But his voice was different.
"Hello, Hal Mayne," he said; and let Hal come to him to grip hands.
The difference was not great; but Hal's ear registered the barely diminished volume, the slightly greater threadiness of breath behind the words and the infinitesimally increased length of the pauses between them as Tam spoke.
"Sit down here, Hal," said Ajela, leading him to a cushioned float at no more than arm's length from the one in which Tam was sitting and pulling one up alongside his for herself.
"You've come back," said Tam.
"Yes," Hal said. "But I've come back with something I've got to do that involves not only the Encyclopedia but everything else, as well. What that's going to mean, though, is that I think the Encyclopedia is going to be put to use the way it ought to be, at last."
"Is it?" said Tam. "Tell me about it."
"You were right when you talked to me about Armageddon, when I was here before," Hal said. "I've taken nearly six years coming to understand what you meant. When I left here to go to the mines on Coby, I didn't know what I was doing; only that I was running, both because I had to find someplace safe for me and because there were things I had to do. What, I didn't know then. I do now."
"Yes," said Tam. The deep hoarseness of age with which he spoke seemed to make his words walk under Hal's like those of a ghost speaking from a crypt at their feet. "You had to find yourself. I knew that, even then."
"I didn't understand people," said Hal. "I'd been brought up under glass. That was why my tutors wanted me to go to Coby. On Coby I began to wake up…"
He told Tam about Walter, Malachi and Obadiah, about Coby, Harmony, and his hours in the Militia cell; with all he had come to understand there and all that had followed from that until now. Tam sat and listened with the motionlessness of face and body that time had brought to him. When Hal finally stopped talking, he did not speak for a long moment.
"And it ends with you back here," he said at last.
"That much of it ends," said Hal.
Tam sat looking at him. A younger individual would have frowned, questioningly. But Tam no longer needed gross facial movements to signal his reactions.
"That much was only the beginning," he went on. "I can understand the situation, now, I can look beyond the Others and know that they're only a part of the real problem; a symptom, not a cause. The real problem's that we've all of us finally come to the point where there's no longer a choice. Now we've got to take charge - consciously - of what's going to happen to us; instead of going on blundering forward instinctively, the way we've always done ever since we first began to look beyond the next meal, or the next dry place to sleep. And the one tool that can let us do that is here. The Final Encyclopedia's the only thing we've managed to show for all those long centuries of savagery and the short centuries of civilization; that so far've only brought us to the point where a handful of us can kill off everyone else."
"Yes," said Tam. For a moment he did not say anything more. His gaze went past Hal and Ajela alike; and when he spoke again, it was clearly to himself as well as them.
"Do you know what it means to try to control history?" he said. He looked back to Hal. "Do you know the mass and momentum of those forces you're talking about laying your hands on? I tried something like that - and I had power. I raised a social tidal wave against a whole people. A tidal wave that ought to have drowned the Friendlies, forever. And all it took to stop me was Jamethon Black, one man of faith who wouldn't move out of my path. On him all that great force I'd built up broke; and it drained away, in a million little streams, in a million directions, doing nothing, harming no one."
Ajela leaned forward and put one of her hands over one of his, where it laid on the padded arm of his float. Hal looked at the warm, white young hand over the dark, gnarled one of age.
"For nearly ninety years you've been making up for that," she said, softly.
"I? All I've done is watch the hearth, keep the candle lit…" His head shook on his shoulders, slightly, from side to side. "But I know the strength of history when it moves."
He looked back at Hal.
"And it's what you're talking about working with," he said. "Even if you're right about using the Encyclopedia, even if everything you hope for gathers behind what you know needs to be done, you'll still be an ant trying to direct a hurricane. You know that?"
"I think so," said Hal, soberly.
"God knows," said Tam, "I want to see you try. God knows it'd justify me, make me of some worth after all these years to the people I'd have destroyed if I could; and also it'd justify Mark Torre and everyone who's come to work here, after him. But think - you could just as easily close your eyes to where it's all going. You could use your mind and your strength to make a comfortable safe niche out of the storm for yourself and any you might love - for the few years your body still has to give you - just by closing your eyes to what's going to happen eventually to people who'll never really know who you were or what it costs you to try what you want to try. You can still turn back."
"No," said Hal. "Not any more. Not for a longer time than you might think."
Tam breathed in deeply and pushed himself more upright in his float.
"All right, then," he said. "Then you ought to know that you've already got most of ten worlds set in motion against what you want. Bleys Ahrens has put in motion a plan for the mobilization of the credit and the force to take over everything the Others don't already control, by military means if necessary."
There was a moment's silence among the three of them.
"Bleys?" said Hal. "What about Danno?"
"Danno died, unexpectedly and conveniently, four standard months ago," said Tam. "Bleys controls the Others now. In fact, he may have already for some time since; and plainly he's come to feel he can't risk waiting any longer to act."
Hal watched the old man, fascinated.
"How do you know that?" he asked. "How do you know about this plan, this mobilization?"
"It's reflected in hundreds of thousands of ordinary news items," said Tam. "All I needed, to pick those out and read them right, was to see the implications of what I read in the neural pathways. What outside scholars come here to do, or what they ask us to tell them, mirrors the state of affairs on their worlds."
"In the neural pathways?" Hal turned to stare at Ajela.
"I haven't seen it there." Her face was pale. "But I told you no one could read the pathways like Tam."
"Time teaches anyone," said Tam. "Believe me."
The full strength of his grim and cantankerous spirit was in his voice; and Hal believed him. Looking at this man who had held the Final Encyclopedia true to Mark Torre's dream for so long, Hal understood for the first time that to Tam the task had not been just like that of standing sentinel at a vault. It had been like the guarding of a living being. Not simply the fierceness of a dragon crouching above a treasure had ridden in the other man, but an unthinking commitment like that of someone who defends and maintains a child of his or her body. It was not the machinery, but a soul, to which he had given the long years of his life.
"Then time's short," said Hal.
"Very short," said Tam. "What do you plan to do?"
Now that the decision was plainly taken, the strength that Hal had felt in the older man a moment before had given way once more to the great weariness in him.
"First," said Hal. "I've got to use the Encyclopedia to trace the roots leading to the emergence of the Others and the emergence of those who may successfully oppose them. It's the process by which knowledge gives birth to idea, and idea gives birth to art, that's the key to the way the Encyclopedia is finally going to be used. But knowledge has to come first. Until I've got a full picture of how the present situation came to be, I'll have no hope of identifying the human elements that are the real things going to war, here. So, while Bleys mobilizes, I'm going to be tracing people and their actions back into the dust of the past. There's no other path I can take to what we need."