Birthplace of Creation

A Captain Future Novelet by EDMOND HAMILTON
In their final adventure the Futuremen are called on to
save the Universe itself from a madman's destructive whim!

CHAPTER I
Citadel of the Futuremen
ARRAND watched the face of the
Moon grow larger in the forward
port of his small cruiser. A white and
terrible face, he thought. A death's-head
with meteor-gnawed bones and gaping
crater-wounds, bleak and cruel and very
silent, watching him come and thinking
secret boding thoughts about him. A
feeling of sickness grew in him.
"I am a fool and soon I will probably be
a dead fool," he said to himself.
He was not a brave man. He was very
fond of living and he did not think of death
at all as a thing to be dared and laughed at.
The knowledge that he was likely to die
there on the Moon gave him qualms of
physical anguish that made him look as
white and hollow as the stony face that
watched him through the port. And yet he
did not turn back. There was something in
Garrand that was stronger than his fear.
His hands trembled, but they held the
cruiser grimly on its course.
The stark plains and mountain ranges
took size and shape, the lonely mountains
of the Moon that looked on nothing and the
plains where nothing stirred, not even the
smallest wind or whirl of dust. Men had
gone out to other worlds and other stars.
They had ranged far across space, founding
colonies on asteroids and cities on the
shores of alien seas. But they left the
deathly airless Moon alone. They had
looked at it once and gone away. There
were only four who made the Moon their
home--and not all of those four where
men.
Tycho Crater widened out below the
little ship. Licking dry lips metallic with
the taste of fear, Garrand consulted a map,
drawn carefully to scale and showing in
that desolation one intricate diagram of a
man-made structure. There were ominous
gaps in that diagram and Garrand was
painfully aware of them. He made his
calculations and set his ship down well
beyond the outer periphery of defenses
marked on the chart.
His landing was a clumsy nervous one.
White pumice-dust burst upward around
the hull and settled slowly back again.
Garrand cut his jets and sat for a moment
looking out across Tycho, all ringed
around in the distance with cliffs and spires
and pinnacles of blasted rock that glittered
in the light. There was no sign of the
structure indicated on the chart. It was all
below ground. Even its observatory dome
was set flush, reflecting the Sun's
unsoftened glare no more than the
surrounding plain.
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RESENTLY Garrand rose, moving
with the stiff reluctance of a man
going to the gallows. He checked over the
bulky shapes of a considerable mass of
equipment. His examination was minute
and he made one or two readjustments.
Then he struggled into a pressure-suit and
opened the airlock. The air went out with a
whistling rush and after that there was no
sound, only the utter silence of a world that
has heard nothing since it was made.
Working in that vacuum Garrand
carried out a light hand-sledge and set it in
the dust. Then he brought out the bulky
pieces of equipment and loaded them onto
it. He was able to do this alone because of
the weak gravitation and when he was
through he was able for the same reason to
tow the sledge behind him.
He set off across the crater. The glare
was intense. Sweat gathered on him and
ran in slow trickles down his face. He
suffered in the heavy armor, setting one
weighted boot before the other, with the
little puffs of dust rising and falling back at
every step, hauling the sledge behind him.
And fear grew steadily in him as he went
on.
He knew--all the System knew--that
the four who lived here were not here now,
that they were far away on a distant
troubled world. But their formidable name
and presence seemed to haunt this lifeless
sphere and he was walking now into the
teeth of the deadly defenses they had left
behind them.
"They can be beaten," he told himself,
sweating. "I've got to beat them."
He studied his map again. He knew
exactly how far he had come from the ship.
Leaving himself a wide margin of safety he
activated the detector-mechanism on the
sledge. The helmet of his pressure-suit was
fitted with ultra-sensitive hearing devices
that had nothing to do with sonic waves
but translated sub-electronic impulses from
the detector into audible sound-signals.
He stood still, listening intently. But the
detector said nothing and he went on, very
slowly now and cautiously, across the dead
waste until his footsteps in the dust
approached the line of that outer circle on
the map. Then the detector spoke with a
faint small clicking.
Garrand stopped. He bent over the panel
of the mechanism, a jumble of dials,
sorters, frequency-indicators and pattern-
indicators. Above them a red pip burned in
a ground-glass field. His heart hammered
hard and he reached hastily for a black
oblong bulk beside the detector.
He thought, "I'm still far enough away
so that the blast won't be lethal if this
doesn't work."
The thought was comforting but
unconvincing. He forced his hand to
steady, to pick up the four-pronged plugs
and insert them, one by one in the proper
order, into the side of the detector. Then he
dropped behind the sledge and waited.
The black oblong hummed. He could
feel it humming where his shoulder
touched the metal of the sledge. It was
designed to pick up its readings from the
detector, to formulate them, adjust itself
automatically to the indicated pattern and
frequency, to broadcast an electronic
barrier that would blank out the impulse-
receptivity of the hidden trap's sensor-unit.
That was its purpose. It should work. But if
it did not . . .
He waited, the muscles of his belly
knotted tight. There was no flash or tremor
of a blast. After he had counted slowly to a
hundred he got up again and looked. The
red pip had faded from the ground-glass
screen. There was a white one in place of
it.
Garrand watched that white pip as
though it were the face of his patron saint,
hauling the sledge on slowly through that
outer circle and through the ones beyond it
that were only guessed at. Three times
more the urgent clicking sounded in his
ears and the dials and pointers changed--
and three times the pip faded from red to
white and Garrand was still alive when he
reached the metal valve door set into the
floor of the crater.
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The controls of that door were plainly in
sight but he did not touch them. Instead he
hauled a portable scanner off the sledge
and used it to examine the intimate
molecular structure of the metal and all its
control connections. By this means he
found the particular bolt-head that was a
switch and turned it, immobilizing a
certain device set to catch an unknowing
intruder as soon as he opened the valve.
Within minutes after that Garrand had
the door open and was standing at the head
of a steep flight of steps, going down. His
heart was still thudding away and he felt
weak in the knees--but he was filled with
exultation and a great pride. Few other
men, he thought, perhaps none, could have
penetrated safely to the very threshold of
this most impregnable of all places in the
Solar System.
He did not relax his caution. A large
mass of equipment went with him down
the dark stairway, including the scanner.
The valve closed automatically behind him
and below in a small chamber he waited
until pressure had build up and another
door automatically opened. He found
nothing more of menace except a system of
alarm bells, which he put out of
commission--not because there was
anyone to hear them but because he knew
there would be recorders and he wanted no
signs, audible or visible, of his visit.
HE recorders themselves were
relatively easy to detect. With an
instrument brought for the purpose he
blanked off their relay systems and went
on across the great circular central
chamber with the glassite dome through
which the sunlight poured. He peered with
a scientist's fascinated wonder at the
laboratory apparatus of various sorts in that
and the smaller chambers which opened
off it until he came to what of all things he
was looking for--the heavy locked door of
a vault, sunk deep in the lunar rock.
