The old man laughed. "We do not die--not as your race knows death. It's
one of our attainments. Like the blackness where you first saw me."
"The blackness?" Angus turned, stared down at the metal collar encasing
the jet black pool. "What is it? It must be all over the planet. No one
knows what the pool is."
"It is the greatest product of my race. Many eons ago a scientist
discovered that an atom may be split to create ravening energy. For
years the mightiest scientists of the Elders studied that fact.
Eventually they built machines that could house such awful power.
Finally, after many centuries, they developed the pools.
"The pools are nothing more than that atomic radiation--sheer
energy--bottled up in vast chambers lined with _stalabasil_. Ready for
use at any time.
"In the early days men died from such radioactivity. As time went
on and we handled it more and more, our bodies evolved, so that the
painful burns that caused death became as mere tinglings along the
nerve-ends. Your own race, that evolved on Karr after the Elders went
on, is also immune to it."
"Reservoirs of energy," murmured Angus, rubbing hand on thigh. "If you
could harness that energy and turn it into channels of production...."
His blue eyes widened as breath caught in his throat. Stasor smiled,
his old head nodding. "That's what we Elders used. We powered our
machines with it. We needed no fuel, no refilling of bins or tanks. It
was always there, ready to tap."
"Does the Book of Nard mention it?"
The old man nodded. "All our secrets are contained in the Book of Nard.
Do you want to see it?"
They went up a flight of spiralling steps and into a room where heavy
golden drapes hung bright and splendid. On a wooden rest lay a closed
book, its covers solid gold, its parchment leaves tinted a pale rose.
"Open it," said the Guardian.
Angus bent and lifted the cover. He gazed on the archaic lettering
etched into the thick vellum.
_Each man has in him the seeds of his own immortality. He must progress
or he must die. And the race is like the man. Who shall say what path
that progression shall take? A man cannot know his own future. Neither
does the race. This is the Book of Nard, first of the Elder Race. With
encouragement to all peoples who come after us, we leave this short
transcript of our past._
Angus lifted his eyes. He stared at the smiling Guardian, who nodded.
Quickly the pirate touched the parchment, spread the pages wide. His
keen blue eyes scanned the etchings while he read the record of those
who had gone on. He scanned mathematical and astronomical formulae,
chemical equations, biological charts.
He whispered, "The entire history of the race, told in the achievements
of its scientists!"
"It is all that lives."
"I don't understand it, of course. I catch a thought, here and there.
But the entire equation...."
"You don't understand it?"
"No."
The old man smiled. He said suddenly, "Would you like to see some of
those achievements in action? Would you like to see the worlds in
three-dimensional space, the island universes, the galaxies, the stars
and their planets?"
Angus said, "I've been out among the Six Worlds. I've seen other
systems through telescopes."
The old man laughed. It was a spontaneous, happy sort of laugh. "I
don't mean that way. Come, let me show you what my race can do." Angus
caught him smiling oddly, the corners of his lips drawing down, as
though he shared a queer joke only with himself.
They did not use the stairway this time. They stepped into a bare
room walled and ceilinged and floored with shining steel. The old man
touched a stud on the door.
The room of the book was gone.
* * * * *
In its stead, there was a round chamber with a transparent dome that
revealed stars twinkling uncounted miles above. In the middle of the
otherwise unfurnished room stood a low, flat dais set with chairs
riveted on their curving metal legs into the dais. A bank of controls
was set flush in the floor of the platform.
The old man led him to the dais. He smiled, bending over the control
panel, "This is the kind of observatory your race will have, someday.
You won't have to depend on polished mirrors and light and thick
lenses. Basically the principle of the thing is the same as that of
the teleport room we used to come over here. We just make use of
coordinated space and time factors. It's like steering a boat on an
uncharted ocean. If you know where your lodestar is you can go anywhere
you want."
He turned and reached for a chair. "We're ready now. You are perfectly
safe, no matter what you see, or think you see. Just relax."
The reflected light in the room was fading. Blackness came down through
the transparent dome and surrounded them. It was like the Staratarium
Red Angus had visited on Mawk--or it was, until Angus saw stars beside
and below him.
A nebulae that was uncounted light-years away came rushing toward them.
It was a spinning silver wheel at a distance, but it broke into great
blotches of black space to dissolve into just another star system
without form or noticeable nebulosity.
They swooped over a reddish planet and dropped through its atmosphere.
They studied great buildings of stone and metal that towered high into
the clouds. Tiny fliers and great air-freighters dotted the skies. The
old man said, "This people used their science wisely. They built a
civilization that gives every man all he wants which is, in effect, all
he can understand."
