Man of the World by Robert Gibson

31: campaign

During the first seconds of dumbfoundment, a reflex of disbelief came to Midax’s aid.
  Surely, said his mind, she cannot have meant never. She must only have meant…
  What, though?
  More seconds ticked on by, and now he faced the fact that Rermer would not lie to him, nor would Pjerl lie to Rermer, about a matter of such importance.
  Thus, disbelief evaporated and the full blow fell.
  Clear ahead and all around, a lifescape of desolation, a sense of being helplessly alive in a world without walls to pound on, surrounded him, denying him the shelter of hope. Self-pity was forbidden; oblivion unobtainable; nothing remained. Except the gangrene of memory, and how to cut it out?
  Midax smiled a manic smile. Dead men have a kind of power. Having nothing to lose, can help to achieve things.
Not the old contentment, though!  He had been down that road before, during his years of studious loneliness, before he met Jerre: years of balanced, limited contentment, lit wanly by the fading prospect that life might bring achievement at some unspecified, distant date; that useless light that had beckoned him on, from a greater and greater stretch ahead, not taken not too seriously after a while… it had seemed to suffice at the time, but he absolutely could not go back to it.
  Or was he seriously suggesting to himself that he should function through compensation again? This time, no doubt, by means of the bleak compensation of fame? Like one of those pathetic politicians who binge on applause as a substitute for love? They never got enough to satisfy their craving, thought Midax, and I would be in the same miserable plight as they.
  Better look for something better and more exciting. Start now, this very minute. It’s either that or retire to your rooms and weep yourself empty.
  He realized that his jaw was still hanging open. He shut his mouth. Then he opened it again.
  “I think,” he said to Rermer, “I’ll go out for a walk.”
  Rermer nodded and Midax left the room, left the building and emerged into the noon sunshine of Serorn.
  He wandered off into the circle of parkland where the creamy stone temple to philosophy rayed its masonry wings, each one a frontage of about two hundred and fifty feet of old blocks. He strained feebly as he trudged, as if to inhale the golden light. The aesthetic sprawling tiers, comfortably enfolding the sunlit lawns, invited him to become one with the tourists and staff on their lunch breaks, the folk who strolled along the bordered paths or sat on benched mounds, imbibing the serenity.
The wider panorama concurred with the mood. The whole of P'Arlcena was preserved by law from ugly development, and reflected the style of the K’tramboleion which stood unchallenged on the summit of the city’s highest hill. So the central focus of contemplation and dignity reared its spires and octagonal towers amid the equally glorious modern forms lower down; a cleansing shower of images to wash the ashes from Midax’s burnt-out mind.  Bicycling along the streets, to and fro, were students and professors who would not be the slightest bit interested to learn that a certain Pjerl Lhared had just announced (at second hand) that she had “never been in love with” a man whom she had allowed to believe otherwise for the past five years… They would shrug, “What’s so important about this Pjerl character?” Good for them, thought Midax. They’d be right to shrug. And then a fiercer light broke in upon him, further to crack his shell of self-concern, to remind him of what his position really was, of the power and influence he wielded as the only person known to be able to roam at will in Glight. For quite a while now he had been standing in history’s full glare, and was it not high time that he should admit the situation and stop being a kind of sleepwalker? Stop wandering dreamily under the spotlight? Ridiculous – he had responsibilities! The drastic thing that he had done to the world meant that duty called him to function –
  How, though?
According to the proverb, time heals all things, but could Time be trusted to get on with the process fast enough?  He would not put it past Time to go on stretching callously ahead for years and years while recollections stabbed him daily. No good, that. One might be drawing one’s old-age pension before heartbreak wore out naturally.
  Some more efficient process was required.
  Rather than wait for loss to fade of itself, he must drive it out with gain.
  That meant finding a greater love than his feeling for Pjerl.
  Which meant finding a love greater than could be provided by any human being. As soon as he expressed the matter in these terms he knew the answer did, in fact, exist - but it had no name. It was a thing which he had neglected for most of his adult life, a thing which his surface mind had got used to forgetting.
  Only when memory glanced aright, could he still catch sight of it with his inner eye. From across the gulf of decades it glimmered: a brightness, a something, a superluminal non-sense. It cadged a lift from ordinary light, to inject its wonder into the glory of the sunsets which as a small boy he had watched with spellbound awe, believing the glory to be a place.
  A place up in those clouds, which you might actually reach if you could fly there… though even then he had probably known that this beyond-ness was not the ordinary kind of “place”. Whatever it was, it had possessed the most powerful pull. Even the wanting of it was sweeter than the actual attainment of anything else.
  Unfortunately, it was also the most unreachable thing. After all, how could a spiritual shimmer – borne by its carrier wave of sunset glow – be reached, be touched? How could you grasp and hold such a thing?
  Midax licked dry lips. Of course, I do possess one extra advantage now.
  I’ve gained a certain particular access…
  The thought was laced with as much fear as hope.
  Having found a way into the dimension of Glight, he had so far used it for a banal, practical purpose. Until this moment he had never seriously weighed the prospect of investigating it.
  Admittedly, he had toyed with the idea. But – just passing through was scary enough. Glight was not, after all, anything like a glorious sunset. In fact Glight was not a place he particularly liked to be in, or even to believe in. He entered it at need; he walked through it, or rowed across its pond, with an averted mind. This cringe of the intellect restricted him to using the box-scape as a map only. To him, so far, it was just a giant 3-D diagram which somehow linked disparate parts of the ‘real’ world. And he still doubted his courage to do more.
  To face the thought of what it really was – no, he was hardly ready for that.
  He reckoned without Xapler Twick.
  “It’s obvious you don’t want to talk about this, and ordinarily I would not press the point, but…”
  “But…?” demanded Midax, not going quite so far as to tell Xapler to mind his own business. The Professor was, in a way, offering such comfort as a friend should offer.
  They sat in the bay window of the Professor’s rooms. Midax had allowed himself to be shepherded here, after Xapler had encountered him walking aimlessly in the park. An offer of “tea, philosophy and sympathy” had sufficed to coax a forlorn Discoverer.
  Though he had not had any intention of confiding his recent thoughts to anyone, Midax had allowed the gist of them to be drawn out of him.
  Now the professorial finger was wagging.
  “You,” frowned Xapler, “may have discovered a life-saver.”
  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
  “I refer to the possibility that you may have something of real use in the fight against Romance.”
  “Slow down, Professor –”
  “Let me finish. You have just hinted to me that you will get over your grief sooner than you feared, because of some greater thing that you have found.”
  “But I haven’t said what this greater thing is.”
