She hung up.
Redfern sat back in his chair. He found that his hands were trembling. Having detected the primary hoax, as he had been meant to do, he had tried a counter-hoax and had thereby fallen into a second or ancillary hoax. He felt ridiculous.
Then a disturbing thought occurred to him. He opened the Manhattan telephone book and looked up the Redfern Behavioural Research Institute.
There was no such listing.
He dialled information and asked for New Listings, then for Regular Listings; but as he had foreseen, there was no Redfern Institute. Finally, taking down the Yellow Pages, he looked up Mazes, Labyrinths, Research, Behaviour, Scientific Equipment, and Laboratory Equipment. There was no Redfern, and no firm which specialized in the construction of mazes.
He realized that, in penetrating the secondary hoax, he had inevitably fallen for a tertiary hoax; nor did this necessarily end the series.
But of course, too much evidence had accumulated by now to permit him to retain the thought of a hoax. The series had been, in fact, a part of the Labyrinth itself, a small loop, curving quickly back to its original point of departure. Or to a point closely resembling the original.
One of the primary aspects of a labyrinth is duplication. That had been faithfully carried out: overtly by the use of Redfern's name in both letters and the imitation of his handwriting; implicitly by the monotonous contradiction of every statement.
The description of the law of the maze (which, it was asserted, he had known but also had not known) was simple enough now. It could be a description only of his own emotions concerning the maze; its forced ambiguities had bored him. Its specious and arbitrary manner and its generally meretricious effect had given him the curiously comforting sensation that one gets by discovering as a falsehood what one had suspected as truth.
Following this, he saw, the first letter was actually the Labyrinth — that slavish, endlessly duplicating monument to tedium whose perfection was marred by one significant detaiclass="underline" its own existence. The second letter was the obligatory duplication of the first, thus fulfilling the requirements for a labyrinth.
Other viewpoints were also possible; but at this point, it occurred to Redfern that he might have thought all of this before.
Proof Of The Pudding
His arms were very tired, but he lifted the chisel and mallet again. He was almost through; only a few more letters and the inscription, cut deeply into the tough granite, would be finished. He rounded out the last period and straightened up, dropping his tools carelessly to the floor of the cave. Proudly he wiped the perspiration from his dirty stubbled face and read what he had written.
I ROSE FROM THE SLIME OF THE PLANET, NAKED AND DEFENCELESS, I FASHIONED TOOLS. I BUILT AND DEMOLISHED, CREATED AND DESTROYED. I CREATED A THING GREATER THAN MYSELF THAT DESTROYED ME.
MY NAME IS MAN AND THIS IS MY LAST WORK.
He smiled. What he had written was good. Not literary enough, perhaps, but a fitting tribute to the human race, written by the last man. He glanced at the tools at his feet. Having no further use for them, he dissolved them, and, hungry from his long work, squatted in the rubble of the cave and created a dinner. He stared at the food for a moment, wondering what was lacking; then, sheepishly, created a table and a chair, utensils and plates. He was embarrassed. He had forgotten them again.
Although there was no need to rush, he ate hurriedly, noting the odd fact that when he didn't think of anything specific, he always created hamburger, mashed potatoes, peas, bread, and ice-cream. Habit, he decided. Finished, he made the remnants of the meal disappear, and with them the plates, utensils and table. The chair he retained. Sitting on it, he stared thoughtfully at the inscription. It's fine, he thought, but no human other than myself will ever read it.
It was fairly certain that he was the last man alive on Earth. The war had been thorough. Thorough as only man, a meticulous animal, could make it. There had been no neutrals in this war, no middle-of-the-road policy. You were on one side or the other. Bacteria, gas, and radiations had covered Earth like a vast cloud. In the first days of that war, invincible secret weapon had succeeded secret weapon with almost monotonous regularity. And after the last hand had pushed the last button, the bombs, automatically guided and impelled, had continued to rain down. Unhappy Earth was a huge junkyard, without a living thing, plant or animal, from pole to pole.
He had watched a good part of it. He had waited until he was fairly sure the last bomb had been dropped; then he had come down.
Very clever of you, he thought bitterly, looking out of the mouth of the cave at the lava plain his ship rested on and at the twisted mountains behind it.
You're a traitor — but who cares?
He had been a captain in the Western Hemisphere Defence. Within two days of warfare, he had known what the end would be. Filling a cruiser with canned air, food, and water, he had fled. In the confusion and destruction, he knew that he would never be missed; after a few days there was no one left to miss him. He had raced the big ship to the dark side of the moon and waited. It was a twelve-day war — he had guessed it would last fourteen — but he had to wait nearly six months before the automatic missiles stopped falling. Then he had come down.
To find himself the only survivor ...
He had expected others to recognize the futility of it, load ships, and flock to the dark side of the moon also. Evidently there had been no time, even if there had been the desire. He had thought that there would be scattered groups of survivors, but he hadn't found any. The war had been too thorough.
Landing on Earth should have killed him, for the air itself was poisoned. He hadn't cared — and he had lived. He seemed to be immune to the various kinds of germs and radiations, or perhaps that was part of his new power. He certainly had encountered enough of both, skipping around the world in his ship, from the ruins of one city to another, across blasted valleys and plains, scorched mountains. He had found no life, but he did discover something.
He could create. He realized the power on his third day on Earth. Wistfully, he had wished for a tree in the midst of the melted rock and metal; a tree had appeared. The rest of the day he experimented and found that he could create anything that he had ever seen or heard about.
Things he knew best, he could create best. Things he knew just from books or conversation — palaces, for example — tended to be lopsided and uncertain, although he could make them nearly perfect by labouring mentally over the details. Everything he created was three-dimensional. Even food tasted like food and seemed to nourish him. He could forget all about one of his creations, go to sleep, and it would still be there when he awakened. He could also uncreate. A single concentrated thought and the thing he had made would vanish. The larger the thing, the longer it took to uncreate.
Things he hadn't made — valleys and mountains — he could uncreate, too, but it took longer. It seemed as though matter was easier to handle once he had shaped it. He could make birds and small animals, or things that looked like birds and small animals.
He had never tried to make a human being.
He wasn't a scientist; he had been a space pilot. He had a vague concept of atomic theory and practically no idea of genetics. He thought that some change must have taken place in his germ plasm, or in his brain, or perhaps on Earth. The why of it all didn't especially bother him. It was a fact and he accepted it.
He stared at the monument again. Something about it bothered him.
Of course, he could have created it, but he didn't know if the things he made would endure after his death. They seemed stable enough, but they might dissolve with his own dissolution. Therefore he compromised. He created a chisel and mallet, but selected a granite wall that he hadn't made. He cut the letters into the inside of the wall of the cave so they would be safe from the elements, working many hours at a stretch, sleeping and eating beside the wall.