In his mind there was nothing. Against the screen of his eyelids there was nothing, save the slow drifting of afterimages conjured by his retinas. The random patterns of pseudo-light continued to merge and mingle, then—very gradually—Snook began to feel he could see something behind them. A pale green wall which was not a wall because it was possessed of movement, and endless rising and overturning and falling of its elements; there was transmcency coupled with strength; a sense of solidity and liquidity; a changeless state of eternal changing…
Deep peace of the running…
“Come on, Gil,” Ambrose called. “We’re nearly all set up. Getting it down to a fine art.”
Helig was standing beside Snook, the collar of his rollneck sweater pulled up over his chin. “Yes, come and join us—there’s no show without Punch, is there?”
Snook blinked at the two men and fought to hide his annoyance. Had he been working a confidence trick on himself? Had the words begun to form in his mind because he had been expecting them? How could a telepath distinguish between his own thoughts and those of another?
“Snap out of it, old boy,” Helig said, amiably impatient. “Have you been at the mother’s ruin again?”
“What the hell’s the rush?” Snook demanded. “We can’t do anything until the Avernians get up to this level.”
“Oh!” Helig raised his eyebrows. “Listen to our prima bloody donna!” He punched Snook playfully on the shoulder.
Snook fended off a second blow and forced himself to relax as they walked along the hollowed-out pipe to the area which Ambrose and Murphy, using drawings of the mine and a surveyor’s tape, had marked off as the scene of operations. He was going to have his fill of telepathic experimentation in a matter of minutes, assuming that Felleth kept the implicit rendezvous. Ambrose, satisfied now that he had got his little team together, went on ahead to supervise Quig and Culver.
“Gene, you know this country better than most,” Snook said in a quiet voice. “How long do you think Ogilvie will tolerate this mine being shut down?”
“Strangely enough, the President is taking it quite well. He’s been flattered by the publicity Barandi has got out of it—these things are important to him—and I think he might be in two minds about what he ought to do. Tommy Freeborn is getting restless, though.” Helig’s face was unreadable behind the dark lenses of his Amplites. “Very restless.”
“Think he’s getting ready to answer the call of destiny?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Come on. Gene—everybody knows Freeborn would like to give the two fingers to the United Nations, seal up the borders and get rid of all the whites and Asians.”
“All right, but I didn’t tell you this.” Helig glanced around him, as if expecting to see microphones projecting from the stone. “The smart money has started to flow out of the country. I can’t see Tommy Freeborn letting that go on for more than a week.”
“I see. Are you leaving?”
Helig looked surprised. “Just when I’ll have some real work to do?”
“Your Press card won’t mean anything to the Colonel”
“It means something to me, old boy.”
“I admire your principles,” Snook said, “but I won’t be around to see them put into practice.”
They reached the other members of the group and Snook stood apart, trying to get his thoughts in order. The time had come for him to move on. All the signs were there, all the warnings had been sounded loud and clear, and although he had allowed himself to become involved in other people’s problems, it was a mistake which could be rectified. It now seemed inevitable that there would be a Sharpeville-type slaughter of miners, but there was nothing he could do about that, and his worrying about it would have a negative result. Nature had yet to design a nervous system which was capable of sustaining the guilt of others.
Ambrose and Prudence represented a separate issue. They were sophisticated, well-educated adults—and the fact that he saw them as innocents abroad did not make him responsible for their welfare. Prudence Devonald, in particular, would resent it if he tried to offer advice, and if she wanted to hitch her wagon to Ambrose…
The trend of his thinking filled Snook with sudden self-doubt. Would he have been coolly planning to cut and run if Prudence had fallen into his arms after the incident in the Cullinan? The storybooks all agreed that was the appropriate reward for a knight who rescued a damsel in distress, but was it possible that he—Gilbert Snook, the human neutrino—had seriously expected her to translate romance to reality? And was it equally possible that he was preparing to abandon her in a fit of adolescent pique?
Disturbed at having blundered into emotional quicksands, Snook was almost relieved to see Ambrose studying his watch and giving the fluttering hand signals which indicated that top dead centre was imminent. Ambrose made some final adjustments to the boson field generator, and began explaining the entire procedure for Helig’s benefit. There was less room than in the tunnels where the previous contacts had been made, and the members of the group were standing quite close together when die now-familiar glowing blue line appeared on the rock floor.
“Lateral displacement less than one metre,” Ambrose murmured into his wrist recorder. Quig’s camera began clicking in the background.
Snook moved forward, eager and reluctant at the same time, and stood perfectly still as die line rose upward to become die apex of a triangular prism of luminosity. The prism expanded upwards and outwards until its peak was above Snook’s head and he could see the ghostly geometries of roof structure all about him. The horizontal plane of a ceiling came next, rising over his ankles and knees like the surface of an insubstantial lake. Snook knelt to bring his head down into the volume of the Avernian room. The three translucent figures were waiting for him, Felleth in the centre, growing upwards from the solid rock like sculpted columns of bluish smoke.
Felledi moved closer to Snook, on legs that were as yet invisible, and his arms were outstretched. Again the mist-pools of his eyes grew large. Snook inclined his head forward and, even before the contact was made, he could see the shimmering movement of the sea-green wall…
Deep peace of the running wave.
I ask your forgiveness, Equal Gil. I was at fault for not understanding that you are not accustomed to the congruency of self which you refer to as telepathy. A few unfortunate members of our race are afflicted with the silence that separates and, in my egotism, I presumed that you were similarly flawed because you issued no greeting. I was glad to feel you trying to make contact with me a short while ago, because it showed that you had come to no harm as a result of my mistake. During this meeting I am using purely sequential thought structures to avoid overloading your neural pathways. This technique, which we use in the teaching of our children, reduces the rate of information transfer, but there will be a gain in effectiveness because your mind will be able to function in an approximation of its normal manner.
I ask your forgiveness, too, because in my blind pride I dared reject your stone house of proven knowledge in favour of my reed hut of conjecture. My only excuse is that I was shocked and in considerable pain—in one second I was given more new knowledge than has been accumulated by the People in the last million days, and much of the knowledge was of a kind I would have been happier not to have. I confess that I was also confused and alarmed by the nature of your arrival. The People have many myths about strange beings who live in the clouds, and when you descended from the sky it seemed to me—for an instant—that all the old superstitions had been proved true. This, of course, is a feeble excuse for my reaction, because the nature of your arrival was in itself a proof of all your claims. A moment of logical consideration would have shown that the vertical displacement of your body relative to mine was generated by a hypocycloid of planetary scale. Once that elementary step had been taken, all the other deductions were inevitable, including the final one concerning the fate of my world.