For the first time since he had emerged from the tunnel, he tried to
think collectedly, with more than the surface of his mind.
He found that the depths of his mind were strangely altered. His
subconscious was no longer an opaque and impenetrable screen. He could
see through it, as through a shadowy corridor, sink into it, hear the
thoughts on the other side, the thoughts of the other Thorns.
One of them, he realized, was instructing him, laying a duty upon him.
The message dealt with such matters as to make the imagination shiver.
It seemed to engulf his personality, his consciousness.
His last glimpse of World III was a gray one of dark, snow-streaked
pines wavering in a rocky frame. Then that had clouded over, vanished,
and he was in a limitless blackness where none of the senses worked and
where only thought--itself become a sense--had power.
It was an utterly alien darkness without real up or down, or this way
or that, or any normal spatial properties. It seemed that every point
was adjacent to every other point, and so infinity was everywhere,
and all paths led everywhere, and only thought could impose order or
differentiate. And the darkness was not that of lightlessness, but of
thought itself--fluttering with ghostly visions, aflash with insight.
And then, without surprise or any consciousness of alteration, he
realized that he was no longer one Thorn, but three. A Thorn who had
lived three lives--and whether memory pictured them as having been
lived simultaneously or in sequence seemed to matter not at all. A
Thorn who had learned patience and endurance and self-sufficiency from
harsh World III, who had had ground into the bedrock of his mind the
knowledge that man is an animal in competition with other animals, that
all human aspirations are but small and vaunting and doomed things--but
not necessarily worthless therefore--in a blind and unfeeling cosmos,
and that even death and the extinguishing of all racial hopes are ills
that can be smiled at while you struggle against them. A Thorn who had
seen and experienced in World II the worst of man's cruelty to man,
who had gained a terrible familiarity with human nature's weaknesses,
its cowardly submissiveness to social pressure, its capacity for
self-delusion, its selfishness, its horrible adaptability, who had
plumbed to their seething, poisoning depths the emotions of hate and
resentment and envy and fear, but who in part had risen superior to all
this and learned humility, and sympathy, and sacrifice, and devotion to
a cause. A Thorn who, in too-easy World I, had learned how to use the
dangerous gift of freedom, how to fight human nature's tendency to go
evil and foul itself when it is not being disciplined by hardship and
adversity, how to endure happiness and success without souring, how to
create goals and purposes in an environment that does not supply them
ready-made.
All these experiences were now those of one mind. They did not
contradict or clash with each other. Between them there was no friction
or envy or guilt. Each contributed a fund of understanding, carrying
equal weight in the making of future decisions. And yet there was no
sense of three minds bargaining together or talking together or even
thinking together. There was only one Thorn, who, except for that
period of childhood before the split took place, had lived three lives.
* * * * *
This composite Thorn, sustained by the talisman, poised in the
dimensionless dark beyond space and time, felt that his personality had
suddenly been immeasurably enriched and deepened, that heretofore he
had been going around two-thirds blind and only now begun to appreciate
the many-sidedness of life and the real significance of all that he had
experienced.
And without hesitation or inward argument, without any sense of
responding to the urgings of Thorn II, since there was no longer a
separate Thorn II, he remembered what the death-resisting Oktav had
whispered to him in the Blue Lorraine, syllable by agonized syllable,
and he recalled the duty laid upon him by the seer.
He thought of the first step--the finding of the Probability
Engine--and felt the answering surge of the talisman, and submitted to
its guidance.
There was a dizzying sense of almost instantaneous passage over an
infinite distance--and also a sense that there had been no movement at
all, but only a becoming aware of something right at hand. And then--
The darkness pulsed and throbbed with power, a power that it seemed
must rack to pieces many-branched time and shake down the worlds like
rotten fruit. The thought-choked void quivered with a terrifying
creativity, as if this were the growing-point of all reality.
Thorn became aware of seven minds crowded around the source of the
pulsations and throbbing and quivering. Homely human minds like his
own, but lacking even his own mind's tripled insight, narrower and more
paternalistic than even the minds of World II's Servants of the People.
Minds festooned with error, barnacled with bias, swollen with delusions
of godhead. Minds altogether horrible in their power, and in their
ignorance--which their power protected.
Then he became aware of vast pictures flaring up in the void in swift
succession--visions shared by the seven minds and absorbing them to
such a degree that they were unconscious of his presence.
Like river-borne wreckage after an eon-long jam has broken, the torrent
of visions flowed past.
World II loomed up. First the drab Servants Hall, where eleven old men
nodded in dour satisfaction as they assured themselves, by report and
transtime televisor, that the invasion was proceeding on schedule.
Then the picture broadened, to show great streams of subtronically
mechanized soldiers and weapons moving in toward the transtime
bridgehead of the Opal Cross. Individual faces flashed by--wry-lipped,
uninterested, obedient, afraid.
