The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Two

For a moment only he stood staring. He felt numb, set apart from reality. Something had happened up on the terrace. He had witnessed it, but there was a barrier, a wall in his mind that blocked him off from remembering exactly what had taken place. In any case, there was no time now to examine it. An urgency implanted long since against just such a moment as this was pushing him hard, urging him along a path toward certain rehearsed actions that had been trained in him against this time when even thought would be impossible. Obeying that urging, he slipped back out of sight among the greenery that surrounded the lake.

Here, in the dimness, he went swiftly around the lake until he came to a small building. He opened its door and stepped into its unlighted interior.

It was a toolshed full of equipment for keeping the grounds in order; anyone unfamiliar with it would have tripped over any of several dozen pieces of such equipment within two steps beyond the door. But Hal Mayne, although he turned on no illumination, moved lightly among them without touching anything, as if his eyes could see in this kind of darkness.

It had been, in fact, one small part of his training - finding his way blindfolded about the interior of this shed. Certainly now, by practice and touch alone, he found a shelf against the wall, turned it on a hidden pivot at its midpoint and opened a shallow, secret compartment between two studs of the building's back wall. Five minutes later, he slipped back outdoors with the compartment reclosed behind him. But now he wore dry clothes, gray slacks and blue half-jacket. He carried a small travel bag, and had tucked into an interior pocket of the half-jacket papers that would authorize him to travel to any of the fourteen inhabited worlds, plus the cards and vouchers that would make available to him enough Earth and interplanetary funds to get him to a number of off-world destinations.

He went now, among the night-dark trees and bushes once more, in the direction of the house. He was deliberately not thinking - he had not thought from the moment he had seen the flag dipped and had responded by hiding in the lake. Thought was trying to come back, but training still held it at bay; and for the moment there was no will or urge in him to break through the wall in his mind.

He was not thinking, only moving - but he moved like a wisp of mist over the night ground. His lessons had begun as soon as he could walk, at the hands of three experts who had literally lived for him and had poured into him everything that they had to teach. From his standpoint, it had all seemed merely natural and normal, that he should come to know what he knew and be able to do what he did. It was without effort, almost unconsciously, that he went through the dark woods so easily and silently, where almost anyone else would have blundered and made noise.

He came at last to the terrace, now deep in shadow - too buried in darkness to show what still lay there, even though light shone from the library windows at its inner edge. His training kept him apart from the shadow, he did not look into it, did not investigate. Instead, he went toward the edge of one of the windows of the house, from which he could look down into the library itself.

The floor of the library was nearly two meters below the level of the terrace; so that, from within, the window he looked through was high in an outer wall. The room itself was both long and high, its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves warmly stuffed with some thousands of antique, printed and bound volumes holding works like those poems of Alfred Noyes which Walter the InTeacher had been fond of reading. In the fireplace at one end a fire had just been lit, to throw the ruddy, comforting light of its flames upon the heavy furniture, the books, and the ceiling. The two men in the room stood talking. They were both so tall that their shoulders were almost on a level with Hal's feet. They stood face to face; and there was a certain tenseness about the two of them, like partners who might at any moment become adversaries.

One was the tall man he had seen earlier on the terrace. The other was a man nearly the same height, but outweighing the slim man by half again as much. Not that the other man was fat. He was merely powerfully built, with the sort of round, thick arms and body that, even in lesser proportion on someone of normal height, would have made him seem formidable. His face was round and cheerful under a cap of curly, jet-black hair, and he smiled merrily. Facing the taller, slimmer man, he appeared coarse-bodied, almost untidy, in the soft material of the slacks and cloth jacket that made up the maroon business suit he wore. In contrast, the taller man - in gray slacks and black half-cape - seemed tailored and remote.

Hal moved close to the edge of the pane to see if he could hear their talk; and the words inside came faintly through the insulated glass to his ear.

"… tomorrow, at the latest," the tall man was saying. "They should all be here, then."

"They better be. I hold you responsible, Bleys." It was the big, black-haired man speaking.

"When didn't you, Dahno?"

