BURTON WEPT WITH THE OTHERS. HE’D LIKED THE HUGE MAN, had perhaps loved him. With his death the group had lost much courage, much morale-boosting, much strength.
After a while they turned around, cautiously, and continued the slow still dangerous descent. When six hours passed, they stopped to eat and sleep. The latter was difficult, since they had to lie on one side and make sure they didn’t roll over while sleeping. They put their pistols against their backs so these would, they hoped, be so uncomfortable that they’d wake them immediately. Excretion was not easy either. The men could face the outer side of the ledge to urinate, though the updraft sometimes caused the liquid to blow back on their cloths. The women had to hang their posteriors over the ledge and hope for the best, which often didn’t happen.
Alice was the only modest one. She required that the others look away while she was relieving herself. Even then, their near presence made her inhibited. Sometimes, though, the mists thickened enough to give her privacy.
They were a gloomy party, still numbed by Joe Miller’s death. Also, they could not help dwelling on the strong possibility that the Ethicals had found the cave and sealed it.
The sound of waves crashing against the base became louder. They descended into the thick clouds; the cliff face and the ledge became even wetter. Finally, Burton, in the lead, was wet by spray and the sea boomed around him.
He halted and sent his lantern beam ahead of him. The edge ran into the black waters. Ahead was the outcropping, and, if what Paheri had said was true, the mouth of the cave would be on its other side.
He called back to those behind Alice, telling them what his light had revealed. He walked into the water, which was only knee deep. Apparently, the shallow ledge went a long way out since the waves were weak here, though powerful on both sides not far away. The water was very cold, seeming to turn his legs into icy clumps.
He came back to the black projection and worked his way around it. Alice came closely behind him. “Is there a cave?” Her voice trembled. He shot the beam ahead to his right. His heart was hammering and not just from the shock of the cold water. He breathed out, “Ah!”
There it was, the long-imagined hole at the base of the mountain. It was arched and low and would require that even Nur stoop to get through it. But it was wide enough for the boats which Paheri had described to pass through it.
Burton shouted back the good news. Croomes, fifth in line, screamed, “Hallelujah!”
However, Burton was not as exultant as he sounded. The cave could still be here, but the boats might not be.
He led Alice along the rope still connected to her belt and bent down to enter the mouth. A few feet inside, a smooth stone floor sloped upward at a 30-degree angle, the hollow broadened, and the ceiling rose to twenty feet. When they were all gathered inside, he ordered that they disconnect the rope. They shouldn’t need it now.
He shone his light on their faces, pale and tired-looking but eager. Gilgamesh was on his far right, and Ah Qaaq stood on the left behind the rest. If Burton had not abandoned his plan to seize the two, the time to do so would be near. But he had decided to improvise when he had to.
He turned and led them up the floor to a tunnel. It curved gently to the right for over three hundred feet, and the air became warmer as they advanced. Before they got to its end, they saw light.
Burton could not resist running toward the illumination. He burst into a very large dome-shaped chamber and almost stepped on a human skeleton. It lay face down, its right arm-bones stretched out as if reaching for something. He picked up the skull and looked within it and at the floor beneath it. There was no tiny black ball.
The light came from huge metal balls, each on one of nine black metal tripods about twelve feet high. The light looked cold.
There were ten black metal boats on V-shaped supports and one empty support. It had held the vessel that the Egyptians had used to get to the tower.
The boats were of various sizes, the largest able to hold thirty people.
At the left side were metal shelves holding gray tins—the Americans would call them cans—each about ten inches high and six inches wide.
It was as Paheri had said it was.
Except that three human skeletons clad in blue clothes lay by one of the large boats.
The others moved in, talking in low tones. The place was certainly awing, but Burton ignored its effect to examine the unexpected remains.
The clothes seemed to be one-piece suits, pocketless, seamless, and buttonless and with pants legs. The material felt glossy and filled out where his fingers had depressed it. He rolled the skulls to one side and shook the bones from the garments. One individual was tall and had heavy bones and a thick supraorbital ridge and heavy jaws. He had probably been an early paleolithic. The bones of the other two were of the modern type, and the pelvis of one was a woman’s.
Inside each skull was a very tiny black sphere. If he hadn’t been looking for them, he wouldn’t have noticed them.
There was no evidence of violence. What had struck these agents down?
And what vehicle had brought them here?
He would have expected one of the flying vessels he’d glimpsed many years ago. But there had been none outside the cave mouth. Could it have floated away?
What or who had interrupted the three? Why hadn’t the people in the tower come after them after a certain amount of time?
They hadn’t because they were having troubles of their own.
Or they were dead, slain by the same thing that had felled these three.
X had to be responsible for this.
Burton reasoned that the same event that had downed these three had also resulted in stranding X and all the other Ethicals and agents in The Valley.
That meant that no craft could fly out from the tower to pick them up. Nor could the renegade fly one of his hidden vessels to the tower. He’d been forced, as Barry Thorn, to go on the airship built by Firebrass. And he’d failed to get in the tower.
From Burton’s viewpoint, the event had made certain advantages for him and for X. The agents had obviously discovered the cloth-ropes hanging down from the cliffside and the tunnels, and they’d found out that the very narrow ledge had been used by people from The Valley. They had probably found the cave last, after trying to make sure that passage would be impossible for any more of the unauthorized.
If the three hadn’t been killed, the cave entrance would be plugged up.
He strode to the shelves filled with tins. At the corner of each shelf was a plastic sheet about twelve inches by twelve inches. On it were figures of a man demonstrating how to open the tins. Burton didn’t need the pictures since he knew from Paheri’s story what to do. He passed a fingertip completely around the upper rim and waited for a few seconds. The top, seemingly of hard metal, quivered, shimmered, and turned into a gelatinous film. His finger penetrated it easily.
Burton said, loudly, “X forgot all about eating utensils and plates! But that’s all right! We can use our fingers!”
Famished, the others quit looking at the objects in the cave and followed his example. They scooped out the beef stew— warm—with their fingers and, from the tins marked by a bas-relief of bread, brought out loaves. They ate voraciously until their bellies were stuffed. There seemed no reason to ration themselves. The supply was more than plentiful.
Burton, sitting on the floor, lis back against a wall, watched the others.
If one was X, why didn’t he reveal his identity? Was it because he had only recruited The Valley people to have a backup team? People who might pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him if he was in a situation where he was helpless without them?
If so, why hadn’t he told them more of what he expected from them?
Or had he meant to do that but events had happened unexpectedly and too swiftly? And now he was in a position where he didn’t need their help? Might, in fact, believe them to be a hindrance?
And why was he a renegade?
Burton didn’t believe X’s story about why the other Ethicals had resurrected the Terrans.
Indeed, he wasn’t sure that he hadn’t been allied with someone whose true goals he would loathe if he knew them.
Perhaps that was why the Mysterious Stranger had been so mysterious, why he’d not told them the truth, why he was still in disguise.
If he were.
Whatever the truth was, it was long past time for the Ethical to reveal himself. Unless... unless X knew that some of this party were agents or other Ethicals. He would then believe that he had to keep his disguise until they were in the tower. Why in the tower? Because there he had means to overpower or kill his enemies. Or anyone else who would try to keep him from carrying out his schemes, beneficent or malignant.
These might require that his recruits be among the removed. He’d needed them only to get to the tower.
Why would he ever have thought that he might have to have their help?
Well... when Spruce had been interrogated, he’d said something about the Operator of a giant computer. Burton didn’t know who the Operator was, but a computer might have been used secretly by X when, or before when, the resurrection project began. He might have put into it all the probabilities he could think of regarding his unlawful project and asked for an estimate of their happening. Perhaps, the computer might even have been able to come up with some that X couldn’t think of.
One of the items offered by the computer was a situation or situations in which X might need recruits.
Burton couldn’t imagine what it was, unless it was the present one.
Good enough.
And so X had gotten his recruits, and he’d erased all his questions and the answers from the computer. Somehow, he’d done it without the Operator’s knowing about it. That is, all this had happened if Spruce hadn’t lied and there were indeed such things as an Operator and computer.
As of now, Burton’s big problem was that X hadn’t told him who he was. Which meant that very soon X would be acting, not for his recruits but against them.
Burton thought that they should get some sleep before they ventured out on the boats. All agreed, and so they laid out their heavy cloths on the floor and rolled up others for pillows. Since it was warm here, they didn’t even have to cover themselves with their eskimo-suit-type garments. The hot air came from slits along the bases of the walls.
“Probably powered by nuclear energy,” Frigate said. “The same goes for the lamps.”
Burton wanted to set two-hour watches with two guards each.
“Why?” Tai-Peng said. “It’s evident that we’re the only ones around for twenty thousand miles.”
“We don’t know that,” Burton said. “We shouldn’t get careless now.”
Some agreed with the Chinese, but it was finally decided that they should take no chances. Burton picked the sentinels and appointed Nur to be Gilgamesh’s partner and himself as Ah Qaaq’s.
The Moor wasn’t likely to be taken by surprise; he had extraordinary perceptions of others’ attitudes and feelings; he could often tell by subtle body language what others intended to do.
It was possible that Nur was an agent or that Gilgamesh and Ah Qaaq were in cahoots. One might pretend to sleep until his colleague who was on watch attacked his partner.
The possibilities were numerous, but Burton had to take chances. He couldn’t do without sleep all the time.
What worried him most, though, was that X, if he was here, might take a small boat during the night and get to the tower ahead of the others. Once there, he would make sure that the entrance at the base couldn’t be entered.
Burton gave de Marbot, Alice’s partner for the first duty, his wristwatch. Then he lay down on his cloths, which were near the entrance to the tunnel. His loaded pistol was under his pillow. He had trouble getting to sleep, though he wasn’t the only one if the sighs and mutterings he heard were any indication. It wasn’t until the first two hours were almost over that he slid into an uneasy sleep. He kept starting awake; he had nightmares, some of them recurrences for the past thirty years. God, in the garments of a late Victorian gentleman, poked him in the ribs with a heavy cane.
“You owe for the flesh. Pay up.”
His eyes opened, and he looked around. Tai-Peng and Blessed Croomes were on guard now. The Chinese was talking in a soft voice to the black woman not ten feet from Burton. Then Croomes slapped his face and walked away.
Burton said, “Better luck next time, Tai-Peng,” and he went back to sleep.
When Nur and Gilgamesh were on watch, Burton roused again. He slitted his eyes so that they would think he was still sleeping. Both were in one of the big boats, sitting on the raised deck by the controls. The Sumerian seemed to be telling a funny story to the Moor, if Nur’s smiles meant anything. Burton didn’t like their closeness. All the very strong Gilgamesh had to do was to reach out and seize Nur’s throat.
The Moor, however, seemed very much at ease. Burton watched them for a while, then nodded off. When he awoke again, with a start, Nur was shaking him.
“Your watch.”
Burton rose and yawned. Ah Qaaq was standing by the shelves, eating bread and stew. He gestured at Burton to join him. Burton shook his head. He didn’t intend to get any closer to him than he had to. Stooping, he withdrew the pistol from under the pillow and placed it in his holster. Ah Qaaq, he noted, was also armed. There was nothing significant in this. The guards were supposed to carry their weapons.
Burton got within six feet of Ah Qaaq and told him he was going outside to urinate. The May an, his mouth full, nodded. He’d lost weight during the hard journey and now seemed determined to make up for it.
If he’s X pretending to be a compulsive eater, Burton thought, he’s certainly an excellent actor.
Burton went through the tunnel with frequent looks behind him and stops now and then to listen for footsteps. He didn’t turn on his lantern until he reached the cave. The lantern, set in the mouth on the sloping floor, beamed past him. The cold fog pressed wetly. Having finished his business quickly, he went back into the cave.
Now would be a good time for Ah Qaaq to sneak up on him. But he neither saw nor heard anything except the crash of waves against the rocks some distance away. When he cautiously returned, he found Ah Qaaq sitting with his back against the wall, his eyes half closed, his head drooping.
Burton moved over to the opposite wall and leaned against it. After a while, the Mayan stood up and stretched. He signaled that he was going out to the cave. Burton nodded. Ah Qaaq, his heavy dewlap bouncing, waddled out through the tunnel. Burton decided that he’d been overly suspicious. A minute later, he thought that he hadn’t been suspicious enough. What if the Mayan was X, and he had another cave nearby in which was a boat? It might be behind a narrow fissure, an opening to which Ah Qaaq could wade through the shallow water on the shelf.
Ten minutes went by, not an unreasonable time for the absence. Should he go after Ah Qaaq?
While Burton was trying to make up his mind, he saw the Mayan enter. Burton relaxed. The watch was half over, and the others would be in the more shallow phase of sleep and thus more easily awakened by noise.
Also, it would be logical for X to wait until the tower was entered. Here, he would have to deal with many. There, he would be on familiar ground.
When the six hours had passed, Burton aroused everybody. They went out to the sea in two groups according to sex and returned complaining about the cold. By then Burton and Ah Qaaq had poured water from the canteens into the cups provided by the grails and were ready to add the instant coffee which also heated the water. They drank and talked softly for a while and then ate breakfast. Some left for the sea again. Croomes insisted that it was a shame to, allow skeletons to lie unburied. She made such a fuss that Burton thought it would be better to mollify her. A delay wasn’t going to make any difference anyway.
They trouped out with the bones and hurled them into the sea while Croomes said a long prayer over them. The skeleton nearest the tunnel had to be Blessed’s mother, but no one mentioned this, and she would certainly have wept if she had suspected it. Burton and some of the others knew from Paheri’s story that, when the Egyptians had come here, they’d found some pieces of scalp which hadn’t rotted away entirely. These had held black kinky hair.
They returned and loaded up one of the thirty-person boats with their possessions and sixty cans of food. Four men picked up the big but very light craft and carried it down the tunnel to the cave. Two men and two women brought out a smaller one to be attached by a rope to the other.
When asked why the extra was needed, he replied, “Just in case.”
He had no idea what the case might be. It couldn’t hinder them, though, to take extra precautions.
The last to leave the chamber, he gave it a final look. It was very quiet and eerie here with the nine glowing lamps and the empty boats. Would anyone follow them? He didn’t think so. This was the third expedition and the most successful, so far. Things went by threes. Then he thought of Joe Miller, who had twice fallen into the sea. Surely he wouldn’t do it again?
Not unless we give him a chance, he thought.
All but Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh got into the big boat. They pushed it into the water, climbed aboard, and began drying off their feet. Burton had studied the picture-chart in the craft until he knew what to do by heart. He stood on the raised deck behind the steering wheel and punched a button on the control panel. A light sprang out from the surface of the panel itself, a glow which enabled him to see the buttons. They had no markings, but the diagram showed the location and purpose of each.
At the same time, a bright orange outline of a cylindrical shape, the tower, sprang out on a screen just above the panel.
“We’re ready,” he called back. He paused, punched another button, and said, “We’re off!”
“Off to see the Wizard of Oz, the Fisher King!” Frigate said. “Off to find the holy grail!”
“May it be holy,” Burton said. He burst out laughing. “But if it is, what are we doing there?”
