Part 2

"Materialism is our bedrock, gentlemen--the firm belief that every phenomenon must have a real existence and a real cause. It has made possible science technology, unbiased self-understanding. I am open-minded. I will go as far as any in granting a hearing to new theories. But when those theories are a revival of the oldest and most ignorant superstitions, when this gentleman seeks to frighten us with nightmares and tales of evil spirits stealing human bodies, when he asks us on this evidence to institute a gigantic witch-hunt, when he raises the old bogey of subtronic power breaking loose, when he brings in a colleague"--he glared at Thorn--"who takes seriously to the idea of surveying dream worlds with transit and theodolite--then I say, gentlemen, that if we yield to such suggestions, we might as well throw materialism overboard and, as for safeguarding the future of mankind, ask the advice of fortunetellers!"

At the last word Clawly started, recovered himself. He dared not look around to see if anyone had noticed.

The anger in Conjerly's voice strained at its leash, threatened to break it.

"I presume, sir, that your confidential investigators will go out with wolfsbane to test for werewolves, garlic to uncover vampires, and cross and holy water to exorcise demons!"

"They will go out with nothing but open minds," Clawly answered quietly.

Conjerly breathed deeply, his face reddened slightly, he squared himself for a fresh and more uncompromising assault. But just at that moment Tempelmar eased himself out of his chair. As if by accident, his elbow brushed Conjerly's.

* * * * *

"No need to quarrel," Tempelmar drawled pleasantly, "though our visitor's suggestions do sound rather peculiar to minds tempered to a realistic materialism. Nevertheless, it is our duty to safeguard the world from any real dangers, no matter how improbable or remote. So, considering the evidence, we must not pass lightly over our visitor's theory that alien minds are usurping those of Earth--at least not until there has been an opportunity to advance alternate theories."

"Alternate theories _have_ been advanced, tested, and discarded," said Clawly sharply.

"Of course," Tempelmar agreed smilingly. "But in science that's a process that never quite ends, isn't it?"

He sat down, Conjerly following suit as if drawn. Clawly was irascibly conscious of having got the worst of the interchange--and the lanky, sleepy-eyed Tempelmar's quiet skepticism had been more damaging than Conjerly's blunt opposition, though both had told. He felt, emanating from the two of them, a weight of personal hostility that bothered and oppressed him. For a moment they seemed like utter strangers.

He was conscious of standing too much alone. In every face he could suddenly see skepticism. Shielding was the worst--his expression had become that of a man who suddenly sees through the tricks of a sleight-of-hand artist masquerading as a true magician. And Thorn, who should have been mentally at his side, lending him support, was sunk in some strange reverie.

He realized that even in his own mind there was a growing doubt of the things he was saying.

Then, utterly unexpectedly, adding immeasurably to his dismay, Thorn got up, and without even a muttered excuse to the men beside him, left the room. He moved a little stiffly, like a sleepwalker. Several glanced after him curiously. Conjerly nodded. Tempelmar smiled.

Clawly noted it. He rallied himself. He said, "Well, gentlemen?"

III.

But who will reveal to our waking ken The forms that swim and the shapes that creep Under the waters of sleep?

_The Marshes of Glynn_, Sidney Lanier.

Like a dreamer who falls head-foremost for giddy miles and then is wafted to a stop as gently as a leaf, Thorn plunged down the main vertical levitator of the Opal Cross and swam out of it at ground level, before its descent into the half mile of basements. At this hour the great gravity-less tube was relatively empty, except for the ceaseless silent plunge and ascent of the graduated subtronic currents and the air they swept along. There were a few other down-and-up swimmers--distant leaflike swirls of color afloat in the contracting white perspective of the tube--but, like a dreamer, Thorn did not seem to take note of them.

Another levitating current carried him along some hundred yards of mural-faced corridor to one of the pedestrian entrances of the Opal Cross. A group of revelers stopped their crazy, squealing dance in the current to watch him. They looked like figures swum out of the potently realistic murals--but with a more hectic, troubled gaiety on their faces. There was something about the way he plunged past them unseeing, his sleepwalker's eyes fixed on something a dozen yards ahead, that awakened unpleasant personal thoughts and spoiled their feverish fun-making.

