He had grown almost accustomed to the clamor of the traffic, the pushing, hurrying throngs on the streets of this, the greatest city of the second world. He was late, he knew. This time it had taken almost an hour to cover half a continent. Possibly Leesa had wearied of waiting for him. She had little patience these days.
Once near the hotel he selected a lean young male body, took over the mind with a casual brusqueness that bordered on the careless. He marched the captive body into the hotel. He had thrust the host-mind far back into a corner of the captive brain. Even in panic, the struggles were weak and far away, a faint fluttering that did not interest him. There were several young women in the lobby, obviously waiting. Near the clock he took a handful of objects from the pocket of the captive body, dropped them clumsily on the floor. He bent and gathered them up — knife, change, lighter.
When he straightened up, a tall girl in gray stood before him. He looked deeply into her eyes and said, in his own tongue, “Hello, Leesa.”
“You’re late, Raul.”
“I’m glad you waited.”
They stood together and talked in low tones.
To the bystanders it appeared that a nervous young man had just arrived to meet his date. They walked out of the hotel together. She said something in the tongue of this city. Through use he had learned a great deal of it, but it was easier to relax the pressure on the host-brain, to allow it to flow up to a point where its language became his. She smiled and repeated, “Now where?”
He turned down a quieter street. He looked up across the street, saw a man and a woman standing together looking out the window of another hotel, looking down the street. “If they’re alone in that room,” he said, “it should be a good place.”
As the gray nothingness closed around him, he made the practiced movement, slanting upward, reaching out ahead. Tendril-tips of prescience brushed another mind, tasted the blade-quick reaction of woman-mind, veered, found the other resistance point, flowed softly in.
He was standing, looking down five stories at the street. A young couple stood on the opposite side, talking excitedly. Leesa stood beside him, and she laughed. “Let them try to explain that to each other,” she said.
He looked at the small room. He pushed the captive mind down to the very thin edge of the breaking point, holding it there by an effort of will that had become almost unconscious. The body was older than the previous one. And he sensed that it was not a healthy body. It carried too much soft white weight. The woman, however, inhabited by Leesa, was beautiful in a clear-lined way.
Leesa sat on the bed. “Now be interesting, Raul.”
“I intend to be. Listen closely. For six months I have had almost all the answers, almost all of our history. Now I have the last pieces. I have gotten some of it from the rooms of learning, some of it through constant questioning of the best minds of world three. And the remainder from the science of this world. A very long time ago, Leesa, a longer time than you can visualize, our world was much like this one.”
“Nonsense!”
“I can prove every part of this. Our race had vast numbers. We found the secrets of travel through space. Our home planet circles a dying red sun very near a star these people call Alpha Centaurai. Twelve thousand years ago the Leaders, realizing that life could only be sustained on our home planet through a constant adjustment to the dwindling moisture and sinking temperature, directed a search for younger planets, planets suitable for migration. Three were found. This planet, also planet one, circling what these people call Delta Canis Minoris near Procyron, ten and a half light-years from here, and planet three, in the system of Beta Aquilae near Altair, sixteen light-years from this place, were found to be suitable.”
“I hear the words you say, and I can find no meaning in them.”
“Leesa, please listen. Twelve thousand years ago, our world was dying. The Leaders found three planets to which our people could migrate. The first world of the dreams, called Marith. This second world, Earth. The third world, Ormazd. For two thousand years the Great Migrations were the task of all our race. Ships were built which could cover the vast distances in a remarkably short time. Our race was ferried across space to the three inhabitable planets.”
“But, Raul—”
“Be still until I finish. The Leaders were wise. They knew that there were three raw savage planets to be colonized, and in the colonization there would be a divergence of culture trends. They were afraid that our people, diverging in three separate directions, would become enemies. They had a choice. Either set up the colonization in such a way that there would be frequent contact between worlds, or else isolate the three colonies until such time as they had advanced to the point where contact could be reestablished without fear of conflict between them. This latter choice was selected because it was felt that by encouraging divergence, each planet would have something new to contribute to the race as a whole once contact was reestablished. In order to implement the second choice — in order to prevent premature contact between the colonial planets — the Watchers were established.
“We, Leesa, are remote descendants of the original Watchers. All the migration ships were destroyed except the six I showed you from the window. The place Jord Orlan calls our ‘world’ is merely a vast structure built over ten thousand years ago, when the Leaders used all the science at the disposal of our race to make it as completely automatic, as immune to time as possible. The original Watchers, five thousand in number, were selected from all the numbers of our race. They were the ones with the greatest emotional stability, the most freedom from hereditary disorders, the highest potentials of intelligence. Those original Watchers were indoctrinated with the importance of their duties, their debt to the future of the race. They were given the great building on a dying world, and six ships with which to make periodic patrols to the colonial worlds.”
“But the ships are not—”
“Listen carefully. It was planned that there would be no contact between colonial worlds for five thousand years. Yet ten thousand have passed, and still it is the Law that we must prevent those ‘dream’ worlds from creating devices to enable them to leave their planets. Here is what happened. The structure Orlan calls our ‘world’ was too comfortable. Patrols were made for almost three thousand years. But those who made the patrols detested being taken out of the warmth and leisure of the structure. It had been built too well. The Watchers had not yet lost the science of the race. It took a thousand years to find a way to eliminate the physical patrols and still discharge the responsibilities given them. At last the Watchers, experimenting with the phenomenon of hypnotic control, with thought transference, with the mystery of the communication of human minds on the level of pure thought — a thing regarded as a superstition on Earth, yet practiced to the extent of near-atrophy of speech on Ormazd — devised a method of mechanically amplifying this latent ability in the human mind. The things we call dream machines are nothing more than devices which hook the massive power sources of our contrived world to the projection of thought, with three control settings so that the narrow, instantaneous beam is directed at whichever colonial world is chosen by the ‘dreamer.’ When we ‘dream’ we are but conducting a mental patrol of the actual colonial planets.”
“That is absurd! You are mad!”
“For many, many years the dreams were sober, serious affairs, conducted as they were meant to be conducted. The ships sat idle. The outside world grew colder. No one left the building. The science was lost. The Watchers failed in their purpose. The genetic selection of the original Watchers was varied enough to prevent the inbreeding and resultant stagnation for five thousand years. But when the science behind the dream machines was lost, the machines themselves acquired a primitive religious significance. We have become a little colony, less than one fifth of the original number. We are blind to the true purpose of our existence. We have gone on for double the length of time originally intended. We are a curse and an affliction to the three colonial planets, merely because we believe that they do not exist, that they are something for our pleasure.”