There was nothing except this to mark the moment and place as anything out of the ordinary - but as Cletus stepped through the door, a deep, instinctive warning shouted loudly at him, checking him just inside the threshold. He sensed an impalpable living tension that held the very air of the room - a feeling as of a massive, invisible force in delicate, temporary balance. For a second his mind recoiled.
Then it cleared. For one fleeting but timeless moment he saw that which was in the room - and that which was not.
What his eyes registered were like two versions of the same scene, superimposed on each other, but at the same time distinct and separate. One was the ordinary room, with Mondar seated on his chair, and all things ordinary.
The other was the same room, but filled with a difference. Here, Mondar did not sit on his chair but floated, in lotus position, a few inches above its seat cushion. Stretching out before and behind him was a succession of duplicating images, semitransparent, but each clearly identifiable - and while those closest to him, before and behind him, were duplicates of himself, those farther from him wore different faces - faces still Exotic, but of different men, different Outbonds. Before and behind him, these stretched away until they were lost to sight.
Cletus, too, he became aware, had his images in line with him. He could see those before and he was somehow conscious of those behind him. Before him was a Cletus with two good knees, but beyond this and two more Cletuses were different men, bigger men. But a common thread ran through them, tying the pulses of their lives to his, and continuing back through him to a man with no left arm, on and on, through the lives of all those others behind him until it ended, at last, with a powerful old man in half-armor sitting on a white horse with a baton in hand.
Nor was this all. The room was full of forces and currents of living pressures coming from vast distances to this focal point, like threads of golden light they wove back and forth, tying each other together, connecting some of Cletus' images with Mondar's, and even Cletus, himself, with Mondar, himself. They two, their forerunners and their followers, hung webbed in a tapestry of this interconnecting pattern of light during that single moment in which Cletus' vision registered the double scene.
Then, abruptly, Mondar turned his gaze on Cletus, and both tapestry and images were gone. Only the normal room remained.
But Mondar's eyes glowed at Cletus like twin sapphires illuminated from within by a light identical in color and texture to the threads that had seemed to fill the air of the room between both men.
"Yes," said Mondar. "I knew... almost from the moment I first saw you in the spaceship dining lounge. I knew you had potential. If it'd only been part of our philosophy to proselytize or recruit in the ordinary way, I'd have tried to recruit you from that minute on. Did you talk to Dow?"
Cletus considered the unlined face, the blue eyes, of the other, and slowly nodded.
"With your help," he said. "Was it actually necessary to get Melissa away, too? DeCastries and I could have talked over her head."
"I wanted him to have every advantage," Mondar said, his eyes glowing. "I wanted no doubt left in your mind that he'd been able to bid as high for you as he wanted to go... He did offer you a job with him, didn't he?"
"He told me," said Cletus, "that he couldn't - to an interesting madman. From which I gathered he was extremely eager to hire one."
"Of course he is," said Mondar. "But he wants you only for what you can do for him. He's not interested in what you could make of yourself... Cletus, do you know how we Exotics came about?"
"Yes," said Cletus. "I looked you up before I put in my request for transfer to here. The Association for the Investigation and Development of Exotic Sciences - my sources say you developed out of a black-magic cult of the early twenty-first century called the Chantry Guild."
"That's right," Mondar said. "The Chantry Guild was the brainchild of a man named Walter Blunt. He was a brilliant man, Cletus, but like most of the people of his tune, he was reacting against the fact that his environment had suddenly been enlarged from the surface of one world to the surfaces of any number of worlds spread out through light-years of interstellar space. You probably know the history of that period as well as I do - how that first, instinctive, racial fear of space beyond the solar system built up and erupted in a series of bloody social eruptions. It spawned any number of societies and cults for people attempting to adjust psychologically to feelings of vulnerability and insignificance, deep down on the unconscious level. Blunt was a fighter, an anarchist. His answer was revolution - "
"Revolution?" asked Cletus.
"Yes. Literally - revolution," Mondar answered. "Blunt wanted to destroy part of actual, objective physical reality as well - by using primitive psychic leverage. He called what he wanted to do 'creative destruction.' He called on people to 'Destruct!' But he couldn't quite push even the intense neurotics of his time all the way over the emotional brink. And then he was deposed as head of the Guild by a young mining engineer who'd lost an arm in a mine accident - "
"Lost an arm?" said Cletus sharply. "Which arm?"
"The left - yes, I think it was the left that was gone," said Mondar.
"Why?"
"Nothing," said Cletus. "Go on."
"His name was Paul Formain - "
"Fort-Mayne?" Cletus interrupted a second time.
"No t," answered Mondar, "F-o-r-m-a-i-n." He spelled it out, looking curiously at Cletus. "Something about this interests you particularly, Cletus?"
"Only the coincidences," said Cletus. "You said he had only one arm, so the right arm he had left would have been overmuscled from compensation development. And his name sounds almost like jort-mayne, which are the words used by the Norman French to describe their policy to the conquered English after they took over England in the eleventh century. Fort-mayne - literally, 'strong-hand.' It described a policy of using whatever force was necessary to keep the native English under control. And you say he took over the Chantry Guild, deposing this Blunt?"
"Yes." Mondar frowned. "I see the coincidences, Cletus, but I don't see why they're important."
"Maybe they aren't," said Cletus. "Go on. Formain took over the Chantry Guild and started your Exotic Association?"
"He almost had to wreck the Chantry Guild to do it," said Mondar. "But he did. He changed its aim from revolution to evolution. The evolution of man, Cletus."
"Evolution." Cletus repeated the word thoughtfully. "So, you don't think the human race is through evolving? What comes next, then?"
"We don't know, of course," said Mondar, folding his hands in his lap. "Can an ape imagine a man? But we're convinced the seeds of further evolution are alive in man, still - even if they aren't already germinating. We Exotics are dedicated to searching for those seeds, and protecting them once we've found them, so that they can flourish and grow until evolved man is part of our community."
"Sorry." Cletus shook his head. "I'd make a poor Exotic, Mondar. I've got my own job to do."
"But this is part of your job - and your job is part of it!" Mondar leaned forward, and his hands slid apart. "There's no compulsion on our members. Each one searches and works for the future the way he thinks best. All we ask is that when the skills of anyone are needed by the community, he makes them available to it. In return the community offers him its skills to improve him, physically and mentally, so he can be that much more effective in his own work. You know what you can do now, Cletus. Think what you might be able to do if you could make use of all we can teach you!"
Cletus shook his head again.
"If you turn us down," said Mondar, "it signals a danger to you, Cletus. It signals an unconscious desire on your part to go the deCastries way - to let yourself be caught up by the excitement of directly manipulating people and situations instead of dealing with what's much more valuable, but less emotionally stimulating - the struggle with ideas to find principles that'll lift people eventually above and beyond manipulation."