The Galaxy Primes -1- Intelligence

SPOILER ALERT! The items discussed here are familiar books that are being re-read for travel. As such, no effort is made to shield the reader from the results of plot development.

• This book was published by Ace books in 1965. The author, Edward E. Smith, had already written similar books with the Lensman series and Skylark In Space series.
• The book deals with people who can Gunther, which wraps up telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, and other skills in a package named for a physicist who worked out procedures for measuring and controlling these skills. The hero, Clelander Garlock, and heroine, Beverly Bellamy, had more brain cells and skills for this than anyone else in the Solar System, and, it turns out, in our Galaxy. Certainly, more than for fat, lecherous Alonzo Farber, chairman of Solar System Enterprises, for whom Garlock works. They use it to send their star ship Pleiades anywhere with an equivalent Gunther field value. At first they quarrel rancorously, and it goes to random places in galaxies so far from ours that ours may not be found. They find planet with blue four-armed telepathic guardians called Arpalones, like white blood cells, and human inhabitants guarded by them who are inter-fertile with the hero and heroine, who are anxious to mate but with lessor skills. This temptation is avoided, but repeated 43 times as they go from galaxy to galaxy, not knowing where they are, but finding the same guardian structure with no explanation.
• There are also invading animals, with their space ships, which attack people, or which turn whole land masses into glop. They fight along side the guardians, but fail to save one planet which is being glopped. Lola, a lessor operator, drives the ship herself to another planet in the same galaxy which starting to be 'glopped' and so which has a hope of being rescued, and they discover that Garlock and Bellamy have independently conditioned parts of the star ship drive mentally to not go if the other wants to go anywhere. Since only Lola wanted to travel, the two conditionings are satisfied, and she can direct their travel, but only within the present galaxy. When Garlock and Bellamy work together, they can go to other galaxies, and back home to Tellus.
• Garlock says "Remember what I said about this drive not being conditioned to anything? I was wrong. Belle and I have conditioned it, but badly. We've been fighting so much that something in that mess down there has been conditioned to her, something else to me. My part will play along with anyone except Belle; hers with anybody except me. Anti-conditioning, you might call it. Anyway, they lay back their ears and balk." (Page 107) This idea of mental blocking parallels what Henry Gross and his daughter found.
• They find that each solar system in our galaxy has only a single young pair of humans who are more powerful than others, also none a strong as them. All pairs are building their space ships, but none has gotten as far. At the end of the book, Garlock tells Bellamy that the whole set of galaxies is like a single super animal, and galaxies are its cells. Our galaxy is its ovaries, and the space ships are like sperm cells or hormones making a change. Bellamy realizes, "If this is true that our vaunted mentality is only that of one blood cell compared to that of a whole brain ... and that intelligence is banked, level upon level . . . well it's simply mind wrecking." (page 188) He holds her as she probes in a new way, and finds intelligence all the way down, and all the way up. "I couldn't understand any of them, of course, but I looked each one squarely in the eye." (page 189) This parallels the plant intelligence found in "The Secret Life of Plants" by Peter Bird, and with what some mystics like Gurdjeif have found.