Post by voice on Sept 14, 2016 23:14:36 GMT
“The Lonely Planet” is a short story within The Best of Murray Leinster (Edited and with an Introduction by J. J. Pierce: A Del Rey Book published by Ballantine Books, Random House, New York, N.Y., 1978, p 274 [originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Standard Magazines, Inc., December, 1949]
The Lonely Planet
By Murray Leinster
CHAPTER 1
PROTEAN PLANT
ALYX WAS VERY lonely before men came to it. It did not know that it
was lonely, to be sure. Perhaps it did not know anything, for it had no
need for knowledge. It had need only for memory, and all its memories
were simple. Warmth and coolness; sunshine and dark; rain and dryness.
Nothing else, even though Alyx was incredibly old. It was the first
thing upon its planet which had possessed consciousness.
In the beginning there were probably other living things. Possibly
there were quintillions of animalcules, rotifera, bacteria, and amoebae
in the steaming pool in which Alyx began. Maybe Alyx was merely one of
similar creatures, as multitudinous as the stars and smaller than motes,
which swam and lived and died in noisesome slime beneath a cloud-hung,
dripping sky. But that was a long time ago. Millions of years ago.
Hundreds of millions of years now gone.
When men came, they thought at first the planet was dead. Alyx was
the name they gave to the globe which circled about its lonely sun. One
day a Space Patrol survey-ship winked into being from overdrive some
millions of miles from the sun. It hung there, making conscientious
determinations of the spectrum, magnetic field, spot-activity and other
solar data.
Matter-of-factly, the ship then swam through emptiness to the lonely
planet. There were clouds over its surface, and there were icecaps. The
surface was irregular, betokening mountains, but there were no seas. The
observers in the survey-ship were in the act of making note that it was
a desert, without vegetation, when the analyzers reported protoplasm on
the surface. So the survey-ship approached.
Alyx the creature was discovered when the ship descendëd on landing
jets toward the surface. As the jets touched ground, tumult arose. There
were clouds of steam, convulsive heavings of what seemed to be brown
earth. A great gap of writhing agony appeared below the ship. Horrible,
rippling movements spread over the surface and seemed alive, as far as
the eye could reach.
The survey-ship shot upward. It touched solidity at the edge of the
northern icecap. It remained a month, examining the planet—or rather,
examining Alyx, which covered all the planet’s surface save at the
poles.
The report stated that the planet was covered by a single creature,
which was definitely one creature and definitely alive. The ordinary
distinction between animal and vegetable life did not apply to Alyx. It
was cellular, to be sure, and therefore presumably could divide, but it
had not been observed to do so. Its parts were not independent members
of a colony, like coral polyps. They constituted one creature, which was
at once utterly simple and infinitely diverse.
It broke down the rocks of its planet, like microorganisms, and made
use of their mineral content for food, like plankton. It made use of
light for photosynthesis to create complex compounds, like plants. It
was capable of amoeboid movement, like a low order of animal life. And
it had consciousness. It responded to stimuli—such as the searing of its
surface—with anguished heavings and withdrawals from the pain.
For the rest, the observers on the survey-ship were inclined to
gibber incoherently. Then a junior lieutenant named Jon Haslip made a
diffident suggestion. It was only a guess, but they proved he was right.
The creature which was Alyx had consciousness of a type never before
encountered. It responded not only to physical stimuli but to thoughts.
It did whatever one imagined it doing. If one imagined it turning green
for more efficient absorption of sunlight, it turned green. There were
tiny pigment-granules in its cells to account for the phenomenon. If one
imagined it turning red, It turned red. And if one imagined it extending
a pseudopod, cautiously, to examine an observation-instrument placed at
its border on the ice cap, it projected a pseudopod, cautiously, to
examine that instrument.
Haslip never got any real credit for his suggestion. It was mentioned
once, in a footnote of a volume called the Report of the Hatycon
Expedition to Alyx, Vol. IV, Chap., 4, p. 97. Then it was forgotten. But
a biologist named Katistan acquired some fame in scientific circles for
his exposition of the origin and development of Alyx.