Garrand worked for a long time over
that door. The silence was beginning to get
to him and the uneasy knowledge that he
was where he had no right to be. He began
to listen for the voices and the steps of
those who might come in and find him.
They were far away and Garrand knew
that he was safe.
But he was not a criminal by habit and
now that the challenge to his skill was past
he began to feel increasingly guilty and
unclean. Personal belongings accused him,
an open book, a pair of boots, beds and
chests and clothing. If it had been merely a
laboratory he would not have minded so
much--but it was also a dwelling place
and he felt like a common thief.
HAT feeling was forgotten when he
entered the vault. There were many
things in that vast lunar cavern, but
Garrand had no more than a passing glance
for any of them except the massive file-
racks where the recorded data which
related to voyages were spooled and kept.
Under the clear light that had come on
of itself with the opening of the door
Garrand searched the racks, puzzling out
the intricate filing system. He had taken off
his helmet. His hands shook visibly and his
breathing was loud and irregular but these
were only secondary manifestations.
His mind, faced with a difficult problem
to solve, slipped by long habit into
calculating-machine efficiency and it was
not long before he found what he wanted.
He took the spool in his two hands, as
tenderly as though it were made of the
delicate stuff of dreams and apt to shatter
at a breath. He carried it to the large table
that stood by the racks and fed the end of
the tape into a reader. His face had grown
pale and quite rigid except that his mouth
twitched a little at the corners. He set up
his last piece of equipment beside the
reader, a photosonic recorder used to make
copies of a master spool, synchronized
them and then closed the switches.
The two spools unwound, one giving,
the other receiving, and Garrand remained
motionless over the viewer, seeing visions
beyond price and listening to the voices
that spoke of cosmic secrets. When the
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spool was finished it was a long time
before he moved. His eyes were still busy
with their visions and they were strangely
dull and shining all at once, shining and far
away.
T last he shook himself and laughed,
small gasping sound that might well
have been a sob. He replaced the original
in the rack and put the second spool into a
special pouch on his belt. In the vault he
left everything exactly as he had found it
and when he came out again onto the
Moon's surface he reset the hidden trigger
that guarded the outer door.
As he had penetrated the defences on
the plain, so he went back through them
again, in a double agony lest now, when he
had the thing he had taken such incredible
chances for, he should blunder and be
killed. The shadows of the crater edge
were crawling toward him, sharp and
black. The last premonitory clicking of the
detector, the last fading of the warning pip
from red to white and he was safe, running
toward the ship into the knife-edged
darkness of the shadow.
Long before night came Garrand was
gone, plunging across the narrow gulf to
Earth. He did not know how to give vent to
the wildness of his exultation, so he held it
in but it burned in his face and eyes.
"Tomorrow," he said aloud to himself,
over and over. "Tomorrow we'll be on our
way." He laughed, addressing someone
who was not present. "You said I couldn't
do it, Herrick. You said I couldn't!"
Behind him the darkening face of the
Moon looked after him.
CHAPTER II
Cosmic Secret
OUR came home to the Moon after
many days. Four, of whom only one
was an ordinary man.
Curt Newton, the man--Otho, the
android or artificial man who was human
in everything but origin--Grag, the
towering metal man or intelligent robot--
and Simon Wright, he who had once been
a man but whose brain only now lived on
in a strange mechanical body.
Their ship came down like a
thunderbolt of metal from the sky. The
camouflaged doors of an underground
hangar opened silently to receive it and
closed as silently.
Into the great circular room beneath the
observatory dome the four Futuremen
came. Curt Newton paused by the wall to
activate the recorder panel. It showed
blank. It always showed blank.
He sat down slowly, a tall man with red
hair and a bronzed face that looked now
very tired.
"Do you think our work out there will
stick, Simon?" he asked.
He addressed the small square metal
case hovering on motor-beams before him,
its strange "face" of lens-eyes turned
toward him. The serum-case, in which
Simon Wright's brain lived its life.
"I am confident," said Simon with his
precise articulation of metallic artificial
accents, "that there will be no more trouble
between Uranus Mines and the natives."
Curt frowned and sighed. "I hope so.
When will they learn how to deal with
planetary primitives?"
Grag spoke up loudly. He was standing,
a seven-foot giant of metal, with his head
turned and his photoelectric eyes staring
intently across the big room.
"Curt, someone's been here," his great
voice boomed.
"No. I checked the recorders," Newton
said without turning.
"I don't care," Grag persisted. "That
chair by the vault door has been moved. I
was the last one out when we left and I
remember exactly where it stood. It's been
moved a good three inches."
Otho burst into laughter. "Listen to Old
Hawkeye. Three inches!" The android, so
perfectly human in appearance that only
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something bright and strange lurking in his
green eyes betrayed an inner difference,
went on mockingly, "Are you sure it's not
two and a half inches ?"
Grag began to protest angrily in his
foghorn voice. Curt swung around irritably
to silence them. But Simon Wright said
gravely, "Wait, Curtis. You know that the
constitution of Grag's metal brain makes
his memory absolutely photographic. If he
says the chair has been moved it has been
moved."
"But the recorders?"
"They could have been blanked, you
know. It's theoretically possible."
"Only theoretically--" Curt began and
then he stopped and swore. "Blast you,
Grag! Why did you have to raise a doubt in
my mind? Now I'll have to take down the
recorders to check them and that's the
devil and all of a job."
Irritation riding him, he went out of the
big room and came back with tools. He
scowled at Grag. "You'd better be right!"
Simon and Otho helped him in the
delicate work of disassembling the
recorders. They examined both the
microfilm and the interior relay circuits bit
by bit.
Curt's irritation left him suddenly. He
looked sharply at the others. He had found
it--the minute blurred line where the film
had started to roll and been arrested. The
relay circuits were a fraction of a decimal
out of synchronization now.
Otho whistled softly. "Blanked!" he
said. "And so beautifully done--nothing
fused or blown out, the derangement so
small that you'd never notice it unless you
were searching for it."
"So I was right?" Grag boomed
triumphantly. "I knew I was right. When I
see a thing that's changed I--"
"Shut up," Curt Newton told him. He
looked, puzzled, at Simon. "No criminal
did this--no ordinary criminal. The job of
blanking these relays required tremendous
scientific ability."
Simon brooded, hovering. "That's
obvious. Only an expert in sub-electronics
would be capable. But that seems
incongruous. Why would a top scientist
come prowling in here like a common
thief?"
Curt turned. "Grag, will you see if
anything else has been moved or taken?"
The metal giant started stalking through
the rooms. Curt remained silent and
thoughtful, the frown on his tanned face
deepening.
Grag came back. "No. Nothing else has
been tampered with."
"Yet it was," Curt said slowly. He
looked again at Simon. "I've been thinking.
