He thought again of what lay in the power of those three minds that had been linked together by the unconscious and unintending ingenuity shaped by the minds of men—the power and the beauty, the wonder and the awfulness. And he quailed before the realization that, perhaps, here had been forged an instrument that outraged all the purpose and the meaning for which it now could seek throughout the universe.
In time, perhaps, the three minds would become a single mind and if that should happen, then his humanity would no longer matter, for it would be gone. Then the ties that bound him to a planet called the Earth and to the race of bipedal beings that resided upon the earth would be snapped and he would be free. Then, he told himself, he could rest easy, then he could forget. And then, perhaps, when he had forgotten, when he was no longer human, he could look upon the powers and capabilities held within that common mind as nothing more than commonplace. For the mind of man, he knew, while it might be clever, was very limited. It gaped at wonder and boggled at the full concept of the universe. But while it might be limited, he told himself, it was safe and warm and comfortable.
He had outgrown the humanity with which he had been endowed and that outgrowing hurt. It left him weak and empty, outside the comfort and the warmth.
He crouched upon the floor and wrapped his arms about him. This little space, he thought, even this tiny room which, crouched, he occupied—even this space did not belong to him nor did he belong to it. There was nowhere for him. He was a tangled nothingness which had been spawned by accident. He had never been meant to be. He was an intruder. An intruder, perhaps, upon this planet only, but the humanity that still clung to him made this planet matter—the only place in all the universe that mattered.
In time he might shuck off the humanness, but that, if ever, would be millenia from now. And it mattered to him now. Now and the Earth, not forever and the universe.
He felt the sympathy reaching out for him and he knew dimly where it came from and even in his bitterness and despair, he knew it was a trap and cried out against it.
He struggled feebly, but they still kept reaching out to snare him and he heard the words and thoughts that passed between the two of them and the words that they spoke to him, although he did not understand them.
They reached out and took him and folded him close against them and their alien warmth held him secure and tight and safe.
He sank into the comfort of forgetting and the battered core of his agony seemed to melt away in a world where there was nothing but the three of them—just he and those two others, bound together for all eternity.
29
A December wind, sharp-toothed and thin, keened across the land, stripping the last of the brown and shriveled leaves from the lone oak tree that stood halfway up the hill. Atop the hill, where the cemetery stood, the giant pines moaned in the chill of the dying year. Ragged clouds raced across the sky and there was a smell of coming snow riding on the wind. Two trim blue figures stood at the cemetery gates, the pale winter sunlight, shining for a moment through the broken clouds, gleaming off the polished buttons and the rifle barrels. To one side of the gate a small group of sight-seers huddled, peering through the iron bars at the whiteness of the chapel.
“Not many here today,” Ryan Wilson told Elaine Horton. “When the weather was good, especially on weekends, we had quite a crowd.”
He shucked the collar of his grey robe close about his neck.
“Not that I approve of it,” he said. “That’s Theodore Roberts up there. I don’t care what shape he takes, it still is Theodore Roberts.”
“Dr. Roberts, I take it,” said Elaine, “was well thought of in Willow Grove.”
“That he was,” said Wilson. “He was the only one of us who ever gained distinction. The town is proud of him.”
“And you resent all this?”
“I don’t know if you can say resentment. So long as a proper decorum is maintained, I don’t think we mind. But at times the crowds take on a holiday aspect and that we do not like.”
“Perhaps,” said Elaine, “I should not have come. I thought a long time about it. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed I must.”
“You were his friend,” said Wilson gravely. “You have a right to come. I don’t imagine he had too many friends.”
The small crowd of huddled people had drifted from the gates and was starting down the hill.
“On a day like this,” said Wilson, “there’s not much for them to see. So they don’t stay very long. Just the chapel. In the good weather, of course, the chapel doors were open and you could catch a glimpse inside. But even then, there wasn’t much to see. To begin with just a patch of darkness, a patch of nothingness, and you couldn’t always see it. But now, when the doors are open, you get a sense of shining, of something shining there. At first it didn’t shine. You couldn’t see a thing. Just like looking into a hole that hung just above the floor. Everything blotted out. A shield of some sort, I suppose. But now, gradually, the shield, the defenses, whatever they may be, have been dropped and you can see it shining there.”
“Will they let me in?” Elaine asked.
“I think they will,” said Wilson. “I’ll send word to the captain. You can’t blame Space Administration for clamping down so hard. The responsibility for whatever’s up there rests solely with them. They started the project, two hundred years ago. What happened here would not have happened if it hadn’t been for Project Werewolf.”
Elaine shuddered.
“You’ll pardon me,” said Wilson. “I should not have said that.”
“Why shouldn’t you?” she asked. “Unpleasant as it is, that’s what it’s called by everyone.”
“I told you about that day he came into the office,” Wilson said. “He was a nice young man.”
