They cared for him, he told himself. They had reached out and taken him in an hour of anguish and now they held him close, for healing, and they would not let him go.
He tried to call up the anguish once again in the hope that in the anguish he would find the strength and will. But he could not recall it. It had been wiped away. He could claw at the edges of it, but could not get a grip upon it.
So he snuggled close against the darkness and let the quiet come in, but even as he did he knew that he would struggle to break free again, feebly, perhaps, hoping, more than likely, that he would not succeed, but knowing that he must keep on and on, never ceasing, because there was some not entirely understood, but compelling reason that he should.
He lay quietly and thought how like a dream it was, a dream wherein one climbed a mountain, but could never reach the top, or one in which one clung to a precipice until his fingers slipped and then fell endlessly, filled with the terror of the falling and of hitting bottom, but never reaching bottom.
Time and futility stretched out ahead of him and time itself, he knew, was futile, for he knew what Thinker knew—that time was not a factor.
He tried to put his situation into correct perspective, but it refused to fall into a pattern against which perspective could be measured. Time was a blur and reality a haze and swimming down toward him through the haze came a face—a face that at first meant not too much to him, but, finally, he realized, of someone that he knew, and then, at last, a face, half seen in darkness, that was imprinted on his mind forever.
The lips moved and he could not hear the words, but they, too, the memory of them, was blazoned in his mind.
When you can, they said, let me hear from you.
And that was it, he thought. He had to let her know. She was waiting to hear what had happened to him.
He surged up out of the darkness and the quiet and there seemed to be a roaring all about him—the outraged roaring protest of the other two.
Black towers spun in the darkness all about him—black spinning in the dark, with the sense of motion, but no sight. And suddenly sight as well.
He stood in the chapel and the place was dim with the feeble light of the candelabra and from outside he could hear the moaning of the pines.
There was someone shouting and he saw a soldier running up the aisle toward the front, while another stood startled, with his rifle raised.
“Captain! Captain!” bawled the running man.
The other soldier took a short step forward.
“Take it easy, son,” said Blake. “I’m not going anywhere.”
There was something tangled about his ankles and he saw it was his robe. He kicked it free and reached down to lift it and hang it on his shoulders.
A man with bars upon his shoulders came striding down the aisle. He stopped in front of Blake.
“I am Captain Saunders, sir,” he said. “Space Administration. We have been guarding you.”
“Guarding me?” asked Blake. “Or watching me?”
The captain grinned, just slightly. “Perhaps a bit of both,” he said. “May I congratulate you, sir, on becoming human once again.”
Blake pulled the robe more tightly about his shoulders. “You are wrong,” he said. “You must know by now you’re wrong. You know I am not human—not entirely human.”
Perhaps, he thought, only human in the shape he now possessed. Although there must be more to it than that, for he’d been designed as human, had been engineered as human. There had been change, of course, but not so much change that he was un-human. Just un-human enough, he thought, to be unacceptable. Just un-human enough to be viewed as a monster by humanity.
“We’ve been waiting,” said the captain. “We’ve been hoping …”
“How long?” asked Blake. “How long has it been?”
“Almost a year,” the captain said.
A year! thought Blake. It had not seemed that long. It had seemed no more than hours. How long, he wondered, had he been held, unknowing, in the healing depths of the communal mind before he had come to know that he must break free? Or had he known from the first and struggled from the moment that Thinker had superceded him? It was hard to know, he realized. Time, inside the disassociated mind, might be robbed entirely of its meaning, might become useless as a yardstick for duration.
But long enough, at least, to effect some healing, for now the terror and the sharp-edged agony was gone, now he could stand and face the prospect that he was not human in sufficient measure to claim a place upon the Earth.
“And now?” he asked.
“My orders,” the captain said, “are to take you to Washington, to Space Administration, as soon as it is safe to do so.”
“It is safe right now,” Blake told him. “I will cause no trouble.”
“It’s not you I mean,” the captain said. “It’s the crowd outside.”
“What do you mean—a crowd?”
“This time a crowd of worshipers. There are cults, it seems, which think you are a messiah sent to deliver Man from all the devil in him. And at other times there are other groups that denounce you as a monster—You’ll pardon me, please, sir, I forgot myself.”
“These groups,” said Blake, “the both of them, have given you some trouble?”
“At times,” the captain said. “At times a great deal of it. That is why we must sneak out of here.”
“But wouldn’t it be better to just walk out? Put an end to it?”
“Unfortunately,” said the captain, “it’s not a situation that can be handled quite so easily. I may as well be frank with you. No one except a few of us will know that you are gone. The guard will still be kept and …”
“You’ll go on letting the people think that I’m still here?”
“Yes. It will be simpler that way.”
“But someday …”
The captain shook his head. “No. Not for a long, long time. You will not be seen. We have a ship waiting for you. So that you can leave—if you want to go, of course.”
“To get rid of me?”
“Perhaps,” the captain said. “But it also will enable you to get rid of us.”