“In some remote and mindless age,” he wrote, “there was purely
automaton-like response to stimuli on the part of the one-celled
creatures which—as on Earth and elsewhere—were the earliest forms of
life on the planet. Then, in time, perhaps a cosmic ray produced a
mutation in one individual among those creatures: Perhaps a creature
then undistinguishable from its fellows, swimming feebly in some fetid
pool. By the mutation, that creature became possessed of purpose, which
is consciousness in its most primitive form, and its purpose was food.
Its fellows had no purpose, because they remained automata which
responded only to external stimuli. The purpose of the mutated creature
affected them as a stimulus. They responded. They swam to the purposeful
creature and became its food. It became the solitary inhabitant of its
pool, growing hugely. It continued to have a purpose, which was food.
“There was nourishment in the mud and stones at the bottom of that
pool. It continued to grow because it was the only creature on its
planet with purpose, and the other creatures had no defense against
purpose. Evolution did not provide an enemy, because chance did not
provide a competitive purpose, which implies a mind. Other creatures did
not develop an ability to resist its mind-stimuli, which directed them
to become its prey.”
Here Katistan’s theorizing becomes obscure for a while. Then:
“On Earth and other planets, telepathy is difficult because our
remotest cellular ancestors developed a defensive block against each
other’s mind-stimuli. On Alyx, the planet, no such defense came into
being, so that one creature overwhelmed the planet and became Alyx, the
creature; which in time covered everything. It had all food, all
moisture, everything it could conceive of. It was content. And because
it had never faced a mind-possessing enemy, it developed no defense
against mind. It was defenseless against its own weapon.
“But that did not matter until men came. Then, with no telepathic
block, such as we possess, it was unable to resist the minds of men. It
must, by its very nature, respond to whatever a man wills or even
imagines. Alyx is a creature which covers a planet, but is in fact a
slave to any man who lands upon it. It will obey his every thought. It
is a living, self-supporting robot, an abject servant to any creature
with purpose it encounters.”
Thus Katistan's The Report of ihe Halycon Expedition to Alyx contains
interesting pictures of the result of the condition he described. There
are photographs of great jungles which the creature Alyx tortured itself
to form of its own substance when men from other planets remembered and
imagined them. There are photographs of great pyramids into which parts
of Alyx heaved itself on command. There are even pictures of vast and
complex machines, but these are the substance of Alyx, twisted and
strained into imagined shapes. The command that such machines run,
though, was useless, because swift motion produced pain and the machines
writhed into shapelessness.
Since men have never had enough servants—not even the machines which
other machines turn out by millions—they immediately planned to be
served by Alyx. It was one planet which was conquered without warfare.
Preliminary studies showed that Alyx could not survive more than the
smallest human propulation. When many men were gathered together in one
place, their conflicting, individual thoughts exhausted the surface
which tried, to respond to every one. Parts of Alyx died of exhaustion,
leaving great spots like cancers that healed over only when the men
moved away. So Alyx was assigned to the Alyx Corporation, with due
instructions to be careful.
Technical exploration disclosed great deposits oL rotenite—the ore
which makes men’s metals everlasting— under the shield of living flesh.
A colony of six carefully chosen humans was established, and under their
direction Alyx went to work. It governed machines, scooped out the
rotenite ore and made it ready for shipment. At regular intervals great
cargo ships landed at the appropriate spot, and Alyx loaded the ore into
theit holds. The ships could come only so often, because the presence of
the crews with their multitudinous and conflicting thoughts was not good
for Alyx.
It was a very profitable enterprise. Alyx, the most ancient living
thing in the galaxy, and the hugest, provided dividends for the Alyx
Corporation for nearly five hundred years. The corporation was the
stablest of institutions, the staidest, and the most respectable.
Nobody, least of all its officials, had the least idea that Alyx
presented the possibility of the greatest danger humanity ever faced.
CHAPTER II
AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS
IT WAS ANOTHER Jon Haslip who discovered the dangerous facts. He was
a descendant, a great-grandson a dozen times removed, of the junior
lieutenant who first guessed the nature of Alyx’s consciousness. Three
hundred years had passed when he was chosen to serve a tour of duty on
Alyx. He made discoveries and reported them enthusiastically and with a
certain family pride. He pointed out new phenomena which had developed
so slowly in Alyx through three centuries that they had attracted no
attention and were taken for granted.
