Then Cargill told about the circle of disciples, the spiritual conduit, and the death of Eathen.

Alec smiled on hearing the last. "So that's what you want from me. You tried to use one freak and he died and now you want to use another freak-me. Android or superman, they're both the same to you and your messiah. Less than human, so why not sacrifice them? Anna too. She's dead."

"She killed herself. To save you."

"To save herself."

"And you're afraid to do the same?"

"I don't need to."

"They are your fathers. Don't you owe the human race that much?"

"If the Inheritors are my fathers and the human race my mothers, why should I choose one over the other?"

"Anna did."

"Quit bringing her up. She failed."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Are you afraid?"

"Of what? Death? No---hardly."

"The war has already begun," Cargill said. "I'm afraid there's nothing any of us can do about that. But it will not last forever. Someday, the fighting will be done. What kind of world are we going to have then, Alec? Is it going to be the world as it ought to be? Who will rule? Who should? The decision is yours, Alec. Make your choice. The Inheritors? Or mankind?"

"So far man hasn't done so well. Maybe it's time to let someone else have a chance."

"Ah, you supermen," Cargill said, shaking his head. "Such a common error. Man has not failed. The fact is that he has, instead, succeeded quite gloriously. Your view is limited only to those things that are wrong. You can see the war and privation, the killing and hate-but what about the successes, the accomplishments? You must realize that the human race is still barely in its childhood. Do we kill small boys because they have failed to accomplish adult aims? No. Don't we indeed allow these boys a chance to attain manhood, the opportunity to grow and develop and mature? What one boy is permitted, surely a whole race deserves as well."

The plane had pierced the layer of clouds. Alec looked down, seeing-without surprise-the vast blue wastes of the Pacific Ocean. From one side, a speck of land appeared, slowly expanding in size. Cargill took firm control of the plane. The land mass grew larger.

Alec was thinking. Everything Cargill had told him was, he knew, only an echo of phrases he had once uttered himself. For years, he had lectured the Superiors on the duty they owed the human race.

Had he come to reject all that? In the past few months, hadn't he experienced so much that the simple solutions of the past now seemed absurdly obsolete?

But Cargill had given him an opening. Anna. Hadn't she chosen to act not from motives of ideal selflessness but rather from an understandable need to express her own personal freedom? Could he do any less than that? Succeed or fail, didn't he owe himself that much?

Outside the window, a paved landing strip had materialized. The plane circled above. Cargill began to speak softly into the phone. The plane dipped, nose turned down, hurtling toward the earth below. A moment later, the wheels struck. The plane bounced, quivered, then rolled casually to a stop.

Alec turned and touched Cargill on the shoulder and said, in a rush, "All right-you win-I'm going to try it."

"I won?" Cargill asked.

A small crowd was rushing the plane. Among the mass, Alec recognized Ah Tran's familiar, worn features. He smiled. Right on time. Cargill had got it down to the last possible second. So that was the reason for all those silly hesitations at the beginning of the voyage. Cargill didn't want Alec to have a chance to say no after he had once said yes. There was no time for changing his mind now.

"We both won," Alec said.

Cargill nodded and opened the door. He pointed at the crowd awaiting them.

"Let's go," he said.

Twenty-Four.

Alec Richmond sat in the center of the circle.

What he wanted to do was ignore everything that existed outside or beyond the limits of his own self. It was not a simple process. There were twenty-four in the circle. Except for Ah Tran, he knew none of them, who or what or why they were. Physically-and he turned his head to make sure-each seemed a rather insubstantial reflection of the person beside him. Whether male or female-and most were female-white or black-and only one was black---young or old-and only Ah Tran could be called old-such distinctions as these did not matter. Each of the disciples radiated a portion of himself, so that-in spite of his wishes---Alec could not keep them out entirely. After a time, he quit trying. It wasn't wholly necessary-not yet. He shouldn't deplete his strength too soon. The best way of handling the situation would be to wait for the mass to form, for the gestalt to be fused into a secure whole, and then, in a rush, he could easily obliterate that which was not relevant and then allow them (or it) to enter. What happened after that was more difficult to determine in advance.