An expert in sub-electronics . . . Do you
remember the nuclear physics man down at
New York Tech whom we met at
Government Center a few months ago?"
"Garris? Garrand--some name like
that? I remember. A nice little man."
"Yes, I thought so too--very eager
about his work. But I remember now he
asked me a question--"
URT broke off suddenly. He went
rapidly across the big room, unlocked
the vault door and inside the silent lunar
cavern he went straight to the files.
Simon had followed him. And when
Simon saw the spool that Curt drew from
the file his lens-eyes turned to Curt's face
with a startled swiftness.
"Curtis, no! You don't think--"
"It was what he asked me about," Curt
said. "The Birthplace."
The word went echoing solemnly back
and forth around the cold rock walls. And
Curt stared at Simon, not really seeing him,
seeing uncanny awesome things that lived
in memory, and a strange look came into
his face--a strange look indeed for the
man Curt Newton. A look of fear.
Simon said, "How could he know of the
Birthplace?"
That word had never been spoken to
anyone. They hardly spoke it even among
themselves. Such a secret was not for the
knowledge nor the use of men and they
had guarded it more carefully than the sum
total of all other knowledge they
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possessed. Now the very sound of that
name brought Grag and Otho to the door
and wrought a sudden tension that filled
the cavern with a waiting stillness.
Curt said heavily, "He connected the
theoretical possibility with the work we did
on Mercury. He's a brilliant man, Simon--
too brilliant."
"Perhaps," said Grag, "he only looked
for the secret and couldn't find it. After all,
our filing system . . ."
Curt shook his head. "If he could get in
here he could find what he wanted." He
examined the spool. "He could make a
copy of this and there would be no way of
telling that it had been done."
He stood motionless for a moment
longer and no one spoke. Otho studied his
face and shot one quick bright glance at
Simon. Simon moved uneasily on his
gliding force-beams.
Curt replaced the spool and turned.
"We've got to find out about this man.
We'll go to New York, at once."
Very soon thereafter the Comet rose
from the dark gap of the hangar-mouth and
shot away toward the great green globe of
Earth.
Not much later, at headquarters of the
Planet Police in New York, old marshal
Ezra Gurney stared at Curt Newton in
blank amazement.
"Garrand?" he said. "But he's a
reputable man, a scientist!"
"Nevertheless," said Curt grimly, "I
want all the information you can get and
fast."
Simon spoke. "This is urgent, Ezra. We
cannot afford delay."
The grizzled old spaceman glanced from
one to the other, and then to Otho.
"Something really bad, eh? All right, I'll
do what I can."
He went out of the office. Otho leaned
against the wall and remained motionless,
watching Curt. Simon hovered near the
desk. Neither one of them was afflicted
with nerves. Curt moved restlessly about,
brooding, his hands touching things and
putting them down again in wire-taut
gestures. The intricate multichron on the
wall whirred softly and the minutes slid
away, on Earth, on Mars, on the far-flung
worlds of the System. No one spoke and
Ezra did not come back.
Simon said at last, "It would take time,
even for Ezra."
"Time!" said Curt. "If Garrand has the
secret we have no time."
He paced the small neat room, a man
oppressed with heavy thoughts. The sound
of the door opening brought him whirling
around to face Ezra almost as though he
were facing his executioner.
"Well?"
"Garrand took off from Earth on the
twenty-first," said Ezra. "He flew a ship of
his own, apparently an experimental model
on which he has been working for some
time in company with a man named
Herrick, who is also listed as chief pilot.
Destination, none. Purpose, cosmic ray
research beyond the System. Because of
Garrand's reputation and standing there
was no difficulty about the clearance. That
was all I could get."
"That's enough," said Curt. "More than
enough." His face was bleak and the color
had gone out of it under the tan. He looked
very tired and in a way so strange that Ezra
came up to him and demanded, "What is it,
Curt? What did Garrand take from the
laboratory?"
Curt answered, "He took the secret of
the Birthplace of Matter."
Ezra stared, uncomprehending. "Is that a
secret you can tell me?"
URT said hopelessly, "I can tell you
now. For it's known now to Garrand
and this other man."
"What is it, then?"
"Ezra, it is the secret of creation."
There was a long silence. It was obvious
from Gurney's face that the term was too
large for him to understand. Yet Curt
Newton did not continue as yet. He looked
beyond them and his face was drawn and
haggard.
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"We'll have to go back there," he said,
his voice low. "We'll have to. And I hoped
never to go back."
Simon's expressionless eyes were fixed
on him. Otho said loudly, "What's there to
be afraid of? We ran the whirls before.
And as for Garrand and the other one--"
"I am not afraid of them," Curt Newton
said.
"I know," said Simon. "I was the only
one who was with you in the shrine of the
Watchers there. I know what you are afraid
of--yourself."
"I still don't get it," Ezra said. "The
secret of creation? Creation of what?"
"Of the universe, Ezra. Of all the matter
in the universe."
A strange wonder came on Gurney's
timeworn face. He said nothing. He
waited.
"You remember," Curt told him, "when
we came back from our first deep-space
voyage? You remember that right after that
we designed the electron-assembly plants
that they've used ever since to replenish
Mercury's thinning atmosphere? Where do
you think we got the knowledge to do that,
to juggle electrons into desired types of
matter on a big scale?"
Gurney's voice was a whisper now.
"You got that knowledge out in deep
space?"
"In deep, deep space, Ezra. Near the
center of our galaxy, amid the thick star-
clusters and nebulae beyond Sagittarius.
There lies the beating heart of our
universe."
He made a gesture. "Back in the
Twentieth Century the scientist Millikan
first guessed the truth. The matter of the
universe constantly melts away into
radiation. Millikan believed that
somewhere in the universe was a place
where radiation was somehow built back
into matter and that the so-called cosmic
rays were the 'birth-cry' of the newborn
matter. The fount of our material universe,
the birthplace of material creation."
Awe was in Ezra's faded old eyes. "And
you found that? And never told--never let
anyone guess--"
"Garrand guessed," Curt said bitterly.
"He connected our work at Mercury with
our mysterious voyage. He tried to learn
what I knew and when I would tell him
nothing he came to the Moon and risked
death to steal our records. And now he's
gone to find it for himself."
Simon Wright said somberly, "He will
only reap disaster if he tries to take it. I
saw what almost happened there to you,
Curtis."
"It's my fault," Curt said harshly. "We
should have left no record. But I could not
quite destroy it." He paused, then went on
rapidly. "We've got to overtake him. What
the other man, Herrick, may have in mind
we can't tell. But Garrand is a fanatical
researcher, who will tamper with the
instruments of the Watchers as I did. He
won't stop where I stopped!"
Ezra jumped to his feet. "I can have
cruisers after him in an hour."
"They couldn't catch him now, Ezra.
The Comet might. We'll have to make
certain preparations and they'll take time.
But even so we may catch him."
