"Shut up!" Turner said. "No—stop it, Mayall!" The knife-blade quivered at Harding's throat. Mayall paused rigidly, the microphone halfway to his lips, eyes on the knife as he struggled against almost unbearable compulsion.

  The last thing Harding saw was Mayall's thin lips moving as he hissed into the diaphragm. Then darkness fell—total blindness, sudden and absolute.

  For the second time in ten minutes Harding had a strong illusion of just having died. His first idea was that the knife at his throat had gone in, and this blindness was the first failure of the senses that presages total failure—but he could still hear. The surf still whispered on the far-off shore. Invisible gulls mewed overhead and Turner's wheezing breath caught with a gasp close to his ear.

  He could still feel. Sunlight was warm on his cheek, and Turner's thick arm across his throat jerked with some sudden shock of astonishment. Turner grunted and the arm went a little slack.

  Then all Harding's reactions snapped into instant alertness. Somehow Mayall had given him this one split-second chance to save himself if he could. Theoretically, he knew what had happened. Frequency juggling was a familiar trick, and phase-cancellation of vibration must have been the process Mayall's hiss into the mike set in motion. The frequencies of the visual spectrum-were being cancelled now, by a broadcast of other frequencies in the right phase. But visual only, since he could feel the sun's infrared heat on his face. If Mayall had an infrared viewing apparatus handy Harding would be clearly visible now.

  He worked it all out neatly in a corner of his mind while his body sprang almost of its own accord into this instant's hesitation that slowed Turner's reactions. Harding's right arm struck upward and outward inside the curve of Turner's arm as it held the knife to his throat. He felt the pressure of the blade cease, and Turner grunted heavily as Harding's elbow drove into the pit of his stomach. For an instant they struggled fiercely together in the blinding dark. Then Harding sprang free.

  Brush crackled and heavy feet thudded rapidly on the ground, diminishing in distance as Turner, gasping for breath, blundered away through the dark. Harding stood still, breathing heavily, feeling sunlight warm on his face as stared about in the intense and total blackness.

  The very completeness of it told him one interesting fact—there must be a roof over the island. It was almost impossible to create darkness in the open air. In all probability some intangible dome of ionization hooded Akassi in, something that could be varied at will, used to reflect downward any frequency-beams aimed up, a simple matter of angle-of-incidence calculation you could work out in your head. Somewhere on the island a device was broadcasting a beam in the right frequency to cancel the vibrations of light blazing down from the hot, invisible tropic sky.

  Mayall's voice spoke out of the darkness, after a long, reluctant pause.

  "Are you all right, Ed?"

  Harding laughed at the note of hope in the question.

  "Disappointed?" he asked.

  Mayall's breath went out in a long sigh. "I hoped he'd get you. I did what I could, but I was praying for the knife to go in. At least, I can get Turner."

  "Don't," Harding said with some urgency. "Let's have the light again, George. But don't kill Turner yet. I want to talk to you first. If he dies the whole espionage network he controls will fall apart, and we're going to need it. Do you hear me?"

  The darkness went crimson before Harding's eyes, quivered, shredded and was gone. Day was blinding. He put up a hand to shield his eyes, seeing through his fingers Mayall's sardonic grin, the lips turned downward in a familiar inverted grimace.

  "I hear you," he said. He lifted the microphone and spoke into it, his eyes still holding Harding's gaze. "Sector Twelve," he said into the mike. "Twelve? Mayall speaking. There's a fat man crossing the hills toward you. Kill him on sight." He lowered the mike and showed his teeth at Harding. "You've got maybe fifteen minutes to live," he said. "Just until I get my Team together and dope out a way to kill you. Maybe I can't beat the compulsion alone. But there are ways. I'll find one."

  "You're cutting your own throat if you kill Turner."

  "It's my throat," Mayall said. "I give the orders here. He can't get away." Suddenly he laughed. "This island's a living thing, Harding. A reacting organism with sense organs of its own and an ionized skin over it. I've got surrogate sensory detectors all over the place. They can analyze anything on the island down to its metallic ions and transmit the impulses back to … to headquarters. I've set up an optimum norm, and any variation will put the whole island in motion. Turner's like a flea on a dog now. The island knows where he is every second."

  "We're going to need him," Harding said.

  "You're going to be dead. You won't be interested."

  Harding laughed. "Never very practical, were you, George? You were always a bright boy, but you theorize too much. You need somebody on your Team like me. Only luck kept Turner from drilling you. Luck—and me. Look at you, standing there unarmed. What was the idea, coming out like that? The island might have been crawling with Turner's men."

  Mayall grinned his wide, thin-lipped, inverted grimace.

  "Ever have hallucinations, Ed?" he asked, his voice suddenly very soft. "Maybe that's the real reason they threw you off the Team. Ever hear voices out of nowhere? Look at me closely, Ed. Are you sure I'm real? Are you sure?"

  For a moment longer the tall, gaunt, stooped figure stood there vividly outlined in the sun. Then Mayall smiled and—faded.

  The trees showed through him. The silver bullet of the spaceship towered visible behind the ghost of George Mayall. The ghost went dim and vanished—

  Mayall laughed softly and unpleasantly out of nowhere.

