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Title: The eternal quest

Author: Joseph Gilbert

Illustrator: Lawrence Sterne Stevens

Release date: October 13, 2022 [eBook #69148]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Fictioneers, Inc

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ETERNAL QUEST ***

                           THE ETERNAL QUEST

                     A Novelette by Joseph Gilbert

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                  Astonishing Stories, October 1942.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


"I have come," said the little man, "a new Moses, to lead my people to
the Promised Land." He said it slowly, with dramatic restraint. "Fate
has led me to a star, and I have returned to show mankind the way to a
thing it has not known for over a hundred years--hope!"

He was not quite five feet tall, with a chubby face and a beet-red
nose, straw-colored hair, and mild gray eyes. He was nondescript.
And it seemed very strange, somehow, that this ridiculous little man
could stand there on that platform, with the gleaming majesty of that
five-hundred-foot spaceship in the background dwarfing him--and facing
that battery of telecasters, talk to two billion people and awaken in
them a thing that had been dormant for a century or more.

He said, "We have died spiritually, and the eternal quest of man for
contentment has almost ceased--for he knows, in his barren, bitter
heart that there is no contentment to find." He paused, and the
tremendous crowd that filled the rocket-ground were weirdly silent,
waiting. "No longer shall only the Space Patrol know the thrills of
adventure and discovery. We, too...."

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert Lawrence smiled whimsically and cut off the televisor. It was
almost impossible to hear the speaker, anyway, for no matter how well
sound-proofed a Space Patrol ship is, the noise is still deafening to
one not long accustomed to it. You can't stop the vibrations of an
atomic engine.

Besides, the reference of the little man to the adventure and discovery
of the Space Patrol was rather amusing to one who held that job, and
was tired of it.

You took up a tight orbit around Mars and were bored to death for some
four weeks, and then there was an order to intercept a gang of wild
youngsters who had run past the Interplanetary Way Station without
signaling, for the thrill of it.

Occasionally you sent out a call for a battle cruiser when you spotted
a private ship that wouldn't answer your demand for call letters, and
if part of the crew tried to run for it in the life rocket, you would
chase them out as far as Venus before you got a magnetic grapple on
them.

Then you risked your life, but it still wasn't much fun, because the
crew was probably made up of a bunch of scatter-brained kids, with
a hysterical finger on the trigger of their blasters, ready to kill
instantly when you got them in the corner.

The rest of the time you dropped in on settlers who were sick and tried
to bring them around; answered any call for help on the planet or in
your sector of space; acted as a sort of watchdog; and wondered what
the hell to do with yourself.

Still, it was the only life left for a strong, active man, and he had
been following it for four years now and would certainly continue
it until the little man's plans were carried out. And carried out
they would be--of that he was confident. Proud, too. Proud that his
quiet faith in the future of mankind had proven itself in spite of
the contempt and cynical ridicule of some of the best minds in the
decadent, dying Science Hall, where he had received his training for
this job.

Not, he thought wryly, that they didn't have excellent reason for
their cynicism. Few people had quite as much opportunity as he to see
what was happening to the world, how effeminate its inhabitants were
becoming. The patrol had been recently cut in half, not for any lack
of material resources, but due rather to the fact that there weren't
enough men to fill the ranks.

A man with sufficient stamina to be in the Patrol, plus the necessary
mental and emotional stability, was practically unobtainable. Perhaps,
he mused, that was why men in the Patrol married so well; they were the
very cream of mankind, the finest group of its kind on earth. But the
thought of women and marriage brought the old hurt and the old memory,
and he turned his attention to checking his unquestionably accurate
course in an equally old and equally futile attempt to forget the past.

Finding it correct, as he had known it would be, he leaned back in his
chair against the centrifugal push of the ship as it banked slightly
and headed in for Mars. Then a buzzer made frantic bees' noise, and he
released the automatic pilot, taking the controls himself. The buzzer
had been a warning that atmosphere was close, and it takes a human hand
to handle a rocket in an atmosphere.

It was possible, of course, that this trip of his was purely a waste of
energy, but it wasn't his job to guess; he was the type who made sure
first--if he had not been, the Patrol would never have accepted him.

With one hand he reached over and flicked on the televisor.

