It came from a distance to which the distance to the farthest stars was like a step to a long day's journey. It came with a speed beside which the speed even of thought was too slow to be measurable. It came along the dark and cobbled road of which Paul had dreamed on returning to the hotel after he had first seen Jase. It was blind and young and not yet fully formed, but it recognized its still-unarmored foe by sure instinct. And it struck.

It brought Paul to his knees as a giant might strike down a baby with a sword of steel—but it clashed like steel on steel against his invincible self behind. For a moment the forces hung together, and then the crest wave of the sounding gong finished closing the door through which the unknown had reached for a microsecond, for almost no time at all. And Paul knelt, free, but numb and blinded on the hard rock floor.

Paul's sight returned to show him the white ceiling of a room above the cot on which he lay. He was vaguely aware that they had carried him here.

Jase's face loomed over him. It was as keenly honed as ever, but there was a touch of friendliness there Paul had not seen before. Beside him was the white-mustached face of Heber showing concern.

Quite a reaction you had there, said Jase, after it was all over. We didn't expect to see you go down like that.

Paul focused on the Necromancer.

You didn't? he said. He frowned. You certainly didn't expect me to stay on my feet?

It was Jase's turn to frown, slightly.

Why not? he said. If you'd stood up to things while it was going on, why collapse after it's all over?

Paul faced it then. Jase and the other watchers had remained unaware. He closed his eyes wearily and a little bitterly, for he felt the beginnings of some sort of understanding seep into him at last; and understanding, he was discovering, like money, does not always bring happiness.

Of course. Why not? he agreed. You must be right. I'm still suffering from the reaction.

Chapter

Dressed in ordinary jacket and slacks, one week later Paul sat with three other journeymen Chantry Guild members in a conference room of the orthodox part of Station Springboard. Talking to them was a brisk athletic young man with a short haircut and no older than Paul. Younger, in fact, than two of the journeymen, who looked disconcertingly like overfed salesmen in their thirties, except that one, who smelled strongly of after-shaving lotion, was twice as tall as the other.

You can't teach the Alternate Laws, the instructor had begun by saying, as he half-perched on the edge of a table, facing the low, comfortable chairs in which the four sat. Any more than you can teach the essential ability to create art, or the essential conviction of a religious belief. Does that make sense to you?

Ah, teaching! said the fourth member of the journeymen group, a pleasant-faced, brown-headed young man, in an entirely unexpected, bell-toned bass. What crimes have been committed in thy name!

Since he had not spoken previously, the rest—even including the instructor—appeared somewhat startled, not only by his pronouncement, but by the volume and timbre of it. The young man smiled at them.

True enough, said the instructor, after a slight pause. And very true to the Alternate Laws. Let's simplify the Laws to a ridiculous extreme and say that the point they express is that as a rule of thumb, if it works best one way for everybody else, chances are that way won't be the best for you. In other words, if you want to get to the top of a mountain and you see a broad, well-marked, much-traveled road headed straight for it, the last route you should choose to the top of the mountain would be up that road.

He stopped talking. They all looked at him expectantly.

No, he said, I'm not going to tell you why. That would be teaching. Teaching is good only for learners, not for discoverers. Right now is the one and only time in the Chantry Guild that you're going to encounter anything like a question-and-answer period. He looked them over. You're at liberty to try and tell me why, if you want to.

Ah, said the large salesman sort with the shaving-lotion smell. He got the interjection out hurriedly, and it was at once noticeable to all his audience that his voice, though loud and determined, was neither bass nor bell-toned. I—ah—understand that the Alternate Laws are parapsychological in nature. Can it be that involvement with the ordinary, that is to say—ah—scientific, laws has an inhibiting effect upon the person's—I mean the different sort of person who is able to take advantage of the powers of the Alternate Forces? He drew a quick breath and added quickly, I mean, his. essential difference, so to speak?

No, said the instructor, kindly.

No? Oh, said the other. He sat back, cleared his throat, crossed his legs, got out a handkerchief, and blew his nose loudly.

The area of parapsychology, said the instructor, is only a small part of the universe of time and space. The Alternate Laws cover all this and more.

They mean what they say, don't they? asked the smaller salesman-type unexpectedly. Alternate Laws— other laws. And the only way to find the other ways is by deliberately avoiding the established way.

That's right, said the instructor.

Creative, rang the young man with the bass voice.

And that's very right, said the instructor. He ran his glance from right to left over them. None of you here would have got this far if you hadn't each demonstrated some capability in the area of the Alternate Laws. That capability may be parapsychological—say, teleportation. Or it might be an ability to write truly creative poetry, say. It might even be a particular sensitivity to the needs of growing plants. Not that I mean to give you the impression that creativity is all of the Alternate Laws, or even the key to them.

Ah, said the large salesman, uncrossing his legs determinedly, you certainly don't expect us just to write poetry or grow plants, or even teleport.

No, said the instructor.

Then—ah—can it be that you mean, said the large salesman, perspiration beginning to stand out on his brow, that these things—whatever they may be—are a part, only a part, of the Alternate Laws? And it's the rest we have to go after? We have to try? We have to get?

Yes, said the instructor. That's very good. It's not a full answer by any means———

No, no, of course not, said the large salesman, flushing and smiling, and pulling out his handkerchief. He blew his nose again as if it were a soldier's bugle.

—a full answer by any means, said the instructor. In fact, if there is a full answer, I don't know it. Everyone, in this, is on his own. And now, he said, standing up, I think you've already had enough discussion about an inherently undiscussable subject to last you a lifetime. If indeed we haven't already done the damage of setting up some artificial concepts. Remember —his whole voice and manner changed abruptly; it was almost as if he had reached out and wrapped some invisible cloak about him— life is an illusion. Time and space and all things are an illusion. There is nothing, nothing but the Alternate Laws.

He ceased speaking suddenly. The journeymen got up automatically and began to file out. As Paul walked past, however, he felt his arm touched by the instructor.

Just a minute, the instructor said. Paul turned. The other waited until the three other journeymen were out of the room. You didn't say anything at all.

Yes, said Paul. That's right. I didn't.

Mind if I ask why?

If I remember rightly, Paul said, the key word of Walter Brant's book is destruct.

Yes, it is.

And we, said Paul, looking down at the instructor from his own greater height, were talking about creativity.

Mmm, said the instructor, nodding his head thoughtfully, I see. You think somebody's lying?

No, said Paul. He felt a sudden weariness that was not physical at all. It's just that there was nothing to say.

The instructor stared at him.

Now you're the one who's baffling me, the instructor said. I don't understand you.

I mean, said Paul patiently, that it's no use saying anything.

The instructor shook his head again.

I still don't understand you, he said. But that's all right. He smiled. In the Guild it's: To thine own self be true, thou needst not then explain to any man.

He patted Paul on the shoulder.

Go, man! he said, and on that note they parted.

Returning to his room, as Jase had warned him to do when not otherwise occupied, Paul passed along the catwalk above the relay room in the orthodox part of the Station. He had only a vague notion of what went on in the three-step accelerator that stretched through nearly a quarter mile of the vast cavern five levels high, with thirty- and forty-foot banks of equipment surrounding its tube shape. From news and magazine accounts he had acquired the general knowledge that its function was a matter of shuttling a point of higher-level energy back and forth along a line of constantly lower energy until the point's speed was just under the speed of light. At which time it broke (i.e., disappeared) and became instead a point of no-time, following the same path. This point of no-time, if perfectly synchronized with a point of no-time back in the laboratory building of World Engineer's Headquarters Complex, created a path for instantaneous, timeless transmission between the two points.

Since the point of no-time had universal dimension, it could, by a complicated technical process, be used to transport objects of any size from the primary station on the Earth to the secondary station here on Mercury Station. For some reason there had to be a critical minimum distance between stations—Mars and Venus were too close to Earth. Stations there had been tried and had failed. But theoretically at least, by this method Springboard could have been directly supplied from World Engineer's Complex, with anything it needed. It was not, in practice, because its function on Mercury was to tinker and experiment with its end of the transmission path. Instead, most of the Station's solid needs were met by resolution of materials from Mercury's crust.

It was also not only theoretically possible, but practically possible, to send living creatures including humans by the same route. However, those who tried it flirted with insanity or death from psychic shock, and even if they missed both these eventualities, could never be induced to try it again. Apparently what was experienced by the transmittee was a timeless moment of complete consciousness in which he felt himself spread out to infinite proportions and then recondensed at the receiving end. It did no good to use present known sedatives or anesthetics—these merely seemed to insure a fatal level of shock. Medicine was reported working on a number of drugs that showed some promise, but no immediate hope of discovering a specific was in sight

Meanwhile drone ships had been started off at sub-light velocities for some of the nearer stars known to have surrounding systems. The ships bore automatic equipment capable of setting up secondary receiving stations on their arrival on some safe planetary base. If and when medicine came through, the transportation setup would be already established.

All of this touched Paul only slightly. He recognized it and passed on, noting only that in passing by and over the equipment, as he was doing now, he received from it an emanation of mild, pleasurable excitement. Like the so-called electric feeling in the air before a thunderstorm, which comes not only from an excess of ions, but from the sudden startling contrast of dark and light, from the black thunderheads piling up in one quarter of a clear sky, the mutter and leap of sheet lightning and thunder along the cloud flanks, and the sudden breath and pause of cooler air in little gusts of wind.

He passed on and entered the area of smaller corridors and enclosures. He passed by the double airlock doors of the transparent enclosure that held the swimming pool. With the relative preciousness of water, this had been set up as a closed system Independent of the rest of the station and supplied with a certain amount of artificial gravitation for Earth-normal swimming and diving. Kantele was all alone in the pool. As he passed, he saw her go gracefully off the low board. He paused to watch her swim, not seeing him, to the side of the pool just beyond the glass where he stood. She did not look so slim in a bathing suit, and for a moment a deep sensation of loneliness moved him.

He went on, before she could climb out of the pool and see him. When he got to his room there was a notice attached to the door: Orientation. Room eight, eighteenth level, following lunch, 1330 hours.

Orientation took place in another conference room. The man in charge was in his sixties and looked and acted as if he had been on an academic roster for some time. He sat on a small raised stage and looked down at Paul, the three men who had been with him for the meeting with the instructor on the subject of Alternate Laws, and six other people, of whom one was a young woman just out of her teens, not pretty, but with an amazingly quick and cheerful expression. The man in charge, who introduced himself as Leland Minault, did not begin with a lecture. Instead he invited them to ask him questions.

There was the usual initial pause at this. Then one of the five men Paul had not met before spoke up.

I don't understand the Chantry Guild's connection with Project Springboard and the Station, here, he said. Leland Minault peered down at the speaker as if through invisible spectacles.

That, said Minault, is a statement, not a question.

All right, said the speaker. Is the Chantry Guild responsible for Station Springboard, or the work on a means of getting out between the stars?

No, said Minault.

Well then, asked the other, just what are we doing here, anyway?

We are here, said Minault deliberately, folding both hands over a slight potbelly, because a machine is not a man—beg pardon —he nodded at the one woman in the group— human being. A human being, if you bring him, or her, say, to some place like Mercury, to an establishment that seems to be completely at odds with his purpose in being there, will sooner or later get around to asking what the connection is.

He beamed at the man who had spoken.

Then, Minault went on, when you give him the answer, it's liable to sink in and promote further thought, instead of merely being filed as a completed explanation. Which is what is likely to happen to it if you just volunteer the information.

There was a general round of smiles.

All right, said the one who had asked, any one of us could have been the patsy. And you still haven't answered me.

Quite right, said Minault. Well, the point is that human beings react this way because they have an innate curiosity. A machine—call it a technological monster— may have everything else, but it'll be bound to lack innate curiosity. That is a talent reserved for living beings.

He paused again. Nobody said anything.

Now our world, Minault said, is at the present time firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head —if you want to call it that—is the World Engineer's Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make with our credit numbers, every time we use the public transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to live—that is, it can as long as we stay on Earth. The Complex of sustaining equipment at Springboard here is officially a part of the Complex-Major back on Earth. But actually there's no connection beyond the bridge of transportation and communication between these two planets. He smiled at the group.

So, he went on, we hide here, under the cloak of Springboard. Actually, we control Springboard. But its work is not our work—it merely serves us as a cover. Of course, we're an open secret to those Springboard workers who aren't Chantry Guild members as well. But a machine, as I say, doesn't react as a human being would. If it doesn't see anything, it simply assumes nothing is there—it doesn't poke and pry into dark corners, because it might find enemies.

A hand was up. Turning his head slightly, Paul saw it was the cheerful-looking young woman.

Yes? said Minault.

That doesn't make sense, she said. The World Engineer's Complex is run by men, not machines.

Ah, said Minault. But you're making the assumption that the World Engineer and his staff are in control. They aren't. They are controlled by the physics of the society of our time, which in turn is controlled by the Earth Complex—to give it a convenient name—without which that society couldn't exist.

She frowned.

You mean —she wavered a moment on the verge of plunging into the cold waters of the wild statement — the Complex-Major has intelligence?

Oh, I'm pretty sure we can say that, replied Minault cheerfully. Fantastic amounts of knowledge, of course; but a sort of definite rudimentary intelligence as well. But I don't think that's what you meant to ask. What you meant to ask was whether the Complex-Major—Super-Complex, I understand a lot of people have begun calling it lately—has an ego, a conscious identity and personality of its own.

Well... yes, she said.

I thought so. Well, the answer to that, lady and gentlemen, is astoundingly enough, Yes, it has.

The group in the room, which had settled back to listen to a Socratic dialogue between the young woman and Minault, woke up suddenly and muttered disbelief.

Oh, not in the human sense, not in the human sense, said Minault, waving them back to calmness. I don't mean to insult your credulity. But surely you all realize that sooner or later a point of complication had to be reached where a certain amount of elementary reasoning power was necessary to the machine. In fact, why not? It's a very handy thing to have a machine that can reason, and consequently protect itself from falling into its own errors.

Ah, said Paul's large salesman-type companion from the earlier gathering. In that case I fail to see—that is, the implied problem was one of control, which we wished to avoid. Wasn't it?

I was, said Minault; peering at the large man, explaining the personality of the Complex-Major.

Ah, I see, said the large man, sitting back. He blew his nose.

Your question was a good one, said Minault, but slightly premature. For the moment, you must understand what I mean by a machine ego. Think of the growing Complexes of computer-directed equipment back on Earth as if they were an animal whose purpose is to take over more and more of the work of keeping mankind alive and well. It grows until it is the means by which mankind is kept alive and well; it grows until a certain amount of independent reasoning ability must be built into it, so that it doesn't provide fine weather for California when that action will later on cause hailstorms on the Canadian wheat crop. Given this much of a thinking creature, what's the next evolutionary step?

An instinct for self-preservation? asked the girl quickly, while the large man was clearing his throat preparatory to another ah.

Quite right.

Ah, I should think it would regard human actions not in line with its reasoning—ah—like grit in a smooth-running motor, so to speak?

