It was a new sort of brilliance that illuminated things formerly hidden from him. He was acutely aware of the two parts of the structure with which he thought. The but and the ben of it - the front chamber and the rear one. In the front, brightly illuminated, was the long and narrow room of his conscious thoughts, where logic kept order and worked in visible steps from question to answer. But at the back of that room was the doorless wall that separated it from the rear chamber - the vast unordered attic of his unconscious, piled and stored with all the rich lumber of his experience. In just the past few hours of talk and dreams that wall had been burned thin, as the connecting link between mind and body had been thinned by his struggle to survive, so that now it was less a wall than a semi-transparent membrane. Also, the normally blinding lamp of his instinct to survive had been turned down, until with vision adjusted to dimness he could see through that membrane into formerly obscure corners and dark places from which his conscious vision had been blocked before.
Now he saw by the light of that gentler lamp of understanding, which illuminated both chambers alike and shone through the thinned membrane that separated them, until from the dimmed front chamber he could now begin to make out new shapes of patterns and identities amongst all the clutter that the back chamber held.
In that seeking light he could no longer deny what he knew to be true. He had indeed, as Bleys had claimed he must sooner or later, taken matters finally into his own hands. He had lied to Rukh by omission because he knew she would not agree with what he wanted to suggest, the removal of the donkeys and the explosive so that the Command might disperse and survive, the explosives taken by one person to a safe hiding place. He had chosen to do this without consultation with anyone, making the decisions for all of the rest and taking charge by main force. But he had done it with a purpose. A purpose outside himself.
And in that fact lay all the difference in the universe from what Bleys had tried to imply to such an action. For Bleys had spoken of matters taken over by the more powerful individual, alone, for his own survival and comfort. Behind the tall man's words had been the implication that there was no other worthwhile goal but this. But he had been wrong. For there was in fact a massively greater goal - the eternal survival of the race so that it could continue to learn and grow. That purpose was toward life while Bleys' was only toward a brief moment of personal satisfaction, followed by an inevitable death that would leave behind no mark upon the fabric of the universe. The truer instinct to sacrifice a personal life that the race might survive was imaged in the Brown Man he had created as part of the poem he had made in the mountains, reaching out to give form to the understanding already growing within him.
It had been a form constructed by way of the pattern of words, as he had been making such constructs unconsciously with his poetry since he had been very young. Bleys' way had no form, no purpose, no value, only the building of a little comfort for a short while - before the coming of the endless dark.
The way of all those Hal had ever been close to had always been aware of the greater purpose. Malachi, Walter and Obadiah had died to ensure that Hal himself would live, and so perhaps come to this present moment of understanding. Those in Rukh's Command had fought and died for an end they felt too strongly to question, even if the exact shape of it was not visible to them. Tam Olyn had given the long years of his life to guardianship of that great lever for humanity that the Encyclopedia would one day be. And he, himself, had been driven from his earliest beginnings by a similar purpose; even if, as with those in the Command, its exact shape had continued to be hidden from him.
A powerful feeling of being close now to what he had always sought took hold of Hal. In the face of that feeling, the agonies and the approaching death of his body dwindled to unimportance. The fact of the cell about him dwindled. Pushing all things into the background now was the fact that through the near-transparent membrane, between the two compartments of his mind, comprehension was at last beginning to flow back and forth, revealing a possible solution to all problems, a victory the possibility of which had been wholly hidden from him, before.
Even now, he still could not see it clearly. But he felt its presence, unmistakably; and, knowing at last that it was there, he mined his way toward it with the twin tools of dreams and poetry, linking the two for the first time to explore, with the illumination of his reasoning front mind, the great store of human experience and unconscious understandings in the mind's darker, older twin beyond the membrane.
A sense of transport uplifted him. He foresaw these tools finally taking him to the distant tower of which he had dreamed, that was his goal and that of humanity since the beginning. The tools only waited for him to fashion them into conscious reality, out of the memories and vision that had been used unconsciously to that purpose since the race first lifted its eyes to dream beyond the prison of its present moment toward a greater and better future.
All that he needed was there in the cluttered attic of his experience. To isolate each necessary element of it he was only required to follow the two lamps that had lighted the way of every human from his beginning… the need, and the dream.
He let his mind take leave, therefore, of his body that was fighting and struggling for the scant breath available to it; and set his perceptions free to go on their search.
Again, he dreamed. But this time on the wings of purpose.
… A young man's face looked down at him, with Old Earth's summer sky blue and high behind it. It was an Exotic face, much more youthful than Walter's, the visage of a visitor to the estate. Its owner was a former pupil of Walter's, who had studied under the older man at a time when Walter had still been a teacher on his home of Mara. The pupil was grown, now, and himself a teacher of other Exotics. He wore a dark brown robe on his slim, erect body, and stood with Hal in the woods just beyond the artificial lake. Together, they were watching a sandy patch of ground at their feet and the busy scurrying there of tiny black bodies to and from the opening of an ant hill.
"… One way of thinking of them," the young Exotic was saying to Hal, "is to think of the whole community as a single creature, so that an ant-hill or a swarm of bees becomes the equivalent of a single animal. The individual ant or bee, then, is just one part of the whole creature. The way a fingernail might be to you, useful, but something that you can do without if necessary, or something for which you can grow a replacement."
"Ants and bees?" echoed Hal, fascinated. The single creature image woke something in him that was almost like a memory. "What about people?"
The Exotic teacher smiled down at him.
"People are individuals. You're an individual," he answered. "You don't have to do what the hive as a whole, or the swarm as a whole wants to do. These have no choice, as you do. You can make individual decisions and be free to act on them."
"Yes, but…" Hal's mind had been captured. The powerful idea that had risen in him was something he could not quite visualize and which his eight-year-old powers of expression were inadequate to describe. "A person doesn't have to do what other persons want unless he wants to - I know that. But there could be something like everyone knowing the same thing, then each person could make up his own mind about it. Wouldn't that be practically the same thing?"