A Choice of Gods

She sat stiff and straight, remembering the man who had stood that morning on the bluff top with her.

"Is he badly hurt?" she asked.

"I do not think so," Thatcher told her. "He sought refuge in the monastery from the storm. When he opened the gate, the wind caught it and it struck him. He is very much alive."

"He is a good man," said Evening Star, "and a very simple man. He ca

And stopped, confused, for she must not talk about the tree. She must learn to guard her tongue.

"Miss, you know this human?"

"No. I mean I do not know him. I saw him for a moment and talked with him this morning. He said he was coming here. He was seeking something and thought he might find it here."

"All humans seek for something," Thatcher said. "We robots are quite different. We are content to serve."

10

"To begin with," said John Whitney, "I simply wandered. It was wonderful to all of us, of course, but I think, somehow, most wonderful of all to me. The idea that man could be a free agent in the universe, that he could go wherever he might wish, was a bit of magic that was utterly beyond all comprehension, and that he could do this by himself, with no machinery, with no instruments, with nothing but his body and his mind, through a power that he held within himself and which no human had ever known before, was simply unbelievable, and I found myself exercising the power to prove to myself again and yet again that it could be really done, that it was a solid and ever-present ability that could be called upon at will and that it was never lost, and that it belonged to one by right of his humanity and not by some special dispensation that could be withdrawn at a moment's notice. You never tried it, Jason, neither you nor Martha?"

Jason shook his head. "We found something else. Not as exhilarating, perhaps, but with a deep satisfaction of its own. A love of land and a feeling of continuity, a sense of heritage, even of being a substantial part of that heritage, an earthbound certainty."

"I think I can understand that," said John. "It's something that I never had and I suspect it was the lack of it that drove me on and on once the sheer exuberance of traveling from one star to another had worn somewhat thin. Although I still can become excited over a new place that I find—for there are never any of them that are exactly like another. The one amazing thing to me, the thing that continues to amaze me, is the great range of dissimilarities that can exist, even on those planets where the basic characteristics of their geology and history are very much the same."

"But why did you wait so long, John? All these years without coming home. Without letting us know. You said you had met others and that they told you we were still on Earth, that we had never left."

"I had thought of it," said John. "Many times I thought of it, of coming back to see you. But I'd have come back empty-handed, with not a thing to show for all the years of wanderlust. Not possessions, of course, for we know now they don't count. But nothing really learned, no great new understanding. A fistful of stories of where I'd been and what I'd seen, but that would have been the size of it. The prodigal coming home and I…"

"But it wouldn't have been that way. Your welcome always waited you. We've waited for years and asked of you."

"What I don't understand," said Martha, "is why there was no word of you. You said you had met others and I talk all the time with our people out there and there never was a word about you, never any news. You just dropped out of sight."

"I was far out, Martha. Much farther than most of the others ever got. I ran hard and fast. Don't ask me why. I sometimes asked myself and there was never any answer. Never any real answer. The others that I met, only two or three of them quite by accident, had run as hard as I. Like a bunch of kids, I suppose, who come to a new and wondrous place, and there is so much to see they're afraid they'll not get to see it all, so they run hard to see it all, telling themselves that once they've seen it all, they'll go back to the one place that is best, probably knowing that they never will, for that one best place is always, in then- minds, just a little way ahead and they become obsessed with the idea that if they don't keep going they will never find it. I knew what I was doing and I knew it made no sense and it was some comfort to me when I met those other few who were the same as I."

"But there was purpose in your ru

"That is true," said John, "but I had no sense of purpose. I simply stumbled on them. I had no word of them, no inkling they were there. I wasn't hunting them. I had sensed the Principle and I was hunting it."

"The Principle?"

"I don't know how I can tell you, Jason. There aren't words to tell you. There is no way I can express exactly what it is, although I am certain I have a fairly good idea. Perhaps no man can ever know exactly what it is. You remember that you said there was an evil toward the center. That evil is the Principle. The people I met far out had sensed it, too, and somehow must have sent back word. But evil is not right; it is not really evil. Sensed, scented, become aware of from far off, it has the smell of evil because it is so different, so unhuman, so uncaring. By human standards blind and reasonless, and seeming blind and reasonless because there is about it not one single emotion, one single motive or purpose, one single thought process that can be equated with the human mind. A spider is blood brother and intellectual equal to us as compared to it. It sits there and it knows. It knows all there is to know. And its knowing is translated in such nonhuman terms that we could never even scratch the surface of the simplest of those terms. It sits there and knows and translates what it knows and that translation of its knowledge is so coldly correct that one shrinks away from it, for there is nothing that can be so right, without the slightest possibility of error. I've said it is unhuman and perhaps it is this ability to be so utterly right, so absolutely correct, that makes it so unhuman. For proud as we may be of our intellect and understanding, there is no one of us who can say with any honesty or any certainty that he is correct on any point of information or interpretation."

"But you said that you found the People and they're coming back to Earth," said Martha. "Can't you tell us more about them and when they're coming back…"

"My dear," said Jason, softly, "I think there's more that John wants to tell us, that he has to tell us before he talks about the People,"

John rose from the chair in which he had been sitting, walked to the ram-smeared window and looked out, then came back to face the two sitting on the davenport. "Jason is right," he said. "There is more I have to tell. I've wanted for so long to tell it to someone, to share it all with someone. I may be wrong. I've thought about it for so long that I may have become confused. I'd like to have you two hear me out and tell me what you think."

He sat down on the chair again. "I'll try to present it as objectively as I can," he said. "You realize that I never saw this thing, this Principle. I may not have even gotten close to it. But close enough to know that it is there and to sense a little, perhaps as much as any man may sense, the sort of thing it is. Not understanding it, of course, not even trying to understand it, for you know you are too small and weak for understanding. That was the thing that hurt the most, perhaps—realizing how small and weak you were, and not only you yourself, but all humanity. Something that reduced the human race to microbe status, perhaps to less than microbe status. You know instinctively that you, as one human being, are beneath its notice, although there is evidence, or I think there may be evidence, that it could and did take notice of humanity.