Whatever the propulsive power was—there was no trembling of the boat from propellers nor wake from a jet—the vessel moved swiftly. Its speed was controlled by a curious device, a plastic bulb attached to the rim of the wheel on the right side. By squeezing or releasing his grip, Burton could control the speed. He turned the wheel until the image of the tower moved from the right to the center of the screen. Then he slowly increased the pressure on the bulb. Presently, the boat was cutting through the waves at an angle. Spray drenched those behind him, but he would not slow down.
Now and then he looked behind him. In the dark fog he could not even see to the stern of the boat, but its passengers were huddled closely at the edge of the control deck. They looked in their shroudlike cloths like souls being ferried by Charon.
They were as silent as the dead, too.
Paheri had estimated that it had taken Akhenaten’s boat about two hours to get to the tower. That was because he had been afraid to make the boat go at top speed. The sea, as reported by the Parseval radarman, was thirty miles in diameter. The tower was about ten miles in diameter. So there were only about twenty miles to go from the cave. The Pharaoh’s vessel must have crawled at ten miles per hour.
The tower rapidly grew larger on the screen.
Suddenly, the image burst into flame.
They were very close to their goal.
The direction sheet indicated that now was the time to punch another button. Burton did so, and two extremely bright bow-lamps shot their beams into the mists and lit upon a vast curving dull surface.
Burton released all pressure on the bulb. The boat quickly lost speed and started drifting away. Applying power again, he swung the boat around and headed it slowly for the dim bulk. He punched another button, and he could see a big port, thick as the door in a bank vault, open in the seamless side.
Light streamed out through the O.
Burton cut off the power and turned the wheel so that the side of the boat bumped against the lower side of the open port. Hands seized the threshold and steadied the boat.
“Hallelujah!” Blessed Croomes screamed. “Momma, I’ll soon be with you, sitting on the right hand of sweet Jesus!”
The others jumped. The stillness, except for the slight thudding of the boat against the metal, had been so impressive and their wonder that the way was finally open for them had been so overpowering, they felt that her cry was near sacrilege.
“Quiet!” Frigate shouted. But he laughed when he realized that no one could hear them.
“Momma, I’m coming!” Blessed shouted.
“Shut up, Croomes!” Burton said. “Or by God I’ll throw you into the water! This is no place for hysterics!”
“I’m not hysterical! I’m joyous! I’m filled with the glory of the Lord!”
“Then keep it to yourself,” Burton said.
Croomes told him he was bound for Hell, but she subsided.
“You may be right,” Burton said. “Let me tell you though, that we’re all going to the same place now. If it’s Heaven, we’ll be with you. If it’s Hell...”
“Don’t say that, man! That’s irreverent!”
Burton sighed. She was, on the whole, sane. But she was a religious fanatic who managed to ignore the facts of-life and also the contradictory elements in her faith. In this, she was much like his wife, Isabel, a devout Roman Catholic who had managed to believe in spiritualism at the same time. Croomes had been strong, enduring, uncomplaining, and always helpful during their struggles to reach this place except when she was trying to convert her crewmates to her religion.
Through the port he could see the gray-metaled corridor which Paheri had described. Of his companions who had collapsed near its end, there was no sight. Paheri had been too frightened to follow the others. He’d stayed in the boat. Then Akhenaten and his people fell to the floor, and the port had swung shut as silently as it had opened. Paheri had been unable to find the cave, and he had finally gone over the first of the cataracts in his boat and had awakened on some far bank of The River. But now there were no more resurrections.
Burton unbuttoned the strap on his holster.
He said, “I’ll go first.”
He stepped up over the threshold. Moving air warmed his face and hands. The light was shadowless, seeming to emanate from the walls, floor, and ceiling. A closed door was at the end of the corridor. The entrance port had been opened by thick gray-metal curving rods that disappeared inside a sixfoot-high cube of gray metal by the outer wall. The base of the cube seemed to be part of the floor. No welding or bolts held it.
Burton waited until Alice, Aphra, Nur, and de Marbot had entered. He told them not to go more than ten feet from the port. Then he called out, “You fellows bring in the small boat!”
Tai-Peng said, “Why?”
“We’ll wedge it in the door. It should keep the door from swinging shut.”
Alice said, “But it’ll be crushed.”
“I doubt it. It’s made of the same substance as the grails and the tower.”
“It still looks awfully fragile.”
“The grails have very thin walls, and the engineers in Parolando tried to blow them up, to crush them with powerful machinery, and to dent them with triphammers. They had no effect whatsoever.”
The corridor light shone on the faces of the men in the boat below. Some looked surprised; some, delighted; some, emotionless. He wasn’t able to determine by their reactions who X might be.
Only Tai-Peng had questioned him, but that didn’t mean anything. The fellow was always wanting to know the why.
With the help of all, the vessel was lifted up and gotten halfway through the port. It was just wide enough to stick in the middle of the O, leaving room for those outside to crawl in underneath after they’d passed in the packs and tins.
Burton backed away as they came in one by one. He held his pistol in his hand, and he told Alice to bring hers out. The others, seeing the weapons trained on them, were astonished. They were even more so when he told them to put their hands on top of their heads.
Frigate said, “You’re X!”
Burton laughed like a hyena.
“No, of course not! What I’m going to do now is to root X out!”
NUR EL-MUSAFIR SAID, “YOU MUST SUSPECT ALL BUT ALICE OF being X.”
“No,” Burton said, “some of you may be agents, and if you are, speak up. But I have seen the Ethicals in their Council, and there are only two in this group whose physiques resemble the person I think might be X!”
He waited. It became evident that if any were agents none was going to admit his or her identity.
“Very well. I’ll explain. It seems obvious that X was Barry Thorn and perhaps Odysseus. Thorn and the self-proclaimed Greek were short and very muscular. Both had similar features, though Odysseus’ ears stuck out and he was much darker. But these differences could be due to disguise-aids.
“The two Ethicals who resembled them were called Loga and Thanabur.
“Two of this group could be either. Or both. I believe, however, that the engineer Podebrad, who was killed on the Rex, was Thanabur. I admit that it could have been Loga. In any event, we’re not going one step further until I question— most severely—two of this group.”
He paused, then said, “These are Gilgamesh, the self-proclaimed king of Uruk of ancient Sumeria, and Ah Qaaq, the self-proclaimed ancient Mayan!”
Alice said in a low voice, “But Richard! If you press him too hard, he can just simply kill himself.”
Burton roared, “Did you hear what she said? No? She said that all X has to do to escape is to kill himself! But I know that he isn’t going to do that! If he does, he can’t carry out his plans, whatever they are! No more raising from the dead for him!
“Now... I’ve finally taken action because we are at a place where we can go no further without him. Only X knows how to cancel the gas or supersonic frequency or whatever that felled the Egyptians. And I want answers to my questions!”
“You’re desperate, man!” Tom Turpin said. “What if none of us is X? You’re skating on mighty thin ice.”
“I’m convinced that one of you is he,” Burton said. “Now... here is what I plan to do. If no one confesses, then* I’ll knock you, Gilgamesh, and you, Ah Qaaq, out. You’re my prime suspects. And while you’re coming out of unconsciousness, I’ll hypnotize you. I found out that Monat Grrautut, the Arcturan, and the men who claimed to be Peter Jairus Frigate and Lev Ruach had hypnotized my friend Kazz. They’re not the only ones who can play at that game. I’m a master hypnotist, and if you’re concealing something, I will get it out of you.”
In the silence that followed, the others looked uneasily at one another.
Croomes said, “You’re a wicked man, Burton! We’re at the gates of Heaven, and you talk of killing us!”
“I said nothing about killing,” Burton said, “though I’m prepared to do it if I must. What I want is to clear up this mystery. Some of you may be agents. I implore you to step forward and confess. You have nothing to lose and much to gain. It’s too late now to attempt to hide things from us.”
De Marbot said, sputtering, “But.. .but, my dear Burton! You hurt me! I am not one of these damnable agents or Ethicals! I am what I say I am, and I’ll strike the man who calls me a liar!”
Nur said, “If one or both of them is guiltless, then you will have injured and insulted an innocent. It would be brutal to do so. Moreover, you’ll have made an enemy of a friend. Can’t you hypnotize them without violence?”
“I hate doing this as much1 as any of you,” Burton said. “Believe me when I say that. But an Ethical would be an excellent hypnotist himself, and no doubt his powers of resistance will be very strong. I must knock these two out so that they won’t have these powers, catch them when they’re half-witless.”
Alice said softly, “It is terribly brutal, Richard.”
“Now,” Burton said, “I want you to take out your weapons and drop them on the floor. Do it one by one and do it slowly. You, Nur, you be the first.”
The knives and pistols clattered onto the gray metal. When they were all disarmed, Burton told them to step back while Alice picked up the weapons. In a short while there was a pile of them against the wall behind him.
“Keep your hands on your heads.”
Most of their faces showed anger, indignation, or hurt puzzlement. The faces of Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh were iron masks.
“Come to me, Gilgamesh,” Burton said. “When you’re five feet from me, stop. Then turn around.”
The Sumerian walked slowly toward him. Now he was glaring. He said, “If you strike me, Burton, you will have made an enemy forever. I was once the king of Uruk, and I am the descendant of gods! No one lays a hand on me without punishment! I will kill you!”
“I am indeed sorry to have to do this,” Burton said. “But surely you can see that the fate of the world is the issue. If we were in each other’s shoes, I would not blame you for what you were doing to me. I’d resent it, yes, but I’d understand it!”
“After you’ve found I’m innocent, you would do well to kill me! If you don’t, I’ll kill you! I speak the truth!”
“We’ll see.”
Burton planned, if the Sumerian was not X, to install a posthypnotic command that Gilgamesh forgive him when he came out of the trance. He would have ordered him to forget the injury, but the others would no doubt remind him of it.
“Place your hands on the back of your neck,” Burton said. “Then turn around. Don’t worry about being hurt too much. I know precisely just how much force I’ll need. You won’t be unconscious for more than a few seconds.”
Burton reversed the pistol and lifted it by its butt. Gilgamesh, bellowing, “No!” whirled, his arms flying out from his neck, and his hand struck the pistol and tore it from Burton’s grip-Alice should have fired then. Instead, she tried to beat the Sumerian on the back with her pistol barrel. Burton was very strong, but he went down under the herculean power of Gilgamesh and then was lifted up. He struck Gilgamesh in the face, making his nose bleed and bruising the skin. The Sumerian lifted him above his head and threw him against the wall. Stunned, Burton dropped to the floor.
The others were shouting and screaming, and Alice was yelling. But she managed to bring the butt of her weapon, now reversed, down on the head of Gilgamesh. He swayed, then began to crumple.
Ah Qaaq, swift despite his fat, ran by Alice, snatching the pistol from her hand, and continued toward the end of the corridor.
Though dazed, Burton struggled to get up, shouting, “Get him! Get him! He’s the Ethical! X! X!”
His legs felt as if they were balloons out of which the air was whistling. He slid back down against the wall.
The Mayan—no, no Mayan he—slammed his palm against the wall on his left. Immediately, the door at the end of the corridor slid into a recess in the wall.
Burton tried to note the exact location of the area that X had struck. The blow had undoubtedly activated machinery behind the wall. And since it opened the door, it also was inhibited from releasing whatever it was that had felled the Egyptians.
Nur, a small skinny dark flash, scooped up a pistol as he ran by the pile. Then he stopped, and he lifted the heavy weapon in both hands. The gun boomed. The projectile struck the side of the door as X went around it. Pieces of plastic flew through the exit and against the wall opposite. X fell, though only his black-clothed legs showed for a moment. Then they were gone.
Nur ran after him but stopped at the doorway. He leaned out cautiously, and at once jerked his head back. The bullet fired by X smashed itself against the wall just outside the door. Nur got down on his knees and looked around the exit again. Another boom. Nur seemed uninjured.
By then the others had picked up their weapons and were running toward the doorway. <
Though regrets were useless, Burton regretted that he had not chosen Ah Qaaq first for hypnotism.
He called to Alice, who was bending over Gilgamesh, to help him up. Weeping she came to him and pulled up on his wrists. His head was clearing, and his legs seemed steadier. He’d be all right in another minute.
He called, “Frigate! Tai-Peng! Turpin! Get Gilgamesh out of here! Everybody else! Out! Out before he closes the door!”
Nur yelled, “He’s gone now!”
The three men came running, and they picked the Sumerian’ s heavy body and bore it toward the doorway. Burton leaned on Alice, his arm around her neck, and they followed the others. By the time he got to the exit, he felt recovered enough to tell Alice that he could go it by himself.
Turpin placed his grail in the doorway so the door couldn’t be fully closed. Just as Alice and Burton stepped into the corridor, the door shot back out of its recess, slammed into the grail, and stopped.
Nur indicated the blood on the floor by the doorway and the red spots farther along.
“The bullet smashed against the wall, but some of the fragments got him.”
The corridor ran both ways as far as they could see. It was illuminated by the shadowless light and was forty feet wide and fifty high by eye estimate. It gently curved to follow the roundness of the exterior. Burton wondered what was between the outer wall of the corridor and the outer wall of the tower. Probably, some of it was empty, but other spaces might contain machinery of some sort or storage facilities. At irregular intervals, at his eye level, the walls held bas-relief letters or symbols some of which superficially resembled runes and others Hindustani characters.
Burton left a bullet by the wall to mark the entrance if the door should somehow close.
Shortly after the bloodstains ceased, the trackers came across a bay in the center of which was a circular hole about a hundred feet across. Burton stood on the edge and looked down. Lights streamed out along the black shaft from many levels, other bays or rooms. He didn’t know how deep the shaft went, but he guessed that it was miles. When he got down on his knees, his hands gripping the edge, and looked up, he saw the same thing. However, the shaft could go up no more than a mile, the height of the tower from sea level.
By then Gilgamesh was recovering. He sat on the floor holding his head and groaning. After a minute, he looked up.
“What happened?”
Burton told him. The Sumerian moaned, then said, “And you didn’t strike me? It was the woman?”
“Yes, I apologize, if it will do any good. But I had to know.”
“She was only fighting to save her man. And since you did not hit me, there is no insult. Though there is plenty of injury.”
“I think you’ll be all right,” Burton said.
He forebore to say that he had hit Gilgamesh in the face. Truth could be sacrificed in this situation. He’d gone through his life making enemies because he didn’t care if he did and even got a certain satisfaction from it. But during the past twenty years he’d seen that he was behaving irrationally in this respect. Nur, the Sufi, had taught him that, though not directly. Burton had learned while listening to Nur’s conversations with his disciple Frigate.
“I think,” Burton said, “that X took a lift of some sort. I don’t see any, though. Nor do I see any controls to bring one up or down to here.”
“Maybe that’s because there isn’t any cage,” Frigate said.
Burton stared at him.
Frigate took a plastic bullet out of the bag that hung from his belt. He threw it twenty feet into the emptiness. It stopped as if it were in jelly at the level of the floor.
“Well, I’ll be damned! I didn’t think it was so, but it is!”
“What is?”
“There’s some kind of field in the shaft. So... how do you go where you want to? Maybe the field moves you according to a codeword.”
“That is good thinking,” Nur said.
“Thank you, master. Only... if one person wants to go down at the same time another wants to go up... ? Maybe the field can do both simultaneously.”
If the shafts—there must be others—were the only way to get from one floor to another, they were trapped. All the Ethical had to do was to let them starve.
