"You're doing it," he said, on a long exhalation of breath.
"Not really," replied Hal. "Not yet. I'm just beginning to investigate the possibilities - "
"You're doing it - at last!" said Tam, in a stronger voice. "What Mark Torre dreamed of - using the Encyclopedia as a pure thinking tool. Using it, by God, the way he planned it to be used!"
"You have to understand," said Hal, "this is just a beginning. I'm only trying out poetry as a creative lever. I was waiting to show you until I had some firm results - "
Tam's wrinkled gray-skinned hand closed with remarkable strength on Hal's sleeve.
"This trip," said Tam. "Put it off. You've got to stay here, now. Stay, and work with the Encyclopedia."
Hal shook his head.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll get at it again just as soon as I can get back. But there's no one else to do what needs to be done on the Friendlies, the Exotics and on the Dorsai. I have to go, if the worlds are to be saved."
"Damn it, the worlds can take care of themselves, for once!" snapped Tam. "This is the doorway, the dawn of a new beginning! And you're the only one who can lead us into it. You can't be risked, now!" The technicians about the room were staring. Tam ignored them. "Hal!" he said. "Do you hear me?"
"I'm sorry." Gently, Hal pulled his sleeve out of the other's grasp. "I meant what I said. There's no one else to talk to the people who have to be talked to if the worlds are going to survive."
"Well, and what if they don't - as long as the Encyclopedia survives with what you can learn to do, now - what does the rest matter, then?" raged Tam. "Let Bleys and his friends have the other worlds, for fifty years - or a hundred years - or whatever. They can't touch you and your work here; and here's where the future lies. Isn't it the future that counts?"
"The future and the people," said Hal. "Without the people there wouldn't be any future. What good's a gift with no one to give it to? And you know as well as I do it's only if what I might find here turned out to be no use to anyone else, that Bleys'd leave the Encyclopedia alone. While if he already had all the other worlds and was really determined to get the Encyclopedia, eventually he would. With Newton, Cassida, and the stations on Venus, he'll have some of the best scientific and technological minds in his service. They'd find a way eventually to break through to us. Nothing ever made by humans stops other humans forever. Tam, I have to go."
Tam stood still. He did not say anything further. But his whole body seemed to hunch into itself, to become less. Ajela stepped to him and put her arms around him.
"It's all right," she said softly to him. "It'll work out, Tam. Hal'll come back safe. Believe him - believe me."
"Yes…" said Tam, harshly. He turned slowly away from her and toward the doorway that would take him back to his own suite. "You don't give me much choice, do you?"
Chapter Fifty-two
The first deep-space vessel available to carry Hal and Amid in the right direction took them both only as far as New Earth City on New Earth, from which point they went different ways. Amid, to Mara to talk to his fellow Exotics there in preparation for the message Hal was planning to bring them; Hal, to the city of Citadel on Harmony.
Hal had half a day to himself in New Earth City after seeing Amid off; and he spent it taking note of the differences that had come over that metropolis since he had paused there as a boy, on his way to Coby seven years before. The larger differences were ones that seven years of time alone could not account for. It was the same city, on the same world; and business within it was proceeding much as it had proceeded when he had seen it before; but in the people there, those Hal saw on the streets and in the buildings, a change had come for which ten times seven years would hardly have been enough to account.
It was as if a darkening sense of limited time had moved in upon them like some heavy overcast of cloud, to interdict whatever hope and purpose had formerly shone into their daily lives. Under this gathering darkness, they seemed to scurry with the frantic energy of those who would deny a rapidly approaching deadline when all their efforts would become useless. Like ants who appear to redouble their dashing about in the fading light of sunset, the people of New Earth City seemed obsessed with an urgency to accomplish all their usual activities, both with great dispatch and with a denial that there was any need for that urgency.
But, behind that denial, Hal felt a penetrating and overwhelming fear of an approaching night in which all they had done to prepare would turn out to be useless.
He was glad at last, therefore, to ride up to the ship into which he had transferred to get to Harmony. Arriving at that world, he rode a jitney down to the Citadel spaceport; and landed on a day there that for once was without weeping rainclouds. A watery, but clear, sunlight from the large yellow orb of E. Eridani, that same sol-like star Hal had picked out of the night sky back on Earth as a boy, gilded the stolid brick and concrete buildings of the city outside the port. He took an automated cab and directed it to a destination on that Friendly city's northern outskirts, to a dome-roofed building in the midst of a large, rubbled, open lot among dwelling places set at some little distance from each other. Releasing the cab, he entered the building.
Within, there was nothing to show that time had not stood still since his last visit. The air, barely a degree or two above the temperature of that outside, was as before heavy with the faintly banana-oil-like smell of the lubricant that those living on the Friendlies had harvested by tapping the variform of one variety of native tree they had discovered at the time of their first wave of colonization. Several surface vehicles with their propulsive units exposed or partially dismantled sat about the unpartitioned interior in the pale light through the translucent dome. In the far end of the floor, a stocky, older man in work clothes was head down into the works of one of the vehicles.
Hal walked over to him.
"Hello, Hilary," he said.
The head of the stocky man came up. Gray eyes from under a tight, oil-streaked skull cap looked at Hal, dryly.
"What can I do for you?" the other man asked.
"You don't recognize me?" said Hal, caught halfway between humor and sadness.
It was not surprising. In the two years since the other had last seen him, Hal had crossed the line into physical maturity. He had been a tall, lean, intense stripling when Hilary had seen him last. Now, although there were no sudden age lines on his face and the twenty extra kilograms of flesh and muscle he now carried on his bones had only reasonably increased his apparent weight, a world of difference had overtaken him. He was no longer just very tall. He was big. Indeed, as he had fully realized at last only when Ajela had confronted him with his own image on his return to the Final Encyclopedia, he was very big.
He read the message of that size in Hilary's response - in the fact that Hilary seemed to tighten up slightly at the first sight of him, then settle in, become even more compact by comparison. It was an unconscious reflex of the other man, part of an indefinable, automatic measuring instinct in him, like that which causes one male dog to bristle at his original glimpse of a strange and larger other, only to lower the hair on back and shoulders when a second glance discovers that the difference in size between them was too great to make any thought of challenge practical.