But enough about Mathias. He was perfect in his emptiness and his belief that the younger worlds had already left us of Earth behind them to dwindle and die, like any dead limb or atrophied part. But neither Eileen nor I could match him in that cold philosophy, for all we tried as children. So, each in our own way, we fought to escape from him and it; and our escape routes brought us, that day, together to the Exotic Enclave at St. Louis, and the Final Encyclopedia.
We took a shuttle flight from Athens to St. Louis and the subway from St. Louis to the Enclave. An airbus took us to the Encyclopedia courtyard; and I remember that, somehow, I was last off the bus. As I stepped to the circle of concrete, it struck again, that deep, sudden gong-note of feeling inside me. I stopped dead, like a man struck into a trance.
“-Pardon me?” said a voice behind me. “You’re part of the tour, aren’t you? Will you join the rest over here? I’m your guide.”
I turned sharply, and found myself looking down into the brown eyes of a girl in the blue robes of an Exotic. She stood there, as fresh as the sunlight about her-but something in her did not match.
“You’re not an Exotic!” I said suddenly. No more she was. The Exotic-born have their difference plain about them. Their faces are more still than other people’s. Their eyes look more deeply into you. They are like Gods of Peace who sit always with one hand on a sleeping thunderbolt they do not seem to know is there.
“I’m a co-worker,” she answered. “Lisa Kant’s my name.-And you’re right. I’m not a born Exotic.” She did not seem bothered by my penetrating her difference from the robe she wore. She was shorter than my sister, who was tall-as I am tall- for a man from Earth. Eileen was silver-blond, while, even then, my hair was dark. It was the same color as hers when our parents died; but it darkened over the years in Mathias’ house. But this girl, Lisa, was brown-haired, pretty and smiling. She intrigued me with her good looks and Exotic robes-and she net-tied me a little as well. She seemed so certain of herself.
I watched her, therefore, as she went about round-ing up the other people who were waiting for the guided tour through the Encyclopedia; and once the tour itself was underway, I fell into step beside her and got her talking to me, between lecture spots.
She showed no hesitation in speaking about herself. She had been born in the North American Midwest, just outside of St. Louis, she told me. She had gone to primary and secondary schools in the Enclave and became convinced of the Exotic philosophies. So she had adopted their work and their ways. I thought it seemed like a waste of a girl as attractive as herself-and bluntly I told her so.
“How can I be wasting myself,” she said, smiling at me, “when I’m using my energies to the full this way-and for the best purposes?”
I thought that perhaps she was laughing at me. I did not like that-even in those days, I was no one to laugh at.
“What best purposes?” I asked as brutally as I could. “Contemplating your navel?”
Her smile went away and she looked at me strangely, so strangely that I always remembered that look, afterward.
It was as if she had suddenly become aware of me-as of someone floating and adrift in a night time sea beyond the firm rock shore on which she stood. And she reached out with her hand, as if she would touch me, then dropped her hand again, as if suddenly remembering where we were.
* ‘We are always here,” she answered me, strangely. “Remember that. We are always here.”
She turned away and led us on through the spread-out complex of structures that was the Encyclopedia. These, once moved into space, she said, speaking to us all now as she led us on, would fold together to form a roughly spherical shape, in orbit a hundred and fifty miles above the Earth’s surface. She told us what a vast expense it would be to move the structure into orbit like that, as one unit. Then she explained how, expensive as this was, the cost was justified by the savings during the first hundred years of construction and information-charging, which could be done more economically here on the ground.
For the Final Encyclopedia, she said, was not to be just a storehouse of feet. It would store facts, but only as a means to an end-that end being the establishment and discovery of relationships between those facts. Each knowledge item was to be linked to other knowledge items by energy pulses holding the code of the relationship, until these interconnections were carried to the fullest extent possible. Until, finally, the great interconnected body of man’s information about himself and his universe would begin to show its shape as a whole, in a way man had never been able to observe it before.
At this point, Earth would then have in the Encyclopedia a mighty stockpile of immediately available, interrelated information about the human race and its history. This could be traded for the hard science knowledge of worlds like Venus and Newton, for the psychological sciences of the Exotic Worlds-and all the other specialized information of the younger worlds that Earth needed. By this alone, in a multi-world human culture in which the currency between worlds was itself the trading of skilled minds, the Encyclopedia would eventually pay for itself.
But the hope that had led Earth to undertake its building was for more than mis. It was Earth’s hope-the hope of all the people of Earth, except for such as Mathias, who had given up all hope-that the true payment from the Encyclopedia would come from its use as a tool to explore Mark Torre’s theory.
And Torre’s theory, as we all should know, was a theory which postulated that there was a dark area in Man’s knowledge of himself, an area where man’s vision had always failed, as the viewing of any perceptive device fails in the blind area where it, itself, exists. Into man’s blind area, Torre theorized, the Final Encyclopedia would be able to explore by inference, from the shape and body of total known knowledge. And in that area, said Torre, we would find something-a quality, ability or strength-in the basic human stock of Earth that was theirs alone, something which had been lost or was not available to the human splinter types on the younger worlds that now seemed to be fast out-stripping our parent breed in strength of body or mind.
Hearing all this, for some reason I found myself remembering the strange look and odd words of Lisa to me earlier. I looked around the strange and crowded rooms, where everything from heavy construction to delicate laboratory work was going on, as we passed; and the odd, dread-like feeling began to come back on me. It not only came back, it stayed and grew, until it was a sort of consciousness, a feeling as if the whole Encyclopedia had become one mighty living organism, with me at its center.
I fought against it, instinctively; for what I had always wanted most in life was to be free-to be swallowed by nothing, human or mechanical. But still it grew on me; and it was still growing as we came at last to the Index Room, which in space would be at the Encyclopedia’s exact center.
The room was in the shape of a huge globe so vast that, as we entered it, its farther wall was lost in dimness, except for the faint twinkling of firefly lights that signaled the establishment of new facts and associations of fact within the sensitive recording fabric of its inner surface, that endless surface curving about us which was at once walls, ceiling and floor.
The whole reaching interior of this enormous spherical room was empty; but cantilevered ramps led out and up from the entrances to the room, stretching in graceful curves to a circular platform poised in the midst of the empty space, at the exact center of the chamber.
It was up one of these ramps that Lisa led us now until we came to the platform, which was perhaps twenty feet in diameter.
“… Here, where we’re now standing,” said Lisa as we halted on the platform, “is what will be known as the Transit Point. In space, all connections will be made not only around the walls of the Index Room, but also through this central point. And it’s from this central point that those handling the Encyclopedia then will try to use it according to Mark Torre’s theory, to see if they can uncover the hidden knowledge of our Earth-human minds.”