-Abruptly, I was back in the office of Mark Torre.
Mark, his aging face set like wood, stared at me. Whitefaced, Lisa also stared in my direction. But, directly before me, Padma sat looking into my eyes with no more expression than he had shown before.
“No,” he said, slowly. “You’re right, Tarn. You can’t be any help here on the Encyclopedia.”
There was a faint sound from Lisa, a little gasp, almost a tiny cry of pain. But it was drowned in a grunt from Mark Tbrre, like the grunt of a mortally wounded bear, cornered at last, but turning to raise up on his hind legs and face his attackers.
“Can’t?” he said. He had straightened up behind his desk and now he turned to Padma. His swollen right hand was cramped into a great, gray fist on the table. “He must-he has to be! It’s been twenty years since anyone heard anything in the Index Room-and I’m getting old!”
“All he heard was the voices; and they touched no special spark in him. You felt nothing when you touched him,” said Padma. He spoke softly and distantly, the words coming out one by one, like soldiers marching under orders. “It’s because there’s nothing there. No identity in him with his fellow-man. He has all the machinery, but no empathy-no power source hooked to it.”
“You can fix him! Damn it”-the old man’s voice rang like a steeple bell, but it was hoarse to the point of tears-“on the Exotics you can heal him!” Padma shook his head.
“No,” he said. “No one can help him but himself. He’s not ill or crippled. He’s only railed to develop. Once, some time when he was young, he must have turned away from people into some dark, solitary valley of his own, and over the years that valley’s grown deeper and darker and more narrow, until now no one can get down there beside him to help him through it. No other mind could go through it and survive-maybe even his can’t. But until he does and comes out the other end, he’s no good to you or the Encyclopedia; and all it represents for men on Earth and elsewhere. Not only is he no good, he wouldn’t take your job if you offered it to him. Look at him.”
The pressure of his gaze all this time, the low, steady utterance of his words, like small stones dropped one after the other into a calm, but bottomless pool of water, had held me paralyzed even while he talked about me as if I were not there. But with his last three words, the pressure from him let up; and I found myself free to speak.
“You hypnotized me!” I flung at him. “I didn’t give you any permission to put me under-to psychoanalyze me!”
Padma shook his head.
“No one hypnotized you,” he answered. “I just opened a window for you to your own inner awareness. And I didn’t psychoanalyze you.”
“Then what was it-” I checked myself, abruptly wary.
“Whatever you saw and felt,” he said, “were your own awarenesses and feelings translated into your own symbols. And what those were IVe no idea- and no way of rinding out, unless you tell me.”
“Then how did you make up your mind to whatever it was you decided here?” I snarled at him.
“You decided it fast enough. How’d you find out whatever it was made you decide?”
“From you,” he answered. “Your looks, your actions, your voice as you talk to me now. A dozen other unconscious signals. These tell me, Tarn. A human being communicates with his whole body and being, not just his voice, or his facial expression.”
“I don’t believe it!” I flared-and then my fury suddenly cooled as caution came on me with the certainty that indeed there must be grounds, even if I could not figure them out at the moment, for my not believing it. “I don’t believe it,” I repeated, more calmly and coldly. “There had to be more going into your decision than that.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. I had a chance to check the records here. Your personal history, like that of everyone Earthborn who’s alive at this moment, is already in the Encyclopedia. I looked at that before I came in.”
“More,” I said grimly, for I felt I had him on the run now. “There was more to it even than that. I can tell. I know it!”
“Yes,” answered Padma and breathed out softly. “Having been through this much, you’d know it, I suppose. In any case, you’d learn it soon enough by yourself.” He lifted his eyes to focus squarely on mine, but this time I found myself facing him without any feeling of inferiority.
“It happens, Tarn,” he said, “that you’re what we call an Isolate, a rare pivotal force in the shape of a single individual-a pivotal force in the evolving pattern of human society, not just on Earth, but on all the sixteen worlds, in their road to Man’s future.
You’re a man with a terrible capability for affecting that future-for good or ill.”
At his words my hands remembered the feel of their grasp on the lightning; and I waited, holding my breath to hear more. But he did not go on.
“And-” I prompted harshly, at last.
“There is no ‘and,’ ” said Padma. “That’s all there is to it. Have you ever heard of ontogenetics?”
I shook my head.
* ‘It’s a name for one of our Exotic calculative techniques,” he said. “Briefly, there’s a continually evolving pattern of events in which all living human beings are caught up. In mass, the strivings and desires of these individuals determine the direction of growth of the pattern into the ftiture. But, again as individuals only, nearly all people are more acted upon, than act effectively upon the pattern.”
He paused, staring at me, as if asking me if I had understood him so far. I had understood-oh, I had understood. But I would not let him know that.
“Go on,” I said.
“Only now and then, in the case of some rare individual,” he continued, “do we find a particular combination of factors-of character and the individual’s position within the pattern-that combined make him inconceivably more effective than his fellows. When this happens, as in your case, we have an Isolate, a pivotal character, one who has great freedom to act upon the pattern, while being acted upon only to a relatively small degree, himself.”
He stopped again. And this time he folded his hands. The gesture was final and I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart.
“So,” I said. “I’ve got all this-and still you don’t want me for whatever it is you want me?”
“Mark wants you to take over from him, eventually, as Controller, building the Encyclopedia,” said Padma. “So do we, on the Exotics. For the Encyclopedia is such a device that its full purpose and use, when completed, can only be conceived of by rare individuals; and that conception can only be continually translated into common terms, by a unique individual. Without Mark, or someone like him to see its construction through at least until it is moved into space, the common run of humanity will lose the vision of the Encyclopedia’s capabilities when it’s finished. The work on it will run into misunderstandings and frustrations. It will slow down, finally stall, and then fall apart.”
He paused and looked at me, almost grimly.
“It will never be built,” he said, “unless a successor for Mark is found. And without it, Earth-born man may dwindle and die. And if Earth-born man goes, the human strains of the younger worlds may not be viable. But none of this matters to you, does it? Because it’s you who don’t want us, not the other way around.”
He stared across the room with eyes that burned with a hazel flame against me.
“You don’t want us,” he repeated slowly. “Do you, Tarn?”
I shook off the impact of his gaze. But in the same moment I understood what he was driving at, and knew he was right. In that same moment I had seen myself seated in the chair at the console before me, chained there by a sense of duty for the rest of my days. No, I did not want them, or their works, on Encyclopedia or anywhere else. I wanted none of it.
Had I worked this hard, this long, to escape Ma-thias, only to throw everything aside and become a slave to helpless people-all those in that great mass of the human race who were too weak to fight the lightning for themselves? Should I give up the prospect of my own power and freedom to work for the misty promise of freedom for them, someday-for them, who could not earn that freedom for themselves, as I could earn my own, and had? No, I would not-I would not, I would have no part of them, of Torre or his Encyclopedia!