Burton became angry. All his life he’d felt caged and he had broken out of some of the cages, though the big ones had restrained him. Now he was on the verge of solving this great mystery, and he was trapped again. This one, he might not escape from.
He stepped out into openness, putting one foot down slowly until he felt resistance. When he’d determined that his weight was going to be held, he moved entirely into the shaft. He was near panic; anybody unfamiliar with the setup would be. But here he was, standing on nothing, apparently, and an abyss below him.
He stopped, picked up the bullet, and threw it to Frigate.
“Now what?” Nur said.
Burton looked up and then down.
“I don’t know. It’s not just like being in air only. There’s a slight resistance to my movements. I don’t have any trouble breathing, however.”
Since it made him more than just uneasy to stand there, he walked back to the solid floor.
“It’s not like standing on something hard. There is a slight give to my weight.”
They were silent for a while. Burton finally said, “We might as well go on.”
THEY CAME TO ANOTHER BAY MARKED BY CHARACTERS IN BAS-relief and containing a lift-shaft. Burton looked up and down this, hoping that he might see something to help them. It was as empty as the other.
When they had left this, Frigate said, “I wonder if Piscator is still alive? If only he’d come by...”
“If only!” Burton said. “We can’t live by if only, even if you do most of the time.”
Frigate looked hurt.
Nur said, “Piscator, as I understand it, was a Sufi. That may explain why he got through the gateway on top of the tower. From what I’ve heard, I’d venture that there’s sort of force, analogous to an electromagnetic field, perhaps, that prevents those who haven’t attained a certain ethical level from entering.”
“He must have been different from most Sufis I’ve seen, yourself excepted,” Burton said. “Those I knew in Egypt were rogues.”
“There are true Sufis and false Sufis,” Nur said, paying no attention to the sneer in Burton’s voice. “Anyway, I suspect that the wathan reflects the ethical or spiritual development of the individuals and what it shows would make the repulsion field admit or deny entrance to a person.”
“Then how would X get in that way? He’s obviously not as ethically developed as the others.”
“You don’t know that,” Nur said. “If what he says about the other Ethicals is true...”
He stopped talking for a moment. Then he said, “If the gateway field admits only the highly ethical, then X made his secret room to avoid that field. But he must have done it when the tower was built, must have planned it before then. So that even then he knew he wouldn’t be admitted into the gateway.”
“No,” Burton said. “The others would have been able to see his wathan. If they did, they’d know that he had degenerated, changed, anyway. And they’d have known that he was the renegade.”
Frigate said, “Maybe the reason his wathan looked okay was that he had some device to distort it from its natural appearance. I mean... from the appearance it would have had if he hadn’t used some kind of distorter. That way, he’d not only have passed as normal among his fellows, he’d have fooled the gateway field.”
“That is possible,” Nur said. “But wouldn’t his colleagues know about distorters?”
“Not if they’d never seen or heard of one. It may have been X’s invention.” /
Burton said, “And he had his hideaway so that he could leave the tower without anybody else knowing it.”
“That implies that there are no radar devices on the tower,” Frigate said.
“Well?” Burton said. “If there had been, they would’ve detected the first and second expeditions when they came down the ledge. The radar might also have spotted the cave, though I suppose its operators wouldn’t have thought anything about it if it had been noted. No, there was no radar scanning the sea and the mountains. Why should there be? The Ethicals didn’t believe that anybody would get that far.”
Nur said, “We all have wathans, if what the Council of Twelve told you was true. You saw theirs. What I don’t understand is why they couldn’t have tracked you down long before they did. Surely, a photograph of your wathan was in the records of that giant computer Spruce mentioned. I would suppose that everybody’s was.”
“Perhaps X arranged it so that the record in the computer wasn’t a true image of my wathan,” Burton said. “Perhaps that was why the agent Agneau was carrying a photograph of my physical person.”
“I think that the Ethicals must have scanner satellites up there,” Frigate said. “Maybe these could locate your wathan. But they couldn’t find it because your wathan was distorted.”
“Hmm,” Nur said. “I wonder if distorting the wathan also results in distorting its owner’s psyche?”
Burton said, “You may remember de Marbot’s report of Clemens’ analysis of the connection between the wathan or ka or soul, call it what you will, and the body? The conclusion was that the wathan is the essence of the person. Otherwise, it is irrelevant. It does no good to reattach the wathan to a duplicated body because the duplicate isn’t the same as the original. Similar to the nth degree, yes, but not the same. If the wathan or soul is the persona, the seat of self-consciousness, then the physical brain is not self-aware. Without the wathan, the human body would have intelligence but no self-awareness. No concept of 7. The wathan uses the physical as a man uses a horse or an automobile.
“Perhaps that comparison isn’t correct. The wathan-body combination is more like a centaur. A melding. Both the man-part and the horse-part need each other for perfect functioning. One without the other is useless. It may be that the wathan itself needs a body to become self-conscious. Certainly, the Ethicals said that the undeveloped wathan wanders in some sort of space when it’s loosed by the body’s death. And then the wathan is not just unaware of its own self but of anything. It’s unconscious.
“Yet, according to our theory, the body generates the wathan. How, I don’t know, don’t even have a hypothesis. But without the body, a wathan can’t come into existence. There are embryo wathans in the body embryos, and infant wathans in the infant body. Like the body, the wathan grows into adulthood.
“However, there are two stages of adulthood. Let’s call the later stage superwathanhood. If a wathan doesn’t attain a certain ethical or spiritual level, it’s destined to wander forever after the body’s death, unaware of itself.
“Unless, as happened here, a duplicate body is made and by some affinity the wathan reattaches itself to the duplicate body. This duplicate body would be intelligent but would have no concept of /. The wathan attached to it would have the self-awareness. But it couldn’t have it until it interacted with the body.
“Without wathans, humans would have evolved from apes, would have had language, would have had technology and science, but no religion, yet would not have had any more knowledge of the self than an ant.”
Frigate said, “What kind of language would that be? I mean, try to imagine a language in which no pronouns for / and me exist. And probably no you or yours either. To tell the truth, I don’t think they’d develop language. Not as we know it, anyway. They’d just be highly intelligent animals. Living machines which would not depend upon instinct as much as animals do.”
“We can talk about that some other time.”
“Yeah, but what about the chimpanzees?”
“They must have had a rudimentary wathan which had a low-level consciousness of their /. However, it was never proved that apes did have language or self-awareness.
“The wathan itself can’t develop self-awareness unless it has a body. If the body has a stunted brain, then the wathan is stunted. Hence, it can attain only to a certain low ethical level.”
“No!” Frigate said. “You’re confusing intelligence with morality. You and I have known too many people with a high intelligence and low ethical development and vice versa to believe that a high I.Q. is a necessary accompaniment to a high moral quotient.”
“Yaas, but you forget about the will.”
They came to another bay. Burton looked along the shaft. “Nothing here.”
They walked on while Burton resumed the role of Socrates.
“The will. We have to assume that it’s not entirely free. It’s affected by events outside the body, its exterior environment, and by internal events, the inside environment. Injuries physical or mental, diseases, chemical changes, and so forth, can change a person’s will. A maniac may have been a good person before a disease or injury made him into a torturer and killer. Psychological or chemical factors may make multiple personalities or a psychic cripple or monster.
“I suggest that the wathan is so closely connected with the body that it reflects the body’s mental changes. And a wathan attached to an idiot or imbecile is itself idiotic or imbecilic.
“That is why the Ethicals have resurrected idiots and imbeciles elsewhere—if our speculations are correct—so that these may get special treatment. Through the medical science of the Ethicals, the retarded are enabled to have fully developed brains. Hence, they also have highly developed wathans with a full potentiality for a choice between good and evil.”
“And,” Nur said, “the opportunity to become super-wathans and so reunited with God. I’ve been listening carefully to you, Burton. I don’t agree with much of what you’ve said. One implication is that God doesn’t care about His souls. He wouldn’t allow them to float around as unconscious things. He has made provision for all of them.”
“Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn’t care,” Burton said. “There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.
“Anyway, I argue that the human being without a wathan has no free will. That is, the ability to make choices between or among moral alternatives. To surpass the demands of body and environment and personal inclination. To lift one’s self, as it were, by the self’s bootstraps. Only the wathan has the free will and the self-awareness. But I admit that it has to express these through the vehicle of the body. And I admit that the wathan closely interacts with and is affected by the body.
“Indeed, the wathan must get its personality traits, most of them, anyway, from the body.”
Frigate said, “Well, then. Aren’t we back where we started? We still can’t make a clear distinction between the wathan and the body. If the wathan furnishes the concept of the / and the free will, it’s still dependent upon the body for its character traits and everything else in the genetic and nervous systems. These are actually images which it absorbs. Or photocopies. So, in that sense, the wathan is only a copy, not the original.
“Thus, when the body dies, it stays dead. The wathan floats off, whatever that means. It has the duplicated emotions and thoughts and all that which make up a persona. It also has the free will and the self-awareness if it’s reattached to a duplicate body. But it isn’t the same person.”
“What you’ve just proved,” Aphra Behn said, “is that there is no soul, not in the way it’s commonly conceived of. Or, if there is one, it’s superfluous, it has nothing to do with the immortality of the individual.”
Tai-Peng spoke for the first time since Burton had brought up the subject.
“I’d say that the wathan part is all that matters. It’s the only immortal part, the only thing the Ethicals can preserve. It must be the same thing as the ka of the Chancers.”
“Then the wathan is a half-assed thing!” Frigate cried. “A part only of me, the creature that died on Earth! I can’t truly be resurrected unless my original body is resurrected!”
“It’s the part that God wants and which he will absorb,” Nur said.
“Who wants to be absorbed? I want to be I, the whole creature, the entire!”
“You will have the ecstasy of being part of God’s body.”
“So what? I won’t be I anymore!”
“But on Earth you as an adult weren’t the same person you were at fifty,” Nur said. “Your whole being, at every second of your life, was and is in the process of change. The atoms composing your body at birth were not the same as when you were eight. They’d been replaced by other atoms. Nor were they the same when you were fifty as when you were forty.
“Your body changed, and with it your mind, your store of memories, your beliefs, your attitudes, your reactions. You were never the same.
“And when—or if—you, the creature, the creation, should return to the Creator, you will change then. It will be the last change. You will abide forever in the Unchanging. Unchanging because He has no need for changing. He is perfect.”
“Bullshit!” Frigate said, his face red, his hands clenched. “There is the essence of me, the unchanging thing that wants to live forever, however imperfect! Though I strive for perfection! Which may not be attainable! But the striving is the thing, that which makes life endurable, though sometimes life itself becomes almost unendurable! I want to be I, forever lasting! No matter what the change, there is something in me, an unchanging identity, the soul, whatever, that resists death, loathes it, declares it to be unnatural! Death is both insult and injury and, in a sense, unthinkable!
“If the Creator has a plan for us, why doesn’t He tell us what it is? Are we so stupid that we can’t understand it? He should tell it to us directly! The books that the prophets, the revelators, and the revisionists wrote, claiming to have authority from God Himself, to have taken His dictations, these so-called revelations are false! They make no sense! Besides, they contradict each other! Does God make contradictory statements?”
“They only seem contradictory,” Nur said. “When you’ve attained a higher stage of thinking, you’ll see that the contradictions are not what they appear to be.”
“Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis! That’s all right for human logic! But I still maintain that we shouldn’t have been left in ignorance. We should have been shown the Plan. Then we could make our choice, go along with the Plan or reject it!”
“You’re still in a lower stage of development, and you seem to be stuck in it,” Nur said. “Remember the chimpanzees. They got to a certain level, but they could not progress further. They made a wrong choice, and...”
“I’m not an ape! I’m a man, a human being!”
“You could be more than that,” Nur said.
They came to another bay. This, however, led not to a shaft but to an entrance, huge, arched. Beyond it was a chamber the enormity of which staggered them. It was at least half a mile long and wide. Within it were thousands of tables on each of which were devices the purposes of which were not obvious.
Skeletons by the hundreds lay on the floor and the upper parts of more hundreds were on the desks or tables. Thigh bones and pelvic bones lay on the seats of chairs, and beneath the seats were more leg bones. Death had struck instantly and en masse.
There wasn’t a single garment anywhere. The people working the experiments had been nude.
Burton said, “The Council of Twelve which interrogated me was clothed. Perhaps they donned their outfits so they wouldn’t offend my sense of modesty. If so, they didn’t know me well. Or perhaps they were required to wear garments when they were in session.”
Some of the equipment on the tables was still running. The nearest to Burton was a transparent sphere the size of his head. It was seemingly without an opening, yet large bubbles of different colors rose from its top, floated up to the ceiling, and burst. By the sphere was a transparent cube in which characters flashed as the bubbles ascended.
They walked on murmuring about the strangeness of the devices. When they’d gone a quarter of a mile, Frigate said, “Look at that!”
He pointed at a wheeled chair which sat in a broad aisle between tables. A jumble of bones, including a skull, lay on the seat, and leg and foot bones were at its base.
THE CHAIR WAS OVERSTUFFED/AND COVERED WITH A SOFT MAterial marked with thin alternating pale-red and pale-green zigzagging lines. Burton brushed the bones from the seat with a callousness which drew a protest from Croomes. He sat down, noting aloud that the chair fitted itself to his body. On the top of each massive arm, near the end, was a wide metal circle.
He gingerly pressed down on the black center of the white disc on his right. Nothing happened.
But when he pressed on the fingertip-thick center on the left, a long thin metal rod slid out.
“Aha!”
He pulled back slowly on the rod.
Nur said, “There’s a light coming from beneath the chair.”
The chair lifted soundlessly from the floor for a few inches.
“Press on the forward edge of the disc on your right,” Frigate said. “Maybe it controls the speed.”
Burton frowned because he did not like anyone telling him what to do. But he did use a fingertip to push the metal as suggested. The chair moved toward the ceiling at a very slow rate.
Ignoring the exclamations and several more suggestions, he pushed the lever to dead center. The chair straightened out at a horizontal level, continuing to move forward. He increased its speed, then moved the left-hand rod toward the right. The chair turned with the rod, maintaining its angle—no banking as in an airplane—and headed for the faraway wall. After making the chair go up to the ceiling and then down to the floor, whirling it a few times, and speeding it up to an estimated ten miles per hour, Burton landed the chair.
He was smiling; his black eyes were shiny with eagerness.
“We may have a vehicle to lift us up the shaft!” he cried.
Frigate and some of the others weren’t satisfied with the demonstration.
“It must be capable of even greater speed,” the American said. “What happens if you have to stop suddenly? Do you hurtle on out of the chair?”
“There’s one way of finding out,” Burton said. He made the chair lift a few inches, then accelerated it toward the wall, half a mile distant. When he was within twenty yards of the wall, he removed pressure from the right-hand disc. The chair at once slowed down but not so quickly that its passenger was in danger of being ejected. And when it was within five feet of the wall, it stopped.
When he returned, Burton said, “It must have built-in sensors. I tried to ram it into the wall, but it wouldn’t do it.”
“Fine,” Frigate said. “We can try to go through the shaft. But what if the Ethical is observing us now? What if he can cut off the power by remote control? We’d fall to our deaths or at least be stuck halfway between floors.”
“We’ll go one at a time. Each one will stop off at a floor before the next one goes. He won’t be able to catch more than one of us, and the others will be warned.”
