machines moving about, and a group of Overlords watching them. Somewhere there was the muffled roar of air as the ship equalized 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 recognized 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.
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 analyzed 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 plaint 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 realized, 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 realized 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 realized 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 fulfillment. The billions of transient sparks of consciousness that had made up humanity would flicker no more like fireflies
