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Throw a key at the feet of a turkey and it is useless to him. Show himthe lock it fits, and it is still useless without the knowledge of howto insert the key and turn it. Unlock it for him, and still it isuseless without the knowledge of how to push or pull the door.
This was the essence of why so few mastered the simple steps of physicalscience, the essence of why so few were able to get beyond step two of Escience. Anyone could disagree with a statement, but in answer to "Whatif it not be true, how then to account for the phenomena?" most boggeddown at that point, unable to demonstrate with evidence the validity ofsome other answer.
Everyone knew the equation E = MC^2, but few could implement it to buildan atomic power plant.
Perhaps the reactions of Tom, that taking away the concept of a balancedequation destroyed all certainty, and therefore was not to becountenanced, was a reflection of his own reaction, willing though hemight be to consider something else.
In his wanderings about the island, picking fruits and nuts, stems andleaves, catching fish when he hungered, drinking the clear water of thestream when he thirsted, yet so enrapt that he was unaware he was takingcare of his body's needs, Cal built up whole structures of alienphilosophies on the nature of the universe, and saw them topple of theirown weight.
Until, at last, he realized the basic flaw in all his reasoning. He wastoo well-grounded in the essence of physical science, and all physicalscience was built on the balanced equation. Even in trying to considerthe unbalanced equation, he had been attempting to determine the exactnature of the unbalance, and to supply it as an X factor on the otherside of the equation to restore balance.
To restore balance was to maintain the status quo of physical reality.To turn the key in the lock, to open the door, he must change thephysical reality to balance the equation, rather than supply the Xfactor to keep reality unchanged.
But how to do it still eluded him.
At times, as if seeing partial diagrams, he seemed very close to asolution. At times it seemed the printed card of an electronic wiringwas necessary only because the human mind could not visualize the wholewithout that aid, that music did not come through because in incompletevisualization some little part was left dangling, unconnected. And thelong history of non-science belief in the magic properties of cabalisticsigns and designs rose up to taunt him, to goad him with the possibilitythat perhaps man had once come close to the answer of how to controlphysical properties without the use of tools; that the development of aphysical science had taken man down a sidetrack instead of farther alongthe direct route toward his goal.
Or that man had once been shown, and never understood, or forgot. Yetkept alive the memory that physical shifts could be changed if he couldonly draw the right design.
Through his wanderings, one fact gradually intruded upon his mind. Itseemed the farther inland he roamed, the closer he came to grasping theproblem; the nearer the seashore, the more it eluded him.
One morning he looked up at the glittering heights of Crystal PalaceMountain, and suddenly he resolved to climb it. Perhaps the winds ofthe mountain being stronger, the fuzziness of his thought would be blownaway? Perhaps the arrangement of the crystalline structures, the archesand spires, might catch his brain waves, modulate them, transform them,strengthen them, feed them back, himself a part of the design instead ofoutside it?
In the framework of physical science a nonsense notion. But what harm totry?
He sought out Tom and Jed, the two who would miss him, the two who wouldcare.
"There ain't no water up there, far as I know," Jed said. "And you can'tcarry none, now. Me and a party scouted the mountain once. It's mightypurty, but useless. The quartz ain't valuable enough to cover itsshipping costs back to Earth. The ground is too rocky to farm. Not muchin the way of food growing there. So we never went back."
"The scientists surveyed it when the planet was first discovered," Calsaid. "One of the first places they went because it was so outstanding.But they found nothing interesting and useful either. Still, I thinkI'll go."
"Well," Jed said with a shrug. "You can't get lost. If you should loseyour bearings, just walk downhill and you'll come to food and water.Follow the shore line until you get back, either direction. And, Ireckon, the way things go now, you ain't goin' to hurt yourself. Wewon't worry about you none. We're all gettin' along all right, so youneedn't worry about us either."
"You want me to come with you, Cal?" Tom asked.
"No," Cal answered, "I think better if I'm alone."
He left them then, went past some colonists who were picking berries andeating them, and on up the valley that ran between two ridges.
It was only a few miles to the foothills, a gradual rise of the valleyfloor, a gradual shallowing and narrowing of the stream, a gradualdrawing in of the spokelike ridges until the valley at last became aravine. The morning air was clear and still, the scent of flowers andripening fruit was sweet.
Before he left the ravine to begin his climb he ate some of the fruit,and washed the lingering sweet taste from his mouth with a long, cooldrink of water from one of the many springs that fed the stream.
He looked up at the mountain above him, and his eye picked out the mostlikely approach to its summit. It was not a high mountain, not in termsof those tremendous, tortured skin folds of other planets. Hardly morethan a high hill in terms of those. Nor, as far as he could see, wouldthe climb be difficult or hazardous.
The fanciful thought of Mount Olympus on Earth came into his mind,although this one was not so inaccessible, so parched and barren. Thegods of Greece would have found this a pleasanter place, although theymight not have lived so long in the minds of man, since the mountain wasmore easily climbed, and therefore man would have been the more easilyconvinced after repeated explorations that no gods lived there afterall.
Would the Greeks, as with the later religions, have placed the site ofheaven farther and farther away, retreating reluctantly, as man exploredthe earlier site and found no heaven there? Retreat after retreat untilat last the whole idea was patently ridiculous?