Though Burton thought that Frigate was too cautious, he had to admit to himself that his speculations were well founded.
“Also,” Frigate said, “The two chairs must have been moving when their occupants died. What made the chairs stop?”
“Obviously, the sensors in the chairs,” Burton drawled.
“Fine. Then we’ll each get a chair and find out how to get used to handling it. After that, what? Up or down?”
“We’ll go to the top floor first. I feel that the headquarters, the nerve center of these operations, must be there.”
“Then we should go down instead,” Frigate said, grinning. -“Your predictions were always of the Moseilima type, you know. The opposite always happened.”
The fellow had his way of getting back at him. He knew too much about Burton’s Earthly life, knew all his faults and failings.
“No,” Burton said, “not true. I warned the British government two years before the Sepoy Mutiny happened that it was coming. I was ignored. I was Cassandra then, not Moseilima.”
“Touche!” Frigate said.
Gilgamesh pulled up his chair alongside Burton’s a few minutes later. He seemed troubled and not well.
“My head still hurts bad. I see things double now and then.”
“Can you make it? Or do you wish to stay here and rest?”
The Sumerian shook his massive taurine head.
“No. I wouldn’t be able to find you. I just wanted you to know that I’m sick.”
Alice must have struck him harder than she’d intended.
Tom Turpin called to Burton then. “Hey, I found out how they get their food here. Look!”
He’d been fiddling around with a big metal box which had many dials and buttons on it. It was set on a table and was connected by a black cable to a plug in the floor.
Turpin opened the glass-fronted door. Within were dishes and cups and cutlery, the dishes full of food and the cups full of liquid.
“This is their equivalent of the grail,” Tom said, his pale yellow face smiling. “I don’t know what any of the controls except this does, but I punched all the buttons and in a few seconds the whole meal formed before my eyes.” He opened the door and removed the contents. “Wow! Smell that beef! And that bread!” Burton thought it would be best to eat now. There would probably be other devices like this elsewhere, but he couldn’t be sure. Besides, they were famished.
Turpin tried another combination of buttons and dials. This time, the meal was a melange of French and Italian and Arabic cooking. All items were delicious, though some were under-cooked, and the filet of camel’s hump was too highly spiced for most of them. They tried other combinations with some surprising results, not all delightful. By experimentation, Turpin found the dial which regulated the degree of cooking, and they were able to get the meal well-done, medium, medium-rare, or rare. All except Gilgamesh ate voraciously, drank some of the liquor, and lit up the cigarettes and cigars also provided by the box. There was no lack of water; faucets were all over the place.
Afterward, they looked for toilets. These were in some nearby giant cabinets which they’d presumed had contained machinery. The toilets didn’t flush; they were holes into which the urine and excrement disappeared before they hit the bottom. Gilgamesh ate some of the bread, then vomited it up. “I can’t go with you,” he said. He wiped his chin and squirted water from his mouth into a sink. “I’m just too sick.” Burton wondered if he were as ill as he said he was. He could be an agent and waiting until he could slip away.
“No, you go with us,” he said. “We might not be able to find our way back to you. You’ll be comfortable in your chair.” He led the others to the shaft. When he took the chair out over the emptiness, he extended a foot to touch below it. His toes met no slight springiness as in the other shaft. Perhaps the presence of the chairs automatically removed the field.
He pulled the rod back and tipped the disc. The chair moved slowly upward, then swiftly as Burton depressed the disc even more. At each bay he saw more corridors and some rooms. The latter were full of strange equipment, but there were no skeletons until he came to the tenth floor. The chamber he looked into was small compared to the one he’d left. It contained twelve large tables on each of which were twelve plates and twelve cups and some skulls and bones. Other bones lay on the chairs or at their feet.
A huge food-box was on a table in the corner.
Burton went on up, stopping now and then, until he arrived at the top of the shaft. The trip had taken fifteen minutes. On one side was another bay with a corridor outside. On his left was a small corridor which quickly opened into a giant one, at least one hundred feet square. After setting the chair down in the larger hallway, he leaned over the shaft and blinked his lantern three times. The answering flashes were tiny but sharp. Nur, the next one, would not make any stops and so would get to Burton in about twelve minutes.
Burton had never been patient except when it was absolutely necessary and often not then. He got back into the chair and moved down the hall. He’d take a six-minute tour and then return to the shaft.
He passed many open doors, all very large, giving him eye access to small and large rooms, some with equipment, some apparently for apartments. A number had many skeletons; some, a few; some, none. The corridor ran straight for at least two miles ahead of him. Just before it was time to return, he saw on his right an entrance with a closed door. He stopped the chair, got out, withdrew his pistol, and cautiously approached the door. Above it were thirteen symbols, twelve helices arranged in a circle with a sundisc in the center. There was no knob on the door. Instead, a metal facsimile of a human hand was attached to the door where a knob should have been. Its fingers were half closed as if about to seize another hand. Burton turned it, and he pulled the door open. The room was a very large, very pale-green semitransparent sphere surrounded by and intersected by other green bubbles. On the wall of the central sphere at one side was an oval of darker green, a moving picture of some sort. The odor of pine and dogwood rose from the trees in the background, and in the foreground a ghostly fox chased a ghostly rabbit. On the bottom of the largest sphere, or bubble, were twelve chairs in a circle. Ten contained parts of skeletons. Two were bare of anything, even dust.
Burton had to breathe deeply. This room brought back frightening memories. It was here that he had awakened after killing himself 777 times to escape the Ethicals. It was here that he had faced the Council.
Now those beings who had seemed so godlike to him were bones.
He put one foot beyond the threshold, poking it through the bubble with only a slight resistance. His body followed, feeling the same tiny push. Then his other foot came through, and he was standing on springy nothingness or what seemed to be nothingness.
He reholstered his pistol and passed through two bubbles, the surfaces closing behind him, but air moving past him, and then he was in the “Council room.” When he got near the insubstantial chairs, he saw that he’d been mistaken. One of the seemingly empty seats held a very thin circular convex lens. He picked it up and recognized the many-faceted “eye” of the man who’d seemed to be the chief of the Council, Thanabur.
This was no jewel, no artificial device to replace an eye, as he’d thought then. It was a lens which could be slipped over the eye. It felt greasy. Perhaps it was lubricated so it wouldn’t irritate the eyeball.
With some difficulty and revulsion, he inserted the lens under his eyelid.
The left eye saw the room through a distorting semiopaque-ness. Then he closed his right eye.
“Oooohhhh!”
He quickly opened the right eye.
He’d been floating in space, in a darkness in which distant stars and great gas sheets shone and there was the feeling, but not the direct effect, of unbelievable coldness. He’d been aware that he was not alone, though. He knew, without having seen them, that he was followed by uncountable souls, trillions upon trillions, perhaps far more. And then he was shooting toward a sun, and it became larger, and suddenly he saw that the flaming body was not a star but a vast collection of other souls, all flaming, yet burning not as in Hell but with an ecstasy that he’d never experienced and which the mystics had tried to describe but was indescribable.
Though shaken and afraid, he was also pulled fiercely by the ecstasy. Moreover, he could not allow his fear to overcome him, he who had boasted that he had never feared anything.
He closed his right eye and was again in space in the same “location.” Again, he was hurtling through space, far swifter than light, toward the sun. Again, he felt the innumerable presences behind him. The star swam up, grew larger, became vast, and he saw that the flames were composed of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of souls.
Then he heard a soundless cry, one of unutterable ecstasy and welcome, and he plunged headfirst into the sun, the swarm, and he was nothing and yet everything. Then, he wasn’t he any more. He was something which had no parts and was not a part but was one with the ecstasy, with the others who were not others.
He gave a great cry and opened his eye. There were Alice and Nur and Frigate and his companions staring at him from the doorway. Trembling, he went to them through the bubbles. He was not so upset, however, that he did not notice that the Sumerian was missing nor that Alice was weeping.
He ignored their questions, saying, “Where’s Gilgamesh?”
“He died on the way up,” Alice said.
“We left him sitting in the chair in a room,” Nur said. “He must have had a brain concussion.”
“I killed him!” Alice said, and she sobbed.
“I’m sorry for that,” Burton said, “but it couldn’t be helped. If he was innocent, he shouldn’t have resisted. Perhaps he really was an agent.”
He put his arms around Alice and said, “You did what you had to do. If you hadn’t, he might’ve killed me.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve killed before, but those people were strangers attacking us. I liked Gilgamesh, and now...”
Burton thought it was best to allow her to weep out her guilt and grief. He released her and turned to the others. Nur asked him what he had been doing in the room. He told them of the lens.
“You must’ve been standing there for at least an hour,”
Frigate said.
“Yes, I know, but the state seemed to last only a minute.”
“What about the aftereffects?” Nur said.
Burton hesitated, then said, “Apart from being shaken up, I feel... I feel... a tremendous closeness to all of you! Oh, I’ve been fond of some of you, but... now... I love all of you!”
“That must’ve been a shock,” Frigate murmured. Burton ignored him.
The Moor held up the multifaceted device and looked through it with his right eye closed.
“I see nothing. It has to be fitted next to the eye.”
Burton said, “I thought that the lens was something which only the chief of the twelve, Thanabur, would wear. I presumed that it was some sort of ritual token or emblem of leadership, something traditional. I may’ve been wrong. Perhaps everybody took a turn wearing it during the Council meetings. It may be that the lens gave all of them a feeling such as I had, a closeness and love for everybody in the room.”
“In which case, X was able to overcome that feeling,” Tai-Peng said.
“What I don’t understand,” Burton said, “is why the lens put me into a trance yet didn’t seem to affect Thanabur.”
“Perhaps,” Nur said, “the Councilors were used to it. After wearing it many times, they got only a mild effect from it.”
Nur fitted the lens under his eyelids and shut his right eye. Immediately, his face took on an expression of ecstasy, though his body remained motionless. When two minutes had passed, Burton shook the Moor by the shoulder. Nur came out of his trance and began weeping. But when he’d recovered and had taken the lens out, he said, “It does induce a state similar to that which the saints have attempted to describe.”
He handed the lens to Burton.
“But it’s a false state brought about by an artificial thing. It’s not the true state. That can only be attained by spiritual development.”
Some of the others wanted to try. Burton said, “Later. We may have used up time we sorely need. We have to find X before he finds us.”
THEY CAME TO AN ENORMOUS CLOSED DOOR ABOVE WHICH were more of the untranslatable characters. Burton halted the train of chairs and got out of his. A button on the wall seemed to be the only obvious means of opening the doors. He pressed, and the two sections slid away from each other into recesses. He looked into a wide hall ending in two more huge doors. Burton pressed the button by that.
They looked into a domed chamber which had to be half a mile across. The floor was earth on which grew a bright green short-bladed grass and, further on, trees. Brooks ran through it here and there, their sources cataracts forty or fifty feet high. Flowering bushes were many, and there were flat-topped rocks which had served as tables, if the plates and cups and cutlery on them meant anything.
The ceiling was a blue across which wisps of clouds moved, and a simulacrum of the sun was at its zenith.
They walked in and looked around. Human skeletons lay here and there, the nearest around a rock. There were also the bones of birds, deer, and some catlike and doglike and raccoon-like animals.
“They must’ve come here to get back to Nature,” Frigate said. “A very reasonable facsimile thereof, anyway.”
They had reasoned that X had transmitted a radio code which had activated the tiny black ball in the brains of the tower-dwellers and caused poison to be released in their bodies. But why had the animals died?
Starvation.
They left the chamber. Before they had traveled a mile, they came across another curiosity, the most puzzling and awe-inspiring of all: A transparent outward-leaning wall on their left revealed a Brobdingnagian shaft. A bright shifting light flared from below. They got off the chairs to look down into the well. And they cried out with wonder.
Five hundred feet below them was a raging furnace of many differently colored shapes, all closely packed but seeming to pass through each other or to merge at times.
Burton shaded his eyes with a hand and stared into it. After a while he could occasionally distinguish the shapes of the things that whirled around and around and shot up and down and sideways.
He turned away, his eyes hurting.
“They’re wathans. Just like those I saw above the heads of the twelve Councilors. The well must be of some material which enables us to see them.”
Nur handed him a pair of dark glasses.
“Here. I found these in a box on a shelf near here.”
Burton and the others put on the glasses and stared into the enormous well. Now he could see the things more clearly, the changing shifting colors in the always expanding-contracting shapes, the six-sided tentacles which shot out, flailed, waved, then shrank back into the body.
Burton, leaning out, his back pressed against the wall, looked up. The brightness showed him a ceiling of the gray metal about a hundred feet above him. He turned around and tried to see across to the other side of the well. He couldn’t. He peered down into it. Far far below was a gray solid. Or was it his imagination, an illusion created by the metamorphosing horde, that made him now think that the solidity was pulsing?
He stepped back, removed the glasses, and rubbed his aching eyes.
“I don’t know what this means, but we can’t stay here any longer.”
They’d passed a number of bays enclosing lift shafts with no upper passage. But after they’d gone a quarter of a mile, they came to one which extended up past their level.
“This may take us to the floor where the gateway is.”
Again, they waited until each person had gotten safely up the shaft before the next flew up.
The bay opened onto another corridor. There were thirteen doors along mis, each an entrance into a very large suite of luxuriously furnished rooms. In one was a table of some glossy reddish hardwood on which was a transparent sphere. Suspended in it were three doll-sized shapes.
“Looks like Monat and two other of his kind,” Burton said.
“Something like three-dimensional photographs,” Frigate said.
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “But there seems to be a family resemblance. Of course, I suppose they’d all look alike to anyone not familiar with the race. Still...”
Croomes had not said a word for a long time. Her grim face had indicated, though, that she was struggling terribly to accept the reality of this place. Nothing here had been what she expected; there had been no welcoming choir of angels, no glory-blazing God on a throne with her mother standing at His right hand to greet her.
Now she said, “Those two could be his parents.”
There were many things to investigate in the rooms, but Burton hurried them on out.
They had gone about two hundred feet when they came to a bay, the first they’d seen on the right-hand wall. Burton got out from the chair and looked along the shaft. Its bottom was level with the floor; the top wasn’t more than fifty feet up.
Wisps of fog rushed across it, apparently drawn from the outside and through vents in the wall opposite.
He withdrew his head.
“That might lead to the dome on the outside, the one which only Piscator could enter.”
The Japanese had been intelligent and brave. He’d probably done as Burton had, tested the invisible field in the shaft, figured out that it would hold him, and then descended. But how could he have activated the field if he didn’t know the codeword or whatever it was that operated it?
However, this shaft was different from the others. It was very short, and there was only one way to go if you were at the top. Sensors might determine that the field was activated if someone came in from the top. The sensors could detect that there was only one person and that he wouldn’t be standing in the field unless he wanted to go down. To go up would require a codeword of some sort. Or maybe it didn’t, the bottom part of the field would act like the top, only in the reverse direction.
Where was Piscator?
To test his theory, Burton stepped into the shaft. After three seconds, he was lifted slowly upward. At the top of the shaft, he stepped out into a short metal corridor. It curved near its end and undoubtedly opened into the corridor in the dome.
Fog billowed around the corner, but the lights were strong enough to pierce it.
He walked into the corridor and at once felt a very slight resistance. Its strength increased as he advanced struggling.