33
Earth wanted to get rid of him, perhaps afraid of him, perhaps merely disgusted by him, a loathsome product of its own ambitions and imagination that must be quickly swept underneath the rug. For there was no place for him on the Earth or in humanity, and yet he was a human product and had been made possible by the nimble brains and the weasel understanding of Earth’s scientists.
He had wondered at this and thought of it when he first had gone into the chapel and now, standing at the window of his room and looking out at the streets of Washington, he knew he had been right, that he had judged accurately the reaction of humanity.
Although how much of this attitude was the actual attitude of the people of the world, how much the official attitude of Space Administration, there was no way of knowing. To Space he was an old mistake, a planning gone far wrong, and the quicker he could be gotten rid of, the better it would be.
There had been, he remembered, a crowd on the hillside outside the cemetery—a crowd that had gathered there to pay homage to what they thought he stood for. Crackpots, certainly, cultists, more than likely—the kind of people who leaped at any new sensation to fill their empty lives, but still people, still human beings, still humanity.
He stood and stared out at the sun-drenched streets of Washington, with the few cars moving up and down the avenue, and the lazy strollers who sauntered on the sidewalks underneath the trees. The Earth, he thought, the Earth and the people living on it—people who had their jobs and a family to go home to, who had chores and hobbies, their worries and their little triumphs, and their friends. But people who belonged. Even if he could belong, he wondered, if by some circumstance beyond imagining, he should be made acceptable to humanity, could he consider it? For he was not himself alone. He could not consider himself alone, for there were the other two and they held w
ith him, in joint right, this mass of matter which made up his body.
That he was caught up in an emotional trap was no concern of theirs, although back there in the chapel they had made it concern of theirs. That they, themselves, were incapable of such emotion was beside the point—although, thinking of it, he wondered if Quester might not hold as great an emotional capacity as he.
But to become an outcast, to be ejected out of Earth, to roam the universe a pariah out of Earth, seemed more than he could face.
The ship was waiting for him, almost ready now, and it was up to him—he could go or stay. Although Space had made it quite apparent it was preferred that he should go.
And there was, actually, nothing to be gained by staying, only the faint hope that some day he might become a human once again.
And if he could—if he only could—would he want it?
His brain hummed with the absence of an answer and he stood, looking dully out the window, only half-seeing what lay out on the street.
A knock on the door brought him around.
The door came open and through it he saw the guard, standing in the hallway.
Then a man was coming in and for a moment, half-blinded from looking out the window at the bright glare of the street, Blake did not recognize him. Then he saw who it was.
“Senator,” he said, moving toward the man, “it was kind of you to come. I hadn’t thought you would.”
“Why shouldn’t I have come?” asked Horton. “Your message said you’d like to talk with me.”
“I didn’t know if you would want to see me,” Blake told him. “After all, I probably contributed to the outcome of the referendum.”
“Perhaps,” Horton agreed. “Yes, perhaps you did. Stone was most unethical in his use of you as a horrible example. Although I must give the man his due—he used it most effectively.”
“I’m sorry,” said Blake. “That’s what I want to tell you. I would have come to see you, but it seems that, for the moment, I am under a mild sort of detention.”
“Well, now,” said Horton. “I would think there’d be more to talk about than that. The referendum and its consequences are, as you may guess, a rather painful subject for me. I sent in my resignation just the other day. It will take a little time, quite frankly, to get used to not being a senator.”
“Won’t you have a seat?” asked Blake. “The chair over there, perhaps. And I can find some brandy.”
“That is an idea,” said the senator, “that I can heartily subscribe to. It’s late enough in the afternoon to begin one’s drinking for the day. That time you came to the house, you may recall, we had brandy then. If I remember, it was a rather special bottle.”
He sat down in the chair and looked around the room.
“I must say,” he declared, “they’re doing well for you. Officer’s quarters, no less.”
“And a guard at the door,” said Blake.
“They’re a bit afraid of you, more than likely.”
“I suppose they may be. But there’s no need of it.”
Blake went to the liquor cabinet and got out a bottle and two glasses. He came back across the room and sat down on a sofa, facing Horton.
“I understand,” said the senator, “that you’re on the point of leaving us. The ship, I’m told, is almost ready.”
Blake nodded, pouring out the brandy. He handed the senator a glass.
“I’ve been doing some wondering about the ship,” he said. “No crew. Just me alone in it. Entirely automatic. To accomplish all of this in just one year’s time …”
“Oh, not a year’s time,” the senator protested. “Hasn’t anyone taken the time to tell you about the ship?”
Blake shook his head. “They’ve briefed me. That’s the word—briefed. I’ve been told what levers to push and what dials to spin to take me where I want to go. How the food processors work. The housekeeping of the ship. But that is all they’ve told me. I asked, of course, but there seemed to be no answers. The main point seemed to be to give me the bum’s rush off the Earth.”
