Jan slowly moved his gaze along the horizon. The cloud-cover extended clear to the edge of this enormous world, but in one direction, at an unguessable distance, there was a mottled patch that might have marked the towers of another city. He stared at it for a long while, then continued his careful survey.
When he had turned half-circle he saw the mountain. It was not on the horizon, but beyond it — a single serrated peak, climbing up over the edge of the world, its lower slopes hidden as the bulk of an iceberg is concealed below the water-line.
He tried to guess its size, and failed completely. Even on a world with gravity as low as this, it seemed hard to believe that such mountains could exist. Did the Overlords, he wondered, sport themselves upon its slopes and sweep like eagles around those immense buttresses?
And then, slowly, the mountain began to change. When he saw it first, it was a dull and almost sinister red, with a few faint markings near its crown that he could not dearly distinguish. He was trying to focus on them when he realised that they were moving…
At first he could not believe his eyes. Then he forced himself to remember that all his preconceived ideas were worthless here; he must not let his mind reject any message his senses brought into the hidden chamber of the brain. He must not try to understand — only to observe. Understanding would come later, or not at all.
The mountain — he still thought of it as such, for there was no other word that could serve — seemed to be alive. He remembered that monstrous eye in its buried vault — but no, that was inconceivable. It was not organic life that he was watching; it was not even, he suspected, matter as he knew it.
The sombre red was brightening to an angrier hue. Streaks of vivid yellow appeared, so that for a moment Jan felt he was looking at a volcano pouring streams of lava down on to the land beneath. But these streams, as he could tell by occasional flecks and mottlings, were moving upwards.
Now something else was rising out of the ruby clouds around the mountain’s base. It was a huge ring, perfectly horizontal and perfectly circular — and it was the colour of all that Jan had left so far behind, for the skies of Earth had held no lovelier blue. Nowhere else on the world of the Overlords had he seen such hues, and his throat contracted with the longing and the loneliness they evoked.
The ring was expanding as it climbed. It was higher than the mountain now, and its nearer arc was sweeping swiftly towards him. Surely, thought Jan, it must be a vortex of some kind — a smoke-ring already many kilometres across. But it showed none of the rotation he expected, and it seemed to grow no less solid as its size increased.
Its shadow rushed past long before the ring itself had swept majestically overhead, still rising into space. He watched until it had dwindled to a thin thread of blue, hard for the eye to focus upon in the surrounding redness of the sky. When it vanished at last, it must already have been many thousands of kilometres across. And it was still growing.
He looked back at the mountain. It was golden now, and devoid of all markings. Perhaps it was imagination — he could believe anything by this time — but it seemed taller and narrower, and appeared to be spinning like the funnel of a cyclone. Not until then, still numbed and with his powers of reason almost in abeyance, did he remember his camera. He raised it to eye-level, and sighted towards that impossible, mind-shaking enigma.
Vindarten moved swiftly into his line of vision. With implacable firmness, the great hands covered the lens turret and forced him to lower the camera. Jan did not attempt to resist; it would have been useless, of course, but he felt a sudden deathly fear of that thing out there at the edge of the world, and wanted no further part of it.
There was nothing else in all his travels that they would not let him photograph, and Vindarten gave no explanations.
Instead, he spent much time getting Jan to describe in minute detail what he had witnessed.
It was then that Jan realised that Vindarten’s eyes had seen something totally different; and it was then that he guessed, for the first time, that the Overlords had masters, too.
* * *
Now he was coming home, and all the wonder, the fear and the mystery were far behind. It was the same ship, he believed, though surely not the same crew. However long their lives, It was hard to believe that the Overlords would willingly cut themselves off from their home for all the decades consumed on an interstellar voyage.
The Relativity time-dilation effect worked both ways, of course. The Overlords would age only four months on the round trip, but when they returned their friends would be eighty years older.
Had he wished, Jan could doubtless have stayed here for the remainder of his life. But Vindarten had warned him that there would be no other ship going to Earth for several years, and had advised him to take this opportunity. Perhaps the Overlords realised that even in this relatively short time, his mind had nearly reached the end of its resources. Or he might merely have become a nuisance, and they could spare no more time for him.
It was of no importance now, for Earth was there ahead.
He had seen it thus a hundred times before, but always through the remote, mechanical eye of the television camera.
Now at last he himself was out here in space, as the final act of his dream unfolded itself; and Earth spun beneath on its eternal orbit.
The great blue-green crescent was in its first quarter; more than half the visible disc was still in darkness. There was little cloud — a few bands scattered along the line of the trade winds.
The arctic cap glittered brilliantly, but was far outshone by the dazzling reflection of the sun in the north Pacific.
