She ran down and looked at me, almost pleadingly as if asking me to excuse her from finishing what she had started to say. But my mind was racing, and my heart pounded with excitement.
"Go on!" I told her harshly.
"The power in you for destruction was greater than he had dreamed. But, Tam" - she broke in on herself quickly, almost frantically- "there was something else. You remember five years ago how Padma thought you had no choice but to go through that dark valley of yours to its very end? Well, that's not quite true. There is a chance - at this point in the pattern, here at this locus. If you'll think, and choose, and turn aside, there's a narrow way for you up out of the darkness. But you've got to turn sharply right now! You've got to give up this assignment you're on, no matter what it costs, and come back to Earth to talk to Mark Torre, right now!"
"Right now," I muttered, but I was merely echoing her words without thought, while listening to my racing mind. "No," I said, "nevermind that. What is it I'm supposed to be turning my back on? What special destruction? I'm not planning anything like that - right now."
"Tam!" I felt her hand distantly on my arm, I saw her pale face staring tensely up at me, as if trying to get my attention. But it was as if these things registered on my senses from a long distance away. For if I was right - if I was right - then even Padma's calculations were testifying to the dark strength in me, that ability I had worked these five years to harness and drive. And if such power were actually mine, what couldn't I do next?
"But it isn't what you plan!" Lisa was saying desperately. "Don't you see, a gun doesn't plan to shoot anyone. But it's in you, Tam, like a gun ready to go off. Only, you don't have to let it go off. You can change yourself while there's still time. You can save yourself, and the Encyclopedia-"
The last word rang suddenly through me, with a million echoes. It rang like the uncounted voices I had heard five years ago at the Transit Point of the Index Room in the Encyclopedia itself. Suddenly, through all the excitement holding me, it reached and touched me as sharply as the point of a spear. Like a brilliant shaft of light it pierced through the dark walls that had been building triumphantly in my mind on either side of me, as they had built in my mind that day in Mark Torre's office. Like an unbearable illumination it opened the darkness for a second, and showed me a picture - myself, in the rain; and Padma, facing me; and a dead man who lay between us.
But I flung myself away from that moment of imagination, flung myself clear back into the comforting darkness, and the sense of my power and strength came back on me.
"I don't need the Encyclopedia!" I said loudly.
"But you do!" she cried. "Everybody who's Earth-born - and if Padma's right, all the people in the future on the sixteen worlds - are going to need it. And only you can make sure they get it. Tam, you have to-"
"Have to!"
I took a step back from her, myself, this time. I had gone fiercely cold all over with the same sort of fury Mathias had been able to raise in me once, but it was mixed now with my feeling of triumph and of power. "I don't 'have to' anything! Don't lump me in with the rest of you Earth worms. Maybe they need your Encyclopedia. But not me!"
I went around her with that, using my strength finally to shove her physically aside. I heard her still calling after me as I went down the stairs. But I shut my mind to the sense of her voice and refused to hear it. To this day I do not know what the last words she called after me were. I left the balcony and her calling behind me, and threaded my way through the people of the floor below toward the same exit through which Bright had disappeared. With the Friendly leader gone, there was no point in my hanging around. And with the newly rearoused sense of my power in me, abruptly I could not bear them close around me. Most of them, nearly all of them, were people from the younger worlds; and Lisa's voice rang on and on, it seemed, in my ear, telling me I needed the Encyclopedia, reechoing all Mathias' bitter lesson - giving about the relative helplessness and ineffectuality of Earthmen.
As I had suspected, once I gained the open air of the cool and moonless Freiland night outside, Eldest Bright, and whoever had called him from the party, had disappeared. The parking-lot attendant told me that they had left.
There was no point in my trying to find them, now. They might be headed anywhere on the planet, if not to a spacefield off-world entirely, back to Harmony or Association. Let them go, I thought, still bitter from the implication of my Earth-born ineffectiveness that I thought I had read in Lisa's words. Let them go. I alone could handle any trouble Dave might get in with the Friendlies, as a result of having a pass unsigned by one of their authorities.
I headed back to the spacefield and took the first shuttle to orbit and shift back to New Earth. But on the way, I had a chance to cool down. I faced the fact that it was still worthwhile getting Dave's pass signed. I might have to send him off for some reason of his own. An accident might even separate us on the battlefield. Any one of a number of things could occur to put him in trouble where I would not be around to save him.
With Eldest Bright a lost cause, I was left with the only option of heading to military headquarters of the Friendly troops in North Partition, to seek the signature for Dave's pass there. Accordingly, as soon as I hit orbit New Earth, I changed my ticket for Contrevale, the North Partition city right behind the lines of the Friendly mercenaries.
All this took some little time. It was after midnight by the time I had gotten from Contrevale to Battle Headquarters of the North Partition Forces. My Newsman's pass got me admission to the Headquarters' area, which seemed strangely deserted even for this time of night. But, when I pulled in at last before the Command building, I was surprised at the number of floaters parked there in the Officers' area.
Once again, my pass got me past a silent-faced, black-clothed guard with spring-rifle at the ready. I stepped into the reception room, with its long counter clipping it in half before me and the tall wall transparencies showing the full parking area under its night lights behind me. Only one man was behind the counter at one of the desks there, a Groupman hardly older than myself, but with his face already hardened into the lines of grim and merciless self-discipline to be observed on some of these people.
He got up from his desk and came to the other side of the counter as I approached the near side.
"I'm a Newsman of the Interstellar News Service," I began. "I'm looking for-"
"Thy papers!"
The interruption was harsh and nasal. The black eyes in the bony face stared into mine; and the archaic choice of the pronoun was all but flung in my face. Grim contempt, amounting nearly to a hatred on sight, leaped like a spark from him to me, as he held out his hand for the papers he had requested - and like a lion roused from slumber by the roar of an enemy, my own hatred leaped back at him, instinctively, before I could leash it with cooler reflection and wisdom.
I had heard of his breed of Friendly, but never until this moment had I come face to face with one. This was one of those from Harmony or Association who used the canting version of their private speech not just privately among themselves, but indifferently toward all men and women. He was one of those who avoided all personal joy in life, as he avoided any softness of bed or fullness of belly. His life was a trial-at-arms, antechamber only for the life to come, that life to come that was possible only to those who had kept the true faith - and to only those who, in keeping the true faith, had in addition been Chosen of the Lord.