NECROMANCER 
Copyright  1962 by Gordon R. Dickson 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by 
any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without 
permission in writing from the publisher. 

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, 
living or dead, is purely coincidental. 
An Ace Book 


ISBN: 0-441-56852-1 
First Ace hinting: April 1981 
This Printing: August 1982 


Published simultaneously in Canada 
Manufactured in the United States of America 
Ace Books, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 


CONTENTS 

Book One: ISOLATE 
Book Two: SET 
Book Three: PATTERN 


Book One: ISOLATE 

And now, through double glass, I see 
My brother's image, darklingly. 
Now, aid us, Thor, who prisoners be. 
Comehammer, Lord! And set us free. 


The Enchanted Tower 


Chapter 1 


The mine, generally speaking, was automatic. It consisted 
of some hundred and eighty million dollars' worth of 
equipment, spread out through three and a half cubic 
miles of gold-ore-bearing rockgranite and quartzall 
controlled by the single console where the shift engineer 
on duty sat. 

Like some ponderous, many-purposed organism, the 
mine walked in the layered rock. On various levels it 
gnawed out the gold-bearing ore, ground it up to pebble-
sized chunks, and sent it by the carload up six hundred 
feet or more to the open air and the equipment 
above. As the mine machinery moved, it created and 
abandoned surface shafts, elevator tubes, new exploratory 
levels and stopes; and extended the vast central cavern 
through which the heavier machinery and its controlling 
console slid with the work in progress, laying down rails 
before and taking them up behind. 

The single engineer on shift at the time controlled all 
this. And a touch of megalomania did him no harm on 
the job. He was seated before the control panels of the 
console like the identity before the brain. His job was the 
job of ultimate control. Logical decision, and the facts on 
which to base decision were supplied by the computer 
element in the equipment. The logically optimum answer 
was available at the touch of a button. But it had been 


discovered that, like the process of living itself, there was 

more to modern mining than logic. 

The best engineers had feel. It was a sensitivity born 

of experience, of talent, and even of something like love, 

with which they commanded, not only the mountains, 

but the machine they rode and directed. 

Now this too was added to the list of man's endeavors 

for which some special talent was needed. Less than ten 

per cent of the young mining engineers graduating every 

year turned out to have the necessary extra ability to 

become one with the titan they directed. Even in the 

twenty-first century's overcrowded employment marts, 

mines were continually on the hunt for more shift engi


neers. Even four hours at a time, and even for the tal


ented ten per cent, was a long time to be the faultless god 

in the machine. And the machinery never rested. 

Six hundred feet overhead of the man at the console, 

Paul Formain, on his first morning at Malabar Mine, 

stepped from his small individual quarters of white bub


ble plastic, and saw the mountains. 

And suddenly, there it was again, as it had been time 

and again since his boating accident of five years before, 

and had been more recently, lately. 

But it was not now the open sea that he saw. Or 
even the dreamlike image of a strange, shadowy figure in 
some sort of cape and a high-peaked hat, who had seemed 
to bring him back to life after he had died in the boat, 
and returned him to the boat to be finally found and rescued 
by the coast guard. 

This time, it was the mountains. 

Suddenly, turning from the white, plastic door, he 
stopped and saw them. Around him was a steep slope 
with the other white buildings of the Malabar Mine. Above 
him the fragile blue of a spring sky spoke to the dark 
blue of the deep lake below, which filled this cleft in the 
mountain rock. About him in every direction were the 
Canadian Rockies, stretching thirty miles in one direc



tion to the British Columbia city of Kamloops, in the 
other to the Coast Range and the stony beaches touching 
the salt Pacific Ocean surf. Unexpectedly, he felt them. 

Like kings they stood up around him, the mountains. 
The surf sounded in his blood, and abruptly he was 
growing, striding to meet them. He was mountain-size 
with the mountains. With them, he felt the eternal movement 
of the earth. For a moment he was naked but unshaken 
to the winds of understanding. And they blew to 
him one word: 

Fear. 

Do not go down into the mine. 

". . . You will get over this, this sort of thing," the 
psychiatrist in San Diego had assured him, five years before, 
after the accident. "Now that you've worked it out 
for yourself and understand it." 

"Yes," said Paul. 

It had made sense then, the way he had explained it to 
himself under the psychiatrist's guidance. He was an orphan, 
since the time of his parents' simultaneous deaths 
in a transportation accident, when he was nine. He had 
been assigned to good foster parents, but they were not 
the same. He had always been solitary. 

He had lacked what the San Diego psychiatrist called 
"protective selfishness." He had the knack of understanding 
people without the usual small urge to turn this understanding 
to his own advantage. It had embarrassed 
those who might have been his friends, once they understood 
this capability in him. They had an instinctive 
urge to put a protective distance between himself and 
them. Underneath, they feared his knowledge and did not 
trust his restraint. As a boy he felt their withdrawal without 
understanding the reasons behind it. And this, said 
the psychiatrist, gave him a false picture of his own situation. 


". . . After all," said the psychiatrist, "this lack of a 
desire to take advantage of a capability, amounted to a 


disability. But no worse than any other disability, such 

as blindness or loss of a limb. There was no need to feel 

that you could not live with it." 

But that was the way, it seemed, that unconsciously he 
had felt. And that feeling had culminated in an unconscious 
attempt at suicide. 

". . . There's no doubt," said the psychiatrist, "that 
you got the bad-weather, small-craft warning put out by 
the coast guard. Or that you knew you were dangerously 
far offshore for any weather, in such a light sailboat." 

So the storm had driven him out to sea and lost him. 
He had been adrift, and in the still days following, death 
had come like some heavy gray bird to sit perched on the 
idle mast, waiting. 

". . . You were in a condition for hallucination," said 
the psychiatrist. "It was natural to imagine you had already 
died. Then, when afterward you were rescued, you 
automatically searched for some justification of the fact 
that you were still alive. Your unconscious provided this 
fantasy of having been brought back to life by a father-
like figure, tall and mysterious, and wrapped in the 
garments that denote magical ability. But when you had 
fully recovered, your conscious mind could not help 
finding this story somewhat thin." 

No, thought Paul, it couldn't help thinking so. He 
remembered, in the San Diego hospital, lying there and 
doubting the whole memory. 

"So to bolster it, you produced these moments of extreme, 
almost painful sensitivity. Which filled two needs. 
They provided support for your delirium fantasy of having 
been raised from the dead, and they acted as an excuse 
for what had caused the death-wish in the first place. 
Unconsciously you were telling yourself that you were not 
crippled, but 'different.'" 

"Yes," Paul had said at that point. "I see." 
"Now that you've dug out the true situation for yourself, 
the need for justification should diminish. The fan



tasy should fade and the sensitivity moments grow less 

frequent, until they disappear." 

"That's good to hear," said Paul. 

Only, in the past five years the moments had not dwindled 
and disappeared. They had stayed with him, as 
the original dream had stuck stubbornly in the back of 
his mind. He thought of seeing another psychiatrist, but 
then the thought would come that the first had done him 
no good at all. So what was there to expect from a second? 


Instead, in order to live with his problem, he had 
anchored himself to something that he had discovered in 
himself since the accident. Deep within him now, something 
invincible stood four-square to the frequent gusts 
from the winds of feeling. Somehow he thought of it as 
being connected to, but independent of, the dream magician 
in the tall hat. So when, as now, the winds blew 
warnings, he felt them without being driven by them. 

Fear: said the mountains. Do not go dawn into the 
mine. 

That's foolish, said Paul's conscious mind. It reminded 
him that he was at last hired for the work to which all his 
education had pointed him. To a job that in the present 
overcrowded world was the dream of many and the 
achievement of few. He reached for that which stood unconquerable 
in the back of his mind. 

Fear, it replied, is merely one more in the multitude of 
factors to be taken into account in moving from point A 
to point B. 

Paul shook himself free from the winds of feeling, 
back to the ordinary existence of the world. The buildings 
of the Malabar Mine were all around him. A little 
distance down the slope from where he stood the wife of 
the company auditor came out on her back step and 
called something across a small white fence to the wife of 
the surface engineer in the yard adjoining. It was Paul's 
first day on the job and already he was close to being 


overdue on the job underground. He turned his gaze 
from the mountains and the buildings, to the near concrete 
walk leading to the main shaft head of the mine. 
And headed toward it, and the waiting skip. 


Chapter 2 


The skip slid Paul down some six hundred steeply slanting 
feet through mountain stone. For all the romanticism 
of its old-fashioned name, it was nothing more in fact 
than a magnetic tube elevator. Through the transparent 
walls of the tube, granite and rose quartz flickered at 
him as he descended. They spoke to him as the mountains 
had, but in smaller voices, fine, thin, crystalline 
voices with no yield, no kindness to them, and no mercy. 
Between them and himself, Paul's own faint image in the 
tube wall kept pace with his descentit was the image of 
a square-shouldered young man of twenty-three, already 
past any look of boyishness or youth. 

He was large-boned and tall, strong-featured, round-
headed, and athletic-looking. A football-player type, 
but not one of the game's commoner varieties. He was 
not bulky enough for a lineman, not tense enough for 
the backfield. Endthat was the sort of position he fitted. 
And, strongly calm, with long-fingered capable hands 
to catch the ball, he remembered playing it well. That 
had been on the first team at Colorado Institute of Mines, 
where he had taken his undergraduate work. 

His eyes were curiously deep, and a warm, gray color. 
His mouth was thin-lipped, but a little wide and altogether 
friendly. His light, straight brown hair was already 
receding at the temples. He wore it clipped short, 
and he would be nearly bald before his thirties were out, 


but since he was not the sort of man to whom good looks 
are necessary, this would make little difference. 

He looked instinctively in command of things. Strongly 
male, intelligent, physically large and strong, with a 
knack for doing things right the first time around. And he 
was all these things. It was only when people got to know 
him intimately that they saw past to the more complex 
inner part of him, the part where his own very different 
image of himself was kept. There were moments like 
this, as he suddenly caught sight of his outer self mirrored 
somewhere, when Paul was as startled as if he had 
come face to face with some stranger. 

The skip stopped at Dig Level. 

Paul stepped out into a bright, huge cavern filled to its 
lofty ceiling with the bright metal of equipment mounted 
ponderously on rails. The acid-damp air of below-ground 
struck coolly into his lungs, and the atmosphere of the 
mine seemed to flow into and through him as he walked 
down alongside the crusher to the small cleared space that 
surrounded the console. There, seated upon the rails, 
was the console itself. And at itat the keys and stops 
that resembled nothing so much as the keyboard of some 
huge electronic organ, with the exception of the several 
small viewing tanks in the console's very centera small, 
round-bodied, black-haired man in his forties sat winding 
up the duties of the shift he was just ending. 

Paul came up to the edge of the platform on which 
the console and its operator sat. 

"Hi," he said. 

The other man glanced down. 

"I'm the new manPaul Formain," said Paul. "Ready 
for relief?" 

The departing engineer made several quick motions 
about the console, his short, thick fingers active. He 
leaned back in the control seat, then stretched. He stood 
up to turn a tough, friendly face toward Paul. 

"Paul?" he asked. "What was the last name?" 

"Formain. Paul Formain." 


"Right. Pat Teasely." He held out a small, square hand 

with a good deal of strength in its grip. 

They shook. Teasely's accent was Australianthat 

particular accent which Australians are continually in


furiated to have called cockney by inexperienced North 

Americans. He gave forth a personality that was as plain 

and straightforward as common earth. It touched sooth


ingly against Paul, after the violence of the mountains. 

"Looks like a nice clear dig for your first shift," Tease


ly said. "Judging by the cores." 

"Sounds good," replied Paul. 

"Right. No large faults in sight and the vein drift's less 

than eight degrees off the vertical. Watch for crowding 

on the ore trains going up Number One surface shaft, 

though." 

"Oh?" said Paul. "Bug in the works?" 

"Not really. They've been jackknifing and getting 
jammed just above Number Eight hatch, about sixty feet 
short of exit. The shaft's cut a little small; but no point 
in widening it when we'll be driving a new one in about a 
hundred and fifty hours. I've been up twice this last shift, 
though, to kick a car back on the tracks." 

"All right," said Paul. "Thanks." He stepped past 
Teasely and sat down at the console. He looked up at 
the smaller man. "See you topside at the bar this evening, 
perhaps?" 

"Might." Teasely lingered. His blunt face looked down, 
uncompromising, individualistic, and congenial. "You 
out of one of the American colleges?" 

"Colorado." 

"Wife and family along?" 

Paul shook his head. His fingers were already moving 
about, becoming acquainted with the console. 

"No," he said. "I'm a bachelorand an orphan." 

"Come have dinner at our place then, sometime," said 
Teasely. "I've got the sort of wife likes to cook for 
guests." 
"Thanks," said Paul. "I'll do that." 


"See you." 

Paul heard Teasely's footsteps crunch away in the loose 
rubble of the cavern floor. He went back to the controls, 
and ran through his take-over check list. It took him 
about six minutes. When that was done he knew the position 
of every piece of equipment and how it was behaving. 
Then he turned to the programming section and 
ran a four-hour estimate and forecast. 

It checked with Teasely's estimate. A routine, easy 
shift. For a moment he laid his fingers on the gross control 
tabs of the computer override and sought for the individual 
qualities of the machine through the little working 
vibrations that reached him through his finger tips. 
A sensation of blind, purposeful, and irresistible force at 
work was returned to him; like, but not identical with, 
the feel of all other mine controls he had touched before. 
He took his hands away. 

For the moment, he had nothing to do. He leaned 
back in his bucket seat at the console and thought about 
leaving things here for a look at the surface shaft where 
Teasely had reported the ore cars had occasionally been 
getting stuck. He decided against it. It was best to stick 
close to the console until he had built up a familiarity 
with this new mine. 

The little lights and gauges and small viewing screens 
showed their flickers of color and movement normally 
before him. He reached over and switched a Vancouver 
news broadcast onto the screen of his central viewing 
tank. 

Abruptly, he looked down as if from a window onto 
the plaza entrance to the Koh-i-Nor Hotel, at Chicago 
Complex. He recognized the locationit was a hotel he 
had stayed at once or twice himself when he was in the 
Chicago area. As he looked down on it now, he saw a 
small knot of people carrying the cameras and equipment 
of reporters, gathered around three people. The view 
zoomed in for a shot from an apparent distance of only 
a few feet and Paul had a second's close-up glimpse of 


two of the three, who were standing a little back from the 

third. The two were a flat-bodied, crop-haired man of 

middle age, and a tall, slim girl of Paul's age, whose 

appearance jerked suddenly at Paul's attention before the 

camera moved away from her, and left him frowning over 

what could have seemed so remarkable about her. He had 

never seen either her or the flat-bodied man before. 

But then he forgot about her. For the third member 

of the group was filling the screen. And there was some


thing about him that would have held any viewer's atten


tion. 

Me was a gaunt giant of an old man in the formal 
black-and-white of evening clothes. Very stark and somber 
in these, he bent his head a little to avoid the low 
edge of a candy-striped beach umbrella overhead. And, 
although straight enough for the years he seemed to own, 
he leaned heavily on the carved handle of a thick cane 
in his right hand. The motion spread his wide shoulders, 
so that he seemed to stoop above the crowd of reporters. 
Dark glasses obscured the expression around bis eyes 
but even without these, his face was an enigma. Though 
it stood clear and sharp on the screen before him, Paul 
could not seem to grasp its image as a whole. It was a 
collection of features, but there was no totality to it. 
Paul found himself staring at the straight lips and the 
deep parentheses of creases around the corners of the 
mouth as the man spoke. 

". . . robes?" one of the newspeople was just finishing 
asking. 

The lips smiled. 

"You wouldn't expect a mechanic to go out to dinner 
in his working clothes, now would you?" The voice from 
the lips was deep and pleasantly sardonic. "If you people 
want to see me in my official robes, you'll have to make 
an appointment to meet me during my office hours." 

"Do they have office hours in the Chantry Guild, Mr. 
Guildmaster?" asked another reporter. There was laugh



ter, but not disrespectful laughter. The lips smiled with 
them. 

"Come and find out," said the lips. Paul frowned. A 
small closed pocket in his memory had opened up. He 
had heard of the Chantry Guildor Socit Chanterie. 
Come to think of it, he had heard of them now and 
againquite often, in fact. They were a cult groupdevil-
worshipers, or some such. He had always dismissed 
them as a group of crackpots. But this manthis Guildmaster
was nothing so simple as a crackpot. He was ... 

Frustrated, Paul put his fingers instinctively out to 
the image of the man before him. But the cold glassy surface 
of the screen baffled his finger tips. The reporters 
were still asking questions. 

"What about Operation Springboard, Mr. Guildmaster?" 


The lips quirked. 

"What about it?" 

"Is the Guild against an attempt to reach the nearer 
stars?" 

"Well now, ladies and gentlemen..." The lips smiled. 
"What did the Sumerian and Semite say in the days of 
the older gods? I believe they called the planets 'sheep 
that are far away.' Did they not? Shamash and Adad 
were the deities responsible for that statement, as you can 
find by checking your ancient histories. And if habitable 
worlds are like sheep, then surely there must be a great 
many strayed around farther stars which we can find 
again." 

And the smile stayed on the lips. 

"Then the Guild is in favor of the station on Mercury? 
You don't object to work on methods for interstellar 
travel?" 

"Such," said the lips, and the smile vanished, "is not 
my concern, or the concern of the Guild. Man may play 
with the technical toys and sciences as he has in the past; 
he may play with space and the stars. But it will only 
sicken him further, as it has already sickened him almost 


to his end. There is only one thing that concerns us of 
the Guild and that's the destruction that will save Man 
from himself." 

"Mr. Guildmaster," said a voice, "you can't mean total 
" 

"Total and absolute!" The deep voice strengthened in 
the speaker. "Complete. Destruction. The destruction of 
Man and all his works." The voice grew, sonorously near 
to chanting, on a note that sent a sudden wild surge of 
feeling through Paul, like a powerful shock from a vein-
injected stimulant. "There have been forces at work for 
eight hundred years that would save Man from his destruction. 
Woe to Man when that day comes, that he is safe 
and saved. Woe to Woman and children unborn, when 
the last strength to destroy himself is finally stolen from 
him. For by his own eternal life will he be doomed, and 
only by his destruction may he survive." 

The buzzing of an alarm signaled the sudden jackknifing 
and jamming of an ore train in surface tube A. 
Paul's hand went out automatically and slapped a fifteen-
minute break on shaft power. 

"And so I charge you"the voice rolled like drums 
below a guillotine from the screen before him"that 
you look to the welfare of man and not to yourselves. 
That you turn your backs on the false promise of life 
and face the reality of death. That you charge yourselves 
with a duty. And that duty is completeis utteris total 
destruction. Destruction. Destruction! Destruction. . . ." 

Paul blinked and sat up. 

The mine was all around him. The console was before 
him and in its center screen the group on the plaza of 
the Koh-i-Nor was breaking up. The newspeople were 
dispersing. The old man and the girl and man with him 
were following a fourth mana thin young man with 
black hair and a tense, driving walkinto the hotel. 
Paul stared. He felt that only a minute had gone by, but 
even that was startling. For one of the peculiar facts 
about him was that he was completely unresponsive to 


hypnosis. It was a trait that had complicated matters 
for the psychiatrist who had worked with him following 
the boating accident. How, then, could he have lost even 
a minute? 

Sudden memory of the jackknifed cars in the surface 
tube broke him away from his personal puzzle. A more 
general power shutoff of equipment would be required 
unless he could solve that problem shortly. He left the 
console and took the chain lift alongside surface shaft 
Number One. The telltale on the console had spotted 
the jam-up at a hundred and forty-three feet below the 
shaft mouth. He reached Number Eight trouble hatch, 
turned on the lights in the shaft, and crawled through 
into the shaft himself. He saw the trouble, almost directly 
before him. 

The Number One surface shaft, like the skip tube, 
approached the surface from the mine below at an angle 
of roughly sixty degrees. A single powered rail ran up the 
bottom center of the shaft, and the fat-bodied, open-
topped ore cars, filled with pebble-sized rock from below, 
rolled their cogwheels up the cleated rail. The cleats 
themselves served Paul now as hand and footholds as he 
climbed up to where one of the cars sat off the rail, angled 
against the stony wall. 

Still wondering about the familiar-looking girl and the 
extraordinary cultist who called himself the Guildmaster, 
Paul braced himself against the sharp-pointed wall of 
the shaft and the last car. He kicked at the hitch between 
the two cars. On the third kick, the hitch suddenly unbound 
the kink it had acquired when the car had jackknifed. 
With a snap and a grunt from the stored power in 
the motorized base of each car, the train suddenly straightened 
out. 

As it did, the lights in the shaft dimmed, then flashed 
up again without warning as all the motors in all the cars 
hummed steadily to life. The train jerked and moved up 
the shaft, and without thinking, instinctively, Paul leaped 
and clung to the final car of the train. 


It burst on him then, brilliantly as mountains seen 
suddenly against a high spring sky, that in his preoccupation 
with the news broadcast he had only put a temporary 
fifteen-minute hold on power to the shaft. And 
afterward, following his little blackout, he had omitted 
to set the power controls for the shaft on manual. 

Now he was being carried up the shaft by the last car 
in the train. A few inches below him, the powered rail 
promised instant electrocution if he touched it. And the 
high-sided cars, all but filling the shaft, would block any 
try he could make to open the emergency hatches yet between 
him and the surface, as the train passed them. 

The walls and the roof were close. 

The roof in particular pressed down near to him. 
Rough-chewed from the granite and quartz, it rose and" 
dipped unevenly. At points along the shaft, Paul knew, 
ft would all but scrape the tops of the ore cars. If he 
could keep low, he might be able to ride the car he was 
holding to, to the surface. But, clinging to the back of 
it as he was, he felt his grip weakening. 

He pulled himself upward, flat onto the bed of ore in 
the car. The roof under which he was passing scraped 
harshly against the back of his head as the ore train, leaving 
the lighted section where he had put it back on the 
track, plunged upward into darkness. His hands pawing 
at the small sharp rock in the car, Paul dug furiously, 
burrowing himself in. Swaying and rumbling, the train 
climbed on. In the blackness Paul did not even see ahead 
the low point of the roof that was approaching.... 

Out in the clear mountain morning the surface engineer 
on duty had been drawn to the mouth of the Number 
One shaft by the blinking of a white trouble light on his 
own console, and a later automatic signal that power to 
that shaft had been cut. He had come to the shaft mouth, 
only to be joined a few minutes later by the managing 
engineer, who had been keeping his eye on the telltales 


in his office, this day with a new man underground for 
the first time. 

"There it goes," said the surface engineer, a slight man 
named Diego and as young as Paul, as the hum of motors 
echoed once more up the natural speaking tube of the 
shaft. "He got it fixed." 

"A little slow," said the Malabar mine manager. He 
frowned. "Let's wait a minute here and see what the 
trouble was." 

They waited. The humming and the clank of the cogwheels 
approached. The first car poked its front out into 
the sunlight and leveled off on the flat 

"What's that?" asked the mine manager, suddenly. 
There was a shadowy outline visible in the gloom around 
the approaching final car. 

The train trundled automatically on. The last car 
emerged into the sunlight and the bright illumination fell 
full on the shape of a man, half-buried and unmoving in 
the load of ore. 

"My God!" said the mine manager. "Stop those cars 
and help me get him off there!" 

But the young surface engineer was already being sick, 
turned away and leaning against the millhouse wall, in the 
early shadow of the mountains. 


Chapter 3 


The clerk working the afternoon division, day shift, on 
the room desk of the Koh-i-Nor Hotel in the downtown 
area of the Chicago Complex, was conscious of the 
fact that his aptitude tests had determined that he should 
find work in a particular class of job. The class was that 
of ornamentactually unnecessary from the point of view 
of modern hotel equipment. Accordingly he worked conscientiously 
at the primary virtue of a good ornament 
being as hard to overlook as possible. 

He did not look up when he heard footsteps approach 
his desk and stop before it. He continued to write in elegant 
longhand at the list of currently newsworthy guests 
he was making on a bulletin sheet laid down beside the 
guest register. 

"I have a reservation," said a man's voice. "Paul For-
main." 

"Very good," said the clerk, adding another name to 
his list without looking up. He paused to admire the 
smooth, flowing loops in the p's and l's of his penmanship. 


Abruptly, he felt his hand caught and held by a fist 
considerably larger than his own. It checked his pen's 
movement. The strange grasp held his hand like an imprisoned 
flynot crushingly, but with a hint of unyielding 
power in reserve. Startled, a little scared, the clerk looked 
up. 


He found himself facing a tall young-old man with only 
one arm, the hand of which was holding him with such 
casual power. 

"Sir?" said the clerk. His voice pitched itself a little 
higher than he would have preferred. 

"I said," said the tall man, patiently, "I have a reservation. 
Paul Formain." 

"Yes sir. Of course." Once more the clerk made an 
effort to free his trapped hand. As if by an afterthought, 
the tall man let go. The clerk turned hurriedly to his desk 
register and punched out the name. The register lighted 
up with information. "Yes sir. Here it is. An outside single. 
What decor?" 

"Modern." 

"Of course, Mr. Formain. Room 1412. Elevators 
around the corner to your left. I'll see your luggage is 
delivered to you immediately it arrives. Thank you...." 

But the tall, one-armed man had already gone off toward 
the elevators. The clerk looked after him, and then 
down at his own right hand. He moved the fingers of it 
experimentally. It had never before occurred to him what 
wonderfully engineered things those fingers were. 

Up in room 1412 Paul stripped and showered. By the 
tune he stepped out of the shower, his single suitcase had 
emerged from the luggage-delivery chute in the wall of the 
room. Half-dressed, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, 
which gave back his lean, flat-muscled image wearing 
the gray-green disposable slacks he had pressed for from 
the room dispenser after the shower. Above the waistband 
of the slacks, his chest and shoulders showed a 
healthy tan. The fine scars left by the plastic surgery had 
now faded almost to the point of invisibility. It was eight 
months since the accident in the mine, early in a new 
spring, with gray skies and a March wind blowing chilly 
off Lake Michigan. 

The stub of his left arm looked shrunken. Not so much, 
it seemed, because it no longer had the rest of the limb 


to support, but in contrast to the right arm that remained 
to him. 

The compensation development of the right arm had 
proceeded with unusual speed and to extremes, according 
to Paul's physicians. It hung now, reflected in the 
mirror's surface, like a great, living club of bone and 
muscle. The deltoid humped up like a rock over the point 
where clavicle toed into shoulder frame; and from the 
lower part of the deltoid, triceps and biceps humped like 
whale-backs down to the smaller, knot-like muscles above 
the elbow. Below the elbow, the flexors and the brachioradialis 
rose like low hills. The thenar group was a hard 
lump at the base of his thumb. 

And it was as a club that he sometimes thought of it. 
Nonothing so clumsy as a club. Like some irresistible, 
battering-ram force made manifest in flesh and skeleton. 
In the three-quarters of a year since the mine accident, 
through the long process of hospitalization, operation, 
and recuperation, that invincible part of him which sat 
in the back of his mind seemed to have chosen the arm 
for itself. The arm was that part of Paul, the part that 
doubted nothing, and least of all itself. Nor had time to 
waste on the posing of a hotel clerk. 

Obscurely, it bothered Paul. Like a man testing a sore 
tooth continually with a tongue, he found himself frequently 
trying the arm's strength on things, and being 
disturbed anew each tune by the result. Now, standing 
before the mirror, he reached out and closed his hand 
around the single ornament in the starkly modern hotel 
rooma tulip-shaped pewter vase about nine inches high, 
with a single red rose in it, that had been sitting on the 
dresser top. The vase fitted easily into his grasp, and he 
lifted it, slowly tightening the grip of his fingers. 

For a moment it almost seemed that the thick metal 
walls would resist. Then slowly the vase crumpled inward, 
until the rose, pinched halfway up its stem, toppled 
to one side, and water, brimming up over the rim of the 
vase, ran down onto Paul's contracting hand. Paul relaxed 


his grasp, opened his hand, and looked down at the 
squeezed shape of the vase lying in it for a second. Then 
he tossed the ruinvase, flower, and allinto the wastebasket 
by the dresser and flexed his fingers. They were not 
even cramped. With that much strength the arm should 
already be becoming muscle-bound and useless. It was 
not. 

He finished dressing and went down to the subway entrance 
in the basement of the hotel. There was a two-seater 
among the empty cars waiting on the hotel switchback. 
He got in and dialed the standard 4441, which was the 
Directory address in all cities, centers, and Complexes 
over the fifty-thousand population figure. The little car 
moved out into the subway traffic and fifteen minutes 
later deposited him forty miles away at the Directory terminal. 


He registered his credit card with Chicago Complex 
Bookkeeping, and a routing service directed him to a 
booth on the ninth level. He stepped onto the disk of a 
large elevator tube along with several other people and 
found Ms eye caught by a book a girl was carrying. 

The book was in a small, hand-sized portable viewer, 
and the book's cover looked out at him from the viewer's 
screen. It gazed at him with the dark glasses and 
clever old mouth of the face he had been watching that 
day in the mine. It was the same face. Only, below the 
chin instead of the formal white collar and knotted scarf, 
there was the red and gold of some ceremonial robe. 

Against this red and gold were stamped the black block 
letters of the book's title. DESTRUCT. 

Glancing up from the book, for the first time he looked 
at the girl carrying it. She was staring at him with an 
expression of shock, and at the sight of her face he felt a 
soundless impact within himself. He found himself looking 
directly into the features of the girl who had stood beside 
and a little behind the Guildmaster in the viewing tank of 
the console at the mine. 

"Excuse me," she said. "Excuse me." 


She had turned, and pushing blindly past the other 
people on the disk stepped quickly off onto the level 
above that level on which Paul had entered. 

Reflexively, he followed her. But she was already lost 
in the crowd. He found himself standing in the heart of 
the musical section of the Directory library. He stood, 
brushed against by passers-by, gazing vainly out over the 
heads of the crowd for the sight of her. He was only 
half a pace from a row of booths, and from the partly-
open door of one of these came the thin thread of melody 
that was a woman's soprano singing to a chimed accompaniment 
in a slow, minor key..... 

In apple comfort, long 1 waited thee 

The music ran through him like a wind blowing from 
far off, and the pushing people about him became distant 
and unimportant as shadows. It was the voice of the girl 
in the elevator just now. He knew it, though he had only 
heard those few words from her. The music swelled and 
encompassed him, and ope of his moments of feeling 
moved in on him, on wings too strong for love and too 
wide for sadness. 

And long I thee in apple comfort waited. 

She was the music, and the music was a wind blowing 
across an endless snow field to a cavern where ice crystals 
chimed to the tendrils of the wind.... 

In lonely autumn and uncertain springtime 
My apple longing for thee was not sated.... 


Abruptly he wrenched himself free. 

Something had been happening to him. He stared 
about him, once more conscious of the moving crowd. 
The music from the booth was once more only a thread 


under the shuffle of feet and the distant sea-roar of conversations. 


He turned around and saw nothing on every side but 
the prosaic music section of a library floor in the directory. 
The magic was gone. 

But so was the girl. 

Paul went on up to the ninth level and found an open 
booth. He sat down, closed the door, and punched for a 
list of local psychiatrists, giving his now-registered credit 
number. As an afterthought, he added a stipulation that 
the list be restricted to those psychiatrists who had been 
interested or concerned with the problems of amputees in 
the past. The board before him flashed an acknowledgment 
of the request, and a statement that the answer 
would require about a ten- to fifteen-minute wait. 

Paul sat back. On impulse he coded the title of the 
book the girl had been carrying with a purchase request, 
and a second later a copy in a commercial viewer was 
delivered to the desk in front of him from the delivery 
chute. 

He picked it up. The face on the book's cover seemed 
to be staring at him with a sardonic expression, as if it 
amused itself with some secret it was keeping from him. 
The imaged face was not as he had seen it in the viewing 
tank at the mine, when the features had seemed to refuse 
to join in a clearly observed face. Now Paul saw the 
whole face, but something else was wrong. It was not so 
much a face but a wax mask. Something lifeless and 
without meaning. Paul punched the trip that would 
change the cover picture to the first page within. 

On the white expanse of paper shown, the title leaped 
at him once again. 

DESTRUCT, by Walter Blunt 

Paul turned the page. He found himself looking at the 
first page of an introduction written by someone whose 


name he did not recognize. Paul skimmed through its 

half-dozen pages. 

Walter Blunt, he read, was the son of rich parents. His 

family had owned a controlling interest in one of the great 

schools of bluefin tuna that followed the circle migratory 

route between North and South America and Japan. Blunt 

had grown up brilliant but undisciplined. He had lived 

the life of the wealthy who have nothing important to do, 

until one day when with thousands of other hunters he 

had been caught in an uncontrolled freak early-whiter 

blizzard, while out stalking deer in the Lake Superior 

Range. 

Four others in Blunt's party had died of exposure. 
Blunt, equally city-bred and unprepared, had in a wry 
moment conceived of the Alternate Forces of existence, 
and offered to trade them his life's service for the protection 
of his life itself. Following this, he had walked unerringly 
out of the woods to safety and arrived warm 
and unexhausted at shelter, in spite of the sleeting wind, 
the dropping temperature, and the fact that he was wearing 
only the lightest of hunting clothes. 

