What should he believe?
What should he do?
Lucifer walked slowly around the small clearing behind their quarters. He stared, for the most part unseeingly, through the force field and into the shadows of the forest.
His shoulder brushed the invisible barricade, and the shock broke the rhythm of his stride.
What should he believe?
This question bubbled most frequently to the roiled surface of his thoughts. With belief would come the mental framework, the pattern for action. It was disturbing and confusing that credo should be so important to a scientific mind. Couldn't facts take form without credo? Did facts shape the framework, or were they molded to conform to it? Einstein made truth relative to its own framework, but which came first—the framework or the truth? And if the answer was framework, could there be truth? Perhaps the childhood riddle of the chicken and the egg could have cosmic implications. A vagrant phrase from a long-ago literature class came back to prod him now: To an egg the chicken is merely the means of producing another egg. Samuel Butler.
A shaft of sunlight speared down through the whispering canopy of branches high above him. It kindled to life a spot of riotous color in the perpetual shadow world at the base of the great trees. Blossoms of delicate blue, petals flecked with orange and gold. Leaves so green they brought an ache of loneliness for a forgotten spring morning of youth.
What should he believe?
With sudden percipience, Lucifer knew that he had moved in the shadows for a long time. The riotous dreams of youth, the exciting sense of being a pioneer among pioneers, had become like a bit of stop-motion film. It preserved the form, without the life or action. A dream cannot be framed and kept behind glass. It cannot be static. To remain, it must change.
Parapsychology had been the high road. The glorious adventure. It had made the son of a New England minister an explorer on a new frontier. But does a frontier of science have purpose other than to lead to an infinite succession of new frontiers? Had he remained too long on one frontier?