The weather had been good and the travel easy. Now that they had reached the home prairies, Cushing estimated that in another ten days they'd be standing before the walls of the university. There they would be accepted. There they would find those who would listen and understand. It might be, he thought, that it was for that very moment that the university had preserved itself all these long years, keeping intact a nucleus of sanity that would be open to a new idea—not accepting it blindly, but for study and consideration. When they set out next spring for Thunder Butte, there would be some from the university, he was certain, who would travel the return journey with them.
Meg was a short distance ahead of him and he trotted to catch up with her. She still carried the brain case, awkward as it might be to carry. During all the miles they'd traveled, it had been always with her. She had clutched it to her, even in her sleep.
"One thing we must be sure of," she had told him days before. "Any sensitive who uses a brain case must realize and accept the commitment to it. Once having made contact with it, that contact must continue. You cannot awaken a brain, then walk away from it. It becomes, in a way, a part of you. It becomes best friend, your other self."
"And when a sensitive dies?" he asked. "The brain case can outlive many humans. When the best friend human dies, what then?"
"We'll have to work that out," she said. "Another sensitive standing by, perhaps, to take over when the first one's gone. Another to replace you. Or, by that time, we may have been able to devise some sort of electronic system that can give the brain cases access to the world. Give them sight and hearing and a voice. I know that would be a return to technology, which we have foresworn, but, laddie boy, it may be we'll have to make certain accommodations to technology."
That might be true, he knew—if they only could. Thinking of it, he was not sure that it was possible. Many years of devoted research and development lay as a background to the achievement of even the simplest electronic device. Even with the technological library at the Place of Going to the Stars, it might not be possible to pick up the art again. For it was not a matter of the knowledge only, of knowing how it worked. It was, as well, the matter of manufacturing the materials that would be needed. Electronics had been based not on the knowledge of the art alone but on a massive technological capability. Even in his most hopeful moments he was forced to realize that it was probably now beyond man's capacity to reproduce a system that would replace that old lost capability. In destroying his technologic civilization, man might have
made an irreversible decision. In all likelihood, there was no going back. Fear alone might be a deterrent, the deep, implanted fear that being successful, there'd be no stopping place; that once reinstituted, technology would go on and on, building up again the monster that had once been killed. It was unlikely that such a situation could come about again, and so the fear would not be valid, but the fear would still be there. It would inhibit any move to regain even a part of what had been lost in the Time of Trouble.
So, if mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology. In sleepless nights he had tried to imagine that other method, that other path, and there had been no way to know. It was beyond his mental capability to imagine. The primordial ancestor who had chipped a rock to fashion the first crude tool could not have dreamed of the kind of tools that his descendants would bring about, based on the concept implicit in the first stone with a contrived cutting edge. And so it was in the present day. Already mankind, unnoticed, might have made that first faltering step toward the path that it would follow. If it had not, the answer, or many different answers, might be in the data banks of Thunder Butte.
He caught up with Meg and walked beside her.
"There is one thing, laddie boy, that worries me," she said. "You say the university will let us in and accept us and I have no doubt of that, for you know the people there. But what about the Team? Will they accept the Team? How will they relate to them?"
Cushing laughed, realizing it was the first time he had laughed in days.
"That will be beautiful," he said. "Wait until you see it. The Team picking the university apart, the university picking the Team apart. Each of them finding out what makes the other tick."
He threw up his head and laughed again, his laughter rolling across the plains.
"My God," he said, "it will be wonderful. I can't wait to see it."
Now he let the thought creep in—the thought that until now he had firmly suppressed in a reluctance to allow himself even to think of a hope that might not be there.
The Team was made up of two alien beings, living representatives of another life form that had achieved intelligence and that must have formed a complex civilization earmarked by an intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity would be, almost by definition, a characteristic of any civilization, but a characteristic that might vary in its intensity. That the Team's civilization has more than its full share of it was evidenced by their being here.
It was just possible that the Team might be willing, perhaps even eager, to help mankind with its problems. Whether they could offer anything of value was, of course, unknown; but, lacking anything else of value, the alien direction of their thought processes and their viewpoints might provide new starting points for man's own thinking, might serve to short-circuit the rut in which man was apt to think, nudging him into fresh approaches and nonhuman logic.
In the free interchange of information and opinion that would take place between the Team and the university, much might be learned by both sides. For although the university no longer could qualify as an elite intellectual community, the old tradition of learning, perhaps even of research, still existed there. Within its wails were men and women who could still be stirred by that intellectual thirst which in ages past had shaped the culture mankind had built and then in a few months time had brought down to destruction.
Although not entirely to destruction, he reminded himself. On Thunder Butte the last remnants, the most sophisticated remnants, of that old, condemned technology still remained. Ironically, that remnant was now the one last hope of mankind.
What might have happened, he asked himself, if man had withheld his destruction of technology for a few more centuries? If he had, then the full force of it would have been available to work out the possible answers contained in the data banks of Thunder Butte. But this, he realized, might not necessarily have followed. The sheer weight, the arrogant power, of a full-scale, runaway technology might have simply rejected, overridden and destroyed what might he there as irrelevant. After all, with as great a technology as mankind possessed, what was the need of it?
Perhaps, just possibly, despite all man's present shortcomings, it might be better this way. As a matter of fact, we're not so badly off, he told himself. We have a few things on which to pin some hopes—Thunder Butte, the Team, the university, the still-living robotic brains, the unimpeded rise of sensitive abilities, the Trees, the Snakes, the Followers.
And how in the world could the Snakes or Followers—? And then he sternly stopped this line of thought. When it came to hope, you did not write off even the faintest hope of all. You held on to every hope; you cherished all; you let none get away.
"Laddie boy," said Meg. "I said it once before, and I'll say it now again. It's been a lovely trip."
"Yes," said Cushing. "Yes, you are right. It has been all of that."