Hal took a deep breath. "That's right. There isn't, in any ordinary way." "I can never accept that," said Rukh - and with her words Hal again remembered her as he had first seen her, on Harmony, in all the physical strength and purpose of her earlier years. The power pistol she had worn strapped to her hip, then, had not been as strong as the sense of will and purpose that drew followers to her. "For Bleys to win he must extinguish God, and that he or no one else can ever do." "Think, Hal," said Ajela. "Earth's got as great a population still as all the Younger Worlds combined. It still has as massive resources of metal and other materials as all the Younger Worlds, combined. If we can match their strength, or even come close to it, why can't we fight them off even if they jump through in mass attack?" "Because it'll be a suicide attack," said Hal. "That's the measure of Bleys' control over the crews of the ships he'll be sending in. Each one will be a weapon of destruction, aimed at any target it can reach. The greatest number of them will only take out one of our ships. But some are going to reach the surface of the Earth. Only a few, maybe, but enough to kill off billions of Earth's people in the phase-explosions of their impacts. "
Rukh was looking hard at him. "Hal," she said, "you're talking very strangely. You're not telling us to give up?" "No," he said. "That is, not you. But I'm afraid I came here today - I've got something rather hard to tell you both." "What?" said Ajela. The single word came at him like a command. "I'm trying to say..."he began.
The words sounded suddenly clumsy in his mouth, and he felt heavily the effort of continuing. "...that maybe it's out of our hands to a certain extent. The phase-shield, the Dorsai coming, the contributions of wealth and knowledge from the Exotics, all the true faith-holders from Rukh's two worlds - in the end they all came here only to buy time while I found an answer to Bleys' plan." They were both staring at him. He went on. "That's been the only possible plan, ever since, as Donal, I found out that in welding the Younger Worlds into a political unit - and playing with the laws of history, as Paul Formain - I'd produced an unexpected side effect - the emergence of the Others, the most able of the crossbreeds between the Splinter Cultures."
He looked at them. He had expected some response - at least a protest that it had not been him alone that they had all been depending upon. But neither of the other two said anything, only sat, watching and listening. "A group like the Others," he said, "has always been outside our control. Something neither the commercial skill of the Exotics, the Faith of the Friendlies, nor the fighting abilities of the Dorsai were equipped to stop. Because the Others attack the instinct of the human race to grow and progress in a new way. A way no one had foreseen." He stopped, but neither of them said anything. He went on. "We dreamed of superpeople and, God help us, we got them," he said, "only too soon and with a few things like empathy and a sense of responsibility to the race, missing. But they've been unstoppable from the first because their powers are powers of persuasion, which work on a majority of humanity. You know all this! Otherwise, why would the only immune ones be the true Exotics, the true faith-holders among the Friendlies, the Dorsai, and that majority of full-spectrum humans on Earth who've got that in-born cantankerous individualism that's always rejected any persuasion?"
He paused a moment, then went on. "So it's been necessary from the first that a new answer be found for this new threat. And it's been up to me to find it. I thought I could lay the devils I'd raised. Well, I was wrong. That's what I've come here to tell YOU today. I've faced it now. I've failed."
There was a moment's utter silence. Ajela was the first to react.
"You!" said Ajela. "You, of all people, Hal - you're not going to sit there and tell us there's no such answer!" "And if you tell us so," said Rukh, "I will not believe thee, for it cannot be."
She spoke in a voice that was completely serene. As serene as a mountain, barring a pathway.
CHAPTER 4
Hal gazed at Rukh, almost helplessly. "No," he said. "No, of course not. It's not that the Others can't be stopped, it's just that I can't stop them, in the way I hoped to. The rest of you haven't failed. I've failed." "Thou art alive," said Rukh. The mountain was as impenetrable as collapsed metal. "Thou canst not therefore use the word failed - yet. " "I could go on trying indefinitely," said Hal, "but it'll be best for everyone under the phase-shield if we face facts and I stop trying. Now." "But why should you stop?" said Ajela. "Because for a year now, I've tried to take the final step, and I can't do it. Ajela, you understand how the memory of the Final Encyclopedia works. But Rukh-" He turned to the other woman. "how much do you understand'?" "Call it nothing," said Rukh, calmly. "Some scraps of understanding I've picked up in my time here. But essentially I know nothing." "Well, I want you to understand as well as Ajela," Hal said, "because it's not easy to explain. Rukh, briefly, the Encyclopedia's memory is, for all practical purposes, bottomless. It already holds all the available knowledge of the human race. Theoretically, it could hold no one knows how many times that much more, added to what's there already. You see, like the phase-shift we use to travel between the stars in our ships, and the phase-shield that protects Earth, now - to say nothing of the earlier one that's guarded this Encyclopedia for twenty years - it's a product of phase mechanics." "I know nothing of phase mechanics," Rukh said. "No one else fully understands it, not even our own Jeamus Walters, here," said Hal. "You know him?" "The Head of Technical Research at the Encyclopedia," answered Rukh. "And you've seen the representation of that stored knowledge in the Operations Section down below us?" Hal said. "I've seen it, yes," said Rukh, "like a mass of iron wires red hot. And the people working with it made some attempt to explain it to me, but I still understood almost nothing." "Basically," said Hal, "what it represents isn't the knowledge itself, but the so-called 'tags' that identify each piece of information stored in the Encyclopedia. The information itself can be as extensive as a book-set of encyclopedias, or larger, but the tags are each represented by only a tiny section of the knowledge-chains that look like wires in the display." "Yes," said Rukh, "I remember them telling me that much at least. " "And you know Tam was unusual in that, by just looking at the image, he could to a certain extent read it?" "Yes." Rukh frowned. "Wasn't there something about his finding evidence that at least two of the visiting scholars from Earth had been spies for Bleys? Back at a time when the Encyclopedia was always open to qualified scholars from all the Worlds?"