The Black Star Passes Part 18

The Sonorans, on the other hand, are now thoroughly scared, and will be feeling correspondingly vindictive. They won this time by a fluke--our coming. I can just see those two peoples getting together and settling any kind of sensible, long-term treaty of mutual cooperation!"

Arcot and Morey both nodded wearily. "That is so annoyingly correct,"

Morey agreed. "And you know blasted well none of us is going to sleep until we have some line of attack on this white elephant disposal problem. Anybody any ideas?"

Fuller looked at the other three. "You know, in design when two incompatible materials must be structurally united, we tie each to a third material that is compatible with both.

"Sonor didn't win this fight. Kaxor didn't win it. Earth--in the _persona_ of the _Solarite_--did. Earth isn't mad at anybody, hasn't been damaged by anybody, and hasn't been knowingly ignoring anybody.

"The Sonorans want to be let alone; it won't work, but they can learn that. I think if we run the United Nations in on this thing, we may be able to get them to accept our white elephant for us.

"They'll be making the same mistake Sonor did if they don't--knowingly ignoring the existence of a highly intelligent and competent race. It doesn't seem to work, judging from history both at home and here."

The four looked at each other, and found agreement.

"That's something more than a problem to sleep on," Morey said. "I'll get in touch with Sonor and tell 'em the shooting is over, so they can get some sleep too.

"It's obvious a bunch of high-power research teams are going to be needed in both countries. Earth has every reason to respect Sonoran mental sciences as well as Kaxorian light-engineering. And Earth--as we just thoroughly demonstrated--has some science of her own. Obviously, the interaction of the three is to the maximum advantage of each--and will lead to a healing of the breach that now exists."

Arcot looked up and yawned. "I'm putting this on autopilot at twenty miles up, and going to sleep. We can kick this around for a month anyway--and this is not the night to start."

"The decision is unanimous," Wade grinned.

BOOK THREE

THE BLACK STAR Pa.s.sES

PROLOGUE

Taj Lamor gazed steadily down at the vast dim bulk of the ancient city spread out beneath him. In the feeble light of the stars its mighty ma.s.ses of up-flung metal buildings loomed strangely, like the sh.e.l.ls of some vast race of crustacea, long extinct. Slowly he turned, gazing now out across the great plaza, where rested long rows of slender, yet mighty ships. Thoughtfully he stared at their dim, half-seen shapes.

Taj Lamor was not human. Though he was humanoid, Earth had never seen creatures just like him. His seven foot high figure seemed a bit ungainly by Terrestrial standards, and his strangely white, hairless flesh, suggesting unbaked dough, somehow gave the impression of near-transparency. His eyes were disproportionately large, and the black disc of pupil in the white corneas was intensified by contrast. Yet perhaps his race better deserved the designation _h.o.m.o sapiens_ than Terrestrians do, for it was wise with the acc.u.mulated wisdom of uncounted eons.

He turned to the other man in the high, cylindrical, dimly lit tower room overlooking the dark metropolis, a man far older than Taj Lamor, his narrow shoulders bent, and his features grayed with his years. His single short, tight-fitting garment of black plastic marked him as one of the Elders. The voice of Taj Lamor was vibrant with feeling:

"Tordos Gar, at last we are ready to seek a new sun. Life for our race!"

A quiet, patient, imperturbable smile appeared on the Elder's face and the heavy lids closed over his great eyes.

"Yes," he said sadly, "but at what cost in tranquility! The discord, the unrest, the awakening of unnatural ambitions--a dreadful price to pay for a questionable gain. Too great a price, I think." His eyes opened, and he raised a thin hand to check the younger man's protest. "I know--I know--in this we do not see as one. Yet perhaps some day you will learn even as I have that to rest is better than to engage in an endless struggle. Suns and planets die. Why should races seek to escape the inevitable?" Tordos Gar turned slowly away and gazed fixedly into the night sky.