Following this experience, he had dedicated himself to 
the Alternate Forces. Over a lifetime he had created and 
organized the Chantry Guild, or Socit Chanterie, composed 
of students of, and graduate workers with, the 
Alternate Forces. The aim of the Chantry Guild was 
universal acceptance of the positive principle of destruction. 
Only by destruction could mankind signify its adherence 
to the alternate Laws, and only the Alternate 
Laws remained strong enough to save mankind from the 
technical civilization that was now on the verge of trapping 
mankind like a fly in amber. 

The delicate chime of a response counter drew Paul's 
attention to the screen before him. He looked at a double 
list of names, addresses, and call numbers. He turned his 
attention to the typewriter-like keyboard below the screen 
and tapped out a message to all the names on the list 


My left arm was amputated slightly over seven 
months ago. My body has to date rejected three 
attempts to graft on a replacement. No reason for 
the intolerance can be discovered in the ordinary 
physiological processes. My physicians have recommended 
that I explore the possibility of a psychological 
factor being involved in the causes of the 
intolerance, and have suggested that I try my case 
among psychiatrists of this area, where a large 
amount of work with amputees has been done. 
Would you be interested in accepting me as a patient? 
Paul Allen Formain. File No. 432 36 47865 
2551 OG3 K122b, Room 1412, Koh-i-Nor Hotel, 
Chicago Complex. 

Paul got up, took the book he had just purchased, 
and headed back toward the hotel. On the way back and 
after he had returned to his room, he read on into Blunt's 
writing. Sprawled out on his hotel-room bed he read a 
collection of wild nonsense mixed with sober fact, and 
an urgent appeal to the reader to enlist himself as a student 
under the instruction of some graduate Chantry 
Guild member. The reward promised for successfully 
completing the course of instruction was apparently to be 
a power encompassing all wild dreams of magical ability 
that had ever been conceived. 

It was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. 
Paul frowned. 
He found himself holding the book gingerly. It did not 


stir in a physical sense, but a vibration came from it that 
seemed to quiver deep in the marrow of Paul's bones. A 
singing silence began to swell in the room. One of his moments 
was coming on him. He held himself still as 
a wolf come suddenly upon a trap. About him the walls 
of the room breathed in and out. The silence sang louder. 
The place and moment spoke to him: 

DANGER. 


Put the book down. 

Louder sang the silence, blinding the ears of his sensing.... 


Danger, said the invincible part of him, is a word invented 
by children, and is essentially meaningless to the 
adult. 

He pressed the button to turn the page. A new chapter 
heading looked up at him. 

ALTERNATE FORCES AND REGROWTH. THE REPLACEMENT 
OF MISSING LIMBS, OR EVEN OF THE BODY ENTIRE. 


The reparative regeneration of parts of the human 
body by epimorphosis, or regrowth beginning from 
a regeneration bud or blastema formed at the 
wound surface, is a property capable of stimulation 
by the Alternate Forces. It has its justification 
and instigation in the intended action of self-destruct. 
Like all use and manipulation of the Alternate 
Forces, the mechanism is simple once the underlying 
principles are grasped. In this case, they are 
the Non-Evolutionary (blocking to the Natural 
Forces) and the Regressive (actively in reversal of 
the Natural Forces). These principles are not merely 
statically negative, but dynamically negative, so that 
from the fact of their dynamism derives the energy 
necessary for the process of regeneration.... 

The call note on Paul's room telephone chimed, breaking 
the spell. The room fled back to naturalness and the 
book sagged in Ms hand. From the bed he saw the screen 
of the phone light up. 

"A Directory report on your query, sir," said a canned 
voice from the lighted screen. 
The screen dissolved into a list of names with medical 
and mental science degrees after them. One by one the 


names winked out until only one was left Paul read it 
from the bed. 

DR. ELIZABETH WILLIAMS 

A moment later the word accept was printed beside it. 
Paul put the book aside where it could be picked up 
later. 


Chapter 4 


"...How do you feel?" 

It was a woman's voice. Paul opened his eyes. Dr. 
Elizabeth Williams was standing over the chair in which 
he sat. She put the hypodermic spray gun down on the 
desk beside him, and walked around to take her seat behind 
the desk. 

"Did I say anything?" Paul sat up straighter in his 
chair. 

"If you mean, did you reply to my questions? no." Dr. 
Williams looked across the desk at him. She was a small, 
square-shouldered woman with brown hair and an unremarkable 
face. "How long have you known about this 
strong resistance of yours to hypnosis?" 

"Is it resistance?" asked Paul. "I'm trying to co-operate." 


"How long have you known about it?" 

"Since the sailing accident. Five years." Paul looked 
at her. "What did I say?" 
Dr. Williams looked at him. 
"You told me I was a foolish woman," she said. 
Paul blinked at her. 
"Is that all?" he asked. "I didn't say anything but 

that." 

"That's all." She looked at him across the desk. He felt 
curiosity and a sort of loneliness emanating from her. 


"Paul, can you think of anything in particular that you're 
afraid of?" 
"Afraid?" he asked, and frowned. "Afraid . . . ? Not 

really. No." 

"Worried?" 

He thought for a long moment 

"Nonot worried, actually," he said. "There's nothing 
you could say was actually worrying me." 

"Unhappy?" 

He smiled. Then frowned, suddenly. 

"No," he said, and hesitated. "That is, I don't think 
so." 

"Then why did you come to see me?" 

He looked at her in some surprise. 

"Why, about my arm," he said. 

"Not about the fact that you were orphaned at an early 
age? Not that you've always led a solitary life, with no 
close friends? Not that you tried to kill yourself in a sailboat 
five years ago, and tried again in a mine, less than a 
year ago?" 

"Wait a minute!" said Paul. She looked at him politely, 
inquiringly. 
"Do you think I arranged those accidents to try and 
kill myself?" 

"Shouldn't I think so?" 

"Why, no," said Paul. 

"Why not?" 

"Because ..." A sudden perfect moment of understanding 
broke through to Paul. He saw her sitting there 
in complete blindness. He stared at her, and before bis 
eyes, looking back at him, she seemed to grow shrunken 
and a little older. He got to his feet. "It doesn't matter," 
he said. 

"You should think about it, Paul." 

"I will. I want to think over this whole business." 

"Good," she said. She had not moved out of her chair, 
and in spite of the assurance of her tone, she did not seem 


quite herself since he bad looked at her. "My receptionist 
will set up your next time in." 

"Thanks," he said. "Good-by." 

"Good afternoon, Paul." 

He went out. In the outer office the receptionist looked 
up from a filing machine as he passed. 
"Mr. Formain?" She leaned forward over the machine. 
"Don't you want to make your next appointment now?" 
"No," said Paul. "I don't think so." He went out. 

He went down a number of levels from Dr. Williams' 
office to the terminal in the base of the building. There 
were public communications booths nearby. He stepped 
into one and closed the door. He felt both naked and 
relieved. He dialed for a listing of the Chantry Guild 
members in the area. The screen lighted up. 

Walter Blunt, Guildmaster (no listed phone number) 

Jason Warren, Necromancer, Chantry Guild Sec


retary, phone number 66 433 35246 

Kantele Maki (no listed phone number) 

Morton Brown, 66 433 67420 

Warra, Mage, 64 256 89235 

(The above list contains only the names of those 

requesting listing under the Chantry Guild heading.) 

Paul punched 66 433 35246. The screen lighted up 
whitely, but it was half a minute before it cleared to show 
the face of one of the people Paul remembered from the 
television broadcast in the mine a year before, the face 
of a thin, black-haired young man with deep-set, unmoving 
eyes. 

"My name is Paul Formain," said Paul. "I'd like to 
talk to Jason Warren." 

"I'm Jason Warren. What about?" 

"I've just read a book by Walter Blunt that says the 
Alternate Forces can grow back limbs that are missing." 


Paul moved so that the stub of his left arm was visible 

to the other. 

"I see." Warren looked at him with the movelessness 

of his dark eyes. "What about it?" 

"I'd like to talk to you about it." 

"I suppose that can be arranged. When would you like 
to talk to me?" 
"Now," said Paul. 
The black eyebrows in the screen went up a fraction. 
"Now?" 
"I was planning on it," said Paul. 
"Oh, you were?" 
Paul waited. 
"All right, come ahead." Abruptly the screen went 

blank, but leaving Paul's vision filled with the after-image 
of the dark face that had been in it looking at him with a 
curious interest and intent. He rose, breathing out a little 
with relief. He had moved without thinking from the 
second of perception that had come to him in Elizabeth 
Williams' office. Suddenly he had realized that her education 
and training had made her blind to understanding 
in his case. She had not understood. That much had 
been explosively obvious. She had been trying to reconcile 
the speed of light with the clumsy mechanism of the 
stop watch she believed in. And if she had made that 
error, then the psychiatrist at San Diego, after the boating 
accident, had been wrong in the same way, as well. 

Paul had reacted without thinking, but, strongly now, 
his instinct told him he was right. He had labored under 
the handicap of a belief in stop watches. Somewhere, he 
told himself now, there was a deeper understanding. It 
was a relief to go searching for it at last with an unfettered 
minda mind awake. 


Chapter 5 


As Paul entered through the automatically-opening 
front door of Jason Warren's apartment, he saw three 
people already in the rooma sort of combination officelounge
he found himself stepping into. 

Two of the three were just going out through a rear 
door. Paul got only a glimpse of themone, a girl who 
with a start Paul recognized as the girl with the book he 
had encountered earlier at Chicago Directory. The other 
was a flat-bodied man in middle age with an air of quiet 
competence about him. He, too, had been with the girl 
and Blunt on the broadcast Paul had witnessed in the 
mine a year before. Paul wondered briefly if Blunt, also, 
was nearby. Then the thought passed from his mind. He 
found himself looking down, slightly, into the dark, mercurial 
face of Jason Warren. 

"Paul Formain," said Paul. "I phoned " 

"Sit down." Warren waved Paul into a chair and took a 
facing one himself. He looked at Paul with something of 
the direct, uninhibited stare of a child. "What can I do 
for you?" 

Paul considered him. Warren sat loosely, almost 
sprawled, but with his thin body held in the balance of a 
dancer or a highly trained athlete, so that a single movement 
might have brought him back to bis feet. 

"I want to grow a new arm," said Paul. 

"Yes," said Warren. He flicked a forefinger toward 


the phone. "I punched information for your public file 

after you called," he said. "You're an engineer." 

"I was," said Paul, and was a little surprised to hear 
himself say it, now, with such a small amount of bitterness. 


"You believe in the Alternate Laws?" 

"No," said Paul. "Truthfullyno." 

"But you think they might give you an arm back?" 

"It's a chance." 

"Yes," said Warren. "An engineer. Hard-headed, practical
doesn't care what makes it work as long as it 
works." 

"Not exactly," said Paul. 

"Why bother with the Alternate Laws? Why not just 
have a new arm out of the culture banks grafted on?" 
"I've tried that," said Paul. "It doesn't take." 
Warren sat perfectly still for a couple of seconds. There 

was no change in his face or attitude, but Paul got an impression 
as if something like a delicately sensitive instrument 
in the other man had suddenly gone click and 
begun to register. 

"Tell me," said Warren, slowly and carefully, "the 
whole story." 

Paul told it. As he talked, Warren sat still and listened. 
During the fifteen minutes or so it took for Paul to tell it 
all, the other man did not move or react. And with no 
warning, even as Paul was talking, it came to Paul where 
he had seen that same sort of concentration before. It 
was in a bird dog he had seen once, holding its point, one 
paw lifted, nose straight and tail in line with the body, as 
still as painted Death. 

When Paul stopped, Warren did not speak at once. Instead, 
without moving a muscle otherwise, he lifted his 
right hand into the air between them and extended his 
forefinger toward Paul. The movement bad all the remote 
inevitability of a movement by a machine, or the slow 
leaning of the top of a chopped tree as it begins its fall. 

"Look," Warren said slowly, "at my finger. Look at 


the tip of my finger. Look closely. Right there at the end 

of the nail, under the nail, you can see a spot of red. It's a 

drop of blood coming out from under the nail. See it 

swelling there. It's getting larger. In a moment it'll drop 

off. But it's getting larger, larger " 

"No," said Paul. "There's no drop of blood there at all. 

You're wasting your timeand mine." 

Warren dropped his hand. 

"Interesting," he said. "Interesting." 

"Is it?" asked Paul. 

"Graduate members of the Chantry Guild," said Warren, 
"can't be hypnotized, either. But you say you don't 

believe in the Alternate Laws." 

"I seem to be a sort of free-lance, then," said Paul. 

Warren rose suddenly from his chair with the single 
motion Paul had expected. He walked lightly and easily 
across the room, turned, and came back. 

"In order to resist hypnosis," he said, standing over 
Paul, "you must make use of the Alternate Laws, whether 
you recognize them as such or not. The keystone of 
the use of the Alternate Laws is complete independence 
of the individualindependence from any force, physical 
or otherwise." 

"And vice versa?" asked Paul, smiling. 

"And vice versa." Warren did not smile. He stood 
looking down at Paul. "I'll ask you again," he said. 
"What do you expect me to do for you?" 

"I want an arm," said Paul. 

"I can't give you an arm," said Warren. "I can't do 
anything for you. The use of the Alternate Laws is for 
those who would do things for themselves." 

"Show me how, then." 
Warren sighed slightly. It was a sigh that sounded to 
Paul not only weary, but a little angry. 

"You don't know what the hell you're asking," said 
Warren. "To train whatever aptitude you have for use of 
the Alternate Laws, I'd have to take you on as my apprentice 
in necromancy." 


"Blunt's book gave me to understand the Guild was 
eager for people." 

"Why, we are," said Warren. "We have an urgent need 
right now for someone comparable to Leonardo da Vinci. 
We'd be very glad to get someone with the qualifications 
of Milton or Einstein. Of course, what we really need is 
someone with a talent no one has conceived of yeta 
sort of X-Genius. So we advertise." 

"Then you don't want people." 

"I didn't say that," said Warren. He turned and paced 
the room and came back. "You're serious about joining 
the Guild?" 

"If it'll get me my arm." 

"It won't get you your arm. I tell you, no one can put 
that arm back but you. There's a relation between the 
Alternate Laws and the work of the Guild, but it isn't 
what you think." 

"Perhaps I'd better be enlightened," said Paul. 

"All right," said Warren. He put his hands in his pockets 
and stood with shoulders hunched slightly, looking 
down at Paul. "Try this on for size. This is an ill world 
we live in, Formain. A world sick from a surfeit of too 
many technical luxuries. An overburdened world, swarming 
with people close to the end of their ropes." His deep-
set eyes were steady on Paul. "People today are like a 
man who thought that if he made his success in the 
world, everything else that makes life good would come 
automatically. Now they've made their successthe perfection 
of a technological civilization in which no one 
lacks anything in the way of a physical comfortand 
they find themselves in a false paradise. Like an electric 
motor without a load upon it, the human spirit without 
the weight of the need to achieve and progress is beginning 
to rev up toward dissolution. Faster and faster, 
until they'll fly apart and destroy this world they've 
made." 

He stopped. 

"What do you say to that?" he asked. 


"It might be the case," said Paul. "I don't really believe 
that's the situation we're in, myself, but it might be 
the case." 

"All right," said Warren. "Now try this: In a climate 
of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the 
enemy is to tell him the plain truth. And the Guildmaster 
has stated the plain truth plainly in his book. The Chantry 
Guild is not interested in propagating the use of the 
Alternate Laws. It only wants to train and make use of 
those who can already use the Laws, to its own end. And 
that end's to hurry the end that is inevitably coming, to 
bring about the destruction of present civilization." 

Warren stopped. He seemed to wait for Paul to say 
something. But Paul also waited. 

"We," said Warren, "are a small but powerful revolutionary 
body with the aim of driving this sick world into 
complete insanity and collapse. The Alternate Laws are 
real, but most of our structure is completely fake. If you 
come in as my apprentice, you'll be committed to the job 
of destroying the world." 

"And that's my only way to a use of the Alternate 
Forces?" asked Paul. 
"For you to accept the Guild's philosophy and aim, 
yes," said Warren. "Otherwise, no." 

"I don't believe that," said Paul. "If your Alternate 
Forces exist, they'll work for me as well as all the Chantry 
Guild put together." 

Warren dropped into a chair and stared at Paul for a 
long moment. 

"Arrogant," he said. "Completely arrogant. Let's see. 
. . ." He rose lightly to his feet, crossed the room, and 
touched a spot on one of the walls. 

The wall slid back, revealing an area which seemed 
half modern laboratory and half alchemist's den. On the 
table in its center were earthenware containers, some 
metal jars, and a large flask full of dark-red liquid. 

Warren opened a drawer in the table, and took out 
something which his body hid from Paul's view. He 


closed the drawer, turned, and came back carrying a 
rather decrepit-looking conch shell, brown-stained and 
polished by handling and age. 

He put the shell down on an occasional table a few 
feet from Paul's chair. 
"What does that do?" Paul asked, looking at it curiously. 


"For me," said Warren, "it does a lot of things. Which 
is no advantage to you except that we might say it's 
been sensitized to the action of the Alternate Laws. Let's 
see if this arrogance of yours can do anything with it." 

Paul frowned. He stared at the shell. For a second the 
situation was merely ridiculous. And then it was as if a 
thread of brightness ran through him. There was a sudden 
weird sensation, as if a great, deep gong sounded, somewhere 
deep inside him. And then a rushing, back in the 
depths of his mind, as if a host of memories long forgotten 
ran and beat upon a locked door held shut to them 
since he could not exactly remember when. 

The conch shell stirred. It rolled to a point of balance 
and hung there. The bright daylight lanced through a far 
window of the room and a faint wisp of some light music 
sounded from the apartment next door. A thin, reedy 
voice spoke faintly but clearly from the shell. 

"From greater dark into the little light. And then once 
more to greater dark he goes." 

The beating on the locked door in Paul's mind dwindled 
away into silence. The shell lost its balance and fell 
over, still, on one side. Across from Paul, Warren drew a 
deep breath and picked up the shell. 

"You may be a natural," he said. 

"A natural?" Paul looked up at him. 

"There are certain abilities in the province of the Alternate 
Powers which can be possessed by those who know 
nothing of the true nature of the Alternate Powers. Mind 
reading, for example. Or artistic inspiration." 

"Oh?" said Paul. "How do you tell the difference be



tween people with that, and your Alternate Power people?" 


"Very simply," answered Warren. But the tone of his 
voice and the way he held the shell and continued to 
watch Paul did not imply simpleness. "For such people 
their abilities work spasmodically and unreliably. For us, 
they always work." 

"For example, mind reading?" 

"I'm a Necromancer," said Warren, shortly, "not a seer. 
Besides, I used the common, recognizable term. I'm told 
minds aren't so much read as experienced." 

"When you go into someone else's mind, you lose your 
own point of view?" 

"Yes," said Warren, "you must be a natural." He took 
the conch shell back across to the cabinet and put it 
away. He turned around and spoke from where he was. 

"You've got something," he said. "It may be a valuable 
aptitude, and it may not. But I'm willing to take you 
on as a probationary apprentice. If I think you have 
promise after a while, you'll be taken fully into the Guild 
on an apprenticeship basis. If that happens, you'll be 
required to assign everything you own and all future 
personal income to the Guild. But if it reaches that point, 
you needn't worry about material things." Warren's lips 
twisted slightly. "The Guild will take care of you. Study 
and learn, and you'll be able to grow your arm back one 
day." 

Paul stood up. 

"You guarantee me an arm?" he said. 

"Of course," said Warren. He did not move from where 
he stood, watching Paul across the widths of laboratory 
and apartment room with unmoving gaze. 


Chapter 6 


Shuttling through the many-leveled maze of the Chicago 
Complex's streets and buildings in a one-man subway 
car, Paul leaned his head back against the cushions of 
the seat and closed his eyes. 

He was exhausted, and exhaustion, he now suspected, 
had its roots in something besides the physical efforts he 
had been put to today. Something almost physical had 
taken place in him following his recognition of the ridiculousness 
of the psychiatric approach to his situation. 
And the business with the shell had also drained him. 

But the exhaustion was something that rest could cure. 
More important were two other things. The first of these 
was a clear recognition that too many things were happening 
around him and to him for them all to be accidents. 
And accidents, once the notion that he was subconsciously 
bent on self-destruction had been discarded, had 
been the obvious alternative answer. 

The second was the fact that the Necromancer, Warren, 
had called him arrogant. 

Disturbed by this, Paul for the first time faced the fact 

that such disturbance was unusual with him. Now that he 

stopped to consider the fact, in spite of all that had hap


pened to him it had never before occurred to him that he 

might be at the mercy of any other force than that of his 

own will. Perhaps, he thought, this was arrogance, but the 

idea did not ring true. Above all else, he trusted his own 


feelings, and he did not feel arrogant. All that came to him 

when he reached back into himself for reasons was a 

calm feeling of certainty. It was that invincible element in 

him which took all things calmly. 

For, thought Paul, leaning back with his eyes closed, 
above all he must not be arrogant. He was like a man 
peering through the glass-clearness of still water into the 
secret life of a tide pool on an ocean beach. Wonderful 
things were happening just a little before him, and 
would continue to happen as long as the pool was not 
disturbed. But a touch of wind or a dabbled finger, a 
ripple across the water's surface, and the life going on 
under his nose would no longer be isolated, pure, and 
complete. Gentleness was the watchword. Gentleness and 

extreme care. Already he had begun to separate and iden


tify elements: by a hint of movement, a change of color, 

an emerging shape.... 

Leaning back with his eyes closed, Paul lost himself 

in a half-doze and a dream of things half-seen. 

Sudden deceleration of his small car pulled him upright 
in his seat. The car jerked to a stop. He opened his 
eyes and looked out through the unopaqued bubble of 
the car's top. 

He was at a mid-level intersection of streets. Above and 
below him were residential and business layers of the great 
three-dimensional community that was Chicago Complex. 
On his own level his car had halted part-way out into 
an intersection the four corners of which were occupied 
by small shops and offices, beyond which was a large 
recreation area, parklike with trees. But no people were 
visible. The shops were empty. The park was empty. The 
streets were clear and still. 

Paul once more leaned forward and pressed for the 
terminal at the Koh-i-Nor Hotel. The car did not move. 
He punched for the transportation control center, malfunction 
division. 

The communications tank above the car's dashboard 
lighted up. 


"Sir?" said a woman's canned voice. "Can I help you?" 

"I'm in a one-man car that won't move," said Paul. 

"It's stopped at the intersection of" he glanced at a 

street-corner sign"N Level 2432 and AANB." 

"Checking," said the canned voice. There was a moment's 
wait and the voice spoke again. "Sir? Are you certain 
of your location. The area you report yourself in 
has been closed to traffic. Your car could not have entered 
it in the last half hour." 

"It seems to have anyway." Paul broke off suddenly. 
He seemed to have heard something odd. He got out 
of the car and stood up alongside it. The sound came 
thinly but more clearly to his ears. It was the noise of 
people chanting, and the noise was approaching. 

"The area you report yourself in," the tank in the car 
was saying, "has been cleared to allow for a public demonstration. 
Would you please check your location again? If 
it is the location you have already reported, please leave 
your car at once and ascend one level immediately to 
find another. Repeat, leave your car immediately." 

Paul swung away from the car. Across the street from 
him was an escalator spiral ramp. He reached it and let 
himself be borne upward. It swung up and out over the 
street he had just left. The chanting now came clearly to 
his ears. It was not words, but sounds without meaning. 

"Hey, hey! Hey, hey! Hey, hey!..." 

Puzzled, he stepped off the upward-moving surface of 
the ramp and looked out over the chest-high siding. Down 
around a curve of the cross street to the one on which his 
car had stalled he saw people pouring toward him in a 
sort of orderly mob, twenty abreast, and filling the street 
solidly from curb to curb. 

They came quickly. They were at jog trot. Young men 
and women for the most part wearing blue slacks, white 
shirts, and green-colored, odd, cocked hats. They ran 
with arms interlinked, in step with the rhythm of their 
chanting. 

Abruptly, Paul identified them. They represented, evi



dently, one of the so-called marching societies. Such 
groups gathered together for no other purpose than to 
run through the streets perhaps once or twice a month. 
It was a sort of controlled and channeled hysteria, or so 
Paul remembered reading. Such exercises blew off a lot 
of emotional steam safely, said the societies' advocates. 
For unless the group ran directly into some obstacle, they 
did no harm and were not harmed. 

They came on now and Paul could see their eyes, 
which were all fixed straight ahead. But their gazes were 
not glassy, as of people drunk or drugged. Rather, they 
were clear, but fixed, as with people undergoing a moment 
of exaltation or frenzy. They were almost below 
Paul, now. Almost to the intersection. 

Suddenly, Paul realized that his one-man car, stalled 
where it was, would be in their way. They were practically 
upon it now. The cadenced slapping of their river of 
feet was shaking the ramp on which he stood. It was making, 
it seemed, the whole structure of the city Complex, 
level on level, vibrate to a high, almost supersonic singing. 
A wave of heat struck up to them from their onrushing 
bodies, and the louder, ever-louder yelping of their chant 
rocked on his ears like the unnatural amplification of 
sounds heard in a fever. Whirlpooled about by noise and 
heat, Paul saw their first ranks run into his empty car and, 
without halting, like a stampede of mindless cattle, tumble 
it, rolling, over and over until it bounced at last to a 
railing overhanging the level below. Paul watched it 
mount the railing and drop from sight, the ultimate noise 
of its impact below lost in the encompassing noise of the 
running crowd. 

He looked back along the road, in the direction from 
which they had come. The river of people was unended, 
still passing out of sight around the curve. But now, as he 
watched, the final ranks began to thin and quieten, and 
over the other sounds he heard the thin wail of ambulance 
sirens following slowly after. 

Paul went on up to the level above, found a two



man car that was empty on a siding, and returned to the 
hotel. 

When he got to his room, the door was open. A small 

gray man in a business suit rose smoothly from a chair 

as Paul entered, and offered an opened wallet cardcase 

for Paul's inspection. 

"Hotel security, Mr. Formain," said the small man. 

"My name's James Butler." 

"Yes?" said Paul. He felt his tiredness like a cloak 

around him. 

"A routine matter, Mr. Formain. Maintenance dis


covered a vase in your room that had been rather bent 

out of shape." 

"Put it on my bill," said Paul. "Now, if you don't 
mind " 
"The vase isn't important, Mr. Formain. But we understand 
you have been seeing a psychiatrist?" 

"A Dr. Elizabeth Williams. Today. Why?" 

"As a routine matter, this hotel asks for and is notified 
if any of its guests are currently under psychiatric care. 
The Chicago Complex Public Health Unit permits us 
to refuse occupancy to guests who might disturb the 
hotel. Of course, no such refusal is anticipated in your 
case, Mr. Formain." 

"I'm checking out in the morning," said Paul. 

"Oh? I'm sorry to hear that," said James Butler evenly. 
"I assure you there was no intention to offend you. It's 
just one of the management rules that we inform our 
guests that we have been notified about them." 

"I was leaving anyway," said Paul. He looked at the 
man's unchanging face and motionless body, and James 
Butler's personality came clearly through to him. Butler 
was a dangerous little man. An efficient little machine of 
suspicion and control. Underneath, though, was something 
repressed, something guarded by an inner fear. 
"Right now, I want to turn in. So if you don't mind ..." 

Butler inclined his head slightly. 


"Unless, of course," he said, "there's something more." 

"Nothing." 

"Thank you." Butler turned and walked smoothly to 

the door. "Feel free to call on hotel services at any 

time," he said, and went out, closing the door behind him. 

Paul frowned. But weariness was like a great load on 

him. He undressed and dropped into the bed. And sleep 

closed down about him like great, gray wings, enfolding. 

He dreamed that he walked a cobbled road, in dark


ness under the stars, alone. And the cobbles grew as he 

went until they were great boulders to be climbed. And 

then that dream vanished and he dreamed that he was 

paralyzed, drifting upright through the nighttime streets 

of the Chicago Complex. He drifted along without touch


ing the ground and after a while he came on an arc light 

on its pole that had been changed into a monstrous candy 

cane. And just beyond it a store front had been turned 

from plastic to ice, and was melting. 

In the morning he woke feeling as if he had slept fourteen 
years, rather than fourteen hours, packed, and went 
down to the main lobby to pay his bill. 

He cut through one of the hotel bars on his way down 
to the basement terminal. At this early hour it was all but 
deserted except for a plump middle-aged man who sat 
alone at a table with a small tulip-shaped glass of some 
purplish liquid before him. For a moment, passing, Paul 
thought that the man was drunk. And then he caught the 
scent of cinnamon from the glass and saw the man's 
eyes had pinpoint pupils. And looking behind this, he 
caught sight of Butler, seated in the darkness of a corner, 
watching. Paul went over to the hotel security man. 

"Are you notified about drug addicts, too?" Paul 
asked. 
"Our bars stock the non-habit-forming synthetics," 
said Butler. "It's quite legal." 

"You didn't answer my question,'' said Paul. 

"The hotel," said Butler, "feels a certain responsibility 
to certain guests." He glanced up at Paul. "That's legal, 


too. And any extra charges are quite reasonable. If you 

hadn't already planned to leave, Mr. Formain, I could 

have told you what services we had available." 

Paul turned and went on. He found a one-man car at 
the terminal, and, getting in, punched for Warren's apartment. 
The first demand the Necromancer had made of 
his probationary apprentice was that Paul should move 
into the apartment, where Warren could have him under 
constant observation. 

He found Warren waiting for him. The Necromancer 
turned over one of the bedrooms in the apartment to 
him, and then to all intents and purposes left Paul to his 
own devices. For the rest of the week Paul hardly saw the 
intense young man. 

It was five days later that Paul, thoroughly bored with 
the apartment by this time, happened to be going through 
the music Warren had listed in his apartment player. 
Abruptly, he came across a title which caught his attention. 


IN APPLE COMFORT ... vocal. Sung by Kantele 

Kantele. Suddenly the mental connection was made. It 
had been there in the list of local members of the Chantry 
Guild. Kantele Maki. And he remembered now, there was 
a girl who sang professionally under the single name Kantele. 
She was the girl with the book that he had first seen 
on the news broadcast, and after that at the Directory. He 
pressed the small black button alongside the initial letter 
of the song tide. 

There was the barest second of a pause, and then the 
chimed music rose softly ringing from the player, interspersed 
by the cool, shifting silver of the voice he recognized. 


In apple comfort, long I waited thee 

And long I thee in apple comfort waited. 

In lonely autumn and uncertain 


A sudden gasp from behind him made Paul shut off 
the player abruptly and turn about. He found himself 
facing the girl herself. 

She stood a little to one side of a bookcase of old-
fashioned volumes. But the bookcase, to Paul's surprise, 
was swung out from its usual place, revealing not a wall 
behind it, but an entrance to a small room furnished and 
equipped like an office. Seeing his gaze go to it, Kantele 
broke suddenly out of the rigidity that had been holding 
her, and, putting out a hand, pushed the bookcase back 
into position, closing the entrance. They stood, looking 
across the room at each other. 

"I didn't know ..." she said. "I forgot you were living 

here now." 

He watched her, curiously. She was noticeably pale. 

"Did you think I was someone else?" he asked. 

"Yes. I mean"she said"I thought you were Jase." 

She was one of the kind who lie defiantly. He felt her 

untruthfulness across all the distance separating them. 

"You've got a fine voice," he said. "I was playing that 

song of yours" 

"Yes. I heard you," she interrupted. "II'd rather you 
wouldn't play it, if you don't mind." 
"Would you?" asked Paul. 
"It has associations for me. If you don't mind..." 
"I won't play it if you don't want me to, of course," 

said Paul. He walked toward her and then stopped suddenly, 
seeing her reflexively take the one step back from 
him that the wall behind her allowed. 

"Jase..." she said. "Jase will be here at any minute." 

Paul watched her, frowning a bit. He felt puzzled and a 
little exasperated by her, but also oddly touched, as he 
might be by anyone or anything defenseless that did not 

realize he meant it no harm. And that was odd too, be


cause Kantele did not give the impression generally of de


fenselessness, but of wire-like courage. Paul was reaching 

to approach this problem in words when the sound of 


the opening front door of the apartment brought both 
their heads around in its direction. 

Warren and the flat-bodied, crop-haired man Paul had 
seen in the news broadcast, and again leaving the apartment 
with Kantele the first time he had come to see Warren, 
had just come in. They headed straight for Paul and 
Kantele. 


Chapter 7 


, "You didn't answer the door," said Warren, stopping before 
them and looking at Kantele. 
"You didn't ring," said Paul. 
"He means memy apartment, next door," said Kantele, 
but without looking away from Warren to Paul. "I 
forgot he was here, Jase. I heard noise and I knew you 
were out. I stepped in from the office." 
"Yes," said Warren. His thin, dark, bright face looked 
from her to Paul without smiling. "Well, you'd have met 
anyway. You know each other now? This is Paul For-
main, Kantele. Paul, Kantele Maki." 
"How do you do?" said Paul to her, and smiled. She 
gave a little spasm of a smile back. 
"And this is Burton McLeod." 
"McCloud?" echoed Paul, shaking hands with the flat-
bodied man. 
"Spelled McLeod, pronounced McCloud," said McLeod. 
His voice was mild and a little husky. His hand-
grip was dry and firm. His brown eyes were the lonely, 
sad, and savage eyes of a hawk on leash and perch. A 
week before, the hotel security man, Butler, had impressed 
Paul as dangerous. McLeod radiated dangerousness 
of a different order. If Butler was like a stiletto, 
needle-pointed and polished, then this man was scarred 
and heavy as some ancient broadsword. 
While Paul and McLeod had been shaking hands, 


Warren and Kantele had held each other's eyes for a long 
second. Now, suddenly, Warren turned away from her 
with a quickness that was almost like a shrug and took a 
small box from his pocket. He opened it in front of Paul. 