When he was panting and unable to go even an inch farther, he turned back. His way was unimpeded to the shaft. When he returned to the lower level, he gave a short report.
“The field works both ways,” he concluded.
The Moor said, “According to the Parseval report, there was only one entrance. Yet.. .there must be an opening, a door of some kind, for the aircraft to come in. There were none on top of the tower. I think, however, that they just weren’t visible. Also, there must be ethical fields in the entrances for the aircraft. Otherwise, anybody could go in that way. Including X. Surely he must have gone out on legitimate business from time to time in an aerial vessel.”
“You forget about the hypothetical wathan distorter,” Burton said. “That would’ve enabled X to get through the dome entrance, too.”
“Yes. I know that. What I’m getting at is that if we could find the hangar for the aircraft, and then find out how to operate them, we could leave here at any time we pleased.”
“They’d better be easier and simpler to fly than an airplane,” Frigate said.
“No doubt they are.”
“Say, I’ve got an idea,” Frigate said, grinning. “Piscator was a Sufi, and he had no trouble entering. You’re a Sufi and a highly developed ethicalist. Why don’t you go out and try to get back in through the dome?”
The Moor grinned back at him.
“You’d like to see if I really am as advanced as I should be, wouldn’t you? And what happens if I can’t get out? Or, if I do, can’t get back in? No, Peter. It would be a waste of time and an exhibition of pride on my part. You know that, yet you urge me to do it. You are teasing me. As a disciple, you sometimes lack the proper reverent attitude toward your master.”
They returned to their chairs and flew slowly down the curving corridor. Burton was beginning to feel that their tour was very informative, even if often puzzling, but useless. This was no way to go about finding X.
What else could they do? There were no directories on the walls, and they couldn’t read them if there were. It was frustrating and futile to proceed in this manner, yet they just couldn’t sit around in one place and hope that X would find them. If he did, he’d be armed with some irresistible weapon. No doubt of that.
On the other hand, they had been fortunate in locating the residences of the twelve and of Monat Grrautut and the dome entrance. Perhaps, the place where X did his experiments or a control center he used might be near his apartment.
They came to a closed door and passed it. There would be many thousands of such in this vast place. They couldn’t afford the time to open every one.
But when he was thirty feet beyond it, Burton raised his hand to signal a halt.
“What is it?” Alice said.
“I’ve a certain feeling, a strong hunch.”
He lowered the chair to the floor.
“I’ll just take a moment to check this out.”
He pressed a button on the wall by the door, and the door slid soundlessly into a recess. Beyond was a cavernous room with much varied equipment on tables and, against the walls, many cabinets. There was only one skeleton. A violent explosion had evidently caught someone as he was passing by a cabinet or doing something with it. The top of the cabinet had been blown off, judging from the outwardly twisted metal, the pieces of some glassy substance on the floor, and metal pieces inside the skeleton. It lay twenty feet out from the wreck, and under the bones were dark bloodstains.
Just beyond the skeleton }he blast had knocked a star-shaped metal construction from the top of a table. It lay on the floor emitting what looked like many-colored heat waves.
Straight ahead of Burton and near the center of the room was a flying chair. It was on the floor and tenantless, one side to him, and fresh bloodstains on the arm.
Just beyond the chair was a great revolving disc on a cylinder about two feet high. Cabinets and consoles were on its perimeter. In the center was a fixed platform. A man sat on a chair of some semitransparent stuff in the middle of the fixed platform. Before him was a console with a sloping instrument panel and several live screens. He was adjusting a dial, his eyes fixed on the largest oscilloscope. His profile was to Burton.
Burton put a finger to his lips and with the other hand gestured at his companions to get off their chairs. Then he unholstered his revolver and indicated that the others should do the same.
The operator had long fox-red hair, a pale white skin, and the eye presented to Burton lacked an epicanthic fold. If the man hadn’t been so fat, Burton might not have identified him. Fat, however, couldn’t be removed in such a short time.
Burton walked slowly through the door and toward the man. The others were fanning out, their guns ready.
When they were within sixty feet of him, the man saw them. He reared up out of the chair, grimaced, and sat back down. His hand shot out, dived into a recess under the panel, and came out holding a strange-looking device. It had a pistollike butt for gripping, a barrel about a foot long and three inches in diameter, and a sphere at its end the size of a large apple.
Burton cried out, “Loga!”
He ran forward.
THE ETHICAL ROSE AGAIN AND SHOUTED, “STOP! OR I’LL FIRE!”
They kept on running. He sighted along the barrel through the transparent sphere, and a thin scarlet line shot soundlessly from the sphere. Smoke curled up from the shallow arc drawn on the metal before the group.
They halted. Anything that could melt that metal was very impressive.
“I can cut you all into two with a single sweep of this,” Loga said. “I don’t want to. There’s been far too much violence, and I’m sick of it. But I will kill you if I must. Now... all of you turn around in unison and throw your weapons as far as you can toward the door.”
Burton said, “There are nine guns trained on you. You might get one or two of us, but you’ll be blown to bits.”
The Ethical smiled grimly.
“It looks like a Mexican standoff, doesn’t it?”
He paused. “But it isn’t, believe me!”
Croomes shouted, “No, it isn’t! You Satan, you fiend from Hell!”
Her pistol boomed. The scarlet beam flashed out from Loga’s weapon at the same time that eight other guns exploded.
Loga fell backwards. Burton ran, leaped upon the revolving disc, darted over it to the fixed platform, and pointed his revolver at the prostrate Ethical. The others crowded around him.
While Turpin and Tai-Peng picked up the bleeding and ashen-skinned man from the floor, Burton seized the sphere-ended weapon. Loga was seated roughly in his chair. He held his hand over a gushing wound on the biceps of his right arm. “He got Croomes!” Alice said, pointing. Burton looked once at the severed body and turned away.
Loga looked around as if he couldn’t believe what had happened, then said, “There are three boxes in the upper-right-hand drawer in the console. Bring them to me, and I’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
“This isn’t a trick?” Burton said.
“No! I swear! I’ve had enough of tricks and murder! I meant you no harm! I just wanted you to be disarmed so that I could explain without worrying about you. You’re such a violent breed!”
“Look who’s talking,” Burton said.
“I didn’t do it because I loved it!”
“Neither did we,” Burton said, but he wasn’t so sure that he was wholly truthful.
They brought out three silver boxes set with green emeralds. Burton opened each one slowly and inspected the contents. As the Ethical had said, each contained a bottle. Two held liquid; one, some pink stuff.
“How do I know they won’t release some sort of gas?” Burton said. “Or that they aren’t poison?”
“They won’t be,” Nur said. “He does not want to die now.”
“That’s right,” Loga said. “Something terrible may happen soon, and only I know how to stop it. I may need your help.”
“You could have had it all along,” Burton said, “if only you’d told us the truth in the beginning.”
“I had my reasons for not doing so,” Loga said. “Very good reasons. And then things got out of hand.”
He squeezed one of the bottles, and a clear liquid spurted out onto his hand. After rubbing it over the wound on his shoulder, wincing at the pain, he drank from the second bottle. From the third he poured out a pink gooey substance into his left hand and then pressed it over the wound.
“The first was to sterilize the wound,” he said. “The second was to cancel the shock and give me strength. The third will heal the wound in a very short time. Three days.”
Burton said, “Where did we wound you the first time?”
“The only bad wound was in my left thigh.”
His grayness of skin had been replaced by a normal color within a minute. He asked for some water, which Frigate brought to him. Burton lit a cigarette. His questions were a logjam in his throat. Which one should be spit out first?
Before the inquisition, though, certain things had to be done. Burton held his revolver on Loga while the others brought their chairs in and Frigate made an extra trip to get Burton’s. These were placed on the floor on the side of the disc where they’d be out of sight of Croomes’ body. While this was being done, Loga was allowed to lift his bloodstained chair to a designated spot. The other chairs were then arranged closely in a semicircle facing the Ethical.
“I think we could all stand a little drink,” Burton said. Loga told them how to set the controls of a grail box to get their orders filled. His own was a yellow wine which the others had never found in their grails. Burton duplicated Loga’s request and tasted the wine. It was comparable to nothing he’d ever had before, delicate yet pungent. For some reason it evoked a slowly receding tide of dark green waters above which flew giant white birds with crimson beaks.
Burton sat with Loga’s weapon across his lap. His first question was how it was operated. Loga indicated the safety lock and the trigger, the use of which Burton had figured out for himself.
“Now,” he said, “I think it best that we start out at the beginning. But wtiat is the beginning?”
“Pardon me for interrupting,” the Moor said. “We should establish one thing right now. Ah Qaaq... Loga... you must have a private resurrection chamber in the tower?”
“Yes.”
The Ethical hesitated. “It wasn’t just for me. Tringu also used it. He was my best friend; we were raised together on the Gardenworld. He was the only one I could trust.”
“Was he the man called Stern who tried to kill Firebrass before the Parseval took off the tower?”
“Yes. He failed, as you know. So, when I saw that Firebrass was going to get into the tower ahead of me... and Siggen was too, I had to kill them both. Siggen had not told Firebrass who I was. She believed me when I told her that I’d abandon my plans and throw myself on the mercy of the Council. But only after we’d gotten to the tower and the Council was resurrected. She never would have agreed if I’d not lied, not told her that I’d put an inhibit on communication with the computer and that only I could break it. She said she wouldn’t tell Firebrass about me until we were in the tower. But she then made arrangements to be in the tower ahead of me with Firebrass. She meant to check up~«n the truth of what I’d told her. Also, I was afraid that while she and Firebrass were in the helicopter on the way to the top of the tower, she’d change her mind and tell Firebrass. So... I set off the bomb I’d planted in the copter just in case...”
“Who’s Siggen?” Alice said.
“My wife. The woman posing as Any a Obrenova, the Russian airship officer.”
“Oh, yes,” Alice said as tears ran down Loga’s cheeks.
“It’s obvious that your people found your private resurrector and deactivated it. Otherwise, you’d have killed yourself and been translated to the tower. Have you reactivated your resurrector?”
“Yes. Actually, I have two. But both were located and deactivated.”
Burton said, “Then if we’d killed you just now, you’d have escaped us. Why didn’t you let us do it? Or kill yourself?”
“Because, as I said, I may need you. Because I’m sick of this violence. Because I owe you something.”
He paused. “I’d set up an inhibition in the general lazarus machinery long ago. It’d be activated at my signal, the same signal which would kill all within the tower, the underground chambers, and in the area of the sea. But Tringu and I had our private lines. One of them was in the room at the base of the tower. Sharmun, the woman in charge in Monat’s and Thanabur’s absence, told me that the two rooms had been found. She said that it would do no good to commit suicide in the hope that I could rise in the tower and continue my evil deeds. Me! Evil!”
“This is getting confusing,” Burton said. “Start at the very beginning.”
“Very well. But I’ll have to be as brief as possible. By the way, where is Gilgamesh?”
Burton told him.
The Ethical said. “I’m sorry.”
He paused, then said, “Like his mythical counterpart, he failed to find the secret of immortality.”
Loga rose, saying, “I just want to see the screens. I won’t go near them.”
They kept their weapons trained on him while he limped to the edge of the revolving platform. It was useless to keep him in their sights, Burton thought. He could elude them at any time by making them kill him if he was telling the truth.
Loga limped back to his chair and eased himself into it.
“We may be able to do something. I don’t really know. We do have some time, though. So...”
He began in the beginning.
When the universe was young, when the first inhabitable planets had formed after the explosion of the primal ball of energy-matter, evolution brought about a people on one planet who differed from those on other planets.
“I don’t mean just in physical construction. All the sentient peoples have either bipedal or centaurine bodies, hands, stereoscopic vision, and so forth. They were intelligent but had no consciousness of self, no concept of the I.”
“We speculated on that!” Frigate said. “But...”
“You must interrupt as little as possible. I’m telling the truth when I say that all sentient beings throughout the universe were without self-awareness. As far as we know, anyway. I know it’s very difficult for you to believe. You can’t conceive of such a state. But it was and is true—with exceptions now.
“The people who differed did not differ in their lack of self-awareness in the beginning of their history. They were like the others in this respect. However, they did have science, though they didn’t go about dealing with it as self-aware sentients do.
“Nor did they have a concept of religion, of gods or of a God. That comes only with an advanced stage of self-awareness.
“Luckily for these people, called by those who followed them The Firsts, one of their scientists had accidentally formed a wathan during an experiment.
“It was the first indication The Firsts had that there was such a force as extraphysical energy. I use the term extra-physical to avoid any confusion with paraphysical, with such evidently existing but usually uncontrollable and elusive forces as telepathy, telekinesis, and other extrasensory perception phenomena.”
Burton forebore saying that it \vas he who’d coined the term ESP on Earth, though he’d called it extra-sensuous perception.
“The wathan may be a form of this, but, if so, it’s the only one that’s controllable. This nameless scientist who accidentally generated a wathan from the extraphysical forces did not know what it was. He or she continued to experiment and generated more. I say generated because the equipment he was using formed the wathan from the extraphysical energy. Shaped it or perhaps plucked it from the field that exists in the same space as matter but usually doesn’t interact with it.
“The first wathans probably attached themselves to the living beings in their proximity.”
“All living creatures?” Nur murmured.
“All living individuals. Insects, trees, starfishes, all. After millions of years of experiments, we still don’t know why the wathans are attracted to life energy. One of the hundreds of theories is that life itself may be a form of extraphysical energy. An interface, rather.”
The effect of the attachments was not immediately noted. The wathan was the source and genesis of self-awareness. But it could not develop this except through living entities, and these had to have highly developed nervous systems if the potentiality for self-awareness was to be realized.
“But that also can’t be realized if the wathan attaches itself to a human entity beyond the initial zygote stage. Beyond the fusion of spermatozoon and ovum. Don’t ask me why. Just believe me when I say that it’s true. Apparently, there is a hardening in the entity, a resistance to the interface.”
The machine spat out billions of wathans during the experiments. Millions attached themselves to the zygotes of the sentients. And, for the first time in the universe, as far as anybody knew, self-awareness was born. Infants grew up with this, and neither the older nor the younger generation could understand that this was unique and new. Self-aware children and youths have always had difficulty understanding the adults, but never before had there been such an empathy gap, such lack of comprehension.
“Eventually, the unself-conscious people died out. It wasn’t until twenty-five or so years after the first wathan was formed that the reason for self-awareness was discovered. Then it became a matter of necessity to keep producing wathans.”
Centuries passed. Space flight via rockets came. After several centuries, a new form of propulsion was discovered. Interstellar flight became possible at speeds unheard of before when a method of sidepassing matter was invented. Even so, it took seven days of Earth-time to go a lightyear.
“The old science-fiction concept of going through other dimensions was realized?” Frigate said.
“No. But we don’t have the time for the necessarily lengthy explanation of it.”
By then The Firsts thought it was their ethical duty to bring immortality and self-awareness via the wathan to all other sentient people. Many expeditions set out to do this. When one found a planet with people whose brains were capable of developing self-awareness, waf/iaw-generating machines were buried so deep in the earth that it was unlikely that they would be discovered by the aborigines.
“Why hidden?” Nur said. He was pale; he looked as if he’d been hard hit by Loga’s revelations.
