But that would not be the end of it: there would be endless time as well as endless space, and in that time would arise new techniques and new sciences, new philosophies, so that eternal Man need never lack for tasks to do or thoughts to think.

And, once you had immortality, what did you use it for?

You used it to keep up your strength. Even if your tribe were small, even if the birthrate were not large, even if new members of the tribe were discovered but infrequentIy, you still would be sure of growth if no one ever died.

You used it to conserve ability and knowledge. If no one ever died, you could count on the ultimate strength and knowledge and ability of each member of the tribe. When a man died, his ability died with him, and to some extent, his knowledge. But it wasn't only that. You lost not only his present ability and knowledge, but all his future ability and knowledge.

What knowledge, Vickers wondered, did the Earth now lack because a certain man died a dozen years too soon? Some of the knowledge, of course, would be recovered through the later work of other men, but certainly there was much that could never be recovered, ideas that would not be dreamed again, concepts that were blotted out forever by the death of a man within whose brain the first faint stirring of their development had just begun to ferment.

Within an immortal society, such a thing could never happen. An immortal society would be certain of total ability and total knowledge of its manpower.

Take the ability to tap the knowledge of the stars, take the business of inherent memory, take the technical knowledge that made everlasting merchandise — and add immortality.

That was the formula — of what? Of the ultimate in life? Of the pinnacle of intellect? Of godhood itself?

Go back a hundred thousand years. Consider the creature, Man. Give him fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, domesticated animals and plants, plus tribal organization and the first, faint dawning concept of Man as the lord of Earth. Take that formula and what did you have?

The beginning of civilization, the foundation of a human culture. That was what you had.

And in its way the formula of fire and wheel and domestic animals was as great as the formula of immortality and time sense and inherent memory.

The formula of the mutants, he knew, was simply another step upward as the fire-wheel-dog formula of a hundred thousand years before had been an earlier forward step.

The mutant formula was not the end result of human effort nor of human intellect and knowledge; it was but a step. There was yet another step. In the future there was still another step. Within the human mind still dwelled the possibility of even greater steps, but what the concepts of those steps might be was as inconceivable to him, Jay Vickers, as the time structure of the following worlds would have been to the man who discovered fire or tamed the dog.

We still are savages, he thought. We still crouch within our cave, staring out beyond the smoky fire that guards the entrance of our cave against the illimitable darkness that lies upon the world.

Some day we'll plumb that darkness, but not yet.

Immortality would be a tool that might help us, and that is all it is. A simple, ordinary tool.

What was the darkness out beyond the cave's mouth?

Man's ignorance of what he was or why he was or how he came to be and what his purpose and his end. The old, eternal question.

Perhaps with the tool of immortality Man could track down these questions, could gain an understanding of the orderly progression and the terrible logic which fashioned and moved the universe of matter and of energy.

The next step might be a spiritual one, the finding and understanding of a divine pattern that was law unto the entire universe. Might Man find at last, in all humility, a universal God — the Deity that men now worshipped with the faintness of human understanding and the strength of human faith? Would Man find at last the concept of divinity that would fill, without question and without quibble, Man's terrible need of faith, so clear and unmistakable that there could be no question and no doubt, as there now was question and doubt; a concept of goodness and of love with which Man could so identify himself that there would then be no need of faith, but faith replaced with knowing and an everlasting sureness?

And if Man outlawed death, he thought, if the doorway of death were closed against the final revelation and the resurrection, then surely Man must find such a concept or wander forever amid the galaxies a lost and crying thing.

With an effort, Vickers brought his thoughts back to the present.

"Hezekiah," he asked, "you are sure?"

"Of what, sir?"

"About the Prestons. You are sure there are no Prestons?"

"I am sure," said Hezekiah, "There was a Kathleen Preston," Vickers said. "I am _sure_ there was…"

But how could he be so sure?

He remembered her.

Flanders said there was such a person.

But his memory could be conditioned and so could Flanders' memory.

Kathleen Preston could be no more than an emotional factor introduced into his brain to keep him tied to this house, a keyed-in response that would not let him forget, no matter where he went or what he might become, this house and the ties it held for him.

"Hezekiah," Vickers asked, "who is Horton Flanders?"

"Horton Flanders," said the robot, "is an android, just the same as you."

CHAPTER FORTY

So he was supposed to stop Crawford.

He was supposed to hunch him.

But first he had to figure out the angles. He had to take the factors and balance one against another and see where the weak spots were and the strong points, too. There was the might of industry, not one industry alone, but the might of all the industry in the entire world. There was the fact that Crawford and industry had declared open war upon the mutants. And there was the matter of the secret weapon.

"Desperation and a secret weapon," Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room. But the secret weapon, he had added, wasn't good enough.

First of all, Vickers had to know what the weapon was. Until he knew that, there would be no point in making any plans.

He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and sorted out the facts and laid them in orderly rows and had a Iook at them. Then he juggled them a bit, changing their position in regard to one another and he balanced the strength of normal human against the strength of mutant and there were many places where they canceled one another and there were other instances where one stood forth, unassailable and uncancelable.

He got exactly nowhere.

"And of course I won't," he said. "This is the old awkward normal human way of doing. This is reasoning.

Hunch was the thing.

And how to do the hunching?

He swept the factors clean away, swept them from his mind, and lay upon the bed, staring at the darkness where the ceiling was and did not try to think.

He could feel the factors bumping in his brain, bouncing together, then fleeing from each other, but he kept himself from recognizing them.

An idea came: War.

He thought about it and it grew and gripped him.

War, but a different kind of war than the world had ever known. What was that phrase from the old history of World War II? A phoney war. And yet, not a phoney war.

It was a disturbing thing to think about something that you couldn't place — to have a hunch — that was it, a hunch grawing at you and not know what it was.

He tried to think about it and it retreated from him. He stopped thinking and it came back again.

Another idea came: Poverty.

And poverty was somehow tied up with war and he sensed the two of them, the two ideas, circling likecoyotes around the campfire that was himself, snarling and growling at each other in the darkness beyond the flame of his understanding.