The Werewolf Principle

31

It all was there. The great black towers anchored in the planet's granite crust, reached towards the skies. The green and leafy glade, with its flowers and gaily-playing animals, stood motionless in time. The pink-white structure rose in airy curves and spirals above the purple, foam-flecked sea. And in the aridity of the great plateau the mustard-coloured domes of hermit intelligences ran as far as sense could reach.

These and many others — and not the pictures of them only, snatched from the ice-hard stars which lay like scattered crystals across the skies that roofed a planet of drifted sand and snow — but the ideas and the thoughts and concepts that clung to all the pictures, like bits of dirt to roots.

Most of the thoughts and concepts were simply isolated pieces which would not correlate, but all of them were springboards for the fabrication of a vast jigsaw puzzle net of logic.

The task was an enormous one and at times confusing, but bit by bit the various data fell into filing patterns, and once identified were erased from active consideration, but still tagged and available when there should be need of them.

It worked with satisfaction and a happiness — and that bothered it. Satisfaction was all right and quite permissible, but happiness was wrong. It was something that had been unknown and should not be felt; it was an alien thing and it was emotion. For the best result, there must be nothing like emotion, and it was irritated at the happiness and tried to wipe it out.

A contagion, it told itself. A contagion that it had caught from Changer and, as well, perhaps, from Quester, who was at the best a most unstable creature. A situation that it must guard against, for happiness was bad enough — there were other illogical emotions held by those two that could be even worse.

So it wiped away the happiness and posted guard against it, and went on with its work, reducing the ideas and the thoughts and concepts, in so far as they could be so reduced, to formulae and axioms and symbols, being careful in the process not to lose the substance of them, for the substance would be needed later.

There were tantalizing hints that must be docketed for more consideration and, perhaps, even for more data. The logic pattern potentially was sound but extrapolated too far it left some room for error and needed further data to indicate direction. There were so many tricky things; there was nothing ever easy. The process called for hard discipline and constant self-examination to be certain that the concept of one's self was eliminated. That was the thing, it thought, that made happiness so bad.

The material of the black tower, for example. So thin it seemed impossible for it to stand, let alone have strength. But there could be no doubt about its thinness; that information came through very clear and solid. But the hint of neutrons was something else — neutrons packed so solidly together that they assumed the characteristics of a metal, all held in a rigid association by a force for which there was no definition. The hint indicated time, but was time a force? A dislocated time, perhaps. A time straining to take its proper place in either past or future, for ever striving towards a goal made impossible by some fantastic mechanism that kept time out of step?

And the fishers of space who cast their nets across empty cubic light years, catching the energy spewed out in space by all the angry suns. Catching, in the process, the incredible flotsam of unknown things that once had crossed or once had lived in space — the garbage of the vast stretches of abandoned space. Nothing about the fishers or what kind of nets they cast or how these nets might trap the energy. Just the thought that the fishers fished. Some fantasy, perhaps, of some dim communal mind, a religion or a faith or myth — or could there be the fishers?

These and many more and that one faint impression, so faint it barely registered, faint, perhaps, because it had been dredged from a star so distant that even light grew tired. A universal mind, it said, and that was all it said. A mind, perhaps, from which all thinking came. A mind, perhaps, that gathered in all thinking. Or a mind that set the law and order which spun the electron around the nucleus and called out marching cadences to the galaxies.

There was much, and all of it fragmentary and very puzzling. And this was just a start. This was the harvest merely of a moment of time on a single planet. But it was important, all of it, every bit of information, every faint impression. Somewhere it all fit in, somehow there was a place for it in that pattern of law and order, cause and effect, action and reaction which made up the universe.

Time was all that was needed. With more data and more logic it could all become as one. And time, as a factor, could be cancelled out. There was an eternity of it.

Thinker, squatted on the chapel floor, pulsated gently, the logic mechanism that was its mind driving towards the universal truth.