And that was right. He would hurt anyone he touched. Elaine Horton, who had kissed him – a girl that he could love, that he perhaps already loved. Although he could love her only with the human part of him, with one third of him. And he could hurt her father, that marvellous old man with the ramrod back and the ramrod principles. And hurt as well that young doctor, Daniels, who had been his first, and for a time, his only friend.
He could hurt them all – he would hurt them all unless…
And that was it. Unless.
There was something he must do, some action he must take.
He searched his mind for this thing that he must do and it was not there.
He rose slowly from the steps and turned towards the gate, then turned back again and went into the chapel, pacing slowly down the aisle.
The place was bushed and shadowed. An electric candelabra, mounted on the lectern, did little to drive back the shadows, a feeble campfire glow burning in the darkened emptiness of a desolated plain.
A place to think. A place to scheme, to huddle for a time. A place to array his thoughts and align the situation and see what he must do.
He reached the front of the building and moved over from the aisle to sit down on one of the seats. But he did not sit down. He remained standing, buttressed by the twilit quiet – a quiet that was emphasized rather than broken by the soft sound of the wind in the pines outside.
This was the decision point, he knew. Here, finally, he had come to that time and place from which there was no retreat. He had run before, and ran to a certain purpose, but now there was no longer any virtue in the simple and impulsive act of fleeing. For there was no longer any place to flee to – he had reached the ultimate point and now, if he were to run again, he must know what he was running to.
Here, in this little town, he had found who and what he was and this town was a dead-end. The whole planet was a dead-end and there was no place for him upon this Earth, no place for him in humanity.
For while he was of Earth, he could lay no claim to humanity. He was a hybrid, rather – out of man’s terrible scheming had arisen something that had not heretofore existed.
He was a team, a team of three different beings. That team had the opportunity and the capacity to work upon, and perhaps to solve, a basic universal problem, but it was not a problem that had specifically to do with the planet Earth or the life that resided on the Earth. He could do nothing here and nothing could be done for him.
On some other planet, perhaps, a bleak and barren planet where there’d be no interference, where there was no culture and no cultural distraction – perhaps there he could perform the function – he, the team, not he the human, but he, the three of them together.
Out of the mists of time and distance he remembered once again the headiness of the realization, when it had come to them, that within their grasp lay the possibility of resolving the purpose, and the meaning of the universe. Of, if not of solving it, of digging closer to the core of it than any intelligence had ever dug before.
He thought again of what lay in the power of those three minds that had been linked together by the unconscious and unintending ingenuity shaped by the minds of men – the power and the beauty, the wonder and the awfulness. And he quailed before the realization that, perhaps, here had been forged an instrument that outraged all the purpose and the meaning for which it now could seek throughout the universe.
In time, perhaps, the three minds would become a single mind and if that should happen, then his humanity would no longer matter, for it would be gone. Then the ties that bound him to a planet called the Earth and to the race of bipedal beings that resided upon the Earth would be snapped and he would be free. Then, he told himself, he could rest easy, then he could forget. And then, perhaps, when he had forgotten, when he was no longer human, he could look upon the powers and capabilities held within that common mind as nothing more than commonplace. For the mind of man, he knew, while it might be clever, was very limited. It gaped at wonder and boggled at the full concept of the universe. But while it might be limited, he told himself, it was safe and warm and comfortable.
He had outgrown the humanity with which he had been endowed and that outgrowing hurt. It left him weak and empty, outside the comfort and the warmth.
He crouched upon the floor and wrapped his arms about him. This little space, he thought, even this tiny room which, crouched, he occupied – even this space did not belong to him nor did he belong to it. There was nowhere for him. He was a tangled nothingness which had been spawned by accident. He had never been meant to be. He was an intruder. An intruder, perhaps, upon this planet only, but the humanity that still clung to him made this planet matter – the only place in all the universe that mattered.
In time, he might shuck off the humanness, but that, if ever, would be millennia from now. And it mattered to him now. Now and the Earth, not forever and the universe.
He felt the sympathy reaching out for him and he knew dimly where it came from and, even in his bitterness and despair, he knew it was a trap and cried out against it.
He struggled feebly, but they still kept reaching out to snare him and he heard the words and thoughts that passed between the two of them and the words that they spoke to him, although he did not understand them.
They reached out and took him and folded him close against them and their alien warmth held him secure and tight and safe.
He sank into the comfort of forgetting and the battered core of his agony seemed to melt away in a world where there was nothing but the Three of them – just he and those two others, bound together for all eternity.
29
A December wind, sharp-toothed and thin, keened across the land, stripping the last of the brown and shrivelled leaves from the lone oak tree that stood halfway up the hill. Atop the hill, where the cemetery stood, the giant pines moaned in the chill of the dying year. Ragged clouds raced across the sky and there was a smell of coming snow riding on the wind. Two trim blue figures stood at the cemetery gates, the pale winter sunlight, shining for a moment through the broken clouds, gleaming off the polished buttons and the rifle barrels. To one side of the gate a small group of sightseers huddled, peering through the iron bars at the whiteness of the chapel.
‘Not many here today,’ Ryan Wilson told Elaine Horton. ‘When the weather was good, especially on week-ends, we had quite a crowd.’
He shucked the collar of his grey robe close about his neck.
‘Not that I approve of it,’ he said. ‘That’s Theodore Roberts up there. I don’t care what shape he takes, it still is Theodore Roberts.’
‘Dr Roberts, I take it,’ said Elaine, ‘was well thought of in Willow Grove.’
‘That he was,’ said Wilson. ‘He was the only one of us who ever gained distinction. The town is proud of him.’
‘And you resent all this?’
‘I don’t know if you can say resentment. So long as a proper decorum is maintained, I don’t think we mind. But at times the crowds take on a holiday aspect and that we do not like.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Elaine, ‘I should not have come. I thought a long time about it. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed I must.’
‘You were his friend,’ said Wilson gravely. ‘You have a right to come. I don’t imagine he had too many friends.’
The small crowd of huddled people had drifted from the gates and was starting down the hill.
‘On a day like this,’ said Wilson, ‘there’s not much for them to see. So they don’t stay very long. Just the chapel. In the good weather, of course, the chapel doors were open and you could catch a glimpse inside. But even then, there wasn’t much to see. To begin with just a patch of darkness, a patch of nothingness, and you couldn’t always see it. But now, when the doors are open, you get a sense of shining, of something shining there. At first it didn’t shine.