There were gravel-bed roads in the area for the traffic of air-cushion vehicles, but the way he took avoided them. He ran steadily, easily, through the pine scented night air of the forest, his footsteps silent on the dead conifer needles underfoot and making only little more sound on the patches of bare rock and hard earth. His pace was a steady twelve kilometers an hour, and in a little less than an hour and a half, he reached the small commercial center known as Thirkel. There were a dozen other such centers and two small towns that he could have reached in less distance and time; but an unconscious calculation from his training had led him to choose Thirkel.
Thanks to that calculation, at Thirkel he had only a fourteen minute wait before a regularly scheduled autobus stopped on its way into Bozeman, Montana. He was the only passenger boarding in the soft mountain night. He stepped aboard and displayed one of the credit tabs he now carried to the automatic control unit of the bus. The unit noted the charge for his travel, closed the doors behind him with a soft breath of air, and lifted the vehicle into the air again.
He came into Bozeman shortly after midnight and caught a shuttle to Salt Lake Pad. Then, as the early dawn was pinkening the sky beyond the surrounding mountains, he lifted in an orbital jitney on its run from that Pad to the gray-clad globe that was the Final Encyclopedia, swimming in orbit around Earth at sixteen hundred kilometers from its surface.
The jitney carried no more than fifty or sixty passengers—all of them having passed pre-clearance at the Earth end of the trip. Among Hal's papers had been a continually-renewed scholar's passport for a single visit, under his own name. Earth, the Dorsai, Mara and Kultis were the only four worlds where the Others had not yet gotten control of the internal government. But on Earth, only the records of the Final Encyclopedia could be regarded as secure from prying by the Others; and so all credit and record transactions Hal had made since leaving his home had been achieved with papers or tabs bearing the name of Alan Semple. These he now destroyed, as the jitney lifted, and he was left carrying nothing to connect him with the false name he had temporarily used. The automated records at the Final Encyclopedia would be too well informed for him to hope to use a false name; but, in them, his real name would be safe.
Twelve hundred kilometers out from Earth's surface the jitney began its approach to the Final Encyclopedia. On the screen of his seat compartment Hal saw it first as a silver crescent, expanding as they moved out of Earth's shadow, to a small silver globe of reflected sunlight. But as they came closer, the small globe grew inexorably and the great size of the Encyclopedia began to show itself.
It was not just its size, however, that held Hal fixed in his seat, his attention captured by the screen as the massive sphere on it swelled and swelled. Unlike the other passengers aboard this jitney, he had been trained by Walter to a special respect for what the Encyclopedia promised. He had gazed at it countless times on screens like this one, but never when he himself was about to set foot in it.
The jitney was slowing now, matching velocities as it approached the sphere. Now that they were closer, Hal could see its surface looking as if it were shrouded in thick gray fog. This would be a result of the protective force-panels that interlocked around the Encyclopedia—a derivation of the phase-shift that had opened up faster-than-light communication and transportation between the worlds, four hundred years before. The force-panels were a discovery, and a closely guarded secret, of those on the Encyclopedia. It had been these which had given the structure the silvery appearance from a distance—as the gray mist of dawn close above the water of a lake seems silvered by the early light of day.
Within those panels, the Encyclopedia was invulnerable to any physical attack. Only at points where the panels joined were there soft spots that had to be conventionally armored; and it was to one of these soft spots the jitney was now headed to find a port in which to discharge its passengers.
Hidden within the shield provided by those panels, was the physical shape of the Encyclopedia: a structure of metal and magic—the metal from the veins of Earth and the magic of that same force that made possible the phase drive and the panels—so that there was no way for anyone to tell from observation alone what was material and what was force-panel about the corridors and rooms that made up the Encyclopedia's interior. People within that structure did not move about as much as they were moved. The room they were occupying, on proper command, would become next door to the room to which they wished to go. Yet, also if they wished, there were distances of seemingly solid corridors to traverse and solid doors to open on places within the structure…
Metal and magic… as a boy Hal Mayne had been led to an awe of the Encyclopedia, from as far back as he could remember. For the moment now, that awe reinforced the wall protecting him from what he might otherwise remember from only a few hours before. He remembered how it had been an Earthman, Mark Torre, who had conceived the Encyclopedia. But Mark Torre, and even Earth would never have managed to get it built on its own. A hundred and thirty years had been required to bring it to completion, and all the great wealth that the two rich Exotic Worlds of Mara and Kultis could spare for its construction. Its beginnings had been put together on the ground, just within the Exotic Enclave at the city of St. Louis, in North America. A hundred and two years later, the half-finished structure had been lifted into its first orbital position only two hundred and fifty kilometers above the Earth. Twelve years after that, the last of the work on it had been finished, and it had been placed here, in its final orbit.
Mark Torre's theory had postulated a dark area always existing in Man's knowledge of himself, an area where self-perception had to fail, as the perception of any viewing mechanism fails in the blind area where it, itself, exists. In that area, ran Torre's theory, the human race would at last find something which had been lost in the people of the Splinter Cultures on the younger worlds; and this, once found, would be the key to the race's last and greatest growth.
