Childhood's End

  “What do you mean?” asked Jan.

  “When our ships entered your skies a century and a half ago, that was the first meeting of our two races, though of course we had studied you from a distance. And yet you feared and recognised us, as we knew that you would. It was not precisely a memory. You have already had proof that time is more complex than your science ever imagined. For that memory was not of the past, but of the future — of those closing years when your race knew that everything was finished. We did what we could, but it was not an easy end. And because we were there, we became identified with your race’s death.

  Yes, even while it was still ten thousand years in the future!

  It was as if a distorted echo had reverberated round the closed circle of time, from the future to the past. Call it not a memory, but a premonition.”

  The idea was hard to grasp, and for a moment Jan wrestled with it in silence. Yet he should have been prepared; he had already received proof enough that cause and event could reverse their normal sequence.

  There must be such a thing as racial memory, and that memory was somehow independent of time. To it, the future and the past were one. That was why, thousands of years ago, men had already glimpsed a distorted image of the Overlords, through a mist of fear and terror.

  “Now I understand,” said the last man.

  * * *

  The Last Man! Jan found it very hard to think of himself as that. When he had gone into space, he had accepted the possibility of eternal exile from the human race, and loneliness had not yet come upon him. As the years passed, the longing to see another human being might rise and overwhelm him, but for the present, the company of the Overlords prevented him from feeling utterly alone.

  There had been men on Earth as little as ten years ago, but they had been degenerate survivors and Jan had lost nothing by missing them. For reasons which the Overlords could not explain, but which Jan suspected were largely psychological, there had been no children to replace those who had gone. Homo sapiens was extinct.

  Perhaps, lost in one of the still-intact cities, was the manuscript of some later-day Gibbon, recording the last days of the human race. If so, Jan was not sure that he would care to read it; Rashaverak had told him all he wished to know.

  Those who had not destroyed themselves had sought oblivion in ever more feverish activities, in fierce and suicidal sports that were often indistinguishable from minor wars. As the population had swiftly fallen, the ageing survivors had clustered together, a defeated army closing its ranks as it made its last retreat.

  That final act, before the curtain came down for ever, must have been lit by flashes of heroism and devotion, darkened by savagery and selfishness. Whether it had ended in despair or resignation, Jan would never know.

  There was plenty to occupy his mind. The Overlords’ base was about a kilometre from a deserted villa, and Jan spent months fitting this out with equipment he had taken from the nearest town, some thirty kilometres distant. He had flown there with Rashaverak, whose friendship, he suspected, was not completely altruistic. The Overlord psychologist was still studying the last specimen of Homo sapiens.

  The town must have been evacuated before the end, for the houses and even many of the public services were still in good order. It would have taken little work to restart the generators, so that the wide streets glowed once more with the illusion of life. Jan toyed with the idea, then abandoned it as too morbid. The one thing he did not wish to do was to brood upon the past.

  There was everything here that he needed to maintain him for the rest of his life, but what he wanted most was an electronic piano and certain Bach transcriptions. He had never had as much time for music as he would have liked, and now he would make up for it. When he was not performing himself, he played tapes of the great symphonies and concertos, so that the villa was never silent. Music had become his talisman against the loneliness which, one day, must surely overwhelm him.

  Often he would go for long walks on the hills, thinking of all that had happened in the few months since he had last seen Earth. He had never thought, when he said goodbye to Sullivan eighty terrestrial years ago, that the last generation of mankind was already in the womb.

  What a young fool he had been! Yet he was not sure that he regretted his action; had he stayed on Earth, he would have witnessed those closing years over which time had now drawn a veil. Instead, he had leap-frogged past them into the future, and had learned the answers to questions that no other man would ever know. His curiosity was almost satisfied, but sometimes he wondered why the Overlords were waiting, and what would happen when their patience was at last rewarded.

  But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach. Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind, but now it seemed to Jan that this was what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness.

  Jan had always been a good pianist — and now he was the finest in the world.

  Chapter 24

  It was Rashaverak who brought Jan the news, but he had already guessed it. In the small hours of the morning a nightmare had awakened him, and he had not been able to regain sleep. He could not remember the dream, which was very strange, for he believed that all dreams could be recalled if one tried hard enough immediately after waking. All he could remember of this was that he had been a small boy again, on a vast and empty plain, listening to a great voice calling in an unknown language.

  The dream had disturbed him; he wondered if it was the first onslaught of loneliness upon his mind. Restlessly, he walked out of the villa on to the neglected lawn.

  A full moon bathed the scene with a golden light so brilliant that he could see perfectly. The immense gleaming cylinder of Karellen’s ship lay beyond the buildings of the Overlord base, towering above them and reducing them to man-made proportions. Jan looked at the ship, trying to recall the emotions it had once roused in him. There was a time when it had been an unattainable goal, a symbol of all that he had never really expected to achieve. And now it meant nothing.