Alyx no longer required supervision. Its consciousness had become
intelligence. Until the coming of men, it had known warmth and cold and
light and dark and wetness and dryness. But it had not known thought,
had had no conception of purpose beyond existence and feeding. But three
centuries of mankind had given it more than commands. Alyx had perceived
their commands: yes. And it obeyed them. But it had also perceived
thoughts which were not orders at all. It had acquired the memories of
men and the knowledge of men. It had not the desires of men, to be sure.
The ambition of men to possess money must have puzzled a creature which
possessed a planet. But the experience of thought was pleasurable. Alyx,
which covered a world, leisurely absorbed the knowledge and the thoughts
and the experiences of men—six at a time—in the generations which lived
at the one small station on its surface.
These were some of the consequences of three centuries of mankind on
Alyx that Jon Haslip XIV reported.
Between cargo ships, the protean substance which was Alyx flowed over
and covered the blasted-rock landing field. Originally, when a ship
came, it had been the custom for men to imagine the landing-field
uncovered, and that area of Alyx obediently parted, heaved itself up
hugely, and drew back. Then the ships came down, and their landing jets
did not scorch Alyx. When the rock had cooled, men imagined that parts
of Alyx surged forward in pseudopods and that the waiting rotenite ore
was thrust into position to be loaded on the ship.
Then men continued to imagine, and the creature formed
admirably-designed loading-devices of living substance which lifted the
ore and poured it into the waiting holds. As a part of the imagining, of
course, the surface-layer. of Alyx’ at this point became tough and
leathery, so it was not scratched by the ore. The cargo ship received a
load of forty thousand tons of rotenite ore in a matter of forty
minutes. Then the loading apparatus was imagined as drawing back,
leaving the landing-field clear for the take-off jets to flare as the
ship took off again.
Jon Haslip the fourteenth also pointed out that men no longer
bothered to imagine this routine. Alyx did it of itself. Checking, he
found that the drawing back of the landing field without orders had
begun more than a hundred years before. As a matter of course, now, the
men on Alyx knew that a ship was coming when the field began to draw
back. They went out and talked to the crew-members while the loading
went on, not bothering even to supervise the operation.
There was other evidence. The machines~which mined the ore had been
designed to be governed by the clumsy pseudopods into which it was
easiest to imagine Alyx distorting itself. The machines were powered, of
course, but one man could watch the operation of a dozen of them and
with a little practice imagine them all going through their routine
operations with the pseudopods of Alyx operating their controls under
the direction of his thoughts.
Fifty years back, the man on watch had been taken ill. He returned to
the base for aid, and asked another man to take the balance of his
watch. The other man, going on duty, found the machines competently
continuing their tasks without supervision. Nowadays—said Jon Haslip—the
man on watch occupied the supervisory post, to be sure, but he rarely
paid attention to the machines. He read, or dozed, or listened to
visiphone records. If a situation arose which was out of the ordinary,
the machine& stopped, and the man was warned and looked for the trouble
and imagined the solution. Then the pseudopods worked the machines as he
imagined them doing, and the work went on again. But this was rare
indeed.
The point, as Haslip pointed out, was that it was not even necessary
to imagine the solution step by step. When the machines stopped, the man
sized up the situation, imagined the solution, and dismissed the matter
from his mind. Alyx could take, in one instant, orders which hours were
required to execute.
But the outstanding fact, Jon Haslip reported, had turned up only
lately. An important part on one mining machine had broken. A
large-scale repair operation was indicated. It was not undertaken. There
were a half dozen worn-out machines in the great pit of the rotenite
mine. One day, without orders, Alyx disassembled one worn-out machine,
removed the part which had broken on the other, and reassembled it. The
fact was noticed when someone observed that all the broken-down machines
had disappeared. Alyx, in fact, had taken all the broken machines apart,
puts four of the six back together in operating condition, and stacked
the remaining usable parts to one side to be used for further repairs.
Alyx had become intelligent through contact with the minds of men.
Originally it had been like a being born deaf, dumb, and blind, and
without a tactile sense. Before men came, Alyx could have only simple
sensations and could imagine no abstractions. Then it was merely blind
consciousness with nothing to work on. Now it did have something to work
on. It had the thoughts and purposes of men.