There was a largeness of dream and purpose about that theory, and the Encyclopedia itself, that had always resonated powerfully within Hal. That resonance touched him now as the jitney reached the point where the corners of four of the huge, insubstantial force-panels came together, and the jointure where their forces met dilated to reveal an aperture into the docking area that awaited them.
The jitney drifted in, very slowly it seemed, and settled into the cradle that waited for it. Abruptly, they were enclosed by a blaze of light. The aperture that had seemed so tiny as they had approached, now revealed itself to have the diameter of a chamber that dwarfed the jitney and was aswarm with human workers and machines.
Hal got to his feet and joined the procession of passengers moving to the exit port of the jitney. He stepped through the port, onto a sloping ramp and into a roar and clangor of sound, as the busy machines moved about the jitney on the metal floor and walls. Metal and magic… he went down the slope of the ramp and through a faintly hazy circle that was an entrance to the interior parts of the Encyclopedia. As he stepped through that circle, all the noise behind him was cut off. He found himself being carried forward by a movable floor, down a corridor walled in soft light, in a muted hush that welcomed him after the noise he had just left, and seemed to soften even the low-voiced conversations of his fellow passengers.
The line slowed, stopped, moved forward a couple of paces, stopped again, moved, stopped. The passengers ahead were displaying their clearance papers to a wall screen from which a thin-faced, black-haired young man looked out at them.
"Fine. Thank you." The young man nodded at the passenger ahead of Hal, and the passenger moved on. As Hal stepped level with the screen, the man moved aside out of camera range and a lively female face under a cloud of bright blonde hair, young enough to be that of a girl rather than of a woman, took the vacated space. Under the bright gold hair, she had a round, laughing expression and brown eyes with flecks of green swimming in their irises.
"I see…" She looked at Hal's papers as he held them up t
o the screen, then back to him. "You're Hal Mayne? Fine."
It seemed to Hal that her eyes met his with a particular friendliness; and a comfort came to him from seeing her that for a second dangerously weakened the wall that hid things in the back of his mind. Then he moved on.
The corridor continued. The people in front of him were moving more quickly now, single file down it. Ahead, a voice was speaking to them out of nowhere in particular.
"… If you'll please pause at the point where the corridor widens, and listen. Tell us if you hear anything. This is the Transit Point, at the center of the Index Room. You are now at the exact center of the communication system of the Encyclopedia. We do not expect you to hear anything; but if any of you do, will you speak up…"
More magic… they had moved what seemed like only a hundred meters; but now they were at the very center of the sphere that was the Encyclopedia. But neither Walter the InTeacher nor anyone else had ever mentioned to him anything about a Transit Point. He was not yet at the wide stationary spot that had been spoken of, but he found himself listening, as if there might be something he could hear even before he reached it. Vaguely, he felt the request to listen as if it had been a challenge. If there was something to hear there, he should be able to pick it up. He found himself straining to hear.
Almost—he could see the wide, unmoving spot now and he was only two people back from it—he could imagine that he was hearing something. But it was probably only the people who had already passed the Transit Point, discussing it among themselves. There was something familiar about their voices. He could not identify them but there was still a feeling of familiarity, although they seemed to be speaking a language he did not know. He had been trained to break down unfamiliar languages into familiar forms. If it was Indo-European… yes, it seemed to be a Romance tongue of some sort, one of the modern derivatives of Latin.
But their conversations were very loud now, and there seemed to be a number of them all talking at once. There was a single person left in front of him before he would reach the Transit Point. How could they expect anyone to hear anything at the Point if they were talking like this ahead of it—and behind, too, for that matter? The voices were all around him. Everybody in the line must be talking. The man just ahead of him stepped on, clearing the Transit Point. Hal stepped into it, stopped there, and the voices exploded.
Not tens of them, not hundreds or thousands, or even millions—but billions and trillions of voices in countless languages, arguing, shouting, calling to him. Only, they did not merge into one great, voiceless roar, like the radio roar of a universe. They each remained distinct and separate—unbelievably, he heard each one; and among them there were three he knew, calling out to him, warning him. The voice of Walter the InTeacher, of Malachi Nasuno, of Obadiah Testator—and with his identification of those three voices, the mental wall that had been protecting him finally crumbled and went down.
The Transit Point whirled around him. He was conscious, as of something heard from a little distance, of a sound coming from his own throat. He spun, staggered, and would have fallen—but he was caught and held upright. It was the young woman from the screen, the one with the green flecks in her eyes, who was holding him. Somehow she was here, physically, beside him; and she was not as small as he had thought her to be when he had seen her face on the screen. Still, his awkward, long-boned length was not easy to support; and, almost immediately, there were two men with her.
"Easy…hold him…" said one man; and something touched deep inside him, triggering a darkness like the spreading stain of biologic ink pushed out by a fleeing octopus. It flooded all through him, hiding all things in utter darkness, even his memory of what had happened on the terrace.
