“Only… voices?” the old man said, half to himself when I was done.
“Why?” I asked, pricked into a little anger. “What was I supposed to hear? What do people usually hear?”
“It’s always different,” put in the voice of Padma soothingly from the side of my vision. But I would not look at him. I kept my eyes on Mark Torre. “Everyone hears different things.”
I turned to Padma at that.
“What did you hear?” I challenged. He smiled a little sadly.
“Nothing, Tarn,” he said.
“Only people who are Earth-born have ever heard anything,” said Lisa sharply, as if I should know this without needing to be told.
“You?” I stared at her.
“Me! Of course not!” she replied. “There’s not half a dozen people since the Project started whoVe ever heard anything.”
“Less than half a dozen?” I echoed.
“Five,” she said. “Mark is one, of course. Of the other four, one is dead and the other three”-she hesitated, staring at me-“weren’t fit.”
There was a different note to her voice that I heard now for the first time. But I forgot it entirely as, abruptly, the figures she had mentioned struck home.
Five people only, in forty years! Like a body blow the message jarred me that what had happened to me in the Index Room was no small thing; and that this moment with Torre and Padma was not small either, for them as well as myself.
“Oh?” I said; and I looked at Torre. With an effort, I made my voice casual. “What does it mean, then, when someone hears something?”
He did not answer me directly. Instead he leaned forward with his dark old eyes beginning to shine brilliantly again, and stretched out the fingers of his large right hand to me.
“Take hold,” he said.
I reached out in my turn and took his hand, feeling his swollen knuckles under my grasp. He gripped my hand hard and held on, staring at me for a long moment, while slowly the brilliance faded and finally went out; and then he let go, sinking back into his chair as if defeated.
“Nothing,” he said dully, turning to Padma. “Still-nothing. You’d think he’d feel something-or I would.”
“Still,” said Padma, quietly, looking at me, “he heard.”
He fastened me to my chair with his hazel-colored Exotic eyes.
“Mark is disturbed, Tarn,” he said, “because what you experienced was only voices, with no overburden of message or understanding.”
“What message?” I demanded. “What kind of understanding?”
“That,” said Padma, “you’d have to tell us.” His glance was so bright on me that I felt uncomfortable, like a bird, an owl, pinned by a searchlight. I felt the hackles of my anger rising in resentment.
“What’s this all got to do with you, anyway?” I asked.
He smiled a little.
“Our Exotic funds,” he said, “bear most of the financial support of the Encyclopedia Project. But you must understand, it’s not our Project. It’s Earth’s. We only feel a responsibility toward all work concerned with the understanding of Man by man, himself. Moreover, between our philosophy and Mark’s there’s a disagreement.”
“Disagreement?” I said. I had a nose for news even then, fresh out of college, and that nose twitched.
But Padma smiled as if he read my mind.
“It’s nothing new,” he said. “A basic disagreement we’ve had from the start. Put briefly, and somewhat crudely, we on the Exotics believe that Man is improvable. Our friend Mark, here, believes that Earth man-Basic Man-is already improved, but hasn’t been able to uncover his improvement yet and use it.”
I stared at him.
“What’s that got to do with me?” I asked. “And with what I heard?”
“It’s a question of whether you can be useful to him-or to us,” answered Padma calmly; and for a second my heart chilled. For if either the Exotics or someone like Mark Tbrre should put in a demand for my contract from the Earth government, I might as well kiss good-bye all hopes of working my way eventually into the News Services Guild.
“Not to either of you-I think,” I said, as indifferently as I could.
“Perhaps. We’ll see,” said Padma. He held up his hand and extended upward his index finger. “Do you see this finger, Tarn?”
I looked at it; and as I looked-suddenly it rushed toward me, growing enormously, blocking out the sight of everything else in the room. For the second time that afternoon, I left the here and now of the real universe for a place of unreality.
Suddenly, I was encompassed by lightnings. I was in darkness but thrown about by lightning strokes-in some vast universe where I was tossed light-years in distance, first this way and then that, as part of some gigantic struggle.
At first I did not understand it, the struggle. Then slowly I woke to the feet that all the lashing of the lightnings was a furious effort for survival and victory in answer to an attempt by the surrounding, ancient, ever-flowing darkness, to quench and kill the lightnings. Nor was this any random battle. Now I saw how there was ambush and defeat, stratagem and tactic, blow and counterblow, between the lightning and the dark.
Then, in that moment, came the memory of the sound of the billions of voices, welling up around me once more in rhythm to the lightnings, to give me the key to what I saw. All at once, in the way a real lightning-flash suddenly reveals in one glimpse all the land for miles around, in a flash of intuition I understood what surrounded me.
It was the centuries-old battle of man to keep his race alive and push forward into the future, the ceaseless, furious struggle of that beastlike, godlike-primitive, sophisticated-savage and civilized-composite organism that was the human race fighting to endure and push onward. Onward, and up, and up again, until the impossible was achieved, all barriers were broken, all pains conquered, all abilities possessed. Until all was lightning and no darkness left.
It was the voices of this continuing struggle down the hundreds of centuries that I had heard in the Index Room. It was this same struggle that the Exotics were attempting to encompass with their strange magics of the psychological and philosophical sciences. This struggle that the Final Encyclopedia was designed at last to chart throughout the past centuries of human existence, so that Man’s path might be calculated meaningfully into his future.
This was what moved Padma, and Mark Torre-and everyone, including myself. For each human being was caught up in the struggling mass of his fellows and could not avoid the battle of life. Each of us living at this moment was involved in it, as its parts and its plaything.
But with that thought, suddenly, I became conscious that I was different, not just a plaything of this battle. I was something more-potentially an involved power in it, a possible lord of its actions. For the first time, then, I laid hands on the lightnings about me and began to try to drive, to turn and direct their movements, forcing them to my own ends and desires.
Still, I was flung about for unguessable distances. But no longer like a ship adrift upon a storm-wrenched sea, now like a ship close-hauled, using the wind to bear to windward. And in that moment for the first time it came upon me-the feeling of my own strength and power. For the lightnings bent at my grasp and their tossing shaped to my will. I felt it-that sensation of unchained power within me that is beyond description; and it came to me at last that indeed I had never been one of the tossed and buffeted ones. I was a rider, a Master. And I had it in me to shape at least part of all I touched in this battle between the lightnings and the dark.
Only then, at last, I became aware of rare others like myself. Like me they were riders and Masters. They, too, rode the storm that was the rest of the struggling mass of the human race. We would be flung together for a second, then torn measureless eons apart in the next moment. But I saw them. And they saw me. And I became conscious of the fact that they were calling to me, calling on me, not to fight for myself alone, but to join with them in some common effort to bring the whole battle to some future conclusion and order out of chaos.
But everything that was inherent in me rebelled against their call. I had been downtrodden and confounded too long.. I had been the lightnings’ helplessly buffeted subject for too long. Now I had won to the wild joy of riding where I had been ridden, and I gloried in my power. I did not want the common effort that might lead at last to peace, but only that the intoxicating whirl and surge and conflict should go on with me, like a fury, riding the breast of it. I had been chained and enslaved by my uncle’s darkness but now I was free and a Master. Nothing should bring me to put on chains again. I stretched out my grasp on the lightnings and felt that grasp move wider and grow stronger, wider and stronger yet.