"To begin with," said John Whitney, "I simply wandered. It was wonderful to all of us, of course, but I think, somehow, most wonderful of all to me. The idea that man could be a free agent in the universe, that he could go wherever he might wish, was a bit of magic that was utterly beyond all comprehension, and that he could do this by himself, with no machinery, with no instruments, with nothing but his body and his mind, through a power that he held within himself and which no human had ever known before, was simply unbelievable, and I found myself exercising the power to prove to myself again and yet again that it could be really done, that it was a solid and ever-present ability that could be called upon at will and that it was never lost, and that it belonged to one by right of his humanity and not by some special dispensation that could be withdrawn at a moment's notice. You never tried it, Jason, neither you nor Martha?"
Jason shook his head. "We found something else. Not as exhilarating, perhaps, but with a deep satisfaction of its own. A love of land and a feeling of continuity, a sense of heritage, even of being a substantial part of that heritage, an earthbound certainty."
"I think I can understand that," said John. "It's something that I never had and I suspect it was the lack of it that drove me on and on once the sheer exuberance of traveling from one star to another had worn somewhat thin. Although I still can become excited over a new place that I find—for there are never any of them that are exactly like another. The one amazing thing to me, the thing that continues to amaze me, is the great range of dissimilarities that can exist, even on those planets where the basic characteristics of their geology and history are very much the same."
"But why did you wait so long, John? All these years without coming home. Without letting us know. You said you had met others and that they told you we were still on Earth, that we had never left."
"I had thought of it," said John. "Many times I thought of it, of coming back to see you. But I'd have come back empty-handed, with not a thing to show for all the years of wanderlust. Not possessions, of course, for we know now they don't count. But nothing really learned, no great new understanding. A fistful of stories of where I'd been and what I'd seen, but that would have been the size of it. The prodigal coming home and I…"
"But it wouldn't have been that way. Your welcome always waited you. We've waited for years and asked of you."
"What I don't understand," said Martha, "is why there was no word of you. You said you had met others and I talk all the time with our people out there and there never was a word about you, never any news. You just dropped out of sight."
"I was far out, Martha. Much farther than most of the others ever got. I ran hard and fast. Don't ask me why. I sometimes asked myself and there was never any answer. Never any real answer. The others that I met, only two or three of them quite by accident, had run as hard as I. Like a bunch of kids, I suppose, who come to a new and wondrous place, and there is so much to see they're afraid they'll not get to see it all, so they run hard to see it all, telling themselves that once they've seen it all, they'll go back to the one place that is best, probably knowing that they never will, for that one best place is always, in then- minds, just a little way ahead and they become obsessed with the idea that if they don't keep going they will never find it. I knew what I was doing and I knew it made no sense and it was some comfort to me when I met those other few who were the same as I."
"But there was purpose in your running," Jason said. "Even if you didn't know it at the time, the purpose still was there. For you found the People. If you hadn't gone so far, I don't suppose you'd ever have found them."
"That is true," said John, "but I had no sense of purpose. I simply stumbled on them. I had no word of them, no inkling they were there. I wasn't hunting them. I had sensed the Principle and I was hunting it."
"The Principle?"
"I don't know how I can tell you, Jason. There aren't words to tell you. There is no way I can express exactly what it is, although I am certain I have a fairly good idea. Perhaps no man can ever know exactly what it is. You remember that you said there was an evil toward the center. That evil is the Principle. The people I met far out had sensed it, too, and somehow must have sent back word. But evil is not right; it is not really evil. Sensed, scented, become aware of from far off, it has the smell of evil because it is so different, so unhuman, so uncaring. By human standards blind and reasonless, and seeming blind and reasonless because there is about it not one single emotion, one single motive or purpose, one single thought process that can be equated with the human mind. A spider is blood brother and intellectual equal to us as compared to it. It sits there and it knows. It knows all there is to know. And its knowing is translated in such nonhuman terms that we could never even scratch the surface of the simplest of those terms. It sits there and knows and translates what it knows and that translation of its knowledge is so coldly correct that one shrinks away from it, for there is nothing that can be so right, without the slightest possibility of error. I've said it is unhuman and perhaps it is this ability to be so utterly right, so absolutely correct, that makes it so unhuman. For proud as we may be of our intellect and understanding, there is no one of us who can say with any honesty or any certainty that he is correct on any point of information or interpretation."
