If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not--
_Macbeth_
Like a mote in the grip of an intangible whirlwind, Clawly whipped
through the gray dawn on a steady surge of subtronic power toward the
upper levels of the Blue Lorraine. The brighter stars, and Mars, were
winking out. Through the visor of his flying togs the rushing air sent
a chill to which his blood could not quite respond. He should be home,
recuperating from defeat, planning new lines of attack. He should be
letting fatigue poisons drain normally from his plasma, instead of
knocking them out with stimulol. He should be giving his thoughts a
chance to unwind. Or he should have given way to lurking apprehensions
and be making a frantic search for Thorn. But the itch of a larger
worry was upon him, and until he had done a certain thing, he could not
pursue personal interests, or rest.
With Thorn gone, his rebuff in the Sky Room loomed as a black and
paralyzingly insurmountable obstacle that grew momently higher. They
were lucky, he told himself, not to have had their present research
funds curtailed--let alone having them increased, or being given a
large staff of assistants, or being granted access to the closely
guarded files of confidential information on cryptic amnesiacs and
other citizens. Any earlier culture would probably have forbidden their
research entirely, as a menace to the mental stability of the public.
Only an almost fetishlike reverence for individual liberty and the
inviolability of personal pursuits, had saved them.
The Committee's adverse decision had even shaken his own beliefs. He
felt himself a puny little man, beset by uncertainties and doubts,
quite incompetent to protect the world from dangers as shadowy, vast,
and inscrutable as the gloom-drenched woodlands a mile below.
Why the devil had Thorn left the meeting like that, of necessity
creating a bad impression? Surely he couldn't have given way to any
luring hypnotic impulse--he of all men ought to know the danger of
that. Still, there had been that unpleasant suggestion of sleepwalking
in his departure--an impression that Clawly's memory kept magnifying.
And Thorn was a strange fellow. After all these years, Clawly still
found him unpredictable. Thorn had a spiritual recklessness, an urge
to plumb all mental deeps. And God knows there were deeps enough
for plumbing these days, if one were foolish. Clawly felt them in
himself--the faint touch of a darker, less pleasant version of his own
personality, against which he must keep constantly on guard.
If he had let something happen to Thorn--!
A variation in the terrestrial magnetic field, not responded to soon
enough, sent him spinning sideways a dozen yards, forced his attention
back on his trip.
He wondered if he had managed to slip away as unobtrusively as he had
thought. A few of the committee members had wanted to talk. Firemoor,
who had voted against the others and supported Clawly's views rather
too excitedly, had been particularly insistent. But he had managed
to put them off. Still, what if he were followed? Surely Conjerly's
reference to "fortunetellers" had been mere chance, although it had
given him a nasty turn. But if Conjerly and Tempelmar should find out
where he was going now--What a handle that would give them against him!
It would be wiser to drop the whole business, at least for a time.
No use. The vice of the thing--if vice it be--was in his blood. The
Blue Lorraine drew him as a magnet flicks up a grain of iron.
* * * * *
A host of images fought for possession of his tired mind, as he
plunged through thin streamers of paling cloud. Green dots on the World
Map. The greens and blues of the Yggdrasil--and in what nightmare
worlds had Hoderson found his inspiration? The blue-tinted sketches one
of Thorn's dreamers had made of the world of his nightmares. A sallow
image of Thorn's face altered and drawn by pain, such an image as might
float into the mind of one who watches too long by a sickbed. The looks
on the faces of Conjerly and Tempelmar--that fleeting impression of a
hostile strangeness. The hint of a dark alien presence in the depths of
his own mind.
The Blue Lorraine grew gigantic, loomed as a vast, shadow-girt cliff,
its topmost pinnacles white with frost although the night below had
been summery. There were already signs of a new day beginning. Here
and there freighters clung like beetles to the wall, discharging or
receiving cargo through unseen ports. Some distance below a stream of
foodstuffs for the great dining halls, partly packaged, partly not,
was coming in on a subtronic current. Off to one side an attendant
shepherded a small swarm of arriving schoolchildren, although it was
too early yet for the big crowds.