He wouldn't be able to hear much, and already knew the general trend of
the little man's plan, but to have that belief around which his entire
philosophy of life had been built borne out by the man who was himself
to restore mankind to the glory that was its heritage, to the ultimate
fulfilment of its age-old quest--that, indeed, was worth the hearing.

The image of the little man snapped on the screen with an abruptness
that was startling after the long minutes required for the televisor to
warm up.

The colors were blurred from the distortion of millions of miles
of travel in space, but the ruddy nose of the little man was still
prominent.

Above the crashing pound of the rockets, Lawrence heard faintly,
"... the psychologists have long known the reason for this soul-decay
in man...."

       *       *       *       *       *

The small room was so Grecian in its simplicity, with its shining
marblelike walls, the bench of the same sea-foam white in the corner,
and the three tunic-clad men, that the televisor screen set in the wall
appeared incongruous and out of place.

"Hear him talk about 'the psychologists'," said Herbert Vaine, with a
wave of his slender, beautiful hand toward the little unimpressive man
on the screen, "when he knows more about applied psychology than any of
us in this room. More than you or I, Stanton, or even Parker there."

He smiled cynically, and his eyebrows climbed an astonishing distance
up his dome of a forehead.

Stanton grunted. He was a sour, disillusioned little monkey of a man,
and prone, at times, to communicate largely by grunts. But now he
spoke. "Be grateful. If it wasn't for that little runt we'd be fighting
off a howling mob of neurotics and incipient schizophrenics right now.
And not only is he giving us a holiday, he's practically saving the
entire race.

"After that speech of his, there's going to be a wave of hysteria that
will make the panic over that comet-striking-the-earth hoax way back
in 2037, ninety-six years ago, look as innocuous as a Sunday school
picnic. And it'll be healthy, it'll be the best that could possibly
happen to this jaded civilization of ours, a safety valve for the
pent-up emotions of over a hundred years! Lord, I hope he can go
through with it--if they're disappointed after this renewal of hope, I
dread to think of the reaction."

He paused, took a deep breath. "Listen."

"--were wise, those ancient ancestors of ours," came the voice of the
little man, "but they did not have the background of experience that
would have enabled them to predict what has happened. They realized
that if machines became so perfect that they could do the work of man,
without the guidance of man, then the hedonistic existence this would
leave as man's only alternative, would quickly lead him back to the
jungles.

"So they arranged a social pattern that would give every man something
to do; you know what that pattern was as well as I. You might have an
interest in constructing televisors, and you would strive to make your
televisors so excellent that there would be a worldwide demand for
them; others who had different hobbies would exchange the product of
their hobbies for that of yours, or give them to you if the difference
in value was too great.

"The world became one giant hobby field, a paradise apparently.

"They were wise; it was a good plan. But it didn't work.

"The machines were to blame. They could do things better, infinitely
better, than human hands. You built televisors and put them together
carefully with the proud hands of a creator. With your care and skill
you were able to turn out, say, some ten televisors a month, but they
were the best of their kind, and you were happy in that knowledge. Then
you discovered that the machines could produce those televisors of
yours at the rate of some five hundred a month, and could make a better
one than you could, with all your patient toil and trouble. You were a
rocket builder, a constructor of homes, a monocar designer? It was the
same.

"Or perhaps you were an inventor? Why? That, too, was what the
inventors wondered--and ceased to invent. There had been too many
wonders, the world was satiated with wonderful things, and those who
create more, found for them merely a bored acceptance. The acceptance
was of the machine, not himself, for the majority of the population
did not even know who had built the marvels that made their life so
monotonously comfortable.

"The incentive to do good in this world died--there was no good to
do. There were no physicians, because the machines could diagnose an
ailment better than they; there were no diseases to eliminate because
they had long been eliminated; there were no surgeons to operate,
because the machines did it quicker, safer, better. There were no
abuses to correct, no social conditions to improve, because there were
no abuses, and the social conditions were Utopian.

"There was no longer any desire to achieve in writing, in art, in
music--for achievement was no longer recognized. If your writing was
packed with significance, with powerful, thought-provoking originality,
then it probably would not even see publication. Those who wrote and
were recognized were those who could thrill with screaming action, with
the forgotten danger of the old, primitive days back in the twentieth
century; cheap stuff produced by men who were more mechanical than the
machines. The only art that any man recognized was illustrating posters
and those stories. Beauty had become too tame. The swing, the jazz, of
an earlier age had evolved into a nerve-racking bedlam of discordant
sounds not even needing a composer--mechanically timed, mechanically
produced, mechanically precise.