Gradually he roused once more, to silence and to peace. He was alone, naked, in a bed in a room walled by slowly changing, pastel colors. Besides the bed, and the table-surface beside it, there were a couple of chair floats hanging in the air, a desk, and a small pool with blue sides and floor that made the water in it seem much deeper than he guessed it actually to be. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked about him. The room had a disconcerting property of seeming to expand in the direction in which he was looking, although he was not conscious of any actual movement of its walls or floor. He looked around and then back at the bed in which he lay.
It had never really occurred to him as an important fact—although he had always been aware of it—that he had been raised under conditions that were deliberately spartan and archaic. It had always seemed only natural to him that the books he read should be heavy things of actual paper, that there should be no moving walkways in his home, or that the furniture there should be uniformly of solid, material construction, with physical legs that supported it upon the floor, rather than devices that appeared to float in midair, and to appear out of that same air or dissolve back into it at the touch of a control.
This was the first time he had ever awakened in a force bed. He knew what it was, of course, but he was totally unprepared for the comfort of it. To the eye, he seemed to lie half-immersed in a white cloud perhaps twenty centimeters thick, which floated in the air with its underside an equal distance above the floor of the room. The white cloud-stuff wrapped him in warmth against the cooler air, and that portion of it which was underneath him became firm enough to support him in whatever position he took. Right now the elbow on which he leaned was upheld as if by a warm cupped hand, although to his eye it was merely buried to the depth of half his forearm in the thick mist.
He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed—and with that movement, memory came back completely, like a silent body blow. He saw the terrace and what had happened there in the eye of his mind, as he had watched it all through the screen of lakeside branches. Overcome, he huddled on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands; and for a moment the universe rocked around him and his mind ran screaming from what it now saw.
But there was no longer any wall to hold it back from him, and after a while he came to some sort of terms with it. He lifted his face from his hands again. The color had gone out of the walls of the room. The sensors in them had read the changes in the temperature and humidity of his skin, as well as half a hundred other tiny signals of his body, and accurately reflected his change in emotion. Now the color of the room was a dull, utilitarian gray, as bleak as a chamber carved from rock.
A terrible feeling of rebellion erupted in him, a fury that such a thing as had happened should have been allowed to take place; and riding the energy wave of that fury as the wall glowed into the redness of heated iron around him, his training was triggered again, and pushed him to a further action.
Under the force of his will his consciousness gathered itself, focused on the glint of a single point of light from one corner of a float and closed in on that point until it was the only thing he saw. Through that point, as through a doorway, his mind moved with its Exotic training into a discipline that was partly self-hypnosis, partly a freeing of a direct channel from his awareness into his own unconsciousness. His vision moved back and out, away once more from the point of light, and he saw all the room again. Only now, there seemed to be three figures sitting in the available floats; and they were Walter, Malachi and Obadiah.
The men who had raised and tutored him were not really there, of course. He knew that. Even as he spoke to them now, he knew that it was not actually they who answered, but constructs of them, created by his imagination from his countless memories of the attitudes and reactions he had observed in them during their lives together. It was, in fact, his own knowledge of them that was answering him, with their voices, uttering the words that he knew they would say if they could be here with him now. The technique was a discipline that had been instilled against a moment just like this one, a moment in which he would need their help and they would no longer be around to give it. But in that first second as he looked at them, it was not a cry for help he threw at them, but an accusation.
"You di
dn't have to!" He was half-sobbing. "You let them kill you and leave me alone; and you didn't have to!"
"Oh, Hal!" Pain was strong in Walter's voice. "We had to protect you."
"I didn't ask you to protect me! I don't want to be protected. I wanted you alive! And you let them shoot you!"
"Boy," said Malachi, gruffly, "you were prepared for this day. We taught you that something like what happened could happen, and what you must do if it did."
Hal did not answer. Now that he had opened the door to his grief it took possession of him utterly. He huddled on the edge of the bed, facing them, weeping.
"I didn't know…" he sobbed.
"Child," said Obadiah, "you've been taught how to handle pain. Don't fight it. Accept it. Pain alters nothing for him who is beyond such things."
"But I'm not beyond it." Hal was rocking in his misery, rhythmically rocking on the edge of the bed, backward and forward.
"Obadiah is right, Hal," said Walter, softly. "You were taught; and you know how to handle this moment."
"You don't care, none of you… you don't understand!" Hal rocked back and forth.
"Of course we understand." Walter's voice sounded the note of the suffering in him, evoked by the suffering in Hal. "We were the only family you had; and now it seems to you you've got no one. You feel as if everything's been taken away. But it's not like that. You still have a family—an enormous family, made up of everyone else in the human race."
Hal shook his head—back and forth, back and forth—as he rocked.
"But you do," said Walter. "Yes, I know. Right now you think there's no one on the fourteen worlds could take the place of those you've lost. But there will be. You'll find all things in people. You'll find those who hate you and those who love you—and those you'll love. I know you can't believe that, now; but it will be."