swift tropical vines are beginning to devour them both. And there is something else, eternal and alien, that stands on the island untouched by the hurricanes that roar yearly along the trades and loose their fury on the islet.
The skippers of a few trading ships know that John Weston once lived there. They used to bring supplies, food and equipment and the luxuries a wealthy man need not be deprived of, even though he lives in the middle of the South Pacific. But no ships anchor there any more. As for the Kanaka boys, no one pays attention to their drunken stories. And they will not go back. They are afraid.
Weston lived on the island for nearly thirty years.
He was in love with Serena, you see. She was the ultimate perfection of the human race. As man strives for perfection, so in his own way he wanted Serena—to keep her with him always—to bask in that shining, vital glow she radiated.
He couldn’t understand her. But he couldn’t stay away from her. She had never known grief or indecision or despair. So, after Versailles, after he had found that nothing else was possible, he took her to the Pacific island. He built her a walled garden there. She knew how to make the moss and the trees grow; the power to control natural dynamics was inbred in her race. She kindled her life-fires—and she began to work again.
The man lived on the island, too—watching Serena, worshipping her. Watching her create life and destroy it. Year after year he watched her follow that single taxis. She answered when Weston asked the right questions, but there was never any real contact. The gulf between them was too vast. She was perfection—and all he had was intelligence.
Sometimes he thought of taking her back to her own world. But he knew he could never do that. The two men would be waiting, and the fires would be waiting, and Serena would be ready to sacrifice herself to create the new race that would supersede mankind. …
Nearly thirty years. She did not seem to age. But Weston did. And then, one day, the end came at last.
He unlocked the door of the garden and went in, calling Serena’s name. She had always answered before. But this time only silence greeted him.
He went down the winding path, and at its end he saw the flame, burning like an unearthly flower, tall, pale gold, swaying in the uprush of its own fire. It lived and burned and waited. He knew, then, instantly. Serena was still in the garden. But she was beyond answering.
It was success. It was what Serena and her race had been trying, for so long, to achieve. The new race. She, herself, had possessed whatever quality it was that had been required—she had, at last, found the right formula for the new life. She was the life. Or part of it.
Weston stood there, watching. He remembered what he had seen so far away in the future, burning in that wilderness of mossy hills. This, then, was why the giant had forgotten Serena and turned to the Golden Light. The Golden Light was Serena. It was the new race. She had used herself to create the next step beyond mankind. She had brought it into being a million years before she, herself, had been born!
And all through those eons, her people were spending their energies striving to accomplish what Serena had already achieved far in their past!
There had been a barrier guarding the light—in the future. But now? Had it developed yet?
In green twilight the flame burned on. It was new. This was the first night it would illumine—but the mind could not grasp the concept of the countless nights to come through which it would burn. Millions upon millions upon millions of nights and days, while the seas shrank and the tides of time rolled relentlessly over the planet. While mankind found paradise and sank into the long, terribly perfect noontide of the human race.
And after that somehow, sometime, it must waken, for it was the first of its superhuman, alien race. After man it would come. And part of it was Serena.
“Serena!” Weston breathed.
And then he was moving forward, his face bright, his eyes eager, into the alien heart of that living fire.
The garden was empty, except for the tremendous flame. Its shining enigma glowed through the night. No man would ever know the secret of its power or the nature of the alien life that burned in its heart, dormant, sleeping—not yet ready to waken and inherit the earth, to waken from man’s eternal, doomed noon into the bright morning of its unimaginable future.
The garden lay silent. No human foot moved through it. Only the golden fire burned like a flower against the darkness.
Now there would be a million years to wait.
Dark Dawn
The Albacore was eight hundred miles out of Suva, feeling her way through the Pacific toward a destination unmarked except on the charts. She was a Navy cruiser jury-rigged into a floating laboratory, Navy manned, but carrying a dozen specialized technicians as passengers.
For days she had waited outside the danger area, till circling planes radioed word that the test atomic blast had apparently subsided. Then the Albacore went into a flurry of preparations. It was a miracle that the watch had sighted Gresham in his rubber boat, and a triple miracle that he was alive.
His eyes bandaged, he sat out on deck, while Black, the neurologist, leaned on the rail beside him and stared aft. Presently Black took out a pack of cigarettes, automatically held it out to Gresham, and then remembered that the man was blind.
“Cigarette?” he said.
“Yes, thanks. Is that you, Dr. Black?” Gresham’s voice was very low.
“Uh-huh. Here. I was watching that shark. He’s followed us from Suva.”
“Big one?”
“One of the biggest I ever saw,” Black said. “That’s the baby who tried to take a chunk out of you when we picked