"But you said that you found the People and they're coming back to Earth," said Martha. "Can't you tell us more about them and when they're coming back…"
"My dear," said Jason, softly, "I think there's more that John wants to tell us, that he has to tell us before he talks about the People,"
John rose from the chair in which he had been sitting, walked to the ram-smeared window and looked out, then came back to face the two sitting on the davenport. "Jason is right," he said. "There is more I have to tell. I've wanted for so long to tell it to someone, to share it all with someone. I may be wrong. I've thought about it for so long that I may have become confused. I'd like to have you two hear me out and tell me what you think."
He sat down on the chair again. "I'll try to present it as objectively as I can," he said. "You realize that I never saw this thing, this Principle. I may not have even gotten close to it. But close enough to know that it is there and to sense a little, perhaps as much as any man may sense, the sort of thing it is. Not understanding it, of course, not even trying to understand it, for you know you are too small and weak for understanding. That was the thing that hurt the most, perhaps—realizing how small and weak you were, and not only you yourself, but all humanity. Something that reduced the human race to microbe status, perhaps to less than microbe status. You know instinctively that you, as one human being, are beneath its notice, although there is evidence, or I think there may be evidence, that it could and did take notice of humanity.
"I got as close to it as my mind could bear. I cowered before it. I don't know what else I did. There is a part of all of this that tends to go foggy in the mind. Perhaps I got too close. But I had to know, you see. I had to be sure and I am sure. It is out there and it watches and it knows and if need be it can act, although I am inclined to think it would not be quick to act…"
"Act—how?" asked Jason.
"I don't know," John told him. "You have to understand this is all impression. Intellectual impression. Nothing visual. Nothing that I saw or heard. It's the fact that it's all intellectual impression that makes it so hard to describe. How do you describe the reactions of the human mind? How do you blueprint the emotional impact of those reactions?"
"We had the report," Jason said to Martha. "You picked it up from someone. Do you remember who it was, who it might have been who was out as far as John, or almost as far as John…"
"They wouldn't have had to be out as far as I was," said John. "They could have picked up the sense of it a good deal farther off. I deliberately tried to get in close to it."
"I don't remember who it was," said Martha. "Two or three people told me of it, It was, I'm sure, all very second-hand. Maybe tenth- or twelfth-hand. Word that had been passed on from one person to another, from many persons to many other persons. Simply that there was something evil out near the center of the galaxy. That someone had been out there and had run into it. But no hint that anyone had investigated. Afraid to investigate, perhaps."
"That would be right," said John. "I was very much afraid."
"You call it a Principle," said Jason. "That is a funny thing to call it. Why the Principle?"
"It was what I thought when I was close to it," said John. "It didn't tell me. It didn't communicate at all. It probably was not even aware of me, didn't know that I existed. One tiny little microbe creeping up on it…"
"But Principle? It was a thing, a creature, an entity. That is a strange designation to hang on a creature or an entity. There must have been a reason."
"I'm not sure, Jason, that it is a creature or an entity. It is simply something. A mass of intelligence, perhaps. And what form would a mass of intelligence take? What would it look like? Could you even see it? Would it be a cloud, a wisp of gas, trillions of tiny motes dancing in the light of the center's suns. And the reason for calling it the Principle? I can't really tell you. There is no logic to it, no single reason I can put a finger on. Simply that I felt it was the basic principle of the universe, the director of the universe, the brain center of the universe, the thing that holds the universe together and makes it operate—the force that makes the electrons spin about the nucleus, that makes the galaxies rotate about their centers, that holds everything in place."
"Could you pinpoint its location?" Jason asked. John shook his head. "No way that I could. No such thing as triangulation. The feel of the Principle was everywhere, it seemed; it came from everywhere. It closed in around you. It muffled and engulfed you; there was no sense of direction. And in any case, it would be difficult, for there are so many suns and so many planets. Jammed close together. Suns fractions of light-years apart. Old, the most of them. Most of the planets dead. Some of them with the wreckage and ruin of what at one time must have been great civilizations, but now all of them are gone…"
"Perhaps it was one of these civilizations…"
"Perhaps," said John. "I thought so at first. That one of the ancient civilizations had managed to survive and that its intelligence evolved into the Principle. But since then I've come to doubt it. For more time would have been needed, I'm convinced, than the lifetime of a galaxy could afford. I can't begin to tell you, I don't know how to tell you, the sheer force of this intelligence, or the alienness of it. Not just the difference of it. Throughout all space you find scattered intelligences that are different and these differences make them alien. But not alien in the way the Principle is alien. And this terrible alienness hints at an origin not of the galaxy, of a time before the galaxy, of a place and time so different from the galaxy that it would be inconceivable. You are acquainted, I suppose, with the theory of the steady-state?"
"Yes, of course," said Jason. "The universe had no beginning and will never have an end, that it is in a state of continual creation, new matter being formed, new galaxies coming into being even as the old ones die. But the cosmologists, before the disappearance of the People, had fairly well established that the theory was untenable."
