9

When they reached the basement, Glimmung boomed a hearty greeting at them. "You won't need translating equipment," he informed them. "I'll speak to each of you telepathically in your own language."

He filled almost all of the basement; they had to remain by the elevators. Now he had become more dense, more compact—but he still remained huge.

Joe took a large, deep, steadying breath and said, "Are you going to pay the hotel compensation? For the damage you've done?"

"My check," Glimmung said, "will be in the mail by tomorrow morning."

"Mr. Fernwright just meant that as a joke," Harper Baldwin said nervously. "About paying the hotel."

" ‘Joke'?" Joe said. "Collapsing ten floors of a twelve-floor building? How do you know people weren't killed? There could be as many as a hundred dead, plus a lot more injured."

"No, no," Glimmung assured him. "I killed no one. But the query is legitimate, Mr. Fernwright." Joe felt the presence of Glimmung within him, stirring in his brain: Glimmung edged here and there throughout the most unusual corners of Joe's mind. I wonder what he's looking for? Joe thought. And at once the answer, within his consciousness, came. "I'm interested in your reaction to the Book of the Kalends," Glimmung said. He spoke, then, to them all. "Out of all of you, only Miss Yojez knew about The Book. The rest of you I'll need to study. It will only take a moment." The extension of Glimmung left Joe's mind, then. It had gone elsewhere.

Turning to Joe, Mali said, "I'm going to ask him a question." She, too, took a deep and steadying breath. "Glimmung," she said sharply, "tell me one thing. Are you going to die soon?"

The enormous lump throbbed; its whiplike extremities thrashed in agitation. "Does it say that in the Book of the Kalends?" Glimmung demanded. "It does not. If I were, it would say."

Mali said, "Then The Book is infallible."

"You have no reason to think I am near death," Glimmung said.

"None at all," Mali said. "I asked my question in order to learn something. I learned it."

"When I am depressed," Glimmung said, "I begin to think about the Book of the Kalends, and I think that their pre diction that I cannot raise Heldscalla is true. That, in fact, I can accomplish nothing; the cathedral will remain at the bottom of Mare Nostrum into eternity."

Joe said, "But that's when your energy is low."

"Each living entity," Glimmung said, "passes through periods of expansion and periods of contraction. The rhythm of living is as active in me as in any of you. I am larger; I am older; I can do many things that none of you, even collectively, can. But there are times when the sun is low in the sky, toward evening, before true night. Small lights come on, here and there, but they are a long way off from me. Where I dwell there are no lights. I could of course manufacture life, light, and activity around me, but they would be extensions of myself alone. This, of course, is changed, now that you have begun to come here. The group today is the final group; Miss Mali Yojez and Mr. Fernwright and Mr. Baldwin, and those with them, are the last who will be coming."

I wonder, Joe thought, if we will leave this planet again. He thought about Earth and his life there; he thought about The Game and his room with its dead, black window; he thought about the government's Mickey Mouse money that came in baskets. He thought of Kate. I won't be calling her again, he thought. For some reason I know that; it is a fact. Probably because of Mali. Or perhaps, he thought, the larger situation... Glimmung and the Undertaking.

And Glimmung's falling through the floor, he thought. Descending ten stories and winding up in the basement. That meant something, he realized, and then he realized something else. Glimmung knew his weight. As Mali had said, no floor could hold him. Glimmung had done it on purpose.

So we wouldn't be afraid of him, Joe realized. When we at last saw him as he really is. Then, he thought, we really should be afraid of him, perhaps. More so than before. Just exactly because of this.

"Afraid of me?" Glimmung's thought came.

"Of the whole Undertaking," Joe said. "There's too little chance of it being a success."

"You are right," Glimmung said. "We are talking about chances, about possibilities. Statistical probabilities. It may work; it may not. I don't claim to know; I am only hoping. I have no certitude about the future--_nor does anyone else, including the Kalends_. That is the basis of my entire position. And my intent."

Joe said, "But to try and then to fail—"

"Is that so terrible?" Glimmung said. "I'll now tell you all something about yourselves, something that every one of you possesses: a quality in common. You have met failure so often that you have all become afraid to fail."

I thought so, Joe thought. Well, so it goes.

"What I am doing," Glimmung said, "is this. I am attempting to learn how much strength I have. There is no abstract way of determining the limits of one's force, one's ability to exert effort; it can only be measured in a way such as this, a task which brings into view the actual, real limitation to my admittedly finite—but great—strength. Failure will tell me as much about myself as will success. Do you see that? No, none of you can. You are paralyzed. That's why I brought you here. Self-knowledge; that is what I will achieve. And so will you: each about himself."

"Suppose we fail?" Mali asked.

"The self-knowledge will be there anyhow," Glimmung said; he sounded baffled, as if there was a gap between himself and the group of them. "You really do not understand, do you?" he said to them all. "You will, before it's over. Those of you, anyhow, who want to go through with it."

A fungiform lispingly asked, "At this late point do we still have the right to choose?"

"Any of you who wish to return to your own world are free to do so," Glimmung said. "I will provide passage—first class—back. But those of you who do go back—you will find it once again as it was. And, as it was, you could not live such a life; each of you intended to destroy yourselves, and were in the process of so doing when I found you. Remember. That is what lies behind you. Don't make it that which lies ahead of you."

There was an uncomfortable silence.

"I'm leaving," Harper Baldwin said.

Several others moved closer to him, signifying that they would leave, too.

"What about you?" Mali asked Joe.

Joe said, "What's behind me is the police." And death, he thought. The same as for you... for us all. "No," he said. "I'm going to try. I'll take the chance that he—we—fail. Maybe he's right; maybe even failure is valuable. As he says, it tells us the limit of ourselves; it maps our boundaries."

"If you'll give me a tobacco cigarette," Mali said, with a shiver of fear, "I'll stay, too. But I'm dying for a cigarette."

"That's nothing worth dying for," Joe said. "Let's die for this. Even if we fall ten stories into the basement doing it."

"And the rest of you are staying," Glimmung said.

"That's right," a univalvular cephalopod squeaked.

Uneasily, Harper Baldwin said, "I'll stay. I guess."

Glimmung, with satisfaction, said, "Then let us begin."

At the curb before the Olympia Hotel heavy-duty trucks had been parked. Each had a driver and each driver knew what to do.

A portly organism with a long, ropy tail approached Joe and Mali, a clipboard clutched energetically in its fuzzy paw. "You two are to go with me," the organism declared, and then picked from the group eleven more individuals.

"That's a werj," Mali said to Joe. "Our driver. They can make excellent speed; their reflexes are so acute. We'll be out on the promontory in the manner of a minute."