Here were suns that had been blazing with mature, steady light when Sol was a mere contracting mass of hydrogen—whose planets had cooled and spawned life before Earth’s hollows cupped the first scalding droplets that were the beginnings of seas.
On these ancient worlds life existed.
McCray had not understood all of what Hatcher had tried to communicate to him, but he had caught the terror in Hatcher’s thoughts. Hatcher’s people had fled from these ancients many millenia before—fled and hidden in the heart of the Orion gas cloud, their world and all. Yet even there they were not safe. They knew that in time the Old Ones would find them. And it was this fear that had led them to kidnap humans, seeking allies in the war that could not forever be deferred.
Hatcher’s people were creatures of thought. Man was the wielder of physical forces—“paranormal” to Hatcher, as teleportation and mind-seeing were “paranormal” to McCray. The Old Ones had mastered both.
McCray paused at the fringe of the cluster, waiting for the touch of contemptuous hate. It came and he recoiled a thousand light-years before he could stop.
To battle the Old Ones would be no easy match—yet time might work for the human race. Already they controlled the electromagnetic spectrum, and hydrogen fusion could exert the force of suns. With Hatcher’s help—and his own—Man would free his mind as well; and perhaps the Old Ones would find themselves against an opponent as mighty as themselves.
He drew back from the Central Masses, no longer afraid, and swept out to see Hatcher’s planet.
It was gone.
In the great gas cloud the tunneling blue suns swept up their graze of hydrogen, untroubled by planets. Themselves too young to have solid satellites, Hatcher’s adopted world removed again, they were alone.
Gone!
It was for a moment, a panicky thought. McCray realized what they had done. Hatcher’s greatest hope had been to find another race to stand between his people and the Old Ones. And they had found it!
Now Hatcher’s world could hide again and wait until the battle had been fought for them.
With a face light-years across, with a brain made up of patterns in the ether, McCray grinned wryly.
“Maybe they made the right choice,” he thought, considering. “Maybe they’d only be in the way when the showdown comes.” And he sought out Jodrell Bank and his body once more, preparing to return to being human … and to teach his fellow-humans to be gods.
Colophon
Short Fiction
was compiled from short stories published between 1942 and 1962 by
Frederik Pohl.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Jason Livermore,
and is based on transcriptions produced between 2007 and 2022 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, Barbara Tozier, Stephen Blundell, Sankar Viswanathan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive and the Luminist League.
The cover page is adapted from
Summer Night,
a painting completed in 1913 by
Albert Bloch.
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League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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