His voice had run down in strength toward the end of his words until it was almost inaudible to Hal. He stopped talking; and this time he did not start again. He sat still behind his desk, looking down at the top of it. Ajela stood silently behind him, soothingly massaging his neck; and Hal sat still. It seemed to Hal, although the little stream ran unchanged beside them, the pseudo-sky overhead was still as blue and the appearance of the pine forest around them was still as green and lovely, that a coldness had crept into the room they occupied, and that all the colors and softnesses in it had become dulled and hardened and old.
"In any case," Ajela said, into the new silence, "I can show Hal around the Encyclopedia during the time he's got before he has to go."
"Yes." Tam lifted his eyes to look at the two of them once more. "Show him around. Give him a chance to see as much as he can, while he can."
Chapter Four
Back in Hal's room, Ajela played with the controls bank; and a lean-faced man with grizzled hair appeared on the screen.
"Ajela!" he said.
"Jerry," she told him, "this is Hal Mayne, who just came in yesterday. He wants to go out to Coby as soon as he can. What have you got as possibilities?"
"I'll look." The screen went blank.
"A friend of yours?" Hal asked.
She smiled.
"There're less than fifteen hundred of us on permanent staff, here," she said. "Everybody knows everybody."
The screen lit up again with the face of Jerry.
"There's a liner outbound to New Earth, due to hit orbit here in thirty-two hours, eighteen minutes," he said, "Hal Mayne?"
"Yes?" Hal moved up to where he could be seen on Jerry's screen.
"From New Earth in two days you can transship by cargo ship to Coby itself. That should put you on Coby in about nine days, subjective time. Will that do you?"
"That's fine," said Hal.
"You've got your credit papers on file, here?"
"Yes."
"All right," said Jerry. "I can just go ahead and book it for you, if you want."
Hal felt a touch of embarrassment.
"I don't want any special favors - " he was beginning.
"What favors?" Jerry grinned. "This is my job, handling traffic for our visiting scholars."
"Oh, I see. Thanks," said Hal.
"You're welcome." Jerry broke the connection.
Hal turned back to Ajela.
"Thank you for doing the calling, though," he said. "I don't know your command codes here at all."
"Neither does anyone who's non-permanent personnel. You could have found out from the Assistance Operator, but this saves time. You do think you'd like to have me show you around the Encyclopedia?"
"Yes. Absolutely - " Hal hesitated. "Could I actually work with the Encyclopedia?"
"Certainly. But why don't you leave that until last? After you've seen something of it, working with it will make more sense to you. We could go back to the Transit Point and start from there."
"No." He did not want to hear the voices again - at least, not for a while. "Can we get some lunch first?"
"Then suppose I take you first to the Academic control center - I mean after the dining room, of course."
They left their table, walked out of the dining room, down what seemed like a short corridor, and entered through a dilated aperture into a room perhaps half the size of the dining room. Its walls were banked with control consoles; and in mid-air in the center of the room floated what looked like a mass of red, glowing cords, making a tangle that was perhaps a meter thick, from top to bottom, and two meters wide by three long. Ajela led him up to it. The cords, he saw from close-up, were unreal - visual projections.
"What is it?" he asked.
"The neural pathways of the Encyclopedia currently being activated as people work with them." She smiled sympathetically at him. "It doesn't seem to make much sense, does it?"
He shook his head.
"It takes a great deal of time to learn to recognize patterns in it," she said. "The technicians that work with it get very good. But, actually only Tam can look at it and tell you at a glance everything that's being done with it."
"How about you?" he asked.
"I can recognize the gross patterns - that's about all," she said. "I'll need ten more years to begin to qualify myself for even the beginning technician level."
He looked at her with a touch of suspicion.
"You're exaggerating," he said. "It won't take you that long."
She laughed, and he felt gratified.
"Well, maybe not."
"I'd guess you must be pretty close to being level with a beginning technician right now," he said. "You're pulling that Exotic trick of talking yourself down. You wouldn't have gone from nowhere to becoming Tam's special assistant in six years, if you weren't unusual."
She looked at him, suddenly sober.
"Plainly," she said, "you're a little unusual yourself. But, of course, you'd have to be."
"I would? Why?"
"To hear the voices at the Transit Point."
"Oh," he said. "That."
She took him up close to the glowing, air-borne mass of red lines, and began to trace individual ones, explaining how one was clearly a tap from the Encyclopedia's memory-area of history over to the area of art, which meant that a certain scholar from Indonesia had found a connection to a new sidelight on the work he was doing; and how another line showed that the Encyclopedia itself was projecting related points to the research another person was doing - in effect suggesting avenues of exploration.
"Is this all just what Tam called 'library' use of the Encyclopedia?" Hal asked.
"Yes." Ajela nodded.
"Can you show me what the other kind would look like in these neural pathways?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"No. The Encyclopedia's still waiting for someone who can do that."
"What makes Tam so sure it's possible?"
She looked gravely at him.
"He's Tam Olyn. And he's sure."
Hal reserved judgment on the question. She took him next to the mechanical heart of the Encyclopedia, the room containing the controls for the solar power it stored and used, to run the sphere and to drive the force-panels that protected it. The panels actually used little of the power. Like the phase-shift from which they were derived, they were almost non-physical. Where the phase-shift drive did not actually move a spaceship as much as it changed the description of its location, the protective panels in effect set up an indescribably thin barrier of no-space. Just as a spaceship under phase drive at the moment of shift was theoretically spread out evenly throughout the universe and immediately reassembled at some other designated spot than that from which it started, so any solid object attempting to pass the curtain of no-space in the panels became theoretically spread out throughout the universe, without hope of reassembling.
"You know about this?" Ajela asked Hal as they stood in the mechanicals control room.
"A little," he said. "I learned, the way everybody does, how the shift was developed from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle."
"Not everybody," she said. He frowned at her.
"Oh?"
She smiled. "You'd be surprised what percentage of the total race has no idea of how space vessels move."
"I suppose," he said, a little wistfully. "But anyway, the force-panels don't seem that hard to understand. Essentially, all they do is what a spaceship does, if a one-in-a-million chance goes wrong. It's just that after things are spread out they're never reassembled."