Alan's soul seemed full for the first time, it even seemed natural that he should be here. He felt affinity with the flames. He began to identify with them, until he was them.
Time stopped.
Thought stopped.
Life alone remained.
Then blackness swam back. From far away he observed that his rigid body was being shaken, that a voice was bellowing in his ear.
"… you have seen! You have seen! Now you know. Now you know! Come back-there is more to see!"
Shocked, it seemed, back into his body, he opened his eyes. He could see nothing still, but felt the grip on his shoulders and knew that the Fireclown, his voice excited- perhaps insane-was shouting from in front of his face. "That is why I call myself the Fireclown. I am full of the joy of the flames of life!"
"How…?' The word stumbled hoarsely from his lips.
But the Fireclown's hands left his shoulders and he heard the man screaming at Helen, shaking her also.
There could be no fear now, Alan decided. Though, earlier, he might have been perturbed by the Fireclown's ravings, he now half ignored them, aware that there was no need to listen.
What he demanded now was an explanation.
"How could we have seen that and lived?" he shouted roughly, groping out to seize the Fireclown's tattered clothing and tug at it. "How?"
He heard Helen mumble. Satisfied, the Fireclown moved away from her, jerking himself free from Alan's grip.
He got up and followed the Fireclown through the blackness, touched his body again, sensing the tremendous strength in the man.
The Fireclown shook with humor again.
"Give me a moment," he laughed. "I have to feed the ship further directions."
Alan heard him reach the control panel, heard him make adjustments to studs and levers, heard the now familiar whine. He groped his way back to Helen. She put her arms round him. She was crying.
"What's the matter?"
"Nothing. Really-nothing. It's just the-the emotion, I suppose."
The lights came on.
Arms akimbo, the Fireclown stood grinning down at them.
"I see you are somewhat stunned. I had hoped to turn you mad-but you are obviously too entrenched in your own narrow 'sanity" to be helped. That grieves me."
"You promised me you would explain," Alan reminded him shakily.
"If you could understand, I said, if you remember. I’ll explain a little. I am not yet ready to tell you my full reason for bringing you with me. Now, see..
." He turned and depressed a stud and a section of one port slid up to reveal normal space, with the sun flaring-still near, but not so near as to be dangerous. "We have returned to our ordinary state for a while. Now you see the sun as any traveler would see it from this region of space. What do you think of it?"
"Think of it? I don't understand you."
"Good."
"What are you getting at?"
"How important do the conflicts now taking place on Earth seem to you now?"
"I haven't…" He couldn't find the words. They were important, still. Did the Fireclown think that this experience, transcendental as it might have been, could alter his view of Earth's peril?
Impatiently, the Fireclown turned to Helen.
"Is your ambition to become president of Earth still as strong as it was, Miss Curtis?" ^ She nodded. "This-vision or whatever it was-has no bearing on what are, as far as you're concerned, mundane problems relating to our society. I still want to do my best in politics. It has changed nothing. I have probably benefited from the experience. If that* s the case, I shall be better equipped to deal with Earth affairs."
The Fireclown snorted, but Alan felt Helen had never sounded so self-confident as she did now.
"I still want to know how you achieved the effect," Alan insisted.
"Very well. Put simply, we shunted part of ourselves and part of the ship out of normal time and hovered, as it were, on its edges, unaffected by many of its rules."
"But that's impossible. Scientists have never…"
"If it was impossible, Alan Powys, it couldn't have happened and you couldn't have experienced it. As for your scientists, they have never bothered to enquire. I discovered the means of doing this after an experience which almost killed me and certainly affected my thought-process.
"The sun almost killed me, realize that. But I bear it no malice. You and I and the ship existed in a kind of time freeze. The ship's computer has a 'mind' constructed according to my own definitions-they are meaningless to the rigidly thinking scientists of Earth but they work for me because I am the Fireclown!
"I am unique, for I survived death by fire. And fire gave my brain life-brought alive inspiration, knowledge!" He pointed back at the sun, now dwindling behind them.
"There is the fire that gave birth to Earth and fed its denizens with vitality.
Worship it-worship it in gratitude, for without it you would not and could not exist. There is truth-perhaps the sum of truth. It flames, living, and is; self-sufficient, careless of why, for why is a question that need not-cannot-be answered. We are fools to ask it."
"Would you, then, deny Man his intellect?" Alan asked firmly. "For that is what your logic suggests. Should we have stayed in the caves, not using the brains which"-he shrugged-"the sun, if you like, gave us? Not using an entire part of ourselves-the part which set us over the animals, which enabled us to live as weaklings in a world of the strong and the savage, to speculate, to build and to plan? You say we should be content merely to exist-I say we should think. And if our existence is meaningless then our thoughts might, in time, give it meaning."
The Fireclown shook his painted head.
"I knew you would not understand," he said sadly.
"There is no communication between us," Alan said. "I am sane, you are mad."
The Fireclown, for the first time, seemed hurt by Alan's pronouncement. Quietly, without his usual zest, he said: "I know the truth. I know it."
"Men down the ages have known a truth such as the one you know. You are not unique. Fireclown. Not in history."
"I am unique, Alan Powys, for one reason if none other. I have seen the truth for myself. And you shall see it, perhaps. Did you not become absorbed into the fire of the sun? Did you not lose all niggling need for meaning therein?"
"Yes. The forces are overwhelming, I admit. But they are not everything."
The Fireclown opened his mouth and once more bellowed with laughter. "Then you shall see more."
He closed the port and the room darkened.
"Where are we going?" Helen demanded grimly, antagonistically.
But the Fireclown only laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until the strange spheres began to roll across the screen again. Then he was silent.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HOURS seemed to pass and Helen dozed in Alan's arms. Alan, too, was half asleep, mesmerized by the colored spheres on the screen.
He came fully awake as the spheres began to jerk and slow. A bright red filled the screen, divided itself into fragments.
More spheres appeared, but these were suns.
Suns. A profusion of suns as closely packed as the planets to Sol. Huge, blue suns, green, yellow and silver suns.
A thousand suns moving in stately procession around the ship.
The screens slid up from the ports and light, ever changing, flickered through the cabin.
"Where are we?" Helen gasped.
"The center of the galaxy," the Fireclown announced grandly.
All around them the huge discs of flame, of all colors and all possible blends of color, spun at extraordinary speeds, passing by in an orbit about an invisible point.
Alan, once again, could not retain his self-possession.
Something within him forced him to look and wonder at the incredible beauty.