Would it have that much power of imagination? asked the girl. She and the large man were both looking at Minault, who sat relaxed, peering at them.

I did not mean actual imagination. Ah—it was an illustration.

A rather good one, said Minault, as the girl opened her mouth again. The Complex-Major is a sort of benevolent monster whose only desire is to choke us with a surfeit of service and protection. It has a sort of mechanical intelligence with no specific locus, but an instinct to protect itself and its ability to go on taking over control of human caretaking. And it does regard not only us in the Chantry Guild, but all those whose independence manifests itself in the taking of drugs, joining of cult societies, or any non-machine-planned action, as a sort of grit in its smooth-running motor. A grit that one day must be neatly cleaned out.

He glanced toward the back of his group of auditors.

Yes? he asked.

Paul, turning, saw a young, swarthy-skinned man in the back putting his hand back down.

It seems, said this man, almost silly to be going to all this trouble just to oppose a pile of equipment, no matter how complicated.

My dear young friend, said Minault, we in the Chantry Guild are not opposing a pile of equipment. We're opposing an idea—an idea that has been growing for some hundreds of years—that happiness for the human race consists of wrapping it tighter and tighter in the swaddling bands of a technological civilization. He stood up. I think that should be enough to chew on for the moment. I suggest you all think the situation over.

He got down from the platform and headed toward the door of the room. His audience rose and also began to move out, and the orderly manner of the room dissolved into a babble of conversation and people slowly swarming out the exit As Paul pushed his way out the door behind Minault, he caught sight of the girl, who had just buttonholed the large man.

I think you're quite wrong about the power of imagination you implied to the Complex-Major, she was saying, severely.

Chapter

You've handled explosives before? asked the lean instructor with the sun-leathered face above the open collar. He was holding a package of plastic, adhesive blasting jelly with a three-minute pinch fuse.

Yes, said Paul.

Paul stood on one cliff-edge of a remarkably realistic simulation of a mountain gorge some five hundred feet wide, across which had been thrown the thin long web of a temporary snap-to arch bridge of magnesium-alloy sections. The bridge-end by which Paul and the instructor stood, just the two of them, had been anchored in a local timber cradle, or box, filled with loose rock. And the cradle extended its wooden underarms in support about fifteen feet out from the lip of the cliff.

This amount of jelly, said the instructor, hefting it, can be carried inconspicuously in a brief case and still leave room for enough other material to make it look as if the brief case is full. It's powerful enough to cut two or three of those timbers or one or two of the metal members you see there. How would you go about completely knocking out this bridge with it?

Paul looked again at the bridge. In the past nine days since his first class he had been put through a number of sessions—that was the only word to describe them. They appeared to be classes, on a strange variety of subjects, some of which appeared to bear no relation to the

Chantry Guild. The longest of them had lasted not much more than twenty minutes, and the information imparted by each of them had been obscure. In fact, it had not been quite clear whether the intent of the sessions had been to inform or to test the journeyman audience, which seemed to consist of different individuals from session to session. Paul was privately of the opinion that the intent had been both to inform and test—and probably, as well, to stimulate and confuse. Some of the journeymen, he was sure, were ringers. Some of the sessions had been nonsense.

And this session—himself alone with the instructor, the explosive, and the simulated bridge in the mountains on Earth. Was it instruction, test, nonsense—or something else?

The simulation was a magnificent job. For the scene it pretended to show was clearly an impossibility, here deep under the surface of Mercury's rocky hide. What Paul's eyes saw was a gorge at least eight hundred feet in depth, up from which came the distant sound of a narrow mountain river in its gallop to lower levels. The air was the thin, dry air of high altitudes. The sky was cloudless.

The question was, How much was real and how much false? For if the blasting-jelly block was real, and it was to be set off in the reality of a small underground room of the size Paul had had his sessions in lately, then it would take Alternate Laws indeed to show cause why Paul and the instructor should survive the explosion. Paul laid his hand on the timber cradle and looked over the cliff edge. His gaze plunged away into spray-misted depths. There was distance down there, by any test of his feelings. Just how much, he could not be sure. But it felt deep below the cliff. On the other hand, under his hand the materials of the bridge felt solid but deceitful.

Well, said Paul, I'm no expert on bridges. But I imagine the trick would be to break this end loose, so that it falls. If this end goes down, it'll tear the other end loose and it'll all drop into the gorge.

Good enough, said the instructor. How'd you go about breaking this end loose?

I think, said Paul, pointing to where the end of the cradle met a magnesium I-beam, fifteen feet out above the gorge's depth, if we blew it loose just there, cutting that stringer, or whatever the proper term is, that runs along the left side of the travel-surface of the bridge, the weight of the rest of it would cause it to sag and twist, and tear the other stringer loose. Then this whole end would drop.

All right. The instructor handed the block of jelly to Paul. Let's see you do it.

Paul looked at the bridge again. Then he stuffed the block of jelly inside the waistband of his slacks and began to climb out along the timbers of the cradle. The lack of a second arm hampered him but not so much as Paul thought it might have seemed to the instructor. The strength of his remaining arm was such as to lift the weight of his body from angles clearly impossible to an ordinary climber. When he got to the end of the stone enclosing the timbers, Paul paused, ostensibly to rest, but actually to reach some sort of conclusion.

The bridge still felt deceitful. He quietly loosed a splinter from the timber on which he rested, and dropped it. It floated down until he lost sight of it some thirty or forty feet below. So, that much of distance under him at least was real. He looked once more at the spot where he would stick the explosive.

It was at a point just above the single final timber of the supporting cradle. He would have to stand on that timber and place the jelly above the upright at the timber's end, where that upright met the magnesium I-beam. He began to move again. He climbed on up to the I-beam and out onto it until he was above the timber. Hanging to the I-beam, he cautiously let his feet down until they rested on the timber.

Then, as unobtrusively as possible, he increased his hold on the I-beam and pressed down with both feet on the timber.

There was a sudden screech of tearing wood. The timber ripped away from beneath him, and he dropped suddenly to the length of his arm, and hung there sustained only by his grip on the I-beam. Below him he saw the falling timber on which he would have stood tumbling and shrinking until it vanished suddenly fifty or sixty feet below him. Still hanging, he looked across to the point where the underfoot timber had been joined to the upright by a metal collar held by four thick magnesium rivets.

There were no rivet-hole marks or broken rivet ends in the wood of the upright at all. What was visible was the snapped end of a quarter-inch-diameter wooden dowel rod.

Paul pulled himself easily back up on the I-beam. The bridge stood firm and secure—it had been balanced, evidently, somewhat differently than it appeared to be, on its supports. He climbed back to the instructor, on solid ground, and handed the jelly block back to the man.

Now what? Paul said.

Well, said the instructor, we'll go up to the front offices. I don't know what your master will say, and of course it's up to him. But as far as I'm concerned, I'd say you've graduated.

They left the simulated scene in the mountains and went out into the Station proper, and took an elevator up a good number of levels. Paul had the impression that they were almost to, if not right at, the surface. And this impression was justified a second or two later when they entered a large lounge-office with, not a vision tank, but an actual window looking out on the yellow twilight and the witches' garden of Mercury's surface around the Station.

Jase was there, along with Heber, the white-mustached unlisted member, and a couple of men Paul did not recognize. The instructor had Paul wait while he went over and talked to the three for a few minutes in a voice too low for Paul to hear. Then Jase came over alone, and the instructor, with the other two men, went over to one of the desks at the other end of the room and began going over what, judging from their quite audible conversation, were the files of journeymen currently undergoing tests.

Come on over to the window, said Jase. Paul followed him. The slim, dark young man was as relaxed as Paul had ever seen him, though he still walked with the prowling balance of a cat. Sit down.

Paul sat, in a low, comfortably overstuffed chair. Jase took one opposite.

To all intents and purposes, said Jase, and his deep-set, clear brown eyes watched Paul closely, you're a Chantry Guild member now. Before you first came to me, you'd gotten the psychiatric viewpoint on yourself and your missing arm. Now, I'll tell you the true situation from the point of someone like myself who is acquainted with the Alternate Laws.

He stopped.

—You were going to say something, he said.

No, said Paul.

All right, said Jase, here it is, then. You have an ability under the Alternate Laws which is probably para-psychological in nature. I told you when I first met you —and I've an ability myself where it comes to judging character—something to the effect that your arrogance was astounding.

Paul frowned. He had all but put aside the memory of the Necromancer calling him arrogant. It was the one thing he could not accept about himself.

I understand now better why you should be so arrogant, Jase was saying. I've no idea, none of us have in the regular membership, about the possibilities or limitations of your ability. But we've no doubt about its essential nature. Your ability is to make use of the Al-ternate Laws for purposes of almost total defense. We've done everything but try to kill you outright and without reservation. You've come through beautifully. Tell me, do you think you could explain to me in words just how you came to suspect that bridge timber just a little while ago? I'm not asking you to explain, I'm asking you if you think you could explain it to me.

No, said Paul, slowly. No, I don't think so.

We thought as much. Well, what you want to do with your ability from here on out is up to you. I myself think that the reason a grafted arm won't take on your left side there, is because this defensive ability of yours sees some danger to you in an arm graft. If you find what that danger is, maybe you can discover another counter to it, and the next arm you have attached to you will live instead of dying. But, as I say, that's up to you. However, there's something else.

He stopped. There seemed to be almost a touch of indecision in his manner, for the first time since Paul had met him.

As I say, said Jase, not quite as quickly as he usually spoke, in all but name now, you're a member. We haven't only been active with you up here, but we've been active for you back down on Earth. If you go back, you'll have to stand police investigation in connection with the death of Kevin Malorn, that man in the Koh-i-Nor you took the drug to.

I was wondering about that, said Paul.

You needn't wonder any longer, said Jase. The purchase desk in the music section of the library at Chicago Complex Directory now has among its records one showing that you purchased a song tape there at the same tune that Malorn was being killed. You will simply have to show up and add your testimony to the evidence of the record. Since the records are machine-made and regarded as untamperable, you'll be clear of any connection with Malorn's death an hour or so after arriving back in Chicago.

I see. Paul nodded. The song tape—it isn't one of Kantele singing something about 'in apple comfort time,' is it?

Jase frowned.

Yes, he said. As a matter of fact it is. Why?

Nothing, said Paul. I've heard it, but not all the way through.

It's a natural choice, said Jase. The record shows my credit number—you were buying it at my request. That's reasonable enough, since Kantele and I are old friends and the song was written for her by Blunt.

Blunt?

Why yes. Jase smiled a little at him. You didn't know the Guildmaster wrote music?

No.

He does a great many things, said Jase, a little dryly. However, the point is you can go back to Earth as free as you ever were. Except that as a Guild member you'll be required to take orders from the masters, like myself.

I see, said Paul, a little grimly.

Do you? replied Jase. He sighed. I don't think you do. Not by a damn sight Would you listen with an open mind for about five minutes?

Of course, said Paul.

All right, said Jase. Modern man got his motor to taming over with the Renaissance. At that time two things were initiated. One was the attitude of enlightened inquiry that began people on the road to a technological society and civilization. The road that sought to build a man a home and keep him well fed and happy within it by use of the machine.

Which was bad? said Paul.

No, no, said Jase. There's nothing wrong with a prosthetic appliance if nothing else is available. But you'd rather have a flesh-and-blood arm just like your own grafted on, wouldn't you?

Go on, said Paul.

However, the original role of the machine started to get perverted around the time of the industrial revelation. It came to be regarded not as a means to a desired end, but as part of the end in itself. The process accelerated in the nineteenth century, and exploded in the twentieth. Man kept demanding more in the way of service from his technology, and the technology kept giving it—but always at the price of a little more of man's individual self-contained powers. In the end—in our time —our technology has become second thing to a religion. Now we're trapped in it. And we're so enfeebled by our entrapment that we tell ourselves it's the only possible way to live. That no other way exists.

I——— began Paul, and checked himself.

Yes, 'I,' said Jase. The arrogant 'I,' with the built-in survival qualities. But other people aren't like you.

That wasn't what I was going to say, observed Paul.

It doesn't matter, said Jase. The point isn't you, but the world, which is at the mercy of an ever-growing technological system.

Which the Chantry Guild wishes to attack.

Attack? said Jase. The Chantry Guild was formed by Walt Blunt to protect its members against the attack of the technological system.

What you're saying, Paul said, is that your members grew up out of something other than the technological system.

That's quite right, said Jase calmly. They did. And so did you.

Paul looked searchingly at the Necromancer, but the dark face was as full of honesty as Paul had ever seen it.

I said, two things were initiated at the time of the Renaissance, said Jase. One was the roots of the single system that has given us our technological civilization, that says there is only one way for Man to live, and that's swaddled by the machine. And the other was all other systems—the principle of freedom which lies at the base of the Alternate Laws. The first would make

Man an inferior, the second acknowledges his superiority.

He looked at Paul as if expecting a protest.

I'm not in disagreement with the idea of superiority, said Paul.

Side by side, but not noticed except by a few, said Jase, while everybody and his Uncle Charlie was engaged in making a god out of the machine, a few talented people were proving that Man had already reached that level of deity and wasn't even started yet. Genius was at work in every generation—and genius works with the Alternate Laws. Only, after a while the machine got enough muscles so that it started crowding genius—and that brings it down to our time, Paul.

We do seem to end there, all the time, said Paul, and could not stop himself from smiling a little.

I thought you promised me an open mind, said Jase.

I'm sorry.

All right, then, said Jase. Answer me something. Suppose you're a person in any generation up to about fifty years ago whose abilities and inclinations make him inclined to have something more or something different than what's available to the mass of people in his time. What happens?

I'm listening, said Paul, with an open mind.

He can go under to the general attitude and be essentially destroyed by denying his own possibilities. Or he can rise above the general attitude and keep afloat by sheer dint of extra ability-muscle. Agreed?

Paul nodded.

In other words, he can lose or win his own personal battle with the mass-opinion of his time. In either case he's resolved his problem. Jase looked at Paul. Paul nodded again.

But in our time, said Jase, such a person isn't up against the opinions and attitudes of his fellows. He's up against an attitude brought to life and resolved into a mechanical monster that can't be reasoned with, and can't be adjusted to. He can't win for the same reason he can't outwrestle a bulldozer with his bare hands. And he can't submit because the bulldozer doesn't understand submission. It only understands a complete job.

Jase leaned forward with his hands on both of his knees. The emotion in the man came at Paul as sharp as an arrow.

Don't you understand? asked the Necromancer. The Chantry Guild was established because the technological system of our own tune was trying to kill these people who belong to the Guild—each and every one of them, and any more like them—kill them off. His eyes blazed at Paul. Just as it's been trying to kill you!

Paul looked back at him for a long moment.

Me? he asked, at last.

The weather warning you didn't get when you were out sailing, said Jase. The temporal disorientation that caused you to be caught by the starting ore cars in the shaft of the mine. The misdirection of the subway car that stranded you in the middle of a street cleared for use by a marching society. Yes, he added, as Paul's eyebrows raised slightly, we had a tracer on you from the time you first left my place. That's usual. He looked a little thin-lipped for a moment. It's part of the war between us and it.