  “Of course you haven’t. How could you, at this stage? But – as I have always suspected – you are the Discoverer in more ways than one. So far, you have got away with saying astonishingly little about this Higher Dimension of yours, this “Glight” (as people call it without really wanting to know what it actually is). But you’ve started something that isn’t going to stop. Something that your intellect surmises – correctly – will do you some good. That being the case, I suggest you have a duty to allow its benefits to other victims too…”
  “Victims of Romance? Other idiots like me, you mean?”
  The Professor’s mouth hardened. “Worse. Don’t you dare pretend that you’ve come out of this badly. You must be aware than some people, weaker than you, go so far as to do away with themselves when they lose their One and Only. It’s a pernicious doctrine, this Romance. Pernicious.” He glared as he chomped out the syllables.
  “And you lay the deaths at Boalo’s door,” remarked Midax. “You’re such a heretic, Xapler, I don’t know how you are allowed to keep your rooms here.”
  “Well now, I wouldn’t call myself completely anti-Boalo,” replied Xapler; “I concede that the fellow was right in his most important message, namely, that there is a world which transcends this one. Where he went disastrously off the beam, was in his doctrine of love – if it really was his doctrine and not a later interpolation by one of his hack disciples. I mean his insistence on the one-and-only Other Half… a doctrine which fabricates illusions, ruins lives and can actually kill the weak. Where he thought he got it from, I never could imagine. To pronounce that when you fall in love you are subconsciously recognizing someone you knew in some other world… that’s so crazy, you wonder whether an intelligent chap like Boalo could ever have dreamed it up himself.”
  After this tirade, Xapler fell silent for a moment; then he grinned. “You threw me off the track! Let’s start again. You’re plainly on to something – though you don’t want to say what it is.”
  “Because I don’t know what it is.”
  “But we can assume that it’s to do with your… er…
journeying ability?”
  Midax nodded slowly. “Which isn’t a thing I can teach, except by rote – since I don’t understand it myself.”
  Xapler leaned forward. “So – you don’t understand it, you just do it. And in any case you are not going to be allowed to disseminate your abilities among the general public. The world can just about tolerate one Midax Rale; no more. So when you open your research centre –”
  “My what?”
  “ – you must make sure your trainees just go on circular tours of the Higher Dimension….”
  “Professor, what in Bo’s name are you talking about?”
  “…coming back to the spot from which they set off. Circular! No economics, no commercial transportation; just pure research. And so the governments of the world will not be afraid of you. They will leave you alone, while you and your colleagues, of whom I shall be one, find out the truth about our universe.”
  Midax heaved a heavy sigh.
  “Nothing like having one’s future mapped out. I wonder what the Director would think. You’re a whole lot more outspoken when he is not present.”
“Outspoken? As a matter of fact I’m just slightly in advance of the majority. You’ll find – as soon as you get started – massive support for your organization: support both from the Spiritual Congress people, the Gevaltigall God-botherers, and from the scientific community, for separate reasons of their own. The one lot want Transcendence, the other lot want Dimensions. Glight can promise either, depending how you look at it. Therefore, though they’ll of course think that they’re talking about different things, both groups will be equally on your side, for a while at least. Mull it over,” smiled Xapler. “And then do it. I see no other way for you. Consider what’s been done to you; and consider, Midax Rale, that you, unlike every other wretch who has ever been squashed by Romance, are in a position to hit back.”
  The Civic Hall in Tarestu, fourth city of Serorn, was buzzing like a hive.
  To entice the curious was the easy part. No problem at all. Midax had advertised, he had hired the hall, he had issued tickets. He had done all this without committing himself to anyone, without spelling out his purpose to a soul – he had merely made it clear that he would make it clearer tonight. Meanwhile, part of him felt sick and appalled, as though he were planning a great crime; yet it was high time that he sought organizational assistance, and in return he would share what he found. That was the logic of his mental balance-sheet. A justification which propelled him through the moral fog wreathing his plan...
  Taking his courage in both fists he strode onto the podium.
  Some of the audience quietened; others turned up the volume of their acclamations, their demands – until he raised a hand. Then there were cries of “Shush!” while cameras flashed.
  “Ladies and gentlemen,” boomed Midax through his microphone, “I had better admit, straightaway, that the project for which I need your help is very much of a gamble.” He let that sink in for a moment. He must impress upon them that he and they were all in it together, if they were in it at all. He continued, “I can give you no idea of the probability of success, nor do I know the time frame within which success might arrive.”
  While he took a breath, he paused again. They were wearing reasonably intelligent looks on their faces. Encouraged, he resumed, “I can guarantee one thing. I can guarantee that no one working for me is going to get bored!”
  That stirred them, and he raised his voice further.
  “…Until now, you see, I have always assumed that the 'higher dimension', or Longlight or Glight or whatever one calls it, is too big to understand, so I haven’t tried to understand it. And to be honest, I have always been too afraid to try. I don’t know – you see how candid I am being with you – I don’t know whether, if you were to go out there with me, you would be in any danger. And if so – what kind of danger. Your guess is as good as mine. Though of course we do all possess one reassuring datum: namely that I have been there, many many times, and I am still here to tell the tale. But then, though I have been there, though I have used it to shorten travel, I haven’t investigated it. Not seriously, not scientifically.
  “But with other to help me, who knows? The sky may be the limit!
  “I propose to name this organization the Light-Cut-Campaign. LCC or L2C. The L2C Research College will open its doors next week. Any of you can enrol. To give me a rough idea, those of you who are interested, please raise your hands.”
  A forest of arms shot up; some people jumped up and waved both arms.
  “Thank you!” cried Midax, shocked to feel the trickle of tears amid the din. He could hardly believe his luck, that this throng was so biddable. Spontaneously he flung up his own arms to salute them all. The roar of excitement swelled. How many others, he suddenly wondered, might also be looking for a childhood vision of a sunset sky? But no, that couldn’t be their reason; if the world were so full of that sort of people, his life surely would have been very different; still, it was heartening to see and hear such support…
  At the appointed hour, about two hundred and fifty men and women, their backpacks bright and bulgy, their scarves flapping in the morning breeze, were stepping over the parapets and jogging down the embankments to swarm and converge on a playing-field on the outskirts of Tarestu.
  The spot had been picked out by the Discoverer, who had made a deliberately last-minute choice, to shake off the media and forestall any hostile move on the part of officialdom. So far, the strategy had worked.
  The volunteers of L2C gathered in expectant clumps; the Discoverer moved among them, exchanging a word here and there, noting who had arrived. He marvelled at their courage and at the same time he found it disturbing, guilt-inducing. Had he failed in his duty to point out the dangers? But then, what were the dangers? He could not define them. No one could; that was the trouble. But how could they look so happy? What kind of clod could face today’s eerie adventure with such happy gusto as these folk seemed to possess? Yet they were far from being clods. “And what a fine morning it is!” said one woman zestfully to Midax. He looked askance at this person – was it any use trying to explain to her how irrelevant the weather was? Belatedly he recognized her as Sennwa Axan, a girl whom he’d been to school with, over two decades ago. So many people he’d been to school with, re-appeared here and there in the world… As if the two ends of his life were pinching round to grip his destiny….