Clawly swooped to a landing stage, hovered for a moment like a bird,
then dropped. In the ante-room he and another early arriver helped each
other remove and check their flying togs.
He was breathing hard, there was a deafness and a ringing in his ears,
he rubbed his chilled fingers. He should not have made such a steep
and swift ascent. It would have been easier to land at a lower stage
and come up by levitator. But this way was more satisfying to his
impatience. And there was less chance of someone following him unseen.
A levitating current wafted him down a quarter mile of mainstem
corridor to the district of the psychologists. From there he walked.
He looked around uneasily. Only now did real doubt hit him. What
if Conjerly were right? What if he were merely dragging up ancient
superstitions, foisting them on a group of overspecialized experts,
Thorn included? What if the world-threat he had tried to sell to
the World Executive Committee were just so much morbid nonsense,
elaborately bastioned by a vast array of misinterpreted evidence? What
if the darker, crueler, deviltry-loving side of his mind were more in
control than he realized? He felt uncomfortably like a charlatan, a
mountebank trying to pipe the whole world down a sinister side street,
a chaos-loving jester seeking to perpetrate a vast and unpleasant hoax.
It was all such a crazy business, with origins far more dubious than he
had dared reveal even to Thorn, from whom he had no other secrets. Best
back down now, at least quit stirring up any more dark currents.
But the other urge was irresistible. There were things he had to know,
no matter the way of knowing.
Stealing himself, he paraphrased Conjerly. "If the evidence seems
to point that way, if the safety of mankind seems to demand it,
then I _will_ throw materialism overboard and ask the advice of
fortunetellers!"
He stopped. A door faced him. Abruptly it was a doorway. He went in,
approached the desk and the motionless, black-robed figure behind it.
* * * * *
As always, there was in Oktav's face that overpowering suggestion of
age--age far greater than could be accounted for by filmy white hair,
sunken cheeks, skin tight-drawn and wrinkle-etched. Unwilled, Clawly's
thoughts turned toward the Dawn Civilization with its knights in armor
and aircraft winged like birds, its whispered tales of elixirs of
eternal life--and toward that oddly long-lived superstition, rumor,
hallucination, that men clad in the antique garments of the Late Middle
Dawn Civilization occasionally appeared on Earth for brief periods at
remote places.
Oktav's garb, at any rate, was just an ordinary houserobe. But in their
wrinkle-meshed orbits, his eyes seemed to burn with the hopes and fears
and sorrows of centuries. They took no note of Clawly as he edged into
a chair.
"I see suspense and controversy," intoned the seer abruptly. "All night
it has surged around you. It regards that matter whereof we spoke at
the Yggdrasil. I see others doubting and you seeking to persuade them.
I see two in particular in grim opposition to you, but I cannot see
their minds or motives. I see you in the end losing your grip, partly
because of a friend's seeming desertion, and going down in defeat."
Of course, thought Clawly, he could learn all this by fairly simple
spying. Still, it impressed him, as it always had since he first
chanced--But was it wholly chance?--to contact Oktav in the guise of an
ordinary psychologist.
Not looking at the seer, with a shyness he showed toward no one else,
Clawly asked, "What about the world's future? Do you see anything more
there?"
There was a faint drumming in the seer's voice. "Only thickening
dreams, more alien spirits stalking the world in human mask, doom
overhanging, great claws readying to pounce--but whence or when I
cannot tell, only that your recent effort to convince others of the
danger has brought the danger closer."
Clawly shivered. Then he sat straighter. He was no longer shy.
Docketing the question about Thorn that was pushing at his lips, he
said, "Look, Oktav, I've got to know more. It's obvious that you're
hiding things from me. If I map the best course I can from the hints
you give me, and then you tell me that it is the wrong course, you
tie my hands. For the good of mankind, you've got to describe the
overhanging danger more definitely."