"Mankind lost its most precious possession--the sense of achievement,
of being valuable, and with it lost its initiative. They suffered from
a mass inferiority complex that was only too well justified by the
superiority of the metal monstrosities they, the Frankensteins, had
made.

"Something died inside the mind of man--his self-confidence, his
superiority. And with it died achievement and progress. Mankind no
longer lived. It existed."

       *       *       *       *       *

His rather ridiculously high-pitched voice died quietly away as he
paused and gazed into, it seemed, the room, as he had gazed into the
empty temple of man's intellect but a moment before. And in that
instant, standing there with his stubby hands on the railing of the
platform, he had the surpassing dignity of one who sees conquest near
and rejoices in the knowledge that his achievement has been something
more than worthy.

"The result," he continued, "was inevitable. The hobby system, as
it has been flippantly termed, dissolved in a chaotic attack on the
machines. Fortunately, the mobs were too disorganized to destroy much
before they felt the effects of their attacks. For men, subject to a
cold they had never known before--due to their damaging the weather
towers--died from exposure, untended by smashed machines that could
have saved them. Everywhere hundreds of people, deprived of the comfort
of machines they had come to regard as essential, died swiftly from
unaccustomed hardships to which their delicate constitutions had been
too long unconditioned.

"That, as you know, was the first and only attack on the machines. It
had become apparent that they had not only degenerated man, but so
degenerated him that he could not live without them.

"And so the present system of credits for the amount of work done by
each person in his own line has come into being. It has not changed the
situation. Man still has no excuse for living, only for existing.

"The frenzied, maddened search for some purpose, some reason for
being, that has taken place since--I need not go into. It is a rather
horrible thing to think about. And in the last twenty-five years it has
resulted in a revolt against convention and the accepted decencies in
life. That has led, in turn, to orgies, to abandoned pleasure-seeking
that has no parallel in our written history. The frustrated creative
genius of our time has found outlet shocking to more ordinary
people--if any person can be called ordinary in this time and age. I do
not believe there is such a person. I believe that we have all gone mad
in our despair and in our lack of any intelligent goal."

       *       *       *       *       *

The voice of Parker cut across the spell in the room like the explosion
of a shell in a country graveyard.

"He's just made the world's biggest understatement. By the God of the
ancients, he should see some of the human wrecks that come to us, that
pack our offices, and practically hang from the fluorescent. Day after
day, hundreds and hundreds of them. And we can only tell them what is
wrong with them--not what to do about it. A noble profession ours,
gentlemen. Hah! It's hollow. Hollow and futile. Like the mobs that
visit us here at Science Hall and go away uncomforted, to wait until
they go completely mad and are taken away to a mechanical madhouse
presided over by the same magnificently futile psychologists. A noble
profession indeed."

"We can't claim immunity from it, either, you know," said Vaine.
"We're all too old to join the orgies, but we try to compensate for
our helplessness, our uselessness, in other ways. You, Parker," he
smiled at the chubby psychologist, "are a faddist who follows every
single mad-eyed craze that crops up. You have no idea how strange you
look right now without any hair at all on your face; no eyebrows, no
eyelashes, a bald dome. You're a remarkable sight."

Parker colored. This turned him oddly red from his smooth chin to his
bald pate, so that he rather resembled a beet carved into the form of a
face.

"It's not a fad. It's a hygienic movement that I highly approve of."

Vaine's laugh left little echoes repeating themselves in the corners of
that acoustically perfect room.

"What term would you use to explain away the time that you brought to
your office some quack's mystic device which would supposedly soothe
the patient by a mysterious mixture of vibrations and music made by the
movement of the operator's hands in an eddy field? Remember how the
frightful noises you hauled up sent three patients into hysteria, and
so accentuated another's delusion of persecution that he focused his
attentions on you as the cause of his troubles? Then he chased you all
around the office with a metal chair, earnestly imploring you to stand
still long enough to get your head bashed in.