  “You’ll soon see how fine, how thin the morning really is,” he replied.
  “Oh,” she said, edgy now. “That means something, because you say it.”
  “Not what I say – it’s what you’ll soon see.”
  “I – we all – hope you will explain… We’re ready to take your lead. We’re waiting, all of us.”
  She still didn’t get it. He switched on a smile and said, “Take some notice of me and what I do, but not too much.”
  “Why do you say that, Discoverer?”
  “Because, before the day is out, you may be lecturing me.”
  He meant it. These folk had something big in them. What he had at first taken for empty-headed rashness was merely the good cheer shown by people who had been given an unexpected opportunity – the chance to participate in something great. The chance to be real explorers in these prosaic times when everyone had been brought up to believe that the Age of Discovery was long past. Today would show that it was not past. And surely that was something to celebrate. Of course, fears were present, but they were vague, while the joy was intense, infectious, mingling himself with his volunteers as if he, like they, were about to enter Glight for the first time.
  For in an important sense it was his first serious entry. Not a matter of playing transportation tricks any longer: today’s motive was new. And this scared him more than it scared them; his nerves twanged at the prospect of looking the truth in the face, having evaded the task before.
  Careful, wipe away that frown.
  Next to approach him was a lanky young man in a white jacket. With a cocksure expression the fellow remarked:
“Safety in numbers, eh?”
  “Quite,” replied Midax. He recognized Polange Nsef – successful sportsman, fashionable traveller. To match this smoothie, Midax went rhetorical: “Did I dare to make this move when I was on my own? No, I did not. Do I dare now that I have a crowd with me? Yes. So you’re right – safety in numbers.”
  “What I suspect, Discoverer,” replied the sportsman, “is that together we can be numerous enough to – er – drag along with us a kind of – what shall I call it – bubble of ordinariness –”
  Midax raised his brows in mute respect. Here was a guy with intuition. “I, also, suspect something, which is, that whether or not you're right, you’re striking the right note.”
  “A bubble of ordinariness,” the gratified Polange Nsef went on, “that will protect us as we probe. Like you, I am willing to risk my life and sanity on that hunch, that our numbers will make a difference.”
  The sportsman then inclined his head and withdrew, unaware of the new turmoil of doubt that he had raised in the Discoverer’s conscience.
  Midax silently reiterated: These are great people. They’re a fine bunch of adventurers whom I have had gathered here. But as for me – like some rash government, which plays the game of inviting one neighbouring army in to provide protection against another, I am inviting in one threat to fight another: inviting the peril of the Beyond to cure me of Romance…
  And how could he have the right? On the rebound from his loss of Pjerl, how could he have the right to gamble with his own sanity and that of his companions? Xapler would say he did have the right, because, if he succeeded, his success would benefit all others who were in like case. But as he looked around at his robust companions Midax found it hard to believe that they were “like cases”. They surely didn’t need the help he needed.
  Be that as it may, they were making their own free choice to join him in this adventure. As a matter of fact, now that the dare was mere minutes away he began to find it impossible even to believe in his own private reasons. The decision was too big. It dwarfed his petty beliefs and disbeliefs; his commitment loomed like a crag, and its reasons didn’t matter; they were just little prompt cards in the forefront of his mind: propping their message that the loss of one love could be assuaged only by the gain of a greater love. It was something to concentrate on, something to get him moving; for if the greater love was to be found anywhere, it must be somewhere beyond the world. That was why its aura could shine at him from the sunset clouds to produce the raptures of childhood… and if any chance at all existed of that being true and graspable, he must take it.
  People were crowding him, calling him by his first name as these thoughts streaked through him. “How do you think we’ll do, Midax?” “We stick together, then we can’t get lost, eh, Midax?” “We’ll be Discoverers too, by this evening, won’t we, Midax?”
  “We will,” he replied, “and my crossing of the Zard may be nothing compared with what you can do.”
  Professor Xapler Twick came up with his own train of students. Twick, something of a celebrity in his own right, bantered with the crowd until, having threaded his way to where the Discoverer stood, he lowered his voice:
  “I may have spotted the stooge.”
  “Anyone I know?”
  “Depends on whom you know.”
  Midax eyed the crowd. “Sennwa I know, and Stid – I went to school with them.”
  “And you’ve probably heard of that young man over there – the one who obviously likes to dress well.”
  “The sporty man-about-town. Polange Nsef. I’ve spoken to him.”
  “Watch him. Don’t underestimate him.”
  “All right.” Midax did not feel like arguing. He doubted very much that he need worry about the worst that a spy could do. It would be as if, while facing execution, one were to fret about having left the kitchen tap running.
  Besides, he had just spotted the presence of someone who worried him more than any government stooge.
  Bercane Carphrae, the zealot from Gevaltigall, was here in the group. The fellow had not said anything so far, no doubt happy to keep in the background since he was about to get what he wanted – his dream outing, his Designer-Rhumb, his Sounding into Glight.
  Midax could have banned him – could have issued instructions to his staff that Bercane be refused admittance to L2C, but what was the use? Better a recognized potential trouble-maker whom one could keep an eye on, than some substitute whom one might not be aware of until too late.
  All the same, it might be as well to have a word… Midax said to Twick, “Wait just a moment while I deliver a caution,” and then began a curving movement through the crowd. Not too obtrusively, it brought him to where he could mutter in the ear of Bercane Carphrae.
  “No rash forward moves – agreed?”
  “Agreed,” Bercane said, smiling. “I am full of thanks to you, Discoverer, for the opportunity to be here this day.”
  Midax said, “And you are quick to agree with me: but I suppose, that what is a ‘rash move’ to me might be something else to you.”
  “You have to trust people sometimes, Discoverer.”
  Midax smiled. “Or at least, hope!”
  He made his way back to where the Professor stood.
  “Is it time?” asked Twick softly.
  “It is time.” Midax raised his voice. “This spot,” he held up his arms, “will do!” The crowd shivered with many movements and he spoke on as people turned to face him, “Form your lines now, each with hands firmly on the shoulders of the one in front! That’s it! That’s it! Form the lines, keep the lines, rigidly keep them or it won’t work, and when you see me disappear, stay where you are and wait for the pull.”
  The lines of faces staring back at him dismayed him with their eagerness, and put him within an ace of disbelieving in the preposterous thing he was about to do. So profoundly deep did the attack of disbelief reach, that it swung him perilously close to dissolving laughter. Yes, the entire enterprise might collapse in mirth if he didn’t look out – and mirth would be swiftly followed by indignation. Even the public memory of his special crossing of the Zard might not outlast his lifetime. It might fade into a legend no longer seriously believed by anyone –
  Vapourings – he must not heed them. It was time to will the move.
