"Yes. They - "Hal hesitated. "It was their idea, their decision."
"I see." Another long pause. "I also assume there're reasons, for your own good, to make you go; and it's these you aren't free to tell me."
"I'm sorry," said Hal. "That's right. I can't."
There rose once again in his mind the remembered image of his three tutors and the still semi-obscured memory of what he had watched on the terrace only the day before. A pressure grew in his chest until it threatened to choke him. It was rage, a rage against the people who had killed those whom he loved. There would be no peace for him, anywhere, until he had found the tall man, and everyone connected with him who had brought Walter, Malachi, and Obadiah to their deaths. Something hard and old and cold had been waked in him by their slaying. He was going to Coby only to grow strong, so that in the end he could bring retribution to that tall man and the others. There was no way he could stay here at the Final Encyclopedia or anywhere else. If he were to be held prisoner here, he knew, he would find some way to break loose and go to Coby.
He became aware that Tam was talking again.
"Well then," said Tam, "I'll respect the privacy of your reasons. But I'll ask you one thing in return - remember. Remember our need of you here. This - "
He gestured at everything around him.
" - this is the most precious thing ever produced by the human race. But it needs someone to direct it. It had Mark Torre in the beginning. It's had me since. But now I'm old, too old. Understand - I'm not offering you the Directorship. You'd only qualify for that later on, if you showed you could do the job, and after a great deal of time and work. But there isn't any other prospect but you; and past indications are there aren't likely to be, in the time I've got left."
He stopped. Hal did not know what to say, so he said nothing.
"Have you any conception of what it's like to have a tool like the Encyclopedia at your fingertips?" Tam said suddenly. "You know scholars use it as a reference work; and the overwhelming majority of people think it's nothing more than that - a large library, nothing else. But that use is like using a human being for a beast of burden when he or she could be a doctor, a scientist, or an artist! The Encyclopedia's not here just to make available what's already known. It's been built at all this great cost and labor for something more, something far more important."
He paused and stared at Hal, the deep lines of his face deeper with emotion that could either be of anger or anguish.
"Its real purpose - its only true purpose - " he went on, "is to explore the unknown. For that it needs a Director who understands what that means, who won't lose sight of that purpose. You can be that person; and without you, all the potential value of the Encyclopedia to the human race can be lost."
Hal had not planned to argue; but his instincts and training led him to question instinctively.
"If it's that important," he said, "what's wrong with waiting however long it takes? Inside the force panels nothing can touch the Encyclopedia. So why not just keep on waiting until someone else who can hear the voices comes along, someone who's free?"
"There're no denotations in reality, only connotations," said Tam harshly. The command in his dark eyes held Hal almost physically in his seat. "Since time began people have given words arbitrary definitions. They created logical structures from those same definitions, and thought that they'd proved something, in terms of the real universe. Safe physically doesn't mean totally safe. There're non-material ways in which the Encyclopedia is vulnerable to destruction; and one of them's an attack on the minds directing it. Marvelous as it is, it's still only a tool, needing the human intellect to put it to work. Take that human intellect from it and it's useless."
"But that's not going to happen," said Hal.
"It's not?" Tam's voice grew even harsher. "Look around you at the fourteen worlds. Do you know the old Norse legends, the term 'Ragnarok'? It means the end of the world. The doom of Gods and Men."
"I know," said Hal. "First came the Frost Giants and Fimbulwinter, then Ragnarok - the last great battle between Gods and Giants."
"Yes," said Tam. "But you don't know that Ragnarok - or Armageddon, the real Armageddon, if you like that word better - is on us now?"
"No," said Hal; but the words in the old, hoarse voice jarred him deeply, and he felt his heart pumping strongly in his chest.
"Then take my word for it. It is. Hundreds of thousands - millions of years it's taken us to build our way up from the animal level to where we could spread out among the stars. Unlimited space. Space for everyone. Space for each individual to emigrate to, to settle down on and raise those of the same mind as himself or herself. And we did it. We paid the cost and some survived. Some even matured and flowered, until we had a few special Splinter Cultures, like the Exotic, the Dorsai, and the Friendly. Some didn't. But so far we've never been tested as a whole race, a whole race inhabiting more than one world. The only enemies we met were natural forces and each other, so we've built up worlds; and we've built this Encyclopedia."
A sudden coughing interrupted him. For a little while his voice had strengthened and cleared as he spoke until it nearly lost its hoarseness and sounded young again. But then it had hoarsened rapidly once more, and now the coughing took him. Ajela massaged his neck with the fingertips of both her hands until the fit stopped and he lay back in the float breathing deeply.
"And now," he went on, slowly and throatily after a long moment, "the work of all our centuries has borne its fruit - just before the frost. The peak of the harvest season is on us and the unpicked fruit will rot on the trees. We've found out the Splinter Cultures can't survive on their own. Only full-spectrum humans survive. Now, the most specialized of our Splinter Cultures are dying; and there's a general social breakdown preparing us for the end. Where the physical laws of the universe have tried and failed to defeat us, we've done it to ourselves. The pattern of life's become fouled and sterile; and there's a new virus spreading among us. The crossbreeds among the Splinter Cultures are a sickness to our whole race as they try to turn it into a mechanism for their own personal survival. Everywhere, everywhere - the season of our times is going downhill into a winter-death."
He stopped and stared fiercely at Hal for a moment.
"Well? Do you believe me?" he demanded.
"I suppose so," said Hal.
The fierceness that had come into Tam's face relaxed.
"You," he went on, looking at Hal, "of all people, have to understand this. We're dying. The race is dying. Look, and you have to see it! The people on all the fourteen worlds don't realize it yet because it's coming too slowly, and because they're blinded by the limited focus of their attitudes toward time and history. They only look as far as their own lifetime. No, they don't even look that far. They only look at how things are for their own generation. But to us, up here, looking down at the original Earth and all the long pattern of the centuries, the beginnings of decay and death are plain to see. The Others are going to win. You realize that? They'll end up owning the rest of the race, as if all other humans were cattle - and from that day on there'll be no one left to fight them. The race as a whole will start to die, because it'll have stopped growing - stopped going forward."
Tam paused again.
"There's only one hope. One faint hope. Because even if we could kill off all the Others now, this moment, it wouldn't stop what's coming. The race'd only find some other disease to die of. The cure has to be a cure of the spirit - a breaking out into some new, vaster area for all of us to explore and grow in. Only the Encyclopedia can make that possible. And maybe only you can make it possible for the Encyclopedia, and push back the shadows that are falling, falling in now over all of us."