"He would not live to get there." A pause. "Go, bring forceps and bone
knives. Hurry."
A long roaring darkness. Then new movement around where he lay: and a
sudden voice that he dimly recognized as his father's.
"Stop! What is that tool in your hand?"
"A new device for extracting teeth," came Bidagha's calm, resonant
voice: "with which we may save your son's life."
Shocked murmurs all over the hall, topped by his father's shout of
outrage, "In Cave--in hands of Healer?"
Bidagha relied, "What Immortals want new, they make new! Here and now,
in my hands, they end our years of darkness! Let Immortals confound me
if I lie!"
* * * * *
The multitude in Cave roared their approval, and Premier Karn
hesitated. He appeared to be struggling within himself. As the echoes
died away, a pebble rolled from a ledge, dislodged by the sound, and
fell at Bidagha's feet. A second pebble fell, and a boulder which had
rested above the hearth for untold centuries shifted its position.
With a shout, Bidagha flung himself over Pehn's body as the boulder
trembled and fell, crushing the life from the bodies of both men.
Dust rose, and a rumble began near the ceiling.
"Run!" cried Premier Karn. "Run for your lives!"
As the others ran from Cave, Lord Karn rushed to the huge rock lying
upon his son, but he had no hope. Neither Pehn nor Bidagha would ever
move again.
A trickle of sand pattered to the floor, and with a last backward
glance Lord Karn ran from Cave. Boulders rained from the ceiling. The
Premier had just reached the outside when a huge slab of rock crashed
to the floor against the entrance. On the slope nearby, Pehn's mother
and sister wept silently.
Lord Karn stood motionless a long while. At last he spoke.
"Cave is sealed," he said. "Let it never be opened again. Immortals
have willed that my son should rest here forever, with impious
Bidagha." Turning his face to the sky, he shook his fist at the bright
spark of Topaz in the paling north. "So much for new things and foreign
stars!" he said between his teeth. "This day's evil is enough."
They extinguished their candles and went slowly up the valley path
towards the city.
* * * * *
Twenty-eight years later, on Earth, an astronomer comparing recent
plates taken of the constellation Lyra noticed that Vega, its brightest
star, had increased in brightness by a slight amount. The event was
not especially remarkable--there are on the average, twenty-five novas
reported every year in our galaxy--but Vega was one of the stars to
be visited during the next decade by one of the Survey ships now in
mid-voyage.
"There's one place they won't have to stop, now," he said to a
colleague, showing him the plates.
"I don't suppose it matters. What's one star, more or less, when they
all turn out to be the same--no planets, or barren ones--no stopping
place for man."
"I suppose you're right," said the astronomer, staring glumly at the
waste immensity of the photograph in front of him.