  His mind launched the action. Suddenly he was back in the way of it. He took some steps while his will pressed on his field of view to ‘collapse’ it into Glight. The crowd saw him disappear.
  In the dim box world, he could still see his followers, though their number was less; he could see them look in his direction without seeing him; they accepted the seeming miracle of his departure to “another dimension”, but – poor things – to follow was a much harder thing. They needed the courage of a parachutist on his first jump. Given a few extra seconds some of them would have baulked. However, no one wished to be allowed to chicken out. All wanted to be pushed, if necessary, onto this page of history.
  So as soon as the first trainee in the first line felt himself pulled forward, he gave way to the pull, and then to further pulls, to the apparent zig-zags which were really straightenings, while the next in line, and then the next, and all the rest of the line followed. The other lines had also begun the manoeuvre. At first, each zig and zag felt unreasonable, being unrelated to the “normal” landscape still visible around them. But with a swooning wrench, sight then unravelled into a different world, a dim land furred with sparkles under a low-bending sky. And so they all saw Glight at last.
  Around them stood the mere dozen buildings that replaced what they had known as the city of Tarestu. And close to them stood Midax, to whom they turned in desperate trust. A few whimpers, and many desperate mutterings, became audible, till his voice rang out in the diminished world:
  “I warned you, and now you people must listen…” His own voice scared him. He had never spoken so loud in Glight before. But he had to go on. “You must accept that things used to seem big only because you never walked straight. You can walk straight now.”
  Oops, yeek – I am suggesting that this is the real world. It seems I believe it.
More grunts of terror came from the huddled explorers. I must not be too hard on them. Let good old disbelief flood their minds. They need, like I did, the reassurance – false though it is – that this is a mere “diagram-dimension”, a subsidiary mode just for short-cuts.
  That way, they’d clutch bravery enough, to assimilate the shrinking, the packed reduction of the world… He watched them look around and at least it seemed they were not succumbing to the shakes; they were taking a few steps, gazing around, even smiling as if they had perhaps taken his words about “walking straight” as somehow ironic. He gave them time to adjust in peace, without further exhortation. Let them gaze at the suggestive “coastline” of that pond that lapped a mere hundred yards to the south of them… like a map of part of the Zard... while it dawned on them that it was the Zard – yes, he could see the idea on their faces, gaining admittance, that this was real.
  Real? Midax’s features convulsed in a grimace of rebellion against the preposterous thought that this weird place could possibly be the ultimate answer. Not this thing like a box, surely! Not this pick-and-mix pack of a world crammed into a few square miles with no clear horizon in any direction and walled by fuzziness beyond! Surely, he insisted, what’s real is our memories of years of life, the big world with its thousands of miles of geography, its millennia of history. Glight can’t compete. Breathe easily and repeat: Glight cannot be the whole story.
  Nevertheless – it had something to do with the whole story.
  He continued to gaze as did the others, and he, and doubtless they too, felt the little box-world’s paradoxical largeness: that's to say, a smallness which, soaked in an infinity of mystery and promise, amounted to a largeness.  And it was awaiting them, the pioneers.
  Midax Rale thought: I’m an utter beginner at this game. He gawped, at one with his awed companions. Although he had been in this dimension before, he had merely used it, not explored it. Today they might do better. If they could keep their nerve.
  Sennwa Axan pulled at Midax’s sleeve. She was pointing at a structure only slightly larger than shed-size, but fronted with a couple of dignified columns.
She said, amazed, “That’s the K’tramboleion.”
  “Correct,” he replied. “You’re looking towards P’Arlcena. Uncanny, isn’t it?”
Such selective abbreviations were indeed more uncanny than a scale model of the city would have been. For the few full-sized buildings now visible fifty yards away weren’t models but sample simplifications, symbolic embodiments of the capital of Serorn, as if they had been put in place to represent it. Or worse, much worse, it was as if they were the real P’Arlcena, and the great old city he’d known so well was some kind of tricked-out elaboration…
  Some more were calling him, grabbing his elbow. Several spoke at once, badgering him with the analogies, the correspondences which they were beginning to see between this scaled-down world and the one they knew. Others, bolder, were wandering off to explore.
  He tried his best to answer each demand. He pointed at the knolls which substituted for crags, the streams in lieu of rivers, the paths that ran instead of roads… and he sought to give them their likely names. The various curves and inlets of the pond which they had known as the Zard Ocean were supposed to form his particular area of expertise.
  “It sure is obvious how you did the Crossing, Midax,” one of them said. Another said, “Piece of cake!” He heard some shaky laughter.
The matching or paralleling exercise, relating what they saw here to what they remembered of the familiar world, inevitably must waft their awareness closer to the idea that the two worlds were really one – and that the only difference between them was in perception. This was the dread growing inside them all. Sensing this flow of opinion, Midax shouted: “Stid! Over here with that camera!”
  Stid Orpen had brought one of the new instant cameras with him. He conferred with Midax, and then snapped a shot. The others jostled round to look at the result. Midax felt strangely unsurprised, as the print showed them a scene that they could not now see but which they would see if they were not in Glight: a corner of Tarestu, normal size; house-dotted swales, full of daylight and a far horizon. The camera is working in ordinary zigzag light. The camera, then, is subject to the light-laws of the ordinary world. Of course it is – else we would have known about Glight from the day that photography was first invented.
  Evidently, “seeing straight”, seeing Glight, must be a privilege of the trained intelligence. Cameras, machines, can’t do it.
  But aloud he could reassure them, “See! The world we left is as real as we ever thought it was. We’re temporarily beyond it, that’s all. It will still be waiting for us when we get back.”
  And if the experiment had had a different result?
Suppose the camera had shown this Glight place?
  Then I would have taken the other tack and said, “See! This place is nothing to do with our world. We’re elsewhere. The sketchy parallels notwithstanding, we are in a different place altogether – so you can still believe in the integrity of our familiar world.”
  Stid Orpen was not satisfied.
  He stumped forward and planted his stocky frame before Midax. “What kind of a spook’s hole can this be, if it will not register on film?”
  Midax had to shrug. “Who can tell? Who knows what, or why, a diagram-dimension is? An overlay of some kind, I suppose, which allows us to take short-cuts through reality. Don’t be too hard on the poor camera. Do you suppose, if we had brought a cine-camera along, that it could have shown us striding over whole countries in minutes? No, it wouldn’t work that way. We are invisible right now to any machine.”
  Seeing Stid hesitate, he went on forcefully:
  “As a matter of fact I like it this way. Think about it, Stid. If our machines don’t work, we can bet pretty heavily that no one back home can see us whatever we do or wherever we go. And meanwhile, with your camera, we can keep track of where we are in the home world that our eyes can no longer see…”
  “Discoverer,” broke in Polange Nsef, “what direction should we take?”
