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suddenly in him. "I'll be damned! You're self-brainwashed, too. In spite of
all that paranormal talent and intelligence, you've been burying your head in
the sand like the rest!"
Jai looked back down at him with a closed face.
"Let me show you something," saidChaz . He reached for the Mass beyond
Pluto and found the way blocked by Jai's mind and para-normal strength."All
right. We can do it right from here."
Chazturned his mind once more to the Mass-on-Earth, found it, and reached out
through it to the cartoon world, to the Mantis itself and the Snail. He found
them, feeling Jai's mind with him, watching.
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"They don't want to believe it,"Chaz said, at once out loud to Jai and
through his mind to the Mantis on the cartoon world. "Can I call on you once
more to tell them your-selves that the road to any other world is closed? That
there's no place we can escape to?"
"This once more," said the Man-tis.
The Mass-on-Earth stirred and shifted under the transparent bubble roofing
over the top floor of the Em-bry Tower; and all overChicago , reality changed.
Not forChaz and Jai alone, but for everyone there. It was a little change, and
at the same time, a big change as if an extra physical dimension had been
added, so that there was no longer merely length, width, height and duration;
but also away, binding Earth and the cartoon world together.
The Mantis and a Snail appeared over the city along the "away" di-mension. In
one sense they were the cardboard cut-out figures of them-selves, now become
solid and alive. In another sense they were enormous, standing in mid-air
be-tween building tops and heavy cloud layer, visible to all ofChicago 's
ster-ile areas. But in a final sense they were even more than this, because
they also stretched from Earth clear back across the unbelievable dis-tance of
light-years to their own world, where in actuality they still were. And yet,
these three things they seemed tobe, were really only one. Topologically, in
the "away" di-mension, all three manifestations were only aspects of single
unity like three views of atorus , the angle of viewing made them look to be
one thing, rather than another.
"It's quite true," said the Mantis to everyone in the Chicago District, while
the Snail beside him, without moving, slid endlessly over a thin surface of
eternally flowing liquid. "There are other worlds; but not for your race,
until you can show your right to them."
"You can't stop us," said Jai and it was a brave statement. With the "away"
dimension now visible around them, Jai's talent glowed vis-ibly, like a small
sun among the feeble lamps of the other human beings around him. But that
glowing was a tiny thing compared to the burning greatness of the Mantis and
the Snail.
"We do not stop you," said the Mantis. "We neither aid you nor hinder you.
You do it all to your-selves. Think of yourselves for a mo-ment, not as
individuals, but as one creature called 'Human' made up of billions of little
individual parts. This creature told itself it would build a bridge to the
stars; but it lied to itself. What its hands were build-ing, all the time it
talked of a new world, was something else it wanted much more."
"What's that?" demanded Jai.
"How do we know?" answered the Mantis. "We are notHuman ; you are. But we can
tell you what you have built is not a way to another world. When the time
comes that another planet is what you really want what you want more than
anything else you will undoubtedly find it. And as we neither helped nor
hindered now, we will not help or hinder then. We would not even be talking to
you now, if one of those tiny parts who knows what Human wants, had not
reached us through what you all built, and put upon us the ethical duty to
answer him."
The Mantis looked atChaz and disappeared. It and the Snail were gone. Away
was no longer per-ceptible; and the cut-out figures were only cut-out figures
again.
Jai looked atChaz . In that mo-ment, a dull sound was heard, far off across
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the city, and a faint shock jar-red the floor under their feet.
"There goes one of the explosion points,"Chaz said. "Tell me, how many did
you really find?"
"None," said Jai. "But you've just killed several million people in this
district. I won't die; and the other witches won't and at a guess there'll be
some others who'll live. We've suspected there were some exiles that had
turned out to be immune.
But what about the four million inChicago district who aren't? At least the
Citadel would have gone on keeping them alive."
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