"I told you, though," he said to her, suddenly conscious of the silence between them, "I'm on my way out. So it doesn't matter whether I heard anything or not."
She sat looking at him penetratingly for a long, silent moment.
"At least," she said at last, "you can take the time to come and talk to Tam Olyn. You and he have something very rare in common."
The point she made was not only effective, but flattering. He was aware she had intended it to be that, but he could not help responding. Tam Olyn was a fabulous name. For his own to be matched with it was ego-building. For just that moment his private grief and loss were forgotten and he thought only that he was being invited to meet Tam Olyn face to face.
"Of course. I'll be honored to talk to him," he said.
"Good!" Ajela got to her feet.
He stared up at her.
"You mean - right now?"
"Why not?"
"No reason not - of course." He got up, in his turn.
"He wants very much to talk to you," she said. She turned, but not toward the door. Instead, she stepped to the bedside tablefloat and the panel of controls there. Her fingers tapped out some code or other.
"We'll go right over," she said.
He was not aware of any feeling of the room's movement; but after a moment's wait she turned toward the door, walked across and opened it, and instead of the corridor he had expected to see, he found himself looking into another, much larger room. Another space, in fact, was a better word for it; it seemed to be not so much a room as a forest glade with comfortable, heavily padded chairfloats scattered up and down its grassy floor along the banks of a small stream that murmured away out of sight between the trunks of a pine forest at the near end of the room and flowed from the base of a small waterfall at the other. A summer midday sky seemed to be overhead.
Behind a desk by the stream, down a little distance from the waterfall, sat the room's single occupant. He looked up as Hal and Ajela approached, pushing aside some time-yellowed and brittle-looking papers that he had been examining on his desk. To Hal's private surprise, he was not the frail-looking centenarian Hal had expected. He was aged - no doubt about it - but he looked more like an eighty-year-old in remarkably good physical condition than someone of his actual years. It was only when they came forward, and Hal met the eyes of the Director of the Final Encyclopedia for the first time, that he felt the full impact of the man's age. The dark gray eyes sunken in wrinkles chilled him with a sense of experience that went beyond any length of the years that Hal could imagine living.
"Sit down," Tam said. His voice was hoarse and old and deep.
Hal walked forward and took a float directly in front of Tam Olyn. Ajela, however, did not sit down. She continued walking forward, and turned to stand beside and partly behind the back of the padded float in which he sat. With one arm she leaned on the top of the float back, the other dropped so that the tips of her fingers rested lightly on Tam's shoulder, as lightly as the lighting of a butterfly. She looked out over Tam's head at Hal, but spoke to the older man.
"Tam," she said, "this is Hal Mayne."
Her voice had a different tone in it that touched Hal for a moment almost with jealousy and with a certain longing.
"Yes," said Tam.
His voice was indeed old. It was hoarse and dry. All his hundred and twenty-plus years echoed in it. His eyes continued to hold Hal's.
"When I first met Mark Torre, after hearing the voices," Tam said slowly, "he wanted to touch my hand. Let me have your hand, Hal Mayne."
Hal got up and extended his hand over the desk. The light, dry fingers of the old man, like twigs covered in thin leather, took it and held it for a second - then let it go.
"Sit down," said Tam, sinking back into his seat.
Hal sat.
"Mark Torre felt nothing when he touched me," Tam said, half to himself, "and I felt nothing now. It doesn't transfer… only, now I know why Mark hoped to feel something when he touched me. I've come to want it, too."
He drew a slow breath through his nostrils.
"Well," he said, "that's it. There's nothing to feel. But you did hear the voices?"
"Yes," said Hal.
He found himself awed. It was not just the ancientness of Tam Olyn that touched him so strongly. There was something beyond that, something that must have been there all of Tam Olyn's life - an elemental force for either good or evil, directed these last eighty-odd years to one purpose only. That time, that distance, that fixity of purpose towered over everything Hal had ever experienced like a mountain over someone standing at the foot of it.
"Yes. I didn't doubt you," Tam was saying, now. "I just wanted the pleasure of hearing you tell me. Did Ajela tell you how rare you are?"
"She mentioned that you and Mark Torre were the only ones who'd heard the voices," Hal answered.
"That's right," Tam Olyn said. "You're one of three. Mark, myself… and now you."
"I…" Hal fumbled as he had fumbled earlier with Ajela, "I'm honored."
"Honored?" There was a dark, angry flash in the eyes set so deeply beneath the age-heavy brow. "The word 'honored' doesn't begin to describe it. Believe me, who used to make my living from words."
Ajela's fingertips pressed down a little, lightly upon the shoulder they touched. The dark flash passed and was gone.
"But you don't understand, of course," Tam said, less harshly. "You think you understand, but you don't. Think of my lifetime and Mark Torre's. Think of the more than a century it took to build this, all around us. Then think deeper than that. Think of all the lifetime of the human race, from the time it began to walk on two legs and dream of things it wanted. Then, you might start to understand what it means to the human race for you to hear the voices at the Transit Point the way you did."
A strange echo came to Hal's mind as he sat under the attack of these words - and it was a curiously comforting echo, Abruptly, it seemed to him he heard in Tam Olyn's voice the trace of an element of another, loved harshness of expression - which had been Obadiah's. He stared at Tam. His studies had always told him that the other was pure Earthman - full-spectrum Earth stock; but what Hal had thought he had heard just now was the hard ring of Friendly thinking - of pure faith, unselfsparing and uncompromising. How could the Director of the Final Encyclopedia have come to acquire some of the thought-ways of a Faith-holder?
"I suppose I can't appreciate it as much as you do," Hal said. "But I can believe it's a greater thing than I can imagine - to have done it."
"Yes. Good," said Tam, nodding. "Good."
He leaned forward over his desk.
"Ajela tells me your clearance request states that you're simply passing through," he said. "We'd like you to stay."
"I can't," answered Hal, automatically. "I've got to go on, as soon as I can find a ship."
"To where?" The commanding old voice, the ancient eyes held him pinned. Hal hesitated. But if it was not safe to speak to Tam Olyn, who could he speak to?
"To Coby."
"Coby? And you're going to do what, on Coby?"
"I'm going to work there," Hal said, "in the mines - for a while."
"Awhile?"
"A few years."
Tam sat looking at him.
"Do you understand you could be here instead, with all it means to have heard the voices, and following to whatever great discovery they might lead you to?" he demanded. "You realize that?"
"Yes."
"But you're going to go to Coby to do mining, anyway?"
"Yes," said Hal, miserably.
"Will you tell me why?"
"No," said Hal, feeling the hand of trained caution on him again, "I… can't."
There was another long moment in which Tam merely sat watching him.
"I assume," Tam said at the end of that time, "you've understood all I've told you. You know the importance of what hearing the voices implies. Ajela and I, here and now, probably know more about you - thanks to the records of the Encyclopedia - than anyone alive, except your three tutors. I assume they agreed to this business of your going to Coby?"