The pedestrian entrance was really a city-limits. Here the one-building metropolis ended, and there began the horizontal miles of half-wild countryside, dark as the ancient past, trackless and roadless in the main, dotted in many areas with small private dwellings, but liberally brushed with forests.

A pair of lovers on the terrace, pausing for a kiss as they adjusted their flying togs, broke off to look curiously after Thorn as he hurried down the ramp and across the close-cropped lawn, following one of the palely-glowing pathways. The up-slanting pathlight, throwing into gaunt relief his angular cheek-bones and chin, made him resemble some ancient pilgrim or crusader in the grip of a religious compulsion.

Then the forest had swallowed him up.

A strange mixture of trance and willfullness, of dream and waking, of aimless wandering and purposeful tramping, gripped Thorn as he adventured down that black-fringed ghost-trail. Odd memories of childhood, of old hopes and desires, of student days with Clawly, of his work and the bewildering speculations it had led to, drifted across his mind, poignant but meaningless. Among these, but drained of significance, like the background of a dream, there was a lingering picture of the scene he had left behind him in the Sky Room. He was conscious of somehow having deserted a friend, abandoned a world, betrayed a great purpose--but it was a blurred consciousness and he had forgotten what the great purpose was.

Nothing seemed to matter any longer but the impulse pulling him forward, the sense of an unknown but definite destination.

He had the feeling that if he looked long enough at that receding, beckoning point a dozen yards ahead, something would grow there.

The forest path was narrow and twisting. Its faint glow silhouetted weeds and brambles partly over-growing it. His hands pushed aside encroaching twigs.

He felt something tugging at his mind from ahead, as if there were other avenues leading to his subconscious than that which went through his consciousness. As if his subconscious were the core of two or more minds, of which his was the only one.

Under the influence of that tugging, imagination awoke.

Instantly it began to recreate the world of his nightmares. The world which had obscurely dominated his life and turned him to dream-research, where he had found similar nightmares. The world where danger lay. The blue-litten world in which a mushroom growth of ugly squat buildings, like the factories and tenements and barracks of ancient times, blotched the utopian countryside, and along whose sluice-like avenues great crowds of people ceaselessly drifted, unhappy but unable to rest--among them that other, dream Thorn, who hated and envied him, deluged him with an almost unbearable sense of guilt.

* * * * *

For almost as long as he could remember, that dream Thorn had tainted his life--the specter at his feasts, the suppliant at his gates, the eternal accuser in the courts of inmost thought--drifting phantom-wise across his days, rising up starkly real and terrible in his nights. During the long, busy holiday of youth, when every day had been a new adventure and every thought a revelation, that dream Thorn had been painfully discovering the meaning of oppression and fear, had been security swept away and parents exiled, had attended schools in which knowledge was forbidden and all a man learned was his place. When he was discovering happiness and love, that dream Thorn had been rebelliously grieving for a young wife snatched away from him forever because of some autocratic government's arbitrary decrees. And while he was accomplishing his life's work, building new knowledge stone by stone, that dream Thorn had toiled monotonously at meaningless jobs, slunk away to brood and plot with others of his kind, been harried by a fiendishly efficient secret police, become a hater and a killer.

Day by day, month by month, year by year, the dark-stranded dream life had paralleled his own.

He knew the other Thorn's emotions almost better than his own, but the actual conditions and specific details of the dream Thorn's life were blurred and confused in a characteristically dreamlike fashion. It was as if he were dreaming that other Thorn's dreams--while, by some devilish exchange, that other Thorn dreamed his dreams and hated him for his good fortune.

A sense of guilt toward his dream-twin was the dominant fact in Thorn's inner life.

And now, pushing through the forest, he began to fancy that he could see something at the receding focus of his vision a dozen yards ahead, something that kept flickering and fading, so that he could scarcely be sure that he saw it, and that yet seemed an embodiment of all the unseen forces dragging him along--a pale, wraithlike face, horribly like his own.

