Chapter 3

"But you've felt it too, haven't you? He's sweet and lovable in his funny, confused way, talking like a comic-strip kid one minute and an encyclopedia the next--so empty and faraway sometimes, then loving and affectionate, as though to make up to us for being ... away. I'm sure he loves us, Jerry and I, as much as we love him, but I feel that we've failed him, that he wants love but it can't reach him. I'll say it, Phil. I feel that he's not mine, that he's apart from us. Ridiculous, isn't it? I can't feel true kinship for my own child, much as he means to me. I feel better now that I've said it."

"I wish I could say the same, but I don't know that I feel any better for adding one more question mark to a long, long line of them. Like you, I sense a loneliness, a reaching out from Timmy for something I can't give him no matter what I do, no matter how I try to understand. I watch him, and I think of that line '... a stranger and afraid ...' What is there that frightens him? Can it ... possibly ... be us?"

VI

Indian summer now lay softly upon the land.

On a wooded rise ten miles from the outskirts of the town, close by a bluff overlooking the bushland, the tan walls of a small tent warmed to the late afternoon sun. Here and there beyond the bushland the supper-smoke of scattered farms stood columned and motionless. The only sound on the still air was the harsh, labored breathing of the dying Homer.

The dog lay in the open near the edge of the bluff, his eyes closed, his companions seated nearby. Phil had brought Timmy on a week-end camping trip that now appeared spoiled at the outset, for the short, steep climb up the bluff had unexpectedly proven too much for old gray-muzzle. His trembling legs had barely carried him to the top before he collapsed, and now it was only a question of how long he must suffer before release. Phil glanced toward a .22 rifle lying with their gear. It would be more merciful.

"No, Uncle Phil. He'll live until sundown at least. Let him have that much."

"I'm sorry this happened, Timmy, but now that it has I think we should make it easier for him."

"You liked him, didn't you, Uncle Phil?"

"Yes, Tim ... I'm a bit surprised to find that I really did. I can't say that I'm much of an animal-lover, but in his way Homer was the perfect Old Faithful. No beauty and not very bright, you must admit, but he never left your side. It won't seem the same."

"It won't _be_ the same, Uncle Phil." The boy raised his head to look over the distant bushland. His face was composed.

"Timmy, I hesitate to say this, but--"

"I don't seem very upset about it?"

"Well, yes. Did you really care much for Homer? You never paid any attention to him, never petted or played with him, just let him tag along."

"I had no need to pet or play with him, and it was enough that he give me all of his attention. I should have spared a thought for him, his needs and limitations, but it's too late now." The answering voice was subtly changed from that of a boy, and strangely gentle. "A dog's life is so short, hardly more than today and tomorrow. A breath or two, and it has begun and ended. When Homer dies he will be free, and I will no longer exist."

A chill slid over the man.

What makes a voice? Air and musculature and tissue, but what more? A brain, a mind--a life. An accumulative series of reactive patterns called Life grows like a fragile crystal around a seeding impulse that lacks a name acceptable to all, and the resulting structure is called "personality" or "character" and it influences what it touches in a manner peculiar to itself alone. Given the crude tools of a sound-producing mechanism it will, if it chooses and has the skill, disclose some trifle of its own true nature. Phil heard words that should have sounded idiotic coming from a boy, but they carried complete and instant conviction. Without elocutionary tricks, without fire and oratory, the boy-voice had changed in timbre, acquired a quality that could sway multitudes--the wild thought crossed Phil's mind that what it had acquired was the quality of complete sanity.

A suspicion, planted deliberately and nurtured through the years, matured on the triggered instant. Phil twisted around--alert, wary, almost hostile, his eyes searching the somewhat bony young face. His gaze was returned steadily, with assured composure.

* * * * *

"Who are you?" he demanded bluntly. "_What_ are you?"

Timmy laughed lightly, patently at ease.

"I am nothing, Phil. Nothing at all."

"Rot. You are flesh and blood, human, and were born to Helen and Jerry. What else?"

"Is there more?"

"Stop playing!" Phil jumped up angrily, standing tall over the seated figure. "I've watched you for years. You've given yourself away repeatedly."

"Ah, that 'advanced scientific knowledge' worried you badly, didn't it?"

"I ... see. You revealed it deliberately. There are other things. Your aversion to crowds--"

"Their thinking confused me. They were dangerous."

"Were?"

"After tonight, crowds will not matter."

"Because Homer will be dead?"

"Because Homer will be dead, poor beast. My conscience will be dead."

"What on earth does that mean? I find it impossible either to doubt you or to think of you as a boy any longer."

"That is because your mind is filled with uncertainties, mine with certainties. You have never before met anyone in whom certainty was a clear truth unquestioned on any level of any remote corner of the mind. I am such a one."

