The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Sixty-seven

As they slid through the pressure airseal of the entrance, Hal was already back up on his feet and putting on one of the vacuum suits. It turned out to be the one provided for Simon and therefore too small for Hal. He took it off and put on the other suit instead. Once donned, it was hardly noticeable, like transparent coveralls of thin material, except for the heavy, dark power belt around the waist. He left the rigid, but equally transparent, bell of the helmet thrown back.

"There it is," said Simon as Hal came back to the front of the craft.

Hal looked in the front screen and saw what looked like a bright, opaque, circular hole in the grayness, perhaps ten meters in diameter. A thick, dark line cut a chord across its bottom curve - the end of the floor provided.

"Nicely illuminated," he said. In fact, the innumerable moisture droplets of the mist filling the tunnel opening seemed to cause its interior to glow as they individually reflected the lighting built into the upper and lower surfaces of the panel that was the floor.

"My directions from Jeamus were to park a good fifty meters off," said Simon. "I can run out a landing ramp for you right up to within half a meter of the iris opening - or would you rather use your power belt and jump?"

"I'll jump," said Hal. "If Jeamus wants you fifty meters off, poking a ramp in close to it might not be the brightest idea."

"There's no problem about my holding the craft steady," said Simon.

"I know you can do it," said Hal. "Still, let's play the odds. If I jump, I'll only have to be thinking about myself."

Simon parked. Hal closed his helmet and went out through the double doors of the vehicle, now on airlock cycle, and stepped toward the entrance to the iris, correcting his course as he approached with small bursts from the power belt.

At the doorway itself there was a little tension to be felt, like that of breaking through an invisible, and thin but tough membrane, as he penetrated the pressure airseal and let himself down, feet first on the mist-hidden floor. In fact, it was easy to imagine that he could feel the coolness of the white fog around him, even through the impermeable fabric of the vacuum suit. The suspended water droplets hid not only the walls of the tunnel and the floor beneath his feet, but floated about him in clouds of varying thickness.

He threw back his helmet and breathed in the moisture-laden atmosphere. It felt heavy as water itself in his lungs; and he knew that the feeling was not simply imagination, as the super-saturation under these abnormal conditions would be well above what Earth surface-pressure air could normally be induced to carry in the way of moisture.

He went forward.

After a hundred or so steps, he caught sight of a bobbing darkness through the mist ahead, which swiftly became the shape of a tall man, also suited, also with helmet thrown back, coming toward him.

Three more steps brought them face to face and they stopped. Through the transparency of Bleys' vacuum suit, he could see the other man was wearing his customary narrow trousers and jacket - but still, there seemed to be a difference about him.

For a moment the difference eluded Hal, and then he identified it. The tall man was as slim as ever, but in the vacuum suit he gave the appearance of being bulkier and more physical. His shoulders had always been as wide as Hal's but now they seemed heavier. His face was unchanged; but his body seemed more heavy-boned and powerful.

It was only a subjective alteration in appearance, but oddly important, here and now. And yet it was not as if the Other had put on weight. Eerily, it was as if he and Hal had grown more alike physically. Their eyes met. Bleys spoke, and his voice went out and was lost against the walls of the tunnel, its crispness blurred by the heavy air and the mist.

"Well," said Bleys, "you've got your Dorsai and everything you want from the Exotics locked up, here. I take it, then, you're determined to go through with this?"

"I told you," said Hal, "there was never any other way."

Bleys nodded, a trifle wearily.

"So now the gloves come off," he said.

"Yes," answered Hal. "Sooner or later they had to, I being what I am and you being what you are."

"And what are you?" Bleys smiled.

"You don't know, of course," said Hal.

"No," said Bleys. "I've known for some time you're not just a boy whose tutors I watched die on a certain occasion. How much more, I still don't know. But it'd be petty-minded of me to hide the fact that I've been astonished by the quality of your opposition to me. You're too intelligent to move worlds like this just for revenge on me because of your tutors' deaths. What you've done and are doing is too big for any personal cause. Tell me - what drives you to oppose me like this?"

"What drives me?" Hal found himself smiling a little sadly - almost a Bleys type of smile. "A million years of history and prehistory drive me - as they drive you. To be more specific, the last thousand years of history drive me. There's no other way for you and I to be, but opponents. But if it's any consolation to you, I've also been surprised by the quality of your opposition."

"You?" Bleys' face could not bring itself to express incredulity. "Why should you be surprised?"

"Because," said Hal, "I'm more than you could imagine - just as you've turned out to be something I couldn't imagine. But then when I was imagining this present time we live in I had no real appreciation of the true value of faith. It's something that goes far beyond blind worship. It's a type of understanding in those who've paid the price to win it. As you, yourself, know."

Bleys was watching him intently.

"As I know?"

"Yes," said Hal, "as you, of all people, know."

Bleys shook his head.

"I should have dealt with you when you were much younger," he said, almost to himself.

"You tried," said Hal. "You couldn't."

"I did?" said Bleys. "I see. You're using faith, again, to reach that conclusion?"

