
tappings and listenings, and (analogously) pressures this way and that as if to find a left-hand thread. There
were scrapings as for samples to analyze, proddings and pricks as for hardness tests, polarized rayings as if
to determine lattice structures. And in the end there was a call it a pressure test, the procedure one
applies to clogged tubing or to oxide-shorts on shielded wire: blow it out. Take what s supposed to be
going through and cram an excess down it.
Gurlick sat on the floor of the abandoned truck, disinterestedly aware of the distant cerebration,
computation, discussion and conjecture. A lot of gabble by someone who knew more than he did about
things he didn t understand. Like always.
Uh!
It had been a thing without sight or sound or touch, but it struck like all three, suffused him for a
moment with some unbearable tension, and then receded and left him limp and shaken. Some mighty
generator somewhere had shunted in and poured its product to him, and it did a great many things inside
him somehow; and all of them hurt, and none was what was wanted.
He was simply not the right conduit for such a force. He was a solid bar fitted into a plumbing
system, a jet of air tied into an electrical circuit; he was the wrong material in the wrong place and the
output end wasn t hooked up to anything at all.
Spectacular, the degree of mystification which now suffused the Medusa. For ages untold there had
always been some segment somewhere which could come up with an answer to anything; now there was
not. That particular jolt of that particular force ought to have exploded into the psyche of every rational
being on earth, forming a network of intangible, unbreakable threads leading to Gurlick and through him
to Medusa itself. It had always happened that way not almost always, but always. This was how the
creature expanded. Not by campaign, attack, siege, consolidation, conquest, but by contact and influx. Its
spores, if they encountered any life-form which the Medusa could not control, simply did not function.
If they functioned, the Medusa flowed in. Always.
From methane swamp to airless rock, from sun to sun through two galaxies and part of a third
flickered the messages, sorting, combining, test-hypothesizing, calculating, extrapolating. And these
flickerings began to take on the hue of fear. The Medusa had never known fear before.
To be thus checked meant that the irresistible force was resisted, the indefensible was guarded. Earth
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