"No," he said suddenly. "I'll not take the key. And you know my reasoning."
"What, you surrender to Waden's bending but not to mine?"
"I have wandered between both. My eyes are open." "Pursue your liberty."
She mocked him now. "Waden has erred about you," he said. "Go to the Residency. Exert your influence there."
"At your suggestion? Or at Waden's either?" She lowered her lids like a curtain and looked up again smiling. "I am the only free individual in Kierkegaard. Go or stay. I am immovable from my Self. I'm the ethicist, and I am continually creating the ethic in my personal reality, which I am doing at this moment. Consider all my advice to you in that light."
He thought it humor for a moment. Then he knew otherwise. He rose, stared down at her in outrage and distress. She continued to smile. "There is a reason," he said, recovering his mental balance, "that you tell me this."
"I refuse comment, perhaps . . . but I don't give reasons. Part of my creativity lies in letting others shape themselves around their own guesswork. You are—what? Omnipotent? Waden's servant? Mine?"
For a second moment she had thrown him totally off his balance, and then he smiled and nodded. Let Keye think as she would. "Good evening," he said. "I prefer a little quietude this evening, and I think we're approaching one of our cooler periods. When you've resolved your personal dilemmas, or when you find it convenient . . . I'll hear you, but I'm tired this evening, Keye, indeed I am. First Waden, and then Waden again tomorrow. So if this is your humor, do without me."
"You exude destruction. Perhaps I want you clear of me."
"Power never comes from retreat, Keye."
She stared at him, wise and amused as Keye could look, perhaps agreeing, perhaps refuting him by her very silence. He sighed, denied all but a good dinner, and walked out the familiar door, down the clean pebblestone hall, the same as every other hall in Kierkegaard, and down the stairs which was like every other stairs, all a blank slate which waited this generation, and his talent, and students of his teaching.
I shall be here, he thought, after them all. It's my nature to take in inspiration, and upon that thought, he suffered such a narrowing of the heart, such an apprehension that he stopped in his tracks there in the stairwell and leaned against the pebbled wall, thinking a moment and cold with fright. An art which was necessarily dependent on inspiration arriving from external forces was—perhaps enslaved to those forces; and if it was, then he was. Keye could be right. It shook the assumption of a lifetime and demanded thinking.
He wandered out then, through the foyer and onto the street where the white electric glare lit small black figures against the white stone and the cranes wheezed and lifted their burdens like grotesque giants. He saw yet another course of stone going into place as a view which had been open in Kierkegaard all the years of his residence here became forever obstructed, imprisoned, cut off.
He built a snare for the eye; he did things until now un-thought of; he discovered unconsidered and unfelt dimensions to his own work which verged on the chaotic.
An irrational force, a madness, a dark and Dionysian force. That was his work, which begun, acquired its own momentum, which seized minds and impressed them with its own Reality.
Kierkegaard changed. It was begun. Keye and Waden had no power against it.
He laughed as he had laughed the sunny day he stood on that bronze circle marking the center of Kierkegaard and spun; but no one would ever stand there again, no foot in all of time to come would likely tread that spot, no one ever have that vantage which had inspired the work. Even if ten thousand years made a crumbled heap of all man had done on the site of Kierkegaard, a hill would stand there, of crumbled marble, of ruin, and memories. A city would have stood there, the heart of which was forever sucked in and warped and changed by his mind. The world would not be the same, since that heap of stone began to stand there, and never could be what it would have been had there been no Herrin Law.
But Waden Jenks had permitted the work, urged it.
The perplexities overcame him. He had interrupted the workers with his laughter, and now with his silence. They stood there, surely wondering who was there in the shadows. But then they began work again, no one investigating. There were madmen in Kierkegaard, the invisibles, who sometimes with sound or action intruded on the Reality of the city— who screamed, sometimes, or laughed, as if they made some attempt to be seen by the sane. Herrin drew breath, and walked quietly away from Keye's apartment building, and through the peripheries of the work.
"Sir," apprentices murmured, recognizing him now, and offering him respect. He walked on, paying no attention to them, casting instead a critical eye to the stone which gleamed white in the darkness, sheened with the artifical lamps. No flaws were evident.
"Sir," said Leona Pace, who came to intercept him. "I thought you'd gone."
"Going," he said equably, and walked on.
He refused to be disturbed. The physical fact of the sculpture reassured him that all Keye's hopes to manipulate him and all Waden's confidence that he did so . . . were the necessary illusions of Keye Lynn and Waden Jenks. This, this stone, was real. He was not deluded into believing the substance was real; he discounted that. The shaping far more than the substance of the stone . . . that was the reality. And the shaping was his.
He walked . . . up the long extent of Main, through the narrow archway in the firebush hedge, onto Port Street, intending to go to the studio in the University, to apply his restlessness to his labors . . . but the Residency was before him and he stopped, stared up at the bleak pebblestone facade which was identical to that of the University, or a warehouse, or anything else.
This too, I shall change, he thought, conceiving further ambitions, wondering which was the more important, to involve himself immediately in the Residency alterations or to intervene in the proposed new hemisphere programs.
MAN, said the plaque inset above the Residency entry, IS THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS.
And he smiled, knowing how that was set forth to the masses of Freedom, and what the real truth was, for in University they taught another maxim: The strongest survives, the weaker serve, the weakest perish.
Who am I? the masses in the provincial schools were taught to ask.
The masses went on asking, diverted by the question and never really wanting the answer if they had known it. The sign was for them. They took pride in it. They saw the world in their own measure.
The Students at University learned a second question. What is reality? They doubted all previous questions.
And a very few attained to the Last Statement.
I.
He smiled somewhat cruelly at the sign, which to the masses promised control of their destinies.
Perhaps the mad, he thought, have seen their conditions. Inferiority was a bitter mouthful. The mad in Kierkegaard were one step ahead of the sane and subservient . . . because most of those out there limited their thoughts—lest they see what the mad had seen, that they were not in control of anything.
Must not think further—or go mad, lacking power, which, after all, makes life worth living.
And is there one, he wondered (the inevitable question), only one man, after all, for whom the whole species exists? But humanity had no existence, of course, save in the mind of the one man who warped all that was about himself.