"Not for that. No, only observation and fact." Hal was still watching Bleys as closely as Bleys was watching him. "Primarily, the fact that I'm who I am, and know what I can do."

"You're mistaken if you think I couldn't have eliminated a sixteen-year-old boy if I'd wanted to."

"No, I'm not mistaken," Hal said. "As I say, you tried. But I wasn't a boy, even then when I thought I was. I was an experienced adult, who had reasons for staying alive. I told you I've learned faith, even if it took me three lives to do the learning. That's why I know I'm going to win, now. Just as I know my winning means your destruction, because you won't have it any other way."

"You seem to think you know a great deal about me." The smile was back on Bleys' face. It was a smile that hid all thoughts behind it.

"I do. I came to understand you better by learning to understand myself - though understanding myself was a job I started long before you came along." Hal paused for a fraction of a second as a surgeon might pause before the first cut of the scalpel. "If you'd been only what I thought you were the first time I saw you, the contest between us would already be over. More than that, I'd have found some way by this time to bring you to the side of things as they must be for the race to survive."

Bleys' smile widened. Ignoring it, Hal went on.

"But since that day at the estate," he said, "I've learned about myself, as well as more about you, and I know I'll never be able to bring you to see what I see until you, yourself, choose to make the effort to do so. And without that effort, we're matched too evenly, you and I, by the forces of history, for any compromise to work."

"I'm not sure I understand you," said Bleys, "and that's unusual enough to be interesting."

"You don't understand me because I'm talking of things outside your experience," Hal said. "I came to talk to you here - as I'll always be willing to come to talk to you - because I've got to hang on to the hope you might be brought to consider things beyond the scope of what you look at now; and change your mind."

"You talk," said Bleys, now openly amused, "like a grandfather talking to a grandson."

"I don't mean to," said Hal. "But the hard fact is you've had only one lifetime from which to draw your conclusions. As I just said, I've had three. It took me that long to become human; and because I've finally made it, I can see how you, yourself, fall short of being the full human being the race has to produce to survive the dangers it can't even imagine yet. Like it or not, that experience is there, and a difference between us."

"I told you you were an Other," said Bleys.

"Not exactly," said Hal. "If you remember, you left me to infer it. But I'm splitting hairs. In a sense you were right. In one sense I am an Other, being a blend of all that's new as well as all that's old in the race. But I'm not the kind of Other who's Everyman. Your kind, if it survives, are at best going to be a transient form of human. Mine, if it does, will be immortal."

"I'm sorry," said Bleys, gracefully, "I don't have a kind. I'm my own unique mixture of Exotic and Dorsai, only."

"No," said Hal. "You did have an Exotic and a Dorsai as parents of your father. But your mother's family, which raised you on Harmony, was pure Friendly, and it's that which dominates in you."

Bleys looked at him as if from an impossible distance.

"In what records did you find that fairy tale?"

"In none," said Hal. "The official records of your birth and movements all show what you fixed them to say."

"Then what makes you say something like this?"

"The correct knowledge," said Hal. "An absolute knowledge that comes from joining together bits and pieces of general records that hadn't been tampered with - because there was no reason to tamper with them - at the Final Encyclopedia. I put them together only a year ago, and then made deductions from them using something I taught myself during my first trial of life. It's called intuitive logic."

Bleys frowned slightly. Then his frown cleared.

"Ah," he said; and was silent for a long moment, looking a little aside from Hal. When he spoke again, his voice was thoughtful and remote. "I believe what you're talking about may be what I've been calling interval thinking."

"The name hardly matters," said Hal.

"Of course not. So," Bleys' gaze came back to him, openly, "there's more to learn about you than I'd imagined. But tell me, why place so much emphasis on the fact that part of what I am by inheritance and upbringing may be Friendly?"

"For one reason, because it explains your ability of charisma, as well as that of those Others who have it to some extent or another," said Hal. "But I'd rather you called yourself faith-holder than Friendly. Because, more than anyone on all the worlds suspects, it's a form of faith-holding that rules you. You never were the bored cross-breed whose only concern was being comfortable during his own brief years of life. That was a facade, a false exterior set up in the first place to protect you from your older half-brother, Danno - who would have been deathly afraid of you if he'd suspected you had a purpose of your own."

"He would, indeed," murmured Bleys. "Not that I'm agreeing with these fancies and good-nights of yours, of course."

"Your agreement isn't necessary," said Hal. "As I was saying, you used it first to protect yourself against Danno, then to reassure the rest of the Others that you weren't just using them for your own private purposes. Finally, you're using it still to blind the peoples of the worlds you control to that personal goal that draws you now more strongly than ever. You're a faith-holder, twisted to the worship of a false god - the same god under a different mask that Walter Blunt worshipped back in the twenty-first century. Your god is stasis. You want to enshrine the race as it is, make it stop and go no farther. It's the end you've worked to from the time you were old enough to conceive it."

"And if all this should be true," Bleys smiled again. "The end is still the end. It remains inevitable. You can think all this about me, but it isn't going to make any difference."