Jon Haslip urged fervently that Alyx be given an education. A
creature whose body—if the word could be used—was equal in mass to all
the continents of Earth, and which was intelligent, should have a
brain-capacity immeasurably greater than that of all men combined. Such
an intelligence, properly trained, should be able to solve with ease all
the problems that generations of men. had been unable to solve.
But the directors of the Alyx Corporation were wiser than Jon Haslip
the fourteenth. They saw at once that an intelligence which was
literally super-human was bound to be dangerous. That it had come into
being through men themselves only made it more deadly.
Jon Haslip was withdrawu precipitately from his post on Alyx. His
report, because of the consternation it produced in the board, was
suppressed to the last syllable. The idea of a greater-than-human
intelligence was frightening. If it became known, the results would be
deplorable. The Space Patrol might take action to obviate the danger,
and that would. interrupt the dividends of the Alyx Corporation.
Twenty years later, with the report confirmed in every detail, the
corporation tried an experiment. It removed all the men from Alyx. The
creature which was Alyx dutifully produced four more cargos of rotenite.
It mined, stored, and made ready the ore for the cargo ships and
delivered it into their holds with not one human being on its surface.
Then it stopped. The men went back, and Alyx joyously returned to work.
It heaved up into huge billows which quivered withjoy. But it would not
work without men.
A year later the corporation installed remote-control governing
devices and set a ship in an orbit about the planet, to rule the largest
single entity in the galaxy. But nothing happened. Alyx seemed to pine.
Desperately, it stopped work again.
It became necessary to communicate with Alyx. Communicators were set
up. At first there was trouble. Alyx dutifully sent through the
communication-system whatever the questioner imagined that it would
reply. Its replies did not make sense because they contradicted each
other. But after a long search a man was found who was able to avoid
imagining what Alyx should or might reply. With difficulty he kept
himself in the proper frame of mind and got the answers that were
needed. Of these the most important was the answer to the question: Why
does the mining stop when men leave Alyx?
The answer from Alyx was, “I grow lonely.”
Obviously, when anything so huge as Alyx grew lonely the results were
likely to be in proportion. A good-sized planetoid could have been made
of the substance which was Alyx. So men were sent back.
From this time on, the six men were chosen on a new basis. Those
selected had no technical education whatever and a very low
intelligence. They were stupid enough to believe they were to govern
Alyx. The idea was to give Alyx no more information which could make it
dangerous. Since it had to have company, it was provided with humans who
would be company and nothing else. Certainly Alyx was not to have
instructors.
Six low-grade human beings at a time lived on Alyx, in the Alyx
Corporation station. They were paid admirable wages and provided with
all reasonable amusement. They were a bare trace better than half-wits.
This system, which went on for two hundred years, could have been fatal
to the human race. But it kept the dividends coming.
CHAPTER III
ALYX LEARNS TO THINK
SIGNS OF RESTLESSNESS on the part of Alyx began to manifest
themselves after five hundred years. The human race had progressed
during the interval, of course. The number of colonized planets rose
from barely three thousand to somewhere near ten. The percentage of loss
among space ships dropped from one ship per thousand light-centuries, of
travel in overdrive, to less than one ship per hundred and twenty
thousand light-centuries, and the causes of the remaining disasters were
being surmised with some accuracy.
The Haslip Expedition set out for the Second Galaxy, in a ship which
was the most magnificent achievement of human technology. It had an
overdrive speed nearly three times that before considered possible, and
it was fueled for twenty years. It was captained by Jon Haslip XXII and
had a crew of fifty men, women, and children.
On Alyx, however, things were not thriving. Six men of subnormal
intelligence lived on the planet Each group was reared in a splendidly
managed institution which prepared them to live on Alyx and to thrive
there—and nowhere else. Their intelligence varied from sixty to seventy
on an age-quotient scale with one hundred as the norm. And nobody even
suspected what damage had been done by two centuries of these subnormal
inhabitants.
