There was a change in Tam's face, so small as to be unreadable by anyone who did not know him like the four now with him. Again, his head moved - in a motion more clearly of agreement now. "Good. You remember," Hal said, "how the knowledge here in the Final Encyclopedia had to be a requirement. Nothing less would do. Whoever intended to be a creator in the Creative Universe would need a memory bank at least that large. "
He paused. "Can you hear me, Tam?" he asked. "Do you understand?"
Tam gave another minuscule nod. His eyes seemed to see nothing but Hal's face. "I thought there had to be the way in. I thought I'd find it here," Hal went on. "But for three years, these last three years, I couldn't find it here. "Then Amanda came to suggest I take a fresh look at the problem from outside the Final Encyclopedia, and she was right. I went to a place called the Chantry Guild, on Kultis - a new I in the Creative Universe without giving up the rules and laws of the real universe we already know. And those rules, by definition, were the last to apply in the Creative Universe, where the first principle of creativity had to apply - that anything and everything conceivable could be made."
He paused, and this time Tam nodded without being asked. "There were no rules," said Hal, "but there were necessities. First, it was necessary for those who entered the Creative Universe to believe in it. Next, whoever tried to enter it had to believe humans could do so. Last, it could only be entered by a mind willing to put aside the laws and rules of the real universe."
Hal paused, but only to take breath. "That was the hardest of all, that last," he said. "From the first moment of life, instinct tells us the only laws are the laws of the place where we're born. I don't think I'd have been able to keep going if I hadn't already had my own private proof of a place somewhere with different laws. I had it with my poetry. I had it when I went back, in mind only, to the twenty-first century to alter a future not yet made, the future of the time I'd known as Donal."
He held Tam's eyes with his own and his voice held them both. "I was ready to give up when Amanda came. And you know she feels what's right. She was right this time. At the new @@ila", she was on Kultis, a Chantry Guild, I found it - the belief of another man who'd been as close to the Creative Universe as I'd been. He'd come up with one insight. Only one, but it was enough to point me to where I could finally understand how, just as the physical laws of our universe can be, they can also not-be... and that they're subject to us, not us to them!"
He paused once more. Where were Jeamus and the doorways? "Tam, his name was Jathed, and his particular battlecry was 'the transient and the Eternal are the same.' At first it meant nothing to me, logically - only a contradiction in terms. And then I saw the truth of it. I broke through, finally, to that truth - and the whole Creative Universe opened out before me like a flower to the morning sun. For if the Transient and the Eternal could be the same, then all things could. All things were possible. It was only our point of view that had learned to encompass the possibility it wanted, using the knowledge the race already had, to make it real, and that knowledge was there, waiting for us, in the Final Encyclopedia! "Jeamus and his people are going to be here in just minutes, with the equipment we need to make the trip," Hal said. He dared not take his eyes from Tam's eyes, and the strength he could see in them that the old man was trying to gather, the ancient fighting spirit of a lifetime trying to rouse for one more effort. But he could feel time slipping away from them, like the running water of the stream beside Tam's armchair. "Amanda, Rukh-" he called, his gaze still locked with Tam's. "Isn't there some way you can call that corridor where we were? Find out how they're coming. Tell them we have to have it - now!"
He concentrated on Tam once more. "We had the means of going there, all the time," he went on to the still face, behind which the great struggle was going on to rouse a dying spirit. "It was in phase-technology. The same thing that gave us the phase-shift and the phase-shield. But maybe even that's not necessary. Maybe it's just an excuse for the mind to go into the Creative Universe. I don't know. But we don't have time to experiment now, and I used it when I went this first time. So..."
He was talking without a pause, desperately, as if his words were the lifeline up which Tam was pulling himself to safety. There was a fear within him that if he stopped speaking, even for a moment, Tam would lose his hold, - would fall back, and be lost. "You see," he said, "you go through a phase-doorway to no set destination, which should end you spread out to infinity-"
But at last now, behind him, there was a sound of the door from the corridor banging open with unusual noise and violence, and a moment later Jeamus struggled, sweating, into his field of vision, helping one other man move the framework of one of the phase-doorways. The framework had obviously been made weightless, but they still had to contend with its mass and the awkwardness of its size and rectangular shape. "There's a chance-" Jeamus panted, as the two of them stopped behind Tam's chair. "there may be a chance you can go - and come through the same doorway - so to save time we came - with just that. You want to try it? if so, where - where do we put it. "Yes!" snapped Hat. "Put it right here, in front of Tam's chair! "
He turned back to Tam, seeing them obey out of the comer of his eye. "Now we go," he said gently to Tam. "We go together. I know you can't get up and walk through the doorway - that's what I did. But when I went back to the time of the first Chantry Guild, I only sent my mind back. Trust me. You can send your mind through that doorway the way I went then."
He looked and saw that Jeamus and the man helping him had just set up the doorway, less than a meter from Tam's feet, and other men he recognized as being from Jeamus's crew were connecting it to some kind of heavy cable that snaked out of sight to disappear among the illusion of trees to their right. "All right," he said to Tam, and closed his hand around the wide but bony, cold hand of Tam, "come with me, now. Look through that doorway as if it was an opening on wherever you want to go to. In your mind, stand up and step through the frame to that place, and I'll go with you, by your side, holding to you as I am now."
He broke off, and stared then, for the doorway before him had suddenly become not merely a plate of silver blankness, as it had been in the blind corridor for him. Instead it now seemed to open on a green hillside, lifting beyond the doorway for only a few meters, before it reached a crest, beyond which was only the cloudless light blue of a spring sky. It was the sky of one of the Younger Worlds Hal had never been on, but he had seen images of it. It was a spring sky over the northern hemisphere of the small, lush world of Sainte Marie, the world on which both Jamethon and Kensie had died.
Hal rose to his feet, letting the dead weight of Tam's hand slip from his own. But - unless it was his imagination - it seemed he still felt it there, though Tam had not stirred and no one stood visibly beside Hal.
Still, he felt that Tam was beside him, that their hands were linked. "Here we go," he said, without looking to his left, where the spirit of Tam should now be, and he stepped forward, through the phase-doorway.
At once he stood on the sloping surface of the hillside under the warmth of the different sunlight. He felt the hand withdrawn from his grasp and, turning, now saw Tam standing with him.
But it was a younger Tam, a Tam in no more than his thirties, wearing green field clothing, except for the newsman's cloak. Tam took a step forward by himself and stood, looking at the hilltop.
His face showed an expression that was a strange mixture of grimness and a hope so painfully deep it barely escaped being a fear. He had let go of Hal. Now he moved away from him. Hat stood where he was and watched.