A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened
bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The
din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a
fluttering beneath it.
Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,
hovering faces of the officials.
"Good God," said the President. "You've got to tell them what you said
isn't true!"
"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth," said Michael.
"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way
it's got to be."
The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.
"There's been some mistake!" he cried. "Go back to the pumps and the
distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the
flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you.
Everything's going to be _all right_!"
Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun
away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like
pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white
ship.
* * * * *
They ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council
chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood
desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And
on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet
square.
The President stood. "Members of the council." He paused. "As you
heard, they report--complete failure." He turned to Michael. "And now,
the proof."
Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair.
The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in
the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around.
Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled
with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the
watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an
ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.
Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of
lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling,
like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts
flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time
passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they
themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward
blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.
The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved
forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many
mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming
to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a
razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson.
Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A
roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear
flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they
gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere
of this planet would disintegrate a human being.
Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and
the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks
of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.
Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and
died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the
death of a ship.
They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they
saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw
creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and
blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking
about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They
saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at
incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs
and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but
invisible.
And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a
compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and
thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks
and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were
aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some
that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into
flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid.
They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of
blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must
ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck
that was Earth.
The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts,
showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the
man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the
woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where
solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was
held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon
them from many pencil like tubes.
The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into
human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and
extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and
cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the
ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their
bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them
in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into
space--all this through millions of miles and a hundred years,
compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of
space.
Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers
of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.
And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a
blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker;
saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past
the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark
nothingness.
Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them
into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another
ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great,
yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it.
Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the
darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies
drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.
At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of
horror and voices crying out, "Shut it off! Shut it off!" There was a
moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval
grew in volume.
Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and
the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the
contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams
and cries of the spectators rose higher, "Shut it off.... Oh Lord...."
Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.
* * * * *
Michael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the
agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in
clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.
There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing
of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to
quiet his trembling.
"There--there've been changes," he said, "since you've been out in
space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for
hundreds of years."