  “I suggest we set out to find the edge of the box.”
  Seeing some of them blench, Midax rebuked himself silently. He ought not to have used the disturbing word “edge”. Still, the plan he had suggested was, he was sure, the right one. He stepped up onto a knoll, drawing the united attention of the crowd.
  “Once I was on a boating holiday,” he told them, “in the Westile Fens. Any of you done the same? Remarkable, isn’t it, how in that flat country laced with waterways, you see the sky march down to the close horizon of a riverbank only yards away… which with a bit of imagination becomes an edge-of-world. But where we are now, we can get more than an imagined taste. I don’t mean that we can see a horizon here; but we do seem to see a boundary, don’t we? A discontinuity, a kind of real edge-of-world, maybe, and within walking distance, or so it looks to me! This may be the only opportunity we’ll ever get to make that kind of dream come real.”

It turned out that he had struck the right note. It soon became clear that quite a few of them had likewise been on the kind of holiday he had just described, in the Westile Fens or other flat low-lying areas, and even those who hadn’t were nevertheless able to relate his remarks to some haunting of their own. Sharing hitherto unshared dreams, the group drew together. They followed Midax.
  Something cosy and snugglesome, as well as scary, inhered in the shrouded box-world: its quality of huge smallness, or small hugeness, could point emotions towards favourite old dreams. Although no normal act of bravery was any guarantee against vertigo of the cosmic kind, the right talismans of triviality or nostalgia could do the job. Old dreams were the saving grace; childhood visions could keep adults' chins up here. Midax knew this from his own example. It did not matter whether the actual visions were shared among the group or were individual to each person. Anything to prevent terror's pale mouth from sagging open, was welcome.
  Stid’s camera had forty-eight shots. They used them sparingly, every hundred paces or so – “to save some for the return journey” as Midax pointed out, valuing that phrase for its optimistic sound.
  Obeying another whisper of the mind, he directed Stid to click the camera at a patch of woodland as they crept past it onto a longer meadow. Pulling out the prints, they saw, sure enough, that the woodland was, in the opinion of the camera, actually a vast forest extending to the horizon, while the meadow was an apparently limitless prairie – which Midax knew in his bones to be the Great Plains of Larmonn, extending thousands of miles westward in the ordinary version of the world. Thousands of miles – though the corresponding patch here, in Glight, could be crossed on foot in a few minutes. And beyond? What lay beyond the meadow?
  Midax peered ahead and saw boulders and little crags and tors, a bit of a rocky jumble small enough to fit in a park.
  Stid, seeing the direction of his leader’s gaze, raised the camera again, but this time Midax pushed his arm down.
  “We know what it will show,” he said quietly.
Twick and Nsef had approached to listen; Midax addressed them all, “That’s the Far West, the Stony Mountains; which means that after having walked west through Cenland and down into Larmonn we’ve now walked further west across most of Larmonn.”
  “Wow, the Stonies - shrunk to that!” said Professor Twick.
Indeed it was a breathtaking diminution of all the sweeping vistas, fantastic rock formations, spectacular canyons, volcanic chimneys and lofty peaks which "the Stonies" ordinarily brought to mind.
  Midax frowned, “Better to think of what we're looking for. The edge: it can’t be far off.”
  Others in the group heard what was being said. Mutters broke out: what does he mean, the edge, can it be seen, what is it, why should it exist, what is he talking about…
  Raising his voice a notch, Midax declared to all of them, “Like it or not, this world is small, and we’ll come to some kind of edge of it fairly soon. Are you having second thoughts? We could turn back, but first, now that we've got this far, let’s probe a little further. Each of us must make our peace with the idea that the world is box-shaped and we are close to the edge.”
  “But why, Midax, why a box?” wailed one voice.
  “How should I know? Maybe that’s what we’re here to find out!” he shouted back.
  Once more he led the way, but his sense of achievement, in getting them to move, was short-lived. He had so far drawn them into provisional acceptance of this abbreviated world; got them to tolerate the uncanny experience of walking across a meadow that was standing in for a prairie, past a copse standing in for a forest, past a pond standing in for an ocean and rocks standing in for mountains; but now he suspected that they were about to reach a point where such representation ceased. And it would be replaced by - what? Something yet more unsettling, he suspected.
Ahead, in the process of solidifying and taking shape, was a sight that did not stand in for anything known. Not a representation of anything ever seen in life, it was something he'd soon see plainly, when they had advanced past a grove of wiry shrubs and young trees standing on an outcrop that partially blocked the view. He led his expedition into the grove and then held up his hand. They were all glad to stop.
  From this area of cover they shot glances through the last screen of branches and across a further stretch of grass. To the extent that the lattice of branches permitted them to see, they saw that the grass beyond was covered with a low, curling, ragged mist that rolled across their direction of vision.
They looked, and kept silent without being told.
At moments they could partly see through the mist towards…a sky-smudge beyond; something at the edge of the world; something from which their eyes shied.
It's at the edge of our courage too, thought Midax. Yet surely we can take a closer peek than this.
  Sportsman Nsef forestalled him. He reached forward to part some branches so that he and the others could peer, one by one, through the gap he had made in the screen that hid them, and take their turns to face the sky-smudge which loomed maybe a quarter of a mile off across the misty grass.
Minutes went by; their eyes in some way adjusted; the “smudge” became a structure, its shape and size like nothing previously seen in the known world.
Still nobody uttered a sound, while their minds steamed with headless thoughts. If a twig had snapped, they might have scattered in panic. Mercifully some quiet time elapsed before the event which was too much.
  It was the sight of two figures, silver-coated, emerging from the mist. They were carrying a stretcher between them, but though this might have been expected to suggest some practical normality, the unexplained sight was drenched with unbearable, nightmare spookiness, so that the explorers’ courage drained away fast.
  Polange Nsef hissed at Midax: “No argument, Discoverer – we’re going home.”
  Twick muttered his support: “Yes, this is the point where we retreat.”
  Midax glanced right and left to gauge the mood of his companions and came to the swift decision that they were right; but it was not unanimous. He became aware of a stir in the line of companions. Someone was preparing to move forwards. Oh no, thought Midax, and raised a restraining hand to clamp on Bercane’s shoulder...
Bercane, his face translucent with rapture, gathered himself too powerfully to be stopped, and lurched out of concealment, bursting through the edge of the grove in a dash towards the stretcher-carriers, while the rest of Midax's expedition, frozen in their unutterable thoughts, could do nothing but watch.
  They saw Bercane halt before the silver beings. They saw lips move. They almost ceased to wonder as Bercane then lay down on the stretcher and was carried away.
