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"I got as close to it as my mind could bear. I cowered before it. I don't know what else I did. There is a part of all of this that tends to go foggy in the mind. Perhaps I got too close. But I had to know, you see. I had to be sure and I am sure. It is out there and it watches and it knows and if need be it can act, although I am inclined to think it would not be quick to act…"
"Act—how?" asked Jason.
"I don't know," John told him. "You have to understand this is all impression. Intellectual impression. Nothing visual. Nothing that I saw or heard. It's the fact that it's all intellectual impression that makes it so hard to describe. How do you describe the reactions of the human mind? How do you blueprint the emotional impact of those reactions?"
"We had the report," Jason said to Martha. "You picked it up from someone. Do you remember who it was, who it might have been who was out as far as John, or almost as far as John…"
"They wouldn't have had to be out as far as I was," said John. "They could have picked up the sense of it a good deal farther off. I deliberately tried to get in close to it."
"I don't remember who it was," said Martha. "Two or three people told me of it, It was, I'm sure, all very second-hand. Maybe tenth- or twelfth-hand. Word that had been passed on from one person to another, from many persons to many other persons. Simply that there was something evil out near the center of the galaxy. That someone had been out there and had run into it. But no hint that anyone had investigated. Afraid to investigate, perhaps."
"That would be right," said John. "I was very much afraid."
"You call it a Principle," said Jason. "That is a fu
"It was what I thought when I was close to it," said John. "It didn't tell me. It didn't communicate at all. It probably was not even aware of me, didn't know that I existed. One tiny little microbe creeping up on it…"
"But Principle? It was a thing, a creature, an entity. That is a strange designation to hang on a creature or an entity. There must have been a reason."
"I'm not sure, Jason, that it is a creature or an entity. It is simply something. A mass of intelligence, perhaps. And what form would a mass of intelligence take? What would it look like? Could you even see it? Would it be a cloud, a wisp of gas, trillions of tiny motes dancing in the light of the center's suns. And the reason for calling it the Principle? I can't really tell you. There is no logic to it, no single reason I can put a finger on. Simply that I felt it was the basic principle of the universe, the director of the universe, the brain center of the universe, the thing that holds the universe together and makes it operate—the force that makes the electrons spin about the nucleus, that makes the galaxies rotate about their centers, that holds everything in place."
"Could you pinpoint its location?" Jason asked. John shook his head. "No way that I could. No such thing as triangulation. The feel of the Principle was everywhere, it seemed; it came from everywhere. It closed in around you. It muffled and engulfed you; there was no sense of direction. And in any case, it would be difficult, for there are so many suns and so many planets. Jammed close together. Suns fractions of light-years apart. Old, the most of them. Most of the planets dead. Some of them with the wreckage and ruin of what at one time must have been great civilizations, but now all of them are gone…"
"Perhaps it was one of these civilizations…"
"Perhaps," said John. "I thought so at first. That one of the ancient civilizations had managed to survive and that its intelligence evolved into the Principle. But since then I've come to doubt it. For more time would have been needed, I'm convinced, than the lifetime of a galaxy could afford. I can't begin to tell you, I don't know how to tell you, the sheer force of this intelligence, or the alie
"Yes, of course," said Jason. "The universe had no begi
"I know they did," said John. "But there was still one hope—you could call it hope, for there were certain people who, for philosophical reasons, clung stubbornly to the steady-state concept. It was so beautiful, so superb and awe-inspiring, that they would not let it go. And they said, suppose that the universe is far bigger than it seems to be, that what we see is only a local segment, one tiny local bubble on the skin of this greater universe and this local bubble is going through a phase that makes it appear not to be steady-state, but an evolving universe."
"And you think that they were right?"
"I think they could be right. Steady-state would give the Principle the time that it needed to come into being. Before it came into being the universe may have been chaotic. The Principle may be the engineering force that put it all to right."
"You believe all this?"
"Yes, I do believe it. I've had time to think of it and I put it all together and I did the job so well that I'm convinced of it. Not a shred of proof. Not a point of information. But it's fastened in my mind and I can't shake it free. I try to tell myself that the Principle, or certain features of the Principle, may have put it in my mind, might have planted it. I try to tell this to myself because it's the only way that I can explain it. And yet I know I must be wrong, for I am sure the Principle was entirely unaware of me. There was never any sign it was aware of me."
"You got close to it, you say."
"As close as I dared to get. I was frightened all the way. I went to a point where I had to break and run."
"Somewhere along the way you found the People. So there was purpose after all. You never would have found them if you'd not gone chasing after this thing you call the Principle."
"Jason," Martha said, "you don't sound too impressed. What's the matter with you? Here your brother has come back and…"
"I am sorry," Jason said. "I would suppose I do not grasp it yet. It is too big to grasp. Maybe I'm deeply horrified and calling it 'this thing' is simply a defense mechanism to hold it away from me."
"I found the same reaction in myself," John told Martha. "That is, to begin with. I soon got over it. And, yes, I'd have never found the People if I'd not tracked down the Principle. It was blind luck I found them. I had started back, you see, and was planet hopping, but going on a different tack than the one I'd followed going in. You have to be extremely careful, as I suppose you know, in choosing the planets that you use. You can sense them and pick out the ones that seem the best and there are a lot of guidelines that serve you fairly well, but there always is a chance that a planet might have some characteristics that you have not detected or lack something that you took for granted and that simply isn't there, so you have to have an alternative or two, so that if anything goes sour with the planet you have chosen you can shift most hurriedly to another one. I had alternatives and I hit a planet that, if not deadly, was uncomfortable, so I switched quickly to another one and that's where I found the People, It was still fairly close to the Principle and I wondered how they stood it, how they could live so close to it and entirely disregard it, or pretend to disregard it. I thought perhaps they had become accustomed to it, although it did not seem the sort of thing one could very readily become accustomed to. It was only after a time that I realized they were unaware of it. They had not developed parapsychic abilities, as we have, and they were entirely deaf to it. They had no idea such a thing was there.