what happened. It wasn’t. It was, in all likelihood, quite accidental. The wave which carried the information is what we should be interested in, and that wave was generated by what we would previously have considered to be an impossible event. The very fact that the intensity of what we felt seems to have depended more or less on the inverse square of the distance between ourselves and the focal point surely suggests that we are dealing with a physical phenomenon whose psychical effects are really secondary.”
“That kind of division doesn’t make sense,” said Ulicon.
“Enzo, we communicate via electromagnetic radiation. We speak into a microphone, and at the other end, someone hears our words. The information is in one brain, which translates thought into sound. The microphone translates sound into electricity. The electricity is translated into modified radio waves, which are translated back into electricity, back into sound, and then back into information in another brain. We can’t try to understand such a process by what goes on in the brains, and only what goes on in the brains. Is that telepathy? Of course it is—information is transmitted from brain to brain. But in order to understand it we must understand the physics of it. We can’t consider it simply as a psychic phenomenon. To do so makes nonsense of it.”
“All right,” said Ulicon. “So it’s a problem in physics. So what?”
“We’ve already established,” said Rypeck, “that the Children of the Voice don’t use telepathy. What does that mean? It means that they aren’t normally able to translate ideas into a form which can be carried by the kind of energy which is involved in the event we’re trying to understand. It’s as though they were mute—unable to translate ideas into sounds so that they can be transmitted from one brain to another. This failure could be at one of several levels. They might lack the physical apparatus for so doing—as if they had no tongues. Or they might lack the coding capacity—that is to say, they have the tongues but not the language. Or they might lack the power—as if they couldn’t expel the breath through the throat in order to vibrate the vocal cords Any of these might be true. But what we must do is abandon the notion that there is something magical or supernatural about what happened, or about the kind of thing we have to deal with. We may have to introduce a whole new physics into our scientific understanding, but what we must not do is try to make do with a whole new metaphysics.”
“All that may be true,” complained Joth, “but it doesn’t help. You both seem obsessed with trying to find words to describe what happened. But that isn’t going to stop Heres destroying the Children of the Voice. He must be prevented from committing genocide. Isn’t that what we’re here for? Isn’t that what we’re trying to do. It’s what I’m trying to do.”
“It’s not so simple,” said Rypeck.
“It’s simple enough,” said Joth. “It’s saving millions of people from being wiped out because Heres and the Euchronians are scared. If they had been reasonable in the first place—if they’d only been prepared to recognize the fact that there are people in the Underworld who should be dealt with as people—then this whole thing wouldn’t have happened.”
“We cannot simply wait,” said Rypeck. “As Heres and millions of others see it—as Enzo and I see it, even—our minds and our identities are threatened with destruction. We know that it could be done. We want to see that it isn’t. If the threat is not to be faced in Heres’ way—a way which we and others consider to be extremely dangerous—then we must find another way to face it. If we are not to attack the threat at its source, then we must find a defense. That logic may be hard, but it is more appropriate than the ethical logic which you are trying to apply. If Enzo and myself are prepared to hear your case and support you, it is because we are afraid that Heres’ plan may precipitate the destruction it attempts to forestall, not because we want to save the Children of the Voice.”
Joth felt stricken. “When I was injured,” he said, in a very low voice, “my father fought for my life. He defended me against a medical committee which wanted to put me out of my supposed misery. My father won, and I have a face of steel and plastic. I was allowed to live. Sometimes, it has occurred to me to doubt whether or not my father did the right thing. I believed that the whole argument was one of ethics. After all, this is the Euchronian Millennium—the end-point of human ambition. And when my father wrote his book—I thought the argument then was a matter of ethics.
It occurs to me to wonder now—who did shoot my father? Who ordered it done?”
“Your father was killed by a man named Simkin Cinner,” said Ulicon, gently. “No one ordered it done. And you must see that whether you approve of our motives or not, the only way of getting what you want is our way. The only way that the people of the Underworld will be allowed to live is by our proving that the Overworld has nothing to fear from them.”
Joth looked him in the face, deliberately staring with his cold, metallic eyes. Ulicon could not meet the stare. No one could.
“I don’t think you can prove that,” said Joth. “Because you’ll always be afraid. The Euchronians have always thought that the world was theirs, because of the platform and the Plan. But now we know that it’s not true. The world belongs to the people of the Underworld. The Underworld is the world. Euchronia is a gigantic castle in the air. A dream. I think that if the Movement tries to destroy the Underworld, the Underworld will destroy the Movement, and the Overworld with it.”
“That,” said Rypeck, “is exactly what we fear.”
7.
The driver screamed, and the armored truck swerved to the left. There was a soft sound as the nearside wing sheared fungus, and then a harsher grating noise as the metal met something more solid. The vehicle came back off the wall into the road, its nose swinging as the driver jerked the wheel.
Germont was into the cockpit in a matter of seconds. By the glare of the headlights he could see something—someone—trying desperately to get out of the path of the vehicle. The driver had not hit the brakes.
It was too late. The truck hit the running figure and ran over the crushed body. Germont grabbed the wheel and held it steady, holding the vehicle on course. Finally, belatedly, the driver found the brake pedal with his foot, and the truck slowed to a halt.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Germont.
“He threw something!” gasped the driver, who was shaking like a leaf. “The lights just picked him up, and he threw a rock. It hit the canopy just in front of me—I thought it was coming through. I couldn’t help it.”
The transparent plastic had taken the blow comfortably—there was no mark. The driver had been startled rather than scared. But the shock had been considerable.
“Cut the engine,” said Germont curtly, and then turned to call to the men in the back: “Get on that searchlight! And the gun.”
He dropped back to snatch up the microphone by which he could broadcast to the convoy.
“Hold your positions,” he said. “Alpha-two, do you see what we ran over?”
“I see it,” came the reply. “I can’t make it out. Could be human. Do you want me to send someone out for a closer look?”
“No! No one gets out. Can you maneuver to get the body into the light from your headlights? I want all searchlights on. Scan the forest.”
“Jacob,” said the driver, speaking with unnatural quietness now that he was past the shock. “The road ahead. There used to be a cutting. The land’s slipped.