Westward, the way the silver beings had come, they carried him towards the looming smudge at the edge of the world. Unwilling to watch for long, Midax and all his remaining followers in a dead quiet turned eastwards and began to retrace their steps with, now and then, trembling glances over their shoulders.
  Dry-throated, Midax could not speak, could not comment on how his expedition had turned into a rout, put to flight with the loss of a man. He could not bring himself to blame anyone, not even himself. Questions bounced around inside his head: Are they supernatural? What is supernatural? Are supernatural beings supernatural to themselves? He could do nothing with the concepts; his mind hung flaccid as a burst balloon.
Presently his thought processes revived enough to foresee that Xapler Twick, who had agreed on the retreat, was nevertheless going to start asking intellectual questions about what had happened. Then the moment would be at hand whereat Midax Rale the Discoverer would have to admit that he and his fellow explorers had been defeated merely by what their eyes had seen, and not by any action.
Yes, a mere sight had defeated them. A sight which carried no definable threat. Only, it had somehow throbbed with such a dazzle of meaning, as to wipe out their resolve; had so knocked the stuffing out of them that right now they craved nothing more than to go home and lie down.
  That night, back home in the big normal world, he thought more calmly. There had been no overt recriminations. Not one single embarrassing question had been voiced; even Twick had, it turned out, remained subdued after all.
All of it they kept to themselves: thoughts about the near-glory, the mystery that they had almost reached, and the decision to turn tail. No one had blamed anyone out loud, but Midax, in his chagrin, grimly vowed that such a fiasco would not recur. Next time, perhaps within a couple of days, they would try again. They’d probe right to the edge of the world. It was doubtless a kind of wall, and he must learn what was beyond the wall. If he, like Bercane, had gone forward to greet those silver-coated figures, perhaps he would know the answer by now. Why had he not done so? Was he a coward, or was he more responsible than Bercane? Beware of wishful thinking! Perhaps I was a coward; if so, it need not necessarily follow that I must go on being one.
  Though he remembered the fit of shivering awe which had seized him and his companions, it was possible to believe, in the light of normal day, that the encounter could have been endured. Perhaps, if he had kept his nerve, perhaps the ancient glory of the sunset clouds could have been his by now, to taste and live in, whatever it might be.
  The phone buzzed.
  “Xapler Twick here. Confirmation – let me read it to you – ‘corpse answering to the description of Bercane Carphrae found near the town of Sagrogon, Onkan State, Western Larmonn.’ Fast work by the police.”
  “Cause of death?”
  “Heart failure – what else? Dustbin category…”
  Midax sighed. “I keep trying to remind myself, that he brought it on himself. Whatever ‘it’ was.”
  “Good – you just keep on doing that. Don’t deny him his status of volunteer. All of us on that expedition were responsible adults.”
  “Adults playing around with a dimension we don’t understand.”
  “That’s what the whole of life is anyway, is it not, when you think about it? You just want to be convinced a bit more – you’re not really pulling out of the effort, are you, Midax?”
  “No, I’m playing for keeps now.”
  “Just checking on your backbone…”
  “Understandable. Good-night, Xapler.”
  A good man, thought Midax as he put the phone down. Xapler was a stalwart friend, but not the sort to whom one could explain about the sunset clouds. What a relief it would be, if only it were possible to share such thoughts and yearnings with someone close enough to understand.
That thought contained a trap. Before he knew it his mind was running around its old electric-bell circuit:
  She said ‘never’. She was ‘never’ in love with me. And she would not say a thing as big as that if she did not mean it.
  The thought activates the magnet called “logic”. Logic lifts a hammer:
  But what about all the other big things she said? The romance-day card she sent me; the “I wish I had been free when I met you”; the melting, the touching…
  The hammer lifts and breaks the circuit:
  But all of that, even if true, was evidently not strong enough to last.
  The break in the circuit switches off the magnet; the demagnetised hammer falls, clanging the bell:
  It did not last – but that means there was a time when it was true! So! Even if the ‘Never’ is not true, it remains true that she did say what she said before, at that time when ‘then’ was ‘now’ – so –
  Touch of bell renews circuit, activates magnet ‘logic’, lifts hammer:
  So why should that ‘now’ not count as her truest self as much as this? The melting, the touching…
  Again and again in the bleak hours before sunup the hammer lifted and fell and the bell clanged and clanged.

III

The lights on stage burned hotter, reflecting off the whiteboard background. Smoothly the show’s presenter, Harlei Dapron, swivelled in his chair, turning his pugnacious features to the audience as the signature tune faded.
  He smiled, toothily handsome. “Welcome to yet another episode of Perspectives. We have a truly scintillating line-up of guests tonight.
  “Professor Xapler Twick, well-known to millions of readers and listeners through those lectures which have, it is fair to say, got him into trouble more than once with the hierarchy of the Shapers’ College of which, nevertheless, he remains a member.
  “Davlr Braze, noted writer on economics and recently elected President of the Scientific Society of Larmonn.
  “Polange Nsef, who alternates between the sports scene and his latest hush-hush post as co-investigator in the Light-Cut Campaign, or L2C as it is more often called.
  “Stid Orpen and Sennwa Axan, likewise participants in the latest L2C adventure.
  “And last the man who never, nowadays, needs any introduction: the Discoverer himself, and now Director of L2C, Midax Rale!”
  Applause erupted from the studio audience while eyes gawped at the screens of ninety per cent of TV sets in ninety percent of the households all over the continent of Larmonn.
  “First of all,” the presenter began, “may I articulate what must be in the minds of most of our viewers. Midax Rale: in the past day or two, rumours have been flying around that what you are doing may perhaps prove the existence of the soul, of life after death, perhaps even the existence of a transcendent Designer.”
  A fragment of Midax’s wandering mind surveyed the studio. Strange how he was not worried. He felt no pressure, though it was imperative that the right moment, when it came, should be recognized and exploited efficiently. It was vital to avoid undue strain for the average viewer’s attention-span.
  For that reason Midax had stipulated, as a condition for appearing on the show, that he must be allowed to draw diagrams. Sure enough, close to where he and the other guests sat, a sill had been placed with black felt markers, beside a whiteboard on an easel. His needs had been met. He had a chance to explain. But he’d have to be quick about it; he would not be allowed to sketch for long. Well, then, that's how he'd do it - fast.
  No, he was not worried at all. It seemed to be a constant theme in his life, that one ordeal diminishes another. Thus, his mind battered by Pjerl, he had dared the crossing of the Zard; now, his mind battered by Glight, he dared a grilling by Harlei Dapron.
  He replied easily: “Life after death. The Designer and the soul. These are ancient ideas. Long-standing spiritual data. That’s why the words exist: they describe given things.”
  “Given? Not to everyone’s satisfaction,” remarked the presenter. “So when you come along and lead a party into an actual higher world, naturally it gives rise to talk!”