He turned, moving swiftly toward the
door as though physical action were a
relief from overpowering tension. Ezra
stopped him. "Curt, wait! Let me go with
you. I should, you know, if it's a case of
catching a lawbreaker."
Newton looked at him. "No, Ezra.
You're only trapped by the lure of this
thing as I was. As I was . . . No."
Simon's metallic voice intervened. "Let
him go with us, Curtis. I think we might
need him--that you might need him."
A look passed between them. Then,
silently, Curt nodded.
Back to the Moon, with five instead of
four, went the Comet on wings of flame.
In the hours that followed, the closed
hangar-doors in silent Tycho gave no hint
of the desperate rushed activity beneath.
But less than twenty-four hours after its
return from Uranus the ship left the Moon
8
a second time. It went out through the
planetary orbits like a flying prisoner
breaking out through bars, poised for a
moment beyond Pluto to shift into a new
kind of motion, then was gone into the
outer darkness.
CHAPTER III
The Birthplace
HE Comet was a fleck, a mote, a tiny
gleam of man-made light falling into
infinity. Behind it, lost somewhere along
the farthest shores of a lightless sea, lay
Earth and Sol and the outposts of familiar
stars. Ahead was the great wilderness of
Sagittarius, the teeming star-jungle that to
the eye seemed crowded thick with
burning Suns and nebulae.
The five within the ship where silent.
Four were busy with the memories they
had of the time they had come this way
before, with the knowledge of what was
still to be encountered. One, Ezra Gurney,
could find no words to speak. He was a
veteran spaceman. He had been a veteran
when Curt Newton was born. He knew the
Solar System from Pluto to Mercury and
back again and he knew how the naked
undimmed stars could shine.
But this was different--this voyaging of
deepest space, this pursuing of the fleets
and navies of the stars to their own harbor,
this going in among them. In a way Ezra
Gurney was afraid. No man, not even Curt
Newton, could look at that flaming sky
ahead and not be a little afraid.
The Comet had come into the region of
the great clusters. Mighty hives of gathered
Suns blazed and swarmed, rolling across
space and time, carrying after them
sweeping trains of scattered stars. Between
and beyond the clusters and their trailing
star-streams shone the glowing clouds of
nebulae, banners of light flung out for a
million miles across the firmament, ablaze
with the glow of drowned and captured
Suns. And beyond them all--the nebulae,
the clusters and the stars--there showed
the black brooding lightless immensity of a
cloud of cosmic dust.
The soul of Ezra Gurney shook within
him. Men had no business here in this
battleground of angry gods. Men? But was
he here with men?
"One-point-four degrees zenith," came
the metallic voice of Simon Wright from
where he hovered above a bulky
instrument.
"Check," Curt Newton said and moved
controls slightly. Then he asked, "Dust?"
"Definitely higher than average
interstellar density now," Otho reported,
from his own place at the wide instrument
panel. "It'll thicken fast as we approach the
main cloud."
Ezra looked at them--at the square,
hovering metal case of the living brain, at
the lithe eager android peering forward
into the abyss with burning green eyes, at
the giant imperturbable metal bulk of the
robot.
Not men, no! He was out here in the
great deeps, rushing toward the mightiest
secret of infinity, with creatures unhuman,
with--
Curt turned, and smiled briefly and
wearily at him. And the clamoring panic in
Ezra was suddenly gone. Why, these were
his oldest staunchest friends, unshakably
loyal and true.
He drew a long breath. "I don't mind
telling you that it's nearly got me down."
"You've got worse coming," Curt said
uncomfortingly. "We'll hit the main cloud
soon."
"The cloud?"
"The great cloud of cosmic dust that
surrounds the Birthplace. That dust is born
from the Birthplace--and flows out in
mighty tides through our hole universe."
"To be born into new worlds?"
"Yes. Weizsacker fathomed that part of
the cycle, long ago in the nineteen forties
when he formulated his theory of the
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gathering of the cosmic dust into new
planets."
Before them now rose a wall of Suns,
glaring like cyclopean furnaces as the
Comet seemingly crawled toward them.
Almost it seemed that they could hear the
clang and thunder of cosmic forges as their
tiny craft approached and went between
the flaming giants.
White and wild flared a far-flung nebula
to the left beyond that rampart of stars. But
ahead there gloomed farther still the black
cloud that now seemed eating up the
universe with jaws of darkness as they
steadily approached it.
"No sign of any other ship outside the
cloud," Otho reported coolly. "Our
detectors won't range inside it, of course."
"They had too big a start," Curt said
broodingly. "Two many days. Garrand and
the other must already have been on the
world of the Watchers for some time."
"Unless the whirls wrecked them,"
Otho suggested.
"Wishful thinking," Curt said. "We ran
the whirls and so could they."
Simon said, "Curtis, you will not go
into the shrine of the Watchers again?"
Curt Newton did not look at him. "I'll
have to if that's where Garrand is."
"You don't have to, Curtis. We three
could go."
OW, Curt looked at Simon, his
tanned face set and unreadable. "You
don't trust me with the power of the
Watchers?"
"You know what that power almost did
to you before. It is for you to say."
Curt looked ahead and said doggedly, "I
am not afraid and I will go in there after
him."
Ezra Gurney, puzzled by the tension
between them, asked, "Who are the
Watchers?"
"They have been dead for ages," Curt
said slowly. "But long ago they penetrated
the Birthplace and conquered its secret and
set up instruments to wield its powers. It's
why we have come. Garrand must not use
those instruments."
"Nobody must use them," said Simon.
Curt said nothing to that.
Gurney, looking ahead, saw the black
cloud widening out across the starry
universe like a great tide of doom, steadily
blotting out the stars. A fitting cosmic
shroud for the greatest of cosmic secrets,
he thought. Its fringes engulfed bright stars
that shone wanly through the dimness like
dying eyes.
"This dust," said Simon, "is newborn
matter, spawned by the Birthplace and
pumped outward by pressure of radiation
to flow out to the whole universe."
"And the--the secret itself--is inside?"
"Yes."
There was no moment when the Comet
plunged suddenly within the cloud. Rather
the dust thickened steadily until all about
the flying ship was a deepening haze,
deepest and darkest ahead but drawing
more and more veils behind them so that
the stars back there shone like smothered
witch-fires.
The ship began to tremble as it
encountered flowing spatial currents of
denser dust. Struts and girders protested
with slight creakings and then more loudly.
They strapped into the recoil-chairs at
Curt's orders.
"Here it comes," said Grag in loud
complaint. "I remember last time almost
every bone in my body was broken."
Otho laughed. He started a caustic retort
but had no time to voice it.
To Gurney the Comet seemed suddenly
to have crashed. The tell-tales on the panel
went crazy and the recoil-chairs screamed
in outrage as the ship was batted through
the haze by unseen giant hands.