Paul saw neat rows of white gelatin capsules within. 
Warren took one out and handing the box aside to McLeod, 
broke it and poured a white powder from it into his 
palm. 

"Taste," said Warren. Paul frowned. 

"It's quite harmless," said Warren. He dipped a finger in the powder 

hesitated a second and then followed suit. He tasted 
sweetness. 

"Sugar?" said Paul, looking at Warren. 

"That's right." The Necromancer dusted off his hands 
over a nearby ash tray. "But to the man you'll be giving 
it to it'll be cocaine. I said" Warren stared at Paul 
tightly"it'll be cocaine. The minute you let the box into 
anyone's hands but your own. I mention this so that you'll 
realize you're legally in the clear in delivering it, as long 
as you keep it in your pocket until the last moment." 

"You want me to deliver it?" asked Paul. "Who to?" 

"You know how the Koh-i-Nor's laid out. I want you 
to take this box to suite 2309. Don't ask directions from 
the desk clerk or anyone else. Give it to the man you 
find there. If you run into any trouble . . ." Warren hesitated 
and glanced for a second at Kantele. "I don't expect 
you will. But if you do, there's a chess tournament 
going on on the sixtieth level in the banquet rooms there. 
Go up there and look for Kantele. She'll get you out." 

He stopped talking. There was a moment of silence in the room. 

"If it was cocaine," said Paul, "of course I wouldn't 
take it." 

"You'll be carrying sugar," said Warren. His thin 
face seemed to flash for a second like a drawn blade in the 
brightness of the sunlight coming through the far windows 
of the room. "It'll be transmuted into the drug only 


after you deliver it. You can believe or not believe, go or 
part company with me, just as you like." 

"I'll take it," said Paul. He held out his hand. McLeod 
gave him the box. "Twenty-three-o-nine?" 

"Twenty-three-o-nine," said Warren. The eyes of all 
three followed him, Paul could feel in the muscles of his 
back, as he took the box and left the apartment. 

The desk clerk he passed at the Koh-i-Nor was a 
stranger and did not look up as Paul went by. Paul took 
the elevator tube to the twenty-third level. 

It turned out to be a level of modern-dcor, semi-VIP 
suites. The type of establishments that would require 
income in excess of forty thousand a year to be supported 
without strain by their occupants. Paul walked down the 
wide, tiled hallway, coolly lighted by the high, blue-curtained 
windows at each end of it, until he came to a door 
marked with the numerals 2309. Below it in small letters 
were the two words service entrance. 

Paul touched the door. It was not only unlocked but 
ajar. It swung noiselessly back into its wall recess at his 
touch. He stepped into the kitchen of the suite. 

Voices broke on bis ear from elsewhere in the suite. 
He stopped dead, and with a faint noise the door slid 
closed again behind him. One of the voices was an incisive, 
middle-aged tenor, sharp with emotion. The other 
was thick and deeper in tone, stumbling, sullen. 

"... pull yourself together!" the tenor voice was saying. 
The deeper voice muttered something unintelligible. 

"You know better than that!" said the tenor. "You 
don't want to be cured, that's what it is. The substitutes 
were bad enough. But your monkeying around with real 
drugs makes you a danger to the whole Department, if 
not the whole Division. Why didn't you take psychiatric 
leave when I offered it to you last March?" 

The heavy voice muttered something, it seemed to Paul, 
about the soup, or super. 
"Get that out of your head!" said the tenor. "You've 


let the statistics on mental health get you to seeing ghosts 
in the woodwork. Electronic equipment is electronic 
equipment. No more. No less. Don't you think that if 
there was anything more there, I'd know it?" 

"Unless . . ." muttered the heavy voice, "got you 
already." 

"For your own sake"the tenor was disgusted"see 
your physician. Get yourself committed. I won't investigate 
your Department for the next four days. That'll give 
you time to get safely into a hospital room where you 
can decently refuse to answer questions. That's it, now. 
It's up to you." There was the sound of footsteps walking 
across hard flooring and a door button snapped to 
unlatch. "Four days. I won't give you an hour more." 

A wind of sudden suspicion blew coolly through Paul, 
chilling him. He turned quickly himself, stepped silently 
back through the door he had just entered, and out into 
the hall. There was a small alcove in the wall about six 
feet to his left. He stepped to it and pressed himself, back 
to its wall, deep in its shadow, looking along the hall to 
2309's main entrance. 

It opened immediately. A small, sparely erect man with 
thin gray hair came out, closed the door behind him, and 
went away from Paul toward the far set of elevator tubes 
at the other end of the hall. For a second as he turned 
to the elevators, Paul saw a sparrow-like profile against 
the blue illumination from the curtain windows, and 
recognized the man. In the suite the tenor voice had 
sounded vaguely familiar, and Paul had thought it might 
be the security man, Butler, speaking. But he saw now 
that there was another reason he had half-recognized the 
voice. 

The man by the elevators was Kirk Tyne, World Complex 
Engineer. He was the executive head of the theoretical 
machinery that correlated the activities of the interlocking 
Complexes of technological devices that made 
modern life possible about the planet. In theory he and 
his Division of Engineers performed the functions of a 


sort of super-computing element, since sooner or later 
mechanical decisions had to find their ultimate authority 
and review in human ones. He reached out his hand now 
to open the elevator tube. 

He had not quite touched it when a fair portion of the 
blue illumination from the window was suddenly occulted 
by the dark, wide-shouldered body of a tall man who 
stepped off the downshaft alongside the one toward which 
Tyne was reaching. 

"Well, Kirk," said the tall man. "Didn't expect to see 
you here." 

His voice struck and reverberated on Paul's listening 
ear like the little echoes chasing each other, on and on, 
from the sound of a gong struck in some deep and stony 
cave. It was the voice of Walter Blunt. Almost involuntarily, 
Paul stepped forward to the edge of his recess to 
get a better look at this head of the Chantry Guild. But 
Blunt was standing just so slightly turned that his face 
was shadowed and averted from Paul. 

"Got off here by mistake," replied Tyne, sharply and 
smoothly. "I was headed for the chess matches upstairs. 
How about you, Walt?" 

"Why," Blunt leaned on his heavy cane, and his voice 
had a humorous note in it, "I saw you and stepped out to 
say hello. Headed for the lobby myself for a moment, to 
meet someone. You look good, Kirk." He laid aside his 
cane, leaning it against the wall of a tube, and offered 
his hand. Tyne shook it. 

"Thank you, Walter," said Tyne, shaking hands. He 
added, drily, "I imagine we'll both live a while, yet." 

"Why, no, Kirk," said Blunt. "The instrument of Armageddon 
is already at work. I intend to survive the 
conflict when it comes, but I don't expect you will." 

Tyne shook his head. 

"You amaze me, Walt," he said. "You know very well 
I'm the one man who knows all about your little sect 
right down to the fact that it numbers only a little more 
than sixty thousand members, scattered all over the globe. 


Yet you keep on insisting to my face that you're about 
to take over the world. And what would you do with it, 
once you'd taken it over? You can't run things without 
the very Complex technologies you claim you intend to 
destroy." 

"Well, now," said Blunt, "there're a lot of different versions 
of this world of ours, Kirk. You've got one, with 
your Complexes of equipmenta nice steady-ticking 
world. The only pity is, it won't stop growing and complicating 
itself. Then, there's the world of the fanatics, the 
people who go in for dangerous sports, wild cults, and 
marching societies. And then again, there's a vague, gauzy 
world of the spiritually inclined, and the world of the 
asymbolic pioneers, artist and scientist. There's the 
world of those to whom tradition and an anchored existence 
are the only worthwhile basis for life. There's even 
the world of the psychotics, the neurotically crippled." 

"You talk," said Tyne, "as if these other . . . attitudes, 
had an equal value with normal civilized society." 

"But they have, Kirk, they have," said Blunt, looming 
over the smaller man. "Ask anyone who belongs to one 
of them. Don't look at me, man. This is your worldthe 
world you boys made out of the industrial revolution 
three hundred years ago. To put it somewhat crudely, 
if this here's heaven, how come we still got stomachaches?" 


"We got stomach-aches," said Tyne, stepping a little 
aside toward his elevator tubes. "But we also got doctors 
to physic 'em. Which we didn't always have before. If 
you'll excuse me, Walt, I want to get upstairs to the chess 
matches. Are you coming back up?" 

"Right away," said Blunt. Tyne stepped onto a disk 
floating up the tube beside him, with one foot. The disk 
checked itself. "And how's Mrs. Tyne been?" asked 
Blunt. 

"Excellent," said Tyne. He stepped completely onto 
the disk and was borne upward out of sight. 
Blunt turned, stepped through the open door of the 


down tube onto a descending disk, and disappeared him


self. 

Paul came out from the shadow, still looking toward 

the elevators where the two men had stood. They were 

gone now, but Blunt's stick was still leaning where he had 

placed it before shaking hands with Tyne. Paul remem


bered abruptly how Blunt had stood, half-turned away 

from the alcove. It came to Paul that he had never got a 

square look at the head of the Chantry Guild. Before, 

this had been only a minor omission in the back of his 

mind. But suddenly it moved to the forefront. 

Paul was suddenly conscious of something that most of 
the time he merely took for granted. That for him to 
meet someone was automatically to gain a great deal of 
insight into them. And Blunt was an enigma. But an enigma 
with whom Paul's life had become considerably entangled. 
With Blunt, as with the Guild itself, there seemed 
to be considerably more going on than met the eye. Deciding, 
Paul strode out from his alcove, down to the 
elevators, and picked up the stick. Blunt could hardly 
avoid facing the man who returned his walking stick to 
him in person. 

Paul came back to suite 2309, the main entrance this 
time, the one through which he had seen Tyne leave. He 
pressed the door button. It was unlocked and opened at 
his touch. He stepped inside, closing the door behind him, 
and found himself in the sitting room of the suite, and 
facing the man he had seen drugged and under watch by 
Butler in the hotel bar, the morning of his leaving. 

The sound of the closing door brought the man's head 
around. He had been half-turned away, blowing his nose 
on a tissue. At the click of the door's latching, he 
jerked about to face Paul. And then he went backward 
across the room, mouthing and stumbling like a creature 
scared out of all common, ordinary sense, until the high, 
wide window of the room stopped him. 

He stood, trapped and staring, blinking, shivering, 
pushing against the window as if he could shove himself 


through it into the twenty-three levels of unblocked air 
that separated him from the ground level before the hotel. 

Paul checked instinctively. And the wave of sick fear 
emanating from the man crested and broke over Paul 
like solid ocean surf. Paul stood, momentarily and in spite 
of himself, stunned. He had never thought a thinking 
being could go so bad. 

The man's eyes flicked and bored into Paul. The eyes 
themselves were watering, and the nose sniffled uncontrollably. 
The man's face was gray and rigid. Something 
mangled whimpered within him. 

"It's all right," said Paul. "All right ..." He came 
gently toward the man, Blunt's stick tucked under his 
right arm and the box of capsules in his single hand outstretched. 
"Here... I'm just bringing you these...." 

The man continued to stare and sniffle spasmodically. 
Paul, now within arm's length of him, laid the box down 
on a table. As an afterthought, he opened it with two 
fingers and took out one of the white capsules. 

"See?" he said. "Here . . ." He held it out to the man, 
but the other, either jerkily reaching for it, or jerkily 
pushing it away, knocked it from Paul's fingers. Automatically, 
Paul bent to pick it up. 

His head was still down when warning rang loud within 
him. He straightened up suddenly to see the drug 
addict facing him now, a small handgun black and deadly 
in one trembling hand. The pinhole of its muzzle wavered 
at Paul's chest. 

"Easy," said Paul. "Easy..." 

His voice seemed not even to reach the ears of the 
other man. The drug addict stepped forward and Paul 
automatically stepped back. 

"It sent you," said the man, hoarsely. "It sent you." 
"Nothing sent me," said Paul. "I came to bring you 
that box on the table. There it is." He nodded toward it. 

The man did not look at it. Moving out into the room, 
he began to circle Paul, while keeping gun and eyes aimed 
at Paul. 


"I'm going to kill you," he said. "You think I won't 

kill you, but I will." 

"Why?" asked Paul. And that monosyllable, he 
thought, should at least have made the other pause, but 
again it seemed the drug addict did not even hear him. 

"It sent you to kill me," said the man. "It can't kill. It 
isn't built to allow itself to kill. But it can fix things so 
some other factor does the duty work." 

"I don't want to hurt you," said Paul. 

"It's no use," said the man. Paul could sense the will 
to pull the trigger accumulating in the mind opposite him. 
The man's back began to straighten with something like 
pride. "I understand, you see. I know all about it." 

The man was almost between Paul and the room's 
entrance, now. He was at a distance of about eight feet, 
out of arm's reach. Paul made a move to step toward 
him and the tiny muzzle of the gun came up sharply. 

"No, no!" said the man. "No!" 

Paul stopped. He became conscious suddenly of the 
hard roundness of Blunt's walking stick under his arm. It 
was a good three feet in length. Paul began to let the stick 
slip down into his hand. 

"Just a little," said the man. "Just a moment more ... 
It thought you'd find me alone here. It didn't know I had 
a gun. When you steal something, there's no way for it to 
know. No recordwhat're you doing?" 

The last three words came out in a scream, as the man 
noticed the end of the walking stick slide into Paul's hand. 
The pinhole muzzle leaped up and forward. Paul jumped 
aside and forward. There was no time to throw the stick 
as he had planned. He saw the man swinging to bring the 
gun's aim upon him. The other was close. 

"Now!" screamed the man. The walking stick leaped in 
Paul's grasp and he felt it connect solidly. The man fell 
away from him. 

The man fell and rolled over on his back on the carpet 
The small gun tumbled foolishly out of his hand. He lay, 
looking in terrified accusation at the ceiling. 


Still holding the walking stick, Paul stepped forward. 
He stared down at the drug addict. The man lay still. His 
bloodshot eyes did not focus upon Paul. Paul lifted the 
stick in his hand and stared at it. The dark wood was 
dented and splintered a little but in no way broken or 
weakened. Paul looked back down at the man on the 
floor, letting the heavy weight of his unnaturally muscled 
right arm, holding the stick, drop limply at his side. 

Among the sparse black hair on the man's skull, the 
blood was beginning to flow, slowly and darkly. Paul felt 
emptiness inside him, as if he had deeply inhaled on nothingness. 
The broken skull looked as if it had been stricken 
almost in two by some heavy sword. 


Chapter 8 


The man's dead, thought Paul. He took a deep, shuddering 
breath, but the emptiness inside him did not go away. 

Why don't I feel anything more than this? 

Once he would have expected an answer from the 
unconquerable element back in the depths of his mind. 
But with the overgrowth of his right arm, and the decision 
in the psychiatrist's office, that part of him seemed to 
have melted into the rest of his consciousness. He was all 
of one piece now. Still, he could almost imagine he heard 
the ghost of a whisper replying to his thought 

Death, it whispered, is a factor also. 

The stick was still poised in his hand. Paul opened his 
hand about it and a small object fell onto the carpet. He 
bent and picked it up. It was the capsule he had offered 
the dead man, flattened and bent now from being between 
his palm and the walking stick. He put it in his 
pocket. Swiftly he turned and went out of the suite. 

He closed the door behind him and was halfway to 
the same elevator tubes which Tyne and Blunt had taken, 
when his mind started working sensibly again. He 
stopped dead. 

Why should he run, he asked himself? He had only 
acted in self-defense on being attacked by what 
amounted to an insane man waving a gun. Paul went 
back into 2309 and used the phone there to call the hotel's 
security office. 


The office answered without lighting up the vision 
tank. A voice spoke to him from out of blank grayness. 

"Who is calling, please?" 

"Suite 2309. But I'm not a guest of the hotel. I want to 
report " 
"One minute, please." 
There was a moment of silence. The tank still did not 

light up. Then suddenly it cleared and Paul found himself 
looking into the neat, expressionless features of James 
Butler. 

"Mr. Formain," said Butler. "I was informed twenty-
eight minutes ago that you had entered the hotel by the 
plaza entrance." 

"I was bringing something " 

"So we assumed," said Butler. "As a matter of routine, 
our hall monitor cameras are lighted to follow nonguests 
under conditions when we haven't been notified of their 
visit in advance. Is the occupant of suite 2309 with you 
now, Mr. Formain?" 

"Yes," said Paul. "But I'm afraid there's been an accident 
here." 
"Accident?" Butler's voice and expression stayed invariable. 
"The man I met here threatened me with a gun." 
Paul hesitated. "He's dead." 

"Dead?" asked Butler. For a second he merely looked 
at Paul."You must be mistaken about the gun, Mr. For-
main. We have a complete file and check on the occupant 
of 2309. He did not own a gun." 

"No. He told me he stole it." 

"I don't mean to argue with you, Mr. Formain. But I 
must inform you that in accordance with police regulations 
this conversation is being irreversibly recorded." 

"Recorded!" Paul stared into the tank. 

"Yes, Mr. Formain. You see, we happen to know that 
it would have been impossible for the resident in 2309 to 
steal any kind of weapon. He has been under constant 
surveillance by our staff." 


"Well, your staff slipped up!" 

"I'm afraid that's impossible, too. The only way a gun 
could have entered the suite where you are now would 
have been if you had carried it in yourself." 

"Just a minute." Paul leaned down toward the tank. 
"Mr. Kirk Tyne, the World Complex Engineer, was here 
just before I came." 

"Mr. Tyne," said Butler, "left the North Tower lobby 
at 14:09 by up tube on the elevators and arrived at the 
chess tournament on the Sixtieth level at 14:10. Our hall 
monitors show no one entering 2309 in the past six 
hours but you. Accordingly..." 

The barest flicker of Butler's eyes to the side woke Paul 
suddenly to the nearness of the trap into which he was 
sliding. The hotel security agent was no mean hypnotist 
himself. The dead monotony of his voice, the expressionless 
face that classed all things with the dull unimportance 
of a lost hotel key or misdirected luggage, 
would have been lethal against anyone who lacked 
Paul's inherent immunity. 

Without waiting even to shut off the phone Paul moved, 
letting his reflexes take over. He was at the door and 
through it into the hall before Butler had time to stop 
talking. The hall outside was empty. 

Moving swiftly, Paul turned from the elevators and 
raced down the hall to a heavy fire door. He pulled it 
open and passed through into the concrete shaft of a stairway. 
He found himself on a small landing with steps 
leading up from one end and down from another. The 
edge of another fire door recessed in its slot in the wall 
stood level with the first step of the down flight of steps. 

Paul ran down the stairs. He was quiet about it, but 
the stair shaft itself was as silent as something that had 
been sealed for eternity. He made four floors without a 
hint of danger. Then, when he reached the landing of the 
fifth level below where he had started, he saw the staircase 
fire door closed, barring further progress. 


He turned to the door leading out into the hallway of 
that level and went through it, onto soft carpeting. 
"Mr. Formain?" asked a polite voice in his ear. "If 
you'll just come..." 

A security agent, a young man by his voice, had 
been standing back by the side of the door where the 
latch was, his back to the wall alongside and waiting for 
Paul to come out. As Paul stepped through, the agent 
spoke and stepped forward to take hold of him. Paul felt 
the left hand of the other man expertly seeking the 
twin nerves just above his elbow and the man's right 
reaching out to catch his thumb and bend it back wrist-
ward in that unobtrusive hold long familiar to police 
people, known as the "comealong." 

The searching hands of the security man failed of their 
mark, for no fault of the man himself, but for two reasons 
he could not have expected. The first was that his 
pinching left hand missed its mark completely, the seeking 
thumb and middle finger not finding the nerve-points 
they sought since they were hidden under the greatly 
overdeveloped muscles of Paul's arm, just above the elbow. 
The second was that Paul was no longer thinking his 
reactions out in conscious terms, but in this emergency 
abandoning himself to that invulnerable part of him 
that had earlier claimed his overdeveloped arm as its 
own. So, what actually happened was that even as the 
security man reached out to take him prisoner, even as he 
felt the man's hands upon him, Paul was already in movement. 


At the other's touch, all in a split second, he checked, 
balanced, moved a fraction of an inch to the right, and 
drove the point of his elbow backward with all the natural 
strength of his arm. 

It was a move executed with a hesitationless smoothness 
and accuracy that would have made it lethal against a 
trained fighter. It was aimed to be lethal. The elbow-point 
was fired with impossible accuracy into the unprotected 
area just below the man's breastbone, and driving upward. 


It would have torn lungs, crushed arteries, and possibly 

burst the heart. The only reason it did not do so, and did 

not kill, was that at the last split second Paul realized 

what was about to happen and managed to slightly de


flect the aim. 

Still, it lifted the man and slammed him back against 
the hallway wall, from which he fell forward and lay on 
his side, eyes half showing under fallen lids, legs a little 
drawn up and twitching with little spasmodic movements. 
Even as it was, he had been severely damaged. 

And so almost, it seemed, had Paul. 

It was nearly as if the blow he bad just struck had recoiled 
on him with most of its original force. He doubled 
up as if he had been the target. A washback of emotion 
shuddered through his whole body, and he staggered 
blindly down the hall, dizzy, nauseated, half-blinded, 
and bent over. Still moving, however, he got himself under 
control. Somehow he sought for and found the control 
in him that was necessary, and it was like pushing a button. 
So swiftly that it almost seemed he had never felt it, 
the reaction vanished from him and he straightened up. 

He found himself now at the end of the hall, by more 
tall, curtained windows. The elevator tubes were close and 
there was no place else to go. He remembered that in 
case of trouble he was to seek out Kantele on the sixtieth 
level, and he stepped onto a disk floating up the up 
tube. 

It carried him up with it. Over his head the bottom of 
the immediately superior disk closed him off into a little 
tube-shaped enclosure of which the bottom was his own 
disk, with him filling the tube. For the moment he was 
safe. Looking out through the transparent wall of the 
tube, he saw the various levels dropping past him, but 
though he saw occasional figures in the halls and standing 
by the tubes, none of them seemed to pay any special attention 
to him. 

If the hotel security men were waiting for him any



where, he thought, it would be at the roof-garden top of 
the hotel where the small-craft landing pad was. But that 
was thirty levels above the floor where he intended to 
get off. 

He was at the fifty-eighth level now. He moved forward 
to the edge of the disk, and as the sixtieth level 
approached, he stepped off. 

He stepped almost immediately into a hallway crowd 
of people coming and going, and standing around in 
small, talkative groups. He pushed his way through them 
and stepped into the first entrance to a banquet room 
he found. Within were tables at which chess matches 
were going on, here and there with a few watchers clustered 
around some special pair of players. Kantele was 
not in view. He left the room and went on. 

In the third room he visited he found Kantele. She was 
with several other people who were watching an individual 
match across the room from the entrance, and not 
too far from the French windows which indicated an 
outside balcony or terrace beyond the banquet room. She 
was standing behind the chair of a man who, with a sudden 
quickening of his pulse, Paul recognized to be 
Blunt. Blunt sat leaning forward, absorbed in the condition 
of the board he was observing, and Kantele stood 
with one hand on his wide shoulder. 

It occurred to Paul that he was going to have the 
chance of facing Blunt sooner than he had expected. He 
started toward the table where Blunt and Kantele 
watched, and abruptly stopped. 

He no longer had the walking stick. 

Paul stood still, and for a second the hum and movement 
of the room faded almost out of his consciousness. 
His hand was empty. But he could not remember either 
dropping the stick or laying it aside. All that occurred 
to him was that he must have let go of it in the reaction 
that followed his elbow-jabbing of the security man. 
Well, if that was the case, Blunt might have something 


to explain to the policeand then he might not. It 

might be that, as in the case of Tyne's visit to 2309, hotel 

security would, on finding the stick, politely cover up 

for him. 

At any rate, Paul intended to face the Chantry Guild 
head now. Paul went forward again. 

But he was already too late. Kantele, he found, had 
already looked up and seen him. Her face unnaturally 
expressionless, she shook her head at his advance and 
then gestured with a nod at the French windows. Paul 
hesitated for a second, then turned and obeyed. 

He passed the tables and stepped through one of the 
French windows, closing it behind him. He found himself, 
as he had expected, on a long and fairly narrow terrace 
with a waist-high parapet of ornamental stone around 
it. Beyond the parapet he could see the rooftops of lower 
surrounding buildings, and beyond them the farther levels 
of Chicago Complex. The afternoon had turned out to be 
almost cloudless, and the bright sun lanced warmly across 
the white, round tables and translucent, single-legged 
chairs on the terrace. He walked to the parapet and looked 
over. 

Below him the side of the Koh-i-Nor's North Tower fell 
sheer in an unbroken pattern of alternate window glass 
and marbled tile to the top level of commuter traffic, 
sixty stories below. Postage-stamp-size directly underneath 
him was the main concourse in front of the tower, 
and, a narrow two hundred yards away across it, some 
sort of office building with a single aircar on its landing 
pad, and the highly-polished surface of the building's 
construction tile reflecting the utter blue of the sky. 

He turned back from the parapet. On the white table 
top nearly beside him was a brightly-illustrated throwaway 
magazine left by some earlier visitor to the terrace. 
The breeze across the terrace ruffled and tried to turn 
its pages. He glanced at the titles in colorful type on its 
cover. The lead one jumped at him. 


WAS GANDHI'S WAY RIGHT? 

And under this, in slightly less bold print: 

The Psychotics of Our Overcrowded Cities 

The author of this later article, he noticed with interest, 
was the same Dr. Elizabeth Williams, psychiatrist, he had 
encountered only the week before. 

He reached for the magazine to turn to the article. 

"Formain," said a voice. He looked up and turned. 

Facing him from about fifteen feet away, his hand on 
the half-open French door through which he must just 
have stepped out onto the terrace, was Butler. The small 
hotel security man stood with one hand thrust into the 
right pocket of his barrel-cut jacket His face was as polite 
as ever. 

"You better come along quietly with me, Formain," 
he said. 

Paul let go of the magazine. The fingers of his single 
hand flexed reflexively. He took a casual step in Butler's 
direction. 

"Stop there," said Butler. He took his hand out of his 
pocket, revealing a small finger gun. Paul stopped. 

"Don't be foolish," said Paul. 

Butler looked at him with the closest approach to a 
flicker of emotion in his face that Paul had yet seen. 
"I think that's my line," Butler said. "Don't be foolish, 
Formain. Come along quietly." 

Paul looked across the short distance separating them. 
His first impulse, as it had been with the agent in the 
hallway, had been to go into action. He had checked that 
And now a part of him waited critically to see what the 
other part of him might do. He looked at Butler, trying 
to narrow down his mental field of vision. Trying to see 
the man as something individual, unique, limited by the 
forces that tied him into his environment, by the very 
elements that made him dangerous. 


Anyone can be understood, Paul told himself. Anyone. 


For a second, Butler's image seemed to swim in Paul's 
retina with the effort Paul was making, like a figure seen 
through the bottom of a drinking glass. Then the image 
cleared. 

"I don't intend to be foolish," said Paul. He sat down 
on the edge of the table beside him. "I'm not going with 
you." 

"Yes," said Butler. He held the finger gun steady. 

"No," said Paul. "If you take me in, in tell the police 
that you were the source of supply for the drugs of the 
man in 2309. Ill tell them you used to be a drug addict 
yourself." 

Butler gave a small, tired sigh. 

"Come along, Formain," he said. 

"No," said Paul. "To take me, you'll have to shoot me 
first. If you kill me, there's bound to be the kind of investigation 
you don't want. If you do less than kill me, 
I'll tell them what I just told you I'd say." 

There was a moment's silence on the terrace. While it 
lasted, they could both hear the leaves of the magazine 
rustling in the breeze. 

"I am not a drug addict," said Butler. 

"No," said Paul. "But you were until some fanaticism, 
some particular blind faith gave you the strength to kick 
the habit. You're not afraid of the fact being found out 
so much as the fact that an investigation into the fact 
would cause you to be cut off from this source of strength. 
If I mention it, the police will have to investigate the 
matter. So, you're going to let me go." 

Butler regarded him. The security man's expression was 
as unreadable as ever, but the finger gun jerked for a 
second as his hand trembled momentarily. He hid the 
hand back in the pocket of his jacket. 

"Who told you?" he asked. 
"You did," said Paul. "Being the sort of man you 
are, the rest had to follow." 


Butler watched him for a second more, then turned 
toward the French door behind him. 

"Someday I'll make you tell me who told you," he said, 
and went back into the banquet rooms where the chessmen 
were at war. 

The French door had barely closed behind him when 
one of the other doors opened and Kantele stepped 
through, quickly closing the door behind her. She came 
quickly over to Paul, her fine-cut features pale and her 
lips a little compressed above the square blue shoulders 
of her tailored jacket and the tooled-leather strap of the 
heavy handbag cutting into one of them. 

"How did youno, don't tell me," she corrected herself 
as she met him. "There isn't time. There are a dozen 
more hotel men going through the banquet rooms. 
Here..." 

She lifted her large handbag onto one of the tables 
and pressed it at certain points. It opened out like a 
slow-motion jack-in-the-box. It was a one-man parachute 
copter, of the emergency type used by aircraft and fire 
departments. She unbuckled the straps that would fit 
around his shoulders and helped him into it. 

"As long as the air-traffic police don't spot you, you'll 
be all right," she said, tightening the straps upon him. 
"Head for the rooftop of that building opposite." 

The sound of one of the French doors opening made 
them both turn. It flew open, smashing against one of the 
tables, and two men catapulted onto the terrace, drawing 
guns from their jackets. 

Paul did not hesitate. With one sweep of his powerful 
arm he snatched up the table alongside and threw it, as if 
it had been a balsawood mock-up of itself, at the two 
charging men. 

They dodged, but not quickly enough. They went down 
before it. And Paul, sweeping Kantele up in his grasp, 
took one long step to the top of the parapet, and another 
off into sixty levels of emptiness. 


Chapter 9 


They fell like a stone, while Paul's hand, restricted by 
the fact that his arm must keep its hold on Kantele, 
fumbled with the controls of the parachute copter. He located 
them finally and switched them on, and suddenly 
it was like a heavy brake being applied against the force 
of gravity as the spinning blades blurred into action to 
break their fall. 

"I'm sorry," he said to Kantele. "But they'd seen you 
with me. I couldn't leave you behind to face the music." 

She did not answer. Her head lay back and sideways 
against his shoulder and her eyes were closed. Her face 
was like the face of someone who has surrendered completely 
to some superior force. 

Paul turned his attention to guiding the copter toward 
the building across the concourse from the hotel. He was 
only partially successful. The copter, powerful enough 
to handle a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound individual, was 
fighting a losing battle in trying to uphold the combined 
weights of a man and woman both wen above the average 
in size. They were drifting off and down at a long slant, 
the way the winged seed of a maple tree flutters to earth in 
fall winds. 

"The rooftop, you said?" asked Paul. Her eyes remained 
closed. He joggled her a little. "Kantele!" 

She opened her eyes, slowly. 

"Yes," she said. "What's that noise?" 


There were faint, piping noises around them. Looking 
back over his shoulder, Paul saw the two men he had 
bowled over with the table, leaning on the parapet with 
their forearms, almost casually. But the fists of both held 
dark objects. They were shooting at Paul and Kantele. 

The anesthetic slivers of metal which were the missiles 
of their weapons could not be too accurate at the present 
and steadily increasing range. Air police were the greater 
danger. Paul fingered the controls and they rotated slowly 
through a hundred-and-eighty-degree angle. 

To the north of them and about five hundred feet up, 
were two specks approaching rapidly. Kantele saw them 
as Paul did, but she said nothing. 

"And after we land on the roof, what?" asked Paul. 
He looked down into her face. She had closed her eyes 
again. 

"Jase is waiting, on the floor below." She answered 
almost dreamily, and her head was back against bis shoulder 
again. 

"The floor below?" Paul was puzzled and nearly provoked 
by her. She seemed to have given the matter completely 
over into his hands. "We haven't time for the roof. 
I'll try for a window." 

"If he has it open," she said dreamily, without opening 
her eyes. 

He understood what she meant. They were falling 
swiftly, even though at a slant. If Jason Warren did not 
see them coming and get the window open in time, they 
would most certainly smash themselves against the unbreakable 
glass, bending their copter blades and ending 
in an unchecked drop to the traffic level thirty or forty 
stories below. There would be no hope for them. 

"He'll have it open," said Paul. She did not disagree. 

The police cars were swelling in size visibly with the 
swiftness of their approach. But the building before them 
was close now, too. Looking down, Paul suddenly saw 
one of the top level's larger windows slide back. 

He angled the copter toward it. 


