‘I am sorry,’ said Blake, ‘that I was not there. Won’t you please sit down.’
She seated herself in a chair and Blake perched on the railing.
‘You and your father are in Washington,’ he said. ‘The hearings…’
She nodded. ‘They began this morning.’
‘You’ll be attending some of them, I suppose.’
‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘But it’s a painful thing. It’s hard to see my father take the beating he will take. I admire him, of course, for standing on the thing that he believes, but I could wish that, occasionally, he might plop for something that carried public approval. But he almost never does. He’s always on the wrong side, so far as the public is concerned. And this one is the one that can really hurt him.’
‘You mean this business of unanimity. I was reading something about it just the other day. It seems to me a foolish set-up.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ she said, ‘but that’s the way it is. It is carrying the rule of the majority to unnecessary limits. It will half kill the senator if he has to retire from public life. It has been meat and bread to him for all the years he’s lived.’
‘I liked your father very much,’ said Blake. ‘There’s something natural about him, something that corresponds to the house you live in.’
‘You mean old-fashioned.’
‘Well, maybe. Although that’s not it exactly. There is something solid about the man, and yet he has an enthusiasm and an apparent dedication…’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He has dedication. And you must admire him for it and I think that mostly people do. But he manages somehow or other to irritate a lot of people by showing them they’re wrong.’
Blake laughed. ‘I don’t know of a better way to irritate the people.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But how about yourself?’
‘I’m getting along quite well,’ he said. ‘There really is no reason why I should be here. Before you came I was sitting here, listening to a tree ring a lot of bells. I couldn’t quite believe my senses. A man across the street brought one out of the house and set it by a pool and it began to ring.’
She leaned forward to stare across the street. The tree emitted a rippling peal of bonging bells.
‘A monastery tree,’ she said. ‘There are not too many of them. A few of them are imported from a planet – one quite far out, I can’t recall which one.’
‘Continually,’ said Blake, ‘I’m running up against these things that are entirely new to me. Things that are outside my entire circle of experience. Just the other day I met a Brownie.’
She stared at him, delighted. ‘A Brownie! You mean you really did?’
He nodded. ‘It ate all my lunch.’ he said.
‘Oh, how nice for you! Most people never see one.’
‘I’d never heard of them,’ he said. ‘I thought that I was having another hallucination.’
‘Like the time you came to our house.’
‘That’s right. I still don’t know what happened that night. There is no explaining it.’
‘The doctors. . .’
‘The doctors don’t seem to be much help. They are as puzzled as I am. I think, perhaps, the Brownie might have come the closest to a guess.’
‘The Brownie? What would he have to do with it?’
‘He asked me how many there were of me. He said he felt quite sure, when he first saw me, that there was more than one of me. Two men in one, three men in one. . . I wouldn’t know how many. More than one, he said.’
‘Mr. Blake,’ she said, ‘I think that every man is more than just one man. He has many sides to him.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s not what the Brownie meant. I am sure it wasn’t. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it and I’m sure he wasn’t talking about different temperaments.’
‘You’ve told this to your doctor?’
‘Well, no, I guess I haven’t. The poor guy has enough to worry him. This would be just another thing.’
‘But important, maybe.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Blake.
‘You act,’ said Elaine Horton, ‘almost as if you didn’t care, as if you didn’t want to find out what has happened to you. Or, perhaps, that you are afraid to find out.”
He glanced sharply at her. ‘I hadn’t thought of it quite that way,’ he said, ‘but you may well be right.’
Across the way the bell-sounds changed – no longer the trilling of many silver bells, but the sonorous clanging of a bell much larger, calling out a warning and a challenge across the rooftops of the ancient city.
12
Fear thundered in the tunnel. There was the reek of alien odours and an alien muttering. Light bounced off the walls and the floor was hard as rock.
The creature crouched and whimpered, every muscle tensed, each separate nerve frayed with paralysing fear.
The tunnel went on endlessly and there was no escape. It was caught and trapped. And it had no idea where it might be trapped. Certainly in a place such as it had never known before and a place it had not sought. It had been caught and dumped here and for no reason that it knew.
There had been a time before and then it had been wet and hot and dark, with the creepy feeling of many tiny life forms. And now it was hot and bright and dry, but there was no sense of tiny life forms – rather the sense of distant larger life forms and the thunder of their thoughts that rumbled like a drum within the brain.
The creature wheeled about, half rising from its crouch, toenails clicking on the hardness of the floor. The tunnel still went on, in back as well as front. An enclosed place where there were not any stars. But there was the talk – the thought talk and the deeper rumble of the spoken talk – not the kind of talk that trickled from the stars, but jumbled and chaotic talk, a murky talk that surged and flared and hadn’t any depth and not a shred of meaning.
A tunnel world, the creature thought in terror, a narrow, enclosed space that went on and on for ever, reeking with its odours and filled with murky talk and awash with fear.
There were openings, it saw, all along the tunnel, and some of them were closed with a dark material, while there were others open, leading, more than likely, into other tunnels that went on and on, as endlessly as this.
Far down the tunnel a creature, huge, misshapen, terrible, came from one of the openings. It made a clicking sound as it walked and it turned towards the creature, coming down the tunnel. It screamed and something that it carried clattered on the floor and the sound of its wrenching terror, welling from its brain, bounced back and forth like shrieks along the tunnel walls. It turned and ran, moving very rapidly, the vocalization of its fear combining with the bouncing reverberations of the terror that welled within its brain to fill the tunnel to bursting with the turmoil of the sound.
The creature moved, its toenails scratching desperately on the hard material, its body flashing towards the nearest opening that led outward from the tunnel. Inside its body its viscera curled and tightened with the panic that surged through it and its brain grew dim and limp with fear and it felt the darkness coming down upon it like a great weight which dropped from some great height. And suddenly it was not itself, it was not within the tunnel, it was back again in that place of warm, black comfort which had been its prison.
Blake skidded to a halt beside his bed and in the moment of his skidding, wondered why he ran and why his hospital gown should be lying on the floor and he naked in the room. And in that second of his wonder there was a snapping in his skull as if something inside his head, too tightly bound, had ripped, and he knew about the tunnel and the fear and those other two who were one with him.
He dropped down to sit upon the bed and happiness gushed through him. He was whole again; he was the creature he had been before. Now he no longer was alone, but with the other two.-Hiyah, pals, he whispered and they answered back, not with words, but with a huddling of their minds.
(Clasped hands and brotherhood. Sharp, cold stars above a desert of drifted sand and snow. The reaching out and snaring of the data from the stars. The hot and steaming swamp. The long weighing of the data inside the pyramid that was a biological computer. The swift, mutual pooling of three separate pools of thought. The touch of minds, one against another.)