There was nothing they could do but
hang on. There was nothing even for Curt
to do. The automatic pilot and stabilizers
had to do it all now or they were finished.
The mechanisms functioned staunchly.
Again and again they snatched the buffeted
little ship out of raging eddies of dust-
currents and hurled it forward again. Now
N
10
the whole hull was creaking and groaning
from constantly changing stresses and the
hiss of dust against its plates became a
rising and falling roar.
Ezra Gurney felt a quaking dread. He
had already seen too much, had come too
far. Now he felt that a universe become
sentient and hostile was wrathfully
repelling them from its hidden heart, from
its supreme secret.
The Comet fought forward, relentlessly
impelled by its own mechanical brains,
until the dust began to thin. It tore onward,
still buffeted by swirling currents and
drenched by radiation. And now, ahead,
Ezra saw a vast hazy space inside the
denser blackness of the cloud. And far
away in this inner space, looming in vague
gigantic splendor . . .
"Good God!" said Ezra Gurney and it
was a prayer. "Then that--that . . ." Curt
Newton's eyes were alight with a strange
glow. "Yes--the Birthplace."
The hazy space within the denser cloud
was vast. And at its center bulked and
gleamed and shifted an enigmatic glory--a
colossal spinning spiral of white radiance.
Its whirling arms spanned millions of miles
and it uttered cosmic lightnings of
radiation that lanced out through the haze.
Beating heart of the universe, fiery
womb that spawned the stuff of worlds,
awesome epicenter of cosmos! Cloaked
and shrouded by the dense black cloud of
its own making, safe behind its ramparts of
terrible whirlpools and the wild tide-runs
of untamed matter fresh from creation, it
flamed across its millions of miles of
space, shaped like a spiral nebula,
spinning, whirling, sending forth its seed to
the farthest corners of the galaxy.
And to Ezra Gurney, cowering in his
seat and staring at that far-off misty glory,
it seemed that the eyes of men were not
meant to see nor their minds to
comprehend this shining Birthplace.
"Surely," he whispered, "surely we're not
going into that!"
Curt Newton nodded. He had still that
strange look in his eyes, a look almost
mystic, as though he could see beyond the
wonder and the glory of the Birthplace to
its innermost secret heart and glimpse there
the hidden laws by which it worked and
carried out its destiny.
"Yes," said Curt, "we're going in." He
leaned forward over the controls, his face
bathed in the misty radiance so that it
seemed not his familiar face at all but the
countenance of a being half godlike with
the strange light flickering in his eyes.
"You see how it is, Ezra?" he asked.
"How it spins like a great centrifuge,
sucking in the spent energy of Suns and
whirling it in currents of incalculable
strength until, in some utterly undreamable
way, the energy coagulates into electrons
and protons which are thrown off in never-
ending streams from the rim of the vortex.
"They form the shining haze that fills
this hollow around the Birthplace. Then,
farther out, they unite to form the atoms of
cosmic dust. The pressure of radiation
forces them on across the galaxy. And out
of them new worlds are made."
Ezra Gurney shivered. He did not speak.
"Curtis!" Simon's voice was loud with a
kind of warning and Curt Newton started,
leaning back in his seat and turning again
to the controls of the Comet. His face had
tightened and his eyes were veiled.
ND the ship sped on across that vast
hollow in the heart of the dark cloud.
And swift as its flight was it seemed only
to creep slowly, slowly, toward the misty
wheel of radiance. Pale witch-fires danced
along its hull, growing brighter until the
metal was enwrapped in veils of flame,
tenuous, cold and having about them an
eerie quality of life. The Comet was
double-shielded against the radiation but
even so Ezra Gurney could feel the echoes
of that terrible force in his own flesh.
The flaming arms of the Birthplace
reached wider and wider across space. The
radiance deepened, became a supernal
brilliance that seared the flinching
eyeballs. The ship began to be shaken now
and again by subtle tremors as the farthest
A
11
edges of out-thrown currents touched it
and passed by.
Ezra shut his teeth hard to keep from
screaming. He had been driven once too
close to the Sun and he had looked hard
into the depths of the atomic furnace that
was about to swallow him. He had not then
known one tenth of the fear that he knew
now.
Slitting his eyes against the glare he
could make out the central sphere from
which the spiral arms curved out, a
gigantic vortex of flaming force, the
wheel-hub of the galaxy. The Comet was
plunging straight toward it and there was
nothing he could do to stop it, nothing . . .
Curt sent the ship driving in between
two of the sweeping arms. Tidal-waves,
torrents of energy picked them up and
flung them, a leaf in the cosmic millrace,
toward the grip of a curving arm that
burned and seethed with all the ultimate
fires of hell. And Curt fought the controls
and tore away again, heading in, heading
in. . .
The central sphere of force loomed up
like a wall of flame higher than all the
skies of space, and then they were in it.
It was as though a million Suns had
exploded. The force and fire took the
Comet and whirled it tumbling away
through a blind and terrible violence. Ezra
sagged half-conscious in his seat and he
thought that he had come a long, long way
to die. No ship, no body, could live for
long in this.
The forces of the cosmic centrifuge
would tear their substance, powder it to
atoms and then still down into the fine raw
stuff of atoms, send it out to join with the
black dust, to begin the timeless pilgrimage
across the empty spaces, to be built at last
into the foundations of some new world to
circle an alien Sun. Human, robot and
android, they would all be one in the end.
The Comet crashed suddenly clear of
that hellish tempest of light and force into
quiet space. Into a space enclosed by the
spinning central sphere of the Birthplace
itself, a calm at the very center of cosmic
storm.
Dazzled, half-stunned, Ezra heard
Simon saying, "In here at the center is only
one world--the world of the Watchers,
where--"
Curt Newton, leaning forward,
interrupted with a strange low cry.
"Simon, look! Look! There are other
worlds here now--worlds and Suns and--"
His voice seemed strangled by a surprise
and terror too great for utterance.
Ezra strained desperately to regain use
of his dazzled eyes. As they began to clear
he too peered tautly forward. At first what
he saw did not seem so terrifying. Here, in
the wide calm space at the heart of the
Birthplace, there was a cluster of Suns and
planets.
Ruby Suns, flaring like new blood,
green and white and somber smoky-gold
Suns! Planets and moons that circled the
changing Suns in sweeping trains,
themselves ever changing! Comets that
shot in living light between the worlds,
meteor swarms rushing and wheeling, an
astronomical phantasmagoria enclosed
within this comparatively little space!
"You said there were no worlds but one
here," Ezra began, bewildered.
"There were none." Curt's face was
deathly, and something in it struck at
Ezra's heart. "There were none but that
little blue world--that alone."
Ezra glimpsed it at the center of the
strange, close-packed cluster--a little blue
planet that was a geometrically perfect
sphere.
"The powers of the Watchers are
there--the instruments by which they
could tap the Birthplace itself," Curt was
saying hoarsely. "And Garrand has been
there with those instruments for days."