They left the red planet, swept light-years away and down through heavy
mists to a greenish globe whirling majestically in the light of its
distant sun. Beneath them lush, tropical jungles lifted fronds and
branches to the steaming mists. Somewhere in that massed carpet of
vegetation an animal screamed in its dying agonies. Through a break in
the trees Angus saw a naked man squat and hairy and with a stone-bladed
spear in his hand, fleeing before the bounding fury of a gigantic
tiger. The great cat was making its last leap, spreading its talons
into the man's shivering flesh, as the mists crept up and hid them.
"A young world," Stasor said softly, "with all its life ahead of it in
which to find its destiny."
They went out into space and found a planet where giant insects ruled,
where a lumbering thing in the shape of a man, but mindless, was used
for heavy labor. Another planet showed lizards dwelling in strangely
wrought mansions. A third showed mind-beings that looked like crimson
jellyfish hanging in midair by some means of mental suspension.
"All these," explained Stasor with a wave of his palm, "are freaks.
Life throughout the whole universe, across all of its uncountable
light-years, follows mainly a pattern like our own. Creatures that
we call man, with two arms, two legs, two eyes, a nose and mouth,
breathing atmosphere into lungs, have been the ruling race because of
circumstances like gravity and atmosphere, over which they themselves
have no control.
"One more example, then we're done...."
They fled across star galaxies, through sprawling universe where
binaries and dwarf stars and red giants alternated against the black
void like a spangled curtain. They went through the Megellanic Cluster
and the Andromeda nebula. They came swooping down so swiftly that the
stars blurred a little, even at their incredible distances, toward
another galaxy.
Stasor found a little star. It was surrounded by nine planets. He chose
the third planet outward from the star, and dropped his observational
platform through the heaviside and ionosphere.
Angus craned forward. He liked this world. It reminded him vaguely of
Karr, with its green grasses and rolling oceans.
"Its inhabitants call it the Earth. A peaceful place. Look over
there--you can see the city clearer now."
It had graceful spires and round, lovely dwellings. Giant ships rested
beside white, sparkling wharves. People went back and forth clad in
light, airy garments. There was an air of glowing contentment.
Stasor said, "This is their golden age. It will last a long time. Soon
they will colonize other planets near them. In the end--some million
years from now--these people will rule almost all the known universes.
And yet, compared to ours, their science is just a crawling child."
* * * * *
Angus felt a touch of jealousy. "Why should they rule the worlds? We
people of Karr...."
"Wait, not yet. I want to show you this world three hundred years ago."
He touched a lever. The world below them grew away, shot backward and
out into space. Angus cried out in amazement. "It's receding away from
us."
"I'm going back in time. Remember, this is an expanding universe. It's
come a long ways in the past three centuries, going toward the fixed
star, Vega. We have to follow it."
This time, there was no lovely world. There was only blackened earth,
charred and scorched. Great humps of steel stuck up from the ground
like the fire-blackened ribs of some giant fallen in swamp-muck. From
the west came seven thin, lean shapes, speeding through the air. From
the blackened ground came thinner, smaller shapes to intercept them.
The small shapes were like wasps in their darting and their speed. The
big shapes never had a chance. They went down in masses of red flame,
spinning.
Stasor announced, "This is their Last War. It is to go on ten more
years. The seven shapes you saw were bombers loaded to their wings with
atomic bombs. The smaller ships were fighters, their armaments mounted
with fission-guns, an invention of an American scientist."
"Ten more years!" flinched Angus. "There's only blackened ground for
them to live on."
"They live underground," explained Stasor.
Angus mused, "There's such a sharp difference between this world and
what it's to be like three hundred years from this time."
"The American who invented the fission gun," explained Stasor, "will
lead their world to that pinnacle. He is going to organize the remnants
of the civilization left after the last war, compel interracial wedlock
and births. The biological result of that will be, naturally, a new and
different race in the course of the years. It is that race that will go
out from Earth to the stars."
Angus regarded Stasor thoughtfully. "You're thinking that what the
American did with his people, I can do with mine."
The old man shrugged. He reached out and twisted the dials. He
murmured, "Karr fights a war just as deadly as the one you see below.
There's a difference. Instead of death, Karr's enemies deal it
stagnation and degeneration."
"If I could get the Diktor to give the Hierarch's sciences to the
people," Angus mused.
"Where there is hope you have new life," smiled Stasor gently. "Without
science to benefit their lives the people of Karr have no hope."
Angus lashed out bitterly, "The Diktor is too powerful. There isn't any
way to beat him."
"I will show you a way," murmured the old man.