With a fresh surge of horror and revulsion, Thorn realized that these minds were absolutely incapable of the slightest approach to unbiased reasoning. They were so fanatically convinced of the correctness of all their past decisions as to the undesirability of the alternate worlds, that they were even completely blind to the apparent success of some of those worlds--or to the fact that the destruction of a lifeless asteroid belt was a meaningless gesture. They could only see the other worlds as horrible deviations from the cherished main trunk. Their reactions were as unweighed and hysterical as those of a murderer, who taking a last look around after an hour spent in obliterating possible clues, sees his victim feebly stir. Thorn gathered his will power for what he knew he must do. "Sikst?" "Yes, destroy!" "Septem?" "Destroy!" "Okt--" But even as Prim remembered that there no longer was an Oktav and joined with the others in thinking destruction, even as the darkness began to rack and heave with a new violence, Thorn sent out the call. "Whoever you may be, wherever you may be, Oh you who created it, here is the Divider of Time, here is the Probability Engine!" His thought deafened him, like a great shout. He had not realized the degree to which the others had been thinking in the equivalent of muted whispers. Instantly Prim and the rest were around him, choking his thoughts, strangling his mind, thinking his destruction along with that of the worlds. The throbbing of the darkness became that of a great storm, in which even the Probability Engine seemed on the verge of breaking from its moorings. Like a many-branched lightning-flash, came a vision of time-streams lashed and shaken--Worlds I and II torn apart--the invasion bridge snapped-- But through it Thorn kept sending the call. And he seemed to feel the eight talismans and the central engine take it up and echo it. His mind began to suffocate. His consciousness to darken. All reality seemed to tremble on the edge between being and not-being. Then without warning, the storm was over and there was only a great quiet and a great silence present, that might have come from the end of eternity and might have been here always. Awe froze their thoughts. They were like boys scuffling in a cathedral who look up and see the priest. What they faced gave no sign of its identity. But they knew. Then it began to think. Great broad thoughts of which they could only comprehend an edge or corner. But what they did comprehend was simple and clear. XIV. And many a Knot unraveled by the Road But not the Master-knot of Human Fate. The Rubaiyat