n me. Your brains should be stored only with the material you
desire most and can use to the best advantage, for your mental capacity
is even more limited than my own. Please understand that I speak in no
derogatory sense; it is only that your race has many thousands of
generations to go before your minds should be stored with knowledge
indiscriminately. We ourselves have not yet reached that stage, and we
are perhaps millions of years older than you. And yet," he continued
musingly, "I envy you. Knowledge is, of course, relative, and I can
know _so_ little! Time and space have yielded not an iota of their
mystery to our most penetrant minds. And whether we delve baffled into
the unknown smallness of the small, or whether we peer, blind and
helpless, into the unknown largeness of the large, it is the
same--infinity is comprehensible only to the Infinite One: the
all-shaping Force directing and controlling the Universe and the
unknowable Sphere. The more we know, the vaster the virgin fields of
investigation open to us, and the more infinitesimal becomes our
knowledge. But I am perhaps keeping you from more important activities.
As you approach Norlamin more nearly, I shall guide you to my
observatory. I am glad indeed that it is in my lifetime that you have
come to us, and I await anxiously the opportunity of greeting you in the
flesh. The years remaining to me of this cycle of existence are few, and
I had almost ceased hoping to witness your coming."
* * * * *
The projection vanished instantaneously, and the four stared at each
other in an incredulous daze of astonishment. Seaton finally broke the
stunned silence. "Well, I'll be kicked to death by little red spiders!"
he ejaculated. "Mart, did you see what I saw, or did I get tight on
something without knowing it? That sure burned me up--it breaks me right
off at the ankles, just to think of it!"
Crane walked to the educator in silence. He examined it, felt the
changed coils and transformers, and gently shook the new insulating base
of the great power-tube. Still in silence he turned his back, walked
around the instrument board, read the meters, then went back and again
inspected the educator.
"It was real, and not a higher development of hypnotism, as at first I
thought it must be," he reported seriously. "Hypnotism, if sufficiently
advanced, might have affected us in that fashion, even to teaching us
all a strange language, but
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