How long, he wondered, how long would it take a man to understand all there was to know about all these massive, intricate machines? How far, he wondered, have we fallen from the knowledge of a thousand years ago?
And the thing he carried dangled on his shoulder and he heard the slow, deliberate dripping of the warm, sticky liquid splashing on the floor.
Horror and wonder—a going back. A going back through a thousand years to a knowledge that could build machines like these. A going back much farther to an instability of human emotions that would drive one man to kill another man.
I must be rid of him, Jon Hoff thought bitterly. I must be rid of him. But I never will be. When he has disappeared, when he has become something other than what he is, when the substances of him have become something else, I still shall not be rid of him. Never!
He found the converter door and braced himself in front of it. He tugged at the door. It stuck and he jerked at it and it came free. The maw gaped, large enough to take a human body, and from behind the baffles he could hear the roaring of the power and imagined that he caught the hellish flicker of the ravening fire.
He balanced the body on his shoulder and slid it off as gently as he could, feeding it to the maw. He gave it a final push and closed the door and trod hard upon the feeder mechanism.
The deed finally was done.
He reeled back from the converter's face and mopped his brow and now the burden was gone, but it still was with him.
As it always would be, he thought. As it always would be.
The footsteps came at him and he did not swing around to face them, for he knew whose the footsteps were—the ghostly footsteps that would dog him all his life—the footsteps of guilt walking in his mind.