Distantly, a point of information clicked in the back of Hal's mind, Dahno, or Danno - it was spelled various ways - was the one usually spoken of as the leader of the loose Mafia-sort of organization by which the Other People were said to be increasing their hold upon the inhabited worlds. The Others tended to be known to their people by first names only - like kings. Bleys… that would be Bleys Ahrens, one of the lesser leaders of the Others.

"Always, Bleys. As now. Your dogs made something of a mess taking over here."

"Your dogs, Dahno."

The thick-bodied giant brushed the answer away.

"The dogs I lent you. It was your job to set up for the Conference here, Mr. Vice-Chairman

"Your dogs aren't trained, Mr. Chairman. They like killing because they think it proves their value in our eyes. That makes them unreliable with void pistols."

Dahno chuckled again. His eyes were hard and bright.

"Are you pushing me, Bleys?"

"Pushing back."

"All right - within limits. But there'll be fifty-three of us here by tomorrow. The bodies don't matter as long as they're cleaned up, out of the way. Then we can forget them."

"The boy won't," said Bleys.

"Boy?"

"The ward these three were raising and tutoring."

Dahno snorted faintly.

"You're worried about a boy?" he said.

"I thought you were the one who talked about neatness, Dahno. The old men died before they could tell us about him."

Dahno brushed the air again - a little impatiently. Hal watched him, standing in darkness outside the swath of light from the window.

"Why would the dogs think to keep them alive?"

"Because I didn't tell them to kill." Bleys' voice did not seem to have been raised, but it came with peculiar clearness to Hal's ears through the glass. Dahno cocked his head to look at the slim man, his face for a moment not cheerful, but merely watching.

"Aside from that," he said, his own voice unchanged, "what could they tell us?"

"More." Bleys' voice was again as it had been earlier. "Didn't you look at the prospectus on holding our Conference here? This place was set up under a trust established from the sale of an unregistered interstellar courier-class ship, which was found drifting near Earth, with the boy in it as a two-year-old child, or younger. No one else was aboard. I don't like mysteries."

"It's all that Exotic blood in you that doesn't like mysteries," Dahno said. "Where would we be if we took the time to try to understand every mystery we came across? Our game is controlling the machinery, not understanding it. Tell me about another way a few thousand of us can hope to run fourteen worlds."

"You could be right," said Bleys. "But still it's a careless attitude."

"Bleys, my buck," said Dahno. His voice changed only as slightly as Ahrens' had a moment before, but his eyes reflected the red light of the fire. "I'm never careless. You know that."

The night breeze freshened off the lake and a sudden small gust sent the branches of a lilac bush lashing against the pane of another of the library windows. Both of the men inside looked toward the sound at once. Hal stepped back noiselessly from the window, deeper into the shadow.

His training was urging him away, now. It was time to go. He half-swung toward the terrace, still not forming clearly in his mind the true picture of what was there, but with the empty feeling that what he was leaving was something to which he would never have a chance to return. But his training had anticipated that feeling also, and overrode it. He turned away from terrace and house alike, and moved off through the surrounding trees at a silent trot.

There were gravel-bed roads in the area for the traffic of air-cushion vehicles, but the way he took avoided them. He ran steadily, easily, through the pine scented night air of the forest, his footsteps silent on the dead conifer needles underfoot and making only little more sound on the patches of bare rock and hard earth. His pace was a steady twelve kilometers an hour, and in a little less than an hour and a half, he reached the small commercial center known as Thirkel. There were a dozen other such centers and two small towns that he could have reached in less distance and time; but an unconscious calculation from his training had led him to choose Thirkel.

Thanks to that calculation, at Thirkel he had only a fourteen minute wait before a regularly scheduled autobus stopped on its way into Bozeman, Montana. He was the only passenger boarding in the soft mountain night. He stepped aboard and displayed one of the credit tabs he now carried to the automatic control unit of the bus. The unit noted the charge for his travel, closed the doors behind him with a soft breath of air, and lifted the vehicle into the air again.

He came into Bozeman shortly after midnight and caught a shuttle to Salt Lake Pad. Then, as the early dawn was pinkening the sky beyond the surrounding mountains, he lifted in an orbital jitney on its run from that Pad to the gray-clad globe that was the Final Encyclopedia, swimming in orbit around Earth at sixteen hundred kilometers from its surface.

