—he was out on an autowalk among the shifting listless crowd. He moved toward the five-acre expanse of World Brain. He was aware of nothing about him, only of Frances. He would soon be back with her. Destroying World Brain was only a means to that end. He noticed then, abruptly, that the people around him had only five fingers on their hands. But he didn’t think about it. It had no meaning anyway.
Then, suddenly, he was aware that there were no more people. No more buildings, either. A cool wind blew across his hot face. He stood awed on the long, sweeping rim of an abyss, the edge of a bowl. Its sides curved down and away in gracious gleaming sweeps, down, down and away into a colossal valley. In its center was World Brain. A gigantic, unbroken cylinder, a mile away and a thousand meters down.
He knew he was on the periphery of the ultrasonic field now. He walked along the railed edge of the abyss until he faced the plastic man who was standing before the opening of a levitation shaft that would take him directly into the arteries of World Brain.
He tried to edge past the plastic man. There wasn’t room enough; the plastic man wasn’t designed to make any room. The creation was very close to a perfect synthesis. There was no other way. Roland charged head down into the waiting figure and hurled him upward over the railing.
Roland watched him spin out end over end, then flatten out on the sweeping curvature and go sliding with fantastic silent slowness, away and down, down the long, seemingly endless curve into the depths of the gigantic plastic bowl. Roland stepped into the shaft. Dwarfed, Roland walked slowly across the gleaming expanse of floor toward the nakedly exposed rows of electronic brain cases. A few blows, a pull or two, and the circuit would be shattered. His sandals rustled softly.
But he hesitated.
There was a guilty feeling and a lost loneliness. Who was he, really? Taken in infancy from some birth center by the Underground. Conditioned precisely as they desired—a completely selective mentality. Had never had a name. But a label someone pulled out of a hat to satisfy a beautiful woman’s peculiar liking for nicknames. The amnesiac’s isolated fear of what he didn’t know and couldn’t remember, mustn’t remember, but what he must know—
But Frances waited for him back in the secret apartment. Warmth would replace a cold emptiness. Meaning and purpose would fill the lonely places in his heart.
He went forward—