Gordon R. Dickson (23 page)

The old man stared at him as if stricken with
a senile paralysis. His firm old face sagged a little, looking numb and grey.

"Kil—" he said, shakily,
"Kil—" gradually the shock seeped out of him and life flowed back.
His face tightened up again, became stern and hard.

"Lying won't help us
here," he said, harshly.

Kil saw through the harshness to the sudden
fear of a wasted lifetime lying beneath it.

"You
found it too, Chase," he said.
"Many times.
You just didn't recognize it, that's all."

"Kil—what
is it?" demanded McElroy. His voice burst in on the conversation with
sudden, staccato insistence.

Kil looked over at him for a moment.

"The children," he said.
"That's the only way anyone can achieve Sub-E; the way the children do
it."

"I don't see what you mean," said
McElroy, shaking his head, "You—"

"I did it," said Kil. "I
scrapped everything I believed and started over again, like a child, without
any ideas of my own. I was willing to do that, to get Ellen back. I would've believed
the moon was made of green cheese and the stars were pumpkins—" he looked
down at her beside him "if that would've helped me find her again."

"Yes indeed—fairy tales," murmured
Mali slumberously; but his eyes on Kil were anything but slumberous.

"No," replied Kil, again.
"Faith.
What Chase saw—the complete faith of a
child—coupled with something he didn't see, the urge of a child, the want of a
child, the complete necessity of a child to learn to do what its parents do. No
one works harder in' their life at anything than they do at growing up. Adults
forget what it was like—when they came once, helpless strangers into an alien
world of giants with unknown languages and customs."

"Faith," said McElroy, sharply.
"And effort.
That it?"

Kil looked at him without
answering for a moment.

"Part of it," he
said at last.

McElroy's eyes held him unyieldingly.

"What's the other
part?" he demanded.

The room trembled on the question. Across the
short distance that separated them, Kil was aware of Toy staring at him with a
strange curiosity in his black eyes.

He turned a little away from those eyes.

"There's something new in the world
today," he said. "A new time coming for us all—" a sadness thickened
his voice as he said it; a sadness neither for the good nor the bad of the
past, but the'familiarity of it, the part of his life it had been. And he could
see from the faces in the audience that his emotion had somehow got through to
them, too; so that, without understanding, they felt the sorrow as well. Their
quick empathy caught him up and drew him on, so that he went on to say more
than he had intended. "Already, the old ways are dying. Soon they'll be
dead and buried, in histories and monuments. And to the people in the new times
they'll be unreal, we'll be unreal, like something out of a book, or old woven
figures on a medieval tapestry." He looked aside at the bare and gleaming
wall of the amphitheater, feeling with unfocused eyes out of the new depths in
him, a vast inexpressible, irrational sorrow, like the remembered sound of
violins in the twilight winding the lost chords of memory around his throat to
choke him into silence.

Ellen
reached out and put her hand on his forearm; and the human .touch of her
brought him back to his purpose. He looked again at the people in the room,
thrusting the thought of Toy from him.

"A
new time," he said, crisply, "A new era—and Sub-E's only a by-product
of it. It's the whole of which Sub-E is a part.
The complete
maturity of the individual, with everything that implies.
The ultimate power, in Sub-E, for the individual to protect himself
against anything but himself.
And the ultimate sense of responsibility
in a fully developed empathic nature, to hold back from hurting others."

Mali laughed, almost
relievedly.

"And
this is what the John Q. Citizens of our time are on the verge of? Kill"
He shook his head and laughed again.

"But
you don't tell us how; how to get to it!" said Mc-Elroy, violently.

Slowly
Kil turned to him. The shorter man's face was forged into a mask of intent and
determination. Now was the time.

"For every person, it's different,"
said Kil. "Everyone has to find it for himself by facing up to the
weaknesses in
himself
and strengthening them.
My
weakness was that I didn't want to concern myself about the world. I
wanted it to trundle along by itself and not bother me; and I was set to do
just that until—" he glanced at Ellen, "I found there was something I
wanted more."

"And mine?" asked
McElroy.

"Don't you know?" said Kil.

McElroy frowned, the sharp effort of his
concentration cutting deep the short line between his eyebrows. "No—"
he said, "no—" Mentally, Kil crossed his finger.

"Think,
Dave," he said, gently. "Chance brought you into the world more
intelligent than most people. Impatience with their slower minds drove you from
them. But loneliness drove you back. And your full conscience blocked the
selfish path for you, that Mali's taken to personal power. So you took it on yourself
to work for and protect people. That way your conscience and loneliness were
both satisfied. But if the day comes at last when you're not needed any longer,
then you'll have to face yourself all over again, won't you? You'll have to
find a new purpose, a purpose—"

He
let his voice die, for something was happening to the other man. For a long
moment, as Kil spoke, there had been no change. And then abruptly, the spark of
awareness in McEIroy's eyes seemed to go back, to dwindle and recede, back and
back until it appeared to have gone off into some great personal infinity, on a
pilgrimage from which there would be no finding its way back, except by the
light of the lamp it searched for. For a long, remembered moment, an empty man
stood before them all; and then, slowly, McElroy came back once more to look
again out of his own eyes.