  How quiet and still it was! The Overlords, of course, would be as active as ever, but for the moment there was no sign of them. He might have been alone on Earth — as, indeed, in a very real sense he was. He glanced up at the moon, seeking some familiar sight on which his thoughts could rest.

  There were the ancient, well-remembered seas. He had been forty light-years into space, yet he had never walked on those silent, dusty plains less than two light-seconds away. For a moment he amused himself trying to locate the crater Tycho. When he did discover it, he was puzzled to find that gleaming speck further from the centre line of the disc than he had thought. And it was then that he realised that the dark oval of the Mare Crisium was missing altogether.

  The face that her satellite now turned towards the Earth was not the one that had looked down on the world since the dawn of life. The Moon had begun to turn upon its axis.

  That could mean only one thing. On the other side of the Earth, in the land that they had stripped so suddenly of life, they were emerging from their long trance. As a waking child may stretch its arms to greet the day, they too were flexing their muscles and playing with their new-found powers.

  * * *

  “You have guessed correctly,” said Rashaverak. “It is no longer safe for us to stay. They may ignore us still, but we cannot take the risk. We leave as soon as our equipment can be loaded — probably in two or three hours.”

  He looked up at the sky, as if afraid that some new miracle was about to blaze forth. But all was peaceful; the Moon had set, and only a few clouds rode high upon the west wind.

  “It does not matter greatly if they tamper with the Moon,” Rashaverak added, “but suppose they begin to interfere with the Sun? We shall leave instruments behind, of course, so that we can lea
rn what happens.”

  “I shall stay,” said Jan abruptly. “I have seen enough of the universe. There’s only one thing that I’m curious about now — and that is the fate of my own planet.”

  Very gently, the ground trembled underfoot.

  “I was expecting that,” Jan continued. “If they alter the Moon’s spin, the angular momentum must go somewhere. So the Earth is slowing down. I don’t know which puzzles me more — how they are doing it, or why.”

  “They are still playing,” said Rashaverak. “What logic is there in the actions of a child? And in many ways the entity that your race has become is still a child. It is not yet ready to unite with the Overmind. But very soon it will be, and then you will have the Earth to yourself.”

  He did not complete the sentence, and Jan finished it for him.

  “If, of course, the Earth still exists.”

  “You realise that danger — and yet you will stay?”

  “Yes. I have been home five — or is it six? — years now. Whatever happens, I’ll have no complaints.”

  “We were hoping,” began Rashaverak slowly, “that you would wish to stay. There is something that you can do for us…”

  * * *

  The glare of the Stardrive dwindled and died, somewhere out there beyond the orbit of Mars. Along that road, thought Jan, he alone had travelled, out of all the billions of human beings who had lived and died on Earth. And no one would ever travel it again.

  The world was his. Everything he needed — all the material possessions anyone could ever desire — were his for the taking. But he was no longer interested. He feared neither the loneliness of the deserted planet, nor the presence that still rested here in the last moments before it went to seek its unknown heritage. In the inconceivable backwash of that departure, Jan did not expect that he and his problems would long survive.

  That was well. He had done all that he had wished to do, and to drag out a pointless life on this empty world would have been an unbearable anti-climax. He could have left with the Overlords, but for what purpose? For he knew, as no one else had ever known, that Karellen spoke the truth when he had said; “The stars are not for Man.”

  He turned his back upon the night and walked through the vast entrance of the Overlord base. Its size affected him not in the least; sheer immensity no longer had any power over his mind. The lights were burning redly, driven by engines that could feed them for ages yet. On either side lay machines whose secrets he would never know, abandoned by the Overlords in their retreat. He went past them, and clambered awkwardly up the great steps until he had reached the control room.

  The spirit of the Overlords still lingered here; their machines were still alive, doing the bidding of their now far-distant masters. What could he add, wondered Jan, to the information they were already hurling into space?

  He climbed into the great chair and made himself as comfortable as he could. The microphone, already live, was waiting for him; something that was the equivalent of a TV camera must be watching, but he could not locate it.

  Beyond the desk and its meaningless instrument panels, the wide windows looked out into the starry night, across a valley sleeping beneath a gibbous moon, and to the distant range of mountains. A river wound along the valley, glittering here and there as the moonlight struck upon some patch of troubled water. It was all so peaceful. It might have been thus at Man’s birth as it was now at his ending.

  Out there across unknown millions of kilometres of space, Karellen would be waiting. It was strange to think that the ship of the Overlords was racing away from Earth almost as swiftly as his signal could speed after it. Almost — but not quite. It would be a long chase, but his words would catch the Supervisor and he would have repaid the debt he owed.

  How much of this, Jan wondered, had Karellen planned, and how much was masterful improvisation? Had the Supervisor deliberately let him escape into space, almost a century ago, so that he could return to play the role he was fulfilling now?

  No, that seemed too fantastic. But Jan was certain now, that Karellen was involved in some vast and complicated plot. Even while he served it, he was studying the Overmind with all the instruments at his command. Jan suspected that it was not only scientific curiosity that inspired the Supervisor; perhaps the Overlords had dreams of one day escaping from their peculiar bondage, when they had learned enough about the powers they served.