“I see,” said the senator. “The old military game. A holdover from the old days. Channels and things like that, I would imagine. And a bit, as well, more than likely, of their ridiculous security.”
He swirled the brandy in his glass, looked up at Blake. “You needn’t be afraid of it, if that’s what’s in your mind. It isn’t any trap. It’ll do all the things they say it will.”
“I’m glad to hear that, senator.”
“That ship wasn’t built,” said the senator. “You might say that it was grown. It’s been continuously on the drawing boards for forty years or more. Redesigned again and yet again. Built and then torn down to incorporate improvements or a new design. Tested time and time again. An attempt, you see, to build a perfect ship. Millions of man-days and billions of dollars spent on it. And always, you see, at any time, within a year or so of being finished because the refinements they were building into it finally became just that—refinement. It is a ship that can operate forever and a man can live in it forever. It is the one way a person equipped as you are can go out in space and do the job he’s built to do.”
Blake crinkled his brow. “One thing, senator. Why go to all the bother?”
“Bother? I don’t understand.”
“Well, look—what you say is right. That strange creature of which we’re talking—of which I am a third—can go out in such a ship to roam the universe, to do our job. But what’s the payoff? What’s in it for the human race? Do you believe, perhaps, that some day we’ll come sailing back across mega-light-years to hand over to you all that we have learned?”
“I don’t know,” said the senator. “Maybe that’s the thought. Maybe you might even do it. Maybe there’s enough humanity in you that you will come back.”
“I doubt it, senator.”
“Well,” said the senator, “there’s not much point in talking of it. Perhaps, even were you willing, it would be impossible. We are aware of the time your work will involve and mankind’s not so stupid—or I don’t think we are so stupid—as to imagine that we will last forever. By the time you have your answer, if you ever get an answer, there may be no human race.”
“We’ll get the answer. If we go out, we’ll get the answer.”
“Another thing,” said the senator. “Has it occurred to you that humanity might be capable of sending you out, of making it possible for you to go out in space to hunt for your answer, even if we knew we would not benefit? Knowing that somewhere in the universe there’d be some intelligence to which your data and your answer would be useful.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Blake, “and I’m not sure that I believe it.”
“You’re bitter toward us, aren’t you.”
“I’m not sure,” said Blake. “I don’t know what I feel. A man who has come home again and is not allowed to stay. Who is kicked out almost the moment he arrives.”
“You don’t have to go, of course. I had thought you wanted to. But if you want to stay …”
“Stay for what?” cried Blake. “To be cooped up in a pretty cage in full official-kindness? To be stared and pointed at? To have fools kneel outside your cage as they knelt and prayed on that hillside back in Willow Grove?”
“It would be rather pointless, I suppose,” said Horton. “Staying here, I mean. Out in space you’d have at least a job to do and …”
“That’s another thing,” said Blake. “How come you know so much about me? How did you dig it out? How did you figure out what was actually involved?”
“I understand,” said Horton, “that it was a matter of basic deduction, based on intensive observation and research. But we’d not got anywhere without the Brownies’ help.”
So that was it, thought Blake. The Brownies once again.
“They were interested in you,” said Horton. “They’re interested, it seems, in everything alive. Meadow mice, insects, porcupines—even human beings. I suppose you could call th
em psychologists. Although that’s not the proper word. Their ability goes far beyond psychology.”
“It wasn’t me, of course,” said Blake. “Not Andrew Blake, I mean.”
“No. As Andrew Blake, you were just another human. But they sensed the three of you—long before we knew about the three of you, although we eventually would have known. They spent a lot of time with Thinker. Just squatting there and looking at him, although I suspect they were doing more than looking.”
“So between the two of you, the humans and the Brownies, you got the basic facts.”
“Not all of them,” said Horton, “but enough to know the abilities you possessed and what you could do with them. We realized those capabilities must not be wasted. You had to have a chance to use them. And we suspected, too, that you could not use them here on Earth. That’s when Space decided to let you have the ship.”
“So it boils down to this,” said Blake. “I have a job to do. Whether I want to or not, there’s a job to do.”
Horton said, a little stiffly: “I suppose it’s up to you.”
“It was not a job I asked for.”
“No,” Horton agreed. “No, I guess you didn’t. But there must be some satisfaction in its magnitude.”
They sat for a moment, silent, both of them uneasy at how the talk had turned. Horton finished the brandy and set the glass aside. Blake reached for the bottle.
Horton shook his head. “No, thank you. I must be going soon. But before I go, there is a question. It’s this: What do you expect to find out there? What do you know already?”
“As to what we expect,” said Blake, “I have no idea. As to what we know—a lot of things that add up to nothing.”
“No hint? No idea of what it might all add up to? No pattern starting to emerge?”
“There’s one indication. Not too strong, but there. A universal mind.”
“You mean a mind that operates the universe—that pushes all the necessary buttons?”
“Maybe,” said Blake. “Maybe something like that.”
Horton let out his breath. “Oh, my God!” he said.