Standing there alone, in the glare of the bulb, with the bed and machine and great steel box before him, terror came upon him, a ravening terror that shook hint even as he tried to stand erect and taut to keep it away from him—a swift backlash of fear garnered from the many generations of unknowing and uncaring.
Knowledge—and there was a fear of knowledge, for knowledge was an evil thing. Years ago they had decided that, the ones who made decisions for the Ship, and they had made a law against Reading and they had burned the books.
The Letter said that knowledge was a necessary thing.
And Joshua, standing beside the tomato tank, with the other tanks and their growing things about him, had said that there must be reason and that knowledge would disclose the reason.
But it was only the Letter and Joshua—only the two of them against all the others of them, only the two of them against the decision that had been made many generations back.
No, he said, talking to himself, no, not those two alone—but my father and his father before him and fathers before that, handing down the Letter and the Book and the art of Reading. And he, himself, he knew, if he had had a child, would have handed him the Letter and the Book and would have taught him how to read. He could envision it—the two of them crouched in some obscure hiding beneath the dim glow of a bulb, slowly studying out the way that letters went together to form the words, doing a thing that was forbidden, continuing a chain of heresy that had snaked its way throughout the Folk for many generations.
And here, finally, was the end result, the bed and machine and the great steel box. Here, at last, was the thing to which it all had pointed.
He went to the bed, approaching it gingerly, as if it might be a hidden trap. He poked and prodded it and it was a bed and nothing more.
Turning from the bed to the machine, he went over it carefully, checking the wiring contacts as the instructions said he should, finding the cap, finding the switches, checking on other vital points. He found two loose contact points and he tightened them, and finally, after some hesitation, he threw on the first switch, as the instructions said he should, and the red light glowed.
So he was all ready.
He climbed onto the bed and took up the cap and set it on his head, twisting it securely into place. Then he lay down and reached out and snapped on the second switch and there was a lullaby.
A lullaby, a singing, a tune running in his brain and a sense of gentle rocking and of drowsiness. Jon Hoff went to sleep.
HE WOKE and there was knowledge. A slow, painful groping to recognize the place, the wall without the Holy Picture, the strange machine, the strange thick door, the cap upon his head.
His hands went up and took off the cap and he held it, staring at it, and slowly he knew what it was. Bit by painful bit, it all came back to him, the finding of the room, the opening of the vault, checking the machine and lying down with the cap tight upon his head.
The knowledge of where he was and why he was there—and a greater knowledge.
A knowing of things he had not known before. Of frightening things.
He dropped the cap into his lap and sat stark upright, with his hands reaching out to grasp the edges of the bed.
Space! An emptiness. A mighty emptiness, filled with flaming suns that were called the stars. And across that space, across the stretches of it too vast to be measured by the mile, too great to be measured by anything but light-years, the space crossed by light in the passage of a year, sped a thing that was called a ship—not the Ship, Ship with a capital S, but simply a ship, one of many ships.
A ship from the planet Earth—not from the sun itself, not from the star, but from one of many planets that circled round the star.
It can't be, he told himself. It simply cannot be. The Ship can't move. There can't be space. There can't be emptiness. We can't be a single dot, a lost and wandering mote in the immensity of a universal emptiness, dwarfed by the stars that shine outside the port.
Because if that were so, then they stood for nothing. They were just casual factors in the universe. Even less than casual factors. Less than nothing. A smear of wandering, random life lost amid the countless stars.
He swung his legs off the bed and sat there, staring at the machine.
Knowledge stored in there, he thought. That's what the instruction sheet had said. Knowledge stored on spools of tape, knowledge that was drummed into the brain, that was impressed, implanted, grafted on the brain of a sleeping man.
And this was just the beginning. This was only the first lesson. This was just the start of the old dead knowledge scrapped so long ago, a knowledge stored against a day of need, a knowledge hid away. And it was his. It lay upon the spools, it lay within the cap. It was his to take and his to use—and to what purpose? For there was no need to have the knowledge if there were no purpose in it.
And was it true?
That was the question.
Was the knowledge true?
How could you know a truth? How could you spot an untruth?
There was no way to know, of course—not yet was there a way to know the truth. Knowledge could be judged by other knowledge, and he had but little knowledge—more than anyone within the ship had had for years, yet still so little knowledge. For somewhere, he knew, there must be an explanation for the stars and for the planets that circled around the stars and for the space in which the stars were placed—and for the ship that sped between the stars. The Letter had said purpose and it had said destination and those were the two things he must know —the purpose and the destination.
He put the cap back in its place and went out of the vault and locked the door behind him and he walked with a slightly surer stride, but still with the sense of guilt riding on his shoulders. For now he had broken not only the spirit, but the letter of the law—he was breaking the law for a reason and he suspected that the reason and the purpose would wipe out the law.
He went down the long flights of the escalator stairs to the lower levels.
He found Joe in the lounge, staring at the chess board with the pieces set and ready.
"Where have you been?" asked Joe. "I've been waiting for you."
"Just around," said Jon.
"This is three days," said Joe, "you've been just around."
He looked at Jon quizzically.
"Remember the hell we used to raise?" he asked. "The stealing and the tricks?"
"I remember, Joe."
"You always got a funny look about you, just before we went off on one of our pranks. You have that same look now."
"I'm not up to any pranks," said Jon. "I'm not stealing anything."
"We've been friends for years," said Joe. "You got something on your mind . . ."
Jon, looking down at him, tried to see the boy, but the boy was gone. Instead was the man who sat beneath the Picture, the man who read the Ending, the pious man, the good man, a leader of the Ship's community.
He shook his head. "I'm sorry, Joe."
"I only want to help."
But if he knew, thought Jon, he wouldn't want to help. He'd look at me in horror, he'd report me to the chapel, he'd be the first to cry heresy. For it was heresy, there was no doubt of that. It was a denial of the Myth, it was a ripping away of the security of ignorance, it was a refutation of the belief that all would be for the best, it was saying they could no longer sit with folded hands and rely upon the planned order of the Ship.
"Let's play a game," he said with resolve.
"That's the way you want it, Jon?" demanded Joe. "That's the way I want it."
"Your move," said Joe.
Jon moved his queen pawn. Joe stared at him.
"You play a king's pawn game."