The jitney carried no more than fifty or sixty passengers - all of them having passed pre-clearance at the Earth end of the trip. Among Hal's papers had been a continually-renewed scholar's passport for a single visit, under his own name. Earth, the Dorsai, Mara and Kultis were the only four worlds where the Others had not yet gotten control of the internal government. But on Earth, only the records of the Final Encyclopedia could be regarded as secure from prying by the Others; and so all credit and record transactions Hal had made since leaving his home had been achieved with papers or tabs bearing the name of Alan Semple. These he now destroyed, as the jitney lifted, and he was left carrying nothing to connect him with the false name he had temporarily used. The automated records at the Final Encyclopedia would be too well informed for him to hope to use a false name; but, in them, his real name would be safe.

Twelve hundred kilometers out from Earth's surface the jitney began its approach to the Final Encyclopedia. On the screen of his seat compartment Hal saw it first as a silver crescent, expanding as they moved out of Earth's shadow, to a small silver globe of reflected sunlight. But as they came closer, the small globe grew inexorably and the great size of the Encyclopedia began to show itself.

It was not just its size, however, that held Hal fixed in his seat, his attention captured by the screen as the massive sphere on it swelled and swelled. Unlike the other passengers aboard this jitney, he had been trained by Walter to a special respect for what the Encyclopedia promised. He had gazed at it countless times on screens like this one, but never when he himself was about to set foot in it.

The jitney was slowing now, matching velocities as it approached the sphere. Now that they were closer, Hal could see its surface looking as if it were shrouded in thick gray fog. This would be a result of the protective force-panels that interlocked around the Encyclopedia - a derivation of the phase-shift that had opened up faster-than-light communication and transportation between the worlds, four hundred years before. The force-panels were a discovery, and a closely guarded secret, of those on the Encyclopedia. It had been these which had given the structure the silvery appearance from a distance - as the gray mist of dawn close above the water of a lake seems silvered by the early light of day.

Within those panels, the Encyclopedia was invulnerable to any physical attack. Only at points where the panels joined were there soft spots that had to be conventionally armored; and it was to one of these soft spots the jitney was now headed to find a port in which to discharge its passengers.

Hidden within the shield provided by those panels, was the physical shape of the Encyclopedia: a structure of metal and magic - the metal from the veins of Earth and the magic of that same force that made possible the phase drive and the panels - so that there was no way for anyone to tell from observation alone what was material and what was force-panel about the corridors and rooms that made up the Encyclopedia's interior. People within that structure did not move about as much as they were moved. The room they were occupying, on proper command, would become next door to the room to which they wished to go. Yet, also if they wished, there were distances of seemingly solid corridors to traverse and solid doors to open on places within the structure…

Metal and magic… as a boy Hal Mayne had been led to an awe of the Encyclopedia, from as far back as he could remember. For the moment now, that awe reinforced the wall protecting him from what he might otherwise remember from only a few hours before. He remembered how it had been an Earthman, Mark Torre, who had conceived the Encyclopedia. But Mark Torre, and even Earth would never have managed to get it built on its own. A hundred and thirty years had been required to bring it to completion, and all the great wealth that the two rich Exotic Worlds of Mara and Kultis could spare for its construction. Its beginnings had been put together on the ground, just within the Exotic Enclave at the city of St. Louis, in North America. A hundred and two years later, the half-finished structure had been lifted into its first orbital position only two hundred and fifty kilometers above the Earth. Twelve years after that, the last of the work on it had been finished, and it had been placed here, in its final orbit.

Mark Torre's theory had postulated a dark area always existing in Man's knowledge of himself, an area where self-perception had to fail, as the perception of any viewing mechanism fails in the blind area where it, itself, exists. In that area, ran Torre's theory, the human race would at last find something which had been lost in the people of the Splinter Cultures on the younger worlds; and this, once found, would be the key to the race's last and greatest growth.

There was a largeness of dream and purpose about that theory, and the Encyclopedia itself, that had always resonated powerfully within Hal. That resonance touched him now as the jitney reached the point where the corners of four of the huge, insubstantial force-panels came together, and the jointure where their forces met dilated to reveal an aperture into the docking area that awaited them.

