The clever men on Earth had not planned it that way, had not dreamed that it would happen that way, had thought that alien mind and body could be got rid of and would not occur again, that the simulated human they had fashioned could be wiped clean as a slate is wiped and go on to something else.
But there was no wiping clean, there was no erasure. The memory and the pattern did not go away, could not be scrubbed away. They remained. They might be driven deep into the consciousness of the re-awakened human, but they crept out again.
So not two creatures ran the plains of drifted sand and snow, but three, all three occupying the body of the Quester. And while the Quester snared the pictures from the stars, the Thinker absorbed the data and evaluated it and, asking questions, sought the answers. As if two parts of a computer operating separately, one the memory core that held the programmed data, the other that part of the system which performed the analysing functions, had been finally brought together – and, now brought together, worked. The pictures were no longer merely something to touch the aesthetic sense, but now held a deeper and a greater meaning, the jigsaw pieces gathered from all parts of the universe and flung on the table-top, waiting there to be put together to form a pattern, the many tiny, fragmented keys to what might prove to be a single overriding universal plan.
Three minds trembled, poised tiptoe on the brink that opened out into the soul-wrenching gulf of all eternity.
Shaken, unable at first to grasp the implications of the possibility that all the answers to all the questions which ever had been asked might be within their grasp, that a totalling up of the secrets of the stars might yield finally the equations of understanding which would allow one to write a single sentence and say: This is the universe.
But the time clock inside one of the minds rang the loud alarm and the insistent summons and it was time to go back to the ship again. There was no denying the cleverness which the men on Earth had wrought and the body of the Quester went back to the ship. Back to the ship to empty out the mind of the simulated human and then it would be time for the ship to leap into the sky again and head out for other stars. To go from star to star, to send out the simulated human time and time again in the bodies of intelligences that might be found on other planets and thus to gain, from first-hand observation, the information that would enable men, in another day, to deal with these intelligences to mankind’s best advantage.
But when Changer came back to the ship, something had gone wrong. Something had happened.
One micro-second of warning that there was something wrong, then a nothingness – a nothingness till now. A half-awakening, but with only one awake, awake and very puzzled. But now, finally, after a time, the three of them together once again, blood brothers of the mind.
-Changer, they were afraid of us. They found out what we were.
-Yes, Quester. Or perhaps they only thought so. They couldn’t know it all. They could only guess. A quiver on a dial. A seepage of a current…
-But they didn’t wait, said Quester. They didn’t take a chance. They saw there was something wrong and then they let us have it. They simply let us have it.
-That, Changer told him, is the way men are.
-Changer, you’re a man.
-Thinker, I don’t know. You tell me what I am.
Down the hall came the sound of running feet and one voice calling loudly: ‘It went in there. Kathy said she saw it go in there.’
The feet made frantic scuffling turns and white-jacketed interns came boiling through the door.
‘Mister,’ shouted one of them, ‘did you see a wolf?’
‘No,’ said Blake, ‘I did not see a wolf.’
‘There’s something damn funny going on,’ said another intern. ‘Kathy wouldn’t lie. She saw something. It scared the hell…’
The first intern advanced threateningly.
‘Mister, if you’re kidding. If this is some sort of joke…’ Panic ran wildly in the other minds, a tidal bore of panic – the panic of minds faced with a threatening situation by aliens in an alien situation. Insecurity, failure of understanding, no basis for the assessment of a situation- ‘No!’ yelled Blake. ‘No! No – wait…’
But he was too late. The change already had begun, the mind of Quester taking over, and once that had happened, once the change had been triggered into action there was no stopping it.
You fools! Blake cried in his mind. You fools! You fools! The interns surged back, jamming through the door into the corridor.
Facing them stood Quester, his hackles raised, the silvergreyness of his coat shining in the light from the ceiling lamp, crouched to spring, his lips rolled back to reveal the gleaming fangs.
14
Quester crouched and growled, fear rumbling in his throat. Trapped and no way out. No opening behind or on either side. The only way to go was the opening into the outer tunnel and that was jammed with a howling pack of alien things that walked on two hind legs and were draped in artificial skins. They stank of body and their minds were pouring out at him a brain-wave so intense that it was like a moving wall and he was forced to brace his feet against it. A brain-wave of no intelligence that he could sense, but made up of primal fears and hates that were jumbled and chaotic.
Quester took a slow step forward and the pack shrank back and, at that backward movement, he felt a sense of triumph go flaring through his body. Inherited from some remote ancestor, an ancient racial memory buried deep inside his mind burst full-fledged into a warrior pride and the rumble that was bubbling in his throat erupted into a roaring roll of savage sound – a sound that ripped deep into the alien pack and sent it scattering.
Quester moved. His legs blurred with speed as he leaped into the tunnel and made a quick turn to the right. One of the alien creatures lunged out from the wall towards him, a weapon of some sort raised above its head, poised for the downward stroke. Quester flung himself off stride to close in on the creature. His massive head swung, slashing, a swift and terrible slash that struck the flesh and ripped it and left a tottering creature that screamed as it collapsed.
Quester spun around and faced the creatures that were charging him. His toenails clawed great scratches in the floor and he hurled himself full-speed at the pack. His head swung right and left and his teeth met flesh and tore and the tunnel seemed to fill with the red haze of his rage.
The creatures all were fleeing now except for those upon the floor and some of these were crawling while others only lay and moaned.
Quester skidded to a halt and half sitting, his back legs bent, but his hindquarters not quite upon the floor, threw up his head and bayed – a cry of triumph and of challenge, the old, unknown-till-now ancestral cry of triumph and of challenge, that in olden days had rung across that far-off planet of drifted sand and snow.
The tunnel was blotted out and he seemed to smell again the clean, dry air of home rather than the strange stinks of this place where he found himself. And he was, most strangely, a very ancient quester, one of the old proud warrior race that in other days had battled far and deadly against the hordes of now almost forgotten scaly things which contested with the questers the dominance of the planet.
Then the odour of the place and its closeness and the harshness of the bright lights shattered off the walls, swept away the sense of other time and place and he rose to his feet again and swung about, uncertainly. The tunnel was clear ahead, but far behind there were creatures running and the air was clogged and murky with the fragmented, but massive mind-waves that came from all directions.
-Changer!
-The stairs, Quester. Get going for those stairs.
-Stairs?
-The door. The closed opening. The one with the sign above it. The little square with the red characters enclosed.
-I see it. But the door is solid.
-Push it. It will open. Use your arms and not your body. Please, remember. Use your arms. You use them so seldom that you forget you have them.
Quester leaped towards the door.
-Your arms, you fool! Your arms!
Quester struck it with his body. It yielded on one side and he slipped quickly through. He was in a cubicle and in the floor of the cubicle was a path of narrow ledges that went downwards. Those would be the stairs, he told himself.