“Why? What?” My tongue was thick and dry. “What is it?”
“Your eyes were closed and you kept saying, ‘I can’t do it—I can’t do it—’ and we couldn’t wake you up,” Doc said.
The Old Man nuzzled my face in relief. I got a noseful of his hair and realized he badly needed a bath. That brought me back to normality faster than anything else.
“Where are we?” I said, sitting up.
“I think we’re almost home,” said Doc. “You take a look. You know how this plane works. I don’t.”
I turned to the control panel and depressed one of the keys.
“Where are we?” I asked. “Show me with a mark on a map.”
Obediently, the screen gave me the image of the last enlargement of the map I had asked it for earlier. A tiny image of the aircraft appeared on this and I peered at it for a second or two before I could see that it was actually in motion across the map lines.
“Looks like we’re not more than a few minutes out,” I said, “depending on how fast we’re travelling.
I looked out and down. We still seemed to be at the same altitude; and, surprisingly, the sun seemed no higher above the horizon behind us than it had been when we took off. That would seem to indicate that we had been matching the earth’s rotational speed—which was a good rate of travel, to be sure.
“I’ve told it to go in and land by the summer palace,” I told Doc. I turned back to the control panel and spoke to it. “Land slowly. I don’t want any of our own people shooting at us. And I don’t want to scare anybody.”
The craft took me literally. It came in over the summer palace at exactly three thousand meters of altitude and then descended vertically, and slowly. We took about twenty minutes to actually touch ground in the landing area, and by the time we did, most of the population of the community was on hand, standing off about fifty feet from our touchdown spot, with the community leaders in the front rank.
I opened the door of the future plane and stepped down to the earth—and they all just stared at me, as if I were a man from Mars. Then Doc and the Old Man came scrambling out behind me; and everyone poured in on us with a rush. I was surrounded, picked up and carried, literally, almost all the way to the summer palace entrance before I could make them put me down on my feet.
When I finally did get a semblance of quiet, I climbed up in one of the jeeps parked there, stood on the back seat and told them, as briefly as I could, that I had escaped from Paula, that she would be after me eventually, but should not be showing up for some weeks at least, and I would have more details for them tomorrow.
But right now, I had to sort myself out and talk things over with the other leaders.
They were a little disappointed not to hear the whole story at once; but they dispersed to their various activities eventually, after I had promised a community-wide celebration for that evening. Finally, I got to go inside the palace with Ellen, Marie, Bill and the rest.
Over food in the same dining room in which I had told them I was going with Paula, I broke the news to them, bluntly.
“She’s not completely sane,” I said. “I don’t mean she’s out of her head all the time; she’d be less dangerous if she was. I mean that when it comes to certain things she’ll do exactly what she wants, regardless of the consequences. Because when she gets to that point, nothing matters except doing what she wants. That’s why I left; because sooner or later, she would want something and find me in the way; and that would be the end of me.”
I told them about the letter she had me sign.
“The point was to hit back at the soldiers who had killed the experts,” I said, “and to saddle me with the blame for doing it. Sooner or later, she would have used that blame to get rid of me. That’s why I had to get out of there without wasting time. Because it could have been sooner. It could have been the minute the men she wanted executed were executed.”
“But what’ll she do now?” Marie asked.
“She’ll send a force to bring me back,” I said. “But maybe not right away, because she’s understrength now. That’s one reason leaving her now was good timing. Here, I can work with Porniarsk and maybe we can find a way to make the move forward before her people can show up here. I’ve been working on pattern recognition. I’m stronger in that area than I was. It’s a fighting chance, anyway.”
I looked over at Porniarsk, who had not been outside with the others when we landed, but who had come into the dining room since we had been sitting there.
“I should have sent word to you sooner,” he said. “The fact is, I ran into this sticking point over a month ago, but I thought that it was something I could get through. Now, I don’t know. Maybe the two of us can get through it.”
“I’ll come to the lab with you as soon as we’re finished here,” I said, between bites of the home-cured ham I was digging into. “But in any case—”
I looked back at the rest of them.
“In any case, everyone in the community who won’t be needed for the monad gestalt, when and if we’re ready to use it, better start making preparations to scatter, now. If Paula can’t get me back, she’ll raise bloody hell—and I mean bloody hell literally— with anyone connected to me she can get her hands on. Bill, Marie-”
They both looked at me, from farther on down the table.
“You’d better start making plans as to how supplies are to be portioned out, and where to, and how people are to take off. Also, Doc-”
“Yo.”
“We’re going to need a fast, a really fast warning system to give us as much notice as possible when we learn Paula or some of her people are headed this way. Maybe you can figure out something using that aircraft we came in.”
“I think so, Marc.” He looked at Ellen. “Right, Ellen?”
Ellen nodded.
“All right.” I finished the ham and pushed my plate back. “Anyone have any suggestions or comments, before I head out to the lab with Porniarsk?”
“You need some sleep,” said Marie. “You look dead. So does Doc.”
I looked at her. The words were Marie-type words, but there was a difference about her which found an echo in the way she said them. However, I had no time to investigate such things now.
“I slept on the flight coming in,” I said. “Doc probably could use some sleep.”
“I slept last night,” said Doc.
“Whatever,” I said, getting to my feet. “Anyway, I’ll catch up on my sleep later. Porniarsk? Ready to go?”
“Yes,” he said. We went out of the dining room together, leaving the others behind us.
“It’s an unusual situation,” said Porniarsk, once we got to the tank in the lab. “It’s the kind of stoppage as if the extrapolative element of this device—what you’ve been calling the computer-had encountered a logical contradiction, so that further extrapolations from this point would result in increasing error. But attempts on my part to find out what such a contradiction might be have produced no results.”
“Let me look at where it stopped,” I said.
He activated the tank. Once more I stared into the blue-grayness, with the little firefly points of light flickering through the space of it. For a moment, a small crawling fear woke inside me, a fear that in my step aside with Paula I had lost whatever had given me the ability to see patterns in the tank before. But then, slowly, the little points of light began to relate and group themselves into associations.
The pattern took shape. It was a strange and unfamiliar pattern, which was to be expected. But when I tried to go one step further and change my perception from that of small lights in a tank to the actual universe envisioned, as I had done once before, I could not do it. The small crawling fear came back, stronger.