2150 A.D.

Finding myself suddenly in the dining hall I began ru

Once again I felt the increasing power of the crushing vise on my mind, but this time I sought to deal with it by not resisting. I tried to respond to it with Macro loving acceptance. At the same time I continued my search for Carol. The underground cellars of Elgon's palace seemed a veritable labyrinth of rooms, but at last I passed through the right door and found myself in the right place with Carol lying as if dead at the center of the room. As I started toward her, I heard deep booming laughter as Elgon emerged from the shadows at my side.

Almost instantly the pressure of the vise upon my mind multiplied and I realized that Elgon was now personally directing the Macro powers of his thousand-member mind net with crushing force upon me. I have no doubt that Rana or even Lea could have handled their telepathic onslaught, but my level-two powers were no match for this mind net.

The pressure quickly overwhelmed me. I could no longer accept it. Then as I began to struggle against it the end came very suddenly. I lost consciousness and awoke back in 1976.

My room was dark. It was only 4 a.m.

I quickly decided to go back to sleep and see what had happened to me back to 2150. While it took me some time to calm my mind from the vivid memory of the crushing vise, I at last managed to fall asleep and awakened back in the canopied bed with Sela bending over me.

The moment I opened my eyes she said, "You are a fool, Jon Two."

I smiled at her in Karl's wry cynical way and said, "I see you no longer keep up the pretense that I'm a level ten."

"That's right," she replied. "We've discovered that your Macro powers are very limited. You'll hardly be attaining level three in these next few days.

"But that's not why I was calling you a fool. Don't you realize that if you leave your body unprotected while you're gone from it on the astral plane someone who knows how-as I do-can sever the silver cord and separate you permanently from your physical body?"

"Yes," I said. "I knew this, but you want me to become a permanent 'live' resident of Micro Island, not a dead one. My propaganda value would be worthless if I was dead."

Sela gave me her sensuous look in which her tongue touched her lips in a kissing motion before she said, "I don't want you dead, Jon. I want you as my lover, and I know that unless you help us complete your time translation that magnificent body of yours will soon die, and your mind will be lost 174 years in the past."

"Sela," I said, "I no longer desire a micro existence."

'But you have no choice," she replied. "You can either live on Micro Island in 2150 in a well-run micro society or you can live in 1976 in a chaotic micro society."

When I didn't reply to this she finally gave a long sigh of resignation and said, "You leave us no other choice but to release Carol to find her own way back to the Macro society. You realize, of course, that since she will not obey our laws she will be put to death."

"That's murder!" I said.

"It's not murder," she replied. "When a person chooses to break laws that she knows will cause her death, that's suicide. Of course, you can always prevent her death by agreeing to become a permanent resident of Micro Island."

"Give me more time," I said. "Let me think about this."

"You've had plenty of time, Jon," she said, "but to show our generosity we'll give you one more day. If by tomorrow morning you have not decided to cooperate with us we will release Carol and you can watch her cause her own death."

After a long silence Sela left and I began pacing about my prison suite trying vainly to discover the solution that Rana said was already in my mind. What was it, I wondered? What would appear the worst possible decision I could make? Well, from one view point, it would be defying Elgon and refusing his terms. That would humble my pride because I would not only lose Carol, but also my chance to live in 2150.

Yes, without a doubt the hardest thing for me to do would be to watch Carol being executed by the Micro Islanders-especially knowing that I could have prevented it.

I remembered Rana saying, "But nothing is terrible from the Macro view. Things can only be terrible from the micro perspective, which is too limited to see that we live in a perfectly just and balanced– macrocosm in which we experience only what we have chosen."

Then if Carol dies, I thought, she will have chosen it and it will bother me only to the extent that I view her as a possession of mine that I can lose. We can have anything we desire and believe in sufficiently, say the Macro philosophers, and since each soul has free will and absolute Macro power there is no problem.

All right, I agreed, there is no problem from the Macro perspective-but I don't live at that level! Where I live, there are lots of problems, and at the moment the most important one is saving Carol from death and me from losing 2150. This would lie resolved successfully if I would just cooperate with Elgon. Then I could dedicate the rest of my life to finding a way to return to the Macro society. But would I?

I was left completely alone for the rest of that long day and evening while I agonized over what I should tell Elgon in the morning. By the time evening came, I was completely, exhausted, having come to the conclusion that I would choose life for Carol, and, thus, life for me on Elgon's Micro Island. Sleep finally came, bringing with it a ghastly nightmare.

I dreamed that I was dressed in long black robes sitting as a judge in a vast desert. In front of me as far as I could see there stretched a long line of people whom I must judge. According to the bailiff standing beside me they had all committed some crime requiring the death penalty. As I listened to each person's explanation of his crime, however, it seemed to me that they all pleaded in such a moving and piteous fashion that I waived the death penalty for each and every one of them. They cheered, thanked, praised me because I chose life for all who came before me.

Then the scene changed to another part of the desert and I found myself walking with the bailiff at my side through a gigantic prison yard where all those whom I had saved from death were shackled by a great ball and chain so that they could barely move. Now instead of praising and thanking me they were all cursing me. I was appalled to see that they were all afflicted with some hideous disease that was destroying their bodies by slowly eating the flesh from their bones. Somehow I felt compelled to look at every one of these prisoners whose lives I had saved and who were now such grotesque and horrifying victims of a plague that slowly and painfully ate away their bodies.

I heard one call out to me. Turning to him, I shuddered and awoke in tears of terror, for the prisoner who last cursed me for saving his life was Karl!

I felt sick at my stomach with self-hatred to think that I could do that to Karl even in a dream.

Why would I have such a dream? What could it possibly mean? As I asked this question I remembered the words of Rana, "All pain, misery, and disease are the results of resisting that which is inevitable-that which we ourselves have chosen to grow on."

Then what was the solution? Again I could almost hear Rana saying, "The only way to balance negative actions is with positive actions. Thus, loving acceptance balances all. The only sin anyone ever commits is denial of the perfection of what is."

Then my dream, I decided, must have been created by my higher self to show me the consequences of trying to deny the perfection-the necessity-of what is. Did this mean that I should take the other path and let Carol die?