I see, said Paul, his mind running back over a number of things.

You're in it, on the side of the Guild, whether you like it or not. We'd like your active, working co-operation. If your ability under the Alternate Laws is what it seems to be, you'll be more valuable to your fellow Guild members than anyone else could be.

Why? asked Paul.

Jase shrugged a little angrily.

I won't tell you that—now, of course, he said. How could I? You've got to commit yourself to the Guild— that is, try for the rank of Necromancer, a master in the Guild. We'll put you to the test. If you come through all right, then some time in the future you'll learn what you can do for the Guild. You'll hear it from the only man who can give you commands once you're a master—the Guildmaster himself, Walt Blunt.

Blunt!

Paul felt the name slide into place with the events here on Mercury at Springboard. He felt a rage of passion remembered, and a lonely sorrow, and then the hard, driving core of his determination to bring this man Blunt face to face.

Of course, Jase was saying. Who else could there be to give orders to the master rank? Blunt's our general.

I'm committed, said Paul, quietly. What do I do?

Well, said Jase, taking his hands off his knees and sitting up straight, I told you it's this ability of yours we want to determine. I said we'd done everything but try to kill you outright and without reservation. We'd like to take that last step now—make a serious effort with the resources of the Guild behind it and no safety hatch— and see if you survive.

Chapter

Master and Necromancer in name only, and under the shadow of a sometime attempt to be made upon his life, Paul returned to Earth and the Chicago Complex—ostensibly from a canoe trip up in the Quetico-Superior wilderness park area along the Canadian border near Lake Superior. He was picked up at the Complex Outer Terminal, taken to Complex Police Headquarters, and gave his statement concerning his whereabouts at the time of Malorn's murder by person or persons unknown. A police-beat reporter for one of the newssheets questioned him perfunctorily as he was leaving after his release by the police.

How does it feel? asked the reporter, matching strides with Paul as Paul walked toward the waiting cars at the Police terminal, not to be facing a possible sentence of death?

You tell me, said Paul, as he got in a two-man car and went off. The reporter considered a moment and erased the reply from his hand recorder. It had been too flippant, he thought.

'I am relieved, of course,' dictated the reporter into the recorder. 'However, knowing modern police methods and equipment I never had any real doubt they would find out I hadn't done it.' He put the recorder back in his pocket and returned to the booking desk inside.

Paul, reporting to Jase, who also had returned, was told to rent himself an apartment not too far from Suntden Place and amuse himself for the present. Paul did so. There followed several weeks of idleness in which Paul slept late, wandered around the Complex soaking up the feel of it and its crowds, and generally waited for his personal ax to fall.

It did not fall. Paul seemed almost forgotten—pensioned off and put aside by the Chantry Guild. Yet Jase, when Paul checked in with the Necromancer, and Kan-tele, on the one or two brief glimpses Paul had of her, seemed caught up in a smoothly constant, high-temperature state of activity. On one of his visits Paul had attempted to find out how he might get in touch with Blunt. Jase had told him quite bluntly that when Paul needed to know such information, it would be given to him. Blunt, Paul gathered, had no fixed address. His location at any time was a matter for his own immediate decision, and known only to those like Jase and Kan-tele, who were close to him.

The first week in May, on a Monday, found Paul up around the Wisconsin Dells, ostensibly squirrel-hunting. He had largely given over any conscious watch for the attack he had been promised by Jase, but that anterior part of his mind which took care of such things had not forgotten. Midday found him seated with his back to the trunk of a silver maple, half drowsy with the warmth of the strong spring sun out of a blue sky, and lost in a collection of newspapers and periodicals. However, his gun was across his knees, a steep fifty-foot cliff of loose gravel fell away behind the maple, and before him he could see clear down through a small grove of maple, pine, and poplar to a wide field of black earth faintly dusted with the new green of coming corn plants. It was an automatically perfect defensive position.

There were gray squirrels in the trees down the slope. They had taken care not to get too close when Paul had first settled himself against the trunk of the maple, but,

Sciurus carolinensis not being known for any lack of curiosity, they had been allowing themselves to work and play closer to where he sat in motionlessness. Now, after about two hours of Paul's sitting and reading, one slim youngster had grown so swashbuckling as to slip out from behind a narrow poplar trunk not fifteen feet from the human and sit up boldly to stare.

Paul was aware of these small attentions, but he felt a certain definite pleasure in letting them go on uninterrupted. The last thing from his mind was the desire to kill. He had more than a moral conviction against it, he was discovering. He almost regarded it as a sort of self-performed amputation. Particularly at this moment when he had allowed himself to go deep into the life and stir of the small section of the world at the moment around him. He let himself float in the sensation of the wanning earth, the light and movement surrounding, and gave the full attention of his thinking processes to the reading material he had brought with him.

The material was merely a chance selection among the many publications currently on sale or merely available for the picking up. But they struck hard upon him. He found himself wondering how, with such a universal voice of unhappiness sounding in the world, he had failed to be overwhelmed by it before.

The publications were full of the statistics of distress. Testing of grade-school children revealed that seven per cent of those under the age of eight were headed for major mental illnesses. The world crime rate had been climbing steadily for fifty years and this last year had jumped twenty-three per cent again. And this in a world in which nobody needed to lack for the necessities, and even most of the luxuries, of life. The world suicide rate was climbing sharply. Cultism was commonplace. Hysteria such as the marching societies exemplified was growing steadily. The birth rate was down.

Article after article either explored the situation, or offered some self-help method of individual adjustment to it. And yet—Paul went back through the pages before him again—there was enough of other topics, of sports, news, humor, art, and science, so that someone like himself who had not suffered individually could ignore the notes of trouble in the general symphony of modern achievement otherwise.

And still—Paul frowned a little. He did not believe what he read, or what people told him. He believed only what he himself could check against the touchstone of his feelings, and it occurred to him now that he seemed to sense something about the catalogue of unhappiness. A faint tone as of something whining. Or was he being unfair?

He pushed the newssheets and periodicals aside, and half-closed his eyes to the sunlight coming through the young leaves. He was conscious of the weight of the gun across his legs as well as the peaceful rustlings of the woods. The adventurous squirrel had been followed into the open by two of his fellows, but the first one, the one with guts, was still in the lead. As Paul watched without stirring, the adventurous one made a sudden dash right up to the toe of Paul's left hiking boot, and examined it with a quivering black nose.

The other two followed after. Man, thought Paul slowly, proceeds by dashes like the squirrel, and each new discovery is the one which is going to turn the world upside down. Each new setback seems to threaten eternal night. He looked at the squirrels. All three were now examining the rifle-stock of the gun where it projected out into the air beyond his right knee on a level with their small, black, fascinated eyes. He tried to feel what it was like to be one with them, and for a second his point of view flooded into a fantastic, pillared world of attack and defense, sleep, hunger, and the unknown.

Another squirrel raced suddenly toward him from the cover of the nearest tree. Suddenly there was concerted movement. As the newcomer reached the two followers, all three with unnaturally perfect teamwork threw their squirrel-weights suddenly against and on top of the projecting rifle stock. The gun tilted and swung, the muzzle of the barrel coming up thump against the left side of Paul's chest.

And at the same moment the adventurous squirrel leaped fair and true for the trigger button of the gun.

All in one explosive instant, it happened. And all in one movement of coldly swift and certain reaction, Paul's arm had galvanized into movement with the first rush of the fourth squirrel across the dappled earth. His long fingers met the leaping squirrel in mid-air, caught him, and broke his neck.

There was a scuttling rush away in all directions. Then silence. Paul found himself standing on his feet with the spilled gun, the scattered throwaway publications at his feet, and no other living creature in sight. He held the dead squirrel still in his hand.

Paul's heart thumped once, savagely, in his chest. He looked down at the dead squirrel. The small, black, animal eyes were squeezed tightly shut, as they might have been in any living being forced into risking all, in one wild tourney with the unknown.

The wound of an amputation bled somewhere in the depths of Paul. His eyes dimmed. The sun had lost its way momentarily behind a cloud, and the forest floor was all one color. Paul laid the small gray body gently down at the foot of the silver maple and smoothed its rumpled fur. He picked up his gun by the cold, slickly-machined metal of its barrel, and went off through the trees.

When he got back to his apartment in the Chicago Complex, Jase was already inside it and waiting for him as he entered.

Congratulations, said Jase, —Necromancer. Paul looked at him. Involuntarily, Jase stepped back.

Chapter

Paul was, he learned in the next few days, now a part of the more or less Cabinet group in the Guild, which operated directly with and under Blunt himself. The other Cabinet members consisted of Jase, Kantele, Burton McLeod—the heavy broadsword of a man Paul had met earlier in Jase's apartment—and an elusive gray wafer of a little man whose name was Eaton White. White, it seemed, was posted high on the personal staff of Kirk Tyne, and the first thing he did was take Paul in to see Tyne about a job in the World Engineer's office.

I suppose, asked Tyne, when he had shaken hands with Paul in the clear morning sunlight coming through the high windows of a luxurious office lounge two hundred levels above the Chicago traffic, you wonder why I seem so little hesitant to have a member of the Guild on my personal staff? Sit down, sit down. You, too, Eat.

Paul and Eaton White took comfortable chairs. Tyne also sat down, stretching his slim legs before him. He looked as fit as a well-kept bowstring, and as unfrayed by the demands of his work. His eyes, glancing directly into Paul's under neat brown eyebrows, were startlingly perceptive.

I was a little surprised, yes, said Paul.

Well, there's a number of reasons, said Tyne. Did you ever consider the difficulties of changing the present?

Changing the present?

It's impossible, said Tyne, almost merrily. Though very few people stop to think about it and realize the fact. When you pick up an inch of the present to move it, you also pick up several thousand miles of history.

I see, said Paul. You mean, to change the present you'd have to first change the past

Exactly, replied Tyne. And that's what reformers invariably forget They talk about changing the future. As if doing so was some new and great feat Nonsense. Our main business as living human beings is changing the future. In fact, that's all we can change. The present is the result of the past; and even if we could monkey with the past, who'd dare to? Change one tiny factor and the result in the present might well be the whole human race blown apart. So your reformers, your great changers, are kidding themselves. They talk about changing the future, when what they really mean is that they want to change the present, the present they're living in right at the moment. They don't realize they're trying to move furniture that's already nailed down.

So you think the Chantry Guild is made up of furniture movers? asked Paul.

Essentially—essentially, said Tyne. He sat forward in his chair. Oh, I want you to know I have a high opinion of the Guild, and the Guild members. And I have something more than a high opinion of Walt Blunt Walt awes me, and I don't mind admitting it. But that doesn't alter the fact that he's barking up the wrong tree.

Apparently, said Paul, he thinks the same of you.

Of course! said Tyne. He'd be bound to. He's a natural revolutionist I'm a real revolutionist. I know the present can't be changed, so I concentrate on changing the future. Really changing it—by hard work, discovery, and progress; the way it actually gets changed.

Paul looked at him interestedly.

What's your idea of the future? asked Paul.

Utopia, said Tyne. A practical Utopia that we've all adjusted to. That's all that's really wrong with the present, you know. We've achieved, through our science and technology, a practical Utopia. Our only trouble is that we aren't adjusted to it yet. We keep feeling there must be a catch somewhere, something to be fought against and licked. That's Walt's trouble, incidentally. He can't help feeling he ought to be revolting against something intolerable. And since he can't find anything intolerable, he's gone to a great deal of trouble to work up a revolt against what's not only tolerable, but infinitely desirable—the very things we've been working for for centuries. Comfort, freedom, and wealth.

I take it, said Paul, and frowned for a second as the ghost of a small gray squirrel scampered for a moment unbidden across his thoughts, you don't worry too much about the increases in crime, suicides, mental disorders, and so forth?

I consider them. I don't worry about them, said Tyne, leaning forward with argumentative relish. In the Super-Complex—I mean by that, the reconciling units here in the Headquarters building—we've got the greatest tool ever forged by Man for solving all Man's problems. It'll take a few generations, no doubt, but eventually we'll iron out the essentially emotional reaction that's causing these things you talk about.

Emotional reaction? asked Paul.

Of course! For the first time in the history of Man, for the first time since he first stuck his nose out of a nice safe hole in the ground, people have absolutely nothing to be afraid of, nothing to worry about. Is it any wonder that all their little individual quirks and idiosyncrasies sprout wings and fly off with them?

I can't believe, said Paul slowly, that the causes for what I read about in the newssheets and periodicals now are caused just by idiosyncrasies in the individual.

Well, of course, it isn't that simple. Tyne sat back in his chair. There are strong group elements in the human character. Religion, for one—that's at the root of all these sects and cults. The tendency toward hysteria and mob action that's been the cause of the marching societies. We're getting a social fragmentation. But just because Utopia's new, and there's no reason not to run hog wild. As I say, a generation or two will see us settling back down.

He stopped talking.

Well, said Paul, when it seemed to be up to him, this is all very interesting. I take it you're trying to convert me.

Exactly right, said Tyne. As I say, I don't agree with Walt, but he recruits some of the best material in the world. Eaton here's an example. And poor Malorn was a Guild member.

Malorn! said Paul, looking closely at the World Engineer.

Yes—in a way you might say I owe you something for having been unfairly accused in connection with his death. It was a breakdown misfunction in the police machinery, and I'm responsible for the smooth working of all machinery.

But that isn't why you'd give me a job?

Not by itself, of course. No. But Eat here speaks highly of you and says you don't seem to be completely blinkered and blinded by all those theories of Walt's. I'm willing to take a chance on talking you over to my point of view, if you're willing to take the chance of being talked. And of course, Walt will be tickled to have you on the inside, here. You see, he thinks he's outsmarting me by being completely open and aboveboard about planting his people on me.

And you, said Paul, think you're outsmarting him.

I know I am, said Tyne, smiling. I have an intelligent friend who tells me so.

It seems to be settled, then, said Paul. He stood up. Tyne and Eaton rose with him. I'd like to meet your intelligent friend, sometime.

Some-day, you might do that, said Tyne. They shook hands. In fact, I imagine you will. It was this friend's recommendation that rather clinched this matter of taking you on here.

Paul looked at the World Engineer sharply. With his last words something had come and gone so swiftly in the other man that it was impossible now to say what it might have been. It was as if a metal edge had shown itself for a moment.

I'll look forward to it, then, said Paul. And Eaton led him out

Outside the World Engineer Complex Headquarters they parted. Eaton went back in to work. Paul went on to Jase's.

As he stepped through the entrance to Jase's apartment and put his key back in his pocket, he heard voices. One was Jase's. But the other—he stopped at the sound of it—was the deep, resonant, and sardonic voice of Blunt

I realize, Jase, the voice of Blunt was saying, that you find me a little too much of a playboy at times. It's something you'll just have to bear with, however.

I don't mean that at all, Walt! The younger man's voice was charged and grim. Who's going to lay down rules for you, of all people? It's just that if I find myself having to take over, I want to know what you had in mind.