  Harding was aware for a moment of a tight coldness at the pit of his stomach. It couldn't happen. It hadn't happened. He had dreamed the whole thing, or else—

  "O.K., George," he said, trying to hide the sudden limpness of his relief. "I get it. Where are you, then? Not far, I know. You can't project a tri-di image more than a hundred feet without a screen—or five hundred with relays. Let's stop playing games."

  Low down in the brush Mayall laughed thinly all around him. Harding felt the hair creep on his scalp. It was not the laughter of a sane man.

  "Start walking," Mayall said. "Toward the settlement over the hill. By the time you get there, I'll have a way figured out to kill you. Don't talk. I'll ask questions when I'm ready."

  Harding turned in silence toward the gap in the hills.

  From the hilltop he could see the settlement glinting in the sun. There was the square Integration Building with its familiar batteries of vanes on the roof, and the familiar tower thrusting a combing finger up against the sky. Long sheds lined the single street. There was a fringe of palm-leaf huts around the buildings, and farther off, over a couple of rolling green hills, the lofty tower of the spaceship balanced like a dancer on its hidden fins.

  Still farther out were black rock cliffs, creaming surf and a lime-green sea with gulls wheeling over it. Brown figures briefly clad in bright colors moved here and there about the buildings, but Harding saw no sign of Mayall. Only the machinery thumping endlessly at mysterious tasks throbbed like the island's heart.

  He started slowly downhill. A palm tree leaning stiffly forward over the path rustled, cleared its throat with a metallic rasp, and said:

  "All right, Ed. First question. Why did they throw you off the Team?"

  Harding jumped a little. "Where are you, George?"

  "Where you won't find me. Never mind. Maybe I'm in my getaway ship, all set to take off for Venus. Maybe I'm right behind you. Answer my question."

  "Rugged individualism," Harding said.

  "That doesn't mean anything. Go on, explain yourself. And keep walking."

  "I was kicked off," Harding said, "because I was so different from you. Exactly your opposite, as a matter of fact. You were the leader of the Team and you held the rest down to your level because you weren't adaptable—remember? It didn't show up because you were leader and set the pace. Only when a new man came in did your status-quo limitations show. The new man, in case you've forgotten, was I."

  "I remember," the palm tree said coldly.

  "You fizzled. I skyrocketed," Harding said. "I had too many boosters. They finally figured I was getting into abstract levels far beyond the Team, which is as bad as being too slow. So I was fired for undependable irrationality, which I prefer to think of as rugged individualism. Now you know."

  Ten feet ahead a flowering shrub chuckled.

  "That's very funny. You were the stupid, unadaptable ones—you and the rest. You couldn't realize I was simply developing along a new line, a different path toward the same goal. I wasn't lagging behind. I was forging ahead of you. Look around you. This island's the living proof. You kicked me into a pretty unpleasant gutter and I pulled myself up by myself. Not easily. I built a living island here. You can have six feet of it, and that's all."

  The bush sighed. "I've dreamed of killing you," it said, rustling gently. "But I'd have left you alone if you'd stayed out of my way. I've never forgotten, though. And I'm going to get even, when the time comes—with you, and the rest of the Team, and Earth. And Earth!"

  Harding whistled softly. "So that's the way it is," he said to the empty air.

  The moss underfoot said bitterly: "That's the way it is. I don't care what happens to Earth now. Earth's overreached itself. Let it blow up. It and its Teams. I'll throw a shield around Venus that no power in the solar system can crack."

  "Maybe that's your trouble, George," Harding told the moss. "You think in terms of shields that can't be cracked. Sooner or later the pressure from within may force a crack. Growth can't be stopped. That was what went wrong on Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda, remember?"

  The moss was silent.

  "Anyhow, it checks," Harding went on, trudging downhill. "Central Integration when I … ah … left the Team, was sending out dope-sheets on an enormously complex plan under way on Venus. That would be you, George. Stuff too complex to figure out and counter without a lot of work among the Teams linked up in units. Obviously the Secessionists had themselves an Integrator at last. It didn't take a Round Table session to find out who they'd subsidized."

  The moss laughed.

  "It was a mistake to let me go," it said. "Do you want to know the real reason? It's the reason why no Integrator that Earth ever sets up can control Venus. The basic logic's wrong. Their key principles are based on Venus being a social satellite of Earth—and the balance has shifted. I've shifted it, Ed. Venus is no protectorate planet any more. That's Apollonian logic. Not a single Integrator on Earth is based on the Faustian viewpoint, which in this case is perfectly simple—Venus is the center of the new Empire!"

  "You think so?" Harding murmured.

  "I made it so! Every single premise the Earth Integrators base on a … a geocentric society has got to turn out wrong. Or multiordinal, anyhow—valid only as long as the truth of Earth's power is maintained. I stopped believing in the old truth-concepts of the Earth Empire—and they threw me off the Team.

  "But right here on Akassi is the only Integrator that works from the basic assumption that Venus is the System's center."

  "All right," Harding said calmly. "Maybe I agree with you."

