Hal shook his head.
"I don't have any answers," he said. "I just believe they can be found. No, I know they can be found."
"We haven't found any," said Alhonan. "But you think you can?"
"Yes."
"Then," said Alhonan, "isn't what you're asking just this - that our two worlds should trust you blindly; and blindly take on all the risks a trust like that implies?"
Hal took a deep breath.
"If you want to put it in those terms," he said.
"I don't know what other terms to put it in," replied Alhonan. "But you do think you, alone, can solve this; and we should simply follow you wherever you want to take us?"
"I've got nothing else to think." Hal looked at him squarely. "Yes."
"All right," said Chavis, "then tell us - what would you do?"
"What I decided to do in that cell on Harmony," said Hal, "learn what's involved for the race in this situation, decide what's to be done, then try to do it."
"Calling on us for whatever help you need," said Alhonan.
"If necessary - and I'd say it will be," Hal said. "You, and any others who also want a solution."
The four before him looked at each other.
"You'll have to give us a specific reason," said Chavis, gently. "You must have a basis for this belief of yours, that, even if there's something there for you to find, a reason why you should be the one to find it where we haven't been able to."
He gazed at her, then at Padma, and finally at Nonne and Alhonan.
"The fact is," he said, slowly at first but gaining speed and emphasis as he spoke, "I don't understand why you, with your ontogenetic calculations, don't see it for yourselves. How is it you can't recognize what's under your noses? All that's needed is to look - to stand back for a moment and look at the last five hundred years, the last thousand years, as a whole. It's people building forward - always forward - that makes history. The interaction of their individual forces - conflicting, opposing, mingling and finding compromise vectors for their impinging forces; like an orchestra with millions of instruments, each trying to play a part and each trying to be heard in its own part. If the brass section sounded as if it was dominating the rest of your orchestra, would your solution be no more than eliminating the brass section?"
He paused, but none of them answered.
"That's exactly what you're suggesting, with your idea of setting the Dorsai to destroy the Others," he said. "And it's wrong! The orchestra as a whole's got a purpose. What has to be done is find why the brass section's too prominent; and from that knowledge learn to use the whole orchestra better. Because it's not happening by accident - what you hear. It's a result, an end product of things done earlier, things done with a purpose that you haven't yet understood, that the individual players even in the brass section don't themselves understand. It's happening for a reason that has to be found; and it won't be found by anyone looking for it who doesn't believe it's there. So I suppose that's why it has to be me who goes looking for it - not you; and that's why you'll have to trust me until I do find it, then listen when I tell you what needs to be done."
He stopped at last. The three other faces before him turned to Padma. But Padma sat without saying anything, with no expression on his calm face that would indicate his opinion.
"I think," Chavis said, carefully, "that at this point we might do better to talk this over by ourselves, if Hal doesn't mind leaving us."
Beside Hal, Amid was getting to his feet. Hal also rose, and Amid led him from the balcony. They went left along the hall to a down-sloping ramp, that let them out into a garden which plainly lay below the balcony where the others still sat. A tall hedge enclosed a small pool and fountain, surrounded by deeply-hollowed blocks of stone, obviously designed as seats.
"If you don't mind waiting alone," Amid said, "I'm one of them, and I ought to be up there with them. I'll be back, shortly."
"That's fine," said Hal, seating himself in one of the stone chairs with its back to the balcony. Amid left him.
The gentle sound of splashing water amid the otherwise silence of the garden enclosed him gently. Looking back over his shoulder and up, he could see the balustrade of the balcony: but the angle of his view was too steep for him to see even the tops of the heads of those still there. By some no-doubt-intentional trick of acoustics, he could hear nothing of their voices.
He looked away from it, back to the leaping water, a jet rising from the center of the pool some fifteen feet in the air before curving over and breaking into feathery spray. Curiously, a feeling of defeat and depression lay like a special darkness upon him.
His thoughts went back to the moment in his cell when he had suddenly broken through to an understanding of all things racial, enclosing him in that moment of his comprehension. The complete picture had been too immense for him to grasp all at once, then; and he still could not do it. During the past weeks he had explored the entity of that understanding section by section, as he might have explored some enormous picture inlaid upon a horizontal area too large to be seen from any one point on it. As he had explored, he had grown taller in knowledge; so that he could see more and more of it from a single point. But, even now, he could not begin to grasp the shape of it as a whole.
However, he could feel it as a whole. He was aware of its totality, the living moment of the great human creation he was now carefully examining, bit by bit.
Already, it had become almost incredible to him that the existence of what he could be so aware of, in its immensity, should not equally, overwhelmingly, be apparent to everyone else; above all, to seekers after understanding like Amid and the other four upstairs. How was it that the Exotics, all through the three centuries of their existence, had never developed a special study of this great, massive forward progress of the race, that was the result of the interaction of every human individual with its fellows, along the endless road of time?
But they had, of course, he told himself. That was what ontogenetics had been intended to become. Only, apparently it had failed in its purpose. Why?
Because - the answer grew in him slowly out of his new awareness of what he now searched, and tried to understand - ontogenetics had been crippled from the start by an assumption that its final answer would be what the Exotics desired as an ultimate goal.
A feeling of depression, a sensation and an emotion such as he had encountered before, was born in him and grew, slowly, undramatically but undeniably. The one people he had counted on had been the Exotics, clothed in the colors of perceptivity and understanding he had found in Walter the InTeacher. Now, at last, he had been brought to doubt those qualities in them; and, doubting them for the first time, he came at last to doubt himself. Who was he to think that worlds of men and women should listen to him? The task on which he had so confidently launched himself from the cell loomed too great for any single human, even with all things made easy for him. He had little more than twenty years of life's experience to draw on. He was alone - even Amid stood on the other side of the barrier that separated him from all others.
The depression he felt spread to fill him and settle itself in the place of the certainty that had been so much a part of his nature until now. At its base was the dark logic of Bleys, now reinforced by the deaf ears to which he had just been speaking. He lost himself in wrestling with this new enemy and the fountain played. Time passed; and it was with a small shock that he was aware of Amid, once more at his elbow.
Hal got to his feet.
"No," said Amid, "no need to go back up. I can tell you what's been decided."