Phil sat down helplessly. There was no point in standing. Whatever Tim was, he was not going to be dominated by tricks.

"_What are you?_"

"What can I say? I am a book that is being read, yet I am neither the pages nor the printing on the pages, but only the meaning inherent in the shapes and sequences of the letters that comprise the printing."

"Can't you give me a straight answer?"

"It is difficult. You must think about what I say."

"But the ideas recorded in a book are merely--thoughts. They have no tangible existence."

"Nor have I."

"You're not a product of my imagination!"

"Hardly."

"Are you giving me that line about 'All is Illusion'?"

"No," the boy laughed spontaneously.

"Are you a mutant, a new evolutionary development?"

"No, nor am I a machine or a monster."

"At least you're alive!"

"That, I think, is a matter of definition."

"Then, for the third time, what are you! Stop baiting me!"

* * * * *

Timmy's hand closed on Phil's--a firm, warm, dirty and somewhat calloused boy's hand that was unquestionably flesh, blood and bone.

"Take it easy, Uncle Phil." Perhaps he had pushed too hard. The dancing eyes veiled themselves a little and the intangible, indescribable magnetism somehow faded. Phil, looking at him, was suddenly able to see him and to think of him once more as Timmy, a boy with unusual qualities, but the same boy he had watched for years. He shook his head and felt somewhat bemused, as he had done once before.

"Look, let's get a fresh start, Tim, and stop going in circles."

"O. K., Uncle Phil." He was an eleven-year-old again, responding obediently.

"I've suspected for years that we didn't know the truth about you--that you were something special, something new."

"Well--" Tim appeared to consider it gravely. "Yeah, I guess that's fair enough. I'm something new, all right."

"For years, then, you've been concealing something--something that showed through whenever you made a slip."

"Wanna bet on how many of those slips were deliberate?" Tim challenged, then joined Phil's rueful laugh. "Not all of them were, I got to admit, but most of them."

"But today--apparently because Homer is dying--you've abandoned pretense, come out in the open."

"Not all the way out, not yet. You've still got some shocks coming, Uncle Phil."

"I don't doubt it, you young hoodlum. You were pretty overwhelming there for a few minutes. But why all the mystery? Why not just tell me?"

"You explained why."

"Overwhelming? Are you that terrific?"

"I'm a humdinger, Bub. Think you can stand it now?"

"I think the full blast would be better than any more of your 'gentle' hints."

"That's what you think." Come now, the first shock had been fairly neatly delivered and fielded after all, the concept of difference proposed, established and accepted. "Well, here goes. You remember that spray of flowers I handed you in the car that night?"

"I've had my suspicions about them ever since."

"O. K.--now smell this pine cone."

Phil looked at it with distrust.

"The thing that beats me is how I can be morally certain that pine cone is loaded, cocked, and ready to fire, and yet I take it," he let Tim put it in his hand, "and smell it." He raised it to his nostrils, held his breath for a moment, then gingerly sniffed.

* * * * *

Time stopped.

All sense of duration was gone. Awareness drifted in formless inattention until a focal point, a mere nucleus of intellect, captured and held it. The nucleus strengthened, became an impression of identity--not his own identity, nor any that he knew, but that of some Other. From this other presence came insistently the warmth and gentleness of good will, an unreserved outpouring that sought to evoke an unreserved response.

Isolation, the sanctum of the mind, took the assault, melting like an ice-castle in the sun--but before the tempting surrender could become irrevocable alarms rang through his being and his mind gathered in on itself in confusion, holding its isolation intact and inviolate. Through the opposing desires to yield and to withhold, to break barriers down and to raise them up, he detected from the Other a reaction both of pity and of revulsion. The pressure decreased. He knew then that what he yielded willingly would be accepted as sufficient, and no more be asked of him than he was capable of giving. Somehow, it was not a victory, but a defeat.

He became aware that the private domain he had claimed for his own was truly his own, a corridored, compartmented, dungeoned storehouse of filed fancies and forgotten files. A tunneled, revetted, embrasured and battlemented citadel filled with rusty armor and broken lances. A hock shop, a junkyard, a hall of distorting mirrors. A cemetery by the sea, a peak of glory, a slough of despond. A radiant light, an encroaching dark, the sweetest of melody, the sourest of discord. A library of trivia, museum of curiosa, sideshow of freaks, and shrine of greatness. It was the lowering pendulum, the waiting pit, the closing walls. It was the vaulting spirit, the gallant heart, the just and the kind and the merciful. Withal, it was a haunted castle, perpetually besieged, the towers soaring but the structure toppling. It was himself. His memories, his experiences, his actions and reactions, his life. And it was appalling.

