The feeling persisted, and suddenly he identified it: Hempstead House, New London, Conn. The stories he had been told in childhood about the underground railroad and the abolitionist meetings held by the few who believed men should be free and were willing to do something about it!
The memory came to him across thirty-five years of his life, and half the span of the galaxy. It came with an impact that snapped something inside him, to bring the entity, the changing personality that was himself, into focus again. But it wasn't the same focus as before. It would never be. Yet he felt more a whole person than ever before, and within him there was a surging current that could not be held back.
Hempstead House had been a verity that could not be fitted into any neat cubicle of orthodoxy. New England ministers and spinsters, businessmen and farmers—all of them motivated by a life force that couldn't be duplicated in any laboratory. The same life force was in this tree cave tonight, far away from Earth. It would go with men forever, through all space and time.
It would go with Lucifer Brill, too—to the end of this experience, to whatever new frontiers of science he might live to reach. It would prevent the vision from becoming the still-life picture, the theory from crystalizing into dogma. As long as the force lived in any man, it had the potential of leading all men to freedom. Psi was an unknown part of that life force. It could not always remain in the laboratory. It must bring freedom from blindness, freedom from the cubicles that restricted each man, each science. It was a weapon ...
A weapon!
Good Lord, why not?
Lucifer stepped into the center of the group before he knew what he was going to say. But the words came: "Wait ... there may be a better way—if you have the courage to try it!"
Fetzer eyed him sceptically.
"We don't have much time, Doc."
"Then you must make time! It's your only chance—our only chance!"