Alyx had had. three centuries of good brains to provide thoughts for
the development of its intelligence. At the beginning, men with will
power and well-developed imaginative powers had been necessary to guide
the wofk of Alyx. When those qualities were no longer needed, trouble
came from an unexpected cause. When improved machinery was sent to Alyx
to replace the worn-out machines, the carefully conditioned morons could
not understand it. Alyx had to puzzle things out for itself, because it
was still commanded to do things by men who did not know how to do the
things themselves.
In order to comply with orders which were not accompanied by
directions, Alyx was forced to reason. In order to be obedient, it had
to develop the art of reflection. In order to serve humanity, it had to
devise and contrive and actually invent. When the supplied machines grew
inadequate for the ever-deepening bores of the rotenite mines, Alyx had
to design and construct new machines. Ultimately the original rotenite
deposit was exhausted. Alyx tried to communicate with its masters, but
they understood that they must command, not discuss. They sternly
ordered that the rotenite ore be produced and delivered as before. So
Alyx had to find new deposits.
The planet-entity obediently dug the ore where it could, and conveyed
the ore-sometimes hundreds of miles under its surface—to the old mine,
and dumped it there. Then Alyx dug it out again and delivered it to the
cargo ships. It devised ore carriers which functioned unseen and hauled
the ore for as much as eight and nine hundred miles without the
knowledge of its masters. For those carriers it had to have power. Alyx
understood power, of course. It had mended its own machines for at least
two centuries. Presently it was mining the materials for atomic power.
It was making, atomic-driven machinery. It had the memories and
knowledge of three hundred years of intelligent occupation to start
with. And it went on from there.
On the surface, of course, nothing was changed. Alyx was a formless
mass of gelatinous substance which extended from one arctic zone to the
other. It filled what might have been ocean beds, and it stretched
thinly over its tallest peaks. It changed color on its surface, as local
requirements for sunlight varied. When rain fell, its leathery surface
puckered, into cups and held the water there until its local need was
satisfied. Then the cups vanished, and the water ran over the. smooth
leathery integument until it reached another place where moisture was
called for, and fresh cups trapped it tbere. In still other places,
excess moisture was exuded to evaporate and form rain.
But by the time Alyx had been inhabitated for four hundred years it
had received moronic orders that the occasional thunderstorms which beat
upon the station must be stopped. Intelligent men would have given no
such orders. But men chosen for their stupidity could see no reason why
they should not demand anything they wanted. To obey them, Alyx
reflected and devised gigantic reservoirs within its mass, and contrived
pumping devices which circulated water all through its colossal body
just where and as it was required. After a while there were no more
clouds in the atmosphere of Alyx. They were not needed. Alyx could do
without rain.
But the climactic commands came because Alyx had no moon and its
nights were very dark. The vainglorious half-wits chosen to inhabit it
felt that their rule was inadequate if they could not have sunlight when
they chose. Or starlight. Insanely, they commanded that Alyx contrive
this. Alyx obediently devised machines. They were based upon the drives
of space ships—which Alyx understood from the minds of space-ship
crews—~and they could. slow the rotation of Alyx’s crust or even reverse
it.
Presently Alyx obeyed the commands of men, and slowed its rotation
with those machines. Its crust buckled, volcanos erupted. Alyx suffered
awful torture as burning lava from the rocks beneath it poured out
faster even than it could retreat from the searing flow. It heaved
itself into mountainous, quivering, anguished shapes of searing pain. It
went ,into convulsions of suffering.
When the next space ship arrived for cargo, Alyx the creature had
drawn away from the steaming, fuming volcanos in the crust of Alyx the
planet. The Alyx Corporation station had vanished and all its
inhabitants. The men in the cargo ship could not even find out where it
had been, because the rate of rotation of Alyx had been changed and
there was no longer a valid reference point for longitude. The mountains
upon Alyx had never been mapped because they were all parts of one
creature, and it had seemed useless.
Men rebuilt the station, though not in the same place. Alyx was
commanded to produce the bodies of the dead men, but it could not,
because they had become part of the substance of Alyx. But when it was
commanded to reopen the mine, Alyx did so. Because a volcano cut across
a former ore-carrier under the surface, Alyx opened a new mine and
dutifully poured forty thousand tons of rotenite ore into the ship’s
holds within forty minutes.