Taj Lamor checked an impatient retort and sighed resignedly. It was this att.i.tude that had made his task so difficult. Decadence. A race on an ages-long decline from vast heights of philosophical and scientific learning. Their last external enemy had been defeated millennia in the past; and through easy forgetfulness and lack of strife, ambition had died. Adventure had become a meaningless word.

Strangely, during the last century a few men had felt the stirrings of long-buried emotion, of ambition, of a craving for adventure. These were throwbacks to those ancestors of the race whose science had built their world. These men, a comparative handful, had been drawn to each other by the unnatural ferment within them; and Taj Lamor had become their leader. They had begun a mighty struggle against the inertia of ages of slow decay, had begun a search for the lost secrets of a hundred-million-year-old science.

Taj Lamor raised his eyes to the horizon. Through the leaping curve of the crystal clear roof of their world glowed a blazing spot of yellow fire. A star--the brightest object in a sky whose sun had lost its light. A point of radiance that held the last hopes of an incredibly ancient race.

The quiet voice of Tordos Gar came through the semidarkness of the room, a pensive, dreamlike quality in its tones.

"You, Taj Lamor, and those young men who have joined you in this futile expedition do not think deeply enough. Your vision is too narrow. You lack perspective. In your youth you cannot think on a cosmic scale." He paused as though in thought, and when he continued, it seemed almost as though he were speaking to himself.

"In the far, dim past fifteen planets circled about a small, red sun.

They were dead worlds--or rather, worlds that had not yet lived. Perhaps a million years pa.s.sed before there moved about on three of them the beginnings of life. Then a hundred million years pa.s.sed, and those first, crawling protoplasmic ma.s.ses had become animals, and plants, and intermediate growths. And they fought endlessly for survival. Then more millions of years pa.s.sed, and there appeared a creature which slowly gained ascendancy over the other struggling life forms that fought for the warmth of rays of the hot, red sun.

"That sun had been old, even as the age of a star is counted, before its planets had been born, and many, many millions of years had pa.s.sed before those planets cooled, and then more eons sped by before life appeared. Now, as life slowly forced its way upward, that sun was nearly burned out. The animals fought, and bathed in the luxury of its rays, for many millennia were required to produce any noticeable change in its life-giving radiations.

"At last one animal gained the ascendancy. Our race. But though one species now ruled, there was no peace. Age followed age while semi-barbaric peoples fought among themselves. But even as they fought, they learned.

"They moved from caves into structures of wood and stone--and engineering had its beginning. With the buildings came little chemical engines to destroy them; warfare was developing. Then came the first crude flying-machines, using clumsy, inefficient engines. Chemical engines! Engines so crude that one could watch the flow of their fuel!

One part in one hundred thousand million of the energy of their propellents they released to run the engines, and they carried fuel in such vast quant.i.ties that they staggered under its load as they left the ground! And warfare became world-wide. After flight came other machines and other ages. Other scientists began to have visions of the realms beyond, and they sought to tap the vast reservoirs of Nature's energies, the energies of matter.

"Other ages saw it done--a few thousand years later there pa.s.sed out into s.p.a.ce a machine that forced its way across the void to another planet! And the races of the three living worlds became as one--but there was no peace.

"Swiftly now, science grew upon itself, building with ever faster steps, like a crystal which, once started, forms with incalculable speed.

"And while that science grew swiftly greater, other changes took place, changes in our universe itself. Ten million years pa.s.sed before the first of those changes became important. But slowly, steadily our atmosphere was drifting into s.p.a.ce. Through ages this gradually became apparent. Our worlds were losing their air and their water. One planet, less favored than another, fought for its life, and s.p.a.ce itself was ablaze with the struggles of wars for survival.

"Again science helped us. Thousands of years before, men had learned how to change the ma.s.s of matter into energy, but now at last the process was reversed, and those ancestors of ours could change energy into matter, any kind of matter they wished. Rock they took, and changed it to energy, then that energy they trans.m.u.ted to air, to water, to the necessary metals. Their planets took a new lease of life!