A comprehension so monstrous that his
mind recoiled from it came to Ezra
Gurney. "You mean that Garrand . . ."
He could not finish, could not say it. It
was not a thing that could be said in any
sane universe.
12
Curt Newton said it. "Garrand by
tapping the Birthplace, has created the
Suns and worlds and comets and meteors
of that cluster. He has fallen victim to the
old allurement, the strongest in the
universe."
"As you almost fell victim once!"
Simon Wright warned.
"Can a man make worlds?" Ezra felt
shaken and sick inside. "Curt, no--this
thing--"
"One who can harness the Birthplace
can create at will !" Curt exclaimed. "And
the instruments of the Watchers do harness
it!"
A kind of madness had come over him.
Under his hands the Comet leaped forward
at terrible speed. Ezra heard him talking,
whether to the others or himself he never
knew.
"There is a balance of forces--always a
balance! It cannot be tampered with too
much. The Watchers left a warning, a plain
and dreadful warning."
The ship rushed forward toward the
distant small blue world, careening wildly
through the unholy stars and worlds and
comets whose creation had blasphemed
against the natural universe.
CHAPTER IV
Power of the Watchers
HE blue world shimmered in the light
of the monstrous aurora, a perfect
jewel, with no height of mountain nor
roughness of natural growth to mar its
symmetry. Its surface showed a gloss that
made Ezra think of porcelain or the deep
gleam of polished lapis.
"The Watchers made it long ago," said
Curt. "They made it out of the forces of the
Birthplace and it was their outpost in this
universe, where they studied the secrets of
creation. There exists a city . . ."
The Comet sped low across the curving
plain. For a time there was nothing but the
blank expanse of blue--what was it, glass
or rock or jewel-stone or some substance
new in the universe? Above them the little
suns with their planets wheeled and shone,
laced about with the fire of comets, and
above those again was the golden sky of
the Birthplace. Curt's face, bent forward
toward the blue horizon, was intense and
pale and somehow alien.
"There it is!" cried Otho, and Curt
nodded. Ahead there were the tips of
slender spires flashing in the light and a
gleam and glow of faceted surfaces that
made a web of radiance like the aura
sometimes seen in dreams. The spires
lifted into graceful height, shaped
themselves into the form of a city.
Walls of the same translucent blue
enclosed the towers and in the center,
rising high above them all, there was a
citadel, a cathedral-form as massive and as
delicate as the castles that sometimes stand
upon the tops of clouds on Earth. And it
was dead, the blue and graceful city. The
walls, the streets, the flying arches that
spanned the upper levels of the towers, all
were silent and deserted.
"Garrand's ship," said Curt and Ezra
saw it on the plain before the city, an ugly
dark intruder on this world that had not
been made for men.
Curt set the Comet down beside it.
There was air on this planet, for the
Watchers had been oxygen-breathers even
though they were not human. The lock of
Garrand's ship stood open but there was no
life nor movement that Curt could see.
"It seems deserted," he said, "but we'd
better make sure."
Ezra roused himself. He went out with
the others and somehow the mere act of
moving and the possibility of facing a
human and comprehensible danger was a
relief, almost a pleasure. He walked beside
Curt with Otho beyond him. Their boots
slipped and rang on the glassy surface.
Apart from that there was no sound. The
city brooded and was still.
T
13
They went through the open airlock into
the other ship. There did not seem to be
anything to fear, but they moved with the
caution of long habit. Ezra found that he
was waiting, hoping for action, for attack.
He needed some escape valve for the
terrors that had grown within him during
this flight into the heart of the universe.
But the narrow corridors were empty and
nothing stirred behind the bulkhead doors.
Then, in the main cabin, they found a
man.
He was sitting on the padded bench
formed by the tops of the lockers along one
wall. He did not move when they came in
except to lift his head and look at them. He
was a big man, of a breed that Ezra Gurney
knew very well, having fought them all his
life across the Solar System. But the
hardness had gone out of him now. The
strong lines of his face had sagged and
softened and his eyes held only
hopelessness and fear. He had been
drinking but he was not drunk.
"You're too late," he said. "Way too
late."
Curt went and stood before him.
"You're Herrick," he said. "Are you
alone?"
"Oh, yes," said Herrick. "I'm alone.
There were Sperry and Forbin but they're
dead now." Herrick had not shaved for
some time. The black stubble on his jaw
was flecked with white. He ran his hand
across it and his fingers trembled. "I
wouldn't be here now," he said, "but I
couldn't run the whirls alone. I couldn't
take this ship clear back to Earth alone. I
couldn't do anything but sit and wait."
Curt said, "Where's Garrand?"
Herrick laughed. It was not pleasant
laughter. "You know where he is. Go in
and get him. Make him come out. That's
how Sperry and Forbin died, trying to
make him. I don't know why I'm alive
myself. I don't know if I want to be alive
after what I've seen."
E GOT up. It was hard for him to
rise, hard to stand. It was as though
fear had eaten the bones away inside him,
dissolved the strength from his muscles,
leaving him only a hulk, a receptacle for
terror. His eyes burned at them.
"You know me," he said. "You know
my kind. You can guess why I came with
Garrand to get the secret of the Birthplace,
what I was going to do with it afterward. I
didn't figure Garrand would get in my way.
I needed his brains, all right, but there
would come a time when I wouldn't need
them anymore." He made a gesture, as of
brushing away an insect with his hand.
"As easy as that." He began to laugh again
and it was more weeping than laughter.
"Stop it!" said Curt and Herrick stopped
quite obediently. He looked at Curt as
though a thought had just come to him,
creeping through the fear-webs that
shrouded his brain.
"You can get me out of here," he said.
There was no threat in his voice, only
pleading, the voice of a man caught in
quicksand and crying for release. "It's no
use going after Garrand. He'll die in there
anyway. He won't eat or sleep, he's gone
beyond those things, but whatever he
thinks he is he's human and he'll die. Just
go! Take me aboard your ship and go!"
"No," said Curt.
Herrick sat down again on the bench.
"No," he whispered. "You wouldn't.
You're as mad as he is."
Simon said, "Curtis . . ."
He had remained in the shadowy
background, listening, but now he came
forward and spoke and Curt turned on him.
"No!" he said again. "I can't go away
and leave a madman there to play with the
forces of the Birthplace till he dies!"
Simon was silent for a time and then he
said slowly, "There is truth in what you say
but only part of it. And I am sorry,
Curtis--for I am no more proof against this
madness than you. Even less, perhaps, than
you.
"I shall stay out here with Grag to guard
the ships and Herrick." His lens-like eyes
H
14
turned upon Ezra Gurney. "I think that
you, of all of us, will resist the lure most
strongly. You are like Herrick, a man of
your hands--and Herrick, who came to
steal the secret, felt only terror when he
found it."
