"Nicely illuminated," he said. In fact, the innumerable moisture droplets of the mist filling the tunnel opening seemed to cause its interior to glow as they individually reflected the lighting built into the upper and lower surfaces of the panel that was the floor.
"My directions from Jeamus were to park a good fifty meters off," said Simon. "I can run out a landing ramp for you right up to within half a meter of the iris opening - or would you rather use your power belt and jump?"
"I'll jump," said Hal. "If Jeamus wants you fifty meters off, poking a ramp in close to it might not be the brightest idea."
"There's no problem about my holding the craft steady," said Simon.
"I know you can do it," said Hal. "Still, let's play the odds. If I jump, I'll only have to be thinking about myself."
Simon parked. Hal closed his helmet and went out through the double doors of the vehicle, now on airlock cycle, and stepped toward the entrance to the iris, correcting his course as he approached with small bursts from the power belt.
At the doorway itself there was a little tension to be felt, like that of breaking through an invisible, and thin but tough membrane, as he penetrated the pressure airseal and let himself down, feet first on the mist-hidden floor. In fact, it was easy to imagine that he could feel the coolness of the white fog around him, even through the impermeable fabric of the vacuum suit. The suspended water droplets hid not only the walls of the tunnel and the floor beneath his feet, but floated about him in clouds of varying thickness.
He threw back his helmet and breathed in the moisture-laden atmosphere. It felt heavy as water itself in his lungs; and he knew that the feeling was not simply imagination, as the super-saturation under these abnormal conditions would be well above what Earth surface-pressure air could normally be induced to carry in the way of moisture.
He went forward.
After a hundred or so steps, he caught sight of a bobbing darkness through the mist ahead, which swiftly became the shape of a tall man, also suited, also with helmet thrown back, coming toward him.
Three more steps brought them face to face and they stopped. Through the transparency of Bleys' vacuum suit, he could see the other man was wearing his customary narrow trousers and jacket - but still, there seemed to be a difference about him.
For a moment the difference eluded Hal, and then he identified it. The tall man was as slim as ever, but in the vacuum suit he gave the appearance of being bulkier and more physical. His shoulders had always been as wide as Hal's but now they seemed heavier. His face was unchanged; but his body seemed more heavy-boned and powerful.
It was only a subjective alteration in appearance, but oddly important, here and now. And yet it was not as if the Other had put on weight. Eerily, it was as if he and Hal had grown more alike physically. Their eyes met. Bleys spoke, and his voice went out and was lost against the walls of the tunnel, its crispness blurred by the heavy air and the mist.
"Well," said Bleys, "you've got your Dorsai and everything you want from the Exotics locked up, here. I take it, then, you're determined to go through with this?"
"I told you," said Hal, "there was never any other way."
Bleys nodded, a trifle wearily.
"So now the gloves come off," he said.
"Yes," answered Hal. "Sooner or later they had to, I being what I am and you being what you are."
"And what are you?" Bleys smiled.
"You don't know, of course," said Hal.
"No," said Bleys. "I've known for some time you're not just a boy whose tutors I watched die on a certain occasion. How much more, I still don't know. But it'd be petty-minded of me to hide the fact that I've been astonished by the quality of your opposition to me. You're too intelligent to move worlds like this just for revenge on me because of your tutors' deaths. What you've done and are doing is too big for any personal cause. Tell me - what drives you to oppose me like this?"
"What drives me?" Hal found himself smiling a little sadly - almost a Bleys type of smile. "A million years of history and prehistory drive me - as they drive you. To be more specific, the last thousand years of history drive me. There's no other way for you and I to be, but opponents. But if it's any consolation to you, I've also been surprised by the quality of your opposition."
"You?" Bleys' face could not bring itself to express incredulity. "Why should you be surprised?"
"Because," said Hal, "I'm more than you could imagine - just as you've turned out to be something I couldn't imagine. But then when I was imagining this present time we live in I had no real appreciation of the true value of faith. It's something that goes far beyond blind worship. It's a type of understanding in those who've paid the price to win it. As you, yourself, know."
Bleys was watching him intently.
"As I know?"
"Yes," said Hal, "as you, of all people, know."
Bleys shook his head.
"I should have dealt with you when you were much younger," he said, almost to himself.
"You tried," said Hal. "You couldn't."
"I did?" said Bleys. "I see. You're using faith, again, to reach that conclusion?"
"Not for that. No, only observation and fact." Hal was still watching Bleys as closely as Bleys was watching him. "Primarily, the fact that I'm who I am, and know what I can do."
"You're mistaken if you think I couldn't have eliminated a sixteen-year-old boy if I'd wanted to."
"No, I'm not mistaken," Hal said. "As I say, you tried. But I wasn't a boy, even then when I thought I was. I was an experienced adult, who had reasons for staying alive. I told you I've learned faith, even if it took me three lives to do the learning. That's why I know I'm going to win, now. Just as I know my winning means your destruction, because you won't have it any other way."
"You seem to think you know a great deal about me." The smile was back on Bleys' face. It was a smile that hid all thoughts behind it.
"I do. I came to understand you better by learning to understand myself - though understanding myself was a job I started long before you came along." Hal paused for a fraction of a second as a surgeon might pause before the first cut of the scalpel. "If you'd been only what I thought you were the first time I saw you, the contest between us would already be over. More than that, I'd have found some way by this time to bring you to the side of things as they must be for the race to survive."
Bleys' smile widened. Ignoring it, Hal went on.
"But since that day at the estate," he said, "I've learned about myself, as well as more about you, and I know I'll never be able to bring you to see what I see until you, yourself, choose to make the effort to do so. And without that effort, we're matched too evenly, you and I, by the forces of history, for any compromise to work."
"I'm not sure I understand you," said Bleys, "and that's unusual enough to be interesting."
"You don't understand me because I'm talking of things outside your experience," Hal said. "I came to talk to you here - as I'll always be willing to come to talk to you - because I've got to hang on to the hope you might be brought to consider things beyond the scope of what you look at now; and change your mind."
"You talk," said Bleys, now openly amused, "like a grandfather talking to a grandson."
"I don't mean to," said Hal. "But the hard fact is you've had only one lifetime from which to draw your conclusions. As I just said, I've had three. It took me that long to become human; and because I've finally made it, I can see how you, yourself, fall short of being the full human being the race has to produce to survive the dangers it can't even imagine yet. Like it or not, that experience is there, and a difference between us."