Dead are the gods, forever dead, and yet--to what may man now turn inrapture? In ecstasy? In communion? What, in all physical science, filledthe deep human need of these expressions?
The climb of the first slope, up to the crest of the ridge he intendedto follow, was quickly done. He turned there and looked behind him, atthe valley of the colonists below, and far down where the valley mergedinto the sea, and far on out at the hazy purple line of another island.As he started to turn back again, to resume his climb, his eye caught aflash of something moving in the ravine below him, sunlight on brown,bare skin.
He waited until he caught another glimpse through the trees. As he hadsuspected it was Louie, still trying to keep him always in sight.
His first impulse was to call out, to wait for Louie, ask him to join inthe climb. He discarded the impulse. His need was to get away from allothers. And sympathetic and compassionate though he might be, theconfusion in Louie's mind seemed to intrude upon his own. Nor had hisearlier attempts to comfort Louie met success.
Let Louie follow if he willed. Perhaps the clean air would clear hismind as well. He feared no physical harm, even if Louie's tortured mindintended it. There were no tools to strike at him from a distance. Evena boulder pushed from a height above him would not strike, for thatwould be the physical use of a tool to gain an end. He feared no bodilyattack from ambush, for his own strength and knowledge were dependable.
He began his climb again, followed the crest of the ridge where it sweptupward to buttress the side of the mountain. The going was notdifficult. The trees and shrubs grew thinner here, and provided clearspaces for him to wind among them. The stones, at first a problem to hisbare feet, bothered him less and less until he forgot them. He felt nophysical discomfort, neither from tiredness nor thirst, nor from thebranches scraping his bare skin, nor anything to drag his mind intotrivialities.
Nor tortured theories such
as had plagued him in trying to reason outthe new concepts of a proportionate, variable reality.
Instead, there was a sense of well being, anticipated completeness, amerging of the often quite separated areas of thought, intuition, andappreciation.
Although at no great height, now the trees no longer grew so tall thatthey obscured his vision of the heights above. As he climbed they werereplaced by shrubs shoulder high, then waist high, then merely low,creeping growths which his feet avoided without mental direction.
A curve of the ridge brought him to the first outcroppings ofcrystallized quartz. On them he saw no signs of scar left by thegeologist's hammer, no imperfections where nodes may have been brokenaway. They were complete, singularly unweathered.
There was no path, nor hint of one, nor sign that either scientist orcolonist had ever passed this way.
The ridge swung back into line, and still he climbed, effortlessly andwithout consciousness of passing time. Time and space and matter seemedto have receded far into the background of consciousness. Man'sstar-strewn civilization was no more than a dream. It was as if he,alone and complete, occupied the whole of the universe, encompassed itas he was encompassed by it.
Yet not alone! Their presence, which seemed so evanescent on the valleyfloor, was closer now, more clearly sensed. Almost as if, at anyinstant, the veil of blindness would disperse and They would standrevealed.
Now up the final slope of the mountain he threaded his way throughhigher outcroppings of a more perfectly formed quartz, with deeperamethystine hue scintillating in the Ceti sun's light, diffracted notonly in the purples but into greens and reds and blues.
As he came around the base of one of these, there towering above hecaught his first full view of the greater spires, pinnacles, buttresses,and arches of the mountain's crest.
It was the crystal palace.
The climb had been steep, steeper than it had appeared from below, yethis breathing was not labored, his mouth was not dry from thirst, norwere his muscles protesting the effort. He did not need to stop andrest, to gather his energy for the last steep assault upon the peak.
Far below him he saw Louie toiling up a slope, then dropping with everyappearance of exhaustion when he came to each level place. Still hewould rest no more than a minute, and always his head was turned to keepsight of Cal above him. He would push himself to his knees, then to hisfeet; and slowly, step by step, begin his climb again.
As if from far away, Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of theself-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guiltof imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moralsense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. For in theordered universe, where everything fitted into the whole, what could beeither good or bad, right or wrong, except as a reflection of man'sinadequacies in his imaginings? Rightness and good, wrongness and evil,these could not possibly be other than assessments of furtherance orthreat to the ascendancy of me-and-mine at the center of things, and hadno meaning beyond that context.
He turned from watching Louie, pitying him, and made the last sharpclimb with no more effort than the whole had been. Now he drew near tothe towering structures of the crest, now he was beside them. Now hewalked beneath and through an arch which seemed almost a gothicentrance.
And stood transfixed in ecstasy.
Magnificent the dreams of man that took form in steel and stone andglass, yet none matched the lightness, the grace, the intricacy, thesublime simplicity of these interwoven crystalline structures wherelight from the noonday sun separated prismatically until it filled theair with myriads of living, darting, colored sparks of fire above him.Where the breeze that blew through the vibrating spires made blendedsounds the ear could barely endure in rapture.
As once, in childhood, he had stood in a grove of giant trees that lacedtheir limbs in gothic splendor above him, now again he stood, lost intime and space and being, lost in vision and in music which neither hadnor needed form nor beginning nor end.
And knew it was a simple tool; Their concession to the mind of man, tobridge the gap between Their minds and his.
Without wondering more, he sank down upon the mossy turf of the floorand lay supine to gaze upward, to follow line to blended line until theyseemed mirrored into infinity.
The darting lights above him whirled, spiraled up, then down, clockwise,then counterclockwise, reminding him ... reminding him ...
... the internal structure of crystals....