“Father?”

“Son.”

“You are me?”

“We are us.”

“Father and son?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t understand… What’s happened?”

“You lost the game, Ben.”

“The Sardine Game?”

“The Cosmic Game.”

“I won, I won. I owned every bit of the world. I—”

“And therefore you lose. We lose.”

“Lose what?”

“Survival.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t understand.”

“My part of us understands, Ben. You would understand too if you hadn’t driven me from you.”

“How did I drive you from me?”

“With every rotten, distorted corruption in you.”

“You say that? You… betrayer, who tried to kill me?”

“That was without passion, Ben. That was to destroy you before you could destroy us. That was for survival. It was to help you lose the world and win the game, Ben.”

“What game? What Cosmic Game?”

“The maze… the labyrinth… all the universe, created as a puzzle for us to solve. The galaxies, the stars, the sun, the planets… the world as we knew it. We were the only reality. All the rest was make-believe… dolls, puppets, stage-settings… pretended passions. It was a make-believe reality for us to solve.”

“I conquered it. I owned it.”

“And you failed to solve it. We’ll never know what the solution is, but it’s not theft, terror, hatred, lust, murder, rapine. You failed, and it’s all been abolished, disbanded…”

“But what’s to become of us?”

“We are abolished too. I tried to warn you. I tried to stop you. But we failed the test.”

“But why? Why? Who are we? What are we?”

“Who knows? Did the seed know who or what it was when it failed to find fertile soil? Does it matter who or what we are? We have failed. Our test is ended. We are ended.”

“No!”

“Perhaps if we had solved it, Ben, it might have remained real. But it is ended. Reality has turned into might-have-been, and you have awakened at last… to nothing.”

“We’ll go back! We’ll try it again!”

“There is no going back. It is ended.”

“We’ll find a way. There must be a way…”

“There is none. It is ended.”

It was ended.

Now… Demolition.

17

THEY FOUND THE TWO MEN next morning, far up the island in the gardens overlooking the old Harlem Canal. Each had wandered all the night, through footway and skyway, unconscious of his surroundings, yet both were drawn inevitably together like two magnetized needles floating on a weed choked pond.

Powell was seated cross-legged on the wet turf, his face shrivelled and lifeless, his respiration almost gone, his pulse faded. He was clutching Reich with an iron grip. Reich was curled into a tight foetal ball.

They rushed Powell to his home on Hudson Ramp where the entire Guild Lab team alternately sweated over him and congratulated themselves on the first successful Mass Cathexis Measure in the history of the Esper Guild. There was no hurry for Reich. In due course and with proper procedure, his inert body was transported to Kingston Hospital for Demolition. There the matter rested for seven days.