If you take over, it's your own mind you'll follow, and that's the way it should be, said Blunt Let's cross such bridges when we come to them. You may not have to take over. Who just came in?

The last words coincided with Paul's stepping around the corner from the entrance hall into the main lounge of Jase's apartment The wall entrance to the office in Kan-tele's apartment next door was open, and through it Paul now saw the wide shoulders and back of Blunt, with the dark, startled visage of Jase beyond.

Me. Formain, answered Paul, and he walked toward the office. But Jase stepped swiftly past Blunt and came down into his own lounge, closing the office entrance behind him.

What is it? asked Jase.

It seems I'm now on the immediate staff of the World Engineer, said Paul. He looked past Jase at the closed wall. That's Walter Blunt in there, isn't it? I'd like to speak to him.

He stepped around Jase, went to the wall, and opened it. Within, the office was empty. He turned back to Jase.

Where did he go?

I imagine, said Jase, dryly, if he'd wanted to stay and talk to you, he'd have stayed.

Paul turned again and went on into the office. He went through it into the farther reaches of Kantele's apartment It was a feminine dwelling, but empty. Paul paused by its front door, but there was no clue about it to signal whether Walter Blunt had walked out through it in the last few minutes.

He went back to the office, and through it. Jase was no longer in his own lounge. He seemed to have left the apartment. Paul was about to leave, too, in a mood of puzzled disturbance, when the entrance to Jase's apartment clicked open—he heard it—and someone came in.

Expecting Jase, Blunt, or both, he was turning toward the entrance hall when Kantele came out of it, carrying some sort of package, and stopped.

Paul! she said.

It was not a happy, or even pleased, sounding of his name. Rather, it was on a note of dismay that she said it.

Yes, he said, a little sadly.

Where's —she hesitated— Jase?

And Walter Blunt, he said. I'd like to know where they disappeared to, and why, myself.

They probably had to go someplace. She was ill-at-ease. It showed in the way she held the package to her.

I hadn't realized, he said, reaching for a neutral topic, that Blunt wrote that 'apple comfort' song of yours. Jase told me.

She looked abruptly a little sharply at him. Almost challengingly.

That surprised you, did it? she asked.

Why— he said. No.

It didn't?

I don't know, he said, exactly whether to call it 'surprise.' I didn't know the Guildmaster wrote songs, that was all. And— He stopped, feeling her bristle.

And what?

Nothing, he said, as peaceably as he could, I only heard the first verse before you came in that day, and the one time I heard it before. But it seemed to me more a young man's song.

She strode angrily past him. He got the impression that she was rather pleased than otherwise to find something to get angry about. She punched buttons on Jase's music player and swung about with her back to it.

Then it's time you heard the second verse, isn't it? she asked. A second later her own voice swelled from the player behind her.

In apple comfort, long I waited thee And long 1 thee in apple comfort waited.

Young man's song, she said bitingly.

In lonely autumn and uncertain springtime My apple longing for thee was not sated.

The clear, mountain rivulet of her recorded voice paused, and then went on into the second verse. She looked across at him with her eyes fixed and her lips together.

Now come thee near anigh my autumn winding. In cider-stouted jugs, my memories

Shall guard thee by the fireside of my passion, And at my life's end keep thy gentle lees.

The music shut off. He saw that she was profoundly moved by it and deeply unhappy. He went to her.

I'm sorry, he said, standing before her. You mustn't let what I think disturb you. Forget I had any opinion at all.

She tried to take a step back from him and found the wall behind her. She leaned her head back against the wall, and he put out his long hand to the wall beside her, half-convinced for a moment that she was about to fall. But she stood with her shoulders against the wall and closed her eyes, turning her face away to one side. Tears squeezed from under her closed eyelids and ran down her cheeks.

Oh, she whispered, why won't you leave me alone? She pressed her face against the wall. Please, just leave me alone!

Torn by her unhappiness, he turned and left, leaving her still standing there, pressed in sorrow against the wall.

Chapter

In the days that followed, Paul did not see her again. It was more than obvious that she was avoiding him, and she must at least have spoken to Jase about him, for the Necromancer made it a point one day to speak about her.

You're wasting your time, there, Jase said bluntly. She's Walt's.

I know that, said Paul. He glanced across the table at Jase. The other man had met him for lunch near World Engineering Headquarters, bringing him a long and curious list of cults and societies with which, as Jase put it, the Guild had some influence. Paul was supposed to learn the names and habits of these groups against some future date when the Guild might want to cultivate them. Paul accepted the list without protest. In spite of the fact that he was theoretically supposed to take orders only from the Guildmaster, he had yet to meet Blunt. Jase brought him all his instructions. Paul had decided not to make an issue of this for the moment. There was too much to be learned even as things were.

There were about sixty thousand members in the Chantry Guild. Of these, perhaps fifteen hundred had dramatic parapsychological talents. Even in a world which accepted such things—even though mostly as interesting parlor tricks or talents on a par with wiggling one's ears —fifteen hundred people represented a pretty remark-able pool of potential ability. Paul was supposed to learn all about each one of the fifteen hundred odd: who could do what, and when, and, most important, who was improving his powers by exploring them in the curious, mystical, long-way-around light of the Alternate Laws.

In addition, there were other aspects of the Guild for . Paul to learn, like the list Jase had just brought over on Paul's lunch hour. And all the work connected with the World Engineering Complex, where Tyne had Paul studying procedure like any executive trainee.

Weather all over the world had been freakishly bad. In the southern hemisphere the winter had been stormy and cold. Here, the summer days were muggy and sweltering, but no rain fell. The Weather Control Complex found itself in the position of having to rob Peter to pay Paul—moisture diverted to one needy section of the Earth left other sections either twice as arid or drowned in torrential, flooding rains that caused widespread damage. It was no crisis, but it was annoyingly uncomfortable. The internal climate of the great city Complexes held the outside weather at arms length, but the emotional impact of the season's aberrancies came through even into air-conditioned interiors like this one where Paul and Jase sat at lunch.

It's just as well you realize she does belong to Walt, said Jase. For perhaps the first time since Paul had met him, there was a gentleness in Jase's voice. She's Finnish, you know—you know where her name comes from?

No, said Paul. No, I don't.

The Kalevala—the Finnish national epic. Longfellow wrote his Hiawatha poem from it.

No, said Paul, I didn't know.

Kaleva—Finland, said Jase.

(Wind across snow fields. Tinkling among the icicles of a cavern—I knew it the first time, thought Paul.)

Kaleva had three sons. Handsome Lemminkainen, the art-smith, Ilmarinen, and the ancient VäinämÃ6inen. Paul watched Jase with interest; for the first time the drive and rush of the man was gone. He spoke the names of the old legend with the lingering love of a scholar in his voice. VäinämÃ6inen invented the sacred harp— Kantele. And she is a harp, our Kantele. A harp for the hand of gods or heroes. That's why Walt holds her, old as he is, unyielding as he is to anything but his own way of doing things. Jase shook his head across the table. You may be arrogant, Paul. But even you have to face the fact that Walt's something more than us ordinary men.

Paul smiled a little. Jase, watching him, laughed shortly. Abruptly the Necromancer was his own hard, glittering self again.

Because you don't think you can be killed, said Jase, you think you can't be defeated, either!

Paul shook his head.

I'm quite sure I can be killed, he answered. It's the defeat I doubt.

Why? asked Jase, leaning forward. Paul was a little surprised to see that the man was seriously asking.

I don't know. I—feel it, said Paul, hesitantly.

Jase let the breath out through his nose with a faint, impatient sound. He stood up.

Learn that list, he said. Burt said to tell you he'd pick you up tonight after you're through at your office, if you weren't otherwise tied up. You might give him a call.

I will, said Paul, and watched the other man leave, moving lithely and swiftly among the tables of the restaurant.

Burton McLeod, two-handed broadsword with human brain and soul, had become the nearest thing to a close friend Paul could ever remember having in his life. And this just in the past few weeks and months.

McLeod was in his early forties. Occasionally he looked immeasurably older. Sometimes he looked almost boyish. There was a deep, unvarying sadness in him, which was there as a result of the violence he had done, but not as a result of the ordinary reactions.

He did not regret the killing he had done. His conscience saw no reason why an enemy should not die. But deep within him, it saddened him that battle was not sanctified. Surely there had been something right and holy at one time about a fiat field, a fair fight, and a fair death? He would never have thought to ask quarter for himself, and it embarrassed him that the world in which he lived insisted upon the concept of unvarying quarter for all, even for those he regarded as needing killing. He was a kind and gentle man, a little shy with those of the human race he considered worthwhile, in which class, along with Blunt, Kantele, and Jase, Paul was pleased and embarrassed in turn to find himself numbered. His mind was brilliant and he was an instinctive bookworm, and his essential moral code was so innate that there seemed to be a wall between him and any possibility of dishonesty.

Like Paul, his life had been solitary. That might have been part of what drew them together. But a mutual honesty and a lack of ordinary fear played a part, also. It began with Paul being sent for some rudimentary tutoring in unarmed self-defense, as part of his Guild teachings, and went on from there with Paul's and McLeod's mutual discovery that Paul's overdeveloped arm was not amenable to ordinary training, or susceptible to ordinary attack and disablement.

It's speed that does it, Mc Leod had said, one evening in a gym, after several unsuccessful attempts on his part to lock and hold Paul's arm. Given speed and leverage, you don't need much La the way of muscle. But you've got the muscle, too. He examined Paul's arm with interest. I don't understand it. You ought to be slow as a truck. Bui you're as fast or faster than I am.

A freak, said Paul, opening and closing his fist to watch the muscles in his forearm bulge and retreat.

That's it, agreed McLeod, without any overtone of comment. That isn't just an overdeveloped arm. It's just a properly developed, trained arm for somebody six inches bigger than you. Someone rather lean, but in top shape, and about six-seven or so. Was your other arm as long as this one?

Paul dropped his arm down by his side. To his intense and sudden interest, he saw that the tips of his fingers hung down almost to his kneecap.

No, he said. This one wasn't, either.

Well, said McLeod, shrugging. He began to put on the shirt he had taken off to instruct Paul. We didn't really work up a sweat. I'll wait until I get home to shower. Buy you a drink?

If I can buy the second, said Paul. And that was the beginning of their friendship.

It was late July of the summer that Jase made his call, left the list of the cults and societies for Paul to learn, and the word about McLeod seeing Paul after working hours that evening.

Paul called up the other man from back at the office and agreed to meet McLeod in the bar of the same restaurant where he had had lunch with Jase. He spent the rest of the afternoon running the charts, as the office phrase was, down in the heart of the huge two-hundred-level building that was the core of the world's machinery, actually in the Super-Complex, itself.

This duty was one which everyone on Tyne's staff, including Tyne, had to perform for himself about once a month. The equipment of the Super-Complex was semi-self-adapting. Changes were constantly being made in it to keep it in line with changes being made in the ultimate mechanisms out in the world with which it was in contact and control. Also, within certain limits, it was capable—and exercised that capability—of making changes in itself. Accordingly, everyone on Tyne's staff had the obligation of keeping up their own portfolio of charts and information about the Super-Complex. You started out with a thick sheaf of notices of alteration, and went down among the working levels, checking the actual changes and seeing they were entered in your portfolio. Without these, there might have been a number of shifts in responsibility from one recording, computing, or controlling element to another, and the human staff might have found itself trying to initiate changes through automatic channels that had already been closed.

It was simply the homework connected with the job of being on the World Engineer's staff, the necessary duty of keeping up-to-date in your own field of endeavor.

Nonetheless, in Paul's case he found it to be much more than the routine duty it was supposed to be. Moving about through chance corridors allowed by the mobile units of the Super-Complex itself, surrounded level by level by the impossible intricacies of softly humming and clicking equipment, Paul could now understand why someone like the weak, drug-fogged Malorn could have been pushed over the unstable border of his mind by moving around here. There was life, all right, in this steadily operating maze of understanding and control; Paul felt it certainly and surely. But it was not life in the human sense of the living, and it did not face him directly. Rather, it slid behind the massed equipment, hid in a corridor closed a second before by a unit moving to block a path that had once been open.

The two previous times he had been down to bring his portfolio up to date he had not seemed to notice so much purposefulness to the feeling of mechanical life about him. He wondered if he was becoming sensitized, perhaps in the same way that Malorn had.

The idea was ridiculous. The moment he held Ma-lora's broken personality up alongside his own for purposes of comparison, that much became immediately plain. Malorn had been afraid.

Paul stood still for a moment on the sixty-seventh level, looking about him. Far down the open corridor in which he was standing, a tall gleaming bank of units slid across the opening, blocking it, and a new path opened up, angling off to the right. It was like being down in among the moving parts of some engine. An engine equipped to be careful of crushing any small creature climbing about within it as it moved to break old connections between its parts, and make new connections.

Paul turned back to his portfolio with a suddenly inquiring eye. It had not occurred to him before to consider areas within the levels of equipment. He, like all other staff members, simply went to the point where it was necessary to check on a change, checked on it, then took the most direct route to the next closest change point. But the portfolio was simply a history of changes running back to the general chart put out at the beginning of each year. He glanced through it.

The forty-ninth to the fifty-second level, he saw, showed no changes whatsoever since the beginning of the year. In this area the chart showed the Earth terminal of the no-time connection with Station Springboard on Mercury, and the equipment dealing with the relationship of this project to Earthside economy, social factors, and science. Paul frowned over the immediate chart of that area. It seemed incredible that an area dealing with research and discovery should have failed to show a multitude of changes in seven months, let alone showing none.

It occurred to Paul, abruptly, that information about the changes in that area might be restricted to certain qualified people. Perhaps to Tyne himself. The World Engineer had, not once but a number of times in the past weeks, recommended that Paul ask about anything that puzzled him. Paul lifted his wrist phone and buzzed the office on the two hundredth level.

Nancy, he said to the receptionist, this is Paul. Do you know anything about any area down here I'm not supposed to go into or know about?

Why, no, said the girl. In the small tank of Paul's wrist phone, her face was slim, cheerful, but puzzled. Staff members from this office can go anywhere in the Supe.

I see, said Paul. Could I talk to Mr. Tyne?

Oh, he just went down into the Supe himself, about five minutes ago.

Portfolio?

That's right.

He's wearing a phone, isn't he?

Just a minute. She glanced at her board. I guess he must have left it on his desk here. You know he doesn't like wearing one. She grinned at Paul. It's just the rest of us have to follow rules.

Well, said Paul, I'll catch him later after he's back.

I'll tell him you called, Paul. 'By.

'By, Nancy. Paul clicked off his phone. He thought for a second and then headed himself for the unchanged area between the forty-ninth and fifty-second levels.

He found it no different on the forty-ninth level than on other levels in the Supe, until he came suddenly upon the long, looming roundness of the three-step accelerator tube. He passed around the end of this and found himself crossing the small open area that was a counterpart of the contact point he had seen at Springboard. This was one end of the no-time pathway that abolished the distance between terminals.

