You couldn’t see a thing. Just like looking into a hole that hung just above the floor. Everything blotted out. A shield of some sort, I suppose. But now, gradually, the shield, the defences, whatever they may be, have been dropped and you can see it shining there.’ ‘Will they let me in?’ Elaine asked.
‘I think they will,’ said Wilson. ‘I’ll send word to the captain. You can’t blame Space Administration for clamping down so hard. The responsibility for whatever’s up there rests solely with them. They started the project two hundred years ago. What happened here would not have happened if it hadn’t been for Project Werewolf.’
Elaine shuddered.
‘You’ll pardon me,’ said Wilson. ‘I should not have said that.’
‘Why shouldn’t you?’ she asked. ‘Unpleasant as it is, that’s what it’s called by everyone.’
‘I told you about that day he came into the office,’ Wilson said. ‘He was a nice young man.’
‘He was a frightened man,’ said Elaine, ‘running from the world. If he had only told me…’
‘Perhaps then he didn’t know…’
‘He knew he was in trouble. The senator and I would have helped him. Dr Daniels would have helped him.’
‘He didn’t want to involve you. It was not the sort of thing one would involve his friends in. And he wanted to keep your friendship. He was afraid, more than likely, if he told you, that he would lose the friendship.’
‘I can see,’ said Elaine, ‘how he might have thought so. And I didn’t even try to make him tell me. I blame myself for that. But I didn’t want to hurt him. I thought he should have a chance of finding the answer for himself.’
The crowd came down the hill, went by the two of them and continued down the road.
30
The pyramid stood to the left, and in front of the row of seats. It glowed dully, pulsating slightly, and out from it hung a curtain of light.
‘Don’t go too close,’ the captain said. ‘You might frighten it.’
Elaine did not answer. She stared at the pyramid and the horror and the wonder of it rose in her throat to choke her.
‘You can go down two or three more rows of seats,’ the captain said. ‘It might be dangerous if you tried to get too close. We don’t really know.’
Words forced themselves up and out of her. ‘Frighten it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ the captain said. ‘That’s the way it acts. As if it might be frightened of us. Or suspicious of us. Or maybe just doesn’t want anything to do with us. It wasn’t like this until recently. It was blacked out, a piece of emptiness, as if there were nothing there. Creating a world of its own, with all defences up.’
‘And now he knows that we won’t harm him?’
‘Him?’
‘Andrew Blake,’ she said.
‘You knew him, miss? Mr Wilson said so.’
‘I saw him three times,’ she said.
‘About knowing we won’t hurt him,’ the captain said. ‘Maybe that is it. Some of the scientists think so. A lot of them have tried to study it – pardon me, Miss Horton – have tried to study him. But they don’t get too far. Nothing much to work on.’
‘They’re sure?’ she asked. ‘They’re sure it’s Andrew Blake?’
‘Down underneath the pyramid,’ the captain told her. ‘Down at the base of it, on the right-hand side.’
‘The robe!’ she said. ‘That was the one I gave him!’
‘Yes. The one that he was wearing. It’s down there on the floor. Just the corner of it sticking out.’
She took a step down the aisle.
‘Not too far,’ the captain warned. ‘Not too close.’
She took another step and halted.
This is foolish, she thought. If he is there, he knows. He’d know that it is me and he would not be frightened – he’d know I have for him nothing but my love.
The pyramid pulsated gently.
But perhaps he doesn’t know, she told herself. Perhaps he has locked himself against the world and if that is what he’s done, he had reason to.
How must it be, she wondered, to know that your mind is the mind of another man – a loaned mind since you can have none of your own, because man’s ingenuity was not quite great enough to fabricate a mind? Ingenuity sufficient to fashion bone and flesh and brain, but not to fashion mind. And how much worse, perhaps, to know that you were a part of two other minds – at least two other minds.
‘Captain?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Miss Horton.’
‘Do the scientists know how many minds there are? Could it be more than three?’
‘They don’t seem to know,’ he said. ‘Granted the situation as it stands, there might not be a limit.’
No limit, she thought. Room for an infinity of minds, for all the thought that lay in the universe.
‘I am here,’ she said, speaking silently to the creature that had been Andrew Blake. ‘I am here. Can’t you tell I’m here? If you ever need me, if you change back into a man again…’
But why should he change back into a man again? Perhaps he had changed to this so he need not be a man, so that he need not face a humanity that he could not share.
She turned and took a hesitant step towards the chapel’s front, then turned back once more.
The pyramid was shining softly and it seemed so peaceful and so solid, yet withdrawn, that her throat constricted and tears came to her eyes.
I will not weep, she told herself, fiercely. I will not weep, for whom would I be weeping? For Andrew Blake? For myself? For the befuddled race of man?
Not dead, she thought. But worse than death, perhaps. If he had been a man and dead, she could have walked away. She could have said goodbye.
Once he had turned to her for help. Now he was beyond her help, or any human help. Perhaps, she thought, he was beyond all humanity.
She turned again.
‘I’ll leave now,’ she said, ‘Captain, please; would you walk beside me.’
He took her arm and walked beside her down the aisle.
31
It all was there. The great black towers anchored in the planet’s granite crust, reached towards the skies. The green and leafy glade, with its flowers and gaily-playing animals, stood motionless in time. The pink-white structure rose in airy curves and spirals above the purple, foam-flecked sea. And in the aridity of the great plateau the mustard-coloured domes of hermit intelligences ran as far as sense could reach.
These and many others – and not the pictures of them only, snatched from the ice-hard stars which lay like scattered crystals across the skies that roofed a planet of drifted sand and snow – but the ideas and the thoughts and concepts that clung to all the pictures, like bits of dirt to roots.
Most of the thoughts and concepts were simply isolated pieces which would not correlate, but all of them were springboards for the fabrication of a vast jigsaw puzzle net of logic.
The task was an enormous one and at times confusing, but bit by bit the various data fell into filing patterns, and once identified were erased from active consideration, but still tagged and available when there should be need of them.
It worked with satisfaction and a happiness – and that bothered it. Satisfaction was all right and quite permissible, but happiness was wrong. It was something that had been unknown and should not be felt; it was an alien thing and it was emotion. For the best result, there must be nothing like emotion, and it was irritated at the happiness and tried to wipe it out.
A contagion, it told itself. A contagion that it had caught from Changer and, as well, perhaps, from Quester, who was at the best a most unstable creature. A situation that it must guard against, for happiness was bad enough – there were other illogical emotions held by those two that could be even worse.
So it wiped away the happiness and posted guard against it, and went on with its work, reducing the ideas and the thoughts and concepts, in so far as they could be so reduced, to formulae and axioms and symbols, being careful in the process not to lose the substance of them, for the substance would be needed later.
There were tantalizing hints that must be docketed for more consideration and, perhaps, even for more data. The logic pattern potentially was sound but extrapolated too far it left some room for error and needed further data to indicate direction. There were so many tricky things; there was nothing ever easy. The process called for hard discipline and constant self-examination to be certain that the concept of one’s self was eliminated. That was the thing, it thought, that made happiness so bad.