Schwartz watched the temperature thereafter and found that it scarcely varied from day to day-and yet the days shortened, as would be expected from a northerly location, say as northerly as Chicago. He wondered if he was on Earth.
He tried reading some of Grew's book films but gave up. People were people still, but the minutiae of daily life, the knowledge of which was taken for granted, the historical and sociological allusions that meant nothing to him, forced him back.
The puzzles continued. The uniformly warm rains, the wild instructions he received to remain away from certain regions. For instance, there had been the evening that he had finally become too intrigued by the shining horizon, the blue glow to the south…
He had slipped off after supper, and when not a mile had passed, the almost noiseless whir of the biwheel engine came up behind him and Arbin's angry shout rang out in the evening air. He had stopped and had been taken back.
Arbin had paced back and forth before him and had said, "You must stay away from anywhere that it shines at night."
Schwartz had asked mildly, "Why?"
And the answer came with biting incision, "Because it is forbidden." A long pause, then, "You really don't know what it's like out there, Schwartz?"
Schwartz spread his hands.
Arbin said, "Where do you come from? Are you an-an Outsider?"
"What's an Outsider?"
Arbin shrugged and left.
But that night had had a great importance for Schwartz, for it was during that short mile toward the shiningness that the strangeness in his mind had coalesced into the Mind Touch. It was what he called it, and the closest he had come, either then or thereafter, to describing it.
He had been alone in the darkling purple. His own footsteps against the springy pavement were muted. He hadn't seen anybody. He hadn't heard anybody. He hadn't touched anything.
Not exactly…It had been something like a touch, but not anywhere on his body. It was in his mind…Not exactly a touch, but a presence-a somethingness there like a velvety tickle.
Then there had been two-two touches, distinct, apart. And the second-how could he tell them apart?-had grown louder (no, that wasn't the right word); it had grown distincter, more definite.
And then he knew it was Arbin. He knew it five minutes, at least, before he caught the sound of the biwheel, ten minutes before he laid eyes on Arbin.
Thereafter it occurred again and again with increasing frequency.
It began to dawn on him that he always knew when Arbin, Loa, or Grew was within a hundred feet of himself, even when he had no reason for knowing, even when he had every reason to suppose the opposite. It was a hard thing to take for granted, yet it began to seem so natural.
He experimented, and found that he knew exactly where any of them were, at any time. He could distinguish between them, for the Mind Touch differed from person to person. Not once had he the nerve to mention it to the others.
And sometimes he would wonder what that first Mind Touch on the road to the Shiningness had been. It had been neither Arbin, Loa, nor Grew. Well? Did it make a difference?
It did later. He had come across the Touch again, the same one, when he brought in the cattle one evening. He came to Arbin then and said:
"What about that patch of woods past the South Hills, Arbin?"
"Nothing about it," was the gruff answer. "It's Ministerial Ground."
"What's that?"
Arbin seemed annoyed. "It's of no importance to you, is it? They call it Ministerial Ground because it is the property of the High Minister."
"Why isn't it cultivated?"
"It's not intended for that." Arbin's voice was shocked. "It was a great Center. In ancient days. It is very sacred and must not be disturbed. Look, Schwartz, if you want to remain here safely, curb your curiosity and tend to your job."
"But if it's so sacred, then nobody can live there?"
"Exactly. You're right."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure…And you're not to trespass. It will mean the end for you."
"I won't."
Schwartz walked away, wondering and oddly uneasy. It was from that wooded ground that the Mind Touch came, quite powerfully, and now something additional had been added to the sensation. It was an unfriendly Touch, a threatening Touch.
Why? Why?
And still he dared not speak. They would not have believed him, and something unpleasant would happen to him as a consequence. He knew that too. He knew too much, in fact.
He was younger these days, also. Not so much in the physical sense, to be sure. He was thinner in his stomach and broader in his shoulders. His muscles were harder and springier and his digestion was better. That was the result of work in the open. But it was something else he was chiefly conscious of. It was his way of thinking.
Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.
But to Schwartz experience remained, and it was with a sharp delight that he found he could understand things at a bound, that he gradually progressed from following Arbin's explanations to anticipating them, to leaping on ahead. As a result, he felt young in a far more subtle way than any amount of physical excellence could account for.
Two months passed, and it all came out-over a game of chess with Grew in the arbor.
Chess, somehow, hadn't changed, except for the names of the pieces. It was as he remembered it, and therefore it was always a comfort to him. At least, in this one respect, his poor memory did not play him false.
Grew told him of variations of chess. There was fourhanded chess, in which each player had a board, touching each other at the corners, with a fifth board filling the hollow in the center as a common No Man's Land. There were three-dimensional chess games in which eight transparent boards were placed one over the other and in which each piece moved in three dimensions as they formerly moved in two, and in which the number of pieces and pawns were doubled, the win coming only when a simultaneous check of both enemy kings occurred. There were even the popular varieties, in which the original position of the chessmen were decided by throws of the dice, or where certain squares conferred advantages or disadvantages to the pieces upon them, or where new pieces with strange properties were introduced.
But chess itself, the original and unchangeable, was the same-and the tournament between Schwartz and Grew had completed its first fifty games.
Schwartz had a bare knowledge of the moves when he began, so that he lost constantly in the first games. But that had changed and losing games were becoming rarer. Gradually Grew had grown slow and cautious, had taken to smoking his pipe into glowing embers in the intervals between moves, and had finally subsided into rebellious and querulous losses.
Grew was White and his pawn was already on King 4.
"Let's go," he urged sourly. His teeth were clamped hard on his pipe and his eyes were already searching the board tensely.
Schwartz took his seat in the gathering twilight and sighed. The games were really becoming uninteresting as more and more he became aware of the nature of Grew's moves before they could be made. It was as if Grew had a misty window in his skull. And the fact that he himself knew, almost instinctively, the proper course of chess play to take was simply of a piece with the rest of his problem.
They used a "night-board," one that glowed in the darkness in a checkered blue-and-orange glimmer. The pieces, ordinary lumpish figures of a reddish clay in the sunlight, were metamorphosed at night. Half were bathed in a creamy whiteness that lent them the look of cold and shining porcelain, and the others sparked in tiny glitters of red.