  "No," an airy whisper said above the whisper and rustle of a red-flowering vine that hung across the path. "Not necessarily. How do I know you've really been kicked off the Team? How do I know you're not a Trojan horse?"

  "There isn't much you can be sure of, is there?" Harding asked. "Your Team here can't be very efficient. You've forgotten basic psych. Why do you suppose you've dreamed of killing me?"

  "Prescience," the vine said quietly.

  "Displacement," Harding told it. "Who would you be wanting to kill? It couldn't be—yourself?"

  Silence.

  "What kind of a Team have you got, anyhow?" Harding asked after a moment. "If it can't answer a simple question like that, it can't be worth much. Maybe you need me, George, even more than I need you."

  "Maybe I haven't got a Team," the vine said behind him, in a die-away voice as the distance lengthened between them.

  "You'd be a maniac if you hadn't," Harding told the empty air flatly. "You've got to have a Team, if you're operating an Integrator. One man couldn't keep up with it. You need a minimum of seven to balance against a machine like that. You have a Team, all right, but an incompetent one. I'll tell you exactly what you're got—either discarded misfits or untrained men. That's all there is available. And it isn't good enough. You need me.

  "You're not wanted here," a clump of bamboo said hissingly, rubbing its fronds together. "If my backers had needed another Integration man, they'd have got in touch with you. I'm all they need."

  Harding laughed. "Thought of a way yet to kill me?"

  The bamboo did not reply. But presently a patch of gravel hissed underfoot and said, "Go down into the village. There'll be a door open in the Integration Building." And a lizard that looked curiously down at him from the top of a flat stone appeared to add in Mayall's voice, "Maybe I've found a way—"

  Harding pushed the heavy door wider and looked into the green-shadowed room. Sunlight filtering through leaves outside its broad windows made the dim air seem to flicker. Frond-shaped shadows moved restlessly upon banked controls which were the nerve-endings of the island.

  In the center of the web George Mayall sat, his sunken eyes glittering, grinning above his beard at the door.

  Harding stood still just inside the door and drew a long, deep breath. The smell of the room, oil and steel, the feel of it around him, the faint throb that traveled from the floor up his body and blended with the beating of his heart, made him a complete man again as he had not been for a long time now. He stood in the presence of the Integrator. He was the Integrator.

  He closed his eyes for a moment When he opened them again he saw that Mayall's sardonic grin had widened and drawn down at the corners.

  Harding nodded. "Alone?" he asked.

  "What do you think?" Mayall said, and his glance flickered once toward the inner door at his elbow—the door without a knob, but a flat plate inset where the lock should be. Harding could see through the steel panels as if they were glass, because he knew so well what the little black-walled room inside looked like, with its tri-di screen and its table and its chair.

  "You've been here all along?" Harding asked. "Are you here now?"

  Mayall only grinned. Harding took out a cigarette, lit it and inhaled smoke. He strolled forward casually toward the inner door, glancing around the big room as he crossed it. A control room is seldom as spectacular as the operational devices it controls. Most of the equipment looked familiar. It was what lay out of sight that interested Harding most. For this was only the antechamber to the Integrator.

  "That's far enough," Mayall said after a moment. Harding stood still, the smoke from his cigarette wreathing ahead of him toward the man behind the control desk. Mayall swung his hand edge-on, chopped through a swirl of smoke. His grin turned down farther at the corners.

  "I'm real," he said. "Don't bother with smoke tests. Clever, aren't you? Stand still, Harding. Don't come any farther. I've got one more question to ask you and then—well, we'll see."

  "Fire away," Harding said, looking at the door with the plate in it.

  "Second question, then," Mayall said. "Second and last. Just what did you hope to accomplish by coming here?"

  Harding blew smoke at him. "It could be almost anything, couldn't it?" he said. "Maybe I came to ask you a question. Could you guess what it is? Or would you rather I didn't speak at all?"

  Mayall regarded him with narrowed eyes, burning black in hollow sockets.

  "Go on," he said after a pause.

  Harding nodded. "I thought you'd say that. Maybe you've been expecting somebody with—a question. Put it like this. You say all Integration has to fail that doesn't figure Venus as the center of the social system. Right?"

  "I said that," Mayall agreed cautiously. "What's your question?"

  "Why Venus?" Harding inquired.

  "What?"

  "You're not stupid. You heard me. Why Venus?"

  Mayall licked his lips suddenly, with a quick, flickering motion, and glanced once at the big TV screen on the wall, nervously, as if the blank screen might be watching him.

  "There are other Thresholders," Harding went on. "You just pointed out that if your backers had needed another Integration man they'd have got in touch with me. Well, maybe somebody did. Not necessarily your boys, but—somebody." He blew more smoke. "Shall I go on?"

  Mayall did not speak a word, but after a second he nodded jerkily.

  "What you've got here is priceless," Harding said. "The group you back has a chance to win independence from Earth. So I just wondered … now, you take Ganymede, for instance. A flourishing little colony they've got up there. Doing a lot of exporting these days. A very rewarding business. Plenty of money in it. What would you say, George, to setting up a little problem in the Integrator to see if you could figure Ganymede as a social center?"

 

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