I can unlock the door and close it again. Perhaps Eden should
become the next step for the E, the next hurdle he must cross.

"When I've sent my ship and crew back to Earth, and we've removed all
the colonists, it might be a good idea to restore Eden to what it was
when I arrived--a place where no tools will work, no physical tools. To
qualify for E, a man will be put on the island, where he can live as we
lived, to work out the step-by-step method. When he's ready, he can go
into the thought-amplifier on top of the mountain, and if his mind is
open enough to the potentials he'll receive the final step of
instruction--as I did.

"One by one, as the E's shake free of their present projects, they can
take this next step."

"I'm not working on any project right now," E McGinnis said hopefully.

"I'll be right back," Cal said with a grin, "and we'll get started on
it."

The chair where he had been sitting was empty.

29

Cal stood within the crystal amphitheater atop the mountain and watched
the interplay of lights until he felt communion come.

Rapture! Joy!

Question?

"Be patient," he said. "There will be more, and more, and more.

"You had an advantage," he reminded Them. "You started with a
crystalline vibration nearer to the force field than that possible in
protoplasm. We've had to come up the hard way.

"But we have come up.

"You had no competition. We've had to fight for our very lives every
inch of the way, endure the setbacks lasting for centuries, millennia.
It is no wonder that the me-and-mine-ascendant concept has dominated all
our thought, and does still. Without it, we'd not have survived at all.

"It takes time to outgrow it, to learn we can survive without it. Five
hundred years after Copernicus, a survey of the high school students in
the United States revealed that a third of them still rejected his
knowledge, still believed the Earth to be at the center of the universe
and man was the reason why the universe had been created at all. But two
thirds had adjusted.

"More important, there _was_ a Copernicus.

"Don't sell man short because he's slow to learn, and you are impatient
for fuller, deeper exploration of the truths in reality. He has much to
offer you, as you to him. Competition for survival has given him
ingenuity.

"Once all learned men believed the Earth to be the center of the
universe, but there _was_ a Copernicus who asked the question, 'What if
it isn't so?'