For a moment he thought that he would be falling too 
rapidly to make it over the open sill. Then it leaped up 
before him. He jammed the controls on to full braking 
power, ready to bum the copter's small motor out now 
that it had served its purpose. 

The last burst of effort from the device saved them. 
The copter shot them through the window, checked itself 
in the midst of its own suddenly enclosed hurricane, 
and froze its bearings with an ear-splitting screech. Paul 
and Kantele dropped less than three inches to land on 
their feet, upright upon an office floor. 

The hurricane with its floating documents and light 
objects blew itself suddenly out, and the Necromancer 
came toward the two of them from a far corner of the 
room. Kantele opened her eyes and looked about her; 
then, suddenly stiffening, pushed herself almost violently 
away from Paul and, turning her back, walked several 
steps from him until a desk blocked her path. Paul looked 
after her, frowning. 

"Get that copter off," said Warren. But Paul was already 
shrugging out of the straps. The piece of ruined 
equipment fell heavily to the floor. 

"Well, Jase?" asked Paul. The minute he had said it 
the name sounded oddly on his tongue. For the first tune 
he realized that he had always thought of the Necromancer 
in terms of his last name. That he had called him by 
the name everybody else who knew him used, was like 
cracking a barrier. He saw the other man glance at him 
for a moment, oddly. 

"We're located, now," said the man called Jase. "We're 
probably surrounded already. We'll have to take another 
way out with you." 

"Why bother?" asked Paul. Jase looked at him again, 
oddly. 

"We take care of our own people, of course," Jase said. 

"Am I one?" asked Paul. 

The Necromancer stopped dead and looked at him. 

"Don't you want to be?" he asked. He nodded toward 


the door of the office. He added, dryly, "If you want to 
walk out there, I won't stop you." 
"No," said Paul, and to his own surprise found himself 
smiling a little sadly, "no, I'm one of you, all right." 

"Good." Jase turned briskly to a desk and swept it 
clean of papers, desk pad, and office instruments. "Shut 
the window," he said, and Kantele went across the room 
to it. As the window closed, Jase lifted a brief case from 
below the table and opened it. 

He took from the brief case a large, hooded, black 
cloak which, when he put it on and pulled the hood over 
his head, covered him almost completely. In the shadow 
of the hood his face lost something of its identity. 
Kantele had come back to the table. He took also from 
the brief case what looked like three good-sized cones of 
incense, and lighted them. They immediately began to 
pour forth a dense, heavy smoke which quickly started to 
obscure the room. The smoke, to Paul's senses, had a 
sweet, almost cloying smell and evidently something 
narcotic about it, for he felt himself getting light-headed 
with the first few inhalations. 

They were all standing close around the desk. The 
room was a fog of dark smoke now, in which Paul's 
drugged senses were already having difficulty focusing on 
nearby objects. Across the desk from him the Necromancer's 
voice came suddenly, deeper-toned than ordinary, 
measured, chanting.... 

"This ae nighte, this ae nighte, everie night and 
alle..." 

Kantele's voice, from another quarter of the table, 
chimed in. And what had been pure doggerel recital from 
Jase's lips acquired a touch of music with the addition 
of her voice. 

"Fire and sleete and candlelight, destruction take thee 
alle." 

The Necromancer produced one more item and put it 
on the desk. At the sight of it Paul's mind went suddenly 
white with an awareness of danger. He would have been a 


poor sort of mining engineer not to have recognized it. 
What Jase had just put on the table was a cotton block of 
blasting jelly two inches on a side, enough to reduce the 
office and everyone within it to uncollectable fragments. 
It was topped with no more than a ninety-second fuse, 
and as Paul peered through the gathering smoke, the 
Necromancer pinched the fuse and started it burning. 

Jase chanted alone: 

"If from hence away thou'rt past" 

And Kantele's voice joined him in chorus: 

"Everie nighte andalle..." 

"To Whinny-muir thou comest at last," Jase chanted 
alone. 
"Destruction take thee alle." Kantele joined again. 
He should not have recognized what they were chant


ing, but it happened that Paul did. From where or how it 
came to him, he could not in that smoke-fogged moment 
remember. But it was a somewhat changed version of one 
of the old north-of-England corpse chants, sung at wakes 
with the corpse under the table and a dish of salt on its 
breast. It was a ritual with its roots going back beyond 
Christianity to the ancient Celts, to a time when small 
dark men crept together in the forests to sing their dead 
kinsman on his road of shadows, in the first nights after 
his departure. And the version Paul heard now had 
none of the solemn music of its seventeenth-century 
shape, but was nearly back to the harsh atonal chant of 
the original primitive, cold as winter stones and unsparing 
as the wind across them. On it went, with Jase speaking 
alone and then Kantele joining in the chorus. It was a 
"lyke-wake dirge": 

"If ever thou gavest roof and flame, 
Everie nighte and alle... 
Pass thee by the standing stane, 

Destruction take thee alle. 


"The standing stane, when thou art past, 

Everie nighte and alle ... 

To empty airt thou comest fast, 

Destruction take thee alle. 

"If ever thou feddest fish or fowl, 
Everie nighte and ..." 

Distantly, through the chanting and the swirling smoke, 
came the sound of a loud-speaker from beyond the closed 
window. 

"Formain! Paul Formain! This is the police. We have 
you completely surrounded. If you do not come out within 
two minutes, and those with you, we will force an 
entrance." There was a momentary pause, and then the 
speaker once more rattled the window. "Formain! Paul 
Formain. This is the police. We have you...." 

Meanwhile, in the office the smoke was now so thick 
that even the cotton block of blasting jelly and its rapidly 
diminishing fuse was hidden from Paul's eyes. He seemed 
to hear the chanting of Jase and Kantele mounting in volume: 


"From empty airt when thou'rt past 

Everie nighte and alle ... 

To Alleman's Ende thou comest at last, 

Destruction take thee alle." 

Something was happening now. The fuse was shortening 
fast. A pressure was building up about the three of 
them and the desk between them. Paul felt a sudden 
deep-moving urge to join with Kantele in the chorus of the 
chant. He heard the fuse fizzing. A part of him shouted 
that in seconds he would be blown to pieces. But another 
part watched, detached and curious, and checked the 
chant in him before it reached his lips. 

"And if thou holdest to any thinge 
Everie nighte and alle... 


The Ende thou canst not enter in, 

Destruction take thee alle." 

Jase's and Kantele's voices were all around Paul now, 
like a loop of rope holding them all together and drawing 
tighter. The fuse must be all burned down now. 

"But if thou guardest nae thing at all, 

Everie nighte andalle... 

To Alleman's Ende thou'lt passe and falle 

And Destruction'll take thee alle!" 

Suddenly, Jase and Kantele were gone, and almost in 
the same fraction of a second the world lighted up around 
Paul and he felt the sudden slam of enormous pressure 
against him, as if he were a fly clapped between two giant 
hands. He was aware, for one tiny moment of perception, 
of the office flying to pieces around him as the blasting 
jelly exploded, and then he himself seemed to fly off into 
nothingness. 


Book Two: SET 

By stony staircase, hall, and pier, 
Those shadows mazed around me there, 
Wove doubt on doubt, andfools!broke out 
That part in me that feared no doubt. 


The Enchanted Tower 


Chapter 10 


With the situation fully and correctly understood, it becomes 
entirely reasonable that the very small fraction of 
a second preceding a violent death could be a trigger to 
speculative thought. 

Ninety-three years after Paul was caught by the explosion 
of the block of blasting jelly, the phenomenon of 
no-timethat is, of a state of existence in which time is 
lackingwas finally and fully explained. It had been 
made use of, of course, even by people preceding the 
Chantry Guild. On a hit-and-miss basis. But with the development 
of the phase-shift form of transportation that 
permitted the interstellar expansion of the human race, 
it became necessary to understand the a-time state which 
was basic to the phase shift. Briefly and crudely, the explanation 
was that there is a reciprocal relationship between 
time and position. And if time becomes nonexistent 
(perhaps nonoperative would be a better word) then 
the choice of position becomes infinite. 

There are, of course, practical difficulties limiting the 
use of this, which arise when the problem of exactly calculating 
the desired position arises. But that has been 
explained in a different place.* Once more, in the future 
and again in a different place, the problem of no-time 
will be entered into once again when the philosophical 

*DORSAI!Commander-in-chief II 


aspects of it become relevant But for now, to return 
once more to the historical moment of the exploding 
blasting-jelly cube, the important thing is that for vulgar 
practical purposes, no-time can be taken merely to mean 
sufficient, uncounted time. 

No oneliterally, no oneis immune to error. It had 
been an error for Paul to linger behind Jase and Kantele 
in their departure and be caught by the first edge of the 
explosion. Having been caught, there was only one way 
out He went instinctively into no-time to escape being 
destroyed, as lesser individuals have done before him. 
Nearly everyone has heard of the authenticated instance 
of the man who walked around the horses of his coach 
into nonexistence, and there are many others. 

In no-time he remained conscious, and was triggered 
into a sudden awareness that since the original boating 
accident, at no time had he ever been without some element 
of awareness. Even his sleep had been given over 
either to periods of asymbolic thought on the subconscious 
level or to dreams. And his dreams, in fact, seemed 
a fine mill in the complex of his mental machinery. 
A mill which took the results of the crude data that had 
been mined from the solid substances of his daytime 
surroundings by the tools of his senses, then rough-
crushed by the intellectual upper processes of his intelligence, 
and now were ground to fine powders and begun 
on the obscurer process that would separate out the pure 
valuable elements of comprehension. 

Other than this he did not approach any letting go of 
his awareness. It had occurred to him that this might be 
the basic cause of his unyielding refusal to accept hypnosis. 
But this explanation failed to completely satisfy 
him in that area of his perception in which he was most 
sensitiveit did not feel like the complete answer. If 
the recognizable processes by which he attempted to understand 
and control his environment could be compared 
to the mechanical, this last could be best compared to 
something chemical. And this was so powerful and ef



fective a tool in its own way that for practical purposes 
it blinded him to the common channels of reasoning. It 
was extremely difficult for him to add two and two and get 
four. It was exceedingly simple and natural for him to 
contemplate two by itself, as an isolated element, and 
find four as an implied, characteristic possibility of it. 

He looked out on all existence through a window that 
revealed only unique elements. He approached everything 
in terms of isolates. Isolates and their implied possibilities 
of characteristics. All time, for example, was implied in 
any single moment that he might choose to examine. But 
the moment itself was unique and unalterably separated 
from any other moment, even though the other moment 
also implied all of time. 

It followed that it was almost impossible for him to be 
tricked or lied to. Any falsity palmed off on him almost 
immediately collapsed like fraudulently understrength 
construction under the natural weight of its own proliferating 
possibilities. It also followed, and this was not always 
an advantage, that he was almost impossible to 
surprise. Any turn of events, being implied in the moment 
preceding its taking place, seemed perfectly natural 
to him. As a result he did not question a great many 
things that he might normally have been expected to 
question. 

He had not, therefore, questioned the abilities the 
Chantry members seemed to claim for themselves. It 
had seemedto this part of him, at leastquite reasonable 
that Jase and Kantele should attempt to make their 
escape with him by means of narcotic smoke, archaic 
corpse chant, and a block of blasting jelly with a short 
fuse. He had, however, allowed himself to get so interested 
in what was going on that he found himself left 
behind and caught in the first microsecond of the explosion. 


He was driven out to the very edges of his consciousness, 
but no farther. He was aware of himself moving 
very swiftly and at the same time being driven by the 


explosion away down into the impossibly tiny end of 
something like an enormous funnel. He flew through this 
into all but complete unconsciousness, fighting for survival. 
He was an infinity of fathoms deep in darkness, 
but somewhere above him was light and life. 

He came up, fighting. 

His mind was quicker to react to full consciousness 
again than his body. He woke to find himself plunging 
clear across some sort of small, bare room with a circular, 
raised stage in the center of it, and carrying four men 
along with him as they attempted to restrain him. He was 
headed for the door to the room. 

He checked, understanding. And, after a second, the 
men holding on to him let go. As they cleared away 
from in front of him, Paul caught sight of himself in the 
mirror surface of a far wall. His clothes were torn, apparently 
by the explosion, and his nose was bleeding 
slightly. He got a handkerchief tissue from his pocket 
and wiped the blood away from his upper lip. The nose 
stopped bleeding. Jase and Kantele watched Mm from 
across the room. 

"I don't understand this," said one of the men who 
had been holding him, a small, brisk-looking man with a 
shock of brown hair over a sharp-featured face. He looked 
at Paul almost challengingly. "How did you get here? 
If Jase brought you, why didn't you come with Jase?" 

Paul frowned. 

"I seem to have been a little slow," he said. 

"Never mind," spoke up Jase from across the room. "If 
you're all right now, Paul, come on." 

He led the way out of the room, Kantele following 
with a momentary, troubled glance in Paul's direction. 
Paul went after them. 

He caught up with them in a hall outside the room. It 
was a blank wall without windows, and it led them up an 
incline until they stepped suddenly around a corner and 
emerged into open air. Paul looked curiously around 
himself. They had emerged onto a vast field spotted with 


the raised white concrete pads from which space-going 
vehicles fitted with their great collars of lifting equipment 
took off. Beyond were the snow-topped peaks of 
a mountain range Paul did not recognize. 

It was no commercial field. The uniformity of the constructions 
about the field and the khaki coveralls of the 
personnel about spoke clearly to the effect that this was 
a government installation. 

"Where are we?" asked Paul. But Jase was already 
striding away with Kantele to a pad occupied by the 
squat, almost bulbous shape of an outer-space vessel 
looking like an ancient artillery shell many times enlarged, 
and fitted with its spreading soup-plate collar of 
atmosphere engines, ducted fans in the outer ring, ramjets 
in toward the center. Paul caught up with Jase and 
Kantele. 

"Where are we?" he asked again. 

"Tell you after we're aboard," said Jase economically. 
They walked along together, Jase staring straight ahead 
toward the ship, his face like a knife edge, Kantele 
with her wordless gaze down and ahead, so that she 
looked at the treated gravel surface of the field on which 
no green grew, just before her as she walked. Paul felt a 
sudden small rush of sorrow that human beings should 
be so locked away and separate in their body and mind, 
so bound to different wheels. And, with a sudden soundless 
shock, it occurred to him that out of all the real 
universe the one class of isolates who strove and threatened 
to burst the bounds of their separateness was people. 


This realization, simple as it appeared in bald statement, 
exploded in Paul like a pan of flash powder set 
off before a man in a vast and complex city, standing 
lightless under the stars. It blinded, rather than illuminated, 
but its light left an afterimage printed on the 
retinas of the explorer in the dark, and would be permanently 
remembered. With his mind washed clean of other 
matters for the moment, Paul walked automatically into 


the base tunnel of the take-off pad, rode the elevator up 
through pad and collar, and paid little attention to anything 
until the whine of the outer ring of fans began to 
impinge on his consciousness. He came back to present 
awareness to see that he was seated in a convertible acceleration 
couch-chair, in a passenger compartment of the 
ship. In front of him he could see the black top of Jase's 
head just showing above the top cushion of the next 
couch-chair, and across the aisle from Jase, up against 
the rounded wall enclosing the elevator-tunnel running 
up the center of the ship, he saw the profile of Kantele. 

The ship lifted. After a little the sound of the fans was 
drowned out in the beginning thunder of the jets, which 
mounted the ladder of volume into silence. A little after 
that, the viewing tank in the wall beside Paul lighted up, 
and, looking into this illusion of a window, he saw the 
lifting collar of atmosphere engines, their earth-bound 
clumsiness all left behind, fall away gracefully like some 
enormous soaring bird toward the cloud-laced earth far 
below. 

"Couchback, all passengers," announced a speaker system 
somewhere above Paul's head. "All passengers, 
couchback now." 

The chairs tilted and leveled into horizontal position. 
Deep cushioning buffers moved in about bis body. There 
was a moment of silence and then the space engines fired, 
and their mighty thrust threw the blunt body of the ship, 
with Kantele, and Jase, and Paul, and all within it, out 
between the stars. 

Mercury, Paul discovered, was a five-day run. The 
ship had four cross levels between the pilot room in the 
nose and the engines in the rear. The passengers were 
restricted to two of them. Evidently because it was government 
procedure, they were required to take mild sedatives 
during the actual flight. These made Kantele and 
three other passengers whom Paul did not know sleepy. 
They spent most of their time dozing with their couch-
chairs in a reclining position. Jase had disappeared early 


up into the crew's section and Paul had not seen him 

after that for the first four days of the run. Since Kantele 

seemed to reinforce the effect of her sedatives with an 

obvious disinclination to have anything to do with Paul, 

once more that left Paul solitary. 

To Paul's unusual set of mental and physical reactions, 

the sedatives brought a bodily lethargy, but an increase 

in mental speculation and introspection. Jase had escaped 

early before Paul could question him again, but a tall, 

stiff-backed man, in the seat behind Paul and across the 

aisle which with the two rows of seats circled the central 

elevator shaft, had replied to Paul's question. 

"Operation Springboard," he had said sharply. He stared 
almost fiercely at Paul out of middle-aged eyes above a 
neat white mustache that contrasted with the brown tan of 
his face. "You know about the project to reach the Arcturian 
planets, don't you? Apprentice, are you?" 

"Yes," said Paul. 
"Ask your master, boy! He'll answer you. Who is he? 
Necromancer Warren?" 

Secretly a little amused to be addressed as "boy," a 
term he had not had used to him since he was fourteen, 
Paul nodded. 

"That's right," he said. "Do you happen to be a Necromancer, 
too?" 

"No, no," said the man. "Sociologistwhat they call 
'untitled.' Don't have the patience for the rigmarole. But 
it's fine work for a younger man like yourself to get into." 
He grew fiercer, suddenly. The white mustache seemed 
to bristle. "A good work!" 

"Necromancy?" asked Paul. 
"All of it. All of it. Think of our children ... and their 
children." 

A man of about the same age as the white-mustached 
speaker leaned out of a couch-chair farther back on 
Paul's side of the circular aisle. 

"Heber," he said. 

"Yes, yes," said the white-mustached man, sinking 


back into his seat. "You're right, Tom. Don't ask me 

questions, boy; ask your master. I've got to take my med


ication now, anyway." He reached into the little compart


ment in one arm of his chair, and Paul, giving up that 

avenue of information, turned and sat back in his own 

place. 

He had plenty to occupy his mind. He let his attention 

go free among it. 

It was a type of mental activity having its own element 
of actual built-in pleasure reward, a pleasure to 
which, he had lately come to realize, it would be quite 
possible to become addicted, if it were not for the fact 
that the basic drive to accomplish forbade too much loitering 
on the pathway from means to end. It was the 
sheer pleasure of turning the questioning spirit loose in 
the great dark city of all personal knowledge. For those 
who panicked easily in the dark, it was no occupation. 
But for those without fear and the true night-sight of 
understanding, there was no pleasure like that of wandering 
some strange and intricate part of that city, until 
out of shadow rose shapes, and out of shapes, plan, and 
out of planoriginal purpose. Only then, at last with 
original purpose encompassed and understood, came 
perhapsthe greater occupation of putting that knowledge 
to work in new building. 

So for five days Paul all but lost himself in a new 
part of his city of knowledge. It was only shortly before 
landing on Mercury that he was abruptly called back 
from it, and the one who called him back was Kantele. 

"I wasn't going to ask you why," she said. He awoke 
to the fact that she was standing in the aisle before his 
seat, looking down at him. "But I just can't. . . . Why 
did you do it? Why did you have to kill Malorn?" 

"Kill who?" asked Paul. For a second she and her 
question was still mixed La with the shapes of his 
thoughts. Then the shapes faded and he became aware 
that they were, at least as far as he could see on this side 


of the elevator shaft, alone on the level among the couch-
chairs. 

"Kevin Malornthe man at the hotel." 

"Kevin Malorn," echoed Paul. For a part of a second 
the only thing that was in his mind was a feeling of unutterable 
sadness that he should have been the instrument 
of the man's death and never until now known the 
name under which other people had known him alive. 

"You won't tell me," said Kantele, when he did not 
answer immediately. He looked up at her pale, set face. 
"Yes," he said. "But you probably won't believe me. I 
didn't kill him. I don't know why he died." 

She stared at him for a moment longer, then whirled 
about and walked off around the elevator tube. Following 
a little later, he discovered all the other passengers one 
level up in the lounge, watching in the large tank there 
the ascent of the landing collar, with chemical engines 
fueled by native Mercury products, that would carry 
them safely down to that planet's surface. 


Chapter 11 


It was a strange tumbled landscape through which they 
all walked the half mile from the ship to the reception 
dome of Station Springboard. The sky was white to the 
right and dark to the left, and cloudless. There was enough 
of an atmosphere here on the surface of Mercury's twilight 
zone to scatter the light in this direction. The resulting 
illumination seen through the face windows of 
Paul's protective suit was like the yellow glare before a 
thunderstorm back under the kinder sky of Earth. In this 
all-pervasive, unchanging light, the terrain appeared to be 
peopled with the split and damaged fragments of fantastic 
sculptures. It would be the temperature changes of 
alternating dark-side and light-side storms that had caused 
this, and the volcanic action along the line of weakness 
in Mercury's crust that the Twilight Zone represented. 
But still it looked like a country out of a dream of un


reality, a garden out of a nightmare, set up and despoiled 
by witches. 

They entered the dome and stepped through a lock into 
an elevator which sank for a quite noticeable distance. 
Paul guessed that he might now be in the neighborhood 
of forty to sixty levels underground, for the elevator had 
been a large mechanical, rather than magnetic, one, and 
the descent had been uncomfortably swift As the elevator 
halted, a further door opened and they passed into 
a desuiting room. 


From the desuiting room they were herded into separate 
cubicles for what Jase informed Paul were purposes 
of decontamination. Paul found himself instructed 
by a wall speaker to strip, pass through a shower area, 
and a further door where new clothes for him would be 
waiting. 

He did so and came out into another cubicle, this one 
not much more than an area hacked out of the solid 
granitic rock. On a concrete bench there a pile of clothing 
was waiting for him. 

He set about putting it on and found it to be of a peculiar 
style. There were soft leather shoes, pointed at the 
toe, fawn-colored; what seemed to be long green stockings; 
shorts; a green smock with a loose belt to cinch it 
up, and a sort of half-sleeved leather jacket 

It seemed likely to Paul that the Chantry Guild was 
given to dressing for dinner, so to speak, here on Mercury. 
He put the clothes onthe left arm of smock and 
jacket had been designed sleeveless and all the clothes 
were in his sizeand stepped through the further door of 
the second cubicle. 

He checked instinctively. 

He had emerged into a single, low-ceilinged room, 
crudely hollowed out of the rock and lighted by two flaring 
torches in heavy wall brackets of some metal-like 
blackened iron. The floor itself was roughhewed of rock 
and pressed hard against the soles of his feet through the 
soft leather of his shoes. Beyond the torches was darkness 
and he could see no far wall. 

He turned quickly, back the way he had come. And 
stopped. There was no door behind him, through where 
he had stepped a minute before. He faced more of the 
hewn-rock wall, only that He reached out and touched 
it with his hand. It felt as solid as judgment day. 

He turned back to the light of the torches. Between 
them now, he saw standing the man called Heber, the 
torchlight sparkling on his white mustache. Unlike Paul, 
he was clothed in a single scarlet robe and hood. The 


hood threw a shadow across his forehead and the long 

sleeves of the robe fell together from his hands, which 

were joined together before him. 

"Come here," said Heber. His lips trembled a second 
after the last word, as if he could just barely restrain 
himself from adding "boy!" Paul walked up to him and 
stopped. Heber was looking past him, the older man's 
shadowed eyes seeming fantastically deep-socketed in the 
shadow of the hood. 

"I am here to sponsor this apprentice," announced 
Heber, "to his initiation into the Socit Chanterie. It is required 
that there be two sponsors, one visible and one invisible. 
Is the other sponsor here?" 

"I am," said the voice of Jason Warren, startlingly at 
Paul's right ear. He turned and saw nothing but the walls 
of the room. But he could now feel the presence of Jase 
beside him. 

Paul turned back to Heber. The white-mustached man, 
he saw, was now holding in one arm a heavy, leather-
bound, archaic-looking book. In the other hand he held 
by the middle a snake about four feet in length, which 
twisted and writhed. 

"To the jurisdiction of the Alternate Laws you have 
come," said Heber. "To the jurisdiction of the Alternate 
Laws are you now committed and sealed. And to the 
jurisdiction of the Alternate Laws will you be bound, for 
all time past or present, and beyond time until the Alternate 
Laws cease their effect." 

"I witness this," said the voice of Jason, at Paul's shoulder. 


"Take then your spear," said Heber. He held out the 
snake toward Paul's single hand. Paul reached for it, but 
at the first touch of his fingers around it, it ceased suddenly 
to move and live. He found himself holding, in fact, 
a tall wooden spear with a dully gleaming metal point 

"Take then your shield," said Heber, stepping forward 
with the book. But it was a kite-shaped metal shield, with 
leather grips riveted to a wooden frame, that he hung 


from Paul's armless left shoulder by a wide leather strap. 

"Now follow me," said Heber. He strode off into the 
darkness beyond the torches. And Paul, following after, 
found himself proceeding down slanted tunnels and 
around corners in the rock, until he came finally to a 
small, square, carved-out room where two more torches 
burned on either side of what looked like a stone altar, 
more long than wide. Along the top of the altar were 
laid out, from left to right, a small toy sailboat with the 
tiny figure of the toy sailor within it spilled out as the 
boat lay over on one side, a toy model of the console of 
a mine, a stained and weathered conch shell, and a 
three-dimensional snapshot of the head of Malorn, the 
dead drug addict, showing the broken skull. 

Heber and Paul stopped before the altar. 

"Let the other sponsor now instruct the apprentice," 
he said. Jase's voice spoke from Paul's other side. He 
looked at empty air. 

"The apprentice is an apprentice in the art of Necromancy," 
his voice said. "Therefore we have brought him 
to the root of the tree. Let the apprentice look." 

Paul turned his attention back to the altar. A massive 
tree root now emerged from the rock and arched out over 
the objects on the altar, down to his feet and Heber's. 

"This," said the voice of Jase, "is the well Hvergelmer, 
in the realm of death. The root is the first root of the ash, 
Yggdrasil, which is the tree of life, knowledge, fate, time, 
and space. During the period of his vigil here, it is the 
duty of the apprentice to defend it, and the parts of his 
life which are on the altar. It may be that the apprentice 
will not be attacked during his time of vigil. But it may 
be that the dragon Nidhug and his brood will come to 
gnaw at the root of the tree. If the tree and the parts of 
his life are attacked, the apprentice may call on the 
Alternate Forces or not, as he chooses; but if he does not 
conquer Nidhug, Nidhug will devour him." 

Jase ceased speaking. Heber spoke, and Paul turned 

his head to the white-mustached man. 


"The tree," said Heber solemnly, "is an illusion. Life 
is an illusion. Nidhug and his brood are an illusion, as is 
all the universe, eternity, and time. Only the Alternate 
Forces exist, and time, space, and all things within them 
are merely toys of the Alternate Forces. Know this and 
know yourself unconquerable." 

"You shall keep vigil," put in the sound of the Necromancer's 
voice, "until the third sounding of the gong. 
With the third sounding of the gong, you will be freed 
from the realm of death, back to the world of light and 
life once more. Now I leave you, until the third ringing 
of the gong." 

Paul felt a void suddenly beside him. He turned instinctively 
toward Heber. The white-mustached man was 
still standing beside him. 

"I leave now, too," said Heber. "Until the gong rings 
for the third time." He stepped past Paul, back toward 
the entrance to the room; and as he did, Paul caught the 
ghost of a wink from the man's near eye, and a sotto 
voce mutter, "Rigmarole." 

Then Heber was gone. 

Silence held the room. 

It was the silence of the rock where the rock is igneous 
in nature and far below ground. Here there was no water 
dripping, only the still cold. Even the torches flared in 
silence. Paul's breath went out in a frosty plume in that 
red, dancing light, and vanished with each fresh inhalation. 


But he began to become aware. 

About him was stone, the mineral flesh of Mercury, in 
all directions. The rough, cut stone underfoot pressed 
sharply against his feet, the cold wrapped him like a 
chilly cloak. The minutes passed in solemn procession, all 
but identical one with the other. Time piled up in the 
quiet of the room, the strap of the shield cut into his 
shoulder and his fingers grew a little cramped around 
the wooden shaft of the spear. He held it with its butt on 


the floor, its point elevated, angled a little out from him 
like a Roman sentry. An hour went by, and then another. 
And then, perhaps, another.... 

The solemn, brassy note of a deep gong struck once, 
reverberated through the entrance to the room, and beat 
about his ears. It rang away into silence, leaving a 
memory behind it in the noiselessness of the room until 
that, too, was buried and smoothed over by the marching 
minutes. 

Paul's mind drifted out to an unconscionable distance. 
He leaned on his spear, now, and the shield had swung 
forward with its own weight. He thought of mountains 
whose stony sides and slopes were constructed of empty 
space, and of the twinkling illuminations of distant habitations 
upon the mountain peaks, which were the lights 
of the farther stars, stars not seen from Earth. A bittersweet 
emotion of sorrow and desire stirred in him like 
faint smoke from burning incense. Love and hunger 
pulled against each other within him.... 

And then suddenly, distant in the back of his mind, 
came a chime of warning. 

He came back to the stony room. It was as it had been 
before. The torches still flared upward and his breath 
smoked peacefully on the still air. But now there was 
something more. While he had daydreamed, the deep 
waters of some unseen danger had welled up to the very 
entrance of the room. It lapped now in the darkness just 
beyond the reach of his sight. And in those deep waters, 
there was something stirring. 

It was Nidhug and his scaly brood. 

They were not real. They were an illusion, as was the 
deep mass of waters making a beleaguered island of this 
room. Paul recognized this with a sure and certain swiftness. 
Those minds among the Chantry Guild who were 
capable of such tricks were flooding the solid (but to 
these productions of their minds, transparent) rock with 
the emanations of fear, pictured as heavy, secret waters. 
And through the fear, in the guise of a monstrous, scaly 


worm and its litter, they were now lifting the image of 
self-doubt. These things were fantasies, but nonetheless 
dangerous. Fear can be a deadly danger to the mind, and 
self-doubt can cause an organism to destroy itself, as Paul 
knew. Knowledge could be a shield and wisdom a weapon, 
but it took something uniquely human to use them. 

He braced himself. The rising tide of fear was already 
flooding into the room. If he allowed his senses to yield to 
the fantasy, he could see it, like a gray, quicksilver tide, 
pushing its sullen rivulets into this and that small indentation 
in the rough floor. Nidhug and his children were 
very close. 

The gong rang for a second time. 

The waters crested suddenly, swirling into the room. 
They mounted up to his knees, surged to his waist, and 
in seconds eddied about his throat. They swelled over 
his head. And touched the ceiling. The room was 
drowned. 

One massive body length below the unblocked opening 
of the room, Nidhug gave his final surge of approach. 
He lifted like a demon out of darkness, and a second later 
his hideous mask blocked the entrance to the room. 

Leveling his spear, hunching his shoulder behind the 
shield, Paul went to meet him. As in a nightmare, the 
heavy waters of fear slowed his thrust to a dreamlike 
slowness. The point of his spear slid deliberately through 
the impending medium and glanced off the tortured 
dragon-face. 

But the overdeveloped muscles of Paul's arm, like what 
they represented in Paul himself, were something more 
than ordinary strength. The spear point, glancing off, dug 
a deep furrow from the twisted jaw to the staring eyes, 
and a flood of deep, luminescent, reddish blood stained 
and clouded the atmosphere of the room. 

In this murk the battle became obscure. It became 
drearily a matter of Paul's thrusting back what came at 
him again and again. Gradually there broke on him the 
understanding that this was a contest that he perpetuated 


by the very act of fighting in it. The way to victory here 
was to deny the enemy. He laughed. 

He threw away both shield and spear. 

Like an express train, Nidhug leaped upon him. Paul 
stood still. And the gaping jaws, monstrous before him, 
closed as if on the invisible substance of an inch-thick 
wall between them. And the creature vanished. 

The waters began to slowly ebb from the room. Far 
away the first shivering sounds of the third striking of the 
gong reached out to Paul's ears. 

And in that moment, that tiny piece of a second, with 
the dragon vanished and the waters failing, something 
real and deadly reached through and struck. 

It came from a distance to which the distance to the 
farthest stars was like a step to a long day's journey. It 
came with a speed beside which the speed even of thought 
was too slow to be measurable. It came along the dark 
and cobbled road of which Paul had dreamed on returning 
to the hotel after he had first seen Jase. It was blind 
and young and not yet fully formed, but it recognized its 
still-unarmored foe by sure instinct. And it struck. 

It brought Paul to his knees as a giant might strike 
down a baby with a sword of steelbut it clashed like 
steel on steel against his invincible self behind. For a 
moment the forces hung together, and then the crest 
wave of the sounding gong finished closing the door 
through which the unknown had reached for a microsecond, 
for almost no time at all. And Paul knelt, free, 
but numb and blinded on the hard rock floor. 

Paul's sight returned to show him the white ceiling of a 
room above the cot on which he lay. He was vaguely 
aware that they had carried him here. 