As his first step came down on the highly polished surface of the area, the alarm of a sudden warning rang loudly in his inner sensitivity. He almost checked himself. But just at that moment something attracted his attention otherwise.

The sound of a conversation came to his ears. Both voices used the deeper, male register of tones, and one was the voice of Kirk Tyne. The other voice was unnatural.

They reached Paul's ears down an angled corridor be-tween high units of equipment. Paul went quickly and, he did not think why, quietly up the corridor toward them.

He turned the angle of the corridor. And stopped, finding himself shielded behind the angle of a projecting unit some eighteen or twenty feet high. Just beyond this angle he looked out into a fairly good-sized open space, almost a square, surrounded by units a good two levels in height. Their lower levels were lighted for the benefit of those living people who might need to work among them, as all units were lighted. But their upper part projected up into the dusk where lights were not. All around the square of open space they loomed like finely machined and polished idols in a temple. Tiny below them, facing one wall of these great shapes, stood Tyne.

There's no doubt about it, Tyne was saying, the weather—all this rioting and upset. The world situation is abnormal.

It has been recorded. The voice came from somewhere in the wall of units facing the World Engineer. It has been symbolized and integrated with the base situation. No apparent need for extraordinary measures is now indicated.

There's an atmosphere of unrest. I can feel it myself.

No concrete indications have been signalized or recorded.

I don't know, said Tyne, almost to himself. He raised his voice slightly. I think I may override you on this.

Override, said the voice, would introduce an un-calculable factor rising to a peak unit influence of twelve per cent and extending over an eighteen-month period.

I can't simply ignore the situation.

No situation is ignored. Ordinary measures are in process to correct the aberrancies.

And you think they'll prove sufficient?

They will correct.

By which you mean, you think they'll correct, said Tyne, a little harshly. Sometime I'm going to take a summer off and design an honest element of self-doubt for you.

The other voice did not answer.

What should I do? asked Tyne, finally.

Continue normal routine.

I guess, said Tyne. He turned suddenly and strode off toward an opposite side of the square. Before him, a corridor opened up. He went away down it, and it closed behind him.

Paul was left watching in silence.

Quietly, he came out into the square and looked about him. The units he looked at were in appearance no different than the larger computer elements on other levels. He walked over to the side where Tyne had stood. But he could not even discern a loud-speaker element in the faces of the units he was observing.

A slight sound behind him made him glance over his shoulder. He turned completely around. The corridor by which he had come to this spot was now closed. The units stood looming, side by side, unbroken around him.

Paul Formain, said the voice that had spoken to Tyne. Paul turned back to the units he had just been looking over.

Your presence at this point in space and tune is unjustified within the symbolic structure of human society. Accordingly, your removal may now justifiably be effected.

Book Three: PATTERN

Emerging on that final plain, Once more the watch-bell tolled again. —Twice! Thor's soul and mine were one, And a dragon shape had crossed the sun,

The Enchanted Tower

Chapter

Set! said Paul.

The word went out and was lost in the shadowy stillness above and behind the metallic shapes of the huge units standing over and around Paul. There was a slight noise behind him. He glanced toward it and saw a corridor opening once more in the general direction from which he had reached this area on the forty-ninth level. In the opposite direction a single unit slid out to fill most of the open space, and turned toward Paul. It rolled slowly toward him. He backed up and saw he was being forced into the newly opened corridor.

So you can do violence to people, said Paul.

No, said the voice that had spoken to Tyne. Now it seemed to come from the unit that was crowding Paul backward.

You're doing violence to me right now.

I am correcting a misplacement, said the voice. Your value is external and false. It is perverting the symbological matrix of society at this moment.

Nonetheless, said Paul, you have a responsibility to me, as well as to society.

More latitude, said the unit, forcing him back along the corridor, is possible with those not sane, who are not responsible.

I'm not sane?

No, said the machine, you are not.

I'd like, said Paul, to hear your definition of sanity.

Sanity, replied the voice, in the human being is a response to natural instincts. It is sane to sleep, to eat, to seek to feed oneself, to fight if attacked, to sleep if no occupation is at hand.

Paul's shoulder blades came up against something hard. Turning around, he saw he had reached a turn in the corridor down which he was backing. The unit rolling toward him on invisible smooth-turning cylinders had not paused. He changed direction and backed away again.

How about thinking? Is that sane?

Thought is a perfectly sane process, as long as it follows sane paths in the human brain.

Such as those concerned with feeding and sleeping?

Yes.

But not, said Paul, those concerned with painting a picture or discovering a new method of interstellar travel?

Such thinking, said the unit, is a response to abnormal irritations in the environment of the human concerned. Perfectly sane human beings have no need to do more than live and propagate, all under the conditions of greatest comfort.

By those standards, said Paul, still backing up, most of the human race is insane.

You are quite wrong, said the voice, roughly eighty-five per cent of the human race has had no real desire outside the framework I mentioned. Of the remaining fifteen, only about five in any generation have made any real effort to put their insanities into practice. Perhaps two per cent have some effect on future generations and one-tenth of one per cent are later admired even by the sane.

I won't argue your figures, said Paul, feeling his left shoulder brush a unit, unyielding as the brick wall against which a man stands before a firing squad. Even though I could. But don't you think the fact that your final category is admired even by the sane, as you put it, is some kind of an indication that maybe others had something besides insanity at work for them?

No, said the voice.

Forgive me, said Paul. I think I overestimated you. Let me say that again in terms you might be able to handle. Once you achieve an ideal existence for the human race, what's going to become of the arts, scientific research of all kinds, and the exploration of the natural universe?

They will be abandoned by the sane, said the machine.

Paul, backing up, saw the flanking units on either side of his corridor suddenly give way to open space. At the same time, the unit which had been herding him forward rolled level with the mouth of the corridor and stopped, so that Paul now found himself facing a final wall. He turned and looked about him. He stood, completely hemmed in by a wall of units, upon the contact area at the end of the three-step accelerator. The end of the tube, the terminal that could tear him from this spot off into the universal ubiquity of no-time, loomed high above his head like a cannon mouth over the head of a sparrow which, in its muzzle, had taken refuge from a hawk.

And the insane, at that time? asked Paul.

There will be no more insane, said the Voice. They will have destroyed themselves.

Paul saw nothing to give him any impression, and heard nothing; but deep within his flesh and bones he felt the accelerator warming to life. Even now, back and forth over flashing yards of distance, the point of no-time to be, was wanning to life. Paul thought of Springboard, and of the emptiness of space.

You tried to get me to destroy myself, didn't you? said Paul, remembering what Jase had said. In the mine; in front of the marching society that day.

Always, said the voice, the way has been open for you to destroy yourself. It is what works best with the insane. The sane are easy to kill. The insane fight very bard against being killed, but are more susceptible where it comes to the opportunities of self-destruction.

Do you realize, asked Paul, feeling the accelerator warming to life over him, your definition of sane and insane is completely artificial and wrong?

No, said the machine, I cannot be anything but correct It is impossible for me to be incorrect.

You ought to see, said Paul, that one false assumption used as a basis for later decisions could cause all your conclusions to be in error.

I know this. I also know I contain no false assumptions, answered the voice. Above the looming curve of the accelerator the dusk of the dark higher up seemed to be pressing down on Paul. Almost, the voice seemed to descend also, becoming confidential. My assumptions must stand the test of whether the structures built upon them guarantee a safe and continued life to mankind. This they do. I am humanity's guardian. You, in contrast, are its destroyer.

I———? asked Paul, staring up into the darkness.

I know you. You are the destroyer of mankind. You are the warrior who will not fight and cannot be conquered. You are proud, said the machine. I know you, Necromancer. Already you have done incalculable damage, and created the first blind living form of the inconceivable enemy.

A barrier went down in Paul's mind. What was beyond it, he could not at this moment see; but it brought him relief and strength. It was as if a soldier, after long waiting, had at last received definite orders commanding him upon a long and desperate journey.

I see, said Paul quietly, as much to himself as to the machine.

To see is not enough, said the voice. It is not enough excuse. I am the living wish of mankind expressed in solidity. I have the right to direct people. You have not. They are not yours. They are mine. The tones of the voice did not vary, but Paul got an impression of total effort being directed against him. I will not let you lead mankind blindfold through a dark maze to an end they cannot conceive of, and final destruction. I cannot destroy you, or I would. But I can put you aside.

The voice paused slightly.

Paul was suddenly aware of a slight humming from the great cylinder head beside and above him. The acceleration was nearing the point of break into no-time which, like a sudden spark jumping, would contact and remove him from the point where he stood. He had just time to remember that he had been through no-time before, on the heels of Jase and Kantele when they escaped the police in the office across the concourse from the Koh-i-Nor. But that had been like running down a flight of stairs, while this would be like being thrown down them. He had just time to brace his awareness.

Now, said the machine.

And Paul was ripped from the position he held in time and space and spread out to the uttermost reaches of the universe.

Chapter

Paul was not immediately delivered at the destination to which the machine had sent him.

From the psychic point of view the action of the accelerator upon him was like that of hurling him down an endless flight of infinitely stretching stairs. But even as he tumbled, that invincible part of him, like the reflexes of a superbly conditioned athlete, was instinctively gathering his feet under him, regaining his balance, and stopping his fall. It checked him, got him upright; but the conscious part of him was for the moment stunned and dazed, out of action. Instinctively in action, like a half-knocked-out fighter too well trained to stay down, he fought clear of the push of the accelerator and wandered, as it were, off sideways along one of the stair surfaces.

The situation was entirely different from when he had gone through no-time on the heels of Jase and Kantele, when he and they had been escaping the air police across from the Koh-i-Nor Hotel. The way by which they had entered no-time then, had been by a much more bearable emotional route. The accelerator method (lacking the medication that was yet to be discovered) was simply and plainly brutal.

It achieved its desired end by sheer savagery of action. It was this that had caused effects ranging from severe nervous breakdown to death in early Springboard volunteers transmitted to the terminal from which Paul had left. In essence, under the accelerator method, the individual's identity fled the immediate level of no-time to escape the suddenly intolerable conditions under which it had been forced to experience real time and space. Inanimate objects, of course, had no such difficulties. But the human psyche could not have retained its orientation under a full experiencing of conscious dispersal to universal dimensions and later reassembly. In instinctive self-protection it made the great step upward into the subjective universe.

Now, experiencing this, Paul suddenly understood the operation of the Alternate Laws, which were naturally entirely subjective in nature. However, at the moment this understanding could make no contact with the operative areas of his mind, which were still stunned. These wandered the subjective dimension of that line of endeavor to which the greater part of his being was dedicated.

There was no shape or dimension to the subjective universe in which he now wandered. It was, however, subject to the reality imposed on it by the symbolic processes of Paul's deeper self. Consequently, to him now, it took on the appearance of a vast, pebbled plain, with the pebbles growing in size in the distance. It was the plain of which he had dreamed on returning to the hotel after his first meeting with Jase.

Before, he had toiled over it as if walking. Now he skimmed rapidly just above its surface. Gray, black, rubbled, and bleak, the plain stretched off about him in all directions, not to any horizons, but to a great but finite distance. An emptiness of spirit, a sense of desolation, made up the atmosphere around him. He chilled in it, even while the unstunned part of him struggled to remind him that it was all subjective, all interpretative of the job he had, at a great distance in time and space, once dedicated himself to do.

Arrogant, murmured a wind across the larger pebbles with the voice of Jase.

These are my people, not yours, whispered a metallic breeze from another direction. And then, from a little farther off, and fainter even: I know you, Necromancer....

He went quickly from the voices. The pebbles grew to boulders, to huge and mammoth shapes, to vast mountains with darkness between them. Then, at last, over the farthest and largest of these, he came to the final edge of the plain.

He went swiftly to it. From a point above the last and most mountainous boulder shapes he hung and looked down, out, and up at the same time upon a shifting infinity of darkness.

It was a gulf beyond which he felt there was light. But he could not see it, for the closer darkness. And in the darkness, something stirred.

It was barely living yet. It was an embryo, an amoeba, with only so much of consciousness as had allowed it to sense his existence when he had been under initiation, deep in the rock of Mercury. And only so much of reaction as had allowed it to make that one reactive, whiplash attack in his direction. Its growing was all yet before it.

And it was all in the way of evil that the Super-Complex had said it was. And Paul had created it. Without him it would never have been, but now it lived, and grew in power and understanding.

A terrible desire came over him then, to attack it now and settle the matter once and for all. But when he moved to go beyond the edge of his plain, he found something invisible there that would not let him pass. It was the barrier of the laws under which he had created what stirred out there. The laws that protected it from him as much as he from it, until the time when both he and it should be strong enough to break all barriers. And suddenly his dazed mind cleared, and he realized that if he should meet and conquer it now, nothing would be proved. Nothing accomplished. There would have been no point in its creation in the first place.

Abruptly, his mind was clear again. He retreated swiftly from the edge of the plain. He returned to the area where the boulders were again down to the size of pebbles. And here, close to where he had wandered astray, he found something like a cairn, or stony pile, new-built. It was about three times his own height, and the chance crevices between its stones gave an errie impression of tiny arrowslits or windows, though he felt instinctively that there was nothing alive about it as yet, nothing within. Standing beside it, he looked once more about the plain, and saw now that here and there at the farthest limits, this subjective landscape of his seemed to have elevated itself slightly, as if in the beginnings of hills, in a circle, surrounding him.

With that, he gave in to the original impulse that had brought him here and went forward to his destination.

He came to ordinary consciousness again in what looked like a small apartment. He had one brief glimpse of it before his legs—he had come through standing in the same position in which he had faced the Supe—crumpled under him and the full shock of what had been done to him took its price from his physical body. He pitched to the floor.

Here again, as always, he did not go completely under into unconsciousness. By all ordinary standards he should have gone completely out, but in actuality he only passed into a foggy, uncertain state which was the physical equivalent of his dazed condition while he had been wandering the subjective universe. During the succeeding several days in which this state gradually wore itself out, he was vaguely conscious of the fact that he had dragged himself from the floor to a nearby couch, and that he had once or twice drunk from a water dispenser that was nearby. Otherwise, he had not eaten or slept, or even fallen into the half-active dream-filled state that was his ordinary slumber.

He did not suffer in a physical sense. He had in no meaning of the term suffered any physical damage as a result of being transmitted to this spot. What had been torn about and attacked in him was his essential, immaterial identity. And the effect was similar to that of an attack of profound depression. He was perfectly capable physically of getting up and examining his surroundings. The act of will required to do so, however, was like that of lifting his own body's weight to a man drained of blood almost to the point of death.

Gradually, however, he recovered.

He became aware first that the apartment was shaped like a section of a cylinder, its bottom curve having a floor built across it. It was fitted with the compact luxury of an ocean-going submersible liner. Between the curved walls were couch and easy chairs, tape cabinets, music player, bar, kitchen—even some finger-sculptures, and a couple of interesting stochastic paintings, one in oils, the other in red, black, and yellow clays.