  Midax replied, “What talk, exactly? I have been too busy to listen.”
  “As I announced just now: the possibility of proof of this and that…”
  “I can tell you right now,” said Midax, “that such talk is quite unnecessary.”
  “You mean you found no proof…”
  “I mean,” and Midax stifled a yawn, “that it would never occur to me to think that any further proof was needed, beyond what a moment’s contemplation should make clear to everyone.”
  “But the world you moved in, the higher-dimension world…”
  “I don’t know about that,” shrugged Midax.
  “You mean, you don’t know whether it is supernatural? Is that what you're saying?”
  “What does ‘supernatural’ mean anyway?” demanded Midax.  That got them buzzing – both the panel and the audience.
Harlei Dapron let them seethe for about ten seconds; then he loudly overruled them all with his own definition:
  “A higher level of reality, perhaps.”
  “That sounds fair, but what do we mean by ‘higher’?” asked Midax. “Ah, you hesitate. Let me offer an answer. By ‘higher’ we must mean – at the minimum – that it is not a mere derivative, or function, or emanation, of the lower dimension. In other words we're making the point that the supernatural doesn’t emanate from the natural. If it did, it would itself be natural. Instead, the supernatural has its own credentials.”
He paused, knowing that Harlei Dapon must ask -
  “What credentials?”
  “Qualitative ones," replied Midax. “The basis of identity. Thus, our consciousness is supernatural – you must admit that unless you’re a behaviourist! Again, value is supernatural – unless you’re a logical positivist! And you’d better not be a behaviourist or a logical positivist because if you are, there’s no reason to listen to anything you say. Why bother to listen to mere noise created by valueless motion of deterministically twitching vocal chords? Assuming we can dismiss that, any remark about ‘better’ or ‘worse’ is a remark about the supernatural. In other words, our lives are saturated with the supernatural, every minute of every day.”
  Harlei Dapron sat gazing in wry respect. “Well,” he said to the others on the panel, “there you have the Discoverer’s move. Glight is dismissed as nothing new for the debate on immortality. Who goes along with this? Let's hear from... Davlr Braze.”
  Davlr was a prominent non-believer in the soul. Jacket and tie and white shirt-front bulked on the successful businessman. His eyes ranged in perplexity, certain he was right but wondering how to put the obvious. “Midax, look, surely, as science progresses, and explains more and more, less and less do we need the old supernaturalist ideas of causation.”
  Murmurs of assent travelled around the studio. Even those who were silent were looking at Midax as if to say to him: how are you going to get out of that one?
  Midax retorted: “I’m not talking about causation. I’m talking about being.”
  Who’d have guessed it when I woke up this morning? I’m about to break the cast-iron social rule, that You Must Not Get Anywhere.
  The rule which decrees that no one must be allowed to win an argument for the soul.
  Well, so I am about to find out what happens when this naughty thing is done.
  He continued, “Those who suspect the existence of a Designer, don’t place Him at the beginning.”
  “Huh?” said Harlei Dapron, while Davlr Braze stayed poker-faced.
  “I mean,” Midax explained, “we don’t place Him at the beginning of a chain of cause and effect. He is an Origin, not a Cause. In other words, He is not on the line at all. Here, I’ll show you.”
  He got up and strode to the whiteboard. The moment, in a way, was more peculiar even than Glight. He picked up the marker pen, and made a vertical sweep with it down the board.
  “Consider this vertical line,” he said, turning to his audience, “as a line of cause and effect. Either with a beginning and/or an end, or going on forever in both directions, it’s as you please – it’s irrelevant because the Designer, if He exists, cannot be part of the line. Was I part of it, when I drew it? Of course not. I ‘caused’ it from outside itself; my arm and hand, reaching over through an extra dimension to that of the whiteboard, impacted it from beyond. Analogously, He, from beyond the cause/effect line, sustains that line like so –” and Midax drew a series of horizontal arrows at right angles to the vertical representation of the universe. Arrows all pointing at it, not along it.
  “How do you know all this?” intervened Dapron.
  “Old stuff, I assure you. Origin or Creation cannot itself be a part of the cause-and-effect line, if the line itself is part of the created, so if you are considering the question seriously at all you must go beyond science, into metaphysics. To put it in technical language, Effect is sequential to Cause, but Origination is orthogonal to Cause.”
  “Erm, yes,” said Davlr.
  “Satisfied?”
  “Not quite. Why do we need this, erm, orthogonal dimension at all?”
  Midax shrugged, “Anyone aware of the fact-value distinction knows that room must be made for transcendence.”
  “Why?” insisted Davlr.
  “Because as I tried to point out before, the qualitative dimension cannot be derived from the dimension of matter-energy-force and therefore must come from ‘somewhere else’ – must, in other words, transcend.”
  Davlr was not letting go. “But this is a circular argument, Midax! You are saying such-and-such must be so because of the transcendent qualitative dimension, but it is the existence of this dimension that we are questioning!”
  The presenter had been on the point of intervening for some time. The show was not going as he had planned, at all. Glight was hardly being mentioned, despite it being the hottest item in the news – the very story which had dictated tonight’s line-up of guests. And two of the guests were hogging the attention of all the rest. The trouble was, he, Harlei Dapron, like everyone else, was fascinated by the cornered Discoverer’s replies. Harlei could not resist witnessing Midax’s next manoeuvre. Besides, a veteran chat-show host must know when to give an unexpected course its head.
  “I have two responses to the charge of circularity which has been levelled just now against me,” Midax replied to Davlr Braze. “Firstly, Davlr, what about the circularity of your creed, scientism? When the scientific approach gets nowhere with something, it says the thing doesn’t exist; and thence draws the conclusion that nothing exists that is not explicable by science. And so it goes, round and round. So much for that. My second, more important point is this: all right, I admit we are both being circular, in fact any system of thought is bound ultimately to refer back to its own assumptions in self-validation; but the point is, how big is the circle? How much can it include? If it really does include everything, then it is good enough! And anyone who tries to allege that science includes everything, must be kidding! Values, qualities – all quiddities – science can’t cope with them, and science admits it!”
  “Emergent properties,” Davlr shot back. “Parallel descriptions.”
  “What about the mind-body problem?”
  “The mind,” retorted Davlr, “is an emergent property of the brain.”
  “Brainglow, eh?” scoffed Midax. “Emergence may sound sophisticated, but really you might as well talk of locating the soul in the pineal gland. You’re trying to splice dimensions by mere words.”
  Harlei Dapron broke in at last. “I sense,” he said, smoothly jocular, “that the audience is becoming fidgety.” Laughter greeted his words.
