From the Ocean from teh Stars (56 page)

what passed for its nervous system were clumping together in new pat
terns, and I would have given much to know their meaning. It may be
that I was looking into the brain of a mindless beast in its last convulsion
of fear—or of a godlike being making its peace with the universe.

Then the radar screen was empty, wiped clean during a single scan
of the beam. The creature had fallen below our horizon, and was hidden
from us now by the curve of the planet. Far out in the burning dayside
of Mercury, in the inferno where only a dozen men have ever ventured
and fewer still come back alive, it smashed silently and invisibly against
the seas of molten metal, the hills of slowly moving lava. The mere impact
could have meant nothing to such an entity; what it could not endure was
its first contact with the inconceivable cold of solid matter.

Yes,
cold.
It had descended upon the hottest spot in the solar system, where the temperature never falls below seven hundred degrees Fahren
heit and sometimes approaches a thousand. And that was far, far colder
to it than the antarctic winter would be to a naked man.

We did not see it die, out there in the freezing fire; it was beyond the
reach of our instruments now, and none of them recorded its end. Yet
every one of us knew when that moment came, and that is why we are
not interested when those who have seen only the films and tapes tell us
that we were watching some purely natural phenomenon.

How can one explain what we felt, in that last moment when half
our little world was enmeshed in the dissolving tendrils of that huge but
immaterial brain? I can only say that it was a soundless cry of anguish,
a death pang that seeped into our minds without passing through the gateways of the senses. Not one of us doubted then, or has ever doubted since,
that he had witnessed the passing of a giant.

We may have been both the first and the last of all men to see so mighty
a fall. Whatever
they
may be, in their unimaginable world within the sun,
our paths and theirs may never cross again. It is hard to see how we can
ever make contact with them, even if their intelligence matches ours.

And does it? It may be well for us if we never know the answer.
Perhaps they have been living there inside the sun since the universe was
born, and have climbed to peaks of wisdom that we shall never scale. The future may be theirs, not ours; already they may be talking across
the light-years to their cousins in other stars.

One day they may discover us, by whatever strange senses they pos
sess, as we circle around their mighty, ancient home, proud of our knowl
edge and thinking ourselves lords of creation. They may not like what
they find, for to them we should be no more than maggots, crawling upon

the skins of worlds too cold to cleanse themselves from the corruption of
organic life.

And then, if they have the power, they will do what they consider
necessary. The sun will put forth its strength and lick the faces of
its children; and thereafter the planets will go their way once more as
they were in the beginning—clean and bright. . . and sterile.

☆
TRANSIENCE

T
he forest, which came almost to the edge of the beach, climbed away into the distance up the flanks of the low, misty hills. Underfoot, the sand was coarse and mixed with myriads of broken shells. Here and there the retreating tide had left long streamers of weed trailed across the beach. The rain, which seldom ceased, had for the moment passed inland, but ever and again large, angry drops would beat tiny craters in the sand.

It was hot and sultry, for the war between sun and rain was never-ending. Sometimes the mists would lift for a while and the hills would stand out clearly above the land they guarded. These hills arced in a semicircle along the bay, following the line of the beach, and beyond them could sometimes be seen, at an immense distance, a wall of mountains lying beneath perpetual clouds. The trees grew everywhere, softening the contours of the land so that the hills blended smoothly into each other. Only in one place could the bare, uncovered rock be seen, where long ago some fault had weakened the foundations of the hills, so that for a mile or more the sky line fell sharply away, drooping down to the sea like a broken wing.

Moving with the cautious alertness of a wild animal, the child came through the stunted trees at the forest's edge. For a moment he hesitated; then, since there seemed to be no danger, walked slowly out onto the beach.

He was naked, heavily built, and had coarse black hair tangled over his shoulders. His face, brutish though it was, might almost have passed in human society, but the eyes would have betrayed him. They were not the eyes of an animal, for there was something in their depths that no animal had ever known. But it was no more than a promise. For this child, as for all his race, the light of reason had yet to dawn. Only a hairsbreadth still separated him from the beasts among whom he dwelt.

The tribe had not long since come into this land, and he was the first
ever to set foot upon that lonely beach. What had lured him from the
known dangers of the forest into the unknown and therefore more terrible
dangers of this new element, he could not have told even had he pos
sessed the power of speech. Slowly he walked out to the water's edge, al
ways with backward glances at the forest behind him; and as he did so,
for the first time in all history, the level sand bore upon its face the foot
prints it would one day know so well.

He had met water before, but it had always been bounded and con
fined by land. Now it stretched endlessly before him, and the sound of its
laboring beat ceaselessly upon his ears.

With the timeless patience of the savage, he stood on the moist sand
that the water had just relinquished, and as the tide line moved out he
followed it slowly, pace by pace. When the waves reached toward his
feet with a sudden access of energy, he would retreat a little way toward
the land. But something held him here at the water's edge, while his
shadow lengthened along the sands and the cold evening wind began to
rise around him.

