The doorway had been there for him to pass through then, seemingly simply because he had believed then he could do it. Why could he not find that belief again, now? Unless he could, and unless he could enter it at will, knowing how he had done it, all he had accomplished and experienced in three different personas had been wasted.
He told himself grimly, now, that the goal he had set himself a hundred years in the past as Donal Graeme could only have been a false one. All he had achieved had been to prod the historic forces of humanity into giving birth to the Others, and the eventual certainty of Old Earth's conquest and destruction.
He could not go on this way, possibly only making matters worse. But, even thinking this, he had weakened. Now, even with Ajela and Rukh waiting, he was going to try to find the doorway one more time before giving up forever. He sat, filling his mind with the storehouse of knowledge represented by the image before him, until it was all within him.
He tried, once more, to use it, to enter the place where he could use it.
And... Nothing. He sat unchanged, unenlightened. The knowledge lay like a dead thing within him, useless as books forgotten as soon as they had been read, cloaked in an eternal darkness. "Hal," said the voice of Ajela, "Rukh and I are already here in my office. Are you coming?" "Coming," he answered, and put the image of the knowledge core, together with all the hopes of his lifetime, away for good.
CHAPTER 3
"Sorry I'm late," Hal said. He came in and sat down in the empty float remaining of the three that were pulled up to Ajela's large desk, now awash with paper. That had never been the case up until the last year. Now, with Tam almost helpless physically - not because his body had been damaged, or lost any of its natural strength, but because the living will in him to move it was fading - Ajela begrudged every moment she could not be by his side. "You weren't tempted to change your mind about coming?" Ajela asked. Her blue eyes were sharp upon him. "No," said Hal.
As usual, the controls of the Final Encyclopedia had aligned his quarters with the corridor that led for a short distance past the Director's office, which Ajela had used since Tam had quitted it permanently, two years before, naming Hal to succeed him as Director. Hal had had to walk only a few meters to get here. "No excuse. No delays. I just forgot the time."
Rukh Tamani, he saw, was also looking at him penetratingly. The two women had been talking as he came in - something about Earth, of which Ajela had, somewhat unwillingly, become, de facto chief executive. This, because simply as a practical matter, with Hal leaving everything to her in order to search for a way into the Creative Universe, she controlled the Final Encyclopedia. More importantly she had defacto control of the Encyclopedia's contract for the services of the Dorsai.
For the Dorsai, when they had come to the defense of Earth at Hal's urging, had been too wise from over two hundred years of experience not to insist that they would refuse to give their lives without the usual contract for their military use.
Knowing history, and the minds of those on worlds that had employed them, they had made their contract with the Encyclopedia, ignoring all the frequently quarreling local governments of Earth, itself. That had meant that, in theory, at least, the defense of Earth took its orders from this desk of Ajela's.
Hal knew, and the two women at the table knew, that the Dorsai would have come to put their lives and skills at the service of the Mother World, in any case. The contract they had signed called for compensation for two million trained men and women, warships and equipment, which represented a fully prepared space force only a full world with the resources of Earth could afford to pay for, and even that, over an extended period of time. But whether the Dorsai would ever actually collect their final pay or not made little difference. They all knew that, barring a miracle, the odds were there would be few of them left to collect when the time came.
Without the breakthrough that Hal had been unable to make, these three now in this room, at least, were aware that the Others, with all the war resources of the Younger Worlds available, must, in the end, prevail. Driven by the remarkable intelligence and destructive intentions of their leader, Bleys Ahrens, eventually that fleet outside the shield would grow large enough to break through, and, dying in droves if they must, overwhelm the more skillfully crewed, but less numerous, ships that could be put up in opposition by the Dorsai alone.
Thirty-one hundred and sixty-two fighting ships, operated around the clock by a scant two million people divided into four shifts - three of them working and one rotating in reserve at all times - were few enough to patrol the inner surface of a globe large enough to enclose, not only the Earth itself, but the orbit of the Final Encyclopedia. The day had to come when the Younger Worlds' fleet would phase-shift through the shield in incredible numbers, and the end be sealed.
The fact that the Dorsai would be dead before the forces of the Others owned the skies over a helpless Earth would be little consolation to Earth's people when that day came. "To catch you up on what I've just been talking over with Rukh," said Ajela, "we've got unexpected good news from below in the shape of the latest statistics."
The concept of "good news" jarred on Hal in the face of what he knew and had come here to say. But, surprisingly, he saw that Rukh was clearly in agreement with Ajela's assessment. Both women were looking at him with what seemed to be lifted spirits - and the difference was particularly noticeable on Rukh's part. She had been pushing her frail physical strength to the limit by adding much of Ajela's office work to her already excessive speaking engagements down on the surface, so as to free the other woman, Ajela, to have as much time as possible with Tam in his last days.
The least Hal could do for them, he told himself now, was to listen first to what they had to tell him before delivering the bad news of his own hard decision. "Tell me," he said.
Ajela picked up a paper from the desk before her. "These are statistics from Earth as a whole, compiled from all the areas," she said, and began to read: "...food production as a whole up eight per cent - (in spite of all those wild complaints we've had that the phase-shield cuts down on needed sunlight over growing areas) - metals production up eleven per cent. Metals directly required in spaceship production up eighteen per cent. Production of warships, fully fitted, armed, and test-flown, now up to an average of one every three and a half days. Enlistment in the training camps for spaceship crews by Earth-born applicants, up' - listen to this, Hal - 'sixty-three per cent! Graduation of fully trained but inexperienced crew people up eleven per cent..."
She continued to read. Rukh was also watching her now, Hal saw. He sat listening to Ajela and watching them both. Rukh's dark-olive face seemed to glow with an invisible but palpable inner light from under her black crown of neat, short hair.
That light had always been there, since he had met her in the camp of the guerrillas she had led on Harmony. But it seemed to stand out more now, because she had never really recovered physically from her weeks of torture at the hands of Amyth Barbage - then an officer of the Harmony Militia, and now, ironically, her most dedicated disciple and protector.
It was an index of the power of her faith that, simply by being what she was, she had been able to turn that lean and fearless fanatic from what he had been to what he was now. Strangely, also, her unbelievable beauty had been heightened rather than lessened by that ordeal in the prison. She seemed in some ways to Hal - and he knew that those who flocked in their thousands to hear her felt it even more strongly - more spirit than flesh.