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Thunderbolt. I was always sorry for you, Clay, and I used to be sorry for
myself. Because the project was your wife and your child. You never needed
me."
Forester nodded unwillingly, stiff with his pain.
"Don't - don't blame Frank." She tried to control her trembling voice.
"Because he wouldn't take me away from Starmont until after you had abandoned
me there, drugged with euphoride, when you wandered away on your insane
adventuring. He brought me here, and woke my memory, and taught me this real
felicity. We're in love, Clay. I - I hope you'll try to wish us well." Her
white throat pulsed. "Won't you, Clay?"
"No!" With that choked sob, Forester pushed the child behind him to shield her
from the fire of annihilation. Swaying to the gray illness of his fury, he
thrust his quivering fist at the two before him, and he tried to kill them
both.
Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
FORESTER TRIED with the weapon of his mind, and he waited for the man and the
woman to die. No part of their bodies was detonated into dreadful flame,
however. They didn't even fall. They merely stood there on the silver steps,
Ironsmith urbanely grave, Ruth shaking her head in sad reproof.
"Huh!" Forester gasped with a shocked unbelief, as if the two had wounded him
with some unfair blow. His bewildered eyes went back to the far horizon, where
that tall mushroom of ominous cloud was beginning to thin and fade against the
blue summer sky. He looked for another rock.
"Stop it, Forester!" the gaunt old man broke in hastily. "There's no use
wrecking all the landscape. Because you can't hurt anybody - not with
psychophysics."
Forester retreated from him warily.
"You needn't be alarmed," the stranger rumbled softly. "You can't injure us,
and we don't need to retaliate." He smiled, patient and not unkind. "If you'll
calm yourself enough to listen, I might explain that you've apparently
overlooked a couple of basic fundamentals."
Forester stood swaying, blank and ill.
"You should have learned that the psychophysical functions are normally
unconscious," the old man said. "They belong very largely to that major
fraction of the brain tissue which is not used for conscious thought. Full
conscious control of them always requires long training, and a high degree of
integration to remove the interfering internal conflicts. You should know that
- though you have astonished us."
The cragged face showed a kind of admiration.
"I don't suppose you know the wonder of your own achievements. It is a rare
thing that a mind divided by such savage conflicts as yours is able to attain
any conscious psychophvsical control at all. The explanation of what you have
done, I believe, is in your unusual grasp of the physical and mathematical
aspects, as well as in the tendency toward psychophysical compensation for
physical handicaps in individuals under intense emotional stress."
Forester stood numb and stupid with his pain.
"Yet, for all your incredible accomplishments, you still show no real
understanding." The old man turned gravely stern again. "You've just proved
your blindness, with this insane attempt at murder. Anybody less crippled with
hate would have learned, long ago, that psychophysical energy cannot be used
for such destructive purposes.
"Because it's creative - can't you see that? The basic creative force of the
universe. It builds stable atoms, out of disruptive ferromagnetic and
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rhodomagnetic components. It is the mother of suns and galaxies, and it aids
the condensation of planets. It kindles life. It is the driving power of
organic evolution. And it is mind."
Forester tried not to yield to his fatigue and his grief and his shock. Thin
blades of pain stabbed through his swollen knee, and small fangs of hungry
agony nibbled at his stomach, and a groggy weakness tried to possess him. But
he shook his head and he tried to listen.
"Psychophysical energy is mind," the old man insisted softly. "Every atom in
the universe has mentality to the tiny extent of its own creative component.
Every molecule has more. Every new development of structure - in the complex
organic molecules, in the simple viruses at the borderline of life, in the
human brain - each such forward step in evolution is brought about by a new
emergence of that building component, on a higher level.
"Some of the mystics among us can see the working of it on levels even higher.
Studying the structure and the function of the entire creative mind arising [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]