He said no more but Ezra knew what he
meant. Simon was giving Curt Newton into
his hands to save him from some
destruction which Ezra did not understand.
There was a coldness around Ezra's heart
and a sickness in his belly and in his mind
a great wish that he had never left Earth.
Curt said to Herrick, "Go to my ship and
wait. When we leave you'll go with us."
Herrick shook his head. His eyes lifted
slowly to Curt Newton's and dropped
again. He said, "You'll never leave."
Ezra left the ship with Curt and Otho
and he was sorry that Herrick had said
those last three words.
They walked again across the ringing
glassy plain, this time toward the city wall
and the tall gateway that was in it. The
leaves of the portal stood open and there
was a look about them as though they had
not been touched or closed for more ages
than Ezra could think about. He and Otho
passed through them, following Curt.
Beyond, at a little distance, were two dark
statues facing each other across the way.
Ezra looked at them and caught his breath
in sharply.
"The Watchers?" he whispered. "Where
they like that? But what were they then?"
Otho said, "They came from another
universe. Simon thought they must have
been liquescent from the formless structure
of their bodies."
Out of each amorphous figure stared
two round yellow eyes, full of light from
the glowing sky and uncannily lifelike.
Ezra shuddered and hurried by, glancing as
he did so at the strangely inscribed letters
upon the bases of the statues. He assumed
that that was the warning Curt had referred
to and he did not want to enquire too
closely into it.
"Go quietly," Curt said. "Two men have
already died here. We want to get as close
to Garrand as we can before he knows
we're here."
"Where is he?" demanded Ezra for the
city was utterly dead and still. Curt pointed
to the citadel.
"In there."
They made their way as silently as they
could along the blue translucent street.
High above them the slender spires made
soft bell-notes where the wind touched
them and the crystal spans thrummed like
muted harps. And the shimmering castle
loomed close before them and the strange
stars sparkled in the golden sky. Ezra
Gurney was afraid.
There was a portal, tall and simply
made, with an unknown symbol cut above
it. They passed it, treading softly, and
stood within a vast cathedral vault that
soared upward until the tops of the walls
were lost in a golden haze and Ezra
realized that it was open to the sky.
The floor was of the same blue
substance as the city and in the center of it,
under the open vault, was a massive
oblong block almost like a gigantic altar
except that its top was set with hundreds of
little, shining keys. Beside this block stood
Garrand. He was not looking at it nor at the
two men and the android who had entered.
He was looking upward into that distant
sky and through the opening Ezra could
see the glittering of stars. Garrand was
smiling.
Curt Newton walked out across the
floor.
"Don't came any closer," said Garrand
mildly. "Just where you are--that's close
enough."
Curt stopped. Otho had begun to edge
away along the curve of the wall very
slowly, like a drifting shadow. Ezra stood a
little behind Curt and to one side.
ARRAND turned toward them and
for the first time Ezra saw his face
quite clearly. Unshaven and deathly white,
its cheeks and temples sunken with hunger
and exhaustion, its eyes dark and burning,
there was a beauty about it that had never
G
15
been there before, something sublime and
glorious and calm, as a sea is calm or a
frozen river, with the potentials of
destruction sleeping in it. And Ezra
understood the danger that Simon had
spoken of in regard to Curt. He understood
now what the power that was here could do
to a man.
"So, after all, you followed me,"
Garrand said. "Well, it doesn't matter
now." He stepped behind the block that
was like an altar, so that it was between
him and Curt.
Curt said quietly, "You must leave here,
Garrand. You'll have to leave some time,
you know. You're only human."
"Am I?" Garrand laughed. His hand
lightly caressed the bank of little shining
keys. "Am I? I was once. I was a little
physicist who thought adding to scientific
knowledge supremely important and I stole
and risked my life to come here for more
knowledge." His eyes lit up. "I came
searching for a scientific secret and I found
the source of godhead!"
"So now, because you've tampered with
the Watcher's powers and tapped the
Birthplace, you're a god?" Curt's tone was
ironic but Ezra could see the sweat
standing out on his forehead.
Garrand took no offence. He was
armored by an egocentric emotion so great
that he merely smiled wearily and said,
"You can go now--all of you. I dislike
chattering. I dislike it so much that I will
quite willingly call destruction in here to
engulf you unless you go."
His fingers had ceased straying, had
come to rest on certain keys. Ezra Gurney
felt a slow freezing of his flesh. He
whispered hoarsely, "You'll have to kill
him, Curt."
He knew the swiftness with which
Newton could draw and fire the weapon at
his belt. But Curt made no move.
"Can I fire into that bank of controls?"
Curt muttered. "Otho's speed is our only
chance."
He flung up his hand, his fingers
crooked. He said loudly, "Garrand, I warn
you--"
His gesture had been both a feint to
draw attention, a signal. A signal that sent
Otho lunging toward the oblong altar.
The phenomenal swiftness of the
android, the reaction speed of nerves and
muscles that were not human, made Otho's
movement almost blurring to the eye. But
Garrand saw and with a low cry he pressed
the keys.
To Ezra, in the next moment, the air
around them seemed suddenly charged
with power. The golden haze spun about
him, darkened, thickened, all in a
heartbeat. He felt the imminent
materialization of an agency of destruction
drawn from the great matrix of force about
them.
He glimpsed through the thickening
haze Otho pulling Garrand back from the
altar. He saw Curt leaping in, his face
desperate and raising the depressed keys.
And Ezra felt the half-materialized
shadowy force around him melting back
into nothingness. "What--" he stammered,
still standing frozen.
"Death," said Curt. "As to the form of it
who knows but Garrand? Anyway, it's over
now." His voice was unsteady and his
hands shook on the keys. He looked down.
Garrand had gone limp in Otho's arms.
Ezra thought at first that he was dead and
then he saw the shallow breathing, the faint
twitching of the mouth.
"Hunger and exhaustion," said Curt.
"Strain. He was already at the end of his
rope. Get him back to the ship, Otho, and
have Simon take care of him."
Otho lifted the unconscious man
without effort but he did not yet move
away. "Aren't you coming, Curt?"
"Not yet." He glanced upward through
the opening at the brilliant stars that
swarmed where no stars ought to be. "I
can't leave this imbalance at the heart of
the Birthplace. The Watchers were careful
about that. They built their one small
planet at the exact center of stress, where it
16
wouldn't upset anything. But those
creations of Garrand's--I don't dare leave
them here, Otho."
Still Otho did not move and Curt said,
"Go on, Otho. Garrand needs help."
LOWLY and reluctantly the android
turned and as he did so he looked at
Ezra, a look of warning, a pleading look.
Then, he went out, carrying Garrand.
Curt Newton bent over the keys. "I
haven't forgotten," he whispered to
himself. "How could anyone ever forget ?"
He touched the gleaming keys, not
pressing them, just touching them lightly
and feeling the power that was in them, the
unimaginable control of matter.