“Why hidden?” Loga said. “Why not just give the machines to the first self-aware generation? You should know why not. Consider your fellow human beings. The wathan generators would have been misused. There would be power struggles to monopolize them and through them the basest exploitation of others. No, the wathan generators can’t be entrusted to people until they attain a certain ethical stage.”
Burton didn’t ask why The Firsts hadn’t set up garrisons on each planet to insure that the generators were the property of all. With their scientific knowledge and ethical knowledge, they could have taught the aborigines to advance much more swiftly. But The Firsts would not consider that ethical. Besides, they wouldn’t have enough of their own people to rule all the planets they found.
The faces of his companions reflected an agonizing struggle, though Frigate seemed the least affected. Nur, who had always been so flexible, so invulnerable to psychological shock, was suffering the worst. He could not accept the idea that wathans, call them souls, were synthetic. Well, not quite that. But they were formed by humanlike creatures through machines. They did not come parceled out by Allah. Nur had believed this far more deeply than some of the others who, though religious, had not had his firmness of faith.
Loga must have been aware of this.
He said, “There is no Creator unless we accept the creation, this universe, as evidence. The Firsts did, and we do. But there is no evidence whatsoever that It has any interest in Its creatures. It...”
“It?” Alice and de Marbot said.
“Yes. The Creator has no sex—as far as we know. The language of Monat’s people has a unique neuter pronoun for the Creator.”
“His people are The Firsts?” Tai-Peng said.
“No. The Firsts have Gone On long, long ago. Monat’s people are the recipients of The Firsts’ work through a line of five other peoples. These, you might say, have handed on the torch to others and then Gone On. Monat himself is just one of ten thousand of his own kind yet alive. The others have all Gone On.
“Some theologians say that the Creator has not done anything Itself to give Its sentient creatures wathans. Its divine plan leaves it to sentients to make their own salvation. But this isn’t logical, since it was only an accident that the wathans were generated, and billions died with no chance of self-awareness or immortality before this. And billions, perhaps trillions, have died and will die, perished forever, before we Ethicals will have arrived to give them the wathans. So it looks as if the Creator is also indifferent to our self-awareness and immortality.
“It is up to sentients, however, wherever they live, to do what the primitive religionists believed was the Creator’s prerogative.”
BURTON WAS MUCH SHAKEN, THOUGH HE FOUND THE STORY perhaps easier to take than any of the rest, Frigate excepted. He’d always been intensely interested in religion. He’d investigated many faiths, especially the Oriental. He’d converted to Roman Catholicism, not only because it fascinated him but because doing so had gotten his wife Isabel off his back. He’d been initiated into the mysteries of Moslem Sufism, had earned the red thread of a Brahmin, had been a Sikh, and a Parsi, and had tried to convince the shrewd Brigham Young that he wanted to be a Mormon. Though he’d acted like a sincere convert and sometimes had surprisingly been overcome by patterned emotion, he’d always left the door of the faith as he’d gone in, a congenital infidel.
Even when he was very young, he had refused to accept the tenets of the Anglican Church. He’d infuriated his parents, and not even the enraged bellowings of and the thrashings given by his father had changed his mind. They had made him tend to keep his opinions and his questions to himself until he had gotten old enough that his father didn’t dare attack him by word or fist.
Despite this, the orthodox concept of the soul and of its Donor had seeped through his being. Though he hadn’t believed it, he hadn’t thought of any other, and it hadn’t been until recently that he had heard of one.
As that exasperating fellow Frigate had told him more than once when ‘Burton was angry with him, he was a broad but not deep thinker. Nevertheless, the logical extrapolation of the concept of the soul he’d heard when with Frigate and the others had impressed him. Indeed, they had convinced him.
Loga’s account was a shock. Not one, though, which stirred the depths of his mind. These had already been disturbed. So, next to Frigate, he was the one who could most accept this extraordinary history.
Loga continued, “It was Monat’s people who came to Earth and set up the wathan generators. This would be, approximately, 100,000 B.C.”
Frigate said, moaning, “And all those who’d lived before? Beyond saving? Gone? Forever?”
“Enough thought and grief have been expended on them,” Loga said. “There is nothing you can do about them, so don’t be self-sadistic. As you Americans say, tough shit. It sounds callous, but it’s the attitude you must adopt if you don’t wish to torment yourself needlessly. Better that some may be redeemed than none at all.”
The wathan generators and the wathan catchers were buried far down, so deep that they were surrounded by a heat that would melt nickel-iron.
“Catchers?” Aphra Behn said softly.
“Yes. There is one in a big shaft in the tower. Did you see it on your way up here?”
Burton said, “We saw it.”
“That is the very grave problem, the pressing problem which I shall get to after a while.”
From that time on, the wathans fixed themselves to or integrated with the human zygotes. When a zygote or an embryo or any of any age died, their wathans were attracted to the buried machine and caged.
“So what the Church of the Second Chance preaches is not entirely true?” Burton said.
“No. It was I who came to Jacques Gillot, La Viro, and told him what we thought he should know. I didn’t reveal more than half the truth, and I lied about some things. It was justifiable because you Valleydwellers were not ready for the full truth.”
“That’s debatable,” Burton said.
“Yes. What isn’t? But I did tell Gillot that the salvation of the wathan depended upon its attaining a certain ethical stage. That was no lie.”
Monat’s ancestors came from a planet of a star which was neither Tau Ceti nor Arcturus. They had found a planet which had no sentients as yet, and they had made it into the Gardenworld.
“After about ten thousand years, they began resurrecting the dead children of Earth.”
“Including the miscarriages and abortions, etcetera?” Burton said.
“Yes. These were developed into full-term infants. I should say, were and are being. When I left the Garden, all those who’d died under the age of five before approximately A.D. 1925 had been resurrected.”
The Gardenworld project had started during the tenth century B.C. The Riverworld project had begun in the late twenty-second century A.D.
Frigate said, “What century is it now in Terrestrial chronology?”
“When I left the Garden for here it was, let’s see, umh, to be precise A.D. 2009. It took me one hundred and sixty Terran years to arrive here. It took fifty years to re-form this planet. The wholesale resurrection day took place twenty-seven years after that. That would be, A.D. 2246. It is now, I’m not sure about this, A.D. 2307.”
“My God!” Alice said. “How old are you?”
“This is really irrelevant now,” Loga said. “But I was born sometime during the twelfth century B.C. In that city which you call Troy. I was a grandson of the king Homer called Priamos. I wasn’t quite five years old when the invading Ak-haiwoi and Danawoi took the city, sacked and burned it, and slaughtered most of its people. I would’ve become a slave, I suppose, but I defended my mother. I stuck a spear into the leg of a warrior, annoying him so much that he killed me with his bronze sword.” Loga shuddered.
“At least, I didn’t have to see her and my sisters raped and my father and brothers butchered.”
Monat and his people raised several generations of Terrestrial children. After this, many of Monat’s people left for other planets. Monat and some others stayed to supervise the human adults who’d grown up in the Garden and were now taking their turn in raising new generations. Monat had left the Garden, however, to accompany the human beings to the Riverworld.
“We sometimes referred to him as the Operator because he was head of the project and chief engineer of the biocomputer.”
“The computer which Spruce mentioned?” Burton said. “The giant protein computer?”
“Yes.”
“Spruce lied to us in other things, though,” Burton said. “He said he was born in the fifty-second century A.D. and that a sort of chronoscope was used to record the bodies of those who’d died.”
“We all had the same false stories if we should somehow get caught and were forced to talk. Of course, we could kill ourselves, but, if there was a chance of escaping, we’d stay alive. Anyway, when you questioned Spruce, Monat was present, and he led Spruce along, fed him the questions which had prepared answers.”
“We’ve figured that out,” Burton said.
“How do you record the dead?” Nur said.
“The wathans contain everything that the body contains. That is, the records of the body, including the brain, of course, and this recording is the basis for duplication of the body.”
“But.. .but,” Frigate said. “Then the duplicates, the resurrected, wouldn’t be the same as the dead model! They’d just be duplicates!”
“No. The wathan is the source and the seat of self-awareness. That is not a copy. The wathan leaves the dead body, takes its self-awareness with it. But it is unconscious, most of the time, anyway. There are some indications that, under certain conditions and for a brief time, the wathan may be conscious after leaving the body. But we don’t have enough evidence to state definitely that this can occur. This newly enfleshed wathan may be hallucinating.
“Anyway, the wathan furnishes all the data we need to make a new body, and then it attaches itself to the duplicate.”
Burton wondered how many times this information would have to be repeated to some of the group before it was finally accepted.
“Why did you decide to carry out your own project?” Nur said.
Loga grimaced.
“I’ll talk about that later.”
The planet was re-formed into a Rivervalley many millions of miles long. The tower and the underground chambers were constructed at the same time. The wathans were fed into the duplicate bodies made in the underground places. The physical defects of the bodies were rectified. Any metabolic disturbances were corrected. Dwarfs and midgets were given a normal height, but pygmies retained their original height. The wathans were attached to the bodies during this process, but the bodies had no self-awareness since the brains of the duplicates were kept unconscious. Nevertheless, the wathans were recording changes. Then, the duplicates were destroyed and, on general resurrection day, the bodies were duplicated again but along the banks of The River.
“My premature awakening in the chambers?” Burton said. “Was that an accident?”
“Not at all,” Loga said. “I was responsible for that. You were one of those I’d picked to help me in my plan—if it ever became necessary that I’d need your help. I caused you to be awakened so that at least one of the group would have some inkling of what was being done to you people. It would also fire your determination. You have a vast curiosity; you would never be satisfied until you got to the bottom of this mystery.”
“Yes, but when you visited us, you lied to us,” Nur said. “You told us you’d picked only twelve. As it’s turned out, you must have chosen many more than that.”
“In the first place, I wasn’t the only one who visited you. Sometimes, Tringu did. He was completely with me in my objections to some features of this project. He was the only one I could trust. I couldn’t even tell Siggen what I was doing.
“In the second place, I couldn’t limit the group to twelve. Chance alone was against that few ever getting to the tower, if I needed them for what I had in mind. So, I actually chose one hundred and_ twenty-four. I lied to you about the number because, if you were ever caught by my people, you’d not be revealing the full truth.
“That is also why I didn’t reveal everything to you and why I lied about some things. If you’d been caught and your memories were read, you’d not be able to give them the complete plan. And you’d have contradictory stories.
“That is why, posing as Odysseus, I told Clemens that the renegade who’d visited me had claimed to be a woman.”
Loga had awakened only one of his chosen group because that could be read by the Ethicals as an accident. More than one would arouse suspicion. But he’d made a mistake in arousing even one. Monat had investigated Burton’s case, and, while he couldn’t prove that someone had tampered with the resurrection machinery, he was on the lookout for more “accidents.”
Loga had become very anxious when Monat said that he meant to be resurrected near Burton and to accompany him for a while. Monat also wished to study the lazari closely, and to do this he had to make up an acceptable story to account for his presence. Why not do both at the same time?
Loga hadn’t warned Burton about this. He was afraid that Burton, knowing Monat’s real story, might be self-conscious and act peculiarly. Or, even worse, try to take matters in his own hands.
“I would’ve,” Burton said.
“I thought so.”
“I don’t like to interrupt,” Nur said. “But do you know what happened to the Japanese, Piscator?”
Loga grimaced again, and he pointed to the wrecked equipment along the wall and the skeleton near it.
“That’s what’s left of Piscator.”
He swallowed, and he said, “I didn’t think that any Valleydweller would ever get to the top of this tower. The odds against it made it very improbable, though not absolutely impossible. I knew that the Parolanders might build an airship, but even so, how would they get into the tower? Only a highly advanced ethical person could enter. That wasn’t likely, but it was possible. As it happened, one man from the Parseval did get in.
“So, just to make sure, or try to make sure that if someone like Piscator did enter, I put bombs in the cabinets along the wall and also in the cabinets in the revolving platform. Not just in this room. There are more in another control room past the apartments in the opposite direction. The bombs were explosives which were formed into instrument panels. Whichever direction the intruder took, he’d see a control room and go in. His curiosity would drive him to do so. He’d see screens still operating and the skeletons of those who’d been working in it.
“The sensors in the bombs would allow the bombs to go off only if the intruder’s brain didn’t contain the little black ball, the suicide mechanism.”
“Piscator wasn’t one of your recruits, was he?” Nur said.
“No.”
“If I’d been on the airship and had gotten in, I’d have been killed.”
Burton wondered briefly why Loga hadn’t planted bombs in the secret room at the base. Then he realized that if Loga had done so and he’d been with the expedition, as he had, he, too, would’ve been killed.
“Did you deactivate the bombs when you came here?” Burton said. He was thinking of the control room with the open door they’d passed before arriving at the apartments.
“I did in this room.”
Loga continued his narrative. He had made a wathan distorter to enter the tower and also to deceive the scanner satellites. And he had fixed the computer so that it couldn’t notify the Council when Burton died and a duplicate body was being made for him.
“That’s why you were able to kill yourself so many times and still elude the Council. But Monat sent word via an agent to inspect the place where your preresurrection duplicate would be made so that your fatal wounds could be repaired. The circuits were traced back to the inhibit I’d installed. That’s why, the last time you committed suicide, you were caught.”
In the frantic search to find out the identity of the renegade, the Council had agreed to submit themselves to the memory scanner. Loga had anticipated this, and he had fixed the computer so that it would show a false memory track.
“You understand that I couldn’t do this for my entire track by any means. Only those memory sections for the times when we had to account for our absences were scanned. Even that took much time and hard work, but I did it.”
The time came which Loga dreaded so much and hoped would not come. He had arranged for that, but he did not want to have to carry out his arrangements. It hurt him severely to do it.
“Monat decided that he would be picked up at night soon and return to the tower. At the same time, you, Burton, would be taken along for a complete scan of your time in The Valley. I think that Monat suspected that the renegade, I, had fixed it so that your memory of your questioning by the Council had not been removed. Also, the violence around him in The Valley was increasingly sickening him. He needed a vacation.”
LOGA WAS FLYING TO THE TOWER, HAVING JUST COMPLETED A legitimate mission, when the two hidden resurrectors were found. At the same time, the engineers had discovered more evidence of Loga’s tampering with the computer.
Monat, Thanabur, and Siggen were in The Valley then. The other Councilors sent out aircraft to pick them up and to give them the news. However, the Council had made an error in judgment. Instead of waiting until Loga arrived and then confronting him, they sent a message to him. He was told to expect arrest when he got home.
“It took me half an hour to work up my nerve to do what I’d long planned and had known that I must someday do. But I’d hoped I’d be in the tower when I had to do it.”
He’d sent out a signal which had activated the codeword in the little black balls in the brains of those in the tower and the sea around it. They had made a mistake when they used one code instead of individual codes.
“But I also made a mistake when I didn’t send the code down into The Valley. I’d thought of it, but I didn’t want to kill any more than I had to. Also, I thought that those Ethicals in The Valley would be helpless. They couldn’t get out to the tower, since I’d fixed it so that the signal also deactivated the aircraft. Those left in The Valley would have to try to get to the tower the hard way. By boat until they got to the headwaters and on foot over the mountains. Long before then, I’d have done what I had to do.”
“But what if the aircraft had fallen into The Valley?” Nur said.