“He was a frightened man,” said Elaine, “running from the world. If he had only told me …”
“Perhaps then he didn’t know …”
“He knew he was in trouble. The senator and I would have helped him. Dr. Daniels would have helped him.”
“He didn’t want to involve you. It was not the sort of thing one would involve his friends in. And he wanted to keep your friendship. He was afraid, more than likely, if he told you, that he would lose the friendship.”
“I can see,” said Elaine, “how he might have thought so. And I didn’t even try to make him tell me. I blame myself for that. But I didn’t want to hurt him. I thought he should have a chance of finding the answer for himself.”
The crowd came down the hill, went by the two of them and continued down the road.
30
The pyramid stood to the left, and in front of the row of seats. It glowed dully, pulsating slightly, and out from it hung a curtain of light.
“Don’t go too close,” the captain said. “You might frighten it.”
Elaine did not answer. She stared at the pyramid and the horror and the wonder of it rose in her throat to choke her.
“You can go down two or three more rows of seats,” the captain said. “It might be dangerous if you tried to get too close. We don’t really know.”
Words forced themselves up and out of her. “Frighten it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the captain said. “That’s the way it acts. As if it might be frightened of us. Or suspicious of us. Or maybe just doesn’t want anything to do with us. It wasn’t like this until recently. It was blacked out, a piece of emptiness, as if there were nothing there. Creating a world of its own, with all defenses up.”
“And now he knows that we won’t harm him?”
“Him?”
“Andrew Blake,” she said.
“You knew him, miss? Mr. Wilson said so.”
“I saw him three times,” she said.
“About knowing we won’t hurt him,” the captain said. “Maybe that is it. Some of the scientists think so. A lot of them have tried to study it—pardon me, Miss Horton—have tried to study him. But they don’t get too far.
Nothing much to work on.”
“They’re sure?” she asked. “They’re sure it’s Andrew Blake?”
“Down underneath the pyramid,” the captain told her. “Down at the base of it, on the right hand side.”
“The robe!” she cried. “That was the one I gave him!”
“Yes. The one that he was wearing. It’s down there on the floor. Just the corner of it sticking out.”
She took a step down the aisle.
“Not too far,” the captain warned. “Not too close.”
She took another step and halted.
This is foolish, she thought. If he is there, he knows. He’d know that it is me and he would not be frightened—he’d know I have for him nothing but my love.
The pyramid pulsated gently.
But perhaps he doesn’t know, she told herself. Perhaps he has locked himself against the world and if that is what he’s done, he had reason to.
How must it be, she wondered, to know that your mind is the mind of another man—a loaned mind since you can have none of your own, because man’s ingenuity was not quite great enough to fabricate a mind? Ingenuity sufficient to fashion bone and flesh and brain, but not to fashion mind. And how much worse, perhaps, to know that you were a part of two other minds—at least two other minds.
“Captain?” she asked.
“Yes, Miss Horton.”
“Do the scientists know how many minds there are? Could it be more than three?”
“They don’t seem to know,” he said. “Granted the situation as it stands, there might not be a limit.”
No limit, she thought. Room for an infinity of minds, for all the thought that lay in the universe.
I am here, she said, speaking silently to the creature that had been Andrew Blake. I am here. Can’t you tell I’m here? If you ever need me, if you change back into a man again …
But why should he change back into a man again? Perhaps he had changed to this so he need not be a man, so that he need not face a humanity that he could not share.
She turned and took a hesitant step toward the chapel’s front, then turned back once more.
The pyramid was shining softly and it seemed so peaceful and so solid, yet withdrawn, that her throat constricted and tears came to her eyes.
I will not weep, she told herself, fiercely. I will not weep, for whom would I be weeping? For Andrew Blake? For myself? For the befuddled race of man?
Not dead, she thought. But worse than death, perhaps. If he had been a man and dead, she could have walked away. She could have said goodbye.
Once he had turned to her for help. Now he was beyond her help, or any human help. Perhaps, she thought, he was beyond all humanity.
She turned again.
“I’ll leave now,” she said. “Captain, please, would you walk beside me.”
He took her arm and walked beside her up the aisle.
31
It all was there. The great black towers anchored in the planet’s granite crust, reached toward the skies. The green and leafy glade, with its flowers and gaily-playing animals, stood motionless in time. The pink-white structure rose in airy curves and spirals above the purple, foam-flecked sea. And in the aridity of the great plateau the mustard-colored domes of hermit intelligences ran as far as sense could reach.
These and many others—and not the pictures of them only, snatched from the ice-hard stars which lay like scattered crystals across the skies that roofed a planet of drifted sand and snow—but the ideas and the thoughts and concepts that clung to all the pictures, like bits of dirt to roots.
Most of the thoughts and concepts were simply isolated pieces which would not correlate, but all of them were springboards for the fabrication of a vast jigsaw puzzle net of logic.