"Yes,"
he said; and sighed—a sigh that had some of Kil's earlier sorrow in it. Then,
like a tired, but satisfied man he straightened up and smiled at them, a queer,
sad, impish smile that had something of the lost Dekko in it. And he held out
his hand, cupped, toward the audience.

"Sub-E,"
he said; and abruptly—in one fractionary moment, one infinitesimally brief bit
of time—there sparked in his palm a tiny bit of fiery matter that was bright
and hot as only a part of the sun could be; and then was gone again.

And
so,
the
first
one
was
convinced.

A
long, pent-up breath soughed out through the room.

"Oh, God—" said Chase, shakily.

"Amen," said McElroy, lifting his
face to the old man. But Mali looked across the room to Kil and chuckled.
"And now you'll convert me, Kil?" he asked.

Kil slowly shook his head.

"I'd
give a great deal to," he said. "You've got the guts, and the
intelligence. If you'd face the fact that you're em-pathically blind, open up
that tight ego of yours—"

Mali laughed out loud.

"And
give up the world, no doubt," he said, "for a little extra insight?
No thanks, Kil. I'm not that much of a fool, to make that bad a bargain."

"Yes,"
said Kil, sadly. "I didn't think you would. You belong to the old days,
Mali, the days that're already dead, when selfishness was a survival factor.
It's twisted you so badly that you couldn't even love the one person in the
world it was possible for you to love: your sister. You could only dominate
her, warp her natural need for affection into nymphomania—and be the cause of
her death."

For
a second, Mali's face became a white and perfectly sculptured death-mask with
rage. Beside him, Toy turned his head to look suddenly at the smaller man,
searching Mali's rigid featuers with an abrupt., demanding interest, like a
dog, tense by a fox's hole, who suddenly thinks he sees the blackness stir
inside. But then, slowly, Mali's face relaxed and the color came back. He
smiled again.

"Sticks
and stones," he said, lightly. "No, you won't convert me, Kil. Or
anyone else."

"Yes
we will," replied Kil, quietly. "We'll go out from here, now; all of
us in the Project, one by one or two by two together, and talk to people in
the world as I've talked here. We'll show them the way to search
themselves
for the road to personal maturity;" he
paused, then added, "and Sub-E."

Mali stared at him.

"You
think I'd let you do that?" he said. "Make one move, Kil, in that
direction,
and I press my button. And what can you do about
that?"

"I can't do
anything," said Kil.

Mali
smiled,
a grim statue's smile.

"But," said Kil,
"there'll be someone—"

Mali stiffened.

"Who?"

Kil turned away.
Murderer!
his
mind shrieked soundlessly at him.
Murderer!
He clamped his jaw tight against the sickness in his heart and spoke.

"There'll
be a man," he said. "There'll be a man somewhere who's come to see
you clearly at last for what you are, and what you're doing to the world and
him. A man of dreams—" Kil's back was almost to Mali now. He spoke to the
audience, but without seeing them, "a man of frustrated dreams, who's
hunted his destiny for years, just wanting the one opportunity, the one chance
to fulfill them. And now, when his eyes are cleared, he'll see at last the
chance of it; the chance of making himself at last what he's lived to be and
never been. And then he'll stop you, Mali."

Behind Kil, Mali's voice
cut sibilantly across the silence.

"Are
you a complete fool, Kil?" he said.
"To dream of
martyrs?
And how can a martyr stop me?"

"I
don't know," answered Kil, without turning. "I don't know. But when
an idea becomes greater than a man; and a man is great enough to see that the
idea
is
greater than
himself
, then there's nothing to
stop him; not personal extinction or anything else. Because when you finally
come to it, there's no point in living unless you have something to live for.
The years of a lifetime are brief, after all. A man can fritter them away, or
miser them up, or sometimes if he wants he can spend them all, all at once and
together in one great purchase—" Kil looked out at the audience, "of
a dream."

Behind him, Mali laughed
loudly.

"Dream!
" ,
he said. "And dreamers!" Kil turned about
to face him; and he went on. "Dreamers, Kil, are psychotics, people with
poor, twisted, unnormal minds. I take good care they don't come too close to
me.

"Are
you sure?" said Kil. "How can you tell about men with dreams, Mali?
You've never had any. So how can you say what this dream of his can mean to one
man who carries the hope of the race in his hands, when he sees this moment of
his, this short, soon-lost moment of his come up? How can you tell what will
happen then?"

Toy
took a sudden, ponderous half-step forward and Mali, without looking, gestured
him back. Mali's eyes were still on Kil and they glittered feverishly.

"How can I tell?" he echoed.
"Because I know what dreams are made
of.
They're
made of air, less than air, of nothing.
Only that."

"Only that?"
asked Kil. "When they're inside a man?"

Mali
laughed again; and his laughter rattled wildly about the walls. He threw his
arms wide, leaving the box at his waist open and unhidden, except by the
impenetrability of his armor.

"Attack
me, then!" he cried. "You're the dreamer, Kil. Draw first, hero, and
stop me; stop me now before I reach down and send this world you want so badly,
to hell! Attack me! Conquer me! Conquer me with your dreams!"