But it was only a machine—it didn’t know all Weston wanted to learn. He found himself looking for some human understanding to go with the more than human wisdom it seemed to have—some friendliness!—behind that shining panel, and of course there was nothing like that at all. A radio-atomic brain, keyed to perform certain functions, but without initiative, to give the humans knowledge as they needed it.
Weston got his answers at last.
After a time he stepped outside to get some fresh air. He felt stifled. He could see Serena and the others working away at their unearthly fires, and overhead was the burning sunlight of mankind’s long noon.
Yes, it was noon. It had been noontide for a millennium!
What Weston had expected to find in the future was problematical. But he had not expected this—what The Knowledge had told him. He stood there, sweating and curiously unwilling to move. Around him were tiny rustlings in the moss. He could hear the flames roar up, and twice he heard a very deep sighing, like a giant drawing the first breaths of life.
It was noon. That was the answer. A noon that might have lasted for a million years. Weston tried to comprehend it. But he was used to flux. He found it hard to realize that when you reach perfection, by the definition of that term you can’t go up or down.
Serena’s race had achieved perfection. It had stopped at mankind’s midday. There would never be afternoon or twilight but, Weston thought coldly, in the end, there would be night!
It had happened before, he knew. Ants and bees were found in fossil form a million years old, exactly like ants and bees today. And the ordinary cockroach is a hundred million years old in its form. When it achieved perfection, absolute adaptation to its environment—it stopped. As the human race had stopped, too.
Noon. …
Weston looked for Serena. He still couldn’t quite believe that she was—what she was. He saw her working with the two men, and amid the fires a giant figure stood motionless. Weston called to the girl.
Noon!
He knew now the kind of work they did, and why it absorbed them so utterly. He knew that they were creating—life. Creating it endlessly, hopelessly, in unstable forms that flickered out or were destroyed as they sprang flawed from the fires. He knew a little of the myriad experiments they had tried and found useless. And perhaps, in a way, he guessed why they worked, and why they failed.
It was clear to him too, by analogy, what had happened to the human race in the interval between his own time and this. He went looking for Serena presently. He wanted to gaze on her strange, vibrant, otherworldly brightness and try to convince himself that she was—what she was.
For already he was finding something almost hypnotic about the girl. Such brilliance, such dazzling perfection, such incredible sureness in all she did, without a wasted motion or a moment of indecision. Of course that was possible to her—as it is impossible in ordinary humans—because she was what she was. Still, he had to look at her.
He found her working with the two men and among the fires he saw a giant figure stand motionless, looming above them.
“Serena!” he called.
He thought: If I could tell her, make her believe what has happened, perhaps she’ll really notice me.
She came forward, wiping the flames from her hands like water. There was a look even brighter than usual on her glowing face.
“We will succeed this time,” she said, and Weston went cold. “Now that you’ve come, a new factor is made available for us. You! We need you. The Knowledge has just told us that if we use your mind-factor, we have a better chance to succeed.”
He looked into her eyes and read the emptiness there. Her hand was suddenly on his arm, tightening. And she was strong—terribly strong. The two men had left their fires and the giant figure, and were moving toward Weston.
He tore free and went running across the moss, running as hard as he could toward the time-door by the pool, under the bright, timeless noonday sky.
Then out of the moss a subtle rustling stirred again, and suddenly Weston felt his feet caught and held. He pitched forward and slid along the ground.
When he sat up, he was looking around at a ring of incredible tiny beings—not human or insect or animal. Brightly tinted little beings that shimmered around their edges with an unreal glimmer. As he looked, two of them seemed to dissolve and vanish upon the air. The others, low down in the moss, stood watching with hard, jewel-bright eyes.
Experiments. The failures … He closed his mind to the thought. Serena and the two men stood above him, looking down with polite, waiting eagerness—waiting, he thought, to feed him into the flames and remould his flesh into—
Serena smiled and held out her hand.
If he could make her understand! Deep panic chilled him. He must play for time!
It could be done. They were not really intelligent. He knew that now.
He stood up. “Wait,” he said. “I’ll go with you, but let’s make quite sure first. There’ve been mistakes enough already. Come back with me to The Knowledge, and listen to what it says when I question it.”
They came quite willingly. The flock of tiny bright things rolled after them, unreal, shimmering. Weston thought of Eden.
The oval window opened in the wall. Weston asked a question, and in his mind and in the minds of the others an unexpected answer took shape.
“Yes,” said The Knowledge, “You have a factor of the mind that could mean success. A factor I have sensed in the Golden Light itself, which is the essence of perfection. But the woman here has more. It is recessive in her brain, but far stronger than the dominant factor in yours.”
Weston spoke to gain time.
“The Golden Light?
