The government shut up shop and declared the so-called "People-Oriented Bomb" illegal. We were not clear if the now very great number of survivors sequestered around the world were letting themselves be sequestered or couldn’t help it; and were they affecting the rest of us from their safe distance or not? and was it safe? Widespread information on the dynamics between the extant and the vacant areas of survivors’ brains achieved fabulous proportions. It could now be told that many survivors had disappeared during extended debriefing; they had relatives to prove it. More disappeared than reappeared. One day a man called to say he was the kidnapped major whose landmark pacemaker had been vaporized; he had felt so good after the resolution of his three-story outerwear factory and subsequent debriefing and hilarious X-rays that he had tried to double his luck and had got past the guards claiming to be a physician in attendance. So he had been resolved twice over, and this second time he had had exploded out of his overall person that last anxious urge to maintain his body as constant evidence of the past and assurance of the future. Thus, he had found he could suck by means of a quickened circulatory system all of himself into those new gaps of brain vacancy that this charge, so curiously equal in distribution, disguised as regular cells. But he did not take to invisibility and was glad of it only since it had helped him escape his kidnapper-torturers who were prepared to impose old-fashioned nuclear blackmail upon a major city to be named later even though everyone knew the government would not buckle under.
When we spoke of Mara’s love for Jim Ash, we knew it was the truth. Her two loves, really. We remembered the first, who had died of excess charge and died at dawn. Jim, then, had been the second love, but it was the two men together who were the love of Mara’s life. And Jim she had loved too much to attach him to herself. He must remain outside the company of survivors. This was a familiar issue. Had the sexton called forth by his thought about clothes the new added capability of the People-Oriented Bomb, or had the potential in the bomb caused him to think the thought that proved to be prediction? Likewise, Jim had often said he wanted no part of survival and would rather be himself, as long as he had all his faculties and, if it wasn’t asking too much, his limbs and principal appurtenances, and would rather from his limited angle look at these people and the powers which survival gave them — and here the former major was saying Mara had wanted this for Jim, perhaps destined it for him.
In his absence Ash was being discussed. He became the current history he had been unwilling to sum up. Why didn’t he get back in touch? He was dead, if that was possible. He was sequestered. He had been put to sleep, or we had. Wherever he was, information from anonymous sources kept reaching our news bank first. At perhaps the birthplace of wind power where Nile boats translate taut sails into authentic motion, a fugitive archaeologist discovered in the inmost burial chamber of the one pyramid not yet leveled both the formula for the pyramids and the original plans for the Parthenon, which had recently fallen apart in gratuitous sympathy with what was going on. The archaeologist disappeared — twice-resolved, sequestered, or stowed away.
Mara had told Jim that blast preceded flair. The flair, of course, for controlled personal descent but also for concentrating upon the buoyancy-choice locus both between the eyes and between the ears. Yet who had given the outerwear employees the last-minute order to concentrate on this locus? It was an order that became standard in later tests. Jim himself had tried concentrating on this locus. It helped him forget a whole lot of what he didn’t much want to know. But when he had gone hang-gliding off a two-thousand-foot ledge during an energy trip to Vermont, he had felt it was the wings and not some subcerebral buoyancy that held him up. But we knew in our banks that he had never been the same after Mara confided in him that day in Biomorph Valley. The test at the jojoba ranch had left her with a white rim beginning to grow around her head and the knowledge that if she kept changing she might have the dubious chance to go on living indefinitely. The radiance given off of her and the other survivors would be measured, she predicted, but its source, no. What had been cleared away in her left room for motion; but the motion was a growth form of what had done the clearing; and the life she now held in her was wholly in the motion between what had stayed and the new gaps. These were partly in the flesh of her head and her calves and her waters, and were partly the activity freed as if unknown hopes had become space.
Scientists eventually knew pretty well how the "persons" of survivors had worked. Elimination of dead matter in the brain both concentrated energies already present and opened gaps that let that energy jump and grow; the void left where internal body parts had been, set off kinetic potential uniting upper with lower. How this turned the whole or entire person into a multiconvergent window radiating communication and genuine feeling outward was not yet known. But meanwhile there was work to do every morning—"chores," as a prize-winning physicist put it.
One evening a freak storm put us in mind of what Mara had told Jim the day he posed as valley hermit. When two or more survivors, she said, were gathered together, they could breathe their mutual auras in and out to set up flows of rapidly spreading charges that balance out the life of the air and reduce the tension, madness, and violent crime caused like lightning by an imbalance between earth and heaven. As Jim once said, this wonderful person may have meant by "heaven" nothing more than the lower, positively charged edges of cumulonimbus thunderheads, but then again she may have meant what she said. In the middle of the night we all got up to listen to our freak storm and check the terminals and endless tapes of our information bank. Just before dawn we looked at each other and knew that the storm had covered a silence we had not heard and that the bank was gone and with it the storm, and that we had contemplated all this before it had happened. Someone had saved one last P.O.B. device, or the government had; and if it had, it would announce that that was absolutely it, the People-Oriented Bomb had been unilaterally liquidated.
We found we could let go of all that data we had been doing. It had impacted and condensed into such a hard load that perhaps only the government could have resolved it, albeit through local control.
The weather was changing back to its old self. Sixty thousand new homes were built to be electrified by the great single-blade wind rotors of Wyoming. The World War Two one-and-a-quarter megawatt device atop Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont was repaired. Tales of the P.O.B. survivors persisted. Thinkers posited that if the People-Oriented Bomb had in fact generated a thought about itself in the mind of someone about to receive the naked, concrete effect of that logical possibility, the bomb’s new attention to the sexton’s polyester and to a derelict’s hoary, living tweed argued not only that the bomb might always have been under the control of the communal mind but, as the government suggested, might have been a figment of that mind.