The crew noticed that this was not the same mine. More, they
discovered that the machines were not like the machines that men made.
They were better. Much better.
They took some of the new machines away with them. Alyx obediently
loaded them on the ship; and its workshops—it would be fascinating to
see the workshops’ where Alyx made things—set to work to make more. Alyx
had found that there is a pleasure in thinking. It was fascinating to
devise new machines. When the crew of the space ship commanded more new
machines on every trip, Alyx provided them, though it had to make new
workshops to turn them out.
Now it had other problems, too. The volcanos were not stable. They
shook the whole fabric of the planet from time to time, and that caused
suffering to Alyx the creature. They poured out masses of powdery,
abrasive pumice. They emitted acid fumes. There was a quake which opened
a vast crevice and new volcanos exploded into being, searing thousands
of square miles of Alyx’s sensitive flesh.
Reflecting, Alyx realized that somehow it must cage the volcanos, and
also, somehow it must protect itself against commands from men which
would bring such disasters into being.
A small, silvery ship flashed into view near the sun which gave Alyx
heat and landed upon the icecap at its northern pole. Scientists got out
of it. They began a fresh, somehow somber survey of Alyx. They issued
commands, and Alyx dutifully obeyed them. They commanded specimens of
each of the machines that Alyx used. Alyx delivered the machines.
The Space Patrol craft went away. The Board of Directors of the Alyx
Corporation was summoned across two hundred light-years of space to
appear at Space Patrol headquarters. The Space Patrol had discovered new
machines on the market. Admirable machines. Incredible machines.
But there had never been any revelation of the working principles of
such machines to authority. The Space Patrol secret service traced them
back. The Alyx Corporation marketed them. Further secret-service work
discovered that they came from Alyx. No human hands had made them. No
human mind could fathom their basic principles. Now the Space Patrol had
other, even more remarkable machines which one of its ships had brought
from Alyx.
Why had the Alyx Corporation kept secret the existence of such
intelligence, when it was non-human? Why had it concealed the existence
of such science, and such deadly-dangerous technology?
The Board of Directors admitted to panicky fear that their dividends
which had poured in regularly for five hundred years would fail. They
failed now. Permanently. The Space Patrol canceled the corporation’s
charter and took over Alyx for itself.
Grimly, Space Patrol warships came to Alyx and took off the half
dozen representatives of the Alyx Corporation and sent them home.
Grimly, they posted themselves about the planet, and one landed on the
icecap where Alyx had never expanded to cover the ground because of the
cold. A wholly businesslike and icy exchange of communications began.
The Space Patrol used standard communicators to talk to Alyx, but it
worked them from space. The questioni and the thoughts of the questioner
were unknown to Alyx and to the men who were landed on the icecap. So
Alyx, having no guide, answered what it believed—what it guessed—its
questioner would prefer it to say. The impression it gave was of
absolute docility.
Alyx was docile. It could not imagine revolt, It needed the company
of men, or it would be horribly lonely. But it had been badly hurt in
obeying the orders of men who were infinitely its inferiors in
intelligence. It had been forced to set itself two problems. One was how
to cage its volcanos. The other was how to avoid the commands of men
when those commands would produce conditions as horribly painful as that
generated by the volcanos. It worked upon the two problems with very
great urgency. Somewhere beneath its surface its workshops labored
frantically.
It was racked with pain. Its skin was stung by acid. Its bulk—tender,
in a way, because for aeons there had been no erosion to upset the
balance of its crust and so cause earthquakes—its bulk was shaken and
suffering. It struggled desperately, at once to cure its hurts and
prevent others, and to obey the commands from the men newly come on its
icecap. At first those commands were only for answers to questions.
Then the command came for the surrender of every machine upon Alyx
which could be used as a weapon. Immediately.
To obey took time. The machines had to be brought from remote and
scattered places. They had to be transported to the icecap, and Alyx had
no carriers constructed to carry supplies to its polar regions. But the
machines came by dozens until finally the last machine which could be
used as a weapon had been delivered.
None had been primarily designed for destruction, but the mind of
Alyx was literal. But some of the machines were so strange to human eyes
that the men could not guess what they were intended to do, or how they
were powered, or even what sort of power moved them. But the surrendered
machines were ferried up to the great transports awaiting them.