There was also the cleared area, floored in polished black, which had been the terminal point of his arrival.

It was sometime on the third day that he found himself staring at the paintings, as he had for some hours now, like a man stupefied. His feeble but certain perception made the connection immediately, and he laughed weakly. He had suddenly realized the existence of a plasma that could in part replace the psychic blood of which he had been drained.

He struggled wearily up from the couch and went clumsily on hands and knees across the room to the music player. From there he went to the tape cabinets, and to some adjoining shelves where he found a reference printer.

Twenty minutes later found him back on the couch. The fine, golden threads of Il Trovatore were spinning themselves out of the speakers of the music player, the rich canvas of Rubens' Adoration of the Magi was displayed in the tank of the tape cabinets, and the solemn heartbreak of Milton's sonnet on his blindness tolled like a slow and shadowed bell from a printer sheet in Paul's hand:

When 1 consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide...

Paul lay there, changing art, music, and poetry for mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and all the fields of man's endeavor. And slowly the life of those who had had something to give to life seeped back into his own drained being, and his strength came back to him.

By the fourth day after his arrival he was back to normal. He got himself a large meal out of the kitchen, and then set about exploring the limits of this prison to which he had been sentenced.

It was about thirty feet in length, and about that same height and width at its greatest points of those two dimensions. Either end of it was a great circle flattened off at the bottom by the chord-line of the floor. One circle overlooked the terminal area of his arrival. The other merely filled up the far end of the living space.

It was this second circle that Paul looked over with interest. The first, overhanging the terminal point of his arrival, presumably simply hid the business end of an accelerator. The second might, however, be blocking the way to an escape route. When he looked closely, he discovered that the second in fact did appear to be something in the nature of a removable cover, held in place by a simple magnetic lock.

He unlocked the cover and the lower half of it swung away from him like half of a huge Dutch door. He walked through it and found himself in a farther extension of the cylinder, three times as big as the living quarters and filled with crated equipment and tools. He let his gaze settle over the tools and crates, and the answer he was looking for became easily apparent to him. This was the material with which the accelerator terminal here could be fitted to transmit as well as receive. He paused to glance at the tickets attached to some of the crates, but they were punch cards notated in a technician's shorthand that he did not know. He went on to the still farther circular wall that ended this division of the cylinder.

This had been sealed with a running bead of plastic weld all around its rim. It was evidently intended to be easily removed, but only by someone who knew how to do so, and why he was doing it.

Paul turned back and searched the second room once more, but there was no message or instruction list in sight.

He went back into the living quarters, and proceeded to make a methodical search of that area. He excavated drawers and investigated files and cabinets. There was no instruction sheet or manual. Evidently, whoever this place had been designed for had been expected to have that sort of information in his head. Paul was standing in the middle of the living-area floor and looking about for some hiding place he might have overlooked, when there was a sound from behind him, from the direction of the terminal area.

He looked. There on the bare and polished surface he saw a newssheet lying, still slightly curled from the printer. He went to it and picked it up.

For a moment he could not imagine what reason had caused the Supe to send it through to him. The headings of the various stories on the front page screamed of riots, panics, and earthquakes. Then, sliding his eye up one column and down the next in automatic speed-reading, Paul saw a small item: WORLD ENGINEER GIVEN EXTRAORDINARY POWERS.

By an unprecedented world-wide register vote, the World Engineer yesterday was awarded authority to freeze the credit numbers and deny all Complex services to rioters and those suspected of disturbing the peace. The Complex-Major tabulated an almost

inconceivable 82 per cent of the total voting population, with 97.54 per cent of those voting registering in favor of awarding the additional authority to the World Engineer.

A tiny item. But Paul frowned. Highly important it was, but that did not seem to him sufficient cause for the Supe to send him the newssheet. Nor—he glanced back at the other stories upon the front page—was the news of widespread emotional disturbances and rioting sufficient. The machine was not equipped to gloat, and surely with Paul imprisoned here as he was, there could be no other reason for informing him about events he was powerless to have an effect upon.

Still puzzling, Paul opened the newssheet to its second and third pages. Then he saw it

By some apparent freak mishap, the printer had failed to bring out the printing on these two pages otherwise than as an unreadable blur, except for one item as small as the front-page item Paul had just frowned over. That one stood out as if framed.

DRONE LOST

The Complex-Major today noted the Information that one of its Springboard drones, carrying automatic terminal receiving equipment to the planet known as New Earth, fourth world of the star Sirius, has suffered a malfunction of the directing system and been lost in space. This drone, which three days ago was noted as being in position to land shortly on New Earth, apparently missed its landing and has fallen beyond that planet under conditions of movement which win carry it out of the Sirian system. There can be no hope of reestablishing contact, notes the Complex-Major, or of recovery of the drone.

Paul dropped the newssheet and, spinning about, strode swiftly back into the farther room. Seizing a tool like a chisel, he attacked the plastic weld around the rim of the circular end wall. The plastic peeled up under his gouging and a thin edge of the metal was revealed. He forced the chisel edge in under the edge of the revealed metal. For a moment there was resistance, and then the chisel plunged through. There was a sudden whistling insuck of air past Paul's hand, the plastic weld cracked loose halfway around the rim, and the lower half spanged sharply on a deep bass note. Before Paul's eyes a horizontal crack ran across the metal, and the lower half of it broke clean from the top and fell into the room.

Paul caught it. It was a thin sheet of light magnesium alloy. He bent it inward and laid it flat on the floor. Then he stepped one step forward and looked out, through heavy glass.

Before him was a rolling landscape under a slightly yellowish sky, an atmosphere hazed with fine dust. Something like tiny, close-packed fern leaves covered the ground and grew thickly and a little larger about an occasional boulder or outcropping of granitic rock. Farther back were low, broad trees whose trunks and limbs looked as if they had been shaped out of dark, twisted cable. The brilliant white points of two Ao-type stars, so close they seemed at the moment to be swimming into each other, peered burningly through the dust haze and made the illumination for the day outside.

From the sight of these and the landscape they lighted —a landscape rich in promise for the yet infant science of terraforming—Paul had no difficulty making the connection between his present location and one of the worlds described in popular articles as destinations for the Springboard drones.

The double star in the sky out there could only be Sirius and its close companion. Which meant that this was New Earth, and the message of the newssheet the Supe had sent him was clear. Paul, and this drone in which he found himself imprisoned, had been deliberately and officially lost from the records.

For a moment Paul leaned his forehead wearily against the cool pane of the glass. The long palm and fingers of his single hand pressed uselessly against the glass' thick surface. Out there beyond its protection was, according to all official reports, an atmosphere suffocating with hydrogen sulphide. Behind him was crated equipment he had not the education and training to assemble.

Suddenly he stiffened. His hand slipped down from the glass and he raised his head to look sharply out through the transparency.

Leaning against a boulder on this alien world a little more than a dozen feet from the drone and incongruous against the small, carpeting ferns, was a heavy cane of dark wood; Walter Blunt's cane, one end of which was cracked and splintered as it would have been from being used to smash a human skull.

Chapter

I see, said Paul quietly to the empty room and the landscape beyond the glass. Of course.

It was like driving through a strange city at night and being convinced that north lay on your right hand. Then, suddenly, a chance-glimpsed street sign, some small but undeniable scrap of information, brings suddenly the undeniable orientation that places north on the left. Abruptly, silently, without real physical movement, the universe swaps ends and you realize that all this time you have been heading west, not east

Suddenly the pattern about Paul had become clear and correct, down to the last detail.

It was Blunt, of course. As he had instinctively felt all along, it was Blunt—this man who would not turn and show his face openly and clearly—who was the demon. Paul spoke out loud again, but not to Blunt.

Get me out of here, he said.

No, came an answer from deep inside him, from the invincible part in the back of his mind.

You mean, asked Paul, we end here, you and me? The two of us?

No.

Then———?

There's only one of us.

I see, said Paul again, quietly. I should have known that.

can do anything you want. But if I do it, what's the use? We won't have found any way other than force. Our work will all have been wasted, as the living darkness we created beyond the boulders would have been wasted if you had killed it then, or if you kill it now, while it's un-grown. It's up to you now to find the different way.

Not the machine's way, said Paul. Not the way you moved me out of that office just behind Jase and Kantele that time? A different way than either of those?

Yes.

I don't know where to start.

Perceive. Recapitulate. Feel.

All right, said Paul. He looked out at the cable trunks and limbs of the trees beyond the window, and at the cane. There is only one thing common to both the objective and the subjective universe. This is identity.

Yes. Go on.

The objective universe can be expressed in its lowest common denominators as an accumulation of identity isolates, both living and nonliving.

That's right.

The isolates, however, in order to live—that is, to have function along the single dimension of the time line— must pass in and out of combinations which can be called sets.

Continue, Brother.

The sets, in order to create the illusion of reality in objective time and space, must at all tunes arrange themselves into a single pattern. The pattern may vary, but it can't be abandoned or destroyed without also destroying or abandoning the illusion of reality.

Entirely correct. And very good for a partial identity that is restricted to reasoning by use of emotion and response. We can be proud of you. Go on. The next step?

Paul frowned.

Next step? he asked. That's all.

Application.

Application? Ah! said Paul, suddenly. Of course.

The so-called Alternate Laws —he glanced once more at the cane against the boulder beyond the window— arid the talents deriving from them are merely methods of altering the pattern so that the illusion of reality temporarily permits actions ordinarily not permitted. He thought for a second. Blunt doesn't understand this, he said.

Are you certain of that?

Paul smiled a little in the empty silence of the room.

That's my department, isn't it? Understanding.

/ submit myself. Go on.

Paul hesitated.

Is there more? he asked.

You wanted to get out of here. You have perceived and recapitulated. From here on you leave me for your own territory. Feel.

Paul closed his eyes. Standing with the yellow light from outside showing faintly through his lids, he tried for a total contact with all that surrounded him—room, drone, planet, suns, space. It was like attempting to make some delicate last connection with blind fingers at arm's length, out of sight inside a piece of complicated equipment Only, Paul's effort was completely nonphysical. He was reaching out to feel fully and correctly the great pattern of the objective universe, so that he could fit his own identity perfectly into pivot position within its structure.

For a moment he made no progress. For a fraction of a second he felt the completely stripped feeling of total awareness, but lacking even a single point of contact as he floated free, swinging into position. Then, suddenly, it was like the moment of orientation that had followed his seeing the cane beyond the glass, but much greater. And mixed with it the sensation of melting together, like but greater than that which had come to him to finish his interview with the psychiatrist Elizabeth Williams.

In one sudden moment of no-time, Paul and the invincible part of him fused irreversibly together.

It was as if he had stood on a narrow stage and sud-denly, on all sides, great curtains had been raised, so that he found himself looking away in all directions to enormous distances. But now—alone.

Ave atque vale, he said, and smiled a little sadly. Hail and farewell. He turned back to the glass of the window. Destruct, he said. Of course. Blunt planted that for me, and in his own limited way, he was right.

Paul turned back to the tools behind him. He chose a heavy sledge hammer and took it to the window. His first blow bent the metal handle of the sledge but merely starred the glass. But his next blow sent the sledge crashing through and the whole wall of glass fell out in ruins.

He took three rapid steps toward the boulder where the cane leaned, as the acid, choking atmosphere numbed his sense of smell with the assault of its odor and filled his lungs. He reached the cane and seized it even as his eyesight began to sear and blur with tears. Almost, he could hear Blunt chanting, as he had chanted in the vision tank back there underground at Malabar Mine while Paul watched.

Destruct! The ultimate destruct! The creative destruct that will rescue Man from being saved forever...

Then Paul felt his knees strike the ground as he fell. And with that his identity quit his body forever and left it there, fallen and dying in the suffocation of the yet-untamed atmosphere of the world which would be called New Earth, with a splintered walking stick clutched in its single fist.

Chapter

Full twenty-fathoms times five, thy body lies. Of its bones is ocean debris made....

Thirty miles due west of La Jolla, California, which is a few miles up the coast line from San Diego, on a sandy underwater pleateau six-hundred-odd feet below the surface of the ever-moving blue Pacific, Paul's bodiless identity hovered above a skeleton of a man wrapped and weighted with half-inch chain. This place had not been his original intended destination, but he had detoured here to settle a purely emotional point in his own mind. Now, hovering above the chain-wrapped skeleton, he sensed with relief that the body it once supported had died a natural death. It was not that he doubted that Blunt had been willing to murder to gain the results he wanted. It was just that he wished the ledger sheet on which he and Blunt were totaled up together and against each other to be as clean as possible.

He left the white bones in the peace of their eternal darkness, and went his way.

His way—the way Blunt's cane on New Earth had been designed to send him—led him to an awakening in something like a coffin. He lay, legs together, arms at his sides, on his back, and tightly enclosed in a metal container. His eyes were open but they saw nothing but blackness. His pattern-linked perception, however, recognized that he was in a sort of cold-storage vault—something very like the slide-out six-and-a-half-foot drawers for unclaimed bodies in a public morgue. The body he now inhabited was identical with the one he was used to, except that it had two good arms. However, it seemed completely paralyzed.

It was paralyzed, he recognized with a sudden grim humor, because it was frozen stiff. The container in which he lay was surrounded with refrigerator coils and his body's temperature was a little more than twenty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The body would first have to be thawed before any life could be brought to it.

Paul surveyed the surrounding pattern. It would be surprising if Blunt, who had made so many arrangements where Paul was concerned, had not also made some here. Sure enough, the container lay on tilted tracks and was held inside the freezing unit by the bare hooking of a catch. Paul made the necessary slight alterations in the pattern and the catch failed. He slid out into the light of a brightly illuminated room without windows.

As he emerged into the room, the temperature rose sharply and suddenly from close to freezing to seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit. Lying at a tilted angle that put his feet close to the floor below the container and his head several inches higher, Paul saw it was a small room with a single door and no furniture, tiled in white.

The single item of interest in it was a message neatly printed in large letters on the wall opposite Paul. It read:

Paul: As soon as you find yourself able, come and join us in suite 1243, at the Koh-i-Nor.

—Walt Blunt

Paul's container had gone into action on its own now. It was beaming deep, gentle heat into the very center of his frozen bones and tissues. It would take—what? Half an hour, perhaps longer, to bring him up to a living temperature so that his identity could take over command of his new body in the ordinary sense. Of course, almost undoubtedly Blunt had planned that Paul would help and hurry the process along. In any case it was rather fine scheduling, and showed an attitude toward other people and the universe that was far from modest. For the first time—in such small unexpected ways, thought Paul, do past things of minor importance explain themselves— Paul received a sudden extra insight into Jase's repeated accusation of arrogance. Over the years Jase must have become well acquainted with arrogance, in the person of Blunt.

Yes, thought Paul, he would hurry things along. But in a way in which Blunt, with his less complete awareness of the pattern, could not expect. Blunt would not expect that the message on the wall would be a clear warning to Paul that the Chantry Guild had already made its move. Outside this room the world would be trapped in a war— a strange, weird war such as it had never known before. And Blunt, general of the attacking forces, would have tuned the entrance of Paul upon the battlefield for the most effective moment from Blunt's point of view.

