The Black Star Passes - John W. Campbell (reading cloud ebooks txt) 📗

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 homo sapiens than Terrestrians do, for it was wise with the accumulated 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 attitude 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 passed before there moved about on three of them the beginnings of life. Then a hundred million years passed, and those first, crawling protoplasmic masses had become animals, and plants, and intermediate growths. And they fought endlessly for survival. Then more millions of years passed, 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 passed 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 quantities that they staggered under its load as they left the ground! And warfare became worldwide. 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 passed out into space 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 passed before the first of those changes became important. But slowly, steadily our atmosphere was drifting into space. 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 space itself was ablaze with the struggles of