Ezra said hoarsely, "What are you
going to do?"
Curt looked upward to where the little
suns swam in the golden haze, the little
suns that could create havoc in this cosmic
womb where only the seed of matter
belonged.
"Watch," he said. "I am going to
dissolve what Garrand created."
Ezra watched. Slowly, carefully, Curt
pressed a certain pattern on the keys and
around a ruby star waves and bands of
golden force began to flicker like faint
auroras. They grew and strengthened and
became streams of raw electrons, pouring
their substance into the little Sun.
Ezra shielded his eyes, but not soon
enough. The star had become a nova, but
without the second, the collapsed stage of
novas. The fury of electronic force
launched upon it from outside in this
universal vortex of such forces had swept
away each fragment of the exploding
atoms to return them to the parent cloud.
The ruby star had ceased to exist and its
worlds had vanished with it.
Swifter now, more surely, Curt's hands
flashed across the keys. And Ezra Gurney
cowered beside the altar, blinded, stunned,
shaken by the savage explosions of far-
distant matter, riven and burst apart.
How long he crouched there while the
great lights flared in the sky and the
cosmic hammers beat he never knew. But
there came a time when everything was
still and he looked up and saw Curt
standing there with his hands motionless
on the keys and his head strained back so
that he could search the farthest reaches of
the sky.
He spoke and Curt did not answer. He
touched him and spoke again, and it was
like speaking to a statue except that under
his fingers he could feel the subtle tremors
of Curt's hard flesh, the taut quivering.
"Curt!" he cried out. And Curt very
slowly lowered his head and looked at him
with a kind of amazement in his eyes, as
though he had forgotten Ezra Gurney.
"Is it finished, Curt?"
"Yes. It's finished."
"Then come away."
Newton's gaze, the unfamiliar gaze that
did not see small things like men but
looked on larger distances, slipped away to
the banks of keys and upward to the sky
again.
"In a moment," he said. "In just a
moment."
Two red bars burned across the bones
of his cheeks and the rest of his face was
like marble. Ezra saw in it the beginning of
the exaltation, the terrible beauty that had
marked the face of Garrand. Curt smiled
and the sinews of his hands moved
delicately as he stroked his fingers across
the keys.
"The worlds that I could make," he
whispered. "Garrand was only a little man.
I could create things he never dreamed of."
"Curt!" cried Ezra in a panic. "Come
away!" But his voice was swallowed up in
dreams and Curt whispered very softly, "I
wouldn't keep them. I would dissolve them
afterward. But I could create . . ."
His fingers were forming a pattern on
the keys. Ezra looked down at his gnarled
old hands and knew that they were not
strong enough. He looked at his gun and
knew that he could not use it in any way.
Searching desperately for a way to pierce
through the dreams he cried, "Could you
create another Earth?"
S
17
For awhile he was not sure that Curt had
heard him, not sure but that he was beyond
hearing. Then a vaguely startled look came
into Curt's eyes and he said, "What?"
"Could you create another Earth, Curt?
Could you put the mountains and the seas
together and build the cities and fill them
with men and women and the voices of
children? Could you create another Otho or
Grag or Simon?"
Curt slowly looked down at his fingers,
curved and hungry on the waiting keys,
and a kind of horror flashed across his
face. He snatched his hands away and spun
around, turning his back to the altar. He
looked sick, and shamed, but the dreams
were no longer shadowing his face, and
Ezra began to breathe again.
"Thanks, Ezra," he said hoarsely. "Now
let's go. Let's go, while I can."
HE black cloud lay behind them and
the Comet fled away from it like a
frightened thing, back through the great
blazing clusters of Suns that had now no
terrors for them. Curt Newton sat silently
at the controls and his face was so
brooding that Ezra Gurney did not venture
to speak.
Ezra looked ahead because he did not
want to look back into the main cabin. He
knew that what Simon was doing there was
perfectly harmless and utterly necessary
but there was something so uncanny about
it that he did not want to see it being done.
He had looked in once and seen Simon
hovering over the strange projector that
Grag and Otho had rigged above the heads
of the drugged unconscious Garrand and
Herrick. He had come away from there
quickly.
He sat unspeaking beside Curt,
watching the great clusters wheel slowly
past them until at last Simon Wright came
gliding into the control-room.
"It is done," said Simon. "Garrand and
Herrick will not wake for many hours.
When they do they won't remember."
Curt looked at him. "You're sure that
you expunged every memory of the Birth-
place?"
"Absolutely sure. I used the scanner to
block every memory-path on that subject--
and checked by questioning them
hypnotically. They know nothing of the
Birthplace. You'll have to have a story
ready for them."
Curt nodded. "We picked them up out
here in deep space when their ship cracked
up in cosmic ray research. That fits the
circumstances--they'll never doubt it."
Ezra shivered a little. Even now the
blocking of part of a man's memories, the
taking away forever of a bit of his
experience, seemed an eerie thing to do.
Curt Newton saw his shiver and
understood it. He said, "It doesn't harm
them, Ezra--and it's necessary."
"Very necessary, if the secret of the
Birthplace is not to get out again," said
Simon.
There was a little silence among them
and the ship crawled on and on through the
cosmic glare and gloom. Ezra saw that the
somber shadow on Newton's face
deepened as he looked out through the
wilderness of Suns and nebulae toward the
far, far spark of Sol.
"But someday," Curt said slowly,
"someday not too far in the future, many
men will be pushing out through these
spaces. They'll find the Birthplace sooner
or later. And then what?"
Simon said, "We will not be here when
that happens."
"But they'll do it. And what will happen
when they do?"
Simon had no answer for that nor had
Ezra Gurney. And Curt spoke again, his
voice heavy with foreboding.
"I have sometimes thought that life,
human life, intelligent life, is merely a
deadly agent by which a stellar system
achieves its own doom in a cosmic cycle
far vaster and stranger than anyone has
dreamed. For see--stars and planets are
born from primal nothingness and they
cool and the cooling worlds spawn life and
T
18
life grows to ever higher levels of
intelligence and power until . . ."
There was an ironical twist to Curt's lips
as he paused and then went on ". . . until
the life of that world becomes intelligent
enough to tap the energies of the cosmos!
When that happens is it inevitable that
fallible mortals should use those energies
so disastrously that they finally destroy
their own worlds and stars? Are life and
intelligence merely a lethal seed planted in
each universe, a seed that must inevitably
destroy that universe?"
Simon said slowly, "That is a terrible
thought, Curtis. But I deny its inevitability.
Long ago the Watchers found the
Birthplace, yet they did not try to use its
powers."
"We are not like the Watchers, we
men," Curt said bitterly. "You saw what it
did to Garrand and to me."
"I know," said Simon. "But perhaps
men will be as wise as the Watchers were
by the time they find the Birthplace.
Perhaps they too will then be powerful
enough to renounce power. We can only
hope."