disease germs live in a human body after they've killed
it?"

"But that horrible Dilipic--the golop. They don't seem to fit."

"Try that on for size as cancer. Also, the Arpalones typed us before
they'd let us land on any planet. Why didn't we blast them out of the
way and land anyway?"

"Why, we didn't want to. It wasn't worth while."

"We couldn't. Psychic block. And if we had, we would have died.
Different blood-types don't mix."

"So you and I are merely two red cells in the bloodstream of a
super-dooper-galactic super-monster? Phooie!" she jeered. "That chestnut
was propounded a thousand years ago. Are you trying to take me for a
ride on _that_ old sawhorse?"

"That's the attitude I had at first. So now we're ready for the chart."
He pointed to a group of symbols. "We start with symbolic logic;
manipulating like so to get this." There was a long mathematical
dissertation; a mind-to-mind, rigorous, point-by-point proof.

"Q. E. D." Garlock concluded.

"I see your math, and if I believed half of it I'd be scared witless.
Those few pieces fit, but they're scattered around in vast areas of
blankness and you're jumping around like the Swiss miss leaping from Alp
to Alp. And how about our own galaxy, the most important piece of all?
It's different, and we're different, mentally. That wrecks your whole
theory."

"No. I told you I need a lot more data. Also, beyond a certain point the
analogy appears to get looser."

"_Appears_ to! It's as loose as a goose!"

"Think a minute. Is it actually loose, or are we getting up into
concepts that no human mind can grasp? That might be the case, you
know."

"Oh.... You're quite a salesman, Clee, but I'm still not buying."

"Our galaxy is a bit of specialized tissue--part of a ganglion, maybe.
Over here, see? I'll have to leave it dangling until we find some more
like it."

"I see. But anyway, you haven't a tenth's worth of real material on that
whole sheet. Feed everything you have there into a computer and it'd
just laugh at you."

"Sure it would. The great advantage of the human brain is its ability to
arrive at valid conclusions from incomplete data. For instance, what
would your computer do with the figures you shot at me the day we
started out? 'Thirty-nine, twenty-two, thirty-nine. Five seven. One
thirty-five.' Yet they're completely informative."

"To anyone interested in that kind of figures, yes."

"Which includes practically all adults. Then take the