And there was something else. His mind, freed of necessity to concentrate on the program, was somewhere off in space, listening intently ... listening to a voice from without and within, a voice that inhabited the cold wastes of time and infinity as well as the bone-bounded sphere of his brain.
Listen to me, Alan Rackham, said the voice. Wordlessly, yet with words, from the farthest stretches of the galaxies and still existing in the core of his own intellect, cold as hoarfrost, hot as berserker's rage, gentle and persuasive as a doting mother, the voice said to him, Listen to me.
He would not listen. It was good and evil both together, and if he listened he would die. Yet it was said he would live. He would live forever; if time can be measured in terms of endlessness, he would not die. But he knew he would die. He struggled. The cameras picked up no hint of the travail. His face was intense and good-humored and his words were intelligent; and all the while he fought with the voice and would not listen. He fought it for an hour, and for a month, and till the end of the world came and beyond, and it spoke to him, fire and ice in the same words, but without words, and then he began to listen to it.
At this point six minutes of the telecast had gone by.
You are listening now, said the voice. You are listening, are you not?
I'm listening, God curse you.
I am taking you, Alan Rackham, as a bear takes a lamb, as a man takes a woman, as a hand takes a glove and the glove takes the hand.
I understand, curse you. Take me.
I am older than your whole race, and wiser than its cumulative wisdom, and I come from the stars.