Only Paul would come early.

He reached into the pattern and to the invincible knowledge that had become a part of him with his own individual ability. He cut certain lines of causal relationship, and established new ones. The pattern altered, in the immediate identity area of the body. And the body itself floated upright out of its container.

It floated toward the door. The door opened. Skimming just above the steps, it mounted a flight of stairs and passed through a farther door into a small hallway. Beyond, was a third door, a transparent door to the traffic level, on a street Paul recognized as being less than a dozen blocks from the Koh-i-Nor. It was night beyond this last door, and for some reason the Complex without seemed darker than it should be.

Paul's body floated to the last door. It opened and he floated out into the hot July night. The Complex Internal

Weather Control seemed to have failed in its functioning, for the temperature outside here was in the high nineties at the very least and humidity must be close to a hundred per cent. The still air of the Complex seemed to hang heavily in the unusual shadows between structures, and its heat wrapped itself steamily around Paul's icy body.

No vehicles were in motion. And here, at least, the streets seemed deserted. Paul swung about and skimmed off along the concrete walk in the direction which he knew would take him to the Koh-i-Nor.

The streets were as empty as if the people in the Complex had locked and barred their doors against some plague or roaming madness. In the first half block the only sound Paul heard was the insane, insect-like buzzing of a defective street light. He looked up at its pulsating, uncertain glow, and saw at least part of the reason it did not do well. Its pole had become a monstrous cane of red-and-white striped candy.

Paul floated on. At the next corner he passed a closed door. From the crack beneath it, however, a flood of red fluid remarkably like blood in its color and viscosity was flowing. One block farther on, Paul turned down into a new street and saw his first living person of the night

This was a man with his shirt half torn off, who was sitting in a doorway and turning a kitchen knife over and over in his hands. He looked up as Paul came toward him.

Are you a psychiatrist? he said. I need——— His lifted eyes caught sight of Paul's feet and the space between them and the pavement. Oh, he said. He looked down at his hands and went back to playing with his knife again.

Paul paused. And then he realized that his body could not speak. He went on, and as he did so he reached once more into the pattern. It was possible, as he had suspected Blunt had intended, to hurry things up. Living cells could not be thawed quite as crudely as dead meat, but borrowing heat uniformly from the general surroundings was even more efficient than the deep-heating mechanism of the storage container had been. Slowly, but at the same time much more rapidly than might have been expected, a living warmth came to Paul's body as he proceeded on toward the Koh-i-Nor.

He passed other things of the night which bore little relation to normality. A monument in the center of one street crossing was slowly melting down as he passed, like wax in a warm oven. The stone head of a lion, at the corner of a heavy balcony running around one large building, dipped its heavy muzzle and roared down at him as he passed below. In the center of one street he passed a circle of blackness—a hole of nothingness that showed, not the level below, but a spatial distortion on which the human eye was not equipped to focus. No cars were running—Complex Transportation must have been as inactive or powerless as Internal Weather—but occasionally Paul saw other people, alone, on foot, and at some distance. None of them stayed to talk when they saw him coming, but hurried off rapidly.

Life was rapidly taking over Paul's body. He had started the heart early. By the time he reached the concourse his temperature was at ninety-six and a fraction of a degree, pulse and respiration almost normal. He could have walked it, but he waited until he actually reached the entrance to the North Tower of the hotel before he put his feet to the ground.

He walked into a dim-lit lobby illuminated only by emergency lighting, and empty of guests. A white face stared at him from well back of the desk counter. It was the clerk with the elegant longhand. Paul paid him no attention, but walked on around the corner to the elevators.

These, being a balanced system running on stored power, had been unaffected by the obvious curtailment of services otherwise. Silently, gently, efficiently, as if the human race were already dead and only a mechani-cal duty remained, the disks floated one after another in regular, spaced intervals, up and down the transparent tubes of their shafts. Paul stepped onto a disk ascending the up shaft.

He slid smoothly up, past a succession of empty hallways, barely lighted by the red emergency light above the door to the stairs on each level. Only once did he see someone. That was in passing the ninth level. It was a woman—a young woman, almost a girl. At the sight of him passing up the elevator tube, she turned hastily and ducked into a doorway.

He went on up.

The twelfth level of the hotel, in contrast to the rest of the world Paul had seen that night, was fully lighted. Its illumination seemed almost garish in contrast to the surrounding dark. But no one stirred about its corridor, either. More than this, Paul received from the closed doors he passed an impression of darkness and emptiness beyond, as if suite 1243 toward which he walked was the only space with life within it on this bright level.

When he turned a last corner of the corridor and approached 1243, he saw its door was ajar. It stood three-quarters of the way rolled back into its wall socket, and the sound of a voice came audibly through the opening.

The voice was that of Kirk Tyne.

. . . your blind spot, he was saying. That's what I can't understand, Walt. A man of your intelligence who thinks the present can be changed in the present, without going back and altering the predisposing factors of the past. And so you let loose this madness on the world.

Paul stopped just short of the entrance. He had heard this argument from Tyne before, at the tune when Tyne had taken him onto the World Engineer's personal staff. Now it struck Paul as interesting to know what Blunt's answer to it would be.

You've sold your birthright for a mess of circuits, answered Blunt's voice. You don't think, Kirk. You parrot what the Supe tells you. If the past can't be changed, the present must. For the future's sake.

Will you use a little logic? asked Tyne. I tell you the present cannot be changed without changing the past. Even the Supe, with all its stored knowledge, wouldn't be able to calculate the ultimate possibilities of a single insect's life pattern being altered in the past. And that's the easier way. What you're trying here, now, tonight, is the harder.

Kirk, said Blunt's voice. You're a fool. The predisposing factors leading up to this hour have been laid and set up for centuries now. All that's necessary for us is to recognize them and use them.

I tell you that's not true!

Because your Supe . . . Blunt was beginning, with hard irony forming a cutting edge to his resonant voice, when Paul stirred himself again. He stepped forward, entered the doorway, and walked into the main lounge of what was probably one of the best suites the Koh-i-Nor had to offer its guests.

Around this large room seven people stood in tableau. Close and on Paul's left was Kantele. Just beyond her, half turned away from the entrance, was Blunt, an odd tall hat on his head and a heavy black cape with purple facings rippling down from his wide shoulders. Beyond Blunt stood Burton McLeod, who of all seven showed the least concern, and Jase, also in cape and hat. His back to the blue curtains closed across the wide, far window wall of the room opposite the door, stood Eaton White, like a small, colorless silhouette. To White's left, on the opposite side of the room, stood the Koh-i-Nor Hotel's security agent, James Butler. But the bizarre touch was upon him, too. He wore the all-black jumper and slacks of one of the better-known marching societies, an outfit that left only face and hands whitely exposed; and in one of those white hands, he held a slim, lethal police handgun which had had its front sight removed. In place of the sight gleamed a small, blue metal cross.

He and McLeod stood across from each other with perhaps a dozen feet of carpet between them. The police handgun casually covered the chest of McLeod, and both men stood untensely, but as if aware of no others in the room besides themselves.

Closest of all, on Paul's right, stood Tyne. He faced the half-turned-away Blunt, and so was, like the colorless and motionless Eaton White, the first to see Paul as he entered. The sudden widening of his eyes made Blunt check his speech. The rest all turned, even Butler and McLeod. And Kantele gasped. They, all except Blunt, stood like people who witness a basic violation of the natural laws by which they have lived all their lives.

But Blunt leaned upon the straight silver knob of a new walking stick and smiled. As perhaps the Athenian pole-march Callimachus smiled on that day in late September, twenty-five hundred and forty years previous, on seeing in the cool bright sunlight between clouds, the dust of his reinforced Greek wings close in on the Persian horde on the plain of Marathon.

You're a little early, not too much, he said, looking at Paul. Kirk here hasn't quite been softened up enough yet. But come on in—myself.

And Paul, walking into the suite, seeing Blunt full and clearly face on for the first time, saw indeed—himself.

Chapter

Paul strode into the suite. The eyes of all of them were fixed on him, but none showed more shattering from the blow than the blue eyes of Kantele. For, of course, she alone of them all had felt it from the beginning, even though she would not admit it to herself. It was the reason she had been so drawn to Paul, and bad denied being drawn so fiercely. Paul had not blamed her then; and understanding as he did now, he blamed her less. Even for him, as he stopped, facing Blunt from the distance of a few feet, the experience had its unnatural elements.

To those standing watching, he knew, it must be worse. For it was not a physical resemblance that he shared with Walter Blunt. They were both tall, wide-shouldered, long-boned, with strong facial features. But there the similarity of the flesh ceased. Their common identity was all the more jolting to the emotions because it was a matter of nonphysical duplications. They should not have looked alike. But they did.

It was weirdly as if the same man wore two different costumes and disguises. The surface appearances were totally different, but identically the same way of standing, the same balance of movement, the same mannerisms and attitudes, glowed through the outer shells like the same candle-flame through two differently ornamented lanterns.

You understand, said Blunt conversationally to Paul, why I've dodged you all this time?

Of course, said Paul.

At that, Kirk Tyne finally found his voice again. And a note that rang clearly in it witnessed to the fact that for the first time the World Engineer was seriously shaken in his convictions.

What kind of unnatural devil-thing is this, Walt? he burst out.

It's a long story, said Blunt. He still leaned on his cane, examining Paul almost the way a connoisseur might examine a particularly valued work of art But that's what I brought you here to hear, Kirk.

Kirk glanced from Paul to Blunt and back, as if magnetically attracted against his will.

I don't believe it, he said.

Neither the world nor I, answered Blunt, without shifting his gaze off Paul, will care what you think after tonight, Kirk.

Satan! said a voice. Those in the room, including Paul and Blunt, all looked. It was James Butler, the hotel agent, and he was lifting the gun in his hand. The blue cross on the end of its barrel centered on Paul, wavered, and swung over to point at Blunt Denier of God.

Something black flickered through the air of the room. There was the sound of a soft impact, and Butler staggered and dropped the gun from his suddenly limp grasp. The polished haft of a leaf-shaped, hiltless knife stood out from the muscles of the agent's shoulder. McLeod came walking calmly across the room. He bent to scoop up the gun and tucked it into his waistband, and then taking hold of Butler's shoulder with his left hand, he pulled out the knife with his right. He pulled a self-adjusting pressure bandage from his pocket, put it around Butler's shoulder to cover the wound, and lifted the crippled arm across Butler's chest into the grasp of Butler's other arm.

Hold that, he said. Butler looked at him. The agent had not made a sound. McLeod went back to his position beyond Blunt.

Now, asked Kirk, out of a white face, you sick your hoods on me, and decent people?

You call that fanatic decent? asked Blunt, nodding at the blackclad Butler. How decent would he have been if he'd shot me, or Paul? As he would have, if Burt hadn't stopped him.

It makes no difference, said Kirk. Before their eyes, with a remarkable effort of will, they saw the man pull himself together. He repeated himself more calmly. It makes no difference. None of this makes any difference. There are still only sixty thousand of you. That's not enough to wreck the world.

Kirk, said Blunt, you know I enjoy arguing with you. You make such a fine straight man.

The credit goes to you as the comic, said Kirk, dryly.

Now, that's more like it, said Blunt, nodding his head thoughtfully. You see, Kirk, I want to break you. If I can get you nicely broken, I can enlist you in tearing this civilization up by the roots and get it done twice as fast. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste tune talking with you like this.

I assure you, said Kirk, I don't feel the least bit broken.

You aren't supposed to—yet, said Blunt.

All I see so far, said Kirk, is a series of adult-scale Halloween tricks.

For example? asked Blunt. Paul, here?

Kirk glanced at Paul and for a moment hesitated.

I don't believe in the supernatural, he said.

Nor do I, said Blunt. I believe in the Alternate Laws. Under their power, I created Paul. Didn't I, Paul?

No, said Paul. Creation isn't that easy.

I beg your pardon, said Blunt. Let me put it this way then—I built you. I brought you to life. How much do you remember?

I remember dying, said Paul. I remember a tall figure wearing the cape and hat you're wearing now, who brought me back to life.

Not brought you back, said Blunt. The real Paul Formain is dead—you knew that?

I know it now, said Paul. I investigated.

I had tracers on a number of youngsters like him for over fifteen years, said Blunt, waiting for an opportunity. Odds were with me. Sooner or later one was bound to die under convenient conditions.

You could have rescued him from that sailboat while he was still alive, said Paul.

I could have, said Blunt. He looked squarely at Paul. I think you know why I wouldn't do such a thing. I got to him in time for the moment of his death. I got several cells from his body, living cells. Under the powers of the Alternate Laws, I regrew from each of those cells a living body.

More? ejaculated Kirk, staring in something like horror at Paul. Blunt shook his head.

Living, he said, but not alive, any more than the dying body I took them from was alive in the true sense. The conscious personality of a living human being is something more than an arithmetical total of the consciousness of its parts. He gazed at Paul for a second without speaking, then said slowly, Under the Alternate Laws I sparked his life with a portion of my own.

There was a silence in the room, so complete that it seemed that for a moment everyone there had ceased breathing.

I made another me, said Blunt. His body, his memories, his skills were those that belonged to the boy who had just died. But in essence, he was me.

In one essence, corrected Paul, I was you.

The most important essence, then, said Blunt. That was why your body wouldn't take an arm graft. Your body's cells had used up their ability to make large adjustments and repairs in forming you.

He has two arms now, said Kirk.

This isn't the original body I started him in, said Blunt. I assume he had to leave the first one on New Earth? He looked inquiringly at Paul.

By your cane, said Paul.

Yes, said Blunt. That cane.

What cane? asked Kirk.

The cane that killed Malorn, said Paul. He gazed with a still face at Blunt. The cane with which he killed Malorn.

No, said McLeod, from behind Blunt. I did it. It took someone who knew how to handle it like a single-stick. Walt just twisted the Alternate Laws to let me do it.

But why? cried Kirk. Murder, canes, New Earth!

I don't understand. He stared. To educate Paul in———

He broke off.

You're breaking very nicely, Kirk, said Blunt, turning his head briefly toward the World Engineer and then coming back as always to look at Paul. You see how little you know? Even your Supe didn't inform you that it had used the accelerator down in its guts to ship Paul off to a planet circling Sinus and its companion star. Ill tell you the rest now and we'll see how you stand up to it. He nodded at the curtained window. Open that, he said to Eaton White.

The colorless little man hesitated.

Go ahead, said Kirk, harshly.

White reached in among the folds of the curtains, and down. They drew back revealing a wall-wide window above a low ledge about two feet high.

All the way, said Blunt.

White reached and pressed again. The whole window slid down into and through the ledge. The hot air of the steamy night outside welled into the conditioned coolness of the room.

