For a moment Paul leaned his forehead wearily against the cool pane of the glass. The long palm and fingers of his single hand pressed uselessly against the glass' thick surface. Out there beyond its protection was, according to all official reports, an atmosphere suffocating with hydrogen sulphide. Behind him was crated equipment he had not the education and training to assemble.
Suddenly he stiffened. His hand slipped down from the glass and he raised his head to look sharply out through the transparency.
Leaning against a boulder on this alien world a little more than a dozen feet from the drone and incongruous against the small, carpeting ferns, was a heavy cane of dark wood; Walter Blunt's cane, one end of which was cracked and splintered as it would have been from being used to smash a human skull.
Chapter 19
"I see," said Paul quietly to the empty room and the landscape beyond the glass. "Of course."
It was like driving through a strange city at night and being convinced that north lay on your right hand. Then, suddenly, a chance-glimpsed street sign, some small but undeniable scrap of information, brings suddenly the undeniable orientation that places north on the left. Abruptly, silently, without real physical movement, the universe swaps ends and you realize that all this time you have been heading west, not east
Suddenly the pattern about Paul had become clear and correct, down to the last detail.
It was Blunt, of course. As he had instinctively felt all along, it was Blunt - this man who would not turn and show his face openly and clearly - who was the demon. Paul spoke out loud again, but not to Blunt.
"Get me out of here," he said.
No, came an answer from deep inside him, from the invincible part in the back of his mind.
"You mean," asked Paul, "we end here, you and me? The two of us?"
No.
"Then...?"
There's only one of us.
"I see," said Paul again, quietly. "I should have known that."
can do anything you want. But if I do it, what's the use? We won't have found any way other than force. Our work will all have been wasted, as the living darkness we created beyond the boulders would have been wasted if you had killed it then, or if you kill it now, while it's un-grown. It's up to you now to find the different way.
"Not the machine's way," said Paul. "Not the way you moved me out of that office just behind Jase and Kantele that time? A different way than either of those?"
Yes.
"I don't know where to start."
Perceive. Recapitulate. Feel.
"All right," said Paul. He looked out at the cable trunks and limbs of the trees beyond the window, and at the cane. "There is only one thing common to both the objective and the subjective universe. This is identity."
Yes. Go on.
"The objective universe can be expressed in its lowest common denominators as an accumulation of identity isolates, both living and nonliving."
That's right.
"The isolates, however, in order to live - that is, to have function along the single dimension of the time line - must pass in and out of combinations which can be called sets."
Continue, Brother.
"The sets, in order to create the illusion of reality in objective time and space, must at all tunes arrange themselves into a single pattern. The pattern may vary, but it can't be abandoned or destroyed without also destroying or abandoning the illusion of reality."
Entirely correct. And very good for a partial identity that is restricted to reasoning by use of emotion and response. We can be proud of you. Go on. The next step?
Paul frowned.
"Next step?" he asked. "That's all."
Application.
"Application? Ah!" said Paul, suddenly. "Of course.
The so-called Alternate Laws" - he glanced once more at the cane against the boulder beyond the window-"arid the talents deriving from them are merely methods of altering the pattern so that the illusion of reality temporarily permits actions ordinarily not permitted." He thought for a second. "Blunt doesn't understand this," he said.
Are you certain of that?
Paul smiled a little in the empty silence of the room.
"That's my department, isn't it? Understanding."
/ submit myself. Go on.
Paul hesitated.
"Is there more?" he asked.
You wanted to get out of here. You have perceived and recapitulated. From here on you leave me for your own territory. Feel.
Paul closed his eyes. Standing with the yellow light from outside showing faintly through his lids, he tried for a total contact with all that surrounded him - room, drone, planet, suns, space. It was like attempting to make some delicate last connection with blind fingers at arm's length, out of sight inside a piece of complicated equipment Only, Paul's effort was completely nonphysical. He was reaching out to feel fully and correctly the great pattern of the objective universe, so that he could fit his own identity perfectly into pivot position within its structure.
For a moment he made no progress. For a fraction of a second he felt the completely stripped feeling of total awareness, but lacking even a single point of contact as he floated free, swinging into position. Then, suddenly, it was like the moment of orientation that had followed his seeing the cane beyond the glass, but much greater. And mixed with it the sensation of melting together, like but greater than that which had come to him to finish his interview with the psychiatrist Elizabeth Williams.
In one sudden moment of no-time, Paul and the invincible part of him fused irreversibly together.
It was as if he had stood on a narrow stage and suddenly, on all sides, great curtains had been raised, so that he found himself looking away in all directions to enormous distances. But now-alone.
"Ave atque vale," he said, and smiled a little sadly. "Hail and farewell." He turned back to the glass of the window. "Destruct," he said. "Of course. Blunt planted that for me, and in his own limited way, he was right."
Paul turned back to the tools behind him. He chose a heavy sledge hammer and took it to the window. His first blow bent the metal handle of the sledge but merely starred the glass. But his next blow sent the sledge crashing through and the whole wall of glass fell out in ruins.
He took three rapid steps toward the boulder where the cane leaned, as the acid, choking atmosphere numbed his sense of smell with the assault of its odor and filled his lungs. He reached the cane and seized it even as his eyesight began to sear and blur with tears. Almost, he could hear Blunt chanting, as he had chanted in the vision tank back there underground at Malabar Mine while Paul watched.
"Destruct! The ultimate destruct! The creative destruct that will rescue Man from being saved forever..."
Then Paul felt his knees strike the ground as he fell. And with that his identity quit his body forever and left it there, fallen and dying in the suffocation of the yet-untamed atmosphere of the world which would be called New Earth, with a splintered walking stick clutched in its single fist.
Chapter 20
Full twenty-fathoms times five, thy body lies. Of its bones is ocean debris made....
Thirty miles due west of La Jolla, California, which is a few miles up the coast line from San Diego, on a sandy underwater pleateau six-hundred-odd feet below the surface of the ever-moving blue Pacific, Paul's bodiless identity hovered above a skeleton of a man wrapped and weighted with half-inch chain. This place had not been his original intended destination, but he had detoured here to settle a purely emotional point in his own mind. Now, hovering above the chain-wrapped skeleton, he sensed with relief that the body it once supported had died a natural death. It was not that he doubted that Blunt had been willing to murder to gain the results he wanted. It was just that he wished the ledger sheet on which he and Blunt were totaled up together and against each other to be as clean as possible.