"But even this could not continue forever. They must stop that loss of air. The process they had developed for reformation of matter admitted of a new use. Creation! They were now able to make new elements, elements that had never existed in nature! They designed atoms as, long before, their fathers had designed molecules. At last their problem was solved. They made a new form of matter that was clearer than any crystal, and yet stronger and tougher than any metal known. Since it held out none of the sun's radiations, they could roof their worlds with it and keep their air within!

"This was a task that could not be done in a year, nor a decade, but all time stretched out unending before them. One by one the three planets became tremendous, roofed-in cities. Only their vast powers, their mighty machines made the task possible, but it was done."

The droning voice of Tordos Gar ceased. Taj Lamor, who had listened with a mixture of amus.e.m.e.nt and impatience to the recital of a history he knew as well as the aged, garrulous narrator, waited out of the inborn respect which every man held for the Elders. At length he exclaimed: "I see no point--"

"But you will when I finish--or, at least, I hope you will." Tordos Gar's words and tone were gently reproving. He continued quietly:

"Slowly the ages drifted on, each marked by greater and greater triumphs of science. But again and again there were wars. Some there were in which the population of a world was halved, and all s.p.a.ce for a billion miles about was a vast cauldron of incandescent energy in which tremendous fleets of s.p.a.ce ships swirled and fused like ingredients in some cosmic brew. Forces were loosed on the three planets that sent even their mighty ma.s.ses reeling drunkenly out of their orbits, and s.p.a.ce itself seemed to be torn by the awful play of energies.

"Always peace followed--a futile peace. A few brief centuries or a few millennia, and again war would flame. It would end, and life would continue.

"But slowly there crept into the struggle a new factor, a darkening cloud, a change that came so gradually that only the records of instruments, made during a period of thousands of years, could show it.

Our sun had changed from bright red to a deep, sullen crimson, and ever less and less heat poured from it. It was waning!

"As the fires of life died down, the people of the three worlds joined in a conflict with the common menace, death from the creeping cold of s.p.a.ce. There was no need for great haste; a sun dies slowly. Our ancestors laid their plans and carried them out. The fifteen worlds were encased in sh.e.l.ls of crystal. Those that had no atmosphere were given one. Mighty heating plants were built--furnaces that burned matter, designed to warm a world! At last a state of stability had been reached, for never could conditions change--it seemed. All external heat and light came from far-off stars, the thousands of millions of suns that would never fail.

"Under stress of the Great Change one scarcely noticed, yet almost incredible, transformation had occurred. We had learned to live with each other. We had learned to think, and enjoy thinking. As a species we had pa.s.sed from youth into maturity. Advancement did not stop; we went on steadily toward the goal of all knowledge. At first there was an underlying hope that we might some day, somehow, escape from these darkened, artificial worlds of ours, but with the pa.s.sing centuries this grew very dim and at length was forgotten.

"Gradually as millennia pa.s.sed, much ancient knowledge was also forgotten. It was not needed. The world was unchanging, there was no strife, and no need of strife. The fifteen worlds were warm, and pleasant, and safe. Without fully realizing it, we had entered a period of rest. And so the ages pa.s.sed; and there were museums and libraries and laboratories; and the machines of our ancestors did all necessary work. So it was--until less than a generation ago. Our long lives were pleasant, and death, when it came, was a sleep. And then--"

"And then," Taj Lamor interrupted, a sharp edge of impatience in his tone, "some of us awakened from our stupor!"

The Elder sighed resignedly. "You cannot see--you cannot see. You would start that struggle all over again!" His voice continued in what Taj Lamor thought of as a senile drone, but the younger man paid scant attention. His eyes and thoughts were centered on that brilliant yellow star, the brightest object in the heavens. It was that star, noticeably brighter within a few centuries, that had awakened a few men from their mental slumbers.