Now, suddenly, nearly a hundred years after he had read the handwritten manuscript, as he still watched and was Cletus under the influence of walking the circle, Hal understood what he had not, before.
In his own time, Cletus had needed to achieve some actual successes in the field to prove to the experienced military that his theories were something more than wild dreams. Those tactical successes were a series of bloodless victories achieved where his superiors would have considered them impossible. Hal had studied these, years ago, to see if Cletus had been using an earlier form of intuitional logic, and had concluded that Cletus had not. He had seen his way to the unexpected tactical solutions he achieved by some other method.
Just what method, Hal had never been able to determine until now. Hal himself knew that his intuitional logic was not unique to him. Chess grandmasters had undoubtedly used versions of it to foresee sequences of moves that would achieve victory on the playing board for them. What he called intuitional logic was only a somewhat refined and extended activity of that same pattern of mind use.
Cletus had clearly made a similar extension of the artistic function he used in painting. His description of the miniature battlefield hanging in midair and the tiny soldiers acting out a solution to a tactical problem, apparently on their own, could be nothing else than a direct application of the unconscious mind to the problem. In short, Cletus, as well as Walter Blunt of the original Chantry Guild - and Jathed, and who knew how many others whose names were lost in history - had been making deliberate use of the Creative Universe to achieve desired ends. Like Blunt, and possibly Jathed, Cletus had used the Creative Universe without realizing its universality, but only the small application of it to what at the moment he wanted to do. But it was startling and rewarding to find further proof of what Hal, himself, sought - and on his own doorstep, so to speak.
At the same time, he realized he still lacked a sure answer to the question of why Cletus had deleted that passage. Hal was suddenly thoughtful. Since Cletus himself had set down the way, why couldn't he, Hal, use his own creative unconscious to try and ask him'?
He looked hard at his own vision of the man who was seated at the desk, writing. Cletus was lost to time. There was no way of actually reaching the living man, himself. But if the transient and the eternal were indeed the same - even though he, Hal, had yet to feel that fact as an absolute, inward truth - then it ought to be possible to talk to the spirit of his great-great-grandfather by the same creative mechanism Cletus himself had described.
Hal concentrated... and although the solid-looking, threedimensional figure he watched continued to sit and write, a ghostlike and transparent version of it turned its head out of the solid head to glance at Hal standing by the desk. Then the whole ghostlike body rose up out of the solid form of Cletus at the desk and walked around the corner of it to face Hal. It was Cletus, as much or more than the solid figure was, and, as Cletus, it sat down on the edge of the desk, folded its arms on its chest and looked at Hal. "So you're my great great-grandson," the spirit of Cletus said. "The family's put on some size since my time." "In my original body as Donal Graeme," said Hal, "I was only a little larger than you. This was the size of my twin uncles, who were unusually large even for my time. But you're right. As Donal Graeme, I was the small one among the men in my family. " "It's flattering to hear I'll have descendants like that," said Cletus. "Though of course I'll never really know of it, since you and I are at this moment just a pair of minds outside both my time and yours. You understand, I'm not just a projection of your own self-hypnosis, as your dead tutors were when you evoked them to advise you as a boy in the Final Encyclopedia, when you first started to run from this man called Bleys Ahrens.
I, the Cletus you're looking at now, am actually more alive than the one seated at that desk, writing. He's a product of your imagination. I, since you brought me to life in what you call the Creative Universe, have a life of my own. I'm Cletus Grahame. not Hal Mayne's concept of Cletus." "I wonder," said Hal soberly. "Maybe I've done you a disservice. What happens to you when I go back to awareness of my own world and time?" "I don't know," said Cletus, "any more than you do. Perhaps I go out like a blown-out candle. Perhaps I wait for you in the Creative Universe until you find your own way there, as you should, eventually. I'm not worried about it. You wanted to know why I deleted those few paragraphs of my writing on the use of terrain?" "Yes," said Hal. "I deleted it because I wanted as many people as possible to read and benefit from my writing," said Cletus. "No one's completely without unconscious prejudices. If, in reading. someone runs across mention of something that offends one of these unconscious prejudices, they tend to find faults to justify a rejection of the writing, whether the faults are actually there or not. I didn't want my work rejected in that way if it could be helped. -
"Why should they find fault with your idea of a vision being something more than a concept?" "Because I was speaking about something that's supposed to be a sort of magic that takes place only in great artists - writers, sculptors, painters, and so forth. The majority of the race, unfortunately, tends far too often to have given up on the possibility of creativity in themselves, either without even having tried to make use of it, or after an early failure. Once something like that's been rejected by an individual, he or she tends to resent anyone who tries to tell them they still have it. Because of that resentment, they'll or make some ground to reject any suggestion it still exists in them, and that rejection, being emotional, would probably force them to reject my writing as a whole, in order to get rid of the unwanted part. So, I took out the passage." "What about those who could have benefited from it?" said Hal. "Those who wouldn't be looking for an excuse to reject the idea?" "They'll find it eventually on their own, I'm sure," said Cletus. "But if a man puts a patch over one eye and goes around trying to convince not only everybody else but himself that he was born with only one peephole on the universe, I've not only got no duty, but no moral right, to pull the patch off and force him to face the fact he's wrong." "History could force you to do it," said Hal. "History hasn't required that of me, in my time," said Cletus. "if it has of you in your time, I sympathize with you. Brace yourself, my great great-grandson. You'll be hated by many of those you give a greater vision to."