Perhaps into his mind had come something of the wonder of the sea,
and a hint of all that it would one day mean to man. Though the first
gods of his people still lay far in the future, he felt a dim sense of worship
stir within him. He knew that he was now in the presence of something
greater than all the powers and forces he had ever met.

The tide was turning. Far away in the forest, a wolf howled once
and was suddenly silent. The noises of the night were rising around him,
and it was time to go.

Under the low moon, the two lines of footprints interlaced across the
sand. Swiftly the oncoming tide was smoothing them away. But they
would return in their thousands and millions, in the centuries yet to be.

The child playing among the rock pools knew nothing of the forest that had once ruled all the land around him. It had left no trace of its
existence. As ephemeral as the mists that had so often rolled down from
the hills, it, too, had veiled them for a little while and now was gone. In
its place had come a checkerboard of fields, the legacy of a thousand
years of patient toil. And so the illusion of permanence remained, though
everything had altered save the line of the hills against the sky. On the
beach, the sand was finer now, and the land had lifted so that the old
tide line was far beyond the reach of the questing waves.

Beyond the sea wall and the promenade, the little town was sleeping

through the golden summer day. Here and there along the beach, people
lay at rest, drowsy with heat and lulled by the murmur of the waves.

Out across the bay, white and gold against the water, a great ship
was moving slowly to sea. The boy could hear, faint and far away, the
beat of its screws and could still see the tiny figures moving upon its decks
and superstructure. To the child—and not to him alone—it was a
thing of wonder and beauty. He knew its name and the land to which it
was steaming; but he did not know that the splendid ship was both the
last and greatest of its kind. He scarcely noticed, almost lost against the glare of the sun, the thin white vapor trails that spelled the doom of the
proud and lovely giant.

Soon the great liner was no more than a dark smudge on the horizon,
and the boy turned again to his interrupted play, to the tireless building
of his battlements of sand. In the west the sun was beginning its long
decline, but the evening was still far away.

Yet it came at last, when the tide was returning to the land. At his
mother's words, the child gathered up his playthings and, wearily con
tented, began to follow his parents back to the shore. He glanced once
only at the sand castles he had built with such labor and would not see
again. Without regret he left them to the advancing waves, for tomorrow
he would return and the future stretched endlessly before him.

That tomorrow would not always come, either for himself or for the
world, he was still too young to know.

And now even the hills had changed, worn away by the weight of
years. Not all the change was the work of nature, for one night in the
long-forgotten past something had come sliding down from the stars, and
the little town had vanished in a spinning tower of flame. But that was
so long ago that it was beyond sorrow or regret. Like the fall of fabled
Troy or the overwhelming of Pompeii, it was part of the irremediable
past and could rouse no pity now.

On the broken sky line lay a long metal building supporting a maze
of mirrors that turned and glittered in the sun. No one from an earlier
age could have guessed its purpose. It was as meaningless as an observa
tory or a radio station would have been to ancient man. But it was neither of these things.

Since noon, Bran had been playing among the shallow pools left by
the retreating tide. He was quite alone, though the machine that
guarded him was watching unobtrusively from the shore. Only a few days
ago, there had been other children playing beside the blue waters of this
lovely bay. Bran sometimes wondered where they had vanished, but he

was a solitary child and did not greatly care. Lost in his own dreams, he
was content to be left alone.

In the last few hours he had linked the tiny pools with an intricate network of waterways. His thoughts were very far from Earth, both in
space and time. Around him now were the dull, red sands of another
world. He was Cardenis, prince of engineers, fighting to save his people
from the encroaching deserts. For Bran had looked upon the ravaged
face of Mars; he knew the story of its long tragedy and the help from
Earth that had come too late.

Out to the horizon the sea was empty, untroubled by ships, as it had
been for ages. For a little while, near the beginning of time, man had
fought his brief war against the oceans of the world. Now it seemed
that only a moment lay between the coming of the first canoes and the
passing of the last great Megatheria of the seas.

Bran did not even glance at the sky when the monstrous shadow
swept along the beach. For days past, those silver giants had been rising
over the hills in an unending stream, and now he gave them little thought.
All his life he had watched the great ships climbing through the skies of
Earth on their way to distant worlds. Often he had seen them return
from those long journeys, dropping down through the clouds with car
goes beyond imagination.

He wondered sometimes why they came no more, those returning
voyagers. All the ships he saw now were outward bound; never one drove
down from the skies to berth at the great port beyond the hills. Why this should be, no one would tell him. He had learned not to speak of it now,
having seen the sadness that his questions brought.

Across the sands the robot was calling to him softly. "Bran," came
the words, echoing the tones of his mother's voice, "Bran—it's time to go."

The child looked up, his face full of indignant denial. He could not
believe it. The sun was still high and the tide was far away. Yet along
the shore his mother and father were already coming toward him.

They walked swiftly, as though the time were short. Now and again
his father would glance for an instant at the sky, then turn his head
quickly away as if he knew well that there was nothing he could hope
to see. But a moment later he would look again.

Stubborn and angry, Bran stood at bay among his canals and lakes.
His mother was strangely silent, but presently his father took him by the
hand and said quietly, "You must come with us, Bran. It's time we went."