The jitney drifted in, very slowly it seemed, and settled into the cradle that waited for it. Abruptly, they were enclosed by a blaze of light. The aperture that had seemed so tiny as they had approached, now revealed itself to have the diameter of a chamber that dwarfed the jitney and was aswarm with human workers and machines.

Hal got to his feet and joined the procession of passengers moving to the exit port of the jitney. He stepped through the port, onto a sloping ramp and into a roar and clangor of sound, as the busy machines moved about the jitney on the metal floor and walls. Metal and magic… he went down the slope of the ramp and through a faintly hazy circle that was an entrance to the interior parts of the Encyclopedia. As he stepped through that circle, all the noise behind him was cut off. He found himself being carried forward by a movable floor, down a corridor walled in soft light, in a muted hush that welcomed him after the noise he had just left, and seemed to soften even the low-voiced conversations of his fellow passengers.

The line slowed, stopped, moved forward a couple of paces, stopped again, moved, stopped. The passengers ahead were displaying their clearance papers to a wall screen from which a thin-faced, black-haired young man looked out at them.

"Fine. Thank you." The young man nodded at the passenger ahead of Hal, and the passenger moved on. As Hal stepped level with the screen, the man moved aside out of camera range and a lively female face under a cloud of bright blonde hair, young enough to be that of a girl rather than of a woman, took the vacated space. Under the bright gold hair, she had a round, laughing expression and brown eyes with flecks of green swimming in their irises.

"I see…" She looked at Hal's papers as he held them up to the screen, then back to him. "You're Hal Mayne? Fine."

It seemed to Hal that her eyes met his with a particular friendliness; and a comfort came to him from seeing her that for a second dangerously weakened the wall that hid things in the back of his mind. Then he moved on.

The corridor continued. The people in front of him were moving more quickly now, single file down it. Ahead, a voice was speaking to them out of nowhere in particular.

"… If you'll please pause at the point where the corridor widens, and listen. Tell us if you hear anything. This is the Transit Point, at the center of the Index Room. You are now at the exact center of the communication system of the Encyclopedia. We do not expect you to hear anything; but if any of you do, will you speak up…"

More magic… they had moved what seemed like only a hundred meters; but now they were at the very center of the sphere that was the Encyclopedia. But neither Walter the InTeacher nor anyone else had ever mentioned to him anything about a Transit Point. He was not yet at the wide stationary spot that had been spoken of, but he found himself listening, as if there might be something he could hear even before he reached it. Vaguely, he felt the request to listen as if it had been a challenge. If there was something to hear there, he should be able to pick it up. He found himself straining to hear.

Almost - he could see the wide, unmoving spot now and he was only two people back from it - he could imagine that he was hearing something. But it was probably only the people who had already passed the Transit Point, discussing it among themselves. There was something familiar about their voices. He could not identify them but there was still a feeling of familiarity, although they seemed to be speaking a language he did not know. He had been trained to break down unfamiliar languages into familiar forms. If it was Indo-European… yes, it seemed to be a Romance tongue of some sort, one of the modern derivatives of Latin.

But their conversations were very loud now, and there seemed to be a number of them all talking at once. There was a single person left in front of him before he would reach the Transit Point. How could they expect anyone to hear anything at the Point if they were talking like this ahead of it - and behind, too, for that matter? The voices were all around him. Everybody in the line must be talking. The man just ahead of him stepped on, clearing the Transit Point. Hal stepped into it, stopped there, and the voices exploded.

Not tens of them, not hundreds or thousands, or even millions - but billions and trillions of voices in countless languages, arguing, shouting, calling to him. Only, they did not merge into one great, voiceless roar, like the radio roar of a universe. They each remained distinct and separate - unbelievably, he heard each one; and among them there were three he knew, calling out to him, warning him. The voice of Walter the InTeacher, of Malachi Nasuno, of Obadiah Testator - and with his identification of those three voices, the mental wall that had been protecting him finally crumbled and went down.

The Transit Point whirled around him. He was conscious, as of something heard from a little distance, of a sound coming from his own throat. He spun, staggered, and would have fallen - but he was caught and held upright. It was the young woman from the screen, the one with the green flecks in her eyes, who was holding him. Somehow she was here, physically, beside him; and she was not as small as he had thought her to be when he had seen her face on the screen. Still, his awkward, long-boned length was not easy to support; and, almost immediately, there were two men with her.

