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"What would you suggest?" asked Pomiarsk. I turned and walked away from them,
out of the building through the door that opened before me and shut after me.
I walked into the solitude of the thin, clean air and the high sunlight There
was something working in me; and for the moment it had driven everything else,
even Ellen, out of my mind. It was like a burning, but beneficent fever, like
a great hunger about to be satisfied, like the feeling of standing on the
threshold of a cavern filled with treasure beyond counting.
It was all this, and still it was indescribable. I did not yet have it but I
could almost touch it and taste it; and I knew that it was only a. matter of
time now until my grasp closed on it Knowing mat was everything, I could wait
now. I could work. I could do anything. The keys of my kingdom were at hand.
Then began a bittersweet time for me, the several weeks that Pomiarsk worked
on the equipment in what we were now calling the "roundhouse." It was sweet
because, day by day, I felt the device-of-assistance coming to life under the
touch of those three tentacle-fingers Pomiarsk had growing out of his
shoulders. The avatar had been right about me. The original Pomiarsk had not
suspected there would be anyone on our Earth who could use the device without
being physically connected to it But evidently I was a freak. I had already
had some kind of mental connection with this place, if only subconsciously,
during the days of The Dream in which I had pushed us all in this direction
and to this location. I said as much to Pomiarsk one day.
"No," he shook his head, "before that, I'd think. You must have felt its
existence, here, and been searching for it from the time you woke to find your
world changed.**
"I was looking," I said. "But I didn't have any idea what for."
"Perhaps," said Pomiarsk. "But you might find, after the device is ready and
you can look back over all you've done, that you unconsciously directed each
step along the way toward this place and this moment, from the beginning."
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I shook my bead. There was no use trying to explain to him, I thought, how I
had never been able to let a problem alone. But I did not argue the point any
further.
I was too intensely wrapped up in what I could feel growing about me-the
assistance of the device. It was only partly mechanical. Pomiarsk would not or
could not, explain its workings to me, although I could watch him as he worked
with the small colored cubes that made up the inner parts of seven of the
consoles. The cubes were about a quarter the size of children's blocks and
seemed to be made of some hard, translucent material. They clung together
naturally in the arrangement hi which they occurred behind the face of the
console; and Porniarsk's work, apparently, was to rearrange then* order and
get them to cling together again. Apparently, the rearrangement was different
with each console; and Porniarsk had to try any number of combinations before
he found it It looked like a random procedure but, evidently, was not; and
when I asked about that, Porniarsk relaxed his no-information rule enough to
tell me that what he was doing was checking arrangements of the cubes in
accordance with "sets" he already carried hi his memory center, to find
patterns that would resonate with the monad that was me. It was not the cubes
that were the working parts, evidently, but the patterns.
Whatever he was doing, and however it was effective, when he got a collection
of cubes to hang together in a different order, I felt the effect immediately.
It was as if another psychic generator had come on-fine in my mind. With each
addition of power, or strength, or whatever you want to call it, I saw more
clearly and more deeply into all things around me.
-Including the people. And from this came the bitter to join with the sweet of
my life. For as, step by step, my perceptions increased, I came to perceive
that Ellen was indeed intending to leave with Tek as soon as my work with the
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