"And bring down upon us forces that will destroy us both?" The seer's
eyes stabbed at him. "There are worlds within worlds, wheels within
wheels. Already I have told you too much for our safety. Moreover,
there are things I honestly do not know, things hidden even from the
Great Experimenters--and my guesses might be worse than yours."
Taut with a sense of feverish unreality, Clawly's mind wandered.
What was Oktav--what lay behind that ancient mask? Were all faces
only masks? What lay behind Conjerly's and Tempelmar's? Thorn's?
His own? Could your own mind be a mask, too, hiding things from
your own consciousness? What was the world--this brief masquerade
of inexplicable events, flaring up from the future to be instantly
extinguished in the past?
"But then what am I to do, Oktav?" he heard his tired voice ask.
The seer replied, "I have told you before. Prepare your world for any
eventuality. Arm it. Mobilize it. Do not let it wait supine for the
hunter."
"But how can I, Oktav? My request for a mere program of investigation
was balked. How can I ask the world to arm--for no reason?"
The seer paused. When he finally answered there drummed in his voice,
stronger than ever, the bitter wisdom of centuries.
"Then you must give it a reason. Always governments have provided
appropriate motives for action, when the real motives would be
unpalatable to the many, or beyond their belief. You must extemporize
a danger that fits the trend of their short-range thinking. Now let me
see--Mars--"
There was a slight sound. The seer wheeled around with a serpentine
rapidity, one skinny hand plunged in the breast of his robe. It fumbled
wildly, agitating the black, weightless fabric, then came out empty. A
look of extreme consternation contorted his features.
Clawly's eyes shifted with his to the inner doorway.
The figure stayed there peering at Oktav for only a moment. Then, with
an impatient, peremptory flirt of its head, it turned and moved out of
sight. But it was indelibly etched, down to the very last detail, on
Clawly's panic-shaken vision.
Most immediately frightening was the impression of age--age greater
than Oktav's, although, or perhaps because, the man's physical
appearance was that of thirty-odd, with dark hair, low forehead,
vigorous jaw. But in the eyes, in the general expression--centuries of
knowledge. Yet knowledge without wisdom, or with only a narrow-minded,
puritanic, unsympathetic, overweening simulacrum of wisdom. A
disturbing blend of unconscious ignorance and consciousness of power.
The animal man turned god, without transfiguration.
But the most lingering impression, oddly repellent, was of its
clothing. Crampingly unwieldly upper and nether garments of
tight-woven, compressed, tortured animal-hair, fastened by bits of
bone or horn. The upper garment had an underduplicate of some sort of
bleached vegetable fiber, confined at the throat by two devices--one a
tightly knotted scarf of crudely woven and colored insect spinnings,
the other a high and unyielding white neckband, either of the same
fiber as the shirt, glazed and stiffened, or some primitive plastic.
It gave Clawly an added, anti-climactic start to realize that the
clothing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which he had
seen pictured in history albums, would have just this appearance, if
actually prepared according to the ancient processes and worn by a
human being.
Without explanation, Oktav rose and moved toward the inner doorway. His
hand fumbled again in his robe, but it was merely an idle repetition
of the earlier gesture. In the last glimpse he had of his face, Clawly
saw continued consternation, frantic memory-searching, and the frozen
intentness of a competent mind scanning every possible avenue of escape
from a deadly trap.
Oktav went through the doorway.
There was no sound.
Clawly waited.
Time spun on. Clawly shifted his position, caught himself, coughed,
waited, coughed again, got up, moved toward the inner doorway, came
back and sat down.
There was time, too much time. Time to think again and again of that
odd superstition about fleeting appearances of men in Dawn-Civilization
garb. Time to make a thousand nightmarish deductions from the age in
Oktav's, and that other's, eyes.
Finally he got up and walked to the inner doorway.
There was a tiny unfurnished room, without windows or another door, the
typical secondary compartment of offices like this. Its walls were bare
and seamless.
There was no one.