Behind the Curlews were three smaller and faster jets belonging to the news agencies which had been first to get their people to the scene. Looming over the aircraft, making them look like toy miniatures, was the burnished coppery hull of the Tara. And beyond the ship was a lake which stretched to the horizon, its waters sewn with diamond-fire by the low morning sun.
No matter how old he lived to be, Nicklin had decided, he would never get used to a sun which traversed the sky. On the previous evening, scant hours after the Tara’s return, he had watched the first sunset of his life, unable to take his eyes off the searing disk as it slid below the horizon. Like many others of the dazed and bemused pilgrims, he had spent most of the night in the open, staring at new constellations and waiting for the sun to reappear. Even though he had known in advance that it had to show itself on the opposite side of the world, the fact that it actually did so filled him with a profound wondering. The confirmation that he now lived on the outside of a sphere had come as a quasi-religious experience for one accustomed to the insularity of Orbitsville. He felt exhilarated, and dangerously exposed to the vastness of the universe, a micro-organism clinging to the surface of a ball that was hurtling through unpredictable space.
And in keeping with the diminutive size of the new world in comparison to Orbitsville, the pace of human affairs seemed to have speeded up to match the flickering, inertia-less activities of creatures whose cosmos is a drop of water…
In one instant the Tara had been drifting in deep space; in the next it had been resting on a sunlit, grassy plain.
The ship’s clocks showed no lapse of time, but every individual on board—children included—had recollections of a time outside of time. From what Nicklin could gather, the common experience—unlike his own—had been a brief and wordless communion with a benign deity, one who was shrouded in white light, rendered invisible by mingling glories.
They had emerged from it as essentially the same people, with all their previous beliefs confirmed beyond all doubt. The first thing Ropp Voorsanger had done was to lead the entire company out on to the lush grass and conduct a service of thanksgiving. And never in human history could there have been a congregation so united in its unshakeable faith. After all, they had been part of a general and undeniable miracle. They had been lost, and now they were saved, and their salvation had come about through a Divine Intervention. They had been justified, as no others had ever been justified, in sending up their cry of Hallelujah!
Nicklin’s experience had been unique, because he had been necessarily transformed. He had come out of it with a new set of beliefs which required him to revise his internal model of reality. Thereafter he had to acknowledge the existence of a supreme being. Giving it the name of God, or the Good Fairy, or the Gaseous Vertebrate made no difference to the central, essential fact that he could no longer live his life as a sceptic.
While waiting, alone beneath the stars, he had wondered if the impact on his personality could have been any greater had he been persuaded to accept the existence of the Judaic God—and not of the ultimate, non-mystical Personality.
You KNOW who I am, the Personality had said, and the uncanny thing was that Nicklin had been prepared long in advance for the revelation. He had almost reached the truth that grey wintry morning in the Beachhead office when Silvia London had preached that all matter had a mindon component, and that all that was needed for the development of an immortal personality was the existence of a sufficiently complex physical organisation, such as the human brain.
Nicklin had begun to argue that if physical complexity was all that was needed to conjure a mind into existence there was, in principle, no need to insist on a biological element. It should have been possible for any sufficiendy complex organisation to develop an intelligent personality. And, taking that argument to its logical conclusion, what better candidate could there be—in the category of complex, multi-component physical structures—than a galaxy?
The concept of an intelligent galaxy was hardly new—scientific visionaries such as Firsoff had advanced it as far back as the middle of the twentieth century.
But to be confronted with the actuality!
Years would pass, Nicklin knew, before he could hope to assimilate the knowledge that he shared the stage of eternity with beings like the Ultans, so advanced and so powerful that they could presume to remodel the entire scheme of creation to their own desires. And that—as far beyond the Ultans as the Ultans were beyond humans—were what he might think of as the Galactians. They were unimaginable, incomprehensible entities, yet so life-oriented that they could concern themselves with the welfare of individual mind units.
Nicklin had to admit the remote possibility that the Tara had been positioned where it was because of some vague and tenuous paraphysical decree that matter would be drawn to its own point of origin on the old Orbitsville shell. But his new instincts told him that the Personality—which had referred to an inert Region 2 galaxy as its “stillborn brother”—had made a conscious and personal decision in the matter.
The implication was that all mind units were uniquely and individually important. They were all immortal, and would all partake in a grand scheme of evolution and assimilation which would lead to the ultimate convergence of Life. The further implication, for those receptive to it, was that no life had ever been wasted, and that…
“Good morning, Jim!” The speaker was Cham White. He and Nora had climbed the hummock which Nicklin had chosen as a vantage point, and both were breathing heavily from the exertion. “What are you doing up here?”
Nicklin waved a greeting. “It’s a good place to think.”
“You have more than most of us to think about, haven’t you, Jim?” Nora said, a smile appearing on her gold-freckled face. “I seem to remember that you were quite the atheist in the old days.”
Nicklin nodded. “As you say, Nora—I have a lot to think about.”
“We came up to bid you goodbye for the time being,” Cham said. “We’re heading back to Beachhead and then Orangefield as soon as possible.”
“You don’t feel like staying on here and helping Voorsanger to found his new Holy City?”
“It was an inspiring sermon he gave this morning.” Cham fingered his grimy trousers with a look of humorous distaste. “But I think I’ll wait until the first hotels have been built and the plumbing put in.”
“Cham White!” Nora dug him with her elbow. “That’s an affront to the Lord.”
“These pants are an affront to everybody—I can’t wait to get changed into something decent.”
“I’m off!” Nora shook Nicklin’s hand, kissed him lightly on the cheek, and started down the slope.
Cham waited until she was some distance off. “Jim, I don’t know what happened between you and Zindee, and I don’t want to know,” he said quickly. “But I have a feeling she’d like to speak to you before we leave. Will you come down and say goodbye to her?”
Nicklin’s heart began to pound. “Of course, Cham.”
He walked beside Cham, his eyes scanning the various centres of activity. Lines were forming near each of the Curlews, but quite a few families had elected to remain with the Tara for the time being, and children belonging to them were darting excitedly between knots of adults. Journalists were wandering about with cameras, and civic officials from Rushport—including welfare people and a few police—were also going about duties which only they seemed to understand. The fiuttery beat of an approaching helicopter added to the impression that the randomly chosen patch of open countryside had become a focus of interest for the rest of the world.