“They wouldn’t. Before they hit the surface they’d have burned up. Those parked on top of the mountains along The Valley would have burned, too. I’d arranged that.”
“How did their pilots get down the mountain and back up to the parked vehicles?” Nur said.
“The ships could be directed by remote control. They’d drop the pilots off in the foothills during a storm or hard rain and return to the mountain top. The pilot would bury the control if he was going to stay in the area or he’d carry it in his grail. It looked just like one of the cups found in all the grails.”
There was nothing to stop Loga then from flying to the tower. But he’d underestimated the wiliness of Monat.
“At least, I believe it was he who took those countermeasures. He must have put into the computer all that had happened and had gotten a list of probabilities. The computer didn’t betray me; it was inhibited. But it did all that Monat asked it to do. I think it did. Possibly Monat thought of it himself.”
Loga was silent for so long that Burton had to jog him along.
“Thought of what?”
“Of their planting a device in my personal aircraft. When I sent out that signal, everybody in the tower and the sea area dropped dead, all other aircraft in flight were burned up, and the general resurrection machinery was shut down. It wouldn’t start again until I signaled it to do so.
“But my own vessel had had a device installed in it. I found that out when I could no longer control it. It was flying automatically. It headed toward the top of the mountain range no matter what I did. At the same time, a recorded voice told me to wait there until I’d be picked up.
“Monat’s voice!
“He’d had the stop-devices installed before he went into The Valley to accompany you, Burton. Of course, he must’ve had the devices put into every ship. If he’d suspected me only, he would’ve had me put under a completely exhaustive examination.
“What Monat hadn’t reckoned on, though, was that there would be no aircraft or pilots to come to my rescue. That meant that I’d be stranded on the mountain top and would starve to death unless I could trace down the device and remove it.
“Though Monat had expected an aircraft from the tower to get to the guilty person’s craft swiftly, he had also made sure that the culprit wouldn’t be able to remove the device or cut it off. A few minutes before my machine would land, a recording told me that the device would burn up the moment contact with the ground was made and so would the motor.”
Loga had cursed and raved. He briefly visualized what would happen. He’d die and so couldn’t send false messages to the Gardenplanet. In one hundred and sixty years, the Gardeners would expect the automatically operated ship with the latest report. When it hadn’t arrived after a reasonable time, the Gardeners would send people to investigate. They would arrive at the tower over three hundred and twenty years after the message-ship should have been launched.
“In one way,” Loga said, “that was good. I had wanted the project to run far past the one hundred and twenty years allotted, though I hadn’t dared say so. My colleagues said that that was more than long enough to weed out the people who would never get to the stage necessary to Go On. Now the project would run far longer than planned. And perhaps my father and mother and sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and cousins would not be doomed.”
Burton said, “What?”
Tears flowed down Loga’s cheeks. He spoke in a strangled voice.
“It was strictly forbidden for anyone to locate any relatives resurrected in The Valley. The formulators of this policy were Monat’s people. They said that experience had shown that Ethicals who found their loved ones among the lazari were too emotionally upset if these were evidently not going to make it. They’d interfere, they’d be tempted to reveal what was happening before the time was ripe for that. In a previous project, a woman had put her parents in a special place in the underground chambers and tried to force-feed, as it were, their ethical advancement.
“I was taught that when I was a young adult on the Gardenworld. I believed in the policy then. But later I couldn’t endure not seeing my family. Nor could I endure the agonizing idea that they might not Go On. So, long before we left the Gardenworld, I had made my plans. Still, I wasn’t sure that I could carry them out. But I did track down my relatives through the computer—that took a long long time, believe me—and I visited them in The Valley. I was in disguise, of course. They had no chance of recognizing me. I’d arranged it so that they’d all be resurrected in the same place. Also, if any moved away from there or was killed, I’d know where they were.
“I have almost photographic recall. Even though I’d died on Earth shortly before I was to be five years old, I vividly remembered my parents and all my other relatives.
“It was very hard on me to keep concealing my identity. But I had to. I did become good friends with them and even pretended to be learning their language. All this while engaged on an authorized project, you understand.
“I dearly loved my foster mother on the Gardenworld. But I loved my own mother even more, though she was not as spiritually developed as my foster mother, far from it.
“During several of my visits, in later years, I made sure that my relatives were introduced to the beliefs of the Church of the Second Chance. They all converted to it, but it wasn’t enough. They were a long way from attaining that stage in which I could have hope that they’d advance even further.
“But I believed, and still believe, that if they’re given enough time, they will do so.”
Burton said gently, “You were just about to land on top of the mountain.”
“Yes. But what I’ve told you about my relatives is highly important. You must also realize that I wasn’t just distressed about my own family. I’ve agonized over all the others, the billions who are doomed. I couldn’t even mention this once to my fellows, though. Except Tringu, of .course, and I didn’t bring up the subject until I was absolutely sure of him. If I’d said anything about it to the others, I’d have been suspected at once if it became known that there was a renegade.”
Though he might be committing suicide, Loga did the one thing that would prevent his vessel from alighting on the designated place. He cut off the power.
“If Monat had thought that anyone’d do that, he’d have arranged it so that it couldn’t be done. But he hadn’t expected any such action. Why should he? The culprit would know that even if he killed himself, he’d be raised in the tower.”
The craft had fallen at once and struck the side of the mountain just below the top. It was going slow, and Loga was in a buffer suit. Moveover, since the vessel was made of the almost indestructible gray metal, it was not even scratched by the impact.
“Even so, I would’ve been killed during the fall. But I turned on the power when it had hurtled for a hundred feet, and the craft started back up toward the top. I cut the power again, and I turned it on when I’d gone fifty feet. The craft started up again for its original destination. I cut the power once more.”
By bone-jarring increments, Loga worked the vessel down to near ground level. Before this, he’d opened a port. When he thought that he was close enough, he leaped out the port, clutching the handle of his grail. He fell through the rain and the thunder and lightning, struck something, and was knocked unconscious. j
When he awoke he was draped belly-down across a branch of an irontree. It was daylight, and he could see his grail a hundred feet below at the base of the tree. Though he was severely scratched and bruised and had some internal injuries and a broken leg, he managed to get to the ground.
“The rest I’ve told you or you’ve correctly inferred.”
Burton said, “Not all. We don’t have the slightest inkling what this terrible thing is which you mentioned. What you were saving for the last.”
“Or what Going On really means,” Nur said.
“Going On? When the body of a person who’s highly advanced ethically dies, the wathan disappears. Our instruments can find no trace of it. If another duplicate body is made, its wathan doesn’t return to it.”
“What do you do with a wathanless body?”
“Only one experiment was made, and the wathanless was allowed to live out her natural span. That’s never been done with human beings. The people who came before Monat’s did that.
“The theory is that, though the Creator may appear to be indifferent to Its creatures, It does welcome and take care of the wathans that disappear. What other explanation is there for that?”
“It could be,” Frigate said, “that there’s something about the extraphysical universe that attracts a wathan when it reaches a certain stage of development. I don’t know why this would have anything to do with the extraphysical. But there could be some sort of magnetic pull caused by this, I suppose.”
“That theory’s been put forth. We prefer to believe that the Creator does it. Though It may do it through purely physical-extraphysical means and not by a supernatural act.”
“In effect,” Burton said, “you aren’t relying on science but on faith to explain the disappearances.”
“Yes, but when you get to the basics, infinity and finiteness, eternity and time, the First Cause, you must rely on faith.”
“Which has led so many billions astray and caused such immense suffering,” Frigate said.
“You can’t say that about this situation.”
Tai-Peng said, fiercely, “Let’s get on with what’s happening in this world.”
“I recruited the lazari because there was a very slight probability that what has happened might happen. I put all the situations I could think of into the computer and told it to estimate their probability. Unfortunately, the computer cannot detect what sentient beings will think, what final choices they’ll make, unless it has all the data and that’s impossible. Well, not even if it had every item could it predict one hundred percent. Thus, Monat, and the others did what I couldn’t expect. Just as I did what he couldn’t anticipate. Just as you did what I couldn’t predict. The human, the sentient, mind is still a deep mystery.”
“May it always be so,” Burton said.
“It is, it is! That is why you can’t predict the stage of development of any wathan. One may be rather advanced, yet go no further. Another may be in a low stage and, suddenly, almost overnight as it were, leap to a far higher state than the previously much further advanced. It’s a quantum ethical leap. Also, people regress.”
“Are you an example of regression?” Burton said.
“No! That’s what Siggen accused me of being when we were living in that hut in Parolando. The truth is, I am more highly advanced than anyone else in the project. Isn’t it much more ethical to give everyone all the time they might need to develop? Isn’t it? Yes, it is! That can’t be denied!”
Alice murmured, “He’s crazy.”
Burton wasn’t so sure. What Loga had said seemed reasonable. But his ideas for insuring his plans didn’t seem so. Yet, if he continued to send false messages, then the Gardenworlders wouldn’t come to investigate. Loga might gain a thousand years. Surely, in that time, anybody would attain the stage desired.
His deep pessimism told him that it might not be so.
What was his own progress?
Or did he want to get to a stage where the essential part of him just disappeared?
Why not? It would be an adventure even greater than this one, the greatest in his life.
“Very well,” he said. “I think we understand all that’s happened. But you’ve hinted that you may not be able to carry out your plans even if you have no one to stop you.
“What terrible thing has happened?”
“It’s my fault, mine only!” Loga cried. He rose from the chair and, despite his limp, paced back and forth, his face twisted and sweating.
“Because of what I did, billions may be doomed forever! In fact, almost everybody! Perhaps, everybody! Forever!”
THERE WAS SILENCE FOR A WHILE. LOGA CONTINUED HIS PAINful limping. Then Burton said, “You might as well tell us.”
Loga sat down in his chair.
“My signal put an inhibit on the resurrection line. I didn’t want any Ethical to commit suicide and get to the tower before I did. What I didn’t know was that another Ethical had also commanded an inhibit on the resurrection line when I was found out.”
The reason for this, Loga said, was that Monat didn’t want the unknown traitor to gain access to the tower. There he or she might be able to carry out his plans—whatever they were— before his presence was known.
Monat’s command overrode everybody else’s.
“He was the Operator.”
Moreover, Monat, through his proxy, had commanded the computer to obey no one else but him until normal operations were restored.
“I’m sure that if he’d known exactly what was to happen, he’d not have given such a command. But fie had no more idea than I what course events would take.”
“The universe is infinite, and the events in it are also infinite,” Nur said.
“Perhaps. But you see, the computer used the wathans as its... what shall I say?... blueprints to duplicate bodies. Once, records were kept of the bodies, but it was more economical to use the wathans themselves, as I’ve explained. There are no other records. So, if the wathans are lost, then we have no way to duplicate bodies anymore.”
Burton rolled this around in his mind.
“Well, you have the wathans. We saw them in that enclosure in the middle of the tower.”
“Yes, but when the computer dies, the wathans will be released! And there is no means then to resurrect the dead. They are lost forever!”
There was another silence. After a minute or two, Alice said, “The computer...is dying?”
Loga was almost choking. “Yes. It wouldn’t be if it hadn’t been left unattended so many years.”
The machinery was built to last for centuries without any need for repair or replacement. Nevertheless, parts and units did malfunction now and then. That was why technicians inspected everything at regular intervals, and why there were so many self-repair capabilities. Machines, however, had a well-known but as yet unexplained obstinacy, a seeming tendency to break down of their own will or refuse to operate. It had been jestingly observed that perhaps they, too, had wathans of a sort, and their free will was more ill will than anything else.
During the long absence of human supervision, a valve had quit operating.
“This is not a mechanical valve, you understand. It’s basically a force field which shuts off or on to allow flow of sea water into the food-mixing chamber for the computer. The computer subsists on distilled water mixed with sugar and some traces of minerals. The shut-down valve is one of two. Its mate is for emergencies. It takes over should the main one go out. Then the technicians repair the field generator of the valve, and the backup one shuts down.”
Unfortunately, the emergency valve did not admit enough water for a long term. And so the protein computer was dying.
“I could use the computer memory banks to furnish a model for a duplicate of it as the original before it was fed any data. Unfortunately, the computer contains the only memory banks of that. And it won’t release the information so that I can feed it into the matter-energy converter.”
“Why don’t you repair the field generator?” Frigate said.
“For the good reason that the computer won’t permit me to. Apparently, Monat ordered long ago that it be equipped with defenses. These weren’t activated, though, until I was found out.”
There was another long silence. Alice broke it, saying “Why don’t you use one of those wathan catchers you told us about? The moment the computer died and released the wathans, the catch could restrain them.”
Logasmiled grimly.
“A very good idea. I’ve thought of that. Briefly. The only catcher is the computer. There are memory banks which I could tap to make a catcher. But these are also in the computer.”
“Are the defenses absolutely invulnerable?” Burton said.
“It’s easy to gain access to the field generator. I’d just have to pull out the malfunctioning module and replace it with another. But I’d be dead before I could do that. The computer would cut me down with beams. Just like those which my beamer shoots.”
Nur said, “You used the computer at the same time that the others were. How did you keep them from finding that out?”
“In a sense, I made the computer schizophrenic. One part of it didn’t know what the other was doing.”
“That’s it!” the Moor cried. Then his exultant expression was replaced by a frown. “No. You’d have thought of using it.”
“Yes. I can’t because the engineers apparently discovered the split mind. Now it’s dominated by the main part.”
“You said dominated, not integrated,” Nur said.
“Yes. The engineers didn’t have time to remove the complex circuits which made the computer schizophrenic. But they did put in temporary bypass circuits to give the main part dominance. They would’ve integrated the parts later. But they were killed before they could do that.”
“How do you know all this?” Burton said.
“The computer gave me that information. It doesn’t refuse to communicate. It just won’t obey any commands except those from Monat or whoever was authorized to act for him.”
“There’s no chance of finding out the codeword or whatever Monat used?”
“Not unless he recorded it somewhere. I doubt that he would. Also, the code would have to be accompanied by the voiceprints of Monat or his aide.”
“Maybe there is no codeword,” Frigate said. “Maybe the voice-recognition is enough.”
“No. Monat would think of that. It’d be relatively easy to isolate phones from records of his speech and synthesize them to make new sentences. Also, Monat might’ve required that there be body recognition, too.”
“Could you make a disguise of Monat to wear yourself?” Turpin said.
“I suppose so. But I’d use beam-simulators.”
Loga seemed very weary now. Burton suspected that it was not the wound which had drained his energy. It was hopelessness and guilt.
“Well,” Burton said. “We don’t know but what voice and body recognition is all that’s required. We must try to fool the computer even if it’s wasted work.”
Alice said, eagerly, “Have you told the computer that it’s going to die?”
“Oh, yes. But it already knew it.”
“Perhaps a man could get through the computer’s defenses,” Burton said, looking hard at Loga.
The Ethical straightened up a little.
“I know what you’re thinking. Since I’m responsible for this horror, I should try to repair the valve generator. Even if there’s an almost one-hundred-percent probability that I’d just be sacrificing myself. I would do that if I thought it’d do any good.
“But what if I succeeded and yet died? None of you would know how to operate the equipment here. You could do nothing to solve this problem.
“Moreover, if the computer lives, what then? The situation is unchanged only in that the computer lives and so the wathans won’t be released.”