"And how about the time you claimed it was the duty of every citizen to
learn the intricacy of a certain machine--and blew out the side of the
wall with the 'harmless' little projector you rigged up? Eh?"

He chuckled and a smile flickered for an instant on the face of the
sour Stanton.

"You aren't too normal yourself," retorted Parker. "Spending all your
time dashing around with other people's wives."

"Granted," said Vaine. "I'm an old fool and I know it."

He smiled somberly.

"Queer. We psychologists know exactly what makes us tick mentally, but
we can't do anything more about our twisted emotions and impulses than
we can do for those poor people who come to us for assistance we can't
give them. Stanton collects old books. Never psychology, religion,
or anything serious. What our ancestors called blood and thunder.
Bang-bang adventure stuff. He calls it a hobby. It isn't. It's wish
fulfilment."

He went on: "Look at that laughable little idiot on the televisor
screen. He's the least imposing person I know of--and the happiest man
on earth. He may be the greatest man who ever lived, for all I know.
Listen to him."

"--man was useless. I knew that man must again find a motive for
progress if he was to exist. The number of births had diminished almost
to nothing. Both sexes felt that it was useless to bring children
into such a world. So they did not, and the population has dropped
frighteningly.

"After some time and thought I came to the conclusion that what
was needed was another civilization with which our own could fuse
its intellectual achievements and progress. For, it would be a new
inspiration to find a race with a culture radically different from our
own, and to adapt ourselves to that culture, to build shelters and
new cities without the machines, and to bring back the old striving,
ever-searching spirit of bygone days. And--I found it."

He stood there flushed with triumph. And the light in his face lit a
similar light in the eyes and hearts of two billion people. Thus this
modern Prometheus brought to earth a far more precious flame than did
his predecessor of old.

"For the last fifty years," he said, "there have been no human trips
made in a rocket--other than were absolutely necessary. As for
exploring trips, there have been none beyond Pluto, and those by robots
telecasting their impressions to earth; for we have lost the spirit of
exploration, the spirit of discovery above all personal discomfort.

"At my request, the Central Consul built a spaceship suitable for a
voyage to Alpha Centauri, which the electronic telescope revealed as
the only star within its range having a civilization stationed on one
of its planets. We used a device in the ship invented nearly forty
years previous and completely ignored, which enabled us to make very
nearly the speed of light."

Stanton interrupted the voice of the little man there. "Wonder how he
managed to get permission to build the ship from that gang of ghouls.
There was nothing they could get out of it, and it took a lot of
credits."

Vaine said: "We're underestimating that little genius, I think. He grew
up with an inferiority complex not brought on by the machines, but
merely accentuated by it. He was one of those people virtually born
that way; without any special ability except for bungling things in
general.

"He's a type that every psychologist knows, the born failure. Only he
had something in him that none of the others had. Something almost
forgotten nowadays, and exceedingly rare in a person of his personality
makeup: guts. There's a rumor that he spent years accumulating enough
blackmail on the members of the Consul, after they refused him the
first time, to force them to build that ship. I believe it.

"If he's right he'll go down in history, if he isn't right--then there
won't be any history."

"Throttle down and listen," suggested Parker.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Alpha Centauri has four planets," said the little man, "and the second
innermost was our destination. We found that it had every conceivable
advantage. The people were advanced scientifically, and evolved
from a protoplasm basis that was, not unnaturally considering the
similar conditions, along our own lines. They were rather ludicrously
like certain twentieth century writers' conception of Martians and
other extra-terrestrial creatures, particularly considering that no
intelligent life has been found on Mars or the other planets in our
system.

"They were small, with strangely faceted eyes, and two long slim
cords for arms, these terminating in three thin fingers." He paused
and repeated that, to emphasize such a familiar human characteristic.
"Three fingers."

He continued: "They had no facial features outside of their eyes. They
apparently perceived sounds by vibrations through their glossy black
'skin', if I may use such an inappropriate phrase, and their body was a
cylinder and nothing more. They transported themselves in swift little
cars, and how they got around before they progressed so far, I don't
know. Probably they had some other method of physical motivation that
has disappeared in long centuries of disuse. It does not matter. What
does is the fact that they are an intelligent, sensitive people, and
they have a great civilization, being able to communicate by means of
telepathy, as many of our own people are able to do quite well.