For a moment World I was glimpsed--the interior of the Opal Cross shown
in section like an ant-hill, aswarm with black uniforms. Quickly, as
if the seven masters hated to look at their pet world so misused, this
gave way to a panoramic vision of World III, in which hundreds of miles
were swept over without showing anything but fallen or fire-tortured
skylons, seared and scrub-grown wasteland, and--cheek by jowl--glacier
walls and smoke-belching volcanoes.
But that was only the beginning. Fruits of earlier time-splits were
shown. There was a world in which telepathic mutants fought with
jealous nontelepaths, who had found a way of screening their thoughts.
There was a world in which a scarlet-robed hierarchy administered a
science-powered religion that held millions in Dawn Age servitude.
A world in which a tiny clique of hypnotic telepaths broadcast
thoughts which all men believed in and lived by, doubtfully, as if in
a half-dream. A world where civilization, still atomic-powered, was
split into tiny feudalistic domains, forever at war, and the memory
of law and brotherhood and research kept alive only in a few poor
and unarmored monasteries. A world similarly powered and even more
divided, in which each family or friends-group was an economically
self-sustaining microcosm, and civilization consisted only of the
social intercourse and knowledge-exchange of these microcosms. A world
where men lived in idle parasitism on the labor of submen they had
artificially created--and another world in which the relationship was
reversed and the submen lived on men.
A world where two great nations, absorbing all the rest, carried on an
endless bitter war, unable to defeat or be defeated, forever spurred
to new efforts by the fear that past sacrifices might have been in
vain. A world that was absorbed in the conquest of space, and where
the discontented turned their eyes upward toward the new frontier. A
world in which a great new religion gripped men's thoughts, and strange
ceremonies were performed on hilltops and in spacecraft and converts
laughed at hate and misery and fear, and unbelievers wonderingly shook
their heads. A world in which there were no cities and little obvious
machinery, and simply clad men led unostentatious lives. A sparsely
populated world of small cities, whose inhabitants had the grave
smiling look of those who make a new start. A world that was only a
second asteroid belt--a scattering of exploded rocky fragments ringing
the sun.
* * * * *
"We've seen enough!"
Thorn sensed the trapped horror and the torturing sense of unadmitted
guilt in Prim's thought.
The visions flickered out, giving way to the blackness of unactualized
thought. On this blackness Prim's next thought showed fiercely,
grimly, monstrously. It was obvious that the interval had restored his
power-bolstered egotism.
"Our mistake is evident but capable of correction. Our thoughts--or
the thoughts of _some_ of us--did not make it sufficiently clear
to the Probability Engine that absolute destruction rather than a mere
veiling or blacking out, was intended, with regard to the botched
worlds. There is no question as to our next step. Sekond?"
"Destroy! All of them, except the main trunk," instantly pulsed the
answering thought.
"Ters?"
"Destroy!"
"Kart?"
"The invading world first. But all the others too. Swiftly!"
"Kant?"
"It might be well first to.... No! Destroy!"
With a fresh surge of horror and revulsion, Thorn realized that these
minds were absolutely incapable of the slightest approach to unbiased
reasoning. They were so fanatically convinced of the correctness of all
their past decisions as to the undesirability of the alternate worlds,
that they were even completely blind to the apparent success of some
of those worlds--or to the fact that the destruction of a lifeless
asteroid belt was a meaningless gesture. They could only see the other
worlds as horrible deviations from the cherished main trunk. Their
reactions were as unweighed and hysterical as those of a murderer, who
taking a last look around after an hour spent in obliterating possible
clues, sees his victim feebly stir.
Thorn gathered his will power for what he knew he must do.
"Sikst?"
"Yes, destroy!"
"Septem?"
"Destroy!"
"Okt--"
But even as Prim remembered that there no longer was an Oktav and
joined with the others in thinking destruction, even as the darkness
began to rack and heave with a new violence, Thorn sent out the call.
"Whoever you may be, wherever you may be, Oh you who created it, here
is the Divider of Time, here is the Probability Engine!"
His thought deafened him, like a great shout. He had not realized the
degree to which the others had been thinking in the equivalent of muted
whispers.
Instantly Prim and the rest were around him, choking his thoughts,
strangling his mind, thinking his destruction along with that of the
worlds.
The throbbing of the darkness became that of a great storm, in which
even the Probability Engine seemed on the verge of breaking from
its moorings. Like a many-branched lightning-flash, came a vision
of time-streams lashed and shaken--Worlds I and II torn apart--the
invasion bridge snapped--
But through it Thorn kept sending the call. And he seemed to feel the
eight talismans and the central engine take it up and echo it.
His mind began to suffocate. His consciousness to darken.
All reality seemed to tremble on the edge between being and not-being.
Then without warning, the storm was over and there was only a great
quiet and a great silence present, that might have come from the end
of eternity and might have been here always.
Awe froze their thoughts. They were like boys scuffling in a cathedral
who look up and see the priest.
What they faced gave no sign of its identity. But they knew.
Then it began to think. Great broad thoughts of which they could only
comprehend an edge or corner. But what they did comprehend was simple
and clear.