Clifford Simak - Project Pope

The yelling and the yammering continued in the street. Were they hunting her? she wondered. Must they feel compelled to look again upon the evidence of the great miracle that had not come to pass? The fools, she thought, the fools!

'There are certain things about it for which there are no words. A culture so ancient, so self-sufficient that it operated on a system of logic that was so far advanced over human knowledge and capability as the fusion of atoms was advanced beyond the chipping of stones into primitive tools. A group of cubes sitting on a great green plain manipulating symbols and diagrams — playing a complicated game or solving problems? Or were the symbols and diagrams the visual manifestations of alien thought, perhaps a band of philosophers sitting around in an informal seminar arguing hair-splitting hypotheses, a mere passing of idle time or the long, slow process of formulating new universal truths? Could the equation folk, in time long past, have penetrated to the edge of space and the end of time and now, retreated back to the place where they first had set out, wherever that might be, now be engaged in trying to pull together and evaluate all that they had seen and sensed?

What astonishment, she thought, must they have felt to be so rudely visited by Jason, a life form similar to others they may have seen in earlier times and now forgotten, or a life form they had missed entirely and had never seen. No wonder they had acted as they had — no wonder they had gone wild with flashing, running symbols and racketing diagrams, no wonder they had built a house of diagrams to hide Jason from their sight. Yet they had given him a gift as one might give a gift to a stranger who came visiting.

She settled back, trying to calm herself, to pull herself together. It was then she saw the flicker in one corner of the shadowed room. I'm seeing things, she told herself — now I'm seeing things.

It was no longer, she saw, a flicker, but a hazy globe of shining dust, a tiny globe of sparkles.

— Whisperer? she asked, speaking to the flicker instinctively as Jason told her he had spoken to him.

— You can see me, Jill?

— I see you, Whisperer.

— And you can hear me?

— Yes, I hear you.

She was numb with wonder, thinking: It is impossible; Jason never even hinted he might come to me or, even if he did, that I could see and talk with him.

— Jason said leave you out of it, said Whisperer. I told him I could talk with you and he said, no, to leave you alone. But, Jill, I cannot leave you out of it. I must come to you.

— It's all right, she said.

— You may see differently than Jason. You may see the better.

— See what the better?

— The equation people.

— No, said Jill. Oh, no!

— Why not? Would you be frightened?

— Yes, I would be frightened. These are terrifying creatures.

— You owe them your face.

— Yes, I owe them that.

— Jason brought back a gift with him. They'll make you a gift as well. They have much to give.

— Why should they give us anything?

— I do not know, said Whisperer. With Jason I dig very deep, but not deep enough.

— Jason did not tell me that.

— Jason could not share it all with me. He could not grasp the wonders that I found. Nor could I grasp all he found. We are very different minds.

— And I? I'll understand no more.

— But differently, perhaps. Jason could see what you could not, and you see what Jason could not.

— Whisperer, I could not go to the equation world. I did not see the cube.

— I've been there, said Whisperer. That is quite enough. It is imprinted on me. I can find the way.

— Whisperer, I don't know. Whisperer, I can't!

— No need to fear. Jason and I came back. There was no danger to us.

— How do you know there was no danger? The two of you might only have been lucky.

— It is important, Jill.

— I'll have to think about it.

— Jason said leave you out of this. He said not to bother you. And I have bothered you.

— I told you it was all right.

— I will urge no further. If you say no, it's no.

I can't, Jill told herself. I'd be petrified. And there is no need of it. Jason has been there. There is no need for me to go. And yet…

— I've never in my life, she told Whisperer, backed away from anything. Not from End of Nothing. Not from anything. If there was something that I should see, I always went and saw it.

That was the truth, she thought. She had always gone — the good reporter, shaking in her shoes, perhaps, scared of what she'd find or how it would turn out. But she'd gone. She'd gritted her teeth and gone. There had been times when it had been very hairy, hut always she'd come back, with her notebook filled with jotted words, with rolls of exposed film, with her nerves rasped raw and her mind seething with ideas.

— All right, she said, I'll go. You can take me, Whisperer? Even if I've seen no cube?

— First I must join your mind. We must be-as-one.

She hesitated, rebelling against another entering her mind — especially another that she did not know, another that was so unlike any creature she had ever seen before.

Yet this strange creature, this Whisperer, had been in Jason's mind. 'I did not know that he was there, Jason had said. 'Yet I was sure he was. At times I could feel him, faintly, but actually never was aware of him. There was, I think, that extra dimension of myself, but I was scarcely aware of it. Just a greater power, a deeper sense of knowing.

— All right, she told Whisperer.

And she was in the equation world. There was no getting ready, no preliminaries, no drawing a deep breath.

There, as Jason had described it, was the flat green carpetlike expanse of surface melding imperceptibly with the soft lavender of sky. On the green carpet of the surface sat the cubes of the equation world, brilliant in their color and with the semblance of life afforded them by the quiver and the flicker of the changing diagrams and the smooth, even flowing of equations.

Hell, she thought, I should have brought my cameras. She could have slung them around her neck and taken them, for they would have come along. Her clothes had come along with her, she was not standing naked — and if the clothes could travel with her, the cameras could as well.

How stupid it had been to forget the cameras!

'Whisperer, she said aloud, thinking to ask him if he knew by what means they had traveled there. But he did not answer and within her mind there was no sign of him. That, she told herself, was no more than she should have expected. Jason had told her how it had been with him. He also had called out to Whisperer and the pinch of diamond dust had been nowhere to be seen because he had not come separately, but had come with Jason and was somewhere inside of him, presumably the scattered atoms of him mixed with the atoms of Jason's human mind, and this, of course, was what had happened with her as well.

— Whisperer, she said. Damn you, answer me. Give me some sign that you are with me.

Whisperer did not answer.

Was it possible, she asked herself, that the little twerp had thrown her into this place while he had stayed behind? She thought about this and it appeared unlikely. Whisperer was an eager beaver, hell-bent on an exploration of the universe. To explore it, apparently, he had to have a guide to show him where to go. Although once he had been shown the way, he would know the way and could go there by himself, or take someone else along, as he had taken her.

— All right, she said, go on hiding. Go on playing these silly games of yours. I can get along without you.

Why had she ever come? she wondered. Because she was a dedicated reporter who could not allow anything to happen if she wasn't in on it? Because she wanted to stand upon the ground on which Jason had stood, to find here a new strand that would tie her the closer to him? God knows, she thought, there is no need of that. Or had she swallowed Whisperer's pitch — that she might see things that Jason had not seen, thereby gaining a greater understanding of the equation world?