"We hastened back before we had an opportunity to learn much about
them, but were assured that we were welcome to their planet by their
governing group.

"And the best news of all, is that it will not be necessary to build
expensive ships to make the long trip! They have long had teleportation
devices that enable them to transport the disassembled atoms of an
individual or material to any distant place on which it is focused,
no matter how far, there to be reassembled. The process is an
extremely complicated and cumbersome one, requiring much mathematical
calculation, but it can be done with absolutely no danger to the person
using it. We have the plans for those machines."

The sound of cheering from the televisor became so ear-splitting that
Vaine cut the volume, and then stood there, numbly cracking the fingers
on his beautiful hands.

The picture on the screen whirled dizzily as the frantic operator
panned too swiftly to pick up the image of the crowd, which was going
mad with an enthusiasm that hurt them inside until they had to get it
out, release it, let off their emotional energy. Women fainted, men
wept, and the platform swayed dangerously as the amok crowd climbed
over it to shake the hands of a new Messiah.

"I'll be damned," whispered Vaine, trying to comprehend hope, "I'll be
completely damned." He cracked his long fingers slowly.

Stanton looked at his sandals as if he had never seen them before, and
scowled. Parker ran his hand through his hair absently, forgetting that
he no longer had any.

There was a buzzing in the next room.

Parker cursed all visaphones and vanished into the other room. They
heard a bellowed, "Pleasure to you, too, and what the hell do you
want?" Pause. "Oh." Another pause. Then: "Glad to hear it, Martin. Yes,
it's a great thing all right. Huh? ... sure; thanks. Same to you. Glad
you changed your mind. Pleasure, Martin."

Parker came back into the room. He tugged absently at his ear lobe.
There was a strange look on his face. He noticed the stares of his
fellow psychologists, and answered the question in their eyes.

"Remember that old duck, Martin Winter, the one with the registry full
of credits he don't know what to do with--who came in here last week?"

He went on without waiting for an acknowledgement of acquaintance from
the other two. "The old fool positively refused when he was here last
time to have a transference to a robot body because he said he didn't
have anything worth living for. But now he's determined to have the
transference made, and to get transported to this other system. Wished
me a happy trip over."

"Oh," said Vaine softly.

The voice of the little man came again into the room.

"Adventure," he said. "Adventure for all of us, and hope, and
happiness." His voice trembled a little with the immensity of his
own vision. "A new heaven and a new Earth, and a new dream for all
mankind--everlasting, eternal, enduring for all time!"

His voice was drowned by a crowd roar that filled the room, then died
away.

       *       *       *       *       *

The jets under the ship came to life with an ear-splitting _whoo-o-om!_
and the ship leveled off and hurtled west.

Electrical impulses touched the desert outside and rebounded to
register on a dial the information that his distance from the ground
was two thousand feet. He consulted another dial and found that the
rocket was traveling a little more than eighteen hundred feet a second.
Too fast. He cut it down to a thousand feet. Instruments were checked.

The energy waves he had received in space had come from the most
desolate part of Mars. Lawrence was unable to understand why anyone
chose this part of the planet to live on.

It was barren of the Martian planets collected by the settlers for
their medicinal and museum value on earth, and it was far from the
closely-clustered settler's towns. Which was strange. The settlers, he
thought with a smile, made a lot of their being pioneers and all that
sort of thing, but they loved their mechanical comforts and the warm,
close companionship of their fellows.

He reached over and flicked the switch of the visor set in the nose
of the ship for observation purposes. The scene revealed was as
disappointingly prosaic to him now, as it had been when he had first
seen it. It looked just as the mid-western deserts used to look before
the Consul had turned them into fertile agricultural grounds, with one
exception: the ground was as red as blood, even in the feeble light of
the Martian moons.

There was a wind blowing, carrying the sand and the half-vegetable,
half-animal "tumblies" along with it. But the wind always blew on Mars
at this time of year, despite the thin air, when one was this near to
the pole.

The shack he had been watching for, loomed dark and dismal in the black
of the Martian night. Lawrence cut his rear jets and throttled down,
aiding the ineffectual gliding surfaces of the rocket with occasional
blasts from the hull. He landed with a very slight jar and cut the
engines.

The racket of the engines in a rocket is so violent that it is always
something of a shock to a rocket man when he cuts them off. The effect
is as though something very vital had died.