One might have thought it was a world of water; this hemisphere was almost devoid of land. The only continent visible was Australia, a darker mist in the atmospheric haze along the limb of the planet.
The ship was driving into Earth’s great cone of shadow; the gleaming crescent dwindled, shrank to a burning bow of fire, and winked out of existence. Below was darkness and night.
The world was sleeping.
It was then that Jan realised what was wrong. There was land down there — but where were the gleaming necklaces of light, where were the glittering coruscations that had been the cities of man? In all that shadowy hemisphere, there was no single spark to drive back the night. Gone without a trace were the millions, of kilowatts that once had been splashed carelessly towards the stars. He might have been looking down on Earth as it had been before the coming of Man.
This was not the homecoming he had expected. There was nothing he could do but watch, while the fear of the unknown grew within him. Something had happened — something unimaginable. And yet the ship was descending purposefully in a long curve that was taking it again over the sunlit hemisphere. He saw nothing of the actual landing, for the picture of Earth suddenly winked out and was replaced by that meaningless pattern of lines and lights. When vision was restored, they were on the ground. There were great buildings in the distance, machines moving about, and a group of Overlords watching them…
Somewhere there was the muffled roar of air as the ship equalised pressure, then the sound of great doors opening. He did not wait; the silent giants watched him with tolerance or indifference as he ran from the control room.
He was home, seeing once more by the sparkling light of his own familiar sun, breathing the air that had first washed through his lungs. The gangway was already down, but he had to wait for a moment until the glare outside no longer blinded him.
Karellen was standing, a little apart from his companions, beside a great transport vehicle loaded with crates. Jan did not stop to wonder how he recognised the Supervisor, nor was he surprised to see him completely unchanged. That was almost the only thing that had turned out as he had expected.
“I have been waiting for you,” said Karellen.
Chapter 23
“In the early days,” said Karellen, “it was safe for us to go among them. But they no longer needed us; our work was done when we had gathered them
together and given them a continent of their own. Watch.”
The wall in front of Jan disappeared. Instead he was looking down from a height of a few hundred metres on to a pleasantly wooded country. The illusion was so perfect that he fought a momentary giddiness.
“This is five years later, when the second phase had begun.” There were figures moving below, and the camera swooped down upon them like a bird of prey.
“This will distress you,” said Karellen. “But remember that your standards no longer apply. You are not watching human children.”
Yet that was the immediate impression that came to Jan’s mind, and no amount of logic could dispel it. They might have been savages, engaged in some complex ritual dance. They were naked and filthy, with matted hair obscuring their eyes. As far as Jan could tell, they were of all ages from five to fifteen, yet they all moved with the same speed, precision, and complete indifference to their surroundings.
Then Jan saw their faces. He swallowed hard, and forced himself not to turn away. They were emptier than the faces of the dead, for even a corpse has some record carved by Time’s chisel upon its features, to speak when the lips themselves are dumb. There was no more emotion or feeling here than in the face of a snake or an insect. The Overlords themselves were more human than this.
“You are searching for something that is no longer there.” said Karellen. “Remember — they have no more identity than the cells in your own body. But linked together, they are something much greater than you.”
“Why do they keep moving like this?”
“We called it the Long Dance,” replied Karellen. “They never sleep, you know, and this lasted almost a year. Three hundred million of them, moving in a controlled pattern over a whole continent. We’ve analysed that pattern endlessly, but it means nothing, perhaps because we can see only the physical part of it — the small portion that’s here on Earth. Possibly what we have called the Overmind is still training them, moulding them into one unit before it can wholly absorb them into its being.”
“But how did they manage about food? And what happened if they hit obstructions, like trees, or cliffs, or water?”
“Water made no difference; they could not drown. When they encountered obstacles, they sometimes damaged themselves, but they never noticed it. As for food — well, there was all the fruit and game they required. But now they have left that need behind, like so many others. For food is largely a source of energy, and they have learned to tap greater sources.”
The scene flickered as if a heat haze had passed over it. When it cleared, the movement below had ceased.
“Watch again,” said Karellen. “It is three years later.”
The little figures, so helpless and pathetic if one did not know the truth, stood motionless in forest and glade and plain. The camera roamed restlessly from one to the other; already, thought Jan, their faces were merging into a common mould. He had once seen some photographs made by the superposition of dozens of prints to give one “average” face. The result had been as empty, as void of character as this.
They seemed to be sleeping or entranced. Then eyes were tightly closed, and they showed no more awareness of their surroundings than did the trees under which they stood. What thoughts, Jan wondered, were echoing through the intricate network in which their minds were now no more — and yet no less — than the separate threads of some great tapestry? And a tapestry, he now realised, that covered many worlds and many races — and was growing still.