"Easy…hold him…" said one man; and something touched deep inside him, triggering a darkness like the spreading stain of biologic ink pushed out by a fleeing octopus. It flooded all through him, hiding all things in utter darkness, even his memory of what had happened on the terrace.

Gradually he roused once more, to silence and to peace. He was alone, naked, in a bed in a room walled by slowly changing, pastel colors. Besides the bed, and the table-surface beside it, there were a couple of chair floats hanging in the air, a desk, and a small pool with blue sides and floor that made the water in it seem much deeper than he guessed it actually to be. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked about him. The room had a disconcerting property of seeming to expand in the direction in which he was looking, although he was not conscious of any actual movement of its walls or floor. He looked around and then back at the bed in which he lay.

It had never really occurred to him as an important fact - although he had always been aware of it - that he had been raised under conditions that were deliberately spartan and archaic. It had always seemed only natural to him that the books he read should be heavy things of actual paper, that there should be no moving walkways in his home, or that the furniture there should be uniformly of solid, material construction, with physical legs that supported it upon the floor, rather than devices that appeared to float in midair, and to appear out of that same air or dissolve back into it at the touch of a control.

This was the first time he had ever awakened in a force bed. He knew what it was, of course, but he was totally unprepared for the comfort of it. To the eye, he seemed to lie half-immersed in a white cloud perhaps twenty centimeters thick, which floated in the air with its underside an equal distance above the floor of the room. The white cloud-stuff wrapped him in warmth against the cooler air, and that portion of it which was underneath him became firm enough to support him in whatever position he took. Right now the elbow on which he leaned was upheld as if by a warm cupped hand, although to his eye it was merely buried to the depth of half his forearm in the thick mist.

He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed - and with that movement, memory came back completely, like a silent body blow. He saw the terrace and what had happened there in the eye of his mind, as he had watched it all through the screen of lakeside branches. Overcome, he huddled on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands; and for a moment the universe rocked around him and his mind ran screaming from what it now saw.

But there was no longer any wall to hold it back from him, and after a while he came to some sort of terms with it. He lifted his face from his hands again. The color had gone out of the walls of the room. The sensors in them had read the changes in the temperature and humidity of his skin, as well as half a hundred other tiny signals of his body, and accurately reflected his change in emotion. Now the color of the room was a dull, utilitarian gray, as bleak as a chamber carved from rock.

A terrible feeling of rebellion erupted in him, a fury that such a thing as had happened should have been allowed to take place; and riding the energy wave of that fury as the wall glowed into the redness of heated iron around him, his training was triggered again, and pushed him to a further action.

Under the force of his will his consciousness gathered itself, focused on the glint of a single point of light from one corner of a float and closed in on that point until it was the only thing he saw. Through that point, as through a doorway, his mind moved with its Exotic training into a discipline that was partly self-hypnosis, partly a freeing of a direct channel from his awareness into his own unconsciousness. His vision moved back and out, away once more from the point of light, and he saw all the room again. Only now, there seemed to be three figures sitting in the available floats; and they were Walter, Malachi and Obadiah.

The men who had raised and tutored him were not really there, of course. He knew that. Even as he spoke to them now, he knew that it was not actually they who answered, but constructs of them, created by his imagination from his countless memories of the attitudes and reactions he had observed in them during their lives together. It was, in fact, his own knowledge of them that was answering him, with their voices, uttering the words that he knew they would say if they could be here with him now. The technique was a discipline that had been instilled against a moment just like this one, a moment in which he would need their help and they would no longer be around to give it. But in that first second as he looked at them, it was not a cry for help he threw at them, but an accusation.

"You didn't have to!" He was half-sobbing. "You let them kill you and leave me alone; and you didn't have to!"

"Oh, Hal!" Pain was strong in Walter's voice. "We had to protect you."

"I didn't ask you to protect me! I don't want to be protected. I wanted you alive! And you let them shoot you!"