A gentle prompting from the Other roused him from his self-immersion and for a moment he was all panic lest his secret had been observed. Mechanisms he had not known he possessed slammed doors and banged shutters over windows in a fine frenzy, so that the Other winced and fell back, pleadingly, then softly and insistently drew near once more. He realized that there was a purpose that must be served. Something was desired from him. A voice. He tried, and the croak of a clogged throat would have held as much meaning as the disharmonious thrust of thought that began in chaos and ended in futility. Abashed, he would not try again. Silence crept around him, the silence of isolation.

The most disarmingly hesitant, the most reassuringly inoffensive of thoughts touched as lightly as a breath and was accepted as his own. He saw no cause to take alarm. Such an insignificant invasion was of no more moment than the blowing of a grain of dust beneath a locked door.

The thought lay among his own, and moved like a thread through his own, and the elements that it drew together became the acceptance of an idea. Secure in his ill-kept citadel, he permitted a rapport so tenuous he could break it at will, yet so strong that--

VII

Memory tinged with homesickness tricked him into a sad reverie. That they were only memories, these thoughts that rose up to slyly capture his attention, was clear. He was under no illusion that he was experiencing for the first time events that had long melted into the past, for they had a common-place familiarity that stamped them as scenes revisited, events relived, dear friends recalled to mind.

He stood alone at the edge of a meadow with the afternoon sun hot on his back and debated with Andra the advisability of transplanting a certain shrub from its chance-chosen place in the meadow to a position in their own gardens. Throughout their discussion he was conscious of little drops of perspiration threading their way down his naked spine, and he longingly savored the coolness of the stream-bank on which Andra reclined, a mile or two to the south.

In good-humored exasperation he commented enviously on woman's lot and drew a dry rejoinder from a chance traveler on the highway to the north. He joined in the general laugh at his own expense, hearing the sally repeated and elaborated until it drifted out of conversational range. He was tempted to follow it farther out of curiosity, but it was not good form to blanket local conversation for a mere whim. While his attention was distracted, however, Andra became involved in an exchange of local recipes with a newcomer to the district, a farm-wife whose husband had had a fancy to try the westward farm lands. He joined the husband in a wry grimace at the loquacity of women, and simultaneously caught sight of a distant figure crossing a ridge somewhat north of him. The figure paused at the same instant, looked searchingly in his direction, then waved on sighting him and strolled on. It was the traveler whose quip was now being repeated miles away, far in advance of him. Andra showed no sign of running out of recipes and returning to shrubs. He sighed, and stood alone in the meadow....

* * * * *

The casual facility of memory bridged time and space without disorientation. He was strolling in the evening with his bride, Andra's arm linked with his for the added pleasure of physical contact. In the manner of lovers they supplemented their thoughts with murmured words and sounds, thus sharing still another physical intimacy, for they were still in that newly-mated condition where every manifestation of the one was a source of delight and wonder to the other.

They paused momentarily by a vine-covered wall and he felt a cool frond reach out to caress his shoulder while a long tendril curled gracefully about his forearm between the upper and the lower wrists. A few hundred-thousand years ago his remote ancestor would have recoiled violently from the touch of what was then a strangler vine, but now he casually disengaged the half-sentient tendril and with his mind caught the faint, faint flicker of rudimentary awareness; thus far had nature progressed with the vine, apparently reluctant to abandon a false start toward mobility and intelligence for an unsuitable species. Or perhaps, Andra added, in nature's long-term view the experiment might still be considered promising. He shook his head.

The vine had learned peaceful ways that saved it from extinction, drawing its food quietly from the earth while further developing a mobility of sorts, but eventually an impasse would be reached when greater mobility would endanger nutrition. If the roots withdrew from the soil, the vine would die--unless, he agreed slowly, echoing her shudder, the vine solved the dilemma by becoming again a carnivorous strangler. Nature made unaccountable blunders and sometimes found strange remedies, turning a blessing for one species into a curse for others....

On the same impulse they gazed at the night sky blazing with the heart of the galaxy spread around them, a galaxy as yet less than half mapped, only a small fraction of its secrets known. Like many new-mates they planned a leisurely, lengthy quest among the stars, a trip for which their mutual absorption peculiarly fitted them. After all, the advancement of knowledge still required physical and intellectual research and the joy of living still demanded physical and emotional release, but there was one great barrier to space-travel.

Leaving the great community of Challon ordinarily meant leaving an intensely experienced fellowship to endure a shattering isolation no less intensely felt, unless one were fortunate enough to be chosen for an exploration team. There was both comfort and common sense in the use of teams of the greatest numerical strength consistent with efficiency, but the resources demanded by such teams limited the number that could be fielded at one time. Consequently, private voyages in small craft were not entirely uncommon among the hardy--or the temporarily self-sufficient, such as he and Andra. In a few days they would leave Challon behind, break for the first time the half-spiritual link with all their world, and voyage forth in the belief that their love for each other was alone enough to sustain them.