"I know they did," said John. "But there was still one hope—you could call it hope, for there were certain people who, for philosophical reasons, clung stubbornly to the steady-state concept. It was so beautiful, so superb and awe-inspiring, that they would not let it go. And they said, suppose that the universe is far bigger than it seems to be, that what we see is only a local segment, one tiny local bubble on the skin of this greater universe and this local bubble is going through a phase that makes it appear not to be steady-state, but an evolving universe."
"And you think that they were right?"
"I think they could be right. Steady-state would give the Principle the time that it needed to come into being. Before it came into being the universe may have been chaotic. The Principle may be the engineering force that put it all to right."
"You believe all this?"
"Yes, I do believe it. I've had time to think of it and I put it all together and I did the job so well that I'm convinced of it. Not a shred of proof. Not a point of information. But it's fastened in my mind and I can't shake it free. I try to tell myself that the Principle, or certain features of the Principle, may have put it in my mind, might have planted it. I try to tell this to myself because it's the only way that I can explain it. And yet I know I must be wrong, for I am sure the Principle was entirely unaware of me. There was never any sign it was aware of me."
"You got close to it, you say."
"As close as I dared to get. I was frightened all the way. I went to a point where I had to break and run."
"Somewhere along the way you found the People. So there was purpose after all. You never would have found them if you'd not gone chasing after this thing you call the Principle."
"Jason," Martha said, "you don't sound too impressed. What's the matter with you? Here your brother has come back and…"
"I am sorry," Jason said. "I would suppose I do not grasp it yet. It is too big to grasp. Maybe I'm deeply horrified and calling it 'this thing' is simply a defense mechanism to hold it away from me."
"I found the same reaction in myself," John told Martha. "That is, to begin with. I soon got over it. And, yes, I'd have never found the People if I'd not tracked down the Principle. It was blind luck I found them. I had started back, you see, and was planet hopping, but going on a different tack than the one I'd followed going in. You have to be extremely careful, as I suppose you know, in choosing the planets that you use. You can sense them and pick out the ones that seem the best and there are a lot of guidelines that serve you fairly well, but there always is a chance that a planet might have some characteristics that you have not detected or lack something that you took for granted and that simply isn't there, so you have to have an alternative or two, so that if anything goes sour with the planet you have chosen you can shift most hurriedly to another one. I had alternatives and I hit a planet that, if not deadly, was uncomfortable, so I switched quickly to another one and that's where I found the People, It was still fairly close to the Principle and I wondered how they stood it, how they could live so close to it and entirely disregard it, or pretend to disregard it. I thought perhaps they had become accustomed to it, although it did not seem the sort of thing one could very readily become accustomed to. It was only after a time that I realized they were unaware of it. They had not developed parapsychic abilities, as we have, and they were entirely deaf to it. They had no idea such a thing was there.
"I was fortunate. I materialized in an open field— materialized is not the word, of course; there is no word for it. It's insane that a man can do a thing and still have no word for what he does. Do you happen to know, Jason, if anyone has actually figured out what actually happens when we go star-traveling?"
"No, I don't," said Jason. "I would think not. Martha might know better than I do. She keeps up a running conversation with the stars. She hears all the news."
"There have been those who've tried," said Martha. "They have gotten nowhere. That was earlier. I don't think anyone has bothered for a long, long time. They just accept it now. No one wonders anymore about how or why it works."
"Perhaps it's just as well," said John. "But, the situation being as it is, I could have muffed it. I could have arrived at a place that teemed with people and someone might have seen me appearing out of nothing or I, seeing humans in numbers for the first time in centuries, or somehow recognizing them as the people who had been taken, might have rushed into their arms, elated at having finally found them, although I was not looking for them. It was the last thing in my mind.
"But I arrived in an open field and at some distance I saw other humans, or what I thought were humans—farmers working with big powered agricultural implements. And when I saw the implements, I knew that if they should be humans, they'd not be humans of our kind, for we've had nothing to do with powered machines of any sort for millennia. The thought crossed my mind that if the creatures undeniably were humans, they might be the ones who were taken from the Earth and my knees went wobbly at the thought of it and I was filled with a great elation. Although I told myself that would be most unlikely and the only other alternative was that I'd found another race of humanoid creatures and that was unlikely, too, for in all the galaxy no one has ever found another human race. Or have they? I've been gone so long my information is much out of date."
"No one has," said Martha. "Many other creatures, but no humanoids."