Lawrence stood there trying to accustom his ears to the silence that
claimed the ship, saving only the weep of the wind outside. And the
wind became, in that moment, as all-pervading, as much a part of things
as the rockets had been. The difference was that the rocket noise
existed for only a brief while, and the wind had moaned out on those
somber plains for--how many millions of years had it been?

He shook off the mood, drew on a light, electrically-heated suit with
an oxygen container on the back. It completely covered every part of
his body, and was especially designed for Mars, having two metaglass
openings for his eyes and a voice amplifier just below it.

After that, he stepped out into the air-lock, the sound detectors
catching the _whoosh_ of exhausted air, and the faint crunch of his
weighted boots in the Martian sand.

The shack was of metal, neat and compact. One side of it bulged like
a tin can in which a firecracker has exploded. He stumbled over
something in the sand--but he did not look down. The ground was covered
in spots with strange relics of a Martian civilization here in this
desert.

In the early twenty-first century, during the rush of excitement over
interplanetary travel, there had been many expeditions to this part
of the planet. In fact, the shack in front of him was probably one
of the Smithsonian's archaeological stations. It had been supposedly
long-deserted, though he had evidence that it wasn't now.

The expeditions had accumulated enough evidence from the desert to
prove conclusively that the Martians had been a highly civilized and
advanced people; more advanced, probably, than Earth. There were ruins
of great cities in the south of the planet that must have been there
for over two million years. The Martians had built well. As to what had
happened to them--that was a mystery that remained unsolved. There had
been no evidence of warfare of any sort, and a few rare translations
of even rarer books, indicated that the Martians had eliminated
diseases and had, in their time, colonized the entire solar system with
their people. But now there was only the weeping wind and the barren
sand--nothing more.

He reached the door, twisted the handle on it. Having suspected that
someone was inside, Lawrence was not surprised when it came open easily
with a sharp creaking sound. It had been recently used, of course,
since otherwise the years would have rusted it to the extent that
the first man to open it again would have had to exert a great deal
of strength. It was monometal, but everything except lead and a few
beryllium alloys rusted in the Martian air.

He took a torch from his utility bag, and the soft but brilliant green
of the portable Howard-Brazier fluorescent stabbed into the darkness
and tore away the shadows. There was nothing in the path of the beam
that he could see. Only the red dust on the wings of the restless wind.

He went in.

The door creaked shut behind him. A tiny air purifier made sighings
somewhere like a big dog with asthma. There was a bare metal table. And
that was all. A door led into another room. He walked into it. Silence,
save for the moan of the deathless wind, crying outside.

It was dark in the room, with only the light of Deimos and Phobos
shining into the glassite windows. He could just make out the
darkness-shrouded bulks of shattered machinery in the corner. He
pressed the button on his torch and the darkness fled in panic from the
brightness of the light.

The whisper in his brain came then. "_Don't_...."

       *       *       *       *       *

His flashlight clattered to the metal floor, and his hand was on his
blaster. Then he cursed himself for a fool and retrieved his torch. He
did not, however, turn it on again.

To be startled like that by mental telepathy was childish. It was
something that every member of the Space Patrol had to master, and
was an ability fairly common among intelligent people--many of whom
practiced the art as something of a hobby. The only element of surprise
was the fact that it was a strain on any ordinary man to project his
thoughts that way, and speech was preferable when practicable. Still,
there was no reason why anyone should not use telepathy if he wished.

"Who--" he began aloud, then shrugged and concentrated on thinking:
"Who are you?"

"Speak aloud," came the thought. "It is easier for you, and makes your
mental impulses clearer."

There is an individuality in thoughts, as well as in voices and faces.
It occurred to Lawrence that the thought waves of this person were the
clearest, the gentlest and the saddest of any he had ever encountered.

There was a clarity about them that was superhuman, that is associated
with genius. And they were filled with a sorrow that transcended all
human understanding. The sorrow of a dying race, of the shattered
dreams of a billion years, the sorrow of the Wandering Jew alone on
another planet and watching his own dissolve into cosmic dust--a sorrow
beyond expression.

He found it dominating his soul, drowning him in a bitterness such as
he had never dreamed possible.

