“Yes,” Babble said. “You can use my microscope.” He had on pajamas and slippers and an ersatz-wool striped bathrobe. “I was just going to bed.” He watched Seth Morley bring forth the miniature building. “Oh, one of those. They’re all over the place.”
Seating himself at the microscope, Seth Morley pried open the tiny structure, broke away the outer hull, then placed the component-complex onto the stage of the microscope. He used the low-power resolution, obtaining a magnification of 600x.
Intricate strands… printed circuitry, of course, on a series of modules. Resistors, condensers, valves. A power supply: one ultra-miniaturized helium battery. He could make out the swivel of the cannon barrel and what appeared to be the germanium arc which served as the source of the energy beam. It can’t be very strong, he realized. Belsnor in a sense was right: the output, in ergs, must be terribly small.
He focused on the motor which drove the cannon barrel as it moved from side to side. Words were printed on the hasp which held the barrel in place; he strained to read them—and saw, as he adjusted the fine focus of the microscope, a confirmation of what he most feared.
The construct had come from Earth. It had not been invented by a superterrestrial race—it did not emanate from the native life forms of Delmak-O. So much for that.
General Treaton, he said to himself grimly. It is you, after all, who is destroying us. Our transmitter, our receiver—and the demand that we reach this planet by noser. Was it you who had Ben Tallchief killed? Obviously.
“What are you finding there?” Babble asked.
“I am finding,” he said, “that General Treaton is our enemy and that we don’t have a chance.” He moved away from the microscope. “Take a look.”
Babble placed his eye against the eye-piece of the microscope. “Nobody thought of that,” he said presently. “We could have examined one of these any time during the last two months. It just never occurred to us.” He looked away from the microscope, peering falteringly at Seth Morley. “What’ll we do?”
“The first thing is to collect all of these, everything brought into the settlement from outside, and destroy them.”
“That means the Building is Earth-made.”
“Yes.” Seth Morley nodded. Evidently so, he thought. “We are part of an experiment,” he said.
“We’ve got to get off this planet,” Babble said.
“We’ll never get off,” Seth Morley said.
“It must all be coming from the Building. We’ve got to find a way to destroy it. But I don’t see how we can.”
“Do you want to revise your autopsy report on Tallchief?”
“I have nothing more to go on. At this point I’d say he was probably killed by a weapon that we know nothing about. Something that generates fatal amounts of histamine in the blood supply. Which brings on what looks like a natural breathing-apparatus involvement. There is another possibility which you might consider. It could be a forgery. After all, Earth has become one giant mental hospital.”
“There are military research labs there. Highly secret ones. The general public doesn’t know about them.”
“How do you know about them?”
Seth Morley said, “At Tekel Upharsin, as the kibbutz’s marine biologist, I had dealings with them. And when we bought weapons.” Strictly speaking, this was not true; he had, really, only heard rumors. But the rumors had convinced him.
“Tell me,” Babble said, eyeing him, “did you really see the Walker-on-Earth?”
“Yes,” he said. “And I know firsthand about the secret military research labs on Terra. For example—”
Babble said, “You saw someone. I believe that. Someone whom you didn’t know came up and pointed out something that should have been obvious to you: namely, that the noser you had picked out was not spaceworthy. But you had it already in your mind—because it was taught to you throughout childhood—that if a stranger came to you and offered unsolicited help, that that stranger had to be a Manifestation of the Deity. But look: what you saw was what you expected to see. You assumed that he was the Walker-on-Earth because Specktowsky’s Book is virtually universally accepted. But I don’t accept it.”
“You don’t?” Seth Morley said, surprised.
“Not at all. Strangers—true strangers, ordinary men—show up and give good advice; most humans are well-intentioned. If I had happened by I would have intervened too. I would have pointed out that your ship wasn’t spaceworthy.”
“Then you would have been in the possession of the Walker-on-Earth; you would have temporarily become him. It can happen to anyone. That’s part of the miracle.”
“There are no miracles. As Spinoza proved centuries ago. A miracle would be a sign of God’s weakness, as a failure of natural law. If there were a God.”
Seth Morley said, “You told us, earlier this evening, that you saw the Walker-on-Earth seven times.” Suspicion filled him; he had caught the inconsistency. “And the Intercessor too.”
“What I meant by that,” Babble said smoothly, “is that I encountered life-situations in which human beings acted as the Walker-on-Earth would have acted, did he exist. Your problem is that of a lot of people: it stems from our having encountered non-humanoid sentient races, some of them, the ones we call ‘gods,’ on what we call ‘god-worlds,’ so much superior to us as to put us in—for example—the role that, say, dogs or cats have to us. To a dog or a cat a man seems like God: he can do god-like things. But the quasi-biological, ultra-sentient life forms on god-worlds—they’re just as much the products of natural biological evolution as we are. In time we may evolve that far… even farther. I’m not saying we will, I’m saying we can.” He pointed his finger determinedly at Seth Morley. “They didn’t create the universe. They’re not Manifestations of the Mentufacturer. All we have is their verbal report that they are Manifestations of the Deity. Why should we believe them? Naturally, if we ask them, “Are you God? Did you make the universe?’ they’ll reply in the affirmative. We’d do the same thing; white men, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, told the natives of North and South America exactly the same thing.”
“But the Spanish and English and French were colonists. They had a motive for pretending to be gods. Take Cortez. He—”
“The life forms on so-called ‘god-worlds’ have a similar motive.”
“Like what?” He felt his dull anger beginning to glow. “They’re saint-like. They contemplate; they listen to our prayers—if they can pick them up—and they act to fulfill our prayers. As they did, for example, with Ben Tallchief.”
“They sent him here to die. Is that right?”
That had been acutely bothering him, starting at the moment he had first caught sight of Tallchief’s dead and inert body. “Maybe they didn’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “After all, Specktowsky points out that the Deity does not know everything. For instance, He did not know that the Form Destroyer existed, or that He’d be awakened by the concentric rings of emanation that make up the universe. Or that the Form Destroyer would enter the universe, and hence time, and corrupt the universe that the Mentufacturer had made in his own image, so that it was no longer his image.”
“Just like Maggie Walsh. She talks the same way.” Dr. Babble barked out a harsh, short laugh.
Seth Morley said, “I’ve never met an atheist before.” In actuality he had met one, but it had been years ago. “It seems very strange in this era, when we have proof of the Deity’s existence. I can understand there being widespread atheism in previous eras, when religion was based on faith in things unseen… but now it’s not unseen, as Specktowsky indicated.”
“The Walker-on Earth,” Babble said sardonically, “is a sort of anti-Person-from-Porlock. Instead of interfering with a good process or event he—” Babble broke off.
The door of the infirmary had opened. A man stood there, wearing a soft plastic work-jacket, semi-leather pants and boots. He was dark-haired, probably in his late thirties, with a strong face; his cheekbones were high and his eyes were large and bright. He carried a flashlight, which he now shut off. He stood there, gazing at Babble and Seth Morley, saying nothing. Merely standing silent and waiting. Seth Morley thought, This is a resident of the settlement that I’ve never seen. And then, noticing Babble’s expression, he realized that Babble had never seen him either.