"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 it - but always at the price of a little more of man's individual self-contained powers. In the end - in 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 single system that has given us our technological civilization, that says there is only one way for Man to live, and that's swaddled by the machine. And the other was all other systems - the 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 generation - and genius works with the Alternate Laws. Only, after a while the machine got enough muscles so that it started crowding genius - and 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 Guild - each and every one of them, and any more like them - kill 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 that - now, 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 master - the 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 now - make 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 Complex - ostensibly 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.