"Boy," said Malachi, gruffly, "you were prepared for this day. We taught you that something like what happened could happen, and what you must do if it did."

Hal did not answer. Now that he had opened the door to his grief it took possession of him utterly. He huddled on the edge of the bed, facing them, weeping.

"I didn't know…" he sobbed.

"Child," said Obadiah, "you've been taught how to handle pain. Don't fight it. Accept it. Pain alters nothing for him who is beyond such things."

"But I'm not beyond it." Hal was rocking in his misery, rhythmically rocking on the edge of the bed, backward and forward.

"Obadiah is right, Hal," said Walter, softly. "You were taught; and you know how to handle this moment."

"You don't care, none of you… you don't understand!" Hal rocked back and forth.

"Of course we understand." Walter's voice sounded the note of the suffering in him, evoked by the suffering in Hal. "We were the only family you had; and now it seems to you you've got no one. You feel as if everything's been taken away. But it's not like that. You still have a family - an enormous family, made up of everyone else in the human race."

Hal shook his head - back and forth, back and forth - as he rocked.

"But you do," said Walter. "Yes, I know. Right now you think there's no one on the fourteen worlds could take the place of those you've lost. But there will be. You'll find all things in people. You'll find those who hate you and those who love you - and those you'll love. I know you can't believe that, now; but it will be."

"And there's more than love," said Malachi, suddenly. "You'll find that out. In the end you may have to do without love to get done what you have to do."

"That will come," said Obadiah, "if God wills. But there's no reason the child should have to face that test, yet. Leave it to the future, Malachi."

"The future is here," growled Malachi. "He won't survive the forces against him by sitting on a bed and crying. Boy, straighten up - " The command was harsh, but the tone in which it was uttered was not. "Try to take hold. You have to plan what to do. The dead are dead. The living owe their concern to the living, even if the living are themselves."

"Hal," said Walter, still gently, but insistently. "Malachi is right. Obadiah is right. By clinging to your grief, now, you only put off the moment when you have to think of more important things."

"No," said Hal, shaking his head. "No."

He shut his mind against them. It was unthinkable that he should let go any of the grief inside him. To do so, even in the smallest way, threw the earth of certainty upon the doubtless unmarked graves of these three he had loved and still loved. But they continued to talk, saying the things he had heard them say so many times, in the ways he remembered them saying such things; and gradually he began, in spite of himself, to listen.

The shock of what had happened had driven him nearly back into being a very young child again, with all the terrible helplessness of the young. But now, as the familiar voices spoke back and forth around him, he began to come back up to the relative maturity of his sixteen years.

"…he must hide somewhere," Walter was saying.

"Where?" said Malachi.

"I'll go to the Exotics," Hal surprised himself by saying. "I could pass for a Maran - couldn't I, Walter?"

"What about that?" Malachi demanded of the InTeacher, "Would your people give him up to the Others?"

"Not willingly," said Walter. "But you're right. If the Others located him there and put pressure on, they couldn't keep him. The Exotics are free of Other control on their own worlds, but their interplanetary connections are vulnerable - and two worlds have to take precedence in importance over one boy."

"He could hide on Harmony or Association," Obadiah said. "The Other People control our cities, but outside those cities there are those who will never work with the Belial-spawn. Such people of mine would not give him up."

"He'd have to live like an outlaw," Walter said. "He's too young to fight yet."

"I can fight!" said Hal. "Others, or anyone else!"

"Be quiet, boy!" growled Malachi. "They'd have you on toast for breakfast without getting up off their chairs. You're right, Walter. The Friendly Worlds aren't safe for him."

"Then, the Dorsai," said Hal. Malachi's gray thickets of eyebrows frowned at him.

"When you're ready and able to fight, then go to the Dorsai," the old man said. "Until that day, there's nothing they can do for you there."

"Where, then?" said Obadiah. "All other worlds but Earth are already under Other control. They'd only have to sniff him there, and he'd be gone with no one to aid him."

"Still," said Walter. "It has to be one of the other worlds. Earth, here, is also no good. They'll be looking for him as soon as they unravel the full story of his life and our teaching. There're Exotic mixed breeds among them, like that tall man who was there at our death; and they, like me - like all of us trained on Mara or Kultis - know ontogenetics. They're a historic force, the Other People, and they'll know that for any such force there must be a counter-force. They'll have been watching for its appearance among the rest of the race, from the beginning. They'll take no chances of leaving Hal alive once they have his full story."

