"You moved too fast!" said Blunt "You only reacted with all the fine obedience of one of your machines. The streets are dark because I wanted them that way. The heat is driving people to huddle apart from each other, alone with their fears, each in his own room, because these are the best breeding grounds for Unreason. Tonight is not something to which people can become accustomed, it's only the first battle in a war that will go on and on, waged with new weapons, fought in different ways, waged on altering battlefields, until you and your kind are destroyed."
Blunt's hard old jaw lifted.
"Until the final moment of destruct!" His voice rang through the room and out into the night. "Until Man is forced to stand without his crutches. Until his leg irons are struck off him and the bars he has built around him are torn down and thrown away! Until he stands upright and alone, free - free in all his questioning, wandering spirit, with the knowledge that in all existence there are only two things: himself, and the malleable universe!"
Blunt's heavy shoulders swayed forward over the cane on which he leaned, almost as if he was about to leap on Kirk Tyne where he stood. The World Engineer did not retreat before Blunt's words, or that movement, but he seemed to have shrunk slightly and his voice was a trifle hoarse when he answered.
"I'm not going to give in to you, Walt," he said. "I'll fight you to the bitter end. Until one of us is dead."
"Then you've lost already," said Blunt, and his voice was almost wild. "Because I'm going on forever." He pointed aside at Paul. "Let me introduce you, Kirk, to a younger, stronger, greater man than yourself, and the continuing head of the Chantry Guild."
He stopped speaking, and as the sound of his voice ceased, a sudden violent silence like summer sheet lightning flashed across the room. On the heels of it came an abrupt, instinctive, inarticulate cry from Jase.
"No," said Paul, "it's all right, Jase. The Guild will go to you. My job is something different."
They stared at him.
"Something different?" asked Blunt, dryly. "What is it you think you're going to do?"
Paul smiled at him and at the others a little sadly.
"Something brutal and unfair to you all," he said. "I'm going to do nothing."
Chapter 22
For a moment they merely looked back at him. But in that moment something inevitable, and not at all unique, happened. It has taken place before at gatherings that those present arrange themselves in a social pattern oriented around the strong point of one individual present. Then, something is said or something takes place. And suddenly, though none present have made an actual movement, the strong point is displaced to a different individual. The pattern reorients itself, and though nothing physical has happened, the emotional effect of the reorientation is felt by everyone in the room.
So with Paul, at that moment. He had reached out and touched the pattern, and like one drop melting into another, abruptly he was the focus for the emotional relationships in the room, where Blunt had been, a moment before.
He met Blunt's eyes across the little distance that separated them. And Blunt looked back, without expression, and without speaking. He leaned still on his cane, as if nothing had taken place. But Paul felt the sudden massive alertness of Blunt's genius swinging to bear completely on him, in the beginnings of a recognition of what Paul was.
"Nothing?" asked Jase, breaking the silence. Sudden alarm for the Chantry Guild, in this breakdown of what-ever Blunt had planned for it, was obvious upon Jase, obvious even to others in the room besides Paul.
"Because," said Paul, "if I do nothing, you'll all go your separate ways. The Chantry Guild will continue and grow. The technical elements in civilization will continue and grow. So will the marching societies and the cult groups. So" - Paul's eyes, ranging backward in the room, met for a moment with Burton McLeod's - "will other elements."
"You want that to happen?" challenged Tyne. "You?"
"I think it's necessary," said Paul, turning to the World Engineer. "The time has come when mankind must fragment so that his various facets may develop fully and unaffected by other facets nearby. As you yourself know, the process has already started." Paul looked over at Blunt. "A single strong leader," said Paul, "could halt this process temporarily - only temporarily, because there would be no one of his stature to replace him when he was dead - but even in temporarily halting it, he could do permanent damage to later development of fragments he didn't favor."
Paul looked back at Kirk. There was something like horror on Kirk's face.
"But you're saying you're against Walt!" stammered Kirk. "You've been against him all along."
"Perhaps," said Paul, a little unhappily, "in a sense. It'd be kinder to say that I haven't been for anyone, including Walt."
Kirk stared at him for a moment, still with an expression varying from shock almost to repugnance.
"But why?" Kirk burst out finally. "Why?"
"That," said Paul, "is a little hard to explain, I'm afraid. Perhaps you might understand it if I used hypnosis as an example. After Walt first brought that last body of mine to consciousness, I had quite a period in which I didn't really know who I was. But a number of things used to puzzle me. Among them the fact that I couldn't be hypnotized."
"The Alternate Laws..." began Jase, from back in the room.
"No," said Paul. "I think someday you Chantry people are going to discover something to which your Alternate Laws bear the same relation alchemy does to modern chemistry. I couldn't be hypnotized because the lightest form of hypnosis requires the giving up of a certain portion of the identity, just as does really complete unconsciousness, and this is impossible to me." He looked around at all of them. "Because, having experienced a shared identity with Walt, it was inevitable that I should come to the capability of sharing the identity of any other human with whom I came in contact."
They all looked back at him. With the exception of Blunt, he saw, they had not fully understood.
"I'm talking about understanding," he said, patiently. "I've been able to share identities with all of you, and what I've found is that each one of you projects a valid form of the future of human society. But a form in which the others would emerge as stunted personalities if they managed to live in it at all. I can't further any one of these futures, because they'll all be coming into existence."
"All?" asked Kirk, just as, at the same moment, Jase also asked, "All?"
"You, yourself, were aware of the situation, Kirk," said Paul. "As you told me yourself, society is going through a necessary stage of fragmentation. It's only a matter of time, now, until a medication is devised that makes Springboard's work into the basis of a practical transportation system. As people spread out to the stars, the fragmentation will be carried further."
He stopped speaking to let that point sink in.
"None of you," said Paul, "should be wasting time fighting each other. You should be busy hunting up your own kind of people and working with them toward your own separate future."
He paused, to give them a chance, this time, to answer.
No one seemed disposed to do so. And then, from perhaps the most unexpected quarter, came the protest.
"There's no reason to believe any of this," said Eaton White, in his thick, dry voice from beside the open window.
"Of course not," said Paul reasonably. "If you disbelieve me, you only have to have the courage of your convictions and ignore what I've said." He looked around at them all. "Certainly you don't believe I'm trying to talk you into anything? All I want to do is step out of the picture and go my own way, and I should think the rest of you would want to do likewise."