He received snatches of information from around the circle. One of the women-barely a girl in fact-was anxious because, the night before, she had confessed to one of the men that she loved him and he had not, so far, chosen to make an answer. One man-for all Alec knew he might be the subject of the girl's concern-was very upset because the wife he had deserted in London some months past had recently communicated a threat to have him confined to a mental home because, she claimed, his action in depositing their joint fortune in a Swiss bank account belonging to Ah Tran (under a phony name) indicated a certain looniness on the part of the man. All sorts of questions assailed him. Would the war intervene and prevent his wife from obtaining the court order she sought? Maybe, with luck, London would be the recipient of that now famous Indonesian A-bomb. Or should he take steps to free the money and see that his wife received a fair share, thus preserving his own freedom for the nonce? There was another young man, who wondered what position his father-the ruler of a primitive island kingdom unfortunately located less than a hundred miles from the center of civilized power-would take now that the war had actually begun. Would he (the father) feel it necessary, for reasons of national or personal pride, to field an army? And, if so, would he then consider it necessary to follow ancient tradition and recall his son and heir to head that army? As he sat in the circle, supposedly trying to meditate, the son struggled to recall some of the lessons he had been forced to study in early childhood relating to the tactical theories of battlefield action. If he was going to be a general, he had to know the proper way to fight.

Alec felt all of them-not just these three. The radiations reached him simultaneously but he had no difficulty separating one from the others. Never before had his talent come so near assuming the aspects of real telepathy. Although each of the disciples was striving to meditate, seeking to discover some abstract location upon which to focus all attention, none had as yet wholly succeeded and thoughts continued to flow. Alec saw anxiety, pleasure, guilt, jealousy, anger, bitterness, fear, envy, disgust, avarice, serenity, joy, pride, and loathing. Alec focused his attention on Ah Tran and although the messiah had withdrawn more fully than the others his thoughts were clearly open. Alec was surprised at what he discovered but not really shocked. He restrained himself to keep from laughing.

Alec realized it was time for him to act. Reaching out with his own mind, he sought to enter the others. He went to the young woman first and drove out all thoughts of her self-proclaimed future husband. He cautioned the man to forget his wife for the time being and further calmed the anxious recollections of the son and heir. He went to each of the twenty-four, smoothing out their psychic wrinkles, slicing off any jagged mental peaks, filling in the gaping chasms, creating a flat but equal wholeness.

Then he drew back. It was time for him to wait. Needing something to fill the gap, he recalled the ancient fable of the dying man and decided to try to review his own life. It was an easy process making it rise up. The events of a lifetime flowed neatly behind his eyes. He assumed an attitude of disinterested observation. He might have been watching one of Anna's more speculative sculptures. The life story of an incomplete superman. A tale without plot, theme, significance, or hero. The most valid artistic aspect of the tale was its keen ambiguity. What, he wondered, was the point? What about the author? Where did he stand in relation to his material? Artistic objectivity seemed quite total. Alec failed to detect, within the story, so much as a hint of tragedy, comedy, farce, allegory, or irony. The sequence of events proceeded casually from cause to effect. A child was born, placed in a home, became a man, married, worked, and-finally-riding in a small plane-turned to the pilot and said that yes, he would do it. Minor characters came and entered. Subplots flickered, then faded. At last, he saw himself seated within the circle. Was this the end? He couldn't tell, but he stopped. Then he sat, witnessing what seemed to be an infinity of mirrors, endless dwindling layers of shining glass, one piled atop the other.

The twenty-four were gone. Instead, a single fused mass lay waiting. Alec trembled with sudden dread. Had he ever really expected this? They had succeeded. The mass beat against the hastily erected barriers of his mind, demanding entrance. For a time-involuntarily-he resisted.