Jase's face loomed over him. It was as keenly honed as 
ever, but there was a touch of friendliness there Paul had 
not seen before. Beside him was the white-mustached 
face of Heber showing concern. 

"Quite a reaction you had there," said Jase, "after it 


was all over. We didn't expect to see you go down like 
that." 

Paul focused on the Necromancer. 

"You didn't?" he said. He frowned. "You certainly 
didn't expect me to stay on my feet?" 
It was Jase's turn to frown, slightly. 
"Why not?" he said. "If you'd stood up to things while 

it was going on, why collapse after it's all over?" 

Paul faced it then. Jase and the other watchers had remained 
unaware. He closed his eyes wearily and a little 
bitterly, for he felt the beginnings of some sort of understanding 
seep into him at last; and understanding, he was 
discovering, like money, does not always bring happiness. 

"Of course. Why not?" he agreed. "You must be right. 
I'm still suffering from the reaction." 


Chapter 12 


Dressed in ordinary jacket and slacks, one week later 
Paul sat with three other journeymen Chantry Guild 
members in a conference room of the orthodox part of 
Station Springboard. Talking to them was a brisk athletic 
young man with a short haircut and no older than 
Paul. Younger, in fact, than two of the journeymen, who 
looked disconcertingly like overfed salesmen in their 
thirties, except that one, who smelled strongly of after-
shaving lotion, was twice as tall as the other. 

"You can't teach the Alternate Laws," the instructor 
had begun by saying, as he half-perched on the edge of 
a table, facing the low, comfortable chairs in which the 
four sat. "Any more than you can teach the essential 
ability to create art, or the essential conviction of a 
religious belief. Does that make sense to you?" 

"Ah, teaching!" said the fourth member of the journeymen 
group, a pleasant-faced, brown-headed young 
man, in an entirely unexpected, bell-toned bass. "What 
crimes have been committed in thy name!" 

Since he had not spoken previously, the resteven including 
the instructorappeared somewhat startled, not 
only by his pronouncement, but by the volume and timbre 
of it. The young man smiled at them. 

"True enough," said the instructor, after a slight pause. 
"And very true to the Alternate Laws. Let's simplify the 
Laws to a ridiculous extreme and say that the point they 


express is that as a rule of thumb, if it works best one 
way for everybody else, chances are that way won't be 
the best for you. In other words, if you want to get to the 
top of a mountain and you see a broad, well-marked, 
much-traveled road headed straight for it, the last route 
you should choose to the top of the mountain would be 
up that road." 

He stopped talking. They all looked at him expectantly.


"No," he said, "I'm not going to tell you why. That 
would be teaching. Teaching is good only for learners, not 
for discoverers. Right now is the one and only time in 
the Chantry Guild that you're going to encounter anything 
like a question-and-answer period." He looked them over. 
"You're at liberty to try and tell me why, if you want to." 

"Ah," said the large salesman sort with the shaving-
lotion smell. He got the interjection out hurriedly, and it 
was at once noticeable to all his audience that his voice, 
though loud and determined, was neither bass nor bell-
toned. "Iahunderstand that the Alternate Laws are 
parapsychological in nature. Can it be that involvement 
with the ordinary, that is to sayahscientific, laws 
has an inhibiting effect upon the person'sI mean the 
different sort of person who is able to take advantage of 
the powers of the Alternate Forces?" He drew a quick 
breath and added quickly, "I mean, bis. essential difference, 
so to speak?" 

"No," said the instructor, kindly. 

"No? Oh," said the other. He sat back, cleared his 
throat, crossed his legs, got out a handkerchief, and blew 
his nose loudly. 

"The area of parapsychology," said the instructor, "is 
only a small part of the universe of time and space. The 
Alternate Laws cover all this and more." 

"They mean what they say, don't they?" asked the 
smaller salesman-type unexpectedly. "Alternate Laws 
other laws. And the only way to find the other ways is 
by deliberately avoiding the established way." 


"That's right," said the instructor. 

"Creative," rang the young man with the bass voice. 

"And that's very right," said the instructor. He ran his 
glance from right to left over them. "None of you here 
would have got this far if you hadn't each demonstrated 
some capability in the area of the Alternate Laws. That 
capability may be parapsychologicalsay, teleportation. 
Or it might be an ability to write truly creative poetry, 
say. It might even be a particular sensitivity to the needs 
of growing plants. Not that I mean to give you the impression 
that creativity is all of the Alternate Laws, or 
even the key to them." 

"Ah," said the large salesman, uncrossing his legs determinedly, 
"you certainly don't expect us just to write 
poetry or grow plants, or even teleport." 

"No," said the instructor. 

"Thenahcan it be that you mean," said the large 
salesman, perspiration beginning to stand out on his brow, 
"that these thingswhatever they may beare a part, 
only a part, of the Alternate Laws? And it's the rest we 
have to go after? We have to try? We have to get?" 

"Yes," said the instructor. "That's very good. It's not 
a full answer by any means " 

"No, no, of course not," said the large salesman, flushing 
and smiling, and pulling out his handkerchief. He 
blew his nose again as if it were a soldier's bugle. 

"a full answer by any means," said the instructor. 
"In fact, if there is a full answer, I don't know it. Everyone, 
in this, is on his own. And now," he said, standing 
up, "I think you've already had enough discussion about 
an inherently undiscussable subject to last you a lifetime. 
If indeed we haven't already done the damage of setting 
up some artificial concepts. Remember"his whole voice 
and manner changed abruptly; it was almost as if he 
had reached out and wrapped some invisible cloak about 
him"life is an illusion. Time and space and all things 
are an illusion. There is nothing, nothing but the Alternate 
Laws." 


He ceased speaking suddenly. The journeymen got up 
automatically and began to file out. As Paul walked past, 
however, he felt his arm touched by the instructor. 

"Just a minute," the instructor said. Paul turned. The 
other waited until the three other journeymen were out 
of the room. "You didn't say anything at all." 

"Yes," said Paul. "That's right. I didn't." 

"Mind if I ask why?" 

"If I remember rightly," Paul said, "the key word of 
Walter Brant's book is destruct." 

"Yes, it is." 

"And we," said Paul, looking down at the instructor 
from his own greater height, "were talking about creativity." 
"Mmm," said the instructor, nodding his head thoughtfully, 
"I see. You think somebody's lying?" 
"No," said Paul. He felt a sudden weariness that was 
not physical at all. "It's just that there was nothing to say." 

The instructor stared at him. 

"Now you're the one who's baffling me," the instructor 
said. "I don't understand you." 
"I mean," said Paul patiently, "that it's no use saying 
anything." 

The instructor shook his head again. 

"I still don't understand you," he said. "But that's 
all right." He smiled. "In the Guild it's: To thine own self 
be true, thou needst not then explain to any man." 

He patted Paul on the shoulder. 

"Go, man!" he said, and on that note they parted. 

Returning to his room, as Jase had warned him to do 
when not otherwise occupied, Paul passed along the catwalk 
above the relay room in the orthodox part of the 
Station. He had only a vague notion of what went on in 
the three-step accelerator that stretched through nearly a 
quarter mile of the vast cavern five levels high, with thirty- 
and forty-foot banks of equipment surrounding its 
tube shape. From news and magazine accounts he had 


acquired the general knowledge that its function was a 
matter of shuttling a point of higher-level energy back 
and forth along a line of constantly lower energy until the 
point's speed was just under the speed of light. At which 
time it "broke" (i.e., disappeared) and became instead a 
point of no-time, following the same path. This point of 
no-time, if perfectly synchronized with a point of no-time 
back in the laboratory building of World Engineer's 
Headquarters Complex, created a path for instantaneous, 
timeless transmission between the two points. 

Since the point of no-time had universal dimension, 
it could, by a complicated technical process, be used to 
transport objects of any size from the primary station on 
the Earth to the secondary station here on Mercury 
Station. For some reason there had to be a critical minimum 
distance between stationsMars and Venus were 
too close to Earth. Stations there had been tried and had 
failed. But theoretically at least, by this method Springboard 
could have been directly supplied from World 
Engineer's Complex, with anything it needed. It was not, 
in practice, because its function on Mercury was to tinker 
and experiment with its end of the transmission path. Instead, 
most of the Station's solid needs were met by 
resolution of materials from Mercury's crust. 

It was also not only theoretically possible, but practically 
possible, to send living creatures including humans 
by the same route. However, those who tried it flirted 
with insanity or death from psychic shock, and even if 
they missed both these eventualities, could never be induced 
to try it again. Apparently what was experienced 
by the transmittee was a timeless moment of complete 
consciousness in which he felt himself spread out 
to infinite proportions and then recondensed at the receiving 
end. It did no good to use present known sedatives 
or anestheticsthese merely seemed to insure a fatal level 
of shock. Medicine was reported working on a number 
of drugs that showed some promise, but no immediate 
hope of discovering a specific was in sight 


Meanwhile drone ships had been started off at sub-
light velocities for some of the nearer stars known to have 
surrounding systems. The ships bore automatic equipment 
capable of setting up secondary receiving stations on their 
arrival on some safe planetary base. If and when medicine 
came through, the transportation setup would be already 
established. 

All of this touched Paul only slightly. He recognized 
it and passed on, noting only that in passing by and over 
the equipment, as he was doing now, he received from it 
an emanation of mild, pleasurable excitement. Like the 
so-called "electric" feeling in the air before a thunderstorm, 
which comes not only from an excess of ions, 
but from the sudden startling contrast of dark and light, 
from the black thunderheads piling up in one quarter of 
a clear sky, the mutter and leap of sheet lightning and 
thunder along the cloud flanks, and the sudden breath 
and pause of cooler air in little gusts of wind. 

He passed on and entered the area of smaller corridors 
and enclosures. He passed by the double airlock doors of 
the transparent enclosure that held the swimming pool. 
With the relative preciousness of water, this had been 
set up as a closed system Independent of the rest of the 
station and supplied with a certain amount of artificial 
gravitation for Earth-normal swimming and diving. 
Kantele was all alone in the pool. As he passed, he 
saw her go gracefully off the low board. He paused to 
watch her swim, not seeing him, to the side of the pool just 
beyond the glass where he stood. She did not look so slim 
in a bathing suit, and for a moment a deep sensation of 
loneliness moved him. 

He went on, before she could climb out of the pool and 
see him. When he got to his room there was a notice 
attached to the door: "Orientation. Room eight, eighteenth 
level, following lunch, 1330 hours." 

Orientation took place in another conference room. The 
man in charge was in his sixties and looked and acted 


as if he had been on an academic roster for some time. 
He sat on a small raised stage and looked down at Paul, 
the three men who had been with him for the meeting 
with the instructor on the subject of Alternate Laws, and 
six other people, of whom one was a young woman just 
out of her teens, not pretty, but with an amazingly quick 
and cheerful expression. The man in charge, who introduced 
himself as Leland Minault, did not begin with a 
lecture. Instead he invited them to ask him questions. 

There was the usual initial pause at this. Then one of 
the five men Paul had not met before spoke up. 

"I don't understand the Chantry Guild's connection 
with Project Springboard and the Station, here," he said. 
Leland Minault peered down at the speaker as if through 
invisible spectacles. 

"That," said Minault, "is a statement, not a question." 

"All right," said the speaker. "Is the Chantry Guild 
responsible for Station Springboard, or the work on a 
means of getting out between the stars?" 

"No," said Minault. 
"Well then," asked the other, "just what are we doing 
here, anyway?" 

"We are here," said Minault deliberately, folding both 
hands over a slight potbelly, "because a machine is not a 
manbeg pardon"he nodded at the one woman in the 
group"human being. A human being, if you bring him, 
or her, say, to some place like Mercury, to an establishment 
that seems to be completely at odds with his purpose 
in being there, will sooner or later get around to asking 
what the connection is." 

He beamed at the man who had spoken. 

"Then," Minault went on, "when you give him the 
answer, it's liable to sink in and promote further thought, 
instead of merely being filed as a completed explanation. 
Which is what is likely to happen to it if you just volunteer 
the information." 

There was a general round of smiles. 

"All right," said the one who had asked, "any one of 


us could have been the patsy. And you still haven't answered 
me." 

"Quite right," said Minault. "Well, the point is that 
human beings react this way because they have an innate 
curiosity. A machinecall it a technological monster 
may have everything else, but it'll be bound to lack innate 
curiosity. That is a talent reserved for living beings." 

He paused again. Nobody said anything. 

"Now our world," Minault said, "is at the present time 
firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head 
if you want to call it thatis the World Engineer's 
Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep 
all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make 
with our credit numbers, every time we use the public 
transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to livethat 
is, it can as long as we stay on Earth. The Complex of 
sustaining equipment at Springboard here is officially a 
part of the Complex-Major back on Earth. But actually 
there's no connection beyond the bridge of transportation 
and communication between these two planets." He 
smiled at the group. 

"So," he went on, "we hide here, under the cloak of 
Springboard. Actually, we control Springboard. But its 
work is not our workit merely serves us as a cover. Of 
course, we're an open secret to those Springboard workers 
who aren't Chantry Guild members as well. But a machine, 
as I say, doesn't react as a human being would. 
If it doesn't see anything, it simply assumes nothing is 
thereit doesn't poke and pry into dark corners, because 
it might find enemies." 

A hand was up. Turning his head slightly, Paul saw it 
was the cheerful-looking young woman. 

"Yes?" said Minault. 

"That doesn't make sense," she said. "The World 
Engineer's Complex is run by men, not machines." 

"Ah," said Minault. "But you're making the assumption 
that the World Engineer and his staff are in control. 
They aren't. They are controlled by the physics of the 


society of our time, which in turn is controlled by the 
Earth Complexto give it a convenient namewithout 
which that society couldn't exist." 

She frowned. 

"You mean"she wavered a moment on the verge 
of plunging into the cold waters of the wild statement 
"the Complex-Major has intelligence?" 

"Oh, I'm pretty sure we can say that," replied Minault 
cheerfully. "Fantastic amounts of knowledge, of course; 
but a sort of definite rudimentary intelligence as well. 
But I don't think that's what you meant to ask. What 
you meant to ask was whether the Complex-MajorSuper-
Complex, I understand a lot of people have begun 
calling it latelyhas an ego, a conscious identity and 
personality of its own." 

"Well... yes," she said. 
"I thought so. Well, the answer to that, lady and gentlemen, 
is astoundingly enough, Yes, it has." 

The group in the room, which had settled back to listen 
to a Socratic dialogue between the young woman and 
Minault, woke up suddenly and muttered disbelief. 

"Oh, not in the human sense, not in the human sense," 
said Minault, waving them back to calmness. "I don't 
mean to insult your credulity. But surely you all realize 
that sooner or later a point of complication had to be 
reached where a certain amount of elementary reasoning 
power was necessary to the machine. In fact, why not? 
It's a very handy thing to have a machine that can reason, 
and consequently protect itself from falling into its 
own errors." 

"Ah," said Paul's large salesman-type companion from 
the earlier gathering. "In that case I fail to seethat is, 
the implied problem was one of control, which we wished 
to avoid. Wasn't it?" 

"I was," said Minault; peering at the large man, "explaining 
the personality of the Complex-Major." 

"Ah, I see," said the large man, sitting back. He blew 
his nose. 


"Your question was a good one," said Minault, "but 
slightly premature. For the moment, you must understand 
what I mean by a machine ego. Think of the growing 
Complexes of computer-directed equipment back on 
Earth as if they were an animal whose purpose is to take 
over more and more of the work of keeping mankind 
alive and well. It grows until it is the means by which 
mankind is kept alive and well; it grows until a certain 
amount of independent reasoning ability must be built 
into it, so that it doesn't provide fine weather for California 
when that action will later on cause hailstorms on 
the Canadian wheat crop. Given this much of a thinking 
creature, what's the next evolutionary step?" 

"An instinct for self-preservation?" asked the girl quickly, 
while the large man was clearing his throat preparatory 
to another "ah." 

"Quite right." 

"Ah, I should think it would regard human actions 
not in line with its reasoningahlike grit in a smooth-
running motor, so to speak?" 

"Would it have that much power of imagination?" 
asked the girl. She and the large man were both looking 
at Minault, who sat relaxed, peering at them. 

"I did not mean actual imagination. Ahit was an 
illustration." 

"A rather good one," said Minault, as the girl opened 
her mouth again. "The Complex-Major is a sort of benevolent 
monster whose only desire is to choke us with a 
surfeit of service and protection. It has a sort of mechanical 
intelligence with no specific locus, but an instinct 
to protect itself and its ability to go on taking over control 
of human caretaking. And it does regard not only 
us in the Chantry Guild, but all those whose independence 
manifests itself in the taking of drugs, joining of 
cult societies, or any non-machine-planned action, as a 
sort of grit in its smooth-running motor. A grit that one 
day must be neatly cleaned out." 

He glanced toward the back of his group of auditors. 


"Yes?" he asked. 
Paul, turning, saw a young, swarthy-skinned man in the back puttin 


"It seems," said this man, "almost silly to be going to 
all this trouble just to oppose a pile of equipment, no 
matter how complicated." 

"My dear young friend," said Minault, "we in the 
Chantry Guild are not opposing a pile of equipment. 
We're opposing an ideaan idea that has been growing 
for some hundreds of yearsthat happiness for the human 
race consists of wrapping it tighter and tighter in the 
swaddling bands of a technological civilization." He 
stood up. "I think that should be enough to chew on for 
the moment. I suggest you all think the situation over." 

He got down from the platform and headed toward the 
door of the room. His audience rose and also began to 
move out, and the orderly manner of the room dissolved 
into a babble of conversation and people slowly 
swarming out the exit As Paul pushed his way out the 
door behind Minault, he caught sight of the girl, who had 
just buttonholed the large man. 

"I think you're quite wrong about the power of imagination 
you implied to the Complex-Major," she was saying, 
severely. 


Chapter 13 


"You've handled explosives before?" asked the lean instructor 
with the sun-leathered face above the open collar. 
He was holding a package of plastic, adhesive blasting 
jelly with a three-minute pinch fuse. 

"Yes," said Paul. 

Paul stood on one cliff-edge of a remarkably realistic 
simulation of a mountain gorge some five hundred feet 
wide, across which had been thrown the thin long web 
of a temporary snap-to arch bridge of magnesium-alloy 
sections. The bridge-end by which Paul and the instructor 
stood, just the two of them, had been anchored in a 
local timber cradle, or box, filled with loose rock. And 
the cradle extended its wooden underarms in support 
about fifteen feet out from the lip of the cliff. 

"This amount of jelly," said the instructor, hefting it, 
"can be carried inconspicuously in a brief case and still 
leave room for enough other material to make it look as 
if the brief case is full. It's powerful enough to cut two or 
three of those timbers or one or two of the metal members 
you see there. How would you go about completely 
knocking out this bridge with it?" 

Paul looked again at the bridge. In the past nine days 
since his first class he had been put through a number of 
sessionsthat was the only word to describe them. 
They appeared to be classes, on a strange variety of subjects, 
some of which appeared to bear no relation to the 


Chantry Guild. The longest of them had lasted not much 
more than twenty minutes, and the information imparted 
by each of them had been obscure. In fact, it had 
not been quite clear whether the intent of the sessions 
had been to inform or to test the journeyman audience, 
which seemed to consist of different individuals from session 
to session. Paul was privately of the opinion that 
the intent had been both to inform and testand probably, 
as well, to stimulate and confuse. Some of the 
journeymen, he was sure, were ringers. Some of the sessions 
had been nonsense. 

And this sessionhimself alone with the instructor, 
the explosive, and the simulated bridge in the mountains 
on Earth. Was it instruction, test, nonsenseor something 
else? 

The simulation was a magnificent job. For the scene it 
pretended to show was clearly an impossibility, here deep 
under the surface of Mercury's rocky hide. What Paul's 
eyes saw was a gorge at least eight hundred feet in depth, 
up from which came the distant sound of a narrow mountain 
river in its gallop to lower levels. The air was the 
thin, dry air of high altitudes. The sky was cloudless. 

The question was, How much was real and how much 
false? For if the blasting-jelly block was real, and it was 
to be set off in the reality of a small underground room 
of the size Paul had had his sessions in lately, then it 
would take Alternate Laws indeed to show cause why 
Paul and the instructor should survive the explosion. Paul 
laid his hand on the timber cradle and looked over the 
cliff edge. His gaze plunged away into spray-misted 
depths. There was distance down there, by any test of his 
feelings. Just how much, he could not be sure. But it felt 
deep below the cliff. On the other hand, under his hand 
the materials of the bridge felt solid but deceitful. 

"Well," said Paul, "I'm no expert on bridges. But I 
imagine the trick would be to break this end loose, so that 
it falls. If this end goes down, it'll tear the other end loose 
and it'll all drop into the gorge." 


"Good enough," said the instructor. "How'd you go 
about breaking this end loose?" 

"I think," said Paul, pointing to where the end of the 
cradle met a magnesium I-beam, fifteen feet out above 
the gorge's depth, "if we blew it loose just there, cutting 
that stringer, or whatever the proper term is, that runs 
along the left side of the travel-surface of the bridge, 
the weight of the rest of it would cause it to sag and 
twist, and tear the other stringer loose. Then this whole 
end would drop." 

"All right." The instructor handed the block of jelly 
to Paul. "Let's see you do it." 

Paul looked at the bridge again. Then he stuffed the 
block of jelly inside the waistband of his slacks and began 
to climb out along the timbers of the cradle. The lack of a 
second arm hampered him but not so much as Paul 
thought it might have seemed to the instructor. The 
strength of his remaining arm was such as to lift the 
weight of his body from angles clearly impossible to an 
ordinary climber. When he got to the end of the stone 
enclosing the timbers, Paul paused, ostensibly to rest, but 
actually to reach some sort of conclusion. 

The bridge still felt deceitful. He quietly loosed a splinter 
from the timber on which he rested, and dropped it. It 
floated down until he lost sight of it some thirty or forty 
feet below. So, that much of distance under him at least 
was real. He looked once more at the spot where he would 
stick the explosive. 

It was at a point just above the single final timber of 
the supporting cradle. He would have to stand on that 
timber and place the jelly above the upright at the 
timber's end, where that upright met the magnesium I-
beam. He began to move again. He climbed on up to the 
I-beam and out onto it until he was above the timber. 
Hanging to the I-beam, he cautiously let his feet down 
until they rested on the timber. 

Then, as unobtrusively as possible, he increased his 


hold on the I-beam and pressed down with both feet on 

the timber. 

There was a sudden screech of tearing wood. The tim


ber ripped away from beneath him, and he dropped sud


denly to the length of his arm, and hung there sustained 

only by his grip on the I-beam. Below him he saw the 

falling timber on which he would have stood tumbling 

and shrinking until it vanished suddenly fifty or sixty 

feet below him. Still hanging, he looked across to the point 

where the underfoot timber had been joined to the up


right by a metal collar held by four thick magnesium riv


ets. 

There were no rivet-hole marks or broken rivet ends 

in the wood of the upright at all. What was visible was the 

snapped end of a quarter-inch-diameter wooden dowel 

rod. 

Paul pulled himself easily back up on the I-beam. The 
bridge stood firm and secureit had been balanced, evidently, 
somewhat differently than it appeared to be, on its 
supports. He climbed back to the instructor, on solid 
ground, and handed the jelly block back to the man. 

"Now what?" Paul said. 

"Well," said the instructor, "we'll go up to the front offices. 
I don't know what your master will say, and of 
course it's up to him. But as far as I'm concerned, I'd 
say you've graduated." 

They left the simulated scene in the mountains and 
went out into the Station proper, and took an elevator 
up a good number of levels. Paul had the impression 
that they were almost to, if not right at, the surface. And 
this impression was justified a second or two later when 
they entered a large lounge-office with, not a vision tank, 
but an actual window looking out on the yellow twilight 
and the witches' garden of Mercury's surface around the 
Station. 

Jase was there, along with Heber, the white-mustached 
unlisted member, and a couple of men Paul did not 


recognize. The instructor had Paul wait while he went 
over and talked to the three for a few minutes in a voice 
too low for Paul to hear. Then Jase came over alone, and 
the instructor, with the other two men, went over to one 
of the desks at the other end of the room and began 
going over what, judging from their quite audible conversation, 
were the files of journeymen currently undergoing 
tests. 

"Come on over to the window," said Jase. Paul followed 
him. The slim, dark young man was as relaxed 
as Paul had ever seen him, though he still walked with the 
prowling balance of a cat. "Sit down." 

Paul sat, in a low, comfortably overstuffed chair. Jase 
took one opposite. 

"To all intents and purposes," said Jase, and his deep-
set, clear brown eyes watched Paul closely, "you're a 
Chantry Guild member now. Before you first came to 
me, you'd gotten the psychiatric viewpoint on yourself 
and your missing arm. Now, I'll tell you the true situation 
from the point of someone like myself who is acquainted 
with the Alternate Laws." 

He stopped. 

"You were going to say something," he said. 

"No," said Paul. 

"All right," said Jase, "here it is, then. You have an 
ability under the Alternate Laws which is probably parapsychological 
in nature. I told you when I first met you 
and I've an ability myself where it comes to judging 
charactersomething to the effect that your arrogance 
was astounding." 

Paul frowned. He had all but put aside the memory of 
the Necromancer calling him arrogant. It was the one 
thing he could not accept about himself. 

"I understand now better why you should be so arrogant," 
Jase was saying. "I've no idea, none of us have in 
the regular membership, about the possibilities or limitations 
of your ability. But we've no doubt about its essential 
nature. Your ability is to make use of the Al



ternate Laws for purposes of almost total defense. We've 
done everything but try to kill you outright and without 
reservation. You've come through beautifully. Tell me, 
do you think you could explain to me in words just how 
you came to suspect that bridge timber just a little while 
ago? I'm not asking you to explain, I'm asking you if 
you think you could explain it to me." 

"No," said Paul, slowly. "No, I don't think so." 

"We thought as much. Well, what you want to do with 
your ability from here on out is up to you. I myself 
think that the reason a grafted arm won't take on your 
left side there, is because this defensive ability of yours 
sees some danger to you in an arm graft. If you find 
what that danger is, maybe you can discover another 
counter to it, and the next arm you have attached to 
you will live instead of dying. But, as I say, that's up to 
you. However, there's something else." 

He stopped. There seemed to be almost a touch of indecision 
in his manner, for the first time since Paul had 
met him. 

"As I say," said Jase, not quite as quickly as he usually 
spoke, "in all but name now, you're a member. We 
haven't only been active with you up here, but we've 
been active for you back down on Earth. If you go back, 
you'll have to stand police investigation in connection 
with the death of Kevin Malorn, that man in the Koh-i-
Nor you took the drug to." 

"I was wondering about that," said Paul. 

"You needn't wonder any longer," said Jase. "The 
purchase desk in the music section of the library at 
Chicago Complex Directory now has among its records 
one showing that you purchased a song tape there at the 
same tune that Malorn was being killed. You will simply 
have to show up and add your testimony to the evidence 
of the record. Since the records are machine-made and regarded 
as untamperable, you'll be clear of any connection 
with Malorn's death an hour or so after arriving back 
in Chicago." 


"I see." Paul nodded. "The song tapeit isn't one 
of Kantele singing something about 'in apple comfort 
time,' is it?" 

Jase frowned. 

"Yes," he said. "As a matter of fact it is. Why?" 

"Nothing," said Paul. "I've heard it, but not all the 
way through." 

"It's a natural choice," said Jase. "The record shows 
my credit numberyou were buying it at my request. 
That's reasonable enough, since Kantele and I are old 
friends and the song was written for her by Blunt." 

"Blunt?" 

"Why yes." Jase smiled a little at him. "You didn't 
know the Guildmaster wrote music?" 
"No." 
"He does a great many things," said Jase, a little dryly. 

"However, the point is you can go back to Earth as free 
as you ever were. Except that as a Guild member you'll 
be required to take orders from the masters, like myself." 

"I see," said Paul, a little grimly. 

"Do you?" replied Jase. He sighed. "I don't think you 
do. Not by a damn sight Would you listen with an 
open mind for about five minutes?" 

"Of course," said Paul. 

"All right," said Jase. "Modern man got his motor to 
taming over with the Renaissance. At that time two 
things were initiated. One was the attitude of enlightened 
inquiry that began people on the road to a technological 
society and civilization. The road that sought to 
build a man a home and keep him well fed and happy 
within it by use of the machine." 

"Which was bad?" said Paul. 

"No, no," said Jase. "There's nothing wrong with a 
prosthetic appliance if nothing else is available. But 
you'd rather have a flesh-and-blood arm just like your 
own grafted on, wouldn't you?" 

"Go on," said Paul. 

"However, the original role of the machine started to 


get perverted around the time of the industrial revelation. 
It came to be regarded not as a means to a desired 
end, but as part of the end in itself. The process accelerated 
in the nineteenth century, and exploded in the 
twentieth. Man kept demanding more in the way of service 
from his technology, and the technology kept giving 
itbut always at the price of a little more of man's individual 
self-contained powers. In the endin our time 
our technology has become second thing to a religion. 
Now we're trapped in it. And we're so enfeebled by 
our entrapment that we tell ourselves it's the only possible 
way to live. That no other way exists." 

"I " began Paul, and checked himself. 

"Yes, 'I,' " said Jase. "The arrogant 'I,' with the built-
in survival qualities. But other people aren't like you." 
"That wasn't what I was going to say," observed Paul. 
"It doesn't matter," said Jase. "The point isn't you, but 


the world, which is at the mercy of an ever-growing technological 
system." 

"Which the Chantry Guild wishes to attack." 

"Attack?" said Jase. "The Chantry Guild was formed 
by Walt Blunt to protect its members against the attack 
of the technological system." 

"What you're saying," Paul said, "is that your members 
grew up out of something other than the technological 
system." 

"That's quite right," said Jase calmly. "They did. And 

so did you." 

Paul looked searchingly at the Necromancer, but the 

dark face was as full of honesty as Paul had ever seen it. 

"I said, two things were initiated at the time of the 

Renaissance," said Jase. "One was the roots of the sin


gle system that has given us our technological civiliza


tion, that says there is only one way for Man to live, 

and that's swaddled by the machine. And the other was 

all other systemsthe principle of freedom which lies 

at the base of the Alternate Laws. The first would make 


Man an inferior, the second acknowledges his superiority." 


He looked at Paul as if expecting a protest. 

"I'm not in disagreement with the idea of superiority," 
said Paul. 

"Side by side, but not noticed except by a few," said 
Jase, "while everybody and his Uncle Charlie was engaged 
in making a god out of the machine, a few talented 
people were proving that Man had already reached that 
level of deity and wasn't even started yet. Genius was at 
work in every generationand genius works with the 
Alternate Laws. Only, after a while the machine got 
enough muscles so that it started crowding geniusand 
that brings it down to our time, Paul." 

"We do seem to end there, all the time," said Paul, and 
could not stop himself from smiling a little. 

"I thought you promised me an open mind," said Jase. 

"I'm sorry." 

"All right, then," said Jase. "Answer me something. 
Suppose you're a person in any generation up to about 
fifty years ago whose abilities and inclinations make him 
inclined to have something more or something different 
than what's available to the mass of people in his time. 
What happens?" 

"I'm listening," said Paul, "with an open mind." 

"He can go under to the general attitude and be essentially 
destroyed by denying his own possibilities. Or he 
can rise above the general attitude and keep afloat by sheer 
dint of extra ability-muscle. Agreed?" 

Paul nodded. 

"In other words, he can lose or win his own personal 
battle with the mass-opinion of his time. In either case 
he's resolved his problem." Jase looked at Paul. Paul 
nodded again. 

"But in our time," said Jase, "such a person isn't up 
against the opinions and attitudes of his fellows. He's up 
against an attitude brought to life and resolved into a 
mechanical monster that can't be reasoned with, and 


can't be adjusted to. He can't win for the same reason he 
can't outwrestle a bulldozer with his bare hands. And he 
can't submit because the bulldozer doesn't understand 
submission. It only understands a complete job." 

Jase leaned forward with his hands on both of his 
knees. The emotion in the man came at Paul as sharp as 
an arrow. 

"Don't you understand?" asked the Necromancer. "The 
Chantry Guild was established because the technological 
system of our own tune was trying to kill these people who 
belong to the Guildeach and every one of them, and 
any more like themkill them off." His eyes blazed at 
Paul. "Just as it's been trying to kill you!" 

Paul looked back at him for a long moment. 

"Me?" he asked, at last. 

"The weather warning you didn't get when you were 
out sailing," said Jase. "The temporal disorientation that 
caused you to be caught by the starting ore cars in the 
shaft of the mine. The misdirection of the subway car 
that stranded you in the middle of a street cleared for use 
by a marching society. Yes," he added, as Paul's eyebrows 
raised slightly, "we had a tracer on you from the 
time you first left my place. That's usual." He looked a 
little thin-lipped for a moment. "It's part of the war between 
us and it." 

"I see," said Paul, his mind running back over a number 
of things. 

"You're in it, on the side of the Guild, whether you 
like it or not. We'd like your active, working co-operation. 
If your ability under the Alternate Laws is what it 
seems to be, you'll be more valuable to your fellow Guild 
members than anyone else could be." 

"Why?" asked Paul. 

Jase shrugged a little angrily. 