Lawrence explained, "My instruments detected a steady stream of free
gamma rays out in space, such as could only come from a ruptured atomic
power source of some sort, and I flew down to ascertain if there had
been an accident." He raised his voice a trifle over the wail of the
desert wind. "Who are you?"

The brooding thought crept slowly into his mind, infinitely sad,
infinitely weary.

"I am one who saw too far. It is no good for any being to go ahead of
his fellows; to dream a greater dream and to find no reality in it.
I had a machine, and it should have carried me outside, should have
taken me above our lost visions to finer things. It did not. I thought
I would climb to heaven. I descended to hell. How they have reversed
our ancestors' prophecies, these metal masters of ours." His thoughts
washed away in a tide of ultimate despair.

Lawrence's eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness, and he could
make out the hammock in the corner of the room with the small form upon
it. "You're hurt!"

He came forward, his bewilderment becoming concern. "Here, I'm one of
the few men who still know something of medicine. Space Patrol men have
to know in case the machines break down. Which," he grimaced, "happens
about once in every four hundred years."

"_No!_"

The thought stopped Lawrence on the verge of tearing the threadbare
cover off the figure on the cot and turning on his flash to examine it.

"Please," it came again, more gently, "I am dying. Believe me, there is
nothing you or any other man or machine could do. And I do not care to
live any more now; there is nothing to live for--now or for the rest of
time."

Pieces of what seemed to be a pattern exploded in Lawrence's brain, and
he turned white. Had this man used the disassembler, obtaining it by
bribing some minor member of the little man's crew, and had he visited
that far-off star and found that which doomed mankind's new hopes?
The thought stunned him beyond thinking. That couldn't be true; it
couldn't. This was man's last hope, his last stand, it was unthinkable
that--

He felt within his brain, currents that were at first puzzled and then
cleared.

"No--" and there was a smile in Lawrence's mind, a heartbroken,
whimsical thing. "No, I have not been to that system you are thinking
of; my journey has been elsewhere. And what I have seen has led me
to destroy both my machine and myself." He was silent a moment,
overwhelmed by disappointment.

Then, "Let me explain, please.

"In our world we know not happiness, have not known it for such a long,
long time. The machines have taken over and there is no longer anything
left--only the bare drabness of day after futile, empty day for all
our lives. Some feel these things more than others, and the idealist,
the dreamer, have suffered in this age more than any other person can
conceive. We feel so much, so very, very much, and we long so hard for
the little, insignificant things that make up beauty--for beauty is our
life."

       *       *       *       *       *

The wind outside sang a song of other days, of laughter and beauty,
and the glorious fortress of mental and physical perfection that had
been here. It spoke of the shining towers, and glistening ships that
thundered above them.

Then it remembered and died slowly away, taking with it the red dust
that drifted across the barren plains.

"Yes," said Lawrence, very softly. "Yes, I understand."

"Not quite," came the whisper in his brain. "You do not, cannot, quite
understand. There are things you do not know."

Silence then. Except for the eternal wind and its companion, the dust.

"I disassembled my atoms," the explanation echoed unexpectedly in
Lawrence's mind, "and selected a lonely place on another world where
they were reassembled. I watched from afar, and there, too, it was
the same. The machines. The uncertain, hurt look in people's eyes,
and--their lack of purpose.

"I destroyed my machine and myself with it. That was best. There was
nothing left for me, you see."

Lawrence stood up by the dusty televisor against the wall. There was
infinite compassion and understanding in his voice. He said, "If
only you had waited! If only you had known that another planet in
another system had a place for us, instead of going elsewhere as you
did--without thought or direction."

"There was thought and direction," said the mental voice. "It availed
me nothing. Bury me, please, out there on the desert with the wind and
sand. I would be with seekers like myself, knowing that their search
is impotent, as was mine. Thank you for your good intentions and your
kindness. Good-by, my friend."

The sense of rapport faded from Lawrence's brain, and he knew he was in
the presence of death. The requiem of the wind sang for another lost
thing now, and that was queerly fitting, somehow.

Then he knew! Knew that the being had indeed traveled to other than
the little man's star system, and his heart cried out within him
unbearably, though he stood still and numb. Knew it when he had
picked up the other's hand to place it beneath the covering and had
felt--three slender fingers.

The quest was ended.



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