Burton said that Loga must train them in the use of whatever instruments might be needed. He-must because something might happen to him. Was there time for that before the computer died?
The Ethical replied that there might be. He’d have to teach them what the instrument markings meant. It would take too long to teach them the language used when talking to the computer, which was that of Monat’s people and the primary one on the Gardernworld. But he could change the language converters and so allow them to use Esperanto.
“Excellent!” Burton said. “I think we should all go to bed now. We’ll wake up refreshed and with clearer minds. Perhaps we can think of something to use against the computer then.”
They moved into the Councilors’ apartments. Loga went into his. Aphra Behn and de Marbot took one; Alice and Burton, another. Tai-Peng and Turpin shared a fourth apartment and Nur and Frigate the one next to it. Burton thought it best that none of their group be alone. He still didn’t entirely trust the Ethical.
Before they went to sleep, Alice said, “Richard, there has to be a way to get around the computer. It was made by humans, so it should be mastered by humans.”
“Why don’t you appeal to its emotions?” Burton said. “You women are particularly good at that.”
“No more than men, you braying arse! Anyway, I know there’s no use appealing to the emotions of a thing that has none. Although I’m not so sure that it doesn’t have some. Or analogies thereof. But since it operates purely by logic, why not use logic against it? Humans put human logic into it. We should be able to fight it or cozen it with logic.”
“I’m sure that Loga has thought of that.”
He kissed her on the cheek and turned away.
“Good night, Alice.”
“Good night, Richard.”
When he awoke some hours later, he found her staring up at the moving figures on the ceiling.
IN THE MORNING, THEY SHOWERED AND PUT ON CLEAN CLOTHS and then went to a room which was used as a dining hall. Going past the control room, they saw that Croomes’ body had been removed. There were no bloodstains on the floor, and all the skeletons were gone.
“Robots,” Loga said. “I also sent one to take care of Gilgamesh’s body.”
“I didn’t see any robots,” Frigate said.
“You did, but they looked like large cabinets. Your beds are robots, too. They gently massage your muscles and manipulate your spinal cords.”
“I didn’t feel anything when I awoke during the night,” Burton said.
“Nor I,” Alice said.
“They’re very subtle and only operate automatically when you’re asleep. But if you want a massage while awake, you command them. I’ll show you how.”
Over the delicious breakfast, Alice told the others her thoughts about circumventing the computer with the very logic it used.
Loga shook his head. “It sounds fine, but it won’t work.”
“We can at least try,” Alice said.
“We’ll try everything, mental or physical,” Loga said. “But, believe me, I’ve thought of everything.”
“I don’t doubt your intelligence,” she said. “But nine heads are better than one.”
“The nine-headed dragon!” Tai-Peng shouted. His face was flushed; he’d been drinking wine throughout the meal.
“I’ll use one of the electronic computers in this room to set up a system,” Loga said. “But it won’t, I believe, be able to beat its own logic. A computer can calculate much faster than a human, if it has all the proper data. But it doesn’t have an imagination. It’s not creative. Still, its data might contain something I’ve overlooked. And it can be set to make combinations in a very short time which it would take me years to write out. Also, it does have some degree of extrapolation.”
After going to his apartment, he went to the control room and seated himself in the chair in the center of the revolving platform. In a very short time, he called to the others.
“I couldn’t resist asking the big computer how many wathans are now in the shaft.”
“How many?” Nur said.
Loga looked at the screen again.
“Eighteen billion and twenty-eight. No. Add three more.”
“Over half the people in The Valley,” Frigate said. “Yes. Add two more now.”
Loga turned the display off.
“For every hour that passes, more people die, more wathans are caught. When the computer dies...”
His voice trailed off.
The Ethical had to have great courage, endurance, determination, and quick wits to do all that he’d done. But his guilt was too crushing for even him.
“Maybe,” Turpin said, “you should throw in the towel. I mean... kill the computer now! That way, you won’t lose any more, and you can continue the project.”
“No!” Loga said, showing fire for the first time since they’d known him. “No! That would be monstrous! I have to save all of them! All!”
“Yes, and maybe you’ll end up losing millions. Or maybe everybody on this planet.”
“No! I can’t!”
“Well,” Turpin said, “I can’t think of anything that’ll help. This is all too deep for me.”
He left for the nearby lounge to play on its piano.
“He’s disgusted with me,” Loga said. “But he doesn’t know the loathing I feel for myself.”
“Recriminations will do no good!” Tai-Peng said, waving a bottle in his hand. “But Tom may be right! I think I’ll go to the lounge and enjoy myself, too! My head aches with thinking!”
“That isn’t what’s making it hurt,” Alice said gently.
Tai-Peng just grinned and kissed her quickly on the cheek as he passed her.
Nur reminded the Ethical that he hadn’t removed the bombs in the cabinets in the other control room.
“I’ll just lock the door,” Loga said. “Now for the logic-versus-logic program. Even if it will be a waste of time.”
Those remaining went off to the language laboratory. The Ethical had given them instructions for the use of the equipment which would teach them to speak and read Gardenworldish or Ghuurrkh. There were also Esperanto-Ghuurrkhian grammars and dictionaries available.
Alice clutched Burton’s arm.
“It is horrible, isn’t it?” she said, her large dark eyes looking into his. “All those souls lost, and they had a chance for immortality! It’s too horrible to think about!”
“Then don’t think about it,” Burton said. “Anyway, even the lost ones will be immortal. They just won’t know it, that’s all.”
She shuddered and said, “Yes. But we could be among them. Do you think you’re Going On? I’d like to believe that I am, but you practically have to be a saint to Go On!”
“Nobody has ever accused me of being a saint unless it was my wife,” Burton said, grinning. “And she knew better.”
Alice wasn’t fooled. She knew that he was as desperate as she.
Two days passed. Loga ran out the results on the console screen while the others watched. When the display was ended, he shook his head.
“No use.”
They conferred again and again and came up with many plans, but these were all dismissed because of flaws in logic or insurmountable facts.
The fourth day after they’d come to the tower, Frigate leaped smiling into the room.
“Hey, we’re pretty dumb! The answer is right under our noses! Why don’t you send robots in to insert the module?”
Loga sighed.
“I’d thought of that. It was one of the first things to occur to me. But even though the robots are made of charruzz (the gray metal), the computer’s beamers will slice through them.”
Frigate looked disappointed and a little foolish.
“Yes... but... if you send enough in, they’d knock out the beamers!”
“None of the robots have the functional structure to shoot beamers.”
“Well, couldn’t you convert them? And then program them?”
“It would take me ten days. If I’d started when I first got here, I couldn’t have altered one in time.”
He paused, then said dolefully, “I just checked on the time left before the computer dies. Five days!”
Even though they’d been expecting such an announcement, they were shocked.
Tom Turpin said, “At least we won’t have that to worry about. The souls’ll be gone, and there’s nothing to do about it. But you can give those that’re still alive a lot more time.”
Loga turned some dials and punched a button. Ghuurrkhian numbers glowed on the screen. The others were advanced enough by now to be able to read them.
“Eighteen billion, one hundred and two,” Aphra said.
“I should kill the computer right now,” Loga said. “I’ve waited too long as it is. For all I know, my mother’s soul was collected today.”
“Wait!” Frigate said. “I’ve got an idea! You said you’d reopened your private resurrection chambers when you got here. Can they be fixed up so that we could be resurrected in them, too?”
“Why, yes. They could be. The resurrector catchers operate on a slightly different frequency from that of the computer. I had my wathan and Tringu’s tuned to it. I could do the same for you. But why?”
Frigate started to explain, but Loga, Burton, and Nur comprehended at the same time what he meant to say.
They would go down in force, leaving several behind to do the necessary supervision. They would storm the room, and, though they might be killed over and over, they still could put out all the beamers of the computer.
“How’d you happen to think of that, Pete?” Tom Turpin said.
“I’m a science-fiction writer. I should’ve thought of it when I found out what the situation was.”
“I should’ve thought of it, too,” Loga said. “But we’re all under great emotional pressure.”
“You can duplicate these?” Burton said, holding up the pistollike sphere-ended weapon.
“As many as we’ll need.”
Within two minutes, the entire group was armed with the beamers. The Ethical then had his machine print out diagrams of the route to the valve room from the control room and from his private resurrectors. They studied the diagrams, identifying each corridor and chamber with the corresponding screen displays.
“There are video cameras on every wall in that area, including the valve room. Here’s a picture of it from the files.”
They studied the reproductions issued by the machine until they knew the room by heart. Then Loga commanded that a module be duplicated in the e-m cabinet, and he gave them the simple instructions for pulling out the old module and inserting the new.
Unfortunately, the Ethical was unable to get diagrams showing where the computer’s defenses were located.
“That information must be in the computer’s memory banks.”
Nur said, “Why don’t you ask the computer for it?”
Loga looked surprised, then laughed softly.
A moment later he had information, though it wasn’t what he’d asked for. The computer refused to divulge where its weapons were.
“Well, it was worth a try.”
They got into their chairs and followed the Ethical to a lift shaft. They descended in it far faster than they’d dared operate their chairs until then. When they’d gone a mile, he stopped and then went into a bay and from there into a corridor. After a few minutes Burton, who had an excellent sense of direction, realized that they were heading for the general area of the secret room at the base of the tower. At their speed, they quickly arrived at it.
The Ethical looked at the door, still kept from opening by the grail Burton had placed there. His face turned red.
“Why didn’t you tell me that the doors were still open?”
“I thought about it, but it didn’t seem important,” Burton said.
“The agents could have come through!”
“No. They couldn’t possibly have caught up with us in such a short time. They’ll be using sailboats.”
“I won’t take any chances.”
Loga turned the chair away from the door, then turned it back to face them.
“You get that boat out of the entrance while I’m gone.”
“Where’ll you be?” Burton said.
“I’m going to a control room so I can reactivate an automatically operated aircraft and direct it to the ledge. It’ll melt it all down, and then it’11-plug up the cave entrance.”
“Go with him,” Burton said to Tai-Peng and de Marbot.
Loga glared but said nothing, and his chair turned and flew down the corridor.
Burton led the others into the fog-shrouded room where, with much shoving, they got the boat out into the sea. Then they went back to the corridor, the larger ones squeezing themselves again through the narrow opening above the grail.
“We should’ve asked Loga to open it all the way,” Frigate said.
“I don’t think he wants us to know how he opens it,” Burton said.
“Still doesn’t trust us?”
“With the life he’s led, he’s conditioned to trust no one.”
That, however, wasn’t true. Loga, trailed by the Chinese and the Frenchman, returned after fifteen minutes. He got out of the chair and banged his fist on the wall a few inches from the door. At the same time, he said, clearly, “Ah Qaaq!”
The door slid back within the recess.
Burton made a mental note of the exact area struck.
“How did you know that someone wouldn’t be coming along and catch you?” he said.
“This door is one big video screen. I also have other screens which look just like part of the walls. They’re situated so that I can see up this corridor past its curves for some distance.”
They followed Loga into the room. Halfway down it, he stopped, turned, facing the wall, and voiced the codeword again. An apparently seamless part of the wall moved back and they slid into a recess. The room beyond was well-lit and contained some equipment on tables, a large cabinet, and two skeletons. These were pointed toward the door as if they’d been about to leave the room. On the floor by bone fingers was a metal box. It had a number of dials, gauges, buttons, and a small video screen on one side and prongs on the other.
Loga said, “If only I could have sent that signal a few seconds earlier. I would’ve caught them before they removed the control box.”
“But you wouldn’t have known that,” Burton said. “You would still not have been able to take the chance of killing yourself. By the way, why were the doors closed? Those two would’ve had to open them to get in.”
Nur said, “Since they wouldn’t have known the codes, how’d they get in?”
“After seventy-five seconds, the doors close automatically unless countermanded. What happened is that the investigators located this room by tracing the circuits. That would’ve been a very time-consuming and arduous job because they couldn’t use the computer to do the tracing. When they located this room, they must have been using magnetometers, too. They went back to find the tap-in source, and found the programmed open-shut code box. It wouldn’t have taken them long to analyze the code.”
“But what about the knock accompanying the code? How...”
“They figured that out, too, though it would’ve taken longer.”
He pointed at the cabinet. “The resurrector.”
He went in with Frigate at his heels. The American said, “You couldn’t use your own power supply?”
Loga stopped and picked up the control box and then walked to the side of the cabinet. He inserted the prongs into receptacles on the side of the cabinet.
“No, I couldn’t. I would’ve liked my own atomic converter so there’d be no wires to trace. But energy-matter conversion and wathlan-attracting require enormous power. The physical-extraphysical interface alone uses enough power to blackout half of the cities of ancient Earth in the late twentieth century.”
Frigate said, “How’d you prevent this power drain from showing up on meters?”
“I made arrangements for it not to. To go back to the original question. If the engineers had removed the code box, I wouldn’t have been able to get out of the secret room into the corridor. The outer access door is activated by a signal going to another coder-decoder. It was very fortunate that the engineers didn’t work on that before they were killed. I lost the signal-generator when I had to abandon my aircraft. But the boats in the cave contain generators. These are automatically started when the sensors detect that the tower is near.”
“The door mechanisms wouldn’t have used much power. Why didn’t you use separate power generators for them?”
“I should have. But it was simpler and more economical to use the main power supply.”
He smiled slightly. “I wonder what the engineers made of the codeword. Ah Qaaq is Mayan. The Ah is the article defining the name as masculine. Qaaq means fire. Loga is Ghuurrkh for fire. Perhaps that was what identified me. They might’ve put the Mayan name into the computer for a search. If they did, they got an answer within a second after insertion of the question.
“I outclevered myself.”
He poised a finger over a button. “Gather around. I’ll explain the simple operation twice so that there won’t be any confusion. You’re able to read the markings. When I press this button, that small silvery inset disc will turn on. That indicates that the power is on.
“That larger inset disc by the ON light is a readout frequency meter.”
He pressed a button. The smaller disc glowed orange.
“Now...”
The light went out.
“Khatuuch! What is... ?”
Loga put his hand on the box for a second, then ran around to the front of the cabinet. He opened the door and looked in. Even at their distance from it, the others could feel the heat.
“Run!” Loga said, and he limped as fast as he could toward the exit.
When Burton had reached the exit he looked at the cabinet. The control box was melting, and a large cube inside the cabinet was glowing red.
Loga swore in Ghuurrkh and then said, “Those... those...! They fixed it so that when power came on it’d melt the converter!”
Except for Loga and Burton, who’d died so many times that they no longer feared the prospect of death, the others were relieved. Burton could see it in their faces. They knew they’d be resurrected with their wathans attached, but they still loathed the idea of dying.
Burton said, “We have the other resurrector.”
“It’ll be set up, too,” Loga said. He was ashen.
“Can’t you fix it so it won’t melt?”
“I’ll try.”
But he failed.
Burton, looking at the molten mass, thought it was time to tell Loga something he’d put off revealing because the resurrectors were more urgent business.
He said, “Loga, when we left your secret room to go after you, I put a bullet by the door to mark its location. The bullet is gone.”
There was a short silence. Frigate said, “A housekeeping robot probably picked it up.”
“No,” Loga said. “If the robots were programmed to do such work, they’d have disposed of the skeletons.”
“Then someone else has gotten in!”