"I won't tell you thatnow, of course," he said. "How 
could I? You've got to commit yourself to the Guild 
that is, try for the rank of Necromancer, a master in the 
Guild. We'll put you to the test. If you come through all 


right, then some time in the future you'll learn what you 
can do for the Guild. You'll hear it from the only man 
who can give you commands once you're a masterthe 
Guildmaster himself, Walt Blunt." 

"Blunt!" 

Paul felt the name slide into place with the events here 
on Mercury at Springboard. He felt a rage of passion remembered, 
and a lonely sorrow, and then the hard, driving 
core of his determination to bring this man Blunt 
face to face. 

"Of course," Jase was saying. "Who else could there 
be to give orders to the master rank? Blunt's our general." 


"I'm committed," said Paul, quietly. "What do I do?" 

"Well," said Jase, taking his hands off his knees and 
sitting up straight, "I told you it's this ability of yours we 
want to determine. I said we'd done everything but try 
to kill you outright and without reservation. We'd like to 
take that last step nowmake a serious effort with the 
resources of the Guild behind it and no safety hatch 
and see if you survive." 


Chapter 14 


Master and Necromancer in name only, and under the 
shadow of a sometime attempt to be made upon his life, 
Paul returned to Earth and the Chicago Complexostensibly 
from a canoe trip up in the Quetico-Superior 
wilderness park area along the Canadian border near Lake 
Superior. He was picked up at the Complex Outer Terminal, 
taken to Complex Police Headquarters, and gave his 
statement concerning his whereabouts at the time of 
Malorn's murder by person or persons unknown. A police-
beat reporter for one of the newssheets questioned 
him perfunctorily as he was leaving after his release by 
the police. 

"How does it feel?" asked the reporter, matching 
strides with Paul as Paul walked toward the waiting cars 
at the Police terminal, "not to be facing a possible sentence 
of death?" 

"You tell me," said Paul, as he got in a two-man car 
and went off. The reporter considered a moment and 
erased the reply from his hand recorder. It had been too 
flippant, he thought. 

" 'I am relieved, of course,' " dictated the reporter into 
the recorder. " 'However, knowing modern police methods 
and equipment I never had any real doubt they 
would find out I hadn't done it.' " He put the recorder 
back in his pocket and returned to the booking desk inside. 



Paul, reporting to Jase, who also had returned, was told 
to rent himself an apartment not too far from Suntden 
Place and amuse himself for the present. Paul did so. 
There followed several weeks of idleness in which Paul 
slept late, wandered around the Complex soaking up the 
feel of it and its crowds, and generally waited for his 
personal ax to fall. 

It did not fall. Paul seemed almost forgottenpensioned 
off and put aside by the Chantry Guild. Yet Jase, 
when Paul checked in with the Necromancer, and Kantele, 
on the one or two brief glimpses Paul had of her, 
seemed caught up in a smoothly constant, high-temperature 
state of activity. On one of his visits Paul had attempted 
to find out how he might get in touch with 
Blunt. Jase had told him quite bluntly that when Paul 
needed to know such information, it would be given to 
him. Blunt, Paul gathered, had no fixed address. His 
location at any time was a matter for his own immediate 
decision, and known only to those like Jase and Kantele, 
who were close to him. 

The first week in May, on a Monday, found Paul up 
around the Wisconsin Dells, ostensibly squirrel-hunting. 
He had largely given over any conscious watch for the 
attack he had been promised by Jase, but that anterior 
part of his mind which took care of such things had not 
forgotten. Midday found him seated with his back to the 
trunk of a silver maple, half drowsy with the warmth of 
the strong spring sun out of a blue sky, and lost in a collection 
of newspapers and periodicals. However, his gun 
was across his knees, a steep fifty-foot cliff of loose gravel 
fell away behind the maple, and before him he could 
see clear down through a small grove of maple, pine, and 
poplar to a wide field of black earth faintly dusted with 
the new green of coming corn plants. It was an automatically 
perfect defensive position. 

There were gray squirrels in the trees down the slope. 
They had taken care not to get too close when Paul had 
first settled himself against the trunk of the maple, but, 


Sciurus carolinensis not being known for any lack of 
curiosity, they had been allowing themselves to work 
and play closer to where he sat in motionlessness. Now, 
after about two hours of Paul's sitting and reading, one 
slim youngster had grown so swashbuckling as to slip out 
from behind a narrow poplar trunk not fifteen feet from 
the human and sit up boldly to stare. 

Paul was aware of these small attentions, but he felt a 
certain definite pleasure in letting them go on uninterrupted. 
The last thing from his mind was the desire to 
kill. He had more than a moral conviction against it, he 
was discovering. He almost regarded it as a sort of self-
performed amputation. Particularly at this moment when 
he had allowed himself to go deep into the life and stir of 
the small section of the world at the moment around 
him. He let himself float in the sensation of the wanning 
earth, the light and movement surrounding, and gave the 
full attention of his thinking processes to the reading material 
he had brought with him. 

The material was merely a chance selection among the 
many publications currently on sale or merely available 
for the picking up. But they struck hard upon him. He 
found himself wondering how, with such a universal 
voice of unhappiness sounding in the world, he had 
failed to be overwhelmed by it before. 

The publications were full of the statistics of distress. 
Testing of grade-school children revealed that seven per 
cent of those under the age of eight were headed for 
major mental illnesses. The world crime rate had been 
climbing steadily for fifty years and this last year had 
jumped twenty-three per cent again. And this in a world 

" in which nobody needed to lack for the necessities, and 
even most of the luxuries, of life. The world suicide rate 
was climbing sharply. Cultism was commonplace. Hysteria 
such as the marching societies exemplified was growing 
steadily. The birth rate was down. 

Article after article either explored the situation, or 
offered some self-help method of individual adjustment 


to it. And yetPaul went back through the pages before 
him againthere was enough of other topics, of 
sports, news, humor, art, and science, so that someone 
like himself who had not suffered individually could ignore 
the notes of trouble in the general symphony of modern 
achievement otherwise. 

And stillPaul frowned a little. He did not believe 
what he read, or what people told him. He believed only 
what he himself could check against the touchstone of 
his feelings, and it occurred to him now that he seemed 
to sense something about the catalogue of unhappiness. 
A faint tone as of something whining. Or was he being 
unfair? 

He pushed the newssheets and periodicals aside, and 
half-closed his eyes to the sunlight coming through the 
young leaves. He was conscious of the weight of the gun 
across his legs as well as the peaceful rustlings of the 
woods. The adventurous squirrel had been followed into 
the open by two of his fellows, but the first one, the one 
with guts, was still in the lead. As Paul watched without 
stirring, the adventurous one made a sudden dash right 
up to the toe of Paul's left hiking boot, and examined it 
with a quivering black nose. 

The other two followed after. Man, thought Paul slowly, 
proceeds by dashes like the squirrel, and each new 
discovery is the one which is going to turn the world upside 
down. Each new setback seems to threaten eternal 
night. He looked at the squirrels. All three were now 
examining the rifle-stock of the gun where it projected 
out into the air beyond his right knee on a level with 
their small, black, fascinated eyes. He tried to feel what 
it was like to be one with them, and for a second his 
point of view flooded into a fantastic, pillared world of attack 
and defense, sleep, hunger, and the unknown. 

Another squirrel raced suddenly toward him from the 
cover of the nearest tree. Suddenly there was concerted 
movement. As the newcomer reached the two followers, 
all three with unnaturally perfect teamwork threw their 


squirrel-weights suddenly against and on top of the projecting 
rifle stock. The gun tilted and swung, the muzzle 
of the barrel coming up thump against the left side of 
Paul's chest. 

And at the same moment the adventurous squirrel 
leaped fair and true for the trigger button of the gun. 

All in one explosive instant, it happened. And all in 
one movement of coldly swift and certain reaction, Paul's 
arm had galvanized into movement with the first rush of 
the fourth squirrel across the dappled earth. His long 
fingers met the leaping squirrel in mid-air, caught him, 
and broke his neck. 

There was a scuttling rush away in all directions. Then 
silence. Paul found himself standing on his feet with the 
spilled gun, the scattered throwaway publications at his 
feet, and no other living creature in sight. He held the 
dead squirrel still in his hand. 

Paul's heart thumped once, savagely, in his chest. He 
looked down at the dead squirrel. The small, black, animal 
eyes were squeezed tightly shut, as they might have 
been in any living being forced into risking all, in one 
wild tourney with the unknown. 

The wound of an amputation bled somewhere in the 
depths of Paul. His eyes dimmed. The sun had lost its 
way momentarily behind a cloud, and the forest floor was 
all one color. Paul laid the small gray body gently down 
at the foot of the silver maple and smoothed its rumpled 
fur. He picked up his gun by the cold, slickly-machined 
metal of its barrel, and went off through the trees. 

When he got back to his apartment in the Chicago 
Complex, Jase was already inside it and waiting for him 
as he entered. 

"Congratulations," said Jase,"Necromancer." 

Paul looked at him. Involuntarily, Jase stepped back. 


Chapter 15 


Paul was, he learned in the next few days, now a part of 
the more or less "Cabinet" group in the Guild, which 
operated directly with and under Blunt himself. The 
other Cabinet members consisted of Jase, Kantele, Burton 
McLeodthe heavy broadsword of a man Paul had 
met earlier in Jase's apartmentand an elusive gray wafer 
of a little man whose name was Eaton White. White, it 
seemed, was posted high on the personal staff of Kirk 
Tyne, and the first thing he did was take Paul in to see 
Tyne about a job in the World Engineer's office. 

"I suppose," asked Tyne, when he had shaken hands 
with Paul in the clear morning sunlight coming through 
the high windows of a luxurious office lounge two hundred 
levels above the Chicago traffic, "you wonder why I 
seem so little hesitant to have a member of the Guild on 
my personal staff? Sit down, sit down. You, too, Eat." 

Paul and Eaton White took comfortable chairs. Tyne 
also sat down, stretching his slim legs before him. He 
looked as fit as a well-kept bowstring, and as unfrayed 
by the demands of his work. His eyes, glancing directly 
into Paul's under neat brown eyebrows, were startlingly 
perceptive. 

"I was a little surprised, yes," said Paul. 

"Well, there's a number of reasons," said Tyne. "Did 
you ever consider the difficulties of changing the present?" 



"Changing the present?" 

"It's impossible," said Tyne, almost merrily. "Though 
very few people stop to think about it and realize the 
fact. When you pick up an inch of the present to move 
it, you also pick up several thousand miles of history." 

"I see," said Paul. "You mean, to change the present 
you'd have to first change the past" 

"Exactly," replied Tyne. "And that's what reformers invariably 
forget They talk about changing the future. As 
if doing so was some new and great feat Nonsense. Our 
main business as living human beings is changing the 
future. In fact, that's all we can change. The present is 
the result of the past; and even if we could monkey with 
the past, who'd dare to? Change one tiny factor and the 
result in the present might well be the whole human race 
blown apart. So your reformers, your great changers, are 
kidding themselves. They talk about changing the future, 
when what they really mean is that they want to 
change the present, the present they're living in right at 
the moment. They don't realize they're trying to move 
furniture that's already nailed down." 

"So you think the Chantry Guild is made up of furniture 
movers?" asked Paul. 

"Essentiallyessentially," said Tyne. He sat forward in 
his chair. "Oh, I want you to know I have a high opinion 
of the Guild, and the Guild members. And I have something 
more than a high opinion of Walt Blunt Walt 
awes me, and I don't mind admitting it. But that doesn't 
alter the fact that he's barking up the wrong tree." 

"Apparently," said Paul, "he thinks the same of you." 

"Of course!" said Tyne. "He'd be bound to. He's a 
natural revolutionist I'm a real revolutionist. I know 
the present can't be changed, so I concentrate on changing 
the future. Really changing itby hard work, discovery, 
and progress; the way it actually gets changed." 

Paul looked at him interestedly. 

"What's your idea of the future?" asked Paul. 

"Utopia," said Tyne. "A practical Utopia that we've 


all adjusted to. That's all that's really wrong with the 
present, you know. We've achieved, through our science 
and technology, a practical Utopia. Our only trouble is 
that we aren't adjusted to it yet. We keep feeling there 
must be a catch somewhere, something to be fought 
against and licked. That's Walt's trouble, incidentally. 
He can't help feeling he ought to be revolting against 
something intolerable. And since he can't find anything 
intolerable, he's gone to a great deal of trouble to work 
up a revolt against what's not only tolerable, but infinitely 
desirablethe very things we've been working for 
for centuries. Comfort, freedom, and wealth." 

"I take it," said Paul, and frowned for a second as the 
ghost of a small gray squirrel scampered for a moment 
unbidden across his thoughts, "you don't worry too much 
about the increases in crime, suicides, mental disorders, 
and so forth?" 

"I consider them. I don't worry about them," said 
Tyne, leaning forward with argumentative relish. "In the 
Super-ComplexI mean by that, the reconciling units 
here in the Headquarters buildingwe've got the greatest 
tool ever forged by Man for solving all Man's problems. 
It'll take a few generations, no doubt, but eventually 
we'll iron out the essentially emotional reaction 
that's causing these things you talk about." 

"Emotional reaction?" asked Paul. 

"Of course! For the first time in the history of Man, 
for the first time since he first stuck his nose out of a nice 
safe hole in the ground, people have absolutely nothing to 
be afraid of, nothing to worry about. Is it any wonder 
that all their little individual quirks and idiosyncrasies 
sprout wings and fly off with them?" 

"I can't believe," said Paul slowly, "that the causes for 
what I read about in the newssheets and periodicals now 
are caused just by idiosyncrasies in the individual." 

"Well, of course, it isn't that simple." Tyne sat back in 
his chair. "There are strong group elements in the human 
character. Religion, for onethat's at the root of all 


these sects and cults. The tendency toward hysteria and 
mob action that's been the cause of the marching societies. 
We're getting a social fragmentation. But just 
because Utopia's new, and there's no reason not to run 
hog wild. As I say, a generation or two will see us 
settling back down." 

He stopped talking. 

"Well," said Paul, when it seemed to be up to him, 
"this is all very interesting. I take it you're trying to 
convert me." 

"Exactly right," said Tyne. "As I say, I don't agree 
with Walt, but he recruits some of the best material in 
the world. Eaton here's an example. And poor Malorn 
was a Guild member." 

"Malorn!" said Paul, looking closely at the World Engineer. 


"Yesin a way you might say I owe you something 
for having been unfairly accused in connection with his 
death. It was a breakdown misfunction in the police 
machinery, and I'm responsible for the smooth working 
of all machinery." 

"But that isn't why you'd give me a job?" 

"Not by itself, of course. No. But Eat here speaks highly 
of you and says you don't seem to be completely 
blinkered and blinded by all those theories of Walt's. 
I'm willing to take a chance on talking you over to my 
point of view, if you're willing to take the chance of 
being talked. And of course, Walt will be tickled to have 
you on the inside, here. You see, he thinks he's outsmarting 
me by being completely open and aboveboard 
about planting his people on me." 

"And you," said Paul, "think you're outsmarting him." 
"I know I am," said Tyne, smiling. "I have an intelligent 
friend who tells me so." 

"It seems to be settled, then," said Paul. He stood up. 
Tyne and Eaton rose with him. "I'd like to meet your 
intelligent friend, sometime." 

"Some-day, you might do that," said Tyne. They shook 


hands. "In fact, I imagine you will. It was this friend's 
recommendation that rather clinched this matter of taking 
you on here." 

Paul looked at the World Engineer sharply. With his 
last words something had come and gone so swiftly in the other man that i 

might have been. It was as if a metal edge had shown itself 
for a moment. 
"I'll look forward to it, then," said Paul. And Eaton 
led him out 

Outside the World Engineer Complex Headquarters 
they parted. Eaton went back in to work. Paul went on 
to Jase's. 

As he stepped through the entrance to Jase's apartment 
and put his key back in his pocket, he heard voices. 
One was Jase's. But the otherhe stopped at the sound 
of itwas the deep, resonant, and sardonic voice of 
Blunt 

"I realize, Jase," the voice of Blunt was saying, "that 
you find me a little too much of a playboy at times. It's 
something you'll just have to bear with, however." 

"I don't mean that at all, Walt!" The younger man's 
voice was charged and grim. "Who's going to lay down 
rules for you, of all people? It's just that if I find myself 
having to take over, I want to know what you had in 
mind." 

"If you take over, it's your own mind you'll follow, 
and that's the way it should be," said Blunt "Let's cross 
such bridges when we come to them. You may not have 
to take over. Who just came in?" 

The last words coincided with Paul's stepping around 
the corner from the entrance hall into the main lounge of 
Jase's apartment The wall entrance to the office in Kan-
tele's apartment next door was open, and through it Paul 
now saw the wide shoulders and back of Blunt, with the 
dark, startled visage of Jase beyond. 

"Me. Formain," answered Paul, and he walked toward 


the office. But Jase stepped swiftly past Blunt and came 
down into his own lounge, closing the office entrance behind 
him. 

"What is it?" asked Jase. 

"It seems I'm now on the immediate staff of the World 
Engineer," said Paul. He looked past Jase at the closed 
wall. "That's Walter Blunt in there, isn't it? I'd like to 
speak to him." 

He stepped around Jase, went to the wall, and opened 
it. Within, the office was empty. He turned back to Jase. 

"Where did he go?" 

"I imagine," said Jase, dryly, "if he'd wanted to stay 
and talk to you, he'd have stayed." 

Paul turned again and went on into the office. He went 
through it into the farther reaches of Kantele's apartment 
It was a feminine dwelling, but empty. Paul paused by 
its front door, but there was no clue about it to signal 
whether Walter Blunt had walked out through it in the 
last few minutes. 

He went back to the office, and through it. Jase was no 
longer in his own lounge. He seemed to have left the 
apartment. Paul was about to leave, too, in a mood of 
puzzled disturbance, when the entrance to Jase's apartment 
clicked openhe heard itand someone came in. 

Expecting Jase, Blunt, or both, he was turning toward 
the entrance hall when Kantele came out of it, carrying 
some sort of package, and stopped. 

"Paul!" she said. 

It was not a happy, or even pleased, sounding of his 
name. Rather, it was on a note of dismay that she said 
it. 

"Yes," he said, a little sadly. 

"Where's"she hesitated"Jase?" 

"And Walter Blunt," he said. "I'd like to know where 
they disappeared to, and why, myself." 
"They probably had to go someplace." She was ill-atease. 
It showed in the way she held the package to her. 
"I hadn't realized," he said, reaching for a neutral 


topic, "that Blunt wrote that 'apple comfort' song of 
yours. Jase told me." 
She looked abruptly a little sharply at him. Almost 
challengingly. 

"That surprised you, did it?" she asked. 

"Why" he said. "No." 

"It didn't?" 

"I don't know," he said, "exactly whether to call it 
'surprise.' I didn't know the Guildmaster wrote songs, 
that was all. And" He stopped, feeling her bristle. 

"And what?" 

"Nothing," he said, as peaceably as he could, "I only 
heard the first verse before you came in that day, and 
the one time I heard it before. But it seemed to me more 
a young man's song." 

She strode angrily past him. He got the impression 
that she was rather pleased than otherwise to find something 
to get angry about. She punched buttons on Jase's 
music player and swung about with her back to it. 

"Then it's time you heard the second verse, isn't it?" 
she asked. A second later her own voice swelled from 
the player behind her. 

In apple comfort, long I waited thee 

And long 1 thee in apple comfort waited. 

"Young man's song," she said bitingly. 

In lonely autumn and uncertain springtime 

My apple longing for thee was not sated. 

The clear, mountain rivulet of her recorded voice 
paused, and then went on into the second verse. She 
looked across at him with her eyes fixed and her lips together. 


Now come thee near anigh my autumn winding. 
In cider-stouted jugs, my memories 


Shall guard thee by the fireside of my passion, 

And at my life's end keep thy gentle lees. 

The music shut off. He saw that she was profoundly 
moved by it and deeply unhappy. He went to her. 

"I'm sorry," he said, standing before her. "You 
mustn't let what I think disturb you. Forget I had any 
opinion at all." 

She tried to take a step back from him and found the 
wall behind her. She leaned her head back against the 
wall, and he put out his long hand to the wall beside her, 
half-convinced for a moment that she was about to fall. 
But she stood with her shoulders against the wall and 
closed her eyes, turning her face away to one side. Tears 
squeezed from under her closed eyelids and ran down 
her cheeks. 

"Oh," she whispered, "why won't you leave me 
alone?" She pressed her face against the wall. "Please, 
just leave me alone!" 

Torn by her unhappiness, he turned and left, leaving 
her still standing there, pressed in sorrow against the 
wall. 


Chapter 16 


In the days that followed, Paul did not see her again. It 
was more than obvious that she was avoiding him, and 
she must at least have spoken to Jase about him, for the 
Necromancer made it a point one day to speak about 
her. 

"You're wasting your time, there," Jase said bluntly. 
"She's Walt's." 

"I know that," said Paul. He glanced across the table 
at Jase. The other man had met him for lunch near 
World Engineering Headquarters, bringing him a long and 
curious list of cults and societies with which, as Jase 
put it, the Guild had some "influence." Paul was supposed 
to learn the names and habits of these groups 
against some future date when the Guild might want to 
cultivate them. Paul accepted the list without protest. 
In spite of the fact that he was theoretically supposed to 
take orders only from the Guildmaster, he had yet to 
meet Blunt. Jase brought him all his instructions. Paul 
had decided not to make an issue of this for the moment. 
There was too much to be learned even as things were. 

There were about sixty thousand members in the Chantry 
Guild. Of these, perhaps fifteen hundred had dramatic 
parapsychological talents. Even in a world which 
accepted such thingseven though mostly as interesting 
parlor tricks or talents on a par with wiggling one's ears 
fifteen hundred people represented a pretty remark



able pool of potential ability. Paul was supposed to learn 
all about each one of the fifteen hundred odd: who 
could do what, and when, and, most important, who 
was improving his powers by exploring them in the curious, 
mystical, long-way-around light of the Alternate 
Laws. 

In addition, there were other aspects of the Guild for 

. Paul to learn, like the list Jase had just brought over on 
Paul's lunch hour. And all the work connected with the 
World Engineering Complex, where Tyne had Paul studying 
procedure like any executive trainee. 
Weather all over the world had been freakishly bad. 
In the southern hemisphere the winter had been stormy 
and cold. Here, the summer days were muggy and sweltering, 
but no rain fell. The Weather Control Complex 
found itself in the position of having to rob Peter to pay 
Paulmoisture diverted to one needy section of the 
Earth left other sections either twice as arid or drowned 
in torrential, flooding rains that caused widespread damage. 
It was no crisis, but it was annoyingly uncomfortable. 
The internal climate of the great city Complexes held 
the outside weather at arms length, but the emotional 
impact of the season's aberrancies came through even into 
air-conditioned interiors like this one where Paul 
and Jase sat at lunch. 
"It's just as well you realize she does belong to 
Walt," said Jase. For perhaps the first time since Paul 
had met him, there was a gentleness in Jase's voice. "She's 
Finnish, you knowyou know where her name comes 
from?" 
"No," said Paul. "No, I don't." 
"The Kalevalathe Finnish national epic. Longfellow 
wrote his Hiawatha poem from it." 
"No," said Paul, "I didn't know." 
"KalevaFinland," said Jase. 
(Wind across snow fields. Tinkling among the icicles 
of a cavernI knew it the first time, thought Paul.) 
"Kaleva had three sons. Handsome Lemminkainen, 


the art-smith, Ilmarinen, and the ancient Vinminen." 
Paul watched Jase with interest; for the first time the 
drive and rush of the man was gone. He spoke the names 
of the old legend with the lingering love of a scholar in 
his voice. "Vinminen invented the sacred harp 
Kantele. And she is a harp, our Kantele. A harp for 
the hand of gods or heroes. That's why Walt holds her, 
old as he is, unyielding as he is to anything but his own 
way of doing things." Jase shook his head across the 
table. "You may be arrogant, Paul. But even you have to 
face the fact that Walt's something more than us ordinary 
men." 

Paul smiled a little. Jase, watching him, laughed shortly. 
Abruptly the Necromancer was his own hard, glittering 
self again. 

"Because you don't think you can be killed," said 
Jase, "you think you can't be defeated, either!" 

Paul shook his head. 

"I'm quite sure I can be killed," he answered. "It's the 
defeat I doubt." 
"Why?" asked Jase, leaning forward. Paul was a little 
surprised to see that the man was seriously asking. 

"I don't know. Ifeel it," said Paul, hesitantly. 

Jase let the breath out through his nose with a faint, 
impatient sound. He stood up. 

"Learn that list," he said. "Burt said to tell you he'd 
pick you up tonight after you're through at your office, 
if you weren't otherwise tied up. You might give him a 
call." 

"I will," said Paul, and watched the other man leave, 
moving lithely and swiftly among the tables of the restaurant. 


Burton McLeod, two-handed broadsword with human 
brain and soul, had become the nearest thing to a close 
friend Paul could ever remember having in his life. And 
this just in the past few weeks and months. 

McLeod was in his early forties. Occasionally he looked 


immeasurably older. Sometimes he looked almost boyish. 
There was a deep, unvarying sadness in him, which was 
there as a result of the violence he had done, but not as a 
result of the ordinary reactions. 

He did not regret the killing he had done. His conscience 
saw no reason why an enemy should not die. But 
deep within him, it saddened him that battle was not 
sanctified. Surely there had been something right and holy 
at one time about a fiat field, a fair fight, and a fair 
death? He would never have thought to ask quarter for 
himself, and it embarrassed him that the world in which 
he lived insisted upon the concept of unvarying quarter 
for all, even for those he regarded as needing killing. He 
was a kind and gentle man, a little shy with those of 
the human race he considered worthwhile, in which class, 
along with Blunt, Kantele, and Jase, Paul was pleased and 
embarrassed in turn to find himself numbered. His mind 
was brilliant and he was an instinctive bookworm, and 
his essential moral code was so innate that there seemed 
to be a wall between him and any possibility of dishonesty. 


Like Paul, his life had been solitary. That might have 
been part of what drew them together. But a mutual 
honesty and a lack of ordinary fear played a part, also. 
It began with Paul being sent for some rudimentary 
tutoring in unarmed self-defense, as part of his Guild 
teachings, and went on from there with Paul's and McLeod's 
mutual discovery that Paul's overdeveloped arm 
was not amenable to ordinary training, or susceptible to 
ordinary attack and disablement. 

"It's speed that does it," Mc Leod had said, one evening 
in a gym, after several unsuccessful attempts on his 
part to lock and hold Paul's arm. "Given speed and 
leverage, you don't need much La the way of muscle. But 
you've got the muscle, too." He examined Paul's arm with 
interest. "I don't understand it. You ought to be slow as 
a truck. Bui you're as fast or faster than I am." 


"A freak," said Paul, opening and closing his fist to 

watch the muscles in his forearm bulge and retreat. 

"That's it," agreed McLeod, without any overtone of 
comment. "That isn't just an overdeveloped arm. It's 
just a properly developed, trained arm for somebody six 
inches bigger than you. Someone rather lean, but in top 
shape, and about six-seven or so. Was your other arm as 
long as this one?" 

Paul dropped his arm down by his side. To his intense 
and sudden interest, he saw that the tips of his 
fingers hung down almost to his kneecap. 

"No," he said. "This one wasn't, either." 

"Well," said McLeod, shrugging. He began to put on the 
shirt he had taken off to instruct Paul. "We didn't really 
work up a sweat. I'll wait until I get home to shower. 
Buy you a drink?" 

"If I can buy the second," said Paul. And that was the 
beginning of their friendship. 

It was late July of the summer that Jase made his call, 
left the list of the cults and societies for Paul to learn, 
and the word about McLeod seeing Paul after working 
hours that evening. 

Paul called up the other man from back at the office 
and agreed to meet McLeod in the bar of the same restaurant 
where he had had lunch with Jase. He spent the rest 
of the afternoon running the charts, as the office phrase 
was, down in the heart of the huge two-hundred-level 
building that was the core of the world's machinery, 
actually in the Super-Complex, itself. 

This duty was one which everyone on Tyne's staff, including 
Tyne, had to perform for himself about once a 
month. The equipment of the Super-Complex was semiself-
adapting. Changes were constantly being made in it 
to keep it in line with changes being made in the ulti


mate mechanisms out in the world with which it was in contact and control. 

capableand exercised that capabilityof making 
changes in itself. Accordingly, everyone on Tyne's staff 


had the obligation of keeping up their own portfolio of 
charts and information about the Super-Complex. You 
started out with a thick sheaf of notices of alteration, and 
went down among the working levels, checking the actual 
changes and seeing they were entered in your portfolio. 
Without these, there might have been a number of shifts 
in responsibility from one recording, computing, or controlling 
element to another, and the human staff might 
have found itself trying to initiate changes through automatic 
channels that had already been closed. 

It was simply the homework connected with the job 
of being on the World Engineer's staff, the necessary 
duty of keeping up-to-date in your own field of endeavor. 


Nonetheless, in Paul's case he found it to be much 
more than the routine duty it was supposed to be. Moving 
about through chance corridors allowed by the mobile 
units of the Super-Complex itself, surrounded level by 
level by the impossible intricacies of softly humming 
and clicking equipment, Paul could now understand why 
someone like the weak, drug-fogged Malorn could have 
been pushed over the unstable border of bis mind by 
moving around here. There was life, all right, in this 
steadily operating maze of understanding and control; 
Paul felt it certainly and surely. But it was not life in the 
human sense of the living, and it did not face him directly. 
Rather, it slid behind the massed equipment, hid in a 
corridor closed a second before by a unit moving to block 
a path that had once been open. 

The two previous times he had been down to bring 
his portfolio up to date he had not seemed to notice so 
much purposefulness to the feeling of mechanical life 
about him. He wondered if he was becoming sensitized, 
perhaps in the same way that Malorn had. 

The idea was ridiculous. The moment he held Malora's 
broken personality up alongside his own for purposes 
of comparison, that much became immediately 
plain. Malorn had been afraid. 


Paul stood still for a moment on the sixty-seventh 
level, looking about him. Far down the open corridor in 
which he was standing, a tall gleaming bank of units slid 
across the opening, blocking it, and a new path opened up, 
angling off to the right. It was like being down in among 
the moving parts of some engine. An engine equipped to 
be careful of crushing any small creature climbing about 
within it as it moved to break old connections between 
its parts, and make new connections. 

Paul turned back to his portfolio with a suddenly inquiring 
eye. It had not occurred to him before to consider 
areas within the levels of equipment. He, like all other 
staff members, simply went to the point where it was 
necessary to check on a change, checked on it, then 
took the most direct route to the next closest change 
point. But the portfolio was simply a history of changes 
running back to the general chart put out at the beginning 
of each year. He glanced through it. 

The forty-ninth to the fifty-second level, he saw, 
showed no changes whatsoever since the beginning of the 
year. In this area the chart showed the Earth terminal of 
the no-time connection with Station Springboard on Mercury, 
and the equipment dealing with the relationship of 
this project to Earthside economy, social factors, and 
science. Paul frowned over the immediate chart of that 
area. It seemed incredible that an area dealing with research 
and discovery should have failed to show a multitude 
of changes in seven months, let alone showing none. 

It occurred to Paul, abruptly, that information about 
the changes in that area might be restricted to certain 
qualified people. Perhaps to Tyne himself. The World 
Engineer had, not once but a number of times in the past 
weeks, recommended that Paul ask about anything that 
puzzled him. Paul lifted his wrist phone and buzzed the 
office on the two hundredth level. 

"Nancy," he said to the receptionist, "this is Paul. Do 
you know anything about any area down here I'm not 
supposed to go into or know about?" 


"Why, no," said the girl. In the small tank of Paul's 
wrist phone, her face was slim, cheerful, but puzzled. 
"Staff members from this office can go anywhere in the 
Supe." 

"I see," said Paul. "Could I talk to Mr. Tyne?" 

"Oh, he just went down into the Supe himself, about 
five minutes ago." 
"Portfolio?" 
"That's right." 
"He's wearing a phone, isn't he?" 
"Just a minute." She glanced at her board. "I guess he 

must have left it on his desk here. You know he doesn't 
like wearing one." She grinned at Paul. "It's just the rest of 
us have to follow rules." 

"Well," said Paul, "I'll catch him later after he's back." 

"I'll tell him you called, Paul. 'By." 

" 'By, Nancy." Paul clicked off his phone. He thought 
for a second and then headed himself for the unchanged 
area between the forty-ninth and fifty-second levels. 

He found it no different on the forty-ninth level than 
on other levels in the Supe, until he came suddenly upon 
the long, looming roundness of the three-step accelerator 
tube. He passed around the end of this and found himself 
crossing the small open area that was a counterpart 
of the contact point he had seen at Springboard. This was 
one end of the no-time pathway that abolished the distance 
between terminals. 

As his first step came down on the highly polished 
surface of the area, the alarm of a sudden warning rang 
loudly in his inner sensitivity. He almost checked himself. 
But just at that moment something attracted his attention 
otherwise. 

The sound of a conversation came to his ears. Both 
voices used the deeper, male register of tones, and one 
was the voice of Kirk Tyne. The other voice was unnatural. 


They reached Paul's ears down an angled corridor be



tween high units of equipment. Paul went quickly and, 
he did not think why, quietly up the corridor toward 
them. 