"Again, you, of all people, know that's not so," answered Hal. "The fact I understand this is going to make all the difference between us. You developed the Others and let them think that the power they gained was all their own doing. But now you'll understand that I'm aware it was mainly accomplished with recruits who were simply non-Other, native-born Friendlies with their own natural, culturally developed, charismatic gift to some degree, working under your own personal spell and command. Meanwhile, covered by the appearance of working for the Others, you've begun to spread your own personal faith in the inevitably necessary cleansing of the race, followed by a freezing of it into an immobility of changelessness." Hal stopped, to give Bleys a chance to respond. But the Other man said nothing. "Unlike your servants and the Others who've been your dupe," Hal went on, "you're able to see the possibility of a final death resulting from that state of stasis, if you achieve it. But under the influence of the dark part of the racial unconsciousness whose laboratory experiment and chess piece you are - as I also am, on the other side - you see growth in the race as the source of all human evils, and you're willing to kill the patient, if necessary, to kill the cancer."

He stopped. This time there was a difference to the silence which succeeded his words and lay between the two of them.

"You realize," said Bleys at last, softly, "that now I have no choice at all but to destroy you?"

"You can't afford to destroy me," said Hal, "even if you could. Just as I can't afford to destroy you. This battle is now being fought for the adherence of the minds of all our fellow humans. What I have to do, to make the race understand which way they must go, is prove you wrong; and I need you alive for that. You have to prove me wrong if you want to win, and you need me alive for that. Force alone won't solve anything for either of us, in the long run. You know that as well as I do."

"But it will help." Bleys smiled. "Because you're right. I have to win. I will win. There's got to be an end to this madness you call growth but which is actually only expansion further and further into the perils of the physical universe until the lines that supply our lives will finally be snapped of their own weight. Only by putting it aside, can we start the growth within that's both safe and necessary."

"You're wrong," said Hal. "That way lies death. It's a dead end road that assumes inner growth can only be had at the price of giving up what's made us what we are over that million years I mentioned. Chained and channeled organisms grow stunted and wrong, always. Free ones grow wrong sometimes, but right other times; because the price of life is a continual seeking to grow and explore. Lacking that freedom, all action, physical and mental, circles in on itself and ends up only wearing a deeper and deeper rut in which it goes around and around until it dies."

"No," said Bleys; and his face, his whole body seemed to shrug off Hal's words. "It leads to life for the race. It's the only way that can. There has to be an end to growth out into the physical universe, and a change over to growth within. That's all that can save us. Only by stopping now and turning back, only by stopping this endless attempt to enlarge and develop can we turn inward and find a way to be invulnerable in spite of anything the universe might hold.

"It's you who are wrong," said Bleys; and his face, his whole body seemed to harden and take on a look of power that Hal had never seen it show before. "But you're self-deluded. Besotted with love for the shiny bauble of adventure and discovery. Out there - "

He stabbed one long finger back into the gray mist that obscured his end of the tunnel, at the upper side of the shield-wall.

" - out there are all things that can be. How can it be otherwise? And among all things have to be all things that must be unconquerable by us. How can it be otherwise? All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword - and this is a sword you keep reaching for, this so-called spirit of exploration and adventure - this leaping out into the physical universe. Is the spirit of mankind nothing more than a questing hound that always has to keep finding a new rabbit to run after? How many other races, in this infinity, in this eternity, do you think haven't already followed that glittering path? And how many of those do you suppose have become master of the universe, which is the only alternate ending to going down?"

His eyes burned on Hal's.

"What will be - " he went on, "what I'll see done will be a final reversal to that process. What you'll try to do to stop it is going to make no difference in that. You've made a fortress out of Old Earth. It makes no difference. What human minds can do by way of science and technology other human minds can undo. We'll find a way eventually through that shield-wall of yours. We'll retake Earth, and cleanse it of all those who'd continue this mad, sick, outward plunge of humankind. Then it'll be reseeded with those who see our race's way as it should be."

"And the Younger Worlds?" Hal said. "What about all the other settled planets? Have you forgotten them?"

"No," said Bleys. "They'll die. No one will kill them. But, little by little, with the outward-seeking sickness cured, and the attention of Earth, of real Earth, on itself as it should be - these others will wither and their populations dwindle. In the long run, they'll be empty worlds again; and humanity'll be back where it began, where it belongs and where it'll stay, on its own world. And here - as fate wills it - it'll learn how to love properly and exist to the natural end of its days - or die."

He stopped speaking. The force that had powered his voice fell away into silence. Hal stood, looking at him, with nothing to say. After a long moment, Bleys spoke again, quietly.

"Words are no use between us two, are they?" he said, at last. "I'm sorry, Hal. Believe what you want, but those who think the way you do can't win. Look how you and your kind have done nothing but lose to me and mine, so far."

"You're wrong," said Hal. "We haven't really contested you until now; and now that we're going to, we're the ones who can't lose."

Bleys reached out his hand and Hal took it. They did not grasp in the ordinary fashion of greeting, but only held for a moment. The Other's flesh and bones felt strange in Hal's hand as if he had taken the hand of a condemned man. Then they both turned and each went off his own way, in opposite directions into the mist.