  That Jan could add to that knowledge by what he was now doing seemed hard to believe. “Tell us what you see,” Rashaverak had said. “The picture that reaches your eyes will be duplicated by our cameras. But the message that enters your brain may be very different, and it could tell us a great deal.” Well, he would do his best.

  “Still nothing to report,” he began. “A few minutes ago I saw the trail of your ship disappear into the sky. The Moon is just past full, and almost half its familiar side has now turned away from Earth — but I suppose you already know that.”

  Jan paused, feeling slightly foolish. There was something incongruous, even faintly absurd, about what he was doing.

  Here was the climax of all history, yet he might have been a radio-commentator at a race-track or a boxing-ring. Then he shrugged his shoulders and put the thought aside. At all moments of greatness, he suspected, bathos had never been very far away — and certain he alone could sense its presence here.

  “There have been three slight quakes in the last hour,” he continued. “Their control of Earth’s spin must be marvellous, but not quite perfect… You know now, Karellen, I’m going to find it very hard to say anything your instruments haven’t already told you. It might have helped if you’d given me some idea of what to expect, and warned me how long I may have to wait. If nothing happens, I’ll report again in six hours, as we arranged…

  “Hello! They must have been waiting for you to leave.

  “Something’s starting to happen. The stars are becoming dimmer. It’s as if a great cloud is coming up, very swiftly, over all the sky. But it isn’t really a cloud. It seems to have some sort of structure — I can glimpse a hazy network of lines and bands that keep changing their positions. It’s almost as if the stars are tangled in a ghostly spider’s web.

  “The whole network is beginning to glow — to pulse with light, exactly as if it were alive. And I suppose it is; or is it something as much beyond life as that is above the inorganic world?

  “The glow seems to be shifting to one part of the sky — wait a minute while I move round to the other window.

  “Yes — I might have guessed. There’s a great burning column, like a tree of fire, reaching above the western horizon. It’s a long way off, right round the world. I know where it springs from; they’re on their way at last, to become part of the Overmind. Their probation is ended; they’re leaving the last remnants of matter behind.

  “As that fire spreads upwards from the Earth, I can see the network becoming firmer and less misty. In places, it seems almost solid — yet the stars are still shining faintly through it.

  “I’ve just realised. It’s not exactly the same, but the thing I saw shooting up above your world, Karellen, was very much like this. Was that part of the Overmind? I suppose you hid the truth from me so that I would have no preconceived ideas — so that I’d be an unbiased observer. I wish I knew what your cameras were showing you now, to compare it with what my mind imagines I’m seeing!

  “Is this how it talks to you, Karellen, in colours and shapes like these? I’ve remembered the control screens on your ship and the patterns that went across them, speaking to you in some visual language which your eyes could read.

  “Now it looks exactly like the curtains of the aurora, dancing and flickering across the stars. Why, that’s what it really is, I’m sure — a great auroral storm. The whole landscape is lit up — it’s brighter than day — reds and golds and greens are chasing each other across the sky — oh, it’s beyond words, it doesn’t seem fair that I’m the only one to see it — I never thought such col
ours —

  “The storm’s dying down, but the great misty network is still there. I think that aurora was only a by-product of whatever energies are being released up there on the frontier of space.

  “Just a minute; I’ve noticed something else. My weight’s decreasing. What does that mean? I’ve dropped a pencil — it’s falling slowly. Something’s happened to gravity — there’s a great wind coming up — I can see the trees tossing their branches down there in the valley.

  “Of course — the atmosphere’s escaping. Sticks and stones are rising into the sky, almost as if the Earth itself is trying to follow them out into space. There’s a great cloud of dust, whipped up by the gale. It’s becoming hard to see… perhaps it will dear in a moment and I’ll be able to find out what’s happening.

  “Yes — that’s better. Everything movable has been stripped away — the dust clouds have vanished. I wonder how long this building will stand? And it’s getting hard to breathe — I must try to talk more slowly.

  “I can see clearly again. That great burning column is still there, but it’s constricting, narrowing — it looks like the funnel of a tornado, about to retract into the clouds. And — oh, this is hard to describe, but just then I felt a great wave of emotion sweep over me. It wasn’t joy or sorrow; it was a sense of fulfilment, achievement. Did I imagine it? Or did it come from outside? I don’t know.

  “And now — this can’t be all imagination — the world feels empty. Utterly empty. It’s like listening to a radio-set that’s suddenly gone dead. And the sky is clear again — the misty web has gone. What world will it go to next, Karellen? And will you be there to serve it still?

  “Strange; everything around me is unaltered. I don’t know why, but somehow I’d thought that…”

  Jan stopped. For a moment he struggled for words, then closed his eyes in an effort to regain control. There was no room for fear or panic now; he had a duty to perform — a duty to Man, and a duty to Karellen.