He lay awake, staring up into the black sky. All desire to sleep had vanished. Now, for the first time since they had left the city of the beetles, he began asking himself what they were trying to achieve. The death had shaken him. Marcus, Yorg, Cyprian, and now Ulic. His whole being was convulsed with a feeling of misery and revolt. It was no use telling himself that their deaths were part of a heroic struggle. They seemed merely a stupid mistake.
The inner turmoil was so acute that he found it hard to lie still. His natural impulse was to get up and walk around; but he knew this would be rash and dangerous. So he concentrated all his will-power on suppressing the desire to move, and forced himself to lie rigid under the blankets.
In the distance he could hear the night cry of some animal, and the crashing of a heavy body through the undergrowth. He reached out cautiously to make sure the Reaper was close beside him, and experienced a sense of comfort as his fingers closed on the point where the butt joined the barrel. Then he seemed to see an image of Doggins destroying the ground squid, and it crystallised his sense of dissatisfaction. For the first time, he understood the curious mixture of shame and delight that he had experienced the first time he handled the Reaper. The delight came from a sense of power. But it was the wrong kind of power.
For a moment, his insight puzzled him. After all, the ground squid was a horrible and dangerous creature; no one could blame Doggins for killing it. Yet there had been no need to destroy it. Doggins had killed it because it aroused in him a feeling of fear and revulsion. He had killed it to exorcise this fear, instead of trying to conquer it with his mind.
The weight of the telescopic rod against his thigh reminded him of the white tower. Now, suddenly, he seemed to hear the words of the Steegmaster; they sounded so clear that it was as if they had been spoken inside his own head. “I want to know why you think the spiders deserve to be destroyed and man deserves to survive. Is man so much better than the spiders?”
Steeg had gone straight to the point.What right had man to try and take over the earth from the spiders? His past history showed that he was unfit to be master of the earth. All his achievements had failed to make him happy. By the time he had evacuated earth to colonise the Centauri system, he had already proved himself a failure.
Could this be the answer to Steeg’s riddle — to that question of why he could not help Niall to conquer the spiders? The thought made Niall’s heart sink. Yet the more he considered it, the more likely it seemed. When he thought of the glue flies, and of how Doggins had forced them to fly until they had died of exhaustion, he felt saddened and ashamed. Yet when he remembered his own joy as he pointed the Reaper at the spiders and pulled the trigger, he knew that he had no right to regard himself as any better.
These thoughts produced a frightening sensation that was like sliding backwards down a slope. He felt confused and strangely vulnerable. Until a few minutes ago he had felt no doubt whatever about his central purpose; to help free men from the domination of the spiders. Now, suddenly, it seemed highly questionable.
Someone began to snore — it sounded like Doggins — and he found it oddly comforting; it seemed to restore a sense of normality. For a moment he thought that his despair had been some kind of mistake, a momentary fit of discouragement. Then his mind came back to the central fact: that men were no more fitted to be lords of the earth than the spiders; and again he experienced that sense of sliding backwards.
His fingers crept to the thought mirror, then withdrew. It seemed pointless to use it; he felt no desire to concentrate his mind. Then, as if challenging it to make any difference to his sense of hopelessness, he turned it over. There was a sensation that was like a fist of clenching inside his brain, and the despair vanished. Instead, there was again a feeling of power and control. In a flash, he recognised the answer to the problem. Human civilisation had been a failure because man had gained control over the material world without gaining control over his own mind. But this did not mean that man had no right to be master of the earth, for the spiders also lacked control over their own minds — this was proved by their cruelty and stupidity, and the pleasure they took in exercising their power. At least man had the insight to know that he lacked control over his own mind. In that respect, at least, he could claim to be better than the spiders. . .
The sky above his head was becoming lighter, so he could see the black outline of the treetops against the blue void. Behind the trees, the moon was rising; it was still invisible, but its light was reflected from the single cloud that drifted overhead. Niall also felt that light was filtering into his inner landscape. Its source was still invisible, but the knowledge that it was there brought a feeling of comfort and relief.
As soon as consciousness began to return, he became aware of the vibration of the Delta. Now it no longer reminded him of the breathing of some huge animal; it was more like the distant vibration of a great machine.
The sky above the eastern treetops was lightening, although they were still in darkness; but the swamplands below would already be illuminated by the rising sun. And the urgent vibration of the force, he now realised, was a response to the rising sun. This thought intrigued him. It suggested that, if the force responded to the dawn, it must be awakening from its sleep like some giant plant or animal.
Since he was still drifting in the state between sleep and waking, it was easy to sink into the stillness of deeper awareness. As soon as he did so, he became conscious of the vast presences of the trees, and realised that they were also awakening. Suddenly, he understood why they were so big. The underground force was arousing them out of their dim, dreamlike vegetable consciousness, awakening them to greater effort. But because the temperature here was too low to incubate this new consciousness, their effort could only be directed upward, towards the sky.
The vibration was also flowing through Niall, producing a peculiar exhilaration. Yet he felt no desire to experience it more deeply; to have done so would have meant deliberately reducing his intelligence to a lower level. Humankind had already evolved to a higher rate of vibration, and although his body responded to the invigorating power of the force, his mind found it somehow vulgar and unsatisfying. Yet it also gave him courage, because it made him aware that he was capable of raising the vibratory rate of his own mind.
The others were still asleep. Niall took his Reaper, and made his way over the ridge and down to the stream. At this point it was scarcely knee deep. He removed his tunic, and sat down on it, experiencing once again the delight of the desert dweller at the sight of an abundance of water. And then, as he stared down into the clear water, which reflected the paling sky, he experienced the illusion that he was back in the shallow stream in the country of the ants. It lasted only for a fraction of a second, but it filled him with a strange feeling of pure joy. And as he splashed the water over his body, he glimpsed the source of this delight. It was as if a door had opened, permitting him a sudden vision of an immense inner wonderland. In that moment, he understood why the vibration of the Delta flowed past him and left him unmoved. It was because he already possessed inside himself this enormous source of joy, and its intensity was far higher than that of the underground force of the Delta. Unlike the trees, his life was not confined to the present moment; every joy he had ever experienced was carefully preserved in his inner wonderland, waiting to be relived with all its original intensity. It was the realisation that, unlike plants and animals, human beings are the masters, not the slaves, of time.
As he pulled on his tunic over his wet body, he was indifferent to the cold; in fact, the discomfort was curiously pleasing and interesting. Walking back to the camp, he carried the Reaper upside down by its trigger guard. His intuition told him that, in this state of mind, his life was not at the mercy of some casual accident.