Space would rush together. All life would be destroyed, galaxies would be wiped out. Existent mass would be compacted into a tiny area. It might even be destroyed if the contraction was so fast that it crushed the galaxies in upon each other. At the best, the universe would have to start all over again.”
'It would start over again,' said the Engineer. 'There would be enough new energy absorbed by the universe for just such an occurrence as you have foreseen. The entire universe would revert to original chaos.”
'And me without my life insurance paid,' said Herb. Gary snarled at him across the table.
Caroline leaned her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands.
'The problem,' she said, 'is to find out how to control that new energy if it does enter the universe.”
'That is the problem,' agreed the Engineer.
'Mister,' said Gary, 'if anyone can do it, this little lady can. She knows more about a lot of things than you do. I'll lay you a bet on that.”
Chapter Eight
The suits were marvelous things, flexible and with scarcely any weight at all, not uncomfortable and awkward like an ordinary spacesuit.
Herb admired his before he fastened down the helmet. 'You say these things will let us walk around on your planet just as if we were at home?' he asked the Engineer.
'We've tried to make it comfortable for you here,' the Engineer replied.
'We hope you find them satisfactory. You came so far to help and we are so glad to see you. We hope that you will like us. We have tried so hard.”
Caroline looked toward the Engineer curiously. There was a queer, vague undertone to all his thought- messages, an inexplicable sense of pleading, of desire for praise from her or from Kingsley. She shook her head with a little impatient gesture, but still that deep, less-than-half-conscious feeling was there. It made no sense, she told herself. It was just imagination. The thought-messages were pure thought, there was nothing to interpret them, nothing to give them subtle shades of meaning… no facial expression, no change of tone.
But that pleading note!
It reminded her suddenly — with a little mounting lump in her throat — of her bird dog, a magnificent mahogany-and-white Chesapeake retriever, dead these thousand years. Somehow she felt again as she used to feel when the dog had looked up at her after placing a recovered bird at her feet.
He was gone now, gone with all the world she'd known. Her ideas and her memories were magnificent antiques, museum pieces, in this newer day. But she felt that if, somehow, that dog could have been granted eternal life, he'd be searching for her still… searching, waiting, hungering for the return that never came. And rising in queerly mixed ecstasies of gladness and shyness if she ever came back to him again.
Kingsley spoke and the rising feeling snapped.
'Gravity suits,' said Kingsley, almost bursting with excitement. 'But even more than that! Suits that will let a man move about comfortably under any sort of conditions. Under any pressure, any gravity, in any kind of atmosphere.”
'With these,' Gary suggested, 'we would be able to explore Jupiter.”
'Sure,' said Tommy, 'that would be easy. Except for one little thing. Find a fuel that will take you there and take you out again.”
'Hell,' enthused Herb, 'I bet the Engineers could tell us how to make that fuel. These boys are bell-ringers all around.”
'If there is any way we can help you, anything you want, anything at all,”
declared the Engineer, 'we would be so glad, so proud to help you.”
'I bet you would at that,' said Herb.
'Only a few of the denizens we called have arrived,' said the Engineer.
'More of them should have come. Others may be on their way. We are afraid…”
He must have decided not to say what was on his mind, for thought clicked off, broken in the middle of the sentence.
'Afraid?' asked Kingsley. 'Afraid of what?”
'Funny,' said Gary, almost to himself. 'Funny they should be afraid of anything.”
'Not afraid for ourselves,' explained the Engineer. 'Afraid that we may be forced to halt our work. Afraid of an interruption. Afraid someone will interfere.”
'But who would interfere?' asked Caroline. 'Who could possibly interfere in a thing like this? The danger is a common one. All things within the universe should unite to try to fight it.”
'What you say is right,' declared the Engineer. 'So right that it seems impossible any could think otherwise. But there are some who do. A race so blinded by ambition and by hatred that they see in this approaching Catastrophe an opportunity to wipe us out, to destroy the Engineers.”
The Earthlings stood stock-still, shocked.
'Now, wait a second,' said Gary slowly. 'Let us understand this. You mean to say that you have enemies who would die themselves just for the satisfaction of knowing that you were destroyed, too?”
'Not exactly,' said the Engineer. 'Many of them would be destroyed, but a select few would survive. They would go back to the point where the universe must start again, back to the point where space and time would once more begin expanding. And, starting there, they would take over the new universe. They would shape it to fit their needs. They would control it. They would have complete dominion over it.”
'But,' cried Gary, 'that is mad! Utterly mad. Sacrificing a present people, throwing away an entire universe for a future possibility.”
'Not so mad,' said Kingsley quietly. 'Our own Earth history will furnish many parallels. Mad rulers, power-mad dictators ready to throw away everything for the bare feel of power… ready to gamble with the horrors of increasingly scientific and ruthless warfare. It almost happened on Earth once… back in 2896. The Earth was almost wiped out when one man yearned for power and used biological warfare in its most hideous form. He knew what the result would be, but that didn't stop him… Better, he reasoned, if there were no more than a thousand persons left alive, if he were the leader of that thousand. Nothing stopped him. The people themselves later stopped him, after he had done the damage… stopped him like the mad dog that he was.”
'They hate us,' said the Engineer. 'They have hated us for almost a million years. Because we, and we alone, have stood between them and their dreams of universal conquest. They see us as the one barrier they must remove, the one obstacle in their way. They know they never can defeat us by the power of arms alone, cannot defeat us so utterly that we still cannot smash their plans to take over the universe.”
'And so,' said Gary, 'they are perfectly willing to let the collision of universes wipe you out, even if it does mean disaster and destruction for the most of them.”
'They must be nuts,' said Herb.
'You do not understand,' protested the Engineer. 'For many millions of years they have been educated with the dream of universal conquest. They have been so thoroughly propagandized with the philosophy that the state, the civilization, the race, is everything… that the individual does not count at all… that there is not a single one of them who would not die to achieve that dream. They glory in dying, glory in any sort of sacrifice that advances them even the slightest step toward their eventual goal.”
'You said that some of them would survive even if the universe, as we know it, were destroyed,' said Caroline. 'How would they do that?”
'They have found a way to burst out of the universe,' said the Engineer.
'How to navigate the inter-space that exists outside the universe. They are more advanced in many sciences that we. If they wished, I have no doubt they could by themselves, with no aid at all, save us from the fate that is approaching.”
'Perhaps,' rumbled Kingsley, 'a treaty could be arranged. A sort of eleventh-hour armistice.”
The impersonal thought of the Engineer struck at them. 'There can be no peace with them. No treaty. No armistice. For more than a million years they have thought and practiced war. Their every thought has been directed toward conquest. To them the very word 'peace' is meaningless. War is their natural state, peace an