He turned the angle of the corridor. And stopped, finding 
himself shielded behind the angle of a projecting 
unit some eighteen or twenty feet high. Just beyond this 
angle he looked out into a fairly good-sized open space, 
almost a square, surrounded by units a good two levels 
in height. Their lower levels were lighted for the benefit 
of those living people who might need to work among 
them, as all units were lighted. But their upper part projected 
up into the dusk where lights were not. All 
around the square of open space they loomed like 
finely machined and polished idols in a temple. Tiny below 
them, facing one wall of these great shapes, stood 
Tyne. 

"There's no doubt about it," Tyne was saying, "the 
weatherall this rioting and upset. The world situation 
is abnormal." 

"It has been recorded." The voice came from somewhere 
in the wall of units facing the World Engineer. "It 
has been symbolized and integrated with the base situation. 
No apparent need for extraordinary measures is now 
indicated." 

"There's an atmosphere of unrest. I can feel it myself." 
"No concrete indications have been signalized or recorded." 


"I don't know," said Tyne, almost to himself. He 
raised his voice slightly. "I think I may override you on 
this." 

"Override," said the voice, "would introduce an uncalculable 
factor rising to a peak unit influence of twelve 
per cent and extending over an eighteen-month period." 

"I can't simply ignore the situation." 

"No situation is ignored. Ordinary measures are in 
process to correct the aberrancies." 
"And you think they'll prove sufficient?" 
"They will correct." 


"By which you mean, you think they'll correct," said 
Tyne, a little harshly. "Sometime I'm going to take a 
summer off and design an honest element of self-doubt for 
you." 

The other voice did not answer. 

"What should I do?" asked Tyne, finally. 

"Continue normal routine." 

"I guess," said Tyne. He turned suddenly and strode 
off toward an opposite side of the square. Before him, a 
corridor opened up. He went away down it, and it 
closed behind him. 

Paul was left watching in silence. 

Quietly, he came out into the square and looked 
about him. The units he looked at were in appearance no 
different than the larger computer elements on other 
levels. He walked over to the side where Tyne had stood. 
But he could not even discern a loud-speaker element in 
the faces of the units he was observing. 

A slight sound behind him made him glance over his 
shoulder. He turned completely around. The corridor by 
which he had come to this spot was now closed. The units 
stood looming, side by side, unbroken around him. 

"Paul Formain," said the voice that had spoken to 
Tyne. Paul turned back to the units he had just been 
looking over. 

"Your presence at this point in space and tune is unjustified 
within the symbolic structure of human society. 
Accordingly, your removal may now justifiably be effected." 



Book Three: PATTERN 

Emerging on that final plain, 
Once more the watch-bell tolled again. 
Twice! Thor's soul and mine were one, 
And a dragon shape had crossed the sun, 


The Enchanted Tower 


Chapter 17 


"Set!" said Paul. 

The word went out and was lost in the shadowy stillness 
above and behind the metallic shapes of the huge 
units standing over and around Paul. There was a slight 
noise behind him. He glanced toward it and saw a corridor 
opening once more in the general direction from which 
he had reached this area on the forty-ninth level. In 
the opposite direction a single unit slid out to fill most of 
the open space, and turned toward Paul. It rolled slowly 
toward him. He backed up and saw he was being 
forced into the newly opened corridor. 

"So you can do violence to people," said Paul. 

"No," said the voice that had spoken to Tyne. Now 
it seemed to come from the unit that was crowding Paul 
backward. 

"You're doing violence to me right now." 

"I am correcting a misplacement," said the voice. 
"Your value is external and false. It is perverting the 
symbological matrix of society at this moment." 

"Nonetheless," said Paul, "you have a responsibility to 
me, as well as to society." 

"More latitude," said the unit, forcing him back along 
the corridor, "is possible with those not sane, who are not 
responsible." 

"I'm not sane?" 

"No," said the machine, "you are not." 


"I'd like," said Paul, "to hear your definition of sanity." 

"Sanity," replied the voice, "in the human being is a 
response to natural instincts. It is sane to sleep, to eat, to 
seek to feed oneself, to fight if attacked, to sleep if no 
occupation is at hand." 

Paul's shoulder blades came up against something 
hard. Turning around, he saw he had reached a turn in 
the corridor down which he was backing. The unit rolling 
toward him on invisible smooth-turning cylinders had 
not paused. He changed direction and backed away 
again. 

"How about thinking? Is that sane?" 

"Thought is a perfectly sane process, as long as it 
follows sane paths in the human brain." 

"Such as those concerned with feeding and sleeping?" 

"Yes." 

"But not," said Paul, "those concerned with painting a 
picture or discovering a new method of interstellar travel?" 


"Such thinking," said the unit, "is a response to abnormal 
irritations in the environment of the human concerned. 
Perfectly sane human beings have no need to do 
more than live and propagate, all under the conditions 
of greatest comfort." 

"By those standards," said Paul, still backing up, "most 
of the human race is insane." 

"You are quite wrong," said the voice, "roughly eighty-
five per cent of the human race has had no real desire outside 
the framework I mentioned. Of the remaining fifteen, 
only about five in any generation have made any real effort 
to put their insanities into practice. Perhaps two per 
cent have some effect on future generations and one-
tenth of one per cent are later admired even by the sane." 

"I won't argue your figures," said Paul, feeling his left 
shoulder brush a unit, unyielding as the brick wall against 
which a man stands before a firing squad. "Even though 
I could. But don't you think the fact that your final 
category is admired even by the sane, as you put it, is 


some kind of an indication that maybe others had something 
besides insanity at work for them?" 

"No," said the voice. 

"Forgive me," said Paul. "I think I overestimated you. 
Let me say that again in terms you might be able to 
handle. Once you achieve an ideal existence for the human 
race, what's going to become of the arts, scientific 
research of all kinds, and the exploration of the natural 
universe?" 

"They will be abandoned by the sane," said the machine. 


Paul, backing up, saw the flanking units on either side 
of his corridor suddenly give way to open space. At the 
same time, the unit which had been herding him forward 
rolled level with the mouth of the corridor and stopped, 
so that Paul now found himself facing a final wall. He 
turned and looked about him. He stood, completely 
hemmed in by a wall of units, upon the contact area at 
the end of the three-step accelerator. The end of the tube, 
the terminal that could tear him from this spot off into 
the universal ubiquity of no-time, loomed high above his 
head like a cannon mouth over the head of a sparrow 
which, in its muzzle, had taken refuge from a hawk. 

"And the insane, at that time?" asked Paul. 
"There will be no more insane," said the Voice. "They 
will have destroyed themselves." 

Paul saw nothing to give him any impression, and heard 
nothing; but deep within his flesh and bones he felt the 
accelerator warming to life. Even now, back and forth 
over flashing yards of distance, the point of no-time to be, 
was wanning to life. Paul thought of Springboard, and of 
the emptiness of space. 

"You tried to get me to destroy myself, didn't you?" 
said Paul, remembering what Jase had said. "In the mine; 
in front of the marching society that day." 

"Always," said the voice, "the way has been open for 
you to destroy yourself. It is what works best with the 
insane. The sane are easy to kill. The insane fight very 


bard against being killed, but are more susceptible where 
it comes to the opportunities of self-destruction." 

"Do you realize," asked Paul, feeling the accelerator 
warming to life over him, "your definition of sane and insane 
is completely artificial and wrong?" 

"No," said the machine, "I cannot be anything but 
correct It is impossible for me to be incorrect." 

"You ought to see," said Paul, "that one false assumption 
used as a basis for later decisions could cause all 
your conclusions to be in error." 

"I know this. I also know I contain no false assumptions," 
answered the voice. Above the looming curve of 
the accelerator the dusk of the dark higher up seemed to 
be pressing down on Paul. Almost, the voice seemed to 
descend also, becoming confidential. "My assumptions 
must stand the test of whether the structures built upon 
them guarantee a safe and continued life to mankind. This 
they do. I am humanity's guardian. You, in contrast, are 
its destroyer." 

"I ?" asked Paul, staring up into the darkness. 

"I know you. You are the destroyer of mankind. You 
are the warrior who will not fight and cannot be conquered. 
You are proud," said the machine. "I know you, 
Necromancer. Already you have done incalculable damage, 
and created the first blind living form of the inconceivable 
enemy." 

A barrier went down in Paul's mind. What was beyond 

it, he could not at this moment see; but it brought him 

relief and strength. It was as if a soldier, after long wait


ing, had at last received definite orders commanding him 

upon a long and desperate journey. 

"I see," said Paul quietly, as much to himself as to the 

machine. 

"To see is not enough," said the voice. "It is not enough 

excuse. I am the living wish of mankind expressed in 

solidity. I have the right to direct people. You have not. 

They are not yours. They are mine." The tones of the 

voice did not vary, but Paul got an impression of total 


effort being directed against him. "I will not let you lead 
mankind blindfold through a dark maze to an end they 
cannot conceive of, and final destruction. I cannot destroy 
you, or I would. But I can put you aside." 

The voice paused slightly. 

Paul was suddenly aware of a slight humming from the 
great cylinder head beside and above him. The acceleration 
was nearing the point of break into no-time which, 
like a sudden spark jumping, would contact and remove 
him from the point where he stood. He had just time to 
remember that he had been through no-time before, on 
the heels of Jase and Kantele when they escaped the police 
in the office across the concourse from the Koh-i-Nor. 
But that had been like running down a flight of stairs, 
while this would be like being thrown down them. He had 
just time to brace his awareness. 

"Now," said the machine. 

And Paul was ripped from the position he held in time 
and space and spread out to the uttermost reaches of the 
universe. 


Chapter 18 


Paul was not immediately delivered at the destination to 
which the machine had sent him. 

From the psychic point of view the action of the accelerator 
upon him was like that of hurling him down an 
endless flight of infinitely stretching stairs. But even as he 
tumbled, that invincible part of him, like the reflexes of a 
superbly conditioned athlete, was instinctively gathering 
his feet under him, regaining his balance, and stopping 
his fall. It checked him, got him upright; but the conscious 
part of him was for the moment stunned and dazed, out 
of action. Instinctively in action, like a half-knocked-out 
fighter too well trained to stay down, he fought clear of 
the push of the accelerator and wandered, as it were, off 
sideways along one of the stair surfaces. 

The situation was entirely different from when he had 
gone through no-time on the heels of Jase and Kantele, 
when he and they had been escaping the air police across 
from the Koh-i-Nor Hotel. The way by which they had 
entered no-time then, had been by a much more bearable 
emotional route. The accelerator method (lacking the 
medication that was yet to be discovered) was simply and 
plainly brutal. 

It achieved its desired end by sheer savagery of action. 
It was this that had caused effects ranging from severe 
nervous breakdown to death in early Springboard volunteers 
transmitted to the terminal from which Paul had 


left. In essence, under the accelerator method, the in-
dividual's identity fled the immediate level of no-time to 
escape the suddenly intolerable conditions under which it 
had been" forced to experience real time and space. Inanimate 
objects, of course, had no such difficulties. But 
the human psyche could not have retained its orientation 
under a full experiencing of conscious dispersal to universal 
dimensions and later reassembly. In instinctive 
self-protection it made the great step upward into the 
subjective universe. 

Now, experiencing this, Paul suddenly understood the 
operation of the Alternate Laws, which were naturally entirely 
subjective in nature. However, at the moment this 
understanding could make no contact with the operative 
areas of his mind, which were still stunned. These 
wandered the subjective dimension of that line of endeavor 
to which the greater part of his being was dedicated. 


There was no shape or dimension to the subjective 
universe in which he now wandered. It was, however, 
subject to the reality imposed on it by the symbolic processes 
of Paul's deeper self. Consequently, to him now, it 
took on the appearance of a vast, pebbled plain, with the 
pebbles growing in size in the distance. It was the plain of 
which he had dreamed on returning to the hotel after his 
first meeting with Jase. 

Before, he had toiled over it as if walking. Now he 
skimmed rapidly just above its surface. Gray, black, 
rubbled, and bleak, the plain stretched off about him in all 
directions, not to any horizons, but to a great but finite 
distance. An emptiness of spirit, a sense of desolation, 
made up the atmosphere around him. He chilled in it, 
even while the unstunned part of him struggled to remind 
him that it was all subjective, all interpretative of the 
job he had, at a great distance in time and space, once 
dedicated himself to do. 

"Arrogant," murmured a wind across the larger pebbles 
with the voice of Jase. 


"These are my people, not yours," whispered a metallic 
breeze from another direction. And then, from a little 
farther off, and fainter even: "I know you, Necromancer...." 


He went quickly from the voices. The pebbles grew to 
boulders, to huge and mammoth shapes, to vast mountains 
with darkness between them. Then, at last, over the 
farthest and largest of these, he came to the final edge of 
the plain. 

He went swiftly to it. From a point above the last and 
most mountainous boulder shapes he hung and looked 
down, out, and up at the same time upon a shifting infinity 
of darkness. 

It was a gulf beyond which he felt there was light. But 
he could not see it, for the closer darkness. And in the 
darkness, something stirred. 

It was barely living yet. It was an embryo, an amoeba, 
with only so much of consciousness as had allowed it to 
sense his existence when he had been under initiation, 
deep in the rock of Mercury. And only so much of reaction 
as had allowed it to make that one reactive, whiplash 
attack in his direction. Its growing was all yet before 
it. 

And it was all in the way of evil that the Super-Complex 
had said it was. And Paul had created it. Without 
him it would never have been, but now it lived, and grew 
in power and understanding. 

A terrible desire came over him then, to attack it now 
and settle the matter once and for all. But when he 
moved to go beyond the edge of his plain, he found something 
invisible there that would not let him pass. It was the 
barrier of the laws under which he had created what 
stirred out there. The laws that protected it from him as 
much as he from it, until the time when both he and it 
should be strong enough to break all barriers. And suddenly 
his dazed mind cleared, and he realized that if he 
should meet and conquer it now, nothing would be 


proved. Nothing accomplished. There would have been no 
point in its creation in the first place. 

Abruptly, his mind was clear again. He retreated swiftly 
from the edge of the plain. He returned to the area 
where the boulders were again down to the size of pebbles. 
And here, close to where he had wandered astray, he 
found something like a cairn, or stony pile, new-built. It 
was about three times his own height, and the chance 
crevices between its stones gave an errie impression of 
tiny arrowslits or windows, though he felt instinctively 
that there was nothing alive about it as yet, nothing within. 
Standing beside it, he looked once more about the 
plain, and saw now that here and there at the farthest 
limits, this subjective landscape of his seemed to have 
elevated itself slightly, as if in the beginnings of hills, in a 
circle, surrounding him. 

With that, he gave in to the original impulse that had 
brought him here and went forward to his destination. 

He came to ordinary consciousness again in what 
looked like a small apartment. He had one brief glimpse 
of it before his legshe had come through standing in the 
same position in which he had faced the Supecrumpled 
under him and the full shock of what had been done to 
him took its price from his physical body. He pitched to 
the floor. 

Here again, as always, he did not go completely under 
into unconsciousness. By all ordinary standards he should 
have gone completely out, but in actuality he only passed 
into a foggy, uncertain state which was the physical 
equivalent of his dazed condition while he had been wandering 
the subjective universe. During the succeeding several 
days in which this state gradually wore itself out, he 
was vaguely conscious of the fact that he had dragged himself 
from the floor to a nearby couch, and that he had 
once or twice drunk from a water dispenser that was 
nearby. Otherwise, he had not eaten or slept, or even 
fallen into the half-active dream-filled state that was his 
ordinary slumber. 


He did not suffer in a physical sense. He had in no 
meaning of the term suffered any physical damage as a 
result of being transmitted to this spot. What had been 
torn about and attacked in him was his essential, immaterial 
identity. And the effect was similar to that of an 
attack of profound depression. He was perfectly capable 
physically of getting up and examining his surroundings. 
The act of will required to do so, however, was like that 
of lifting his own body's weight to a man drained of 
blood almost to the point of death. 

Gradually, however, he recovered. 

He became aware first that the apartment was shaped 
like a section of a cylinder, its bottom curve having a floor 
built across it. It was fitted with the compact luxury of an 
ocean-going submersible liner. Between the curved walls 
were couch and easy chairs, tape cabinets, music player, 
bar, kitcheneven some finger-sculptures, and a couple 
of interesting stochastic paintings, one in oils, the other in 
red, black, and yellow clays. 

There was also the cleared area, floored in polished 
black, which had been the terminal point of his arrival. 

It was sometime on the third day that he found himself 
staring at the paintings, as he had for some hours now, 
like a man stupefied. His feeble but certain perception 
made the connection immediately, and he laughed weakly. 
He had suddenly realized the existence of a plasma that 
could in part replace the psychic blood of which he had 
been drained. 

He struggled wearily up from the couch and went 
clumsily on hands and knees across the room to the 
music player. From there he went to the tape cabinets, 
and to some adjoining shelves where he found a reference 
printer. 

Twenty minutes later found him back on the couch. 
The fine, golden threads of Il Trovatore were spinning 
themselves out of the speakers of the music player, the 
rich canvas of Rubens' "Adoration of the Magi" was displayed 
in the tank of the tape cabinets, and the solemn 


heartbreak of Milton's sonnet on his blindness tolled like 
a slow and shadowed bell from a printer sheet in Paul's 
hand: 

When 1 consider how my light is spent 

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide... 

Paul lay there, changing art, music, and poetry for 
mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and all the fields of 
man's endeavor. And slowly the life of those who had 
had something to give to life seeped back into his own 
drained being, and his strength came back to him. 

By the fourth day after his arrival he was back to normal. 
He got himself a large meal out of the kitchen, and 
then set about exploring the limits of this prison to which 
he had been sentenced. 

It was about thirty feet in length, and about that same 
height and width at its greatest points of those two dimensions. 
Either end of it was a great circle flattened off 
at the bottom by the chord-line of the floor. One circle 
overlooked the terminal area of his arrival. The other 
merely filled up the far end of the living space. 

It was this second circle that Paul looked over with interest. 
The first, overhanging the terminal point of his 
arrival, presumably simply hid the business end of an 
accelerator. The second might, however, be blocking the 
way to an escape route. When he looked closely, he discovered 
that the second in fact did appear to be something 
in the nature of a removable cover, held in place by a 
simple magnetic lock. 

He unlocked the cover and the lower half of it swung 
away from him like half of a huge Dutch door. He walked 
through it and found himself in a farther extension of the 
cylinder, three times as big as the living quarters and 
filled with crated equipment and tools. He let his gaze 
settle over the tools and crates, and the answer he was 
looking for became easily apparent to him. This was the 


material with which the accelerator terminal here could 
be fitted to transmit as well as receive. He paused to 
glance at the tickets attached to some of the crates, but 
they were punch cards notated in a technician's shorthand 
that he did not know. He went on to the still farther circular 
wall that ended this division of the cylinder. 

This had been sealed with a running bead of plastic 
weld all around its rim. It was evidently intended to be 
easily removed, but only by someone who knew how to do 
so, and why he was doing it. 

Paul turned back and searched the second room once 
more, but there was no message or instruction list in sight. 

He went back into the living quarters, and proceeded 
to make a methodical search of that area. He excavated 
drawers and investigated files and cabinets. There was no 
instruction sheet or manual. Evidently, whoever this 
place had been designed for had been expected to have 
that sort of information in his head. Paul was standing in 
the middle of the living-area floor and looking about for 
some hiding place he might have overlooked, when there 
was a sound from behind him, from the direction of the 
terminal area. 

He looked. There on the bare and polished surface he 
saw a newssheet lying, still slightly curled from the printer. 
He went to it and picked it up. 

For a moment he could not imagine what reason had 
caused the Supe to send it through to him. The headings 
of the various stories on the front page screamed of riots, 
panics, and earthquakes. Then, sliding his eye up one 
column and down the next in automatic speed-reading, 
Paul saw a small item: WORLD ENGINEER GIVEN 
EXTRAORDINARY POWERS. 

By an unprecedented world-wide register vote, the 
World Engineer yesterday was awarded authority to 
freeze the credit numbers and deny all Complex services 
to rioters and those suspected of disturbing 
the peace. The Complex-Major tabulated an almost 


inconceivable 82 per cent of the total voting population, 
with 97.54 per cent of those voting registering 
in favor of awarding the additional authority to the 
World Engineer. 

A tiny item. But Paul frowned. Highly important it 
was, but that did not seem to him sufficient cause for the 
Supe to send him the newssheet. Norhe glanced back 
at the other stories upon the front pagewas the news of 
widespread emotional disturbances and rioting sufficient. 
The machine was not equipped to gloat, and surely with 
Paul imprisoned here as he was, there could be no other 
reason for informing him about events he was powerless 
to have an effect upon. 

Still puzzling, Paul opened the newssheet to its second 
and third pages. Then he saw it 

By some apparent freak mishap, the printer had failed 
to bring out the printing on these two pages otherwise 
than as an unreadable blur, except for one item as small 
as the front-page item Paul had just frowned over. That 
one stood out as if framed. 

DRONE LOST 

The Complex-Major today noted the Information 
that one of its Springboard drones, carrying automatic 
terminal receiving equipment to the planet 
known as New Earth, fourth world of the star Sirius, 
has suffered a malfunction of the directing system 
and been lost in space. This drone, which three days 
ago was noted as being in position to land shortly on 
New Earth, apparently missed its landing and has 
fallen beyond that planet under conditions of movement 
which win carry it out of the Sirian system. 
There can be no hope of reestablishing contact, notes 
the Complex-Major, or of recovery of the drone. 

Paul dropped the newssheet and, spinning about, strode 
swiftly back into the farther room. Seizing a tool like a 


chisel, he attacked the plastic weld around the rim of the 
circular end wall. The plastic peeled up under his gouging 
and a thin edge of the metal was revealed. He forced the 
chisel edge in under the edge of the revealed metal. For a 
moment there was resistance, and then the chisel plunged 
through. There was a sudden whistling insuck of air past 
Paul's hand, the plastic weld cracked loose halfway 
around the rim, and the lower half spanged sharply on a 
deep bass note. Before Paul's eyes a horizontal crack ran 
across the metal, and the lower half of it broke clean 
from the top and fell into the room. 

Paul caught it. It was a thin sheet of light magnesium 
alloy. He bent it inward and laid it flat on the floor. Then 
he stepped one step forward and looked out, through 
heavy glass. 

Before him was a rolling landscape under a slightly 
yellowish sky, an atmosphere hazed with fine dust. Something 
like tiny, close-packed fern leaves covered the 
ground and grew thickly and a little larger about an occasional 
boulder or outcropping of granitic rock. Farther 
back were low, broad trees whose trunks and limbs looked 
as if they had been shaped out of dark, twisted cable. 
The brilliant white points of two Ao-type stars, so close 
they seemed at the moment to be swimming into each 
other, peered burningly through the dust haze and made 
the illumination for the day outside. 

From the sight of these and the landscape they lighted 
a landscape rich in promise for the yet infant science of 
terraformingPaul had no difficulty making the connection 
between his present location and one of the worlds 
described in popular articles as destinations for the Springboard 
drones. 

The double star in the sky out there could only be Sirius 
and its close companion. Which meant that this was New 
Earth, and the message of the newssheet the Supe had 
sent him was clear. Paul, and this drone in which he found 
himself imprisoned, had been deliberately and officially 
"lost" from the records. 


For a moment Paul leaned his forehead wearily against 
the cool pane of the glass. The long palm and fingers of 
his single hand pressed uselessly against the glass' thick 
surface. Out there beyond its protection was, according to 
all official reports, an atmosphere suffocating with hydrogen 
sulphide. Behind him was crated equipment he had 
not the education and training to assemble. 

Suddenly he stiffened. His hand slipped down from the 
glass and he raised his head to look sharply out through 
the transparency. 

Leaning against a boulder on this alien world a little 
more than a dozen feet from the drone and incongruous 
against the small, carpeting ferns, was a heavy cane of 
dark wood; Walter Blunt's cane, one end of which was 
cracked and splintered as it would have been from being 
used to smash a human skull. 


Chapter 19 


"I see," said Paul quietly to the empty room and the landscape 
beyond the glass. "Of course." 

It was like driving through a strange city at night and 
being convinced that north lay on your right hand. Then, 
suddenly, a chance-glimpsed street sign, some small but 
undeniable scrap of information, brings suddenly the undeniable 
orientation that places north on the left. Abruptly, 
silently, without real physical movement, the universe 
swaps ends and you realize that all this time you have 
been heading west, not east 

Suddenly the pattern about Paul had become clear and 
correct, down to the last detail. 

It was Blunt, of course. As he had instinctively felt all 
along, it was Bluntthis man who would not turn and 
show his face openly and clearlywho was the demon. 
Paul spoke out loud again, but not to Blunt. 

"Get me out of here," he said. 
No, came an answer from deep inside him, from the 
invincible part in the back of his mind. 
"You mean," asked Paul, "we end here, you and me? 
The two of us?" 

No. 

"Then ?" 

There's only one of us. 

"I see," said Paul again, quietly. "I should have known 
that." 


1 can do anything you want. But if I do it, what's the 
use? We won't have found any way other than force. Our 
work will all have been wasted, as the living darkness we 
created beyond the boulders would have been wasted if 
you had killed it then, or if you kill it now, while it's ungrown. 
It's up to you now to find the different way. 

"Not the machine's way," said Paul. "Not the way you 
moved me out of that office just behind Jase and Kantele 
that time? A different way than either of those?" 

Yes. 

"I don't know where to start." 

Perceive. Recapitulate. Feel. 

"All right," said Paul. He looked out at the cable trunks 
and limbs of the trees beyond the window, and at the 
cane. "There is only one thing common to both the objective 
and the subjective universe. This is identity." 

Yes. Go on. 

"The objective universe can be expressed in its lowest 
common denominators as an accumulation of identity 
isolates, both living and nonliving." 

That's right. 

"The isolates, however, in order to livethat is, to have 
function along the single dimension of the time line 
must pass in and out of combinations which can be called 
sets." 

Continue, Brother. 

"The sets, in order to create the illusion of reality in 
objective time and space, must at all tunes arrange themselves 
into a single pattern. The pattern may vary, but it 
can't be abandoned or destroyed without also destroying 
or abandoning the illusion of reality." 

Entirely correct. And very good for a partial identity 
that is restricted to reasoning by use of emotion and response. 
We can be proud of you. Go on. The next step? 

Paul frowned. 

"Next step?" he asked. "That's all." 

Application. 

"Application? Ah!" said Paul, suddenly. "Of course. 


The so-called Alternate Laws"he glanced once more at 
the cane against the boulder beyond the window"arid 
the talents deriving from them are merely methods of 
altering the pattern so that the illusion of reality temporarily 
permits actions ordinarily not permitted." He 
thought for a second. "Blunt doesn't understand this," he 
said. 

Are you certain of that? 

Paul smiled a little in the empty silence of the room. 

"That's my department, isn't it? Understanding." 

/ submit myself. Go on. 

Paul hesitated. 

"Is there more?" he asked. 

You wanted to get out of here. You have perceived and 
recapitulated. From here on you leave me for your own 
territory. Feel. 

Paul closed his eyes. Standing with the yellow light from 
outside showing faintly through his lids, he tried for a 
total contact with all that surrounded himroom, drone, 
planet, suns, space. It was like attempting to make some 
delicate last connection with blind fingers at arm's length, 
out of sight inside a piece of complicated equipment 
Only, Paul's effort was completely nonphysical. He was 
reaching out to feel fully and correctly the great pattern of 
the objective universe, so that he could fit his own identity 
perfectly into pivot position within its structure. 

For a moment he made no progress. For a fraction of a 
second he felt the completely stripped feeling of total 
awareness, but lacking even a single point of contact as he 
floated free, swinging into position. Then, suddenly, it 
was like the moment of orientation that had followed his 
seeing the cane beyond the glass, but much greater. And 
mixed with it the sensation of melting together, like but 
greater than that which had come to him to finish his interview 
with the psychiatrist Elizabeth Williams. 

In one sudden moment of no-time, Paul and the invincible 
part of him fused irreversibly together. 
It was as if he had stood on a narrow stage and sud



denly, on all sides, great curtains had been raised, so that 
he found himself looking away in all directions to enormous 
distances. But nowalone. 

"Ave atque vale," he said, and smiled a little sadly. 
"Hail and farewell." He turned back to the glass of the 
window. "Destruct," he said. "Of course. Blunt planted 
that for me, and in his own limited way, he was right." 

Paul turned back to the tools behind him. He chose a 
heavy sledge hammer and took it to the window. His 
first blow bent the metal handle of the sledge but merely 
starred the glass. But his next blow sent the sledge crashing 
through and the whole wall of glass fell out in ruins. 

He took three rapid steps toward the boulder where 
the cane leaned, as the acid, choking atmosphere numbed 
bis sense of smell with the assault of its odor and filled 
his lungs. He reached the cane and seized it even as his 
eyesight began to sear and blur with tears. Almost, he 
could hear Blunt chanting, as he had chanted in the 
vision tank back there underground at Malabar Mine 
while Paul watched. 

"Destruct! The ultimate destruct! The creative destruct 
that will rescue Man from being saved forever..." 

Then Paul felt his knees strike the ground as he fell. 
And with that his identity quit his body forever and left it 
there, fallen and dying in the suffocation of the yet-untamed 
atmosphere of the world which would be called 
New Earth, with a splintered walking stick clutched in its 
single fist. 


Chapter 20 


Full twenty-fathoms times five, thy body lies. Of its 
bones is ocean debris made.... 

Thirty miles due west of La Jolla, California, which is 
a few miles up the coast line from San Diego, on a sandy 
underwater pleateau six-hundred-odd feet below the surface 
of the ever-moving blue Pacific, Paul's bodiless identity 
hovered above a skeleton of a man wrapped and 
weighted with half-inch chain. This place had not been his 
original intended destination, but he had detoured here to 
settle a purely emotional point in his own mind. Now, 
hovering above the chain-wrapped skeleton, he sensed 
with relief that the body it once supported had died a 
natural death. It was not that he doubted that Blunt had 
been willing to murder to gain the results he wanted. It 
was just that he wished the ledger sheet on which he and 
Blunt were totaled up together and against each other to 
be as clean as possible. 

He left the white bones in the peace of their eternal 
darkness, and went his way. 

His waythe way Blunt's cane on New Earth had been 
designed to send himled him to an awakening in something 
like a coffin. He lay, legs together, arms at his sides, 
on his back, and tightly enclosed in a metal container. 
His eyes were open but they saw nothing but blackness. 
His pattern-linked perception, however, recognized that 


he was in a sort of cold-storage vaultsomething very 

like the slide-out six-and-a-half-foot drawers for un


claimed bodies in a public morgue. The body he now in


habited was identical with the one he was used to, except 

that it had two good arms. However, it seemed com


pletely paralyzed. 

It was paralyzed, he recognized with a sudden grim 

humor, because it was frozen stiff. The container in which 

he lay was surrounded with refrigerator coils and his 

body's temperature was a little more than twenty degrees 

below zero, Fahrenheit. The body would first have to be 

thawed before any life could be brought to it. 

Paul surveyed the surrounding pattern. It would be 
surprising if Blunt, who had made so many arrangements 
where Paul was concerned, had not also made some here. 
Sure enough, the container lay on tilted tracks and was 
held inside the freezing unit by the bare hooking of a 
catch. Paul made the necessary slight alterations in the 
pattern and the catch failed. He slid out into the light of a 
brightly illuminated room without windows. 

As he emerged into the room, the temperature rose 
sharply and suddenly from close to freezing to seventy-six 
degrees Fahrenheit. Lying at a tilted angle that put his 
feet close to the floor below the container and his head 
several inches higher, Paul saw it was a small room with a 
single door and no furniture, tiled in white. 

The single item of interest in it was a message neatly 
printed in large letters on the wall opposite Paul. It read: 

Paul: As soon as you find yourself able, 
come and join us in suite 1243, at the Koh-i-Nor. 
Walt Blunt 

Paul's container had gone into action on its own now. It 
was beaming deep, gentle heat into the very center of his 
frozen bones and tissues. It would takewhat? Half an 
hour, perhaps longer, to bring him up to a living temperature 
so that his identity could take over command of his 


new body in the ordinary sense. Of course, almost un


doubtedly Blunt had planned that Paul would help and 

hurry the process along. In any case it was rather fine 

scheduling, and showed an attitude toward other people 

and the universe that was far from modest. For the first 

timein such small unexpected ways, thought Paul, do 

past things of minor importance explain themselves 

Paul received a sudden extra insight into Jase's repeated 

accusation of arrogance. Over the years Jase must have 

become well acquainted with arrogance, in the person of 

Blunt. 

Yes, thought Paul, he would hurry things along. But in 

a way in which Blunt, with his less complete awareness of 

the pattern, could not expect. Blunt would not expect 

that the message on the wall would be a clear warning to 

Paul that the Chantry Guild had already made its move. 

Outside this room the world would be trapped in a war 

a strange, weird war such as it had never known before. 

And Blunt, general of the attacking forces, would have 

tuned the entrance of Paul upon the battlefield for the 

most effective moment from Blunt's point of view. 

Only Paul would come early. 