At the same instant the same doubt of self-worthiness crept into each mind and was read and stoutly answered by the other, while a dozen neighbors near and distant interrupted their own concerns to murmur encouragement and recall the doubts they, too, had felt and learned to dismiss. Reassured he led Andra back to the house, scarcely aware of the background bustle of other minds busy with other matters--nor, in fact, greatly caring at that moment that others existed. The manner of love may change, but not the manners of lovers.

* * * * *

Memory surged after memory on waves of nostalgia and homesickness that told their own story of why the memories had been long buried. Challon had fallen away behind them and the strangeness of the cleavage from their fellows had dismayed them. In and around the spaceport center, a multitude of the fellows they were never to see again had paused long enough in their own affairs to mesh thoughts in a final projection of encouragement that reached after the dwindling ship like a gesture of farewell.

A long, long farewell. A final farewell, unrecognized for the last parting that it was.

They had known from the experience of others that the first terrible silence would be a hard thing to endure until the strangeness wore off. At first they huddled like two children, driving their thoughts far into unanswering space in desperate disbelief that such utter silence could be. Repelled by space, they turned to each other and found more complete union than they had thought possible. From the depth of their union they found the strength and growth and maturity to adapt, to endure, and to survive. The fear passed. The worst was over.

* * * * *

Planetfall succeeded planetfall and the routine of their activities became smooth and practiced. As was the custom, they had been asked to obtain various items of information from sundry known but largely unexplored planets to help determine whether a later visit by a full-scale exploration team would be advisable. In one system they made a rapid instrumental survey of the only major continent on the only inhabitable planet, from a height of a hundred miles. In another, a skimming prospecting trip in a certain area confirmed a predicted rich ore body. And at all times, of course--particularly when they left the known systems behind and entered virgin territory--there was the Challonari to be trained and observed.

The Challonari--a part-organic, artificial brain--was one of the most promising recent developments of Challon science. It was also one of the most debatable, for the Challonari was capable of independent thought in its limited fashion and yet had been devised solely as an instrument, a tool. It had no freedom of action, no physical independence, but it had childlike emotions and--this was the damnable thing--a sense of identity and awareness of its creators as such. Thus the moral issue was raised. To the Challon, the control or coercion of an independent intelligence was a cardinal outrage. No greater sanctity existed than the sanctity of the individual, for anything that prejudiced or restricted the right of the individual to full mastery of himself was worse even than the deliberate taking of life. It was murder of the ego. In a telepathic society, life itself could not be more precious than self-control.

The combined growth and manufacture of the Challonari had been stopped in horror when it was realized that their capabilities were greater than anticipated. An organic tool had not been created, but rather a ... what? When does a tool become an entity? If it is an entity, what right have its makers to control it and use it as a tool? What right have they to--the thorniest issue of all--destroy it or otherwise put it aside when it is no longer required? Until these fundamental issues could be settled, the handful of Challonari in existence must be cared for, trained and observed as if they were backward children.

The main function of the Challonari on such a voyage as this was to safeguard the ship and its immediate vicinity when on strange worlds. This it accomplished by a swift, simplified appraisal of the offensive capacities of any life form coming within its limited range. If their natural weapons--claws, size, poison, fangs--rendered them potentially dangerous should the Mentor leave the ship, then the Challonari projected into their minds a simple disinterest in the environs of the ship, a reluctance to approach closer. If this failed, the reluctance impulse became tinged with fear, the intensity of the fear increasing until the desired retreat occurred.

If the approaching unknown was of sufficient intelligence to identify the disinterest-reluctance-fear impulse as a telepathic warning, then no further effort was made to turn it back, much less to hurl it back by force. That would have been unthinkable. An intelligent entity approaching the vessel would be welcomed and requested to identify itself, while notice of its approach would be delivered to the Challon Mentor. Stranger and Challon would then inevitably join in friendly greeting, for hostile suspicion was unknown among minds that lay open one to the other. Among the handful of known life forms of sufficient intelligence to possess highly organized communications, no exception to this natural rule existed. A meeting of minds was a meeting of friends.

* * * * *

Memory flinched, wavered, then flowed on into previously forbidden areas. The long outward voyage approached its turning point, its disaster point. He did not know how or why it had happened. Perhaps in their mutual absorption he and Andra became careless. They had entered a planetary system, he recalled, and he had casually manipulated the controls. His perceptive faculties detected a tiny spurt of flame somewhere out of sight in the control bank, then the potent engines reacted out of control for a critical instant near planetary mass. The swift restoration of control only eased the crash, the automatics taking over a fraction too late after the fragile living tissue was smashed against the walls.

The return of consciousness told him at once that he was in the presence of death. Lying paralyzed and helpless in a pool of his own fluids, he could see the jelly that had been Andra. He quietly resigned himself to the death that might yet take days to come. It would be welcome.