  “I don’t blame them,” laughed Midax in sync with them. He meanwhile sensed a peculiar warning signal. It was as if a flag were raised inside his head, suggesting to him that winning might have its dangerous side. Instinctively welcoming Dapron’s intervention, he continued: “My aim was not to destroy Davlr’s faith in scientism; I was concerned to head off the scores of religious nutcases that might otherwise be encouraged to join my next expedition to Glight.”
  “You see that as a real danger?”
  “Wild rumours are flying, and even as we speak I can picture fanatics preparing to swamp L2C, seeing it as a chance to prove their theories. Therefore, loud and clear, I repeat: Anyone with any sense knows you don’t need Glight to prove the soul. Glight is irrelevant to that sort of thing.”
  “Ah,” nodded Dapron. “You’re dampening the flames. Not fanning them. I see that now.”
  “You see it? Good!” snapped Midax. He was keyed up to finish stating his case. “I hope to mount another expedition soon. I shall need sharp observers. Properly receptive observers – I don’t want the whole thing to dissolve in ideological chaos. For the record, then, Glight has nothing, repeat nothing to do with attempts to prove that anybody’s religion is right or wrong.” He sighed, and relaxed; his job here was done, though the programme still had some time to run.
  Harlei Dapron was turning to Xapler Twick.
  “What have you to say to that, Professor? Are you, by any chance, hoping to find, somewhere in the Light-Cut Campaign, confirmation of your theories about the Boalonian Doctrine of Romance?”
  “As to that,” said Xapler perkily, “I can always hope.”
  “Hope what, precisely?”
  “That one way or another our discoveries about the ‘soul’ (if you want to call it that) or rather our discoveries about destiny will one day put paid to our pernicious habit of putting Romance on a pedestal! I suppose you all know what I think about that. I’ve appeared on this programme enough times before.”
  “All right,” said Harlei, “now let’s hear some reaction from the rank-and-file of the new army of investigators, which the Discoverer is mustering for the invasion of that higher dimension to which he alone controls the entry… Stid Orpen, what was your impression of yesterday’s sortie?”
  “All I can say,” said Stid, “is that I felt the world had gone small. The landscape had shrunk, become compressed, its details more compact. And yet I felt a bigness all around me. Like I never felt before. I don’t understand. It’s a…”
  “Paradox?” suggested Harlei.
  “If you say so. Yes, that is the word.”
  “Midax? Any comment on that?”
  “I have already talked too much.”
  “Well, this show relies on talk. And we’ve still got half an hour.” (Audience laughter.)
  “All right,” mused Midax. “Think, now, of the Emperor Pableon Ossu. Remember our school history lessons? Pableon the First conquered many countries for about a decade. Then, after he’d tried too much and the Fourth Coalition had finally overthrown him, his attempt at universal empire led paradoxically – so say the books – to increased nationalism after his fall. Yes, the history books put it this way: that the result of his universalism was merely an increase in subsequent particularism. Wow, say the books, what a paradox.” Midax paused. “Paradox? Bilge.”
  “Hm… Are you saying the school books are wrong?”
  “I’m saying that they are just trying to be clever. I’m saying that to look for paradoxes is a sterile game. As if it were in the least surprising that the aftermath of a tyrant’s rule should see increased value placed upon freedom! Or as if it were in the least surprising that in Glight you feel closer to beyondness when your world turns small.”
  “We’re listening. Say more.”
  “I’ve said it all. It’s not a bit paradoxical, it’s obvious, or it ought to be. We who have been there can feel how natural it is, that the beyond gets closer, when we’re no longer coated with so much world.”
  For many more seconds than Harlei usually allowed, he and all those in the studio were silent as they absorbed the Discoverer’s strange turn of phrase. Then the presenter turned to the ever-glib Polange Nsef in the expectation that he, surely, would break the spell of quietness; after all, this was supposed to be a chat show.
  “Polange, you might be characterised as being ‘coated with much world’…”
  Welcome return of studio laughter.
  “I usually am,” agreed Nsef. “Since yesterday, though, I fell coated instead with universes, shell beyond shell…”
  His voice sounded unusually distant.
  Startled at the drop in emotional temperature, Dapron asked: “What do you mean?”
  “I have a confession to make,” continued Polange Nsef. “And I am grateful for the opportunity to make it on TV. The truth is, I was sent by the government – the World Government – to watch over Discoverer Midax and report on his activities.” Babble broke out in the ranks of the audience as he continued, “I shall do so no longer. I am changing my allegiance, so to speak…”
  His brain fudgy with fatigue, Midax reached home that evening – “home” now being his quarters in Tarestu – satisfied with the way things had gone so far.
  With the simplified awareness of a very tired man he held on to the fact that he had scored the point he meant to score – that he and his organization weren’t holding out any religious promises – which meant he was in a position to launch his next sortie into Glight without fear of religious recrimination or misunderstanding. Above all he could do it in the firm hope that no more headstrong enthusiasts like Bercane would lose their lives under his leadership.
  As he fumbled with his door-keys, he looked askance at the watchers lounging a block away. Nowadays he was always followed, wherever he went in the everyday world. Only when he took the Glight short-cuts which no one could track, did he shake off the constant surveillance… His self-appointed protectors meant well, he knew. As for the others, the ones who might think him a nuisance, they, too, wished to control rather than eliminate him – or so he assumed. Maybe sooner or later he would be brought to book for the death of Bercane Carphrae; on the other hand, maybe not. Bercane’s organization would certainly not wish to prosecute. They were the last people to wish to cut off the access to Glight which only he could provide. And as for the government… any public prosecutor on this case would find it somewhat difficult to cite precedents! Yes, the Campaign was still intact. Still workable. He should be relieved. He was relieved. And yet –
  He sighed with weariness as he opened the door and let himself into the hall. He wondered if he would ever really rest again. The enormous pressures of the last few days, the stresses of singlehandedly inventing a new era in human history, were rubbing in the truth that there was no end to isolation, that in fact the new kind of loneliness was in some ways starker than the old, and certainly much more scary.
  A pity he could not have stopped midway in the twilight zone of happiness when…
  Oh no, not that thought again!
  Fool, avoid that circuit – you need some sleep.
  But it was too late; the hammer of logic and the clang of regret, the “how can she mean it and how can she not” perpetual motion machine, was resuming its round. Pjerl’s Never took up its position once more at the prime focus of his memory.
  Bother! If only someone could tap him on the head with a mallet.
  Meanwhile as he groped further down the hall, he noticed a glow upon a message screen.
  The sender’s identity was displayed: a logo depicting a post with a banner swirling down from its summit.
  On the banner were written the names of the inhabited continents Larmonn, Shershe, Sycronn, Poidal…
  The sight almost numbed him. He dazedly pressed a switch and listened.
  His phone had recorded a summons from Waretik Thanth, the World President.
  Well, thought Midax, whether or not my Campaign has woken anything in Glight, it has certainly roused some concern at a certain address in Merod, Derom, Cenland.