"There was, too, the fact that they had machines. And I told myself that made the possibility even of less likelihood. For we've found new technological races and of those the technology so weird that in many cases it was impossible for us to grasp the principle or the purpose of it. To find another humanoid race with machine technology seemed to me absurd. The only answer could be that here were the People. Realizing this, I became somewhat cautious. We might be of the same blood, but there was five thousand years between us and I reminded myself that five thousand years might have made them as alien as anything we've found in space. And we've learned, if nothing else, that first contact with aliens must be managed adroitly.
"I will not try to tell you now all the things that happened. Later on, perhaps. But I rather think I managed very well. Although I guess, it was mostly luck. When I went up to the farmers I was mistaken for a wandering scholar from another of the three planets the human race inhabits—not quite right in the head and concerned with things no normal man would think worth consideration. Once I caught the drift of it, I went along with them. It covered up a lot of slips I made. My slips seemed no more than eccentricities to them, I think it may have been my clothing and my language that made them think I was a wanderer. Luckily, they spoke a sort of English, but changed considerably from the language that we speak. I would imagine that back on the old Earth of five thousand years ago our language, as we speak it now, would not be readily understood. Time and changing circumstance and sloppiness in speech brings about many changes in the spoken word. Under the guise of their mistake, I was able to get around enough to find out what was going on, to learn what sort of society had developed and some of their long-range planning."
"And," said Jason, "it turned out not so pretty."
John gave him a startled glance. "How would you know that?"
"You said they still had a machine technology. I think that might be the key. I would guess they continued, once they got themselves sorted out, in about the same way they were going before they were snatched off Earth. And if that is the case, the picture would not be a pretty one."
"You are right," said John. "It took them, apparently, not too long to get themselves, as you say, sorted out. Within a few years after finding themselves, in a twinkling, on another planet, or on other planets, rather, in an unguessed part of space, they got their bearings and became organized and went on pretty much the way they had left off. They had to start from scratch, of course, but they had the technological knowledge and they had brand-new planets with untouched raw materials and they were very quickly on their way. And what was more, they have the same life expectancy, the same long life that we have. A lot of them died in those first few years while they struggled to get themselves adjusted, but there still were a lot of them left, and among those were people with all the skills that were needed to develop a new technology. Can you imagine what might happen if a skilled, trained engineer or a well-grounded, imaginative scientist lived for many centuries? The society did not lose needed skills by death, as had been the case before. Geniuses did not die, but continued being geniuses. Engineers did not build and plan for a few years only and then die or retire, but kept on building and planning. A man with a theory was given as many centuries as he needed to develop it to its full potentiality and retained the youth that was needed to continue with it. There is a great drawback to this, of course. The presence of men of great age and vast experience and in positions of importance would tend to have an inhibiting influence upon younger men and would make for a conservatism that would be blind to new ideas and in the end would stall all progress if it had not been recognized and compensated for. The People had the sense to recognize it and to build some compensatory features into the social structure."
"Were you able to arrive at any idea of their time table? How swiftly did they get started again and
how they may have progressed?"
"Roughly. Nothing definite, of course. But say a hundred years to get themselves established as a viable society, perhaps three hundred to rebuild an approximation of the kind of technological setup they had here on Earth. And from there they built on the basis of what they had, with the advantage of being able to drop a lot of ancient millstones they carried around their necks. They build from scratch and to start with there was no need to struggle with the obsolescence they were burdened with on Earth. Well before a thousand years had passed the groups living on the three different planets—all within less than a light-year of one another—knew about the others and in a very little time spaceships had been developed and built and the human race was together once again. The physical contact and the commerce this made possible gave the technology a new shot in the arm, for during those thousand years or so they had been apart each had developed their technology a little differently, had gone probing in different directions. And also they had the resources of three planets rather than of one and that must have been a distinct advantage. What happened was the melding of three separate cultures into a sort of superculture that still had the advantage of having common roots."
'They never developed parapsychic powers? No sign of them at all?"
John shook his head. "They are as blind to them as they had been before. It's not only time that's needed to develop them, for now each of them, all of them, have as much time as we have. It must be that what is needed is a different outlook, a lifting of the pressures that a particular brand of technology imposes not only on a race, but on each human being."
"And this brand of technology?"
"To you and me," said John, "it would be brutal. Knowing nothing else, seeing in it the goals they have striven for, it must seem wonderful to them. Satisfactory, if not wonderful. For them it represents freedom, the freedom of being lifted above and beyond the environment they have struggled to subdue and bend to their purposes; to us it would be stifling."
"But they must think back," said Martha. "Their transfer from Earth must be recent enough that it is remembered. There must be records. They must have wondered all these years what happened to them and where the Earth may be."