The task was an enormous one and at times confusing, but bit by bit the various data fell into filing patterns, and once identified were erased from active consideration, but still tagged and available when there should be need of them.
It worked with satisfaction and a happiness—and that bothered it. Satisfaction was all right and quite permissible, but happiness was wrong. It was something that had been unknown and should not be felt; it was an alien thing and it was emotion. For the best result, there must be nothing like emotion, and it was irritated at the happiness and tried to wipe it out.
A contagion, it told itself. A contagion that it had caught from Changer and, as well, perhaps, from Quester, who was at the best a most unstable creature. A situation that it must guard against, for happiness was bad enough—there were other illogical emotions held by those two that could be even worse.
So it wiped away the happiness and posted guard against it, and went on with its work, reducing the ideas and the thoughts and concepts, insofar as they could be so reduced, to formulae and axioms and symbols, being careful in the process not to lose the substance of them, for the substance would be needed later.
There were tantalizing hints that must be docketed for more consideration and, perhaps, even for more data. The logic pattern potentially was sound, but extrapolated too far it left some room for error and needed further data to indicate direction. There were so many tricky things; there was nothing ever easy. The process called for hard discipline and constant self-examination to be certain that the concept of one’s self was eliminated. That was the thing, it thought, that made the happiness so bad.
The material of that black tower, for example. So thin it seemed impossible for it to stand, let alone have strength. But there coud be no doubt about its thinness; that information came through very clear and solid. But the hint of neutrons was something else—neutrons packed so solidly together that they assumed the characteristics of a metal, all held in a rigid association by a force for which there was no definition. The hint indicated time, but was time a force? A dislocated time, perhaps. A time straining to take its proper place in either past or future, forever striving toward a goal made impossible by some fantastic mechanism that kept time out of step?
And the fishers of space who cast their nets across empty cubic light-years, catching the energy spewed out in space by all the angry suns. Catching, in the process, the incredible flotsam of unknown things that once had crossed or once had lived in space—the garbage of the vast stretches of abandoned space. Nothing about the fishers or what kind of nets they cast or how these nets might trap the energy. Just the thought that the fishers fished. Some fantasy, perhaps of some dim communal mind, a religion or a faith or myth—or could there be the fishers?
These and many more and that one faint impression, so faint it barely registered, faint, perhaps, because it had been dredged from a star so distant that even light grew tired. A universal mind, it said, and that was all it said. A mind, perhaps, from which all thinking came. A mind, perhaps, that gathered in all thinking. Or a mind that set the law and order which spun the electron around the nucleus and called out marching cadences to the galaxies.
There was much, and all of it fragmentary and very puzzling. And this was just a start. This was the harvest merely of a moment of time on a single planet. But it was important, all of it, every bit of information, every faint impression. Somewhere it all fit in, somehow there was a place for it in that pattern of law and order, cause and effect, action and reaction which made up the universe.
Time was all that was needed. With more data and more logic it could all become as one. And time, as a factor, could be canceled out. There was an eternity of it.
Thinker, squatted on the chapel floor, pulsated gently, the logic mechanism that was its mind driving toward the universal truth.
32
Changer struggled.
He must get out. He must escape. He could not remain, buried in this blackness and quietness, in the comfort and security, in the brotherhood that encompassed and engulfed him.
He did not want to struggle. He would rather have stayed exactly where he was, remain the thing he was. But something made him struggle—not something inside himself, it s
eemed, but something from outside himself, a creature or a being or a situation that called out to him and told him that he could not stay, that no matter how much he might wish to stay, he could not. There was something left undone and it could not be left undone and he was the only one who would be able to perform the task, whatever it might be.
—Quiet, quiet, said Quester. You are better where you are. There is too much grief, too much bitterness for you outside of here.
Outside of here? he wondered. And remembered some of it. A woman’s face, the tall pines at the gate—another world seen as one would see it through a wall of running water, remote and far away and improbable. But he knew that it was there.
—You shut me in! he shouted. You must let me go.
But Thinker paid no attention to him. Thinker went on thinking, all his energies directed toward the many pieces of information and of fact—the great black towers, the mustard-colored domes, the hint of something or someone barking out the orders for the universe.
His strength and will wore off and he sank into the blackness and the quiet.
—Quester, he said.
—No, said Quester. Thinker’s hard at work.
He lay and raged wordlessly at the two of them, raging in his mind. But raging did no good.
I did not treat them that way, he told himself. When I was in the body, I listened to them always. I did not shut them out.
He lay and rested and the thought was in his mind that it was better to stay in the comfort and the quietness. What did this other matter, whatever it might be? What did Earth matter?
And there he had it—Earth!
Earth and humanity. And the both of them did matter. Not, perhaps, to Quester or to Thinker—although what mattered to the one of them must matter to all three.
He struggled feebly and he did not have the strength, nor perhaps the will.
So he lay back again and waited, gathering strength and patience.