Then he closed his mind, drawing back. It was too late now for saying no. He began to tear down his own self, moving through his mind from room to room, snuffing out any illumination he found. At last he came to a final lighted corner and, stopping here, he turned and raised the barriers, allowing the fused mass to rush through. It poured into his mind as thick as water, obliterating any final remnants of himself, drowning his soul, consuming him; and in the final flickering moments of his awareness, Alec reached out and grabbed the thing that had entered his mind and threw it high, like a rock, letting it soar upward and into the infinite unknown.

Then Alec Richmond was gone.

The fused spirit-departing the husk of the conduit---rose high. Propelled by the spark provided by the man once known as Alec Richmond, the mass sped into the heavens, reaching out, stretching toward a form of existence never previously known. The gestalt was whole now-fused and merged-and once it reached its proper dwelling place would assume a fixed location in the universe and be as truly and purely alive as any of its components once had been. Closer... it came closer... closer. The mass rushed through a world outside space, one lacking in color, light, and time. A place of utter nothingness and yet-near at hand-another place lay waiting, a world of synesthesia, where light was sound, color motion, and time space. The mass moved as an embryo now. Its existence seemed inexorable, as though firmly predestined, predicated upon events that had already occurred and could not be revoked.

But then the other thing came rushing down. In a flash of individual awareness, Alec knew: Ford! It came sweeping down-blackness-ripping into the fused mass, lodging there, caught. The moment contact occurred, Alec screamed, Father, father, father. He fought with all his might to drive this foul and ugly thing away. But he was burning up. As if he had been carried bodily through space and plunged into the heart of a flaming star. He could not fight. This thing was far stronger than himself. Father, father, father. The thing exuded an essence of such undiluted evil that Alec was suddenly certain that not only was there a Creator but a Destroyer and that this thing was as surely the son of the latter as Christ was born of God.

The thing of blackness permeated the fused gestalt. Alec glimpsed the dawning of his own end. He did struggle-yes-he resisted. But the barriers he erected to protect himself were as fruitless against this thing as the shield of a medieval knight raised against a cosmic bomb. The fusion began to shatter. Alec glimpsed them separately-the woman worried of her love, the heir and his father, the man and his wife, and even Ah Tran himself- rigid with fear. The broken gestalt limped through the summit of its arc, then turned downward. The earth rushed up, spinning, while Alec-alone-struggled to preserve some faint, lingering vision of life.

And then a flash of sudden whiteness swept over him and, with it, the sweeping pain was gone. A horrible weight was raised from his shoulders. The black thing was gone; the gestalt was set free. Quickly, though wounded, Alec struggled to fuse the mass together once more, to repair the injured fragments. He let it fall. The mass dipped, swung through the nadir of its arc, then soared high again. Alec died. He merged wholly with the mass. The place came near-land of synesthesia-paradise, heaven. It grew nearer. Closer. Closer. Close....

And then it was there.

The journey was over.

The gestalt paused, trembling with eager expectation, but then, realizing that anticipation was no longer necessary, settled down to await the beginning.

And, soon enough, it came.

Later, Inspector Cargill approached the room where the circle had met. With the key Ah Tran had given him, he unlocked the door and peeped inside. He discovered the twenty-three remaining disciples, Ah Tran, and Alec Richmond seated exactly as he had originally left them. He shook his head, but without any real disappointment. In truth, he had not expected anything more. Ah Tran was his friend and an intelligent young man. Perhaps he had indeed stumbled upon some important spiritual technique and if that method had not proved great enough to save the human race, then the failure in itself could hardly be termed exceptional. After all, in all the past centuries of human life, no other method or technique had been invented, created, or detected capable, by itself, of providing complete spiritual salvation. Why should Ah Tran be allowed to succeed where so many others had failed before him? There was only one difference this time. Before, there had always been other times in which to try again. But the days were over now and, with them, the human race as well.

Cargill entered the room in order to find out exactly what had occurred. He approached the circle. The eyes of the disciples were shut. Only Alec, in the center, lifted his gaze as Cargill came near.

"What happened?" Cargill asked, standing behind the circle. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," Alec said, and his voice was barely more than a whisper.