And then, without surprise or any consciousness of alteration, he realized that he was no longer one Thorn, but three. A Thorn who had lived three lives--and whether memory pictured them as having been lived simultaneously or in sequence seemed to matter not at all. A Thorn who had learned patience and endurance and self-sufficiency from harsh World III, who had had ground into the bedrock of his mind the knowledge that man is an animal in competition with other animals, that all human aspirations are but small and vaunting and doomed things--but not necessarily worthless therefore--in a blind and unfeeling cosmos, and that even death and the extinguishing of all racial hopes are ills that can be smiled at while you struggle against them. A Thorn who had seen and experienced in World II the worst of man's cruelty to man, who had gained a terrible familiarity with human nature's weaknesses, its cowardly submissiveness to social pressure, its capacity for self-delusion, its selfishness, its horrible adaptability, who had plumbed to their seething, poisoning depths the emotions of hate and resentment and envy and fear, but who in part had risen superior to all this and learned humility, and sympathy, and sacrifice, and devotion to a cause. A Thorn who, in too-easy World I, had learned how to use the dangerous gift of freedom, how to fight human nature's tendency to go evil and foul itself when it is not being disciplined by hardship and adversity, how to endure happiness and success without souring, how to create goals and purposes in an environment that does not supply them ready-made. All these experiences were now those of one mind. They did not contradict or clash with each other. Between them there was no friction or envy or guilt. Each contributed a fund of understanding, carrying equal weight in the making of future decisions. And yet there was no sense of three minds bargaining together or talking together or even thinking together. There was only one Thorn, who, except for that period of childhood before the split took place, had lived three lives. * * * * * This composite Thorn, sustained by the talisman, poised in the dimensionless dark beyond space and time, felt that his personality had suddenly been immeasurably enriched and deepened, that heretofore he had been going around two-thirds blind and only now begun to appreciate the many-sidedness of life and the real significance of all that he had experienced. And without hesitation or inward argument, without any sense of responding to the urgings of Thorn II, since there was no longer a separate Thorn II, he remembered what the death-resisting Oktav had whispered to him in the Blue Lorraine, syllable by agonized syllable, and he recalled the duty laid upon him by the seer. He thought of the first step--the finding of the Probability Engine--and felt the answering surge of the talisman, and submitted to its guidance.