‘What was the name of this man who testified?’
‘Lukas. Dr Lukas. I don’t recall his first name. It would be in the papers. The switchboard operator more than likely has one.’
‘I suppose we’d better get the senators down here, too, if they can come. Horton – Chandler Horton. Who is the other one?’
‘Solomon Stone.’
‘OK,’ said Winston. ‘we’ll see what they think of this. Them and Lukas.’
‘Space, too, sir?’
Winston shook his head. ‘No. Not right at the moment. We’ll need more to go on before we start tangling with Space.’
16
The den was small and close – a projecting ledge of rock with a space eroded out beneath it. Above it the ground rose sharply, below it the ground fell steeply away. At the foot of the hill a stream of water ran raggedly over a pebbly bed. On the slope, at the lip of the cave, the ground was littered with tiny slabs of rock – the shards that through the years had been eroded out of the face of the stone. The slabs shifted treacherously under Quester’s paws as he scrambled for the cave, but he managed to squeeze himself into it, twisting around until he could face outwards.
For the first time now he felt a measure of safety, with his flanks and back protected, but he knew that it was an illusory safety. The creatures of this planet, even now, perhaps, were hunting him and it would not be long, he was certain, before they’d be combing through the area. Certainly he had been seen by the metallic creature which had come charging after him with its howling windstorm and its glaring eyes that shot out light before it. He shuddered as he recalled how he had barely gained the shelter of the trees just ahead of it. Another three lengths of his body to have gone and it would have overrun him.
He relaxed, willing his body to grow limp in every muscle.
His mind went out, checking, seeking, prying. There was life, more life than one would expect – an overcrowded planet, a place that swarmed with life. Tiny resting life, unthinking, unintelligent, existing but doing little more. There were small intelligences that rustled, restless, alert, afraid – but their intelligence so thin and barren that they were little more than aware of life and the dangers that might threaten it. One thing ran, seeking, hunting, with the red streak of killing pulsating in its mind, vicious and terrible and a very hungry thing. Three life forms were huddled in one place, some safe and hidden place, for their minds were snug and smug and warm. And others – many, many others. Life and some of the life with intelligence. But nowhere the sharp, bright, terrifying sense of the things that lived in the above-ground caves.
A messy planet, thought Quester, untidy and unneat, with too much life and water and too much vegetation, its air too thick and heavy and its climate far too hot. A place that gave one no rest at all, no sense of security, the sort of place where one must sense and watch and listen, and fear that, even so, an undetected danger might come slipping through the net and fasten on one’s throat. The trees were moaning gently and he wondered, as he listened to them, if it were the trees themselves, or if the moaning came from the moving atmosphere that was blowing through them.
And as he lay there wondering, he knew that it was the friction of the wind against the substance of the trees and the rustling of the leaves, the groaning of the branches, that the trees themselves had no way to make a sound, that the trees and all the other vegetation upon this planet, which was called the Earth, were alive, but with no intelligence and no perceptive senses. And that the caves were buildings and that the humans were not tribal members, but formed sexual units which were known as families, and that a building in which a family lived was called a home.
The information bore down upon him like a tidal wave that curled above him and overwhelmed him in a moment of blind panic and he came battling out of it and the tidal wave was gone. But in his mind, he knew, lay all the knowledge of the planet, every shred of information which lay in the mind of Changer.
-I am sorry, Changer said. There was no time for you to absorb it slowly and decently and get acquainted with it and try to classify it. I gave it all at once. Now you have it all to use.
Tentatively, Quester took a quick survey of it and shuddered at the tangled pile it was.
-Much of it is out of date, said Changer. There are many things that I don’t know. You have this planet as I knew it two hundred years ago, plus what I picked up since I returned to it. I would impress upon you that the data are not complete and some of it may now be worthless.
Quester crouched close against the rock floor of the den, still probing out into the darkness of the woods, straightening and strengthening the detection net that he had laid out in all directions.
A sense of desolation swept through him. Homesickness for the planet of drifted snow and sand – and no way to get back. Perhaps never to get back. Here in this tangled place of too much life and too much danger and not knowing where to turn, not knowing what to do. Hunted by the dominant creatures of the planet, creatures that he now knew were more horrible than he had thought they were. Cunning and ruthless and illogical, weighed down by fears and hatreds, obeying the murderous drive of a species on the make.
-Changer, he asked, what of my other body? The one I inhabited before you humans came. You caught that body, I remember. What did you do with it?
-Not I! I didn’t catch it. I did nothing with it.
-Don’t try your human legalistic tricks on me. Don’t take refuge in semantics. Not you alone, perhaps, Not you personally, but…
-Quester, Thinker said, don’t take that tone of thought. The three of us are caught in a single trap – if it is a trap. I’m inclined to believe it may not be a trap, but a unique situation which will work to our advantage. We share one body and our minds are closer than any minds have ever been before. And we must not quarrel; we must not have differences, for we can’t afford them. We must work together always. We must harmonize ourselves. If there are differences, we, must work them out immediately, we must not let them fester.
-That, said Quester, is exactly what I’m doing. There is a thing that bothers me. What happened to that first me?
-That first body, Changer told him, was biologically scanned. It was taken apart, almost molecule by molecule, and analysed. There was no way in which it could be re-assembled.
-You murdered me, you mean.
-If you want to call it that.
-And Thinker, too?
-Thinker, too. Thinker was the first.
-Thinker, Quester asked, do you not resent this?
-What good would resentment accomplish?
-That is no answer and you know it.
-I can’t be sure, said Thinker. I would have to cogitate it. One must, of course, resent any violence done him. But I would be inclined to consider what has happened as a transfiguration rather than a violence. If this had not occurred to me I could never have existed in your body or touched your mind. All the data that you gathered from the stars would have been lost to me and lost most pitifully, for I’d never have known of it. And you, in turn, if it had not been for what the humans did, never would have guessed the significance of the pictures that you garnered from the stars. You simply would have gone on garnering them and enjoying them and perhaps not even wondered at them and I can conceive of nothing more tragic than that, to be on the edge of mystery and not even wonder at it.
-I am not so sure, said Quester, that I would prefer the mystery and forgo the wonder.
-But don’t you see the beauty of it? Thinker asked. Here the three of us, all of us most different. Three types most distinctive. You, Quester, the roughneck and the bandit, Changer the cunning schemer, and I…
-And you, said Quester, the all-wise, the far-seeing…
-I was about to say, said Thinker, the fumbler after truth.
-If it will make either of you feel better, Changer told them, I’ll apologize for the human race. In many ways I like them no better than you do.