The sense of a destination grew stronger and more urgent. The mile wall of the Opal Cross, a pale cataract of stone glimpsed now and then through overhanging branches, still seemed to rise almost at his heels, creating the maddening illusion that he was making no progress. The wraith-face blacked out. He began to run.

Twigs lashed him. A root caught at his foot. He stumbled, checked himself, and went on more slowly, relieved to find that he could at least govern the rate of his progress.

The forces tugging at him were both like and infinitely unlike those which had for a moment controlled his movements at the symchromy. Whereas those had seemed to have a wholly alien source, these seemed to have come from a single human mind.

He felt in his pocket for the object he had stolen from Clawly's mysterious confidant. He could not see much of its color now, but that made its baffling texture stand out. It seemed to have a little more inertia than its weight would account for. He was certain he had never touched anything quite like it before.

He couldn't say where the notion came from, but he suddenly found himself wondering if the thing could be a single molecule. Fantastic! And yet, was there anything to absolutely prevent atoms from assembling, or being assembled, in such a giant structure?

Such a molecule would have more atoms than the universe had suns.

Oversize molecules were the keys of life--the hormones, the activators, the carriers of heredity. What doors might not a supergiant molecule unlock?

The merest fancy--yet frightening. He started to throw the thing away, but instead tucked it back in his pocket.

* * * * *

There was a rush in the leaves. A large cat paused for an instant in the pathlight to snarl and stare at him. Such cats were common pets, for centuries bred for intelligence and for centuries tame. Yet now, on the prowl, it seemed all wild--with an added, evil insight gained from long association with man.

The path branched. He took a sharp turn, picking his way over bulbous roots. The pathlight grew dim and diffuse, its substance dissolved and spread by erosion. At places the vegetation had absorbed some of the luminescence. Leaves and stems glowed faintly.

But beyond, on either side, the forest was a black, choked infinity.

It had come inscrutably alive.

The sense of a thousand infinities pressing upon him, experienced briefly at the Yggdrasil, now returned with redoubled force.

The Yggdrasil was true. Reality was not what it seemed on the surface. It had many roots, some strong and true, some twisted and gnarled, nourished in many worlds.

He quickened his pace. Again something seemed to be growing at the focus of his vision--a flitting, pulsating, bluish glow. It was like the Yggdrasil's Nidhogg motif. Nidhogg, the worm gnawing ceaselessly at the root of the tree of life that goes down to hell. It droned against his vision--an unshakable color-tune.

Then, gradually, it became a face. His own face, but seared by unfamiliar emotions, haggard with unknown miseries, hard, vengeful, accusing--the face of the dream Thorn, beckoning, commanding, luring him toward some unknown destination in the maze of unknown, unseen worlds.

With a sob of courage and fear, he plunged toward it.

He must come to grips with that other Thorn, settle accounts with him, even the balance of pleasure and pain between them, right the wrong of their unequal lives. For in some sense he must _be_ that other Thorn, and that other Thorn must be he. And a man could not be untrue to himself.

The wraithlike face receded as swiftly as he advanced.

His progress through the forest became a nightmarish running of the gauntlet, through a double row of giant black trees that slashed him with their branches.

The face kept always a few yards ahead.

Fear came, but too late--he could not stop.

The dreamy veils that had been drawn across his thoughts and memories during the first stages of his flight from the Opal Cross, were torn away. He realized that what was happening to him was the same thing that had happened to hundreds of other individuals. He realized that an alien mind was displacing his own, that another invader and potential cryptic amnesiac was gaining a foothold on Earth.

The thought hit him hard that he was deserting Clawly, leaving the whole world in the lurch.

But he was only a will-less thing that ran with outclutched hands.

Once he crossed a bare hilltop and for a moment caught a glimpse of the lonely glowing skylons--the Blue Lorraine, the Gray Twins, the Myrtle Y--but distant beyond reach, like a farewell.

He was near the end of his strength.

The sense of a destination grew overpoweringly strong.

Now it was something just around the next turn in the path.

He plunged through a giddy stretch of darkness thick as ink--and came to a desperate halt, digging in his heels, flailing his arms.

From somewhere, perhaps from deep within his own mind, came a faint echo of mocking laughter.

IV.

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."