It happened with a swiftness that dazzled the eye and stunned the brain. At one moment Jan was looking down upon a beautiful, fertile country with nothing strange about it save the countless small statues scattered — yet not randomly — over its length and breadth. And then in an instant all the trees and grass, all the living creatures that had inhabited this land, flickered out of existence and were gone. There were left only the still lakes, the winding rivers, the rolling brown hills, now stripped of their green carpet — and the silent, indifferent figures who had wrought all this destruction.
“Why did they do it?” gasped Jan.
“Perhaps the presence of other minds disturbed them — even the rudimentary minds of plants and animals. One day, we believe, they may find the material world equally distracting. And then, who knows what will happen? Now you understand why we withdrew when we had done our duty. We are still trying to study them, but we never enter their land or even send our instruments there. All we dare do is to observe from space.”
“That was many years ago,” said Jan. “What has happened since?”
“Very little. They have never moved in all that time, and take no notice of day or night, summer or winter. They are still testing their powers; some rivers have changed their courses, and there is one that flows uphill. But they have done nothing that seems to have any purpose.”
“And they have ignored you completely?”
“Yes, though that is not surprising. The — entity — of which they are part knows all about us. It does not seem to care if we attempt to study it. When it wishes us to leave, or has a new task for us elsewhere, it will make its desires very obvious. Until then, we will remain here so that our scientists can gather what knowledge they may.”
So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of Man. It was an end that no prophet had ever foreseen — an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike.
Yet it was fitting; it had the sublime inevitability of a great work of art. Jan had glimpsed the universe in all its awful immensity, and knew now that it was no place for Man. He realised at last how vain, in the ultimate analysis, had been the dream that had lured him to the stars.
For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.
At the end of one path were the Overlords. They had preserved their individually, their independent egos; they possessed self-awareness and the pronoun “I” had a meaning in their language. They had emotions, some at least of which were shared by humanity. But they were trapped, Jan realised now, in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. Their minds were ten — perhaps a hundred — times as powerful as men’s. It made no difference in the final reckoning. They were equally helpless, equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies.
And at the end of the other path? There lay the Overmind, whatever it might be, bearing the same relation to Man as Man bore to amoeba. Potentially infinite, beyond mortality, how long had it been absorbing race after race as it spread across the stars? Did it too have desires, did it have goals it sensed dimly yet might never attain? Now it had drawn into its being all that the human race had ever achieved. This was not tragedy, but fulfilment. The billions of transient sparks of consciousness that had made up humanity would flicker no more like fireflies against the night. But they had not lived utterly in vain.
The last act, Jan knew, had still to come. It might occur tomorrow, or it might be centuries hence. Even the Overlords could not be certain.
He understood their purpose now, what they had done with Man and why they still lingered upon Earth. Towards them he felt a great humility, as well as admiration for the inflexible patience that had kept them waiting here so long.
He never learned the full story of the strange symbiosis between the Overmind and its servants. According to Rashaverak, there had never been a time in his races history when the Overmind was not there, though it had made no use of them until they had achieved a scientific civilisation and could range through space to do its bidding.
“But why does it need you?” queried Jan. “With all its tremendous powers, surely it could do anything it pleased.”
“No,” said Rashaverak, “it has limits. In the past, we know, it has attempted to act directly upon the minds of other races, and to influence their cultural development. It’s always faile
d, perhaps because the gulf is too great. We are the interpreters — the guardians. Or, to use one of your own metaphors, we till the field until the crop is ripe. The Overmind collects the harvest — and we move on to another task. This is the fifth race whose apotheosis we have watched. Each time we learn a little more.”
“And do you not resent being used as a tool by the Overmind?”
“The arrangement has some advantages; besides, no one of intelligence resents the inevitable.”
That proposition, Jan reflected wryly, had never been fully accepted by mankind. There were things beyond logic that the Overlords had never understood.
“It seems strange,” said Jan, “that the Overmind chose you to do its work, if you have no trace of the paraphysical powers latent in mankind. How does it communicate with you and make its wishes known?”
“That is one question I cannot answer — and I cannot tell you the reason why I must keep the facts from you. One day, perhaps, you will know some of the truth.”
Jan puzzled over this for a moment, but knew it was useless to follow this line of inquiry. He would have to change the subject and hope to pick up clues later.
“Tell me this, then,” he said, “here is something else you’ve never explained. When your race first came to Earth, back in the distant past, what went wrong? Why had you become the symbol of fear and evil to us?”
Rashaverak smiled. He did not do this as well as Karellen could, but it was a fair imitation.
“No one ever guessed, and you see now why we could never tell you. There was only one event that could have made such an impact upon humanity. And that event was not at the dawn of history, but at its very end.”