Party Line

'You're right,' said Thomas. 'It would have been impossible to rely on the memories of the telepaths. Many of them, most of them, in fact, have only a marginal understanding of what they are told; they are handling information that is beyond their comprehension. They have a general idea, probably, but they miss a lot of it. Jay is an exception, of course. And that makes it easier with him. But with the others, the ones who do not fully understand, we have a record of the communications in the memory bank.'

'We need more operators,' said Allen. 'We're barely touching all the sources out there. And we can't go skipping around a lot because if we did, we might be passing up some fairly solid material. We do our recruiting and we uncover a lot of incipient telepaths, of course, but very few of the kind we are looking for.'

'At no time,' said Thomas, 'are there ever too many of them to find.'

'We got off what we were talking about,' said Allen. 'Mary Kay and Jennie, wasn't it?'

'I guess it was. They're the question marks. Jay either will pin down the matter of FTL or he'll not be able to. Dick will keep on with the economics and will either get some worth-while feedback or he won't. Those are the kinds of odds we have to play. Hal will go on talking with his alien computer and we eventually may get something out of it. One of these days, we'll jerk the memory banks on that one and see what we have. I'd guess there might be some nebulous ideas we could play around with. But Mary Kay and Jennie — Christ, they're into something that is beyond anything we ever bargained for. Mary Kay a simulation — or maybe even the actuality — of a heavenly existence, a sort of Paradise, and Jennie with overtones of an existence beyond the grave. These are the kinds of things that people have been yearning for since the world began. This is what made billions of people, over the ages, tolerate religions. It poses a problem — both of them pose problems.'

'If something came of either of them,' said Allen, 'what would we do with it?'

That's right. Yet, you can't go chicken on it. You can't just turn it off because you're afraid of it.'

'You're afraid of it, Paul?'

T guess I am. Not personally. Personally, like everyone else, I would like to know. But can you imagine what would happen if we dumped it on the world?'

'I think I can. A sweep of unrealistic euphoria. New cults rising and we have more cults than we can handle now. A disruptive, perhaps a destructive impact on society.'

'So what do we do? It's something we may have to face.'

'We play it by ear,' said Allen. 'We make a decision when we have to. As project manager, you can control what comes out of here. Which may make Ben Russell unhappy, but something like this business of Mary Kay and Jennie is precisely why the director was given that kind of authority.'

'Sit on it?' asked Thomas.

'That's right. Sit on it. Watch it. Keep close tabs on it. But don't fret about it. Not now at least. Fretting time may be some distance down the road.'

'I don't know why I bothered you,' said Thomas. 'That's exactly what I intended all along.'

'You bothered me,' said Allen, 'because you wanted someone in to help you finish up that bottle.'

Thomas reached for the bottle. 'Let's be about it, then.'

VII

'If you had to invent a universe,' asked Mary Kay, 'if you really had to, I mean; if it was your job and you had to do it, what kind of universe would you invent?'

'A universe that went on and on,' said Martin. 'A universe with no beginning and no end. Hoyle's kind of universe.

Where there'd be the time and space for everything that possibly could happen, to happen.'

That entropy thing really got to you, didn't it. A voice out of the void saying it was all coming to an end.'

Martin crinkled his forehead. 'More now than it did to start with. Now that I've had time to think it over. Christ, think of it. We've been sitting here, us and all the people before us, thinking that there was no end, ever. Telling ourselves we had all the time there is. Not considering our own mortality, that is. Thinking racially, not of ourselves alone. Not ourselves, but all the people who come after us. An expanding universe, we told ourselves. And maybe now it isn't. Maybe, right this minute, it is a contracting universe. Rushing back, all the old dead matter, all the played-out energy.'

'It has no real bearing on us,' said Mary Kay. 'No physical effect. We won't be caught in the crunch, not right away at least. Our agony is intellectual. It does violence to our concept of the universe. That's what hurts. That a thing so big, so beautiful — the only thing we really know — is coming to an end.'

'They could have been wrong,' he said. They might have miscalculated. Their observations might have been faulty. And it might not really be the end. There might still be another universe. Once everything retreated back as far as it could go, there might be another cosmic explosion and another universe.'