He reached into the pattern and to the invincible 
knowledge that had become a part of him with his own 
individual ability. He cut certain lines of causal relationship, 
and established new ones. The pattern altered, in the 
immediate identity area of the body. And the body itself 
floated upright out of its container. 

It floated toward the door. The door opened. Skimming 
just above the steps, it mounted a flight of stairs and 
passed through a farther door into a small hallway. Beyond, 
was a third door, a transparent door to the traffic 
level, on a street Paul recognized as being less than a 
dozen blocks from the Koh-i-Nor. It was night beyond 
this last door, and for some reason the Complex without 
seemed darker than it should be. 

Paul's body floated to the last door. It opened and he 
floated out into the hot July night. The Complex Internal 


Weather Control seemed to have failed in its functioning, 

for the temperature outside here was in the high nineties at 

the very least and humidity must be close to a hundred 

per cent. The still air of the Complex seemed to hang 

heavily in the unusual shadows between structures, and its 

heat wrapped itself steamily around Paul's icy body. 

No vehicles were in motion. And here, at least, the 

streets seemed deserted. Paul swung about and skimmed 

off along the concrete walk in the direction which he knew 

would take him to the Koh-i-Nor. 

The streets were as empty as if the people in the Complex 
had locked and barred their doors against some 
plague or roaming madness. In the first half block the 
only sound Paul heard was the insane, insect-like buzzing 
of a defective street light. He looked up at its pulsating, 
uncertain glow, and saw at least part of the reason it did 
not do well. Its pole had become a monstrous cane of 
red-and-white striped candy. 

Paul floated on. At the next corner he passed a closed 
door. From the crack beneath it, however, a flood of red 
fluid remarkably like blood in its color and viscosity was 
flowing. One block farther on, Paul turned down into a 
new street and saw his first living person of the night 

This was a man with his shirt half torn off, who was 
sitting in a doorway and turning a kitchen knife over and 
over in his hands. He looked up as Paul came toward 
him. 

"Are you a psychiatrist?" he said. "I need " His 
lifted eyes caught sight of Paul's feet and the space between 
them and the pavement. "Oh," he said. He looked 
down at his hands and went back to playing with his 
knife again. 

Paul paused. And then he realized that his body 
could not speak. He went on, and as he did so he reached 
once more into the pattern. It was possible, as he had 
suspected Blunt had intended, to hurry things up. Living 
cells could not be thawed quite as crudely as dead meat, 


but borrowing heat uniformly from the general surroundings 
was even more efficient than the deep-heating mechanism 
of the storage container had been. Slowly, but at 
the same time much more rapidly than might have been 
expected, a living warmth came to Paul's body as he 
proceeded on toward the Koh-i-Nor. 

He passed other things of the night which bore little 
relation to normality. A monument in the center of one 
street crossing was slowly melting down as he passed, 
like wax in a warm oven. The stone head of a lion, at 
the corner of a heavy balcony running around one large 
building, dipped its heavy muzzle and roared down at 
him as he passed below. In the center of one street he 
passed a circle of blacknessa hole of nothingness that 
showed, not the level below, but a spatial distortion on 
which the human eye was not equipped to focus. No 
cars were runningComplex Transportation must have 
been as inactive or powerless as Internal Weatherbut 
occasionally Paul saw other people, alone, on foot, and 
at some distance. None of them stayed to talk when they 
saw him coming, but hurried off rapidly. 

Life was rapidly taking over Paul's body. He had 
started the heart early. By the time he reached the concourse 
his temperature was at ninety-six and a fraction 
of a degree, pulse and respiration almost normal. He 
could have walked it, but he waited until he actually 
reached the entrance to the North Tower of the hotel 
before he put his feet to the ground. 

He walked into a dim-lit lobby illuminated only by 
emergency lighting, and empty of guests. A white face 
stared at him from well back of the desk counter. It 
was the clerk with the elegant longhand. Paul paid him no 
attention, but walked on around the corner to the elevators. 


These, being a balanced system running on stored 
power, had been unaffected by the obvious curtailment 
of services otherwise. Silently, gently, efficiently, as if 
the human race were already dead and only a mechani



cal duty remained, the disks floated one after another in 
regular, spaced intervals, up and down the transparent 
tubes of their shafts. Paul stepped onto a disk ascending 
the up shaft. 

He slid smoothly up, past a succession of empty hallways, 
barely lighted by the red emergency light above the 
door to the stairs on each level. Only once did he see 
someone. That was in passing the ninth level. It was a 
womana young woman, almost a girl. At the sight of 
him passing up the elevator tube, she turned hastily and 
ducked into a doorway. 

He went on up. 

The twelfth level of the hotel, in contrast to the rest of 
the world Paul had seen that night, was fully lighted. Its 
illumination seemed almost garish in contrast to the surrounding 
dark. But no one stirred about its corridor, 
either. More than this, Paul received from the closed 
doors he passed an impression of darkness and emptiness 
beyond, as if suite 1243 toward which he walked was 
the only space with life within it on this bright level. 

When he turned a last corner of the corridor and approached 
1243, he saw its door was ajar. It stood 
three-quarters of the way rolled back into its wall socket, 
and the sound of a voice came audibly through the 
opening. 

The voice was that of Kirk Tyne. 

". . . your blind spot," he was saying. "That's what I 
can't understand, Walt. A man of your intelligence who 
thinks the present can be changed in the present, without 
going back and altering the predisposing factors of the 
past. And so you let loose this madness on the world." 

Paul stopped just short of the entrance. He had heard 
this argument from Tyne before, at the tune when Tyne 
had taken him onto the World Engineer's personal staff. 
Now it struck Paul as interesting to know what Blunt's 
answer to it would be. 

"You've sold your birthright for a mess of circuits," 
answered Blunt's voice. "You don't think, Kirk. You 


parrot what the Supe tells you. If the past can't be 
changed, the present must. For the future's sake." 

"Will you use a little logic?" asked Tyne. "I tell you the 
present cannot be changed without changing the past. 
Even the Supe, with all its stored knowledge, wouldn't 
be able to calculate the ultimate possibilities of a single 
insect's life pattern being altered in the past. And that's 
the easier way. What you're trying here, now, tonight, 
is the harder." 

"Kirk," said Blunt's voice. "You're a fool. The predisposing 
factors leading up to this hour have been laid 
and set up for centuries now. All that's necessary for us 
is to recognize them and use them." 

"I tell you that's not true!" 

"Because your Supe . . ." Blunt was beginning, with 
hard irony forming a cutting edge to his resonant voice, 
when Paul stirred himself again. He stepped forward, entered 
the doorway, and walked into the main lounge of 
what was probably one of the best suites the Koh-i-Nor 
had to offer its guests. 

Around this large room seven people stood in tableau. 
Close and on Paul's left was Kantele. Just beyond her, 
half turned away from the entrance, was Blunt, an odd 
tall hat on his head and a heavy black cape with purple 
facings rippling down from his wide shoulders. Beyond 
Blunt stood Burton McLeod, who of all seven showed 
the least concern, and Jase, also in cape and hat. His 
back to the blue curtains closed across the wide, far window 
wall of the room opposite the door, stood Eaton 
White, like a small, colorless silhouette. To White's left, 
on the opposite side of the room, stood the Koh-i-Nor 
Hotel's security agent, James Butler. But the bizarre 
touch was upon him, too. He wore the all-black jumper 
and slacks of one of the better-known marching societies, 
an outfit that left only face and hands whitely exposed; 
and in one of those white hands, he held a slim, lethal 
police handgun which had had its front sight removed. 
In place of the sight gleamed a small, blue metal cross. 


He and McLeod stood across from each other with 
perhaps a dozen feet of carpet between them. The police 
handgun casually covered the chest of McLeod, and both 
men stood untensely, but as if aware of no others in the 
room besides themselves. 

Closest of all, on Paul's right, stood Tyne. He faced the 
half-turned-away Blunt, and so was, like the colorless 
and motionless Eaton White, the first to see Paul as he 
entered. The sudden widening of his eyes made Blunt 
check his speech. The rest all turned, even Butler and 
McLeod. And Kantele gasped. They, all except Blunt, 
stood like people who witness a basic violation of the 
natural laws by which they have lived all their lives. 

But Blunt leaned upon the straight silver knob of a 
new walking stick and smiled. As perhaps the Athenian 
pole-march Callimachus smiled on that day in late September, 
twenty-five hundred and forty years previous, on 
seeing in the cool bright sunlight between clouds, the 
dust of his reinforced Greek wings close in on the Persian 
horde on the plain of Marathon. 

"You're a little early, not too much," he said, looking 
at Paul. "Kirk here hasn't quite been softened up enough 
yet. But come on inmyself." 

And Paul, walking into the suite, seeing Blunt full 
and clearly face on for the first time, saw indeedhimself. 



Chapter 21 


Paul strode into the suite. The eyes of all of them were 
fixed on him, but none showed more shattering from 
the blow than the blue eyes of Kantele. For, of course, 
she alone of them all had felt it from the beginning, even 
though she would not admit it to herself. It was the reason 
she had been so drawn to Paul, and bad denied being 
drawn so fiercely. Paul had not blamed her then; and 
understanding as he did now, he blamed her less. Even 
for him, as he stopped, facing Blunt from the distance 
of a few feet, the experience had its unnatural elements. 

To those standing watching, he knew, it must be worse. 
For it was not a physical resemblance that he shared 
with Walter Blunt. They were both tall, wide-shouldered, 
long-boned, with strong facial features. But there the 
similarity of the flesh ceased. Their common identity was 
all the more jolting to the emotions because it was a matter 
of nonphysical duplications. They should not have looked 
alike. But they did. 

It was weirdly as if the same man wore two different 
costumes and disguises. The surface appearances were 
totally different, but identically the same way of standing, 
the same balance of movement, the same mannerisms 
and attitudes, glowed through the outer shells like the 
same candle-flame through two differently ornamented 
lanterns. 


"You understand," said Blunt conversationally to Paul, 

"why I've dodged you all this time?" 

"Of course," said Paul. 

At that, Kirk Tyne finally found his voice again. And 
a note that rang clearly in it witnessed to the fact that 
for the first time the World Engineer was seriously shaken 
in his convictions. 

"What kind of unnatural devil-thing is this, Walt?" he 
burst out. 

"It's a long story," said Blunt. He still leaned on his 
cane, examining Paul almost the way a connoisseur might 
examine a particularly valued work of art "But that's 
what I brought you here to hear, Kirk." 

Kirk glanced from Paul to Blunt and back, as if magnetically 
attracted against his will. 

"I don't believe it," he said. 

"Neither the world nor I," answered Blunt, without 
shifting his gaze off Paul, "will care what you think after 
tonight, Kirk." 

"Satan!" said a voice. Those in the room, including Paul 
and Blunt, all looked. It was James Butler, the hotel 
agent, and he was lifting the gun in his hand. The blue 
cross on the end of its barrel centered on Paul, wavered, 
and swung over to point at Blunt "Denier of God." 

Something black flickered through the air of the room. 
There was the sound of a soft impact, and Butler staggered 
and dropped the gun from his suddenly limp grasp. 
The polished haft of a leaf-shaped, hiltless knife stood 
out from the muscles of the agent's shoulder. McLeod 
came walking calmly across the room. He bent to scoop 
up the gun and tucked it into his waistband, and then 
taking hold of Butler's shoulder with his left hand, he 
pulled out the knife with his right. He pulled a self-adjusting 
pressure bandage from his pocket, put it around Butler's 
shoulder to cover the wound, and lifted the crippled 
arm across Butler's chest into the grasp of Butler's 
other arm. 

"Hold that," he said. Butler looked at him. The agent 


had not made a sound. McLeod went back to his position 
beyond Blunt. 
"Now," asked Kirk, out of a white face, "you sick 
your hoods on me, and decent people?" 

"You call that fanatic decent?" asked Blunt, nodding 
at the blackclad Butler. "How decent would he have 
been if he'd shot me, or Paul? As he would have, if 
Burt hadn't stopped him." 

"It makes no difference," said Kirk. Before their eyes, 
with a remarkable effort of will, they saw the man pull 
himself together. He repeated himself more calmly. "It 
makes no difference. None of this makes any difference. 
There are still only sixty thousand of you. That's not 
enough to wreck the world." 

"Kirk," said Blunt, "you know I enjoy arguing with 
you. You make such a fine straight man." 

"The credit goes to you as the comic," said Kirk, dryly. 

"Now, that's more like it," said Blunt, nodding his head 
thoughtfully. "You see, Kirk, I want to break you. If I 
can get you nicely broken, I can enlist you in tearing this 
civilization up by the roots and get it done twice as fast. 
Otherwise, I wouldn't waste tune talking with you like 
this." 

"I assure you," said Kirk, "I don't feel the least bit 
broken." 

"You aren't supposed toyet," said Blunt. 

"All I see so far," said Kirk, "is a series of adult-scale 
Halloween tricks." 
"For example?" asked Blunt. "Paul, here?" 
Kirk glanced at Paul and for a moment hesitated. 
"I don't believe in the supernatural," he said. 
"Nor do I," said Blunt. "I believe in the Alternate 
Laws. Under their power, I created Paul. Didn't I, Paul?" 

"No," said Paul. "Creation isn't that easy." 

"I beg your pardon," said Blunt. "Let me put it this 
way thenI built you. I brought you to life. How much 
do you remember?" 
"I remember dying," said Paul. "I remember a tall 


figure wearing the cape and hat you're wearing now, 
who brought me back to life." 
"Not brought you back," said Blunt. "The real Paul 
Formain is deadyou knew that?" 

"I know it now," said Paul. "I investigated." 

"I had tracers on a number of youngsters like him for 
over fifteen years," said Blunt, "waiting for an opportunity. 
Odds were with me. Sooner or later one was 
bound to die under convenient conditions." 

"You could have rescued him from that sailboat while 
he was still alive," said Paul. 

"I could have," said Blunt. He looked squarely at Paul. 
"I think you know why I wouldn't do such a thing. I 
got to him in time for the moment of his death. I got 
several cells from his body, living cells. Under the powers 
of the Alternate Laws, I regrew from each of those 
cells a living body." 

"More?" ejaculated Kirk, staring in something like horror 
at Paul. Blunt shook his head. 

"Living," he said, "but not alive, any more than the 
dying body I took them from was alive in the true sense. 
The conscious personality of a living human being is 
something more than an arithmetical total of the consciousness 
of its parts." He gazed at Paul for a second without 
speaking, then said slowly, "Under the Alternate 
Laws I sparked his life with a portion of my own." 

There was a silence in the room, so complete that it 
seemed that for a moment everyone there had ceased 
breathing. 

"I made another me," said Blunt. "His body, his memories, 
his skills were those that belonged to the boy who 
had just died. But in essence, he was me." 

"In one essence," corrected Paul, "I was you." 

"The most important essence, then," said Blunt. "That 
was why your body wouldn't take an arm graft. Your 
body's cells had used up their ability to make large adjustments 
and repairs in forming you." 

"He has two arms now," said Kirk. 


"This isn't the original body I started him in," said 
Blunt. "I assume he had to leave the first one on New 
Earth?" He looked inquiringly at Paul. 

"By your cane," said Paul. 

"Yes," said Blunt. "That cane." 

"What cane?" asked Kirk. 

"The cane that killed Malorn," said Paul. He gazed 

with a still face at Blunt. "The cane with which he killed 
Malorn." 

"No," said McLeod, from behind Blunt. "I did it. It 
took someone who knew how to handle it like a single-
stick. Walt just twisted the Alternate Laws to let me do 
it." 

"But why?" cried Kirk. "Murder, canes, New Earth! 
I don't understand." He stared. "To educate Paul in " 
He broke off. 

"You're breaking very nicely, Kirk," said Blunt, turning 
his head briefly toward the World Engineer and then 
coming back as always to look at Paul. "You see how 
little you know? Even your Supe didn't inform you that 
it had used the accelerator down in its guts to ship Paul 
off to a planet circling Sinus and its companion star. Ill 
tell you the rest now and we'll see how you stand up to 
it." He nodded at the curtained window. "Open that," he 
said to Eaton White. 

The colorless little man hesitated. 

"Go ahead," said Kirk, harshly. 

White reached in among the folds of the curtains, and 

down. They drew back revealing a wall-wide window 

above a low ledge about two feet high. 

"All the way," said Blunt. 

White reached and pressed again. The whole window 

slid down into and through the ledge. The hot air of 

the steamy night outside welled into the conditioned cool


ness of the room. 

"Look!" said Blunt. "Listen out there." He pointed with 

his stick at the bulking darkness of the Complex out


side, lighted here and there dimly. On the hot still air 


came the sound of chanting, the "Hey-ha! Hey-ha!" of a 
marching society. And from closer by, out of sight somewhere 
twelve stories below the window ledge, came a 
long drawn-out howl from something human that had 
gone a long ways back toward the animal. 

"Look," said Blunt. Turning, he threw his cane out 
the window. Wheeling, spinning about the axis of its 
center point, the two rotating ends blurred themselves 
into scalloped, raking wings. The center acquired a rodent 
body, and a bat-shape instead of what had been a 
stick beat upward blackly against the dim glow of the 
Complex, turned and swooped back, gliding into the 
room to end up a stick in Blunt's hand again. 

"Sixty thousand, you said," said Blunt to Kirk. "The 
unstable groups, organizations, and elements in this 
world of ours total nearly one-fifth the world population. 
For forty years the Chantry Guild has primed them for 
this moment of final breakdown. One-fifth of the world 
is out of its senses tonight, Kirk." 

"No," said Kirk. "I don't believe it. No, Walt." 

"Yes, Kirk." Blunt leaned on his cane again. His dark 
eyes under the eaves of his aging eyebrows bored in on 
the other man. "For centuries now you and your kind 
kept the hound of Unreason chained and locked away 
from the world. Now we've set him loose againloose 
for good. From now on, there'll be no certainty to existence. 
From now on there'll always be the possibility 
that the invariable laws won't work. Reason and past 
experience and the order of the community will fail as 
guides, and the individual will be left with nothing to 
anchor to, only himself." 

"It won't work," said Kirk. "Those streets out there 
are mostly empty. We moved too fast for you, my staff 
and the Super-Complex. Lack of light, lack of comfort, 
lack of servicespeople are hiding in their rooms now, 
because we forced them there. They can only hide so 
long; then the basic needshunger, reaction against bore-
domwill take over. They'll come out in the daylight 


and see how little your Halloween tricks have changed 
the essential structure of their lives. They'll adjust and 
learn to live with the necessarily small percentage of your 
magic in the same way they live with the small possibilities 
of other freak accidents or being struck by lightning." 

"You moved too fast!" said Blunt "You only reacted 
with all the fine obedience of one of your machines. The 
streets are dark because I wanted them that way. The 
heat is driving people to huddle apart from each other, 
alone with their fears, each in his own room, because 
these are the best breeding grounds for Unreason. Tonight 
is not something to which people can become accustomed, 
it's only the first battle in a war that will go 
on and on, waged with new weapons, fought in different 
ways, waged on altering battlefields, until you and your 
kind are destroyed." 

Blunt's hard old jaw lifted. 

"Until the final moment of destruct!" His voice rang 
through the room and out into the night. "Until Man is 
forced to stand without his crutches. Until his leg irons 
are struck off him and the bars he has built around him 
are torn down and thrown away! Until he stands upright 
and alone, freefree in all his questioning, wandering 
spirit, with the knowledge that in all existence there are 
only two things: himself, and the malleable universe!" 

Blunt's heavy shoulders swayed forward over the cane 
on which he leaned, almost as if he was about to leap 
on Kirk Tyne where he stood. The World Engineer did 
not retreat before Blunt's words, or that movement, but 
he seemed to have shrunk slightly and his voice was a 
trifle hoarse when he answered. 

"I'm not going to give in to you, Walt," he said. "I'll 
fight you to the bitter end. Until one of us is dead." 

"Then you've lost already," said Blunt, and his voice 
was almost wild. "Because I'm going on forever." He 
pointed aside at Paul. "Let me introduce you, Kirk, to 
a younger, stronger, greater man than yourself, and the 
continuing head of the Chantry Guild." 


He stopped speaking, and as the sound of his voice 
ceased, a sudden violent silence like summer sheet lightning 
flashed across the room. On the heels of it came an 
abrupt, instinctive, inarticulate cry from Jase. 

"No," said Paul, "it's all right, Jase. The Guild will 
go to you. My job is something different." 

They stared at him. 

"Something different?" asked Blunt, dryly. "What is it 
you think you're going to do?" 
Paul smiled at him and at the others a little sadly. 
"Something brutal and unfair to you all," he said. "I'm 

going to do nothing." 


Chapter 22 


For a moment they merely looked back at him. But in 
that moment something inevitable, and not at all unique, 
happened. It has taken place before at gatherings that 
those present arrange themselves in a social pattern oriented 
around the strong point of one individual present. 
Then, something is said or something takes place. And 
suddenly, though none present have made an actual 
movement, the strong point is displaced to a different 
individual. The pattern reorients itself, and though nothing 
physical has happened, the emotional effect of the 

reorientation is felt by everyone in the room. 

So with Paul, at that moment. He had reached out and 
touched the pattern, and like one drop melting into another, 
abruptly he was the focus for the emotional relationships 
in the room, where Blunt had been, a moment 
before. 

He met Blunt's eyes across the little distance that separated 
them. And Blunt looked back, without expression, 
and without speaking. He leaned still on his cane, 
as if nothing had taken place. But Paul felt the sudden 
massive alertness of Blunt's genius swinging to bear completely 
on him, in the beginnings of a recognition of 
what Paul was. 

"Nothing?" asked Jase, breaking the silence. Sudden 
alarm for the Chantry Guild, in this breakdown of what



ever Blunt had planned for it, was obvious upon Jase, 
obvious even to others in the room besides Paul. 

"Because," said Paul, "if I do nothing, you'll all go your 
separate ways. The Chantry Guild will continue and 
grow. The technical elements in civilization will continue 
and grow. So will the marching societies and the cult 
groups. So"Paul's eyes, ranging backward in the room, 
met for a moment with Burton McLeod's"will other 
elements." 

"You want that to happen?" challenged Tyne. "You?" 

"I think it's necessary," said Paul, turning to the 
World Engineer. "The time has come when mankind 
must fragment so that his various facets may develop 
fully and unaffected by other facets nearby. As you yourself 
know, the process has already started." Paul looked 
over at Blunt. "A single strong leader," said Paul, "could 
halt this process temporarilyonly temporarily, because 
there would be no one of his stature to replace him 
when he was deadbut even in temporarily halting it, 
he could do permanent damage to later development of 
fragments he didn't favor." 

Paul looked back at Kirk. There was something like 
horror on Kirk's face. 
"But you're saying you're against Walt!" stammered 
Kirk. "You've been against him all along." 

"Perhaps," said Paul, a little unhappily, "in a sense. 
It'd be kinder to say that I haven't been for anyone, including 
Walt." 

Kirk stared at him for a moment, still with an expression 
varying from shock almost to repugnance. 

"But why?" Kirk burst out finally. "Why?" 

"That," said Paul, "is a little hard to explain, I'm 
afraid. Perhaps you might understand it if I used hypnosis 
as an example. After Walt first brought that last body 
of mine to consciousness, I had quite a period in which 
I didn't really know who I was. But a number of things 
used to puzzle me. Among them the fact that I couldn't 
be hypnotized." 


"The Alternate Laws " began Jase, from back in 
the room. 

"No," said Paul. "I think someday you Chantry people 
are going to discover something to which your Alternate 
Laws bear the same relation alchemy does to modern 
chemistry. I couldn't be hypnotized because the lightest 
form of hypnosis requires the giving up of a certain 
portion of the identity, just as does really complete unconsciousness, 
and this is impossible to me." He looked 
around at all of them. "Because, having experienced a 
shared identity with Walt, it was inevitable that I should 
come to the capability of sharing the identity of any other 
human with whom I came in contact." 

They all looked back at him. With the exception of 
Blunt, he saw, they had not fully understood. 

"I'm talking about understanding," he said, patiently. 
"I've been able to share identities with all of you, and 
what I've found is that each one of you projects a valid 
form of the future of human society. But a form in 
which the others would emerge as stunted personalities 
if they managed to live in it at all. I can't further any 
one of these futures, because they'll all be coming into 
existence." 

"All?" asked Kirk, just as, at the same moment, Jase 
also asked, "All?" 

"You, yourself, were aware of the situation, Kirk," said 
Paul. "As you told me yourself, society is going through 
a necessary stage of fragmentation. It's only a matter of 
time, now, until a medication is devised that makes 
Springboard's work into the basis of a practical transportation 
system. As people spread out to the stars, the 
fragmentation will be carried further." 

He stopped speaking to let that point sink in. 

"None of you," said Paul, "should be wasting time 

fighting each other. You should be busy hunting up 

your own kind of people and working with them toward 

your own separate future." 

He paused, to give them a chance, this time, to answer. 


No one seemed disposed to do so. And then, from perhaps 
the most unexpected quarter, came the protest. 

"There's no reason to believe any of this," said Eaton 
White, in his thick, dry voice from beside the open window. 


"Of course not," said Paul reasonably. "If you disbelieve 
me, you only have to have the courage of your 
convictions and ignore what I've said." He looked around 
at them all. "Certainly you don't believe I'm trying to talk 
you into anything? All I want to do is step out of the 
picture and go my own way, and I should think the 
rest of you would want to do likewise." 

He turned back to meet Blunt's eyes. 

"After all," he said, "this has been a transition period 
in history, as Kirk has, no doubt, often told other people 
besides myself. It's been a time of stress and strain, and 
in such times things tend to become dramatic. Actually, 
each generation likes to think of itself as at the pivot 
point in history, that in its time the great decision is 
made which puts man either on the true road or the 
false. But things aren't really that serious. Truthfully, the 
way of mankind is too massive to be kinked, suddenly; it 
only changes direction in a long and gradual bend over 
many generations." 

Paul turned to the World Engineer. 

"Kirk," he said, "as I say, I'm not trying to convince 
anyone. But certainly you can see I'm talking sense?" 
Kirk Tyne's head came up with decision. 
"Yes," he said sharply, "I can." He looked at Blunt 

and back to Paul. "Everything you say makes sense. Everybody 
has one person who can put the Indian sign on 
them. With me it's always been Walt." He turned to Blunt. 
"Because I always admired you, Walt. I wanted to believe 
in you. And as a result you were able to con me into 
thinking that the world was upside down and just about 
to be inside out. It took someone with his feet on the 
ground, like Paul here, to bring me back to Earth. Of 
course, our centuries-old technical civilization wasn't the 


sort of thing that could be hoodooed out of existence by 
black magic overnight. But you almost had me thinking 
it could." 

He stepped up to Paul and held out his hand. Paul 
took it. 

"Everybody owes you a lot," said Kirk, shaking Paul's 
hand. "But I, most of all. I want you to know I haven't 
any doubts where you're concerned. I'll get the services 
back in action immediately. Come on, Eat." He turned 
to Blunt, hesitated, shook his head, and turning away 
again, walked toward the door. Blunt smiled grimly 
after him. 

Eaton White came forward from his position at the 
window. As he passed by Paul, he hesitated, turned to 
Paul, and opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he 
turned and went on out, after Kirk. Jase followed. 

"Jim," said Paul gently, looking across at the black-
clad hotel agent, still holding his helpless arm across his 
chest with his other hand, "you probably have responsibilities 
calling." 

Butler snapped his head around at the sound of his 

first name like a man coming out of a dream. His eyes 

were like gun-muzzles trained on Paul. 

"Yes," he interrupted. "Responsibilities. But not the 

sort you think. You've been the instrument of a revela


tion to methe revelation of the New Jerusalem. The 

future may hold more than many think." 

He turned and walked upright away, still holding his arm, 

until he passed through the door, and turning, vanished. 

"Good-by, Walt," said a voice. Paul and Kantele 

turned to see that McLeod had come up and put his 

hand on Blunt's shoulder. Blunt, still leaning on his 

cane, turned his face sideways toward that hand. 

"You, too?" he asked a little huskily. 

"You'll be all right, Walt," said McLeod. "Truth is, 

I've been thinking of it for some time." 

"For the last six weeksI know," said Blunt with a 


wolf's grin. "No, no, go on, Burt. There's nothing to stay 
here for now, anyway." 

Burt squeezed the caped shoulder, looked across it 
compassionately at Paul, and went toward the door. The 
three who were left watched him out in silence. 

When Burt had gone, Blunt swung about a little on 
his cane and looked sardonically at Paul. 

"Do I have to love you, too?" he asked. 

"No," said Paul. "No, of course not! I wouldn't ask 
that." 

"Then, damn you," said Blunt. "Damn you and may 
you rot in hell until judgment day!" 

"Paul smiled sadly. 

"You won't tell me why?" asked Blunt. 

"If I could," said Paul, "I would. But it's a matter of 
language. I don't have words for you." He hesitated. "You 
could take it on faith." 

"Yes," said Blunt, suddenly and heavily as if the 
strength had gone out of him. "I could take it on faith, 
if I were bigger." He straightened up suddenly and 
looked with a deep, penetrating curiosity at Paul. 

"Empath," he said. "I should have suspected it sooner. 
But where did the talent come from?" 

"From your plans for me," said Paul. "I told the truth. 
It's a high wall that separates the inner parts of one 
identity from the inner being of another. From having 
the experience of no wall between you and me, I could 
learn to tear down the walls between myself and all 
others." 

"But why?" said Blunt. "Why would you want to?" 

Paul smiled again. 

"Partly," he said, "because unlimited power or 

strength is a little like credit. In the beginning it seems 
that enough of it would do anything. But, when you 
achieve it, you find that it, too, is limited. There are areas in which it's helpless 

out a roughness in a delicate piece of carved jade?" 


Blunt shook his head. 

"I don't see how it applies," he said. 

"It's just that I have some things in common," said 
Paul. "And Kirk was very nearly right. It's not possible 
to change the future except by changing the present 
And the only way to change the present is to return to 
the past and change that." 

"Return?" asked Blunt. "Change?" Blunt's eyes had lost 
their earlier hardness. They were now fully alive. He 
leaned on his cane and looked directly at Paul. "Who 
could change the past?" 

"Perhaps," said Paul, "someone with intuition." 

"Intuition?" 

"Yes. Someone," Paul said, "who could see a tree in a 
garden. And who knew that if that tree were to be cut 
down, then some years in time and some light-years in 
distance away, another man's life would be changed. A 
man, say, who has conscious intuitive process and can 
immediately realize all the end possibilities of an action 
the moment he considers it. Someone like that could 
step back into time, perhaps, and make changes without 
risk of error." 

Blunt's face was perfectly still. 

"You aren't me, at all," Blunt said. "You never were 
me. I think it was you who animated Paul Formain's 
body, not me at all. Who are you?" 

"Once," said Paul, "I was a professional soldier." 
"And an Intuit?" asked Blunt. "And now an Empath 
as well?" His voice was a little harsh. "What next?" 

"An identity," said Paul slowly, "needs to be a dynamic, 
not a static, quantity. If it is static, it becomes helpless 
within the pattern of its existence. This is a lesson man 
eventually will have to learn. But if it is dynamic, it may 
direct its existence as a mining machine is directed, 
through the otherwise impassable fusion of rocky elements 
known as reality. From being dominated and 
imprisoned by them, it can pass to dominating and making 
use of them, and with its existence plow through, 


pulverize, and handle reality until it separates out those 
uniquely real and valuable parts of it which the identity 
wishes to make its own." 

Blunt nodded, slowly, like an old man. It was not 
clear whether he had understood and was agreeing, or 
whether he had given up the attempt to understand and 
was merely being agreeable. 

"They all would have their futures," he said. "That's 
what you told them, wasn't it?" He stopped nodding 
and looked at Paul for the first time with eyes that were 
a little faded. "But not me." 

"Of course, you," said Paul. "Yours was the greatest 
vision, and simply the one furthest from realization, that 
was all." 

Blunt nodded again. 

"Not," he said, "in my lifetime. No." 

"I'm sorry," said Paul. "No." 

"Yes," said Blunt. He took a deep breath and straightened 
up. "I had plans for you," he said. "Plans rooted in 
ignorance. I had everything set up for you." He glanced 
at Kantele. "It was almost like having a " He checked 
himself, threw back his head, and took a firmer grip on 
his cane. "I planned to retire after tonight, anyway." 

He started to turn away. As he turned, he stooped a 
little. He hesitated and looked back at Kantele. "I don't 
suppose. . . . No," he said, interrupting himself. He 
straightened up once again, so straight the cane merely 
brushed the surface of the rug underfoot. He threw 
back his shoulders and for a moment towered in the 
room, as if he were young again. 

"It's been an education," he said, and saluted Paul 
with the cane. Turning, he strode out. Behind his back, 
Kantele made a little gesture after him with her hands, 
and then let her hands and gaze drop. She stood, her 
head bent, her eyes on the carpet at her feet, like a 
maiden, captive to the stranger's bow and spear. 

Paul looked at her. 

"You love him," he said. 


"Always. Very much," she said, almost inaudibly, not 
looking up. 

"Then you're a fool to stay," he said. 

She did not answer that. But after a moment she spoke 
again, uncertainly, her gaze still on the carpet. 
"You could be mistaken," she said. 
"No," said Paul; and she did not see the centuries-old 

pain that came into his eyes as he said it. "I never make 
mistakes." 