"Newton, then," said Obadiah. "Let him hide among the laboratories and the ivory towers."

"No," said Malachi. "They're all turtles, there, all clams. They pull back into their shell and pull the shell in after them. He'd stick out like a sore thumb among such people."

"What about Ceta?" said Obadiah.

"That's where the Others are thickest - where the banking and the threads of interstellar trade are pulled," said Malachi, irritably. "Are you mad, Obadiah? Anyway, all of these unspecialized worlds, as well as old Venus and Mars, are places where none of the machinery of society is under any control but that of the Others. One slip and it'd be over for our boy."

"Yes," said Walter slowly. "But Obadiah, you said all worlds but the Dorsai, the Exotics, the Friendlies and Earth were already under Others' control. There's one exception. The world they can't be bothered with because there's no real society there for them to want to control. Coby."

"The mining world?" Hal stared at Walter. "But there's nothing there for me to do but work in the mines."

"Yes," said Walter.

Hal continued to stare at the InTeacher.

"But…" words failed him. Mara, Kultis, the Friendly Worlds of Harmony and Association, and the Dorsai were all places to which he had longed to go. Any beyond these, any of the Younger Worlds were unknown, interesting places. But Coby…

"It's like sending me to prison!" he said.

"Walter," Malachi was looking at the InTeacher, "I think you're right."

He swung to face Hal.

"How old are you now, boy? You're due to turn seventeen in a month or so, aren't you?"

"In two weeks," said Hal, his voice thinning at the sudden surge of old memories, of early birthday parties and all the years of his growing up.

"Seventeen - " said Malachi, looking again at Walter and at Obadiah. "Three years in the mines and he'd be almost twenty - "

"Three years!" The cry broke from Hal.

"Yes, three years," said Walter softly. "Among the nameless and lost people there, you can do a better job of becoming nameless and lost, yourself, than you can do on any other world. Three years will bury you completely."

"And he'll come out different," said Obadiah.

"But I don't want to be different!"

"You must be," said Malachi to him. "That is, at least, if you're to survive."

"But, three years!" said Hal again. "That's nearly a fifth of my life so far. It's an eternity."

"Yes," said Walter; and Hal looked at him hopelessly. Walter, the gentlest of his three tutors, was the least likely to be moved once he had come to a decision. "And it's because it'll be an eternity for you, Hal, that it'll be so useful. With all we tried to do for you, we've still raised you off in a corner, away from ordinary people. There was no choice for us, but still you're crippled by that. You're like a hothouse plant that can wither if it's suddenly set out in the weather."

"Hothouse plant?" Hal appealed to Malachi, to Obadiah. "Is that all I am? Malachi, you said I was as good as an average Dorsai my age, in my training. Obadiah, you said - "

"God help you, child," said Obadiah, harshly. "In what you are and in what we tried to make of you, you're a credit to us all. But the ways of the worlds are some of the things you do not know; and it's with those ways that you'll have to live and struggle before God brings you at last to your accomplishment and your rest. Your way cannot be in corners and byways any more - and I should have realized that when I suggested Newton as a place for you to go. You have to go out among your fellow men and women from now on and begin to learn from them."

"They won't want to teach me," said Hal. "Why should they?"

"It's not for them to teach, but for you to learn," said Obadiah.

"Learn!" said Hal. "That's all you ever said to me, all of you - learn this! Learn that! Isn't it time I was doing something more than learning?"

"There is nothing more than learning," said Walter; and in the InTeacher's voice Hal heard the absolute commitment of the three facing him that he should go to Coby. It was not something that he could argue against successfully. He was not being faced with an opinion by three other people, but by the calculation that was part of the pattern trained in him. That calculation had surveyed the options open to him and decided that his most secure future for the upcoming years lay on Coby.

Still, he was crushed by that decision. He was young and the thirteen other inhabited worlds of mankind glittered with promise like tempting jewels. As he had said, going into the mines would be like going to prison, and the three years - to him - would indeed be an eternity.