"Records, yes," said John. "Myth-haunted, for it was some time, many years, before anyone got around to putting anything on paper and by that time the incident had grown misty and no two men, most likely, could ever quite agree on what exactly happened. But they did think about it. It was forever in their minds. They tried to explain it and there are some marvelous theories and once again there is no agreement on one particular theory. The fuzziness of it all may seem difficult for us to understand, for you have your records, Jason, the ones Grandfather started. I suppose you keep them up."
"Sporadically," said Jason. "Often there is not much to write about."
"Our records," said John, "were written with clear deliberation, with a sense of calmness. We had no upheaval; we were simply left behind. But with the others there was upheaval. It is hard to imagine how it might have been. To be one second on familiar Earth, the next dumped on a planet that was, of course, much the same as Earth, but in many ways entirely different. To be dumped there without food, with no possessions, without shelter. To become pioneers at a moment's notice, under the most adverse circumstances. They were frightened and confused and, worst of all, entirely mystified. There is a great need for man to explain what happens to him or how a thing has happened and they had no way to arrive at any explanation. It was as if magic had been performed—a very vicious and unfeeling magic. The wonder is that any of them survived at all. Many of them didn't. And to this day they don't know why or how it happened. But I think I know the why of it, the reason. Maybe not the method, but the reason."
"You mean the Principle?"
"The idea may be no more than fantasy," said John. "I may have arrived at it because there seemed no other explanation. If the People had parapsychic abilities and knew what I know, that the Principle exists, I have no doubt they would arrive at the same idea as I have. Which wouldn't mean that we were correct. I have said that I don't think the Principle was aware of me. I'm not sure it could become aware of any single human being—it would be akin to a human being becoming aware of a single microbe. Although it may have the power to focus down to very fine perception; it may have no limitations whatever. But in any case it would be more likely to pay attention to humans in a mass, to any sort of creature in a mass, being attracted, perhaps, to the social structure and the intellectual trend brought about by such a mass of beings rather than by the mere massiveness itself. To attract its attention, I would presume that any situation would have to be unique and from what we ourselves have found so far in the galaxy, I would assume that the humanity of five millennia ago, in the full flower of its technological development and its materialistic point of view, must have seemed unique. The Principle may have studied us for a time and puzzled over us, maybe a bit apprehensive over the possibility that, given time, we could upset the orderliness and precision of the universe—which would have been something it would not have been willing to tolerate. So I think it did with us exactly what men of that day would have done if they'd found a new strain of virus that might just possibly be dangerous. Such a virus would have been placed in culture tubes and run through many tests, trying to determine what it might do under varying conditions. The Principle reached out and grabbed humanity and dumped it on three planets and then settled back to watch, wondering, perhaps, if there'd be divergence or if the strain ran true. By this time it must know that the strain runs true. The cultures on the three planets varied, certainly, but even in their variance all three were technological and materialistic, and once they became aware of one another they had no trouble pooling their characteristics to become a superculture, still materialistic, still technological."
"I don't know why," said Jason, "but when you talk about the People I have the feeling that you are describing a monstrous alien race rather than humanity. Without knowing any of the details, they sound frightening."
"They are to me," said John. "Not perhaps because of any single facet of their culture, for some of these facets can be very pleasant, but because of a sense of the irresistible arrogance implicit in it. Not the power so much, although the power is there, but the naked arrogance of a species that sees everything as property to be manipulated and used."
"And yet," said Martha, "they are our people. The rest of us have wondered about them for so long, have worried over them, wondering what could have happened to them, fearful of what had happened to them. We should be happy that we found them, happy that they have done so well."
"I suppose we should," said Jason, "but somehow I can't. If they'd stay where they are, I'd feel differently about it, I imagine. But John said they're coming back to Earth. We can't let them come. Can you imagine what it might be like? What they'd do to Earth and us?"
"We might have to leave," said Martha.
"We can't do that," said Jason. "Earth is part of us. And not only you and I, but the others, too. Earth is the tie, the anchor. It holds us together— all of us, even those who have never been on Earth."
"Why did they have to locate Earth?" asked Martha. "How could they, lost among the stars, have located Earth?"
"I don't know," said John. "But they are clever. Far too clever, more than likely. Their astronomy, all their sciences, exceed anything that man of Earth had even dared to dream. Somehow they managed to sift among the stars until they found, and identified, the old ancestral sun. And they have the ships to get here. They've gone to many other, nearby suns, exploring and exploiting."
"It may take them awhile to get here," Jason said. "We'll have some time to figure out what should be done."
John shook his head. "Not with the kind of ships they have, traveling many times the speed of light. The survey ship had been a year on its way when I found out about it. It could be here almost any time."