Look! said Blunt. Listen out there. He pointed with his stick at the bulking darkness of the Complex outside, lighted here and there dimly. On the hot still air came the sound of chanting, the Hey-ha! Hey-ha! of a marching society. And from closer by, out of sight somewhere twelve stories below the window ledge, came a long drawn-out howl from something human that had gone a long ways back toward the animal.

Look, said Blunt. Turning, he threw his cane out the window. Wheeling, spinning about the axis of its center point, the two rotating ends blurred themselves into scalloped, raking wings. The center acquired a rodent body, and a bat-shape instead of what had been a stick beat upward blackly against the dim glow of the Complex, turned and swooped back, gliding into the room to end up a stick in Blunt's hand again.

Sixty thousand, you said, said Blunt to Kirk. The unstable groups, organizations, and elements in this world of ours total nearly one-fifth the world population. For forty years the Chantry Guild has primed them for this moment of final breakdown. One-fifth of the world is out of its senses tonight, Kirk.

No, said Kirk. I don't believe it. No, Walt.

Yes, Kirk. Blunt leaned on his cane again. His dark eyes under the eaves of his aging eyebrows bored in on the other man. For centuries now you and your kind kept the hound of Unreason chained and locked away from the world. Now we've set him loose again—loose for good. From now on, there'll be no certainty to existence. From now on there'll always be the possibility that the invariable laws won't work. Reason and past experience and the order of the community will fail as guides, and the individual will be left with nothing to anchor to, only himself.

It won't work, said Kirk. Those streets out there are mostly empty. We moved too fast for you, my staff and the Super-Complex. Lack of light, lack of comfort, lack of services—people are hiding in their rooms now, because we forced them there. They can only hide so long; then the basic needs—hunger, reaction against boredom—will take over. They'll come out in the daylight and see how little your Halloween tricks have changed the essential structure of their lives. They'll adjust and learn to live with the necessarily small percentage of your magic in the same way they live with the small possibilities of other freak accidents or being struck by lightning.

You moved too fast! said Blunt You only reacted with all the fine obedience of one of your machines. The streets are dark because I wanted them that way. The heat is driving people to huddle apart from each other, alone with their fears, each in his own room, because these are the best breeding grounds for Unreason. Tonight is not something to which people can become accustomed, it's only the first battle in a war that will go on and on, waged with new weapons, fought in different ways, waged on altering battlefields, until you and your kind are destroyed.

Blunt's hard old jaw lifted.

Until the final moment of destruct! His voice rang through the room and out into the night. Until Man is forced to stand without his crutches. Until his leg irons are struck off him and the bars he has built around him are torn down and thrown away! Until he stands upright and alone, free—free in all his questioning, wandering spirit, with the knowledge that in all existence there are only two things: himself, and the malleable universe!

Blunt's heavy shoulders swayed forward over the cane on which he leaned, almost as if he was about to leap on Kirk Tyne where he stood. The World Engineer did not retreat before Blunt's words, or that movement, but he seemed to have shrunk slightly and his voice was a trifle hoarse when he answered.

I'm not going to give in to you, Walt, he said. I'll fight you to the bitter end. Until one of us is dead.

Then you've lost already, said Blunt, and his voice was almost wild. Because I'm going on forever. He pointed aside at Paul. Let me introduce you, Kirk, to a younger, stronger, greater man than yourself, and the continuing head of the Chantry Guild.

He stopped speaking, and as the sound of his voice ceased, a sudden violent silence like summer sheet lightning flashed across the room. On the heels of it came an abrupt, instinctive, inarticulate cry from Jase.

No, said Paul, it's all right, Jase. The Guild will go to you. My job is something different.

They stared at him.

Something different? asked Blunt, dryly. What is it you think you're going to do?

Paul smiled at him and at the others a little sadly.

Something brutal and unfair to you all, he said. I'm going to do nothing.

Chapter

For a moment they merely looked back at him. But in that moment something inevitable, and not at all unique, happened. It has taken place before at gatherings that those present arrange themselves in a social pattern oriented around the strong point of one individual present. Then, something is said or something takes place. And suddenly, though none present have made an actual movement, the strong point is displaced to a different individual. The pattern reorients itself, and though nothing physical has happened, the emotional effect of the reorientation is felt by everyone in the room.

So with Paul, at that moment. He had reached out and touched the pattern, and like one drop melting into another, abruptly he was the focus for the emotional relationships in the room, where Blunt had been, a moment before.

He met Blunt's eyes across the little distance that separated them. And Blunt looked back, without expression, and without speaking. He leaned still on his cane, as if nothing had taken place. But Paul felt the sudden massive alertness of Blunt's genius swinging to bear completely on him, in the beginnings of a recognition of what Paul was.

Nothing? asked Jase, breaking the silence. Sudden alarm for the Chantry Guild, in this breakdown of what-ever Blunt had planned for it, was obvious upon Jase, obvious even to others in the room besides Paul.

Because, said Paul, if I do nothing, you'll all go your separate ways. The Chantry Guild will continue and grow. The technical elements in civilization will continue and grow. So will the marching societies and the cult groups. So —Paul's eyes, ranging backward in the room, met for a moment with Burton McLeod's— will other elements.

You want that to happen? challenged Tyne. You?

I think it's necessary, said Paul, turning to the World Engineer. The time has come when mankind must fragment so that his various facets may develop fully and unaffected by other facets nearby. As you yourself know, the process has already started. Paul looked over at Blunt. A single strong leader, said Paul, could halt this process temporarily—only temporarily, because there would be no one of his stature to replace him when he was dead—but even in temporarily halting it, he could do permanent damage to later development of fragments he didn't favor.

Paul looked back at Kirk. There was something like horror on Kirk's face.

But you're saying you're against Walt! stammered Kirk. You've been against him all along.

Perhaps, said Paul, a little unhappily, in a sense. It'd be kinder to say that I haven't been for anyone, including Walt.

Kirk stared at him for a moment, still with an expression varying from shock almost to repugnance.

But why? Kirk burst out finally. Why?

That, said Paul, is a little hard to explain, I'm afraid. Perhaps you might understand it if I used hypnosis as an example. After Walt first brought that last body of mine to consciousness, I had quite a period in which I didn't really know who I was. But a number of things used to puzzle me. Among them the fact that I couldn't be hypnotized.

The Alternate Laws——— began Jase, from back in the room.

No, said Paul. I think someday you Chantry people are going to discover something to which your Alternate Laws bear the same relation alchemy does to modern chemistry. I couldn't be hypnotized because the lightest form of hypnosis requires the giving up of a certain portion of the identity, just as does really complete unconsciousness, and this is impossible to me. He looked around at all of them. Because, having experienced a shared identity with Walt, it was inevitable that I should come to the capability of sharing the identity of any other human with whom I came in contact.

They all looked back at him. With the exception of Blunt, he saw, they had not fully understood.

I'm talking about understanding, he said, patiently. I've been able to share identities with all of you, and what I've found is that each one of you projects a valid form of the future of human society. But a form in which the others would emerge as stunted personalities if they managed to live in it at all. I can't further any one of these futures, because they'll all be coming into existence.

All? asked Kirk, just as, at the same moment, Jase also asked, All?

You, yourself, were aware of the situation, Kirk, said Paul. As you told me yourself, society is going through a necessary stage of fragmentation. It's only a matter of time, now, until a medication is devised that makes Springboard's work into the basis of a practical transportation system. As people spread out to the stars, the fragmentation will be carried further.

He stopped speaking to let that point sink in.

None of you, said Paul, should be wasting time fighting each other. You should be busy hunting up your own kind of people and working with them toward your own separate future.

He paused, to give them a chance, this time, to answer.

No one seemed disposed to do so. And then, from perhaps the most unexpected quarter, came the protest.

There's no reason to believe any of this, said Eaton White, in his thick, dry voice from beside the open window.

Of course not, said Paul reasonably. If you disbelieve me, you only have to have the courage of your convictions and ignore what I've said. He looked around at them all. Certainly you don't believe I'm trying to talk you into anything? All I want to do is step out of the picture and go my own way, and I should think the rest of you would want to do likewise.

He turned back to meet Blunt's eyes.

After all, he said, this has been a transition period in history, as Kirk has, no doubt, often told other people besides myself. It's been a time of stress and strain, and in such times things tend to become dramatic. Actually, each generation likes to think of itself as at the pivot point in history, that in its time the great decision is made which puts man either on the true road or the false. But things aren't really that serious. Truthfully, the way of mankind is too massive to be kinked, suddenly; it only changes direction in a long and gradual bend over many generations.

Paul turned to the World Engineer.

Kirk, he said, as I say, I'm not trying to convince anyone. But certainly you can see I'm talking sense?

Kirk Tyne's head came up with decision.

Yes, he said sharply, I can. He looked at Blunt and back to Paul. Everything you say makes sense. Everybody has one person who can put the Indian sign on them. With me it's always been Walt. He turned to Blunt. Because I always admired you, Walt. I wanted to believe in you. And as a result you were able to con me into thinking that the world was upside down and just about to be inside out. It took someone with his feet on the ground, like Paul here, to bring me back to Earth. Of course, our centuries-old technical civilization wasn't the sort of thing that could be hoodooed out of existence by black magic overnight. But you almost had me thinking it could.

He stepped up to Paul and held out his hand. Paul took it.

Everybody owes you a lot, said Kirk, shaking Paul's hand. But I, most of all. I want you to know I haven't any doubts where you're concerned. I'll get the services back in action immediately. Come on, Eat. He turned to Blunt, hesitated, shook his head, and turning away again, walked toward the door. Blunt smiled grimly after him.

Eaton White came forward from his position at the window. As he passed by Paul, he hesitated, turned to Paul, and opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he turned and went on out, after Kirk. Jase followed.

Jim, said Paul gently, looking across at the black-clad hotel agent, still holding his helpless arm across his chest with his other hand, you probably have responsibilities calling.

Butler snapped his head around at the sound of his first name like a man coming out of a dream. His eyes were like gun-muzzles trained on Paul.

Yes, he interrupted. Responsibilities. But not the sort you think. You've been the instrument of a revelation to me—the revelation of the New Jerusalem. The future may hold more than many think.

He turned and walked upright away, still holding his arm, until he passed through the door, and turning, vanished.

Good-by, Walt, said a voice. Paul and Kantele turned to see that McLeod had come up and put his hand on Blunt's shoulder. Blunt, still leaning on his cane, turned his face sideways toward that hand.

You, too? he asked a little huskily.

You'll be all right, Walt, said McLeod. Truth is, I've been thinking of it for some time.

For the last six weeks—I know, said Blunt with a wolf's grin. No, no, go on, Burt. There's nothing to stay here for now, anyway.

Burt squeezed the caped shoulder, looked across it compassionately at Paul, and went toward the door. The three who were left watched him out in silence.

When Burt had gone, Blunt swung about a little on his cane and looked sardonically at Paul.

Do I have to love you, too? he asked.

No, said Paul. No, of course not! I wouldn't ask that.

Then, damn you, said Blunt. Damn you and may you rot in hell until judgment day!

Paul smiled sadly.

You won't tell me why? asked Blunt.

If I could, said Paul, I would. But it's a matter of language. I don't have words for you. He hesitated. You could take it on faith.

Yes, said Blunt, suddenly and heavily as if the strength had gone out of him. I could take it on faith, if I were bigger. He straightened up suddenly and looked with a deep, penetrating curiosity at Paul.

Empath, he said. I should have suspected it sooner. But where did the talent come from?

From your plans for me, said Paul. I told the truth. It's a high wall that separates the inner parts of one identity from the inner being of another. From having the experience of no wall between you and me, I could learn to tear down the walls between myself and all others.

But why? said Blunt. Why would you want to?

Paul smiled again.

Partly, he said, because unlimited power or strength is a little like credit. In the beginning it seems that enough of it would do anything. But, when you achieve it, you find that it, too, is limited. There are areas in which it's helpless, like other things. Can you hammer out a roughness in a delicate piece of carved jade?

Blunt shook his head.

I don't see how it applies, he said.

It's just that I have some things in common, said Paul. And Kirk was very nearly right. It's not possible to change the future except by changing the present And the only way to change the present is to return to the past and change that.

Return? asked Blunt. Change? Blunt's eyes had lost their earlier hardness. They were now fully alive. He leaned on his cane and looked directly at Paul. Who could change the past?

Perhaps, said Paul, someone with intuition.

Intuition?

Yes. Someone, Paul said, who could see a tree in a garden. And who knew that if that tree were to be cut down, then some years in time and some light-years in distance away, another man's life would be changed. A man, say, who has conscious intuitive process and can immediately realize all the end possibilities of an action the moment he considers it. Someone like that could step back into time, perhaps, and make changes without risk of error.

Blunt's face was perfectly still.

You aren't me, at all, Blunt said. You never were me. I think it was you who animated Paul Formain's body, not me at all. Who are you?

Once, said Paul, I was a professional soldier.

And an Intuit? asked Blunt. And now an Empath as well? His voice was a little harsh. What next?

An identity, said Paul slowly, needs to be a dynamic, not a static, quantity. If it is static, it becomes helpless within the pattern of its existence. This is a lesson man eventually will have to learn. But if it is dynamic, it may direct its existence as a mining machine is directed, through the otherwise impassable fusion of rocky elements known as reality. From being dominated and imprisoned by them, it can pass to dominating and making use of them, and with its existence plow through, pulverize, and handle reality until it separates out those uniquely real and valuable parts of it which the identity wishes to make its own.

Blunt nodded, slowly, like an old man. It was not clear whether he had understood and was agreeing, or whether he had given up the attempt to understand and was merely being agreeable.

They all would have their futures, he said. That's what you told them, wasn't it? He stopped nodding and looked at Paul for the first time with eyes that were a little faded. But not me.

Of course, you, said Paul. Yours was the greatest vision, and simply the one furthest from realization, that was all.

Blunt nodded again.

Not, he said, in my lifetime. No.

I'm sorry, said Paul. No.

Yes, said Blunt. He took a deep breath and straightened up. I had plans for you, he said. Plans rooted in ignorance. I had everything set up for you. He glanced at Kantele. It was almost like having a——— He checked himself, threw back his head, and took a firmer grip on his cane. I planned to retire after tonight, anyway.

He started to turn away. As he turned, he stooped a little. He hesitated and looked back at Kantele. I don't suppose. . . . No, he said, interrupting himself. He straightened up once again, so straight the cane merely brushed the surface of the rug underfoot. He threw back his shoulders and for a moment towered in the room, as if he were young again.

It's been an education, he said, and saluted Paul with the cane. Turning, he strode out. Behind his back, Kantele made a little gesture after him with her hands, and then let her hands and gaze drop. She stood, her head bent, her eyes on the carpet at her feet, like a maiden, captive to the stranger's bow and spear.

Paul looked at her.

You love him, he said.

Always. Very much, she said, almost inaudibly, not looking up.

Then you're a fool to stay, he said.

She did not answer that. But after a moment she spoke again, uncertainly, her gaze still on the carpet.

You could be mistaken, she said.

No, said Paul; and she did not see the centuries-old pain that came into his eyes as he said it. I never make mistakes.