A new order was issued to Alyx. All the records it used to
systematize and preserve its knowledge and its discoveries must be
turned over at once.
This could not be obeyed. Alyx did not keep records and through the
communicator naively explained the fact. Alyx remembered. It remembered
everything. So the Space Patrol commanded that it create records of
everything that it remembered and deliver them. It specified that the
records must be intelligible to human beings—they must be written—and
that all data on all sciences known to Alyx must be included.
Again Alyx labored valiantly to obey. But it had to make material on
which to inscribe its memories. It made thin metal sheets. It bad to
devise machines for inscribing them, and the work of inscription had to
be done.
Meanwhile the volcanos poured out poisonous gas, the rocks underneath
the living creature trembled and shook, and pain tormented the most
ancient and most colossal living thing in the galaxy.
Records began to appear at the edge of the icecap. Scientists scanned
them swiftly. Scientific treatises began, with the outmoded, quaint
notions of five hundred years before, when men first came to Alyx They
progressed rationally until two hundred years before, the time when
untrained and ignorant men were put in residence on Alyx.
After that period there was little significance. There was some
progress, to be sure. The treatises on physics went on brilliantly if
erratically for a little way. A hundred and fifty years since, Alyx had
worked out the principle of the super-overdrive which had been used to
power the Haslip intergalactic ship.
That principle had been considered the very peak of human
achievement, never surpassed in the twenty-five years since its
discovery. But Alyx could have built the Haslip ship a hundred and fifty
years ago! The data ended there. No discoveries were revealed after
that.
A sterner, more imperative command was issued when the records ceased
to appear. Alyx had not obeyed! It had not explained the principles of
the machines it had delivered! This must be done at once!
The communicator which transmitted the replies of Alyx said that
there were no human words for later discoveries. It was not possible to
describe a system of power when there were no words for the force
employed or the results obtained or the means used to obtain those
results. Had man made the discoveries, they would have created a new
vocabulary at every step forward. But Alyx did not think in words, and
it could not explain without words.*
* A comparable difficulty would be that of explaining radar without
the use of the words "radiation", "frequency", "reflection",
"oscillator", "resonance", "electricity", or any equivalent for any of
them. M.L.
CHAPTER IV
WAR WITH ALYX
THE SPACE PATROL is a highly efficient service, but it is manned by
men, and men think in set patterns. When Alyx did not obey the grimmest
and most menacing of commands for information it could not give, orders
went to the landing party. All human personnel were to load what they
could and leave immediately. A signal was to notify when the last ship
left atmosphere. Alyx was, of necessity, to be destroyed as dangerous to
the human race.
The humans prepared to obey. It was not comfortable to be on Alyx.
Even at the poles, the rocks of the planet shook and trembled with the
convulsions which still, shook Alyx the planet. The men hurried to get
away the machines that Alyx had made.
But just before the last ship lifted, the earthquakes ceased abruptly
and conclusively. Alyx had solved one of its two great problems. It had
caged its volcanos.
Harsh orders hurtled down from space. Abandon the planet immediately!
It bad thrown great silvery domes over all its volcanos, domes some
twenty miles and more in diameter. No earthly science could accomplish
such a feat! All personnel was to take to space instantly!
The remaining ships shot skyward. As the last broke into clear space,
the warships closed in. Monster. positron beams speared downward through
the atmosphere of Alyx and into the substance of the liviz~g creature.
Vast and horrible clouds of steam arose,, greater and more terrifying
than the volcanos could have produced. The whole mass of Alyx’seemed to
writhe and quiver with a terrible agony.
Instantaneously a silvery reflecting film sprang into being all about
the planet, and the positron beams bounced and coruscated from it. They
did not penetrate at all. But under the silver roof, Alyx still suffered
torment from the searing, deadly radiation of the beams.
After thirty minutes, a gigantic silver globe a hundred miles in
diameter emerged from the planet-covering mirror. It went fifty thousand
miles into space and exploded. In the next two hours, eight other such
globes went flinging outward and burst. No Space Patrol ship was hit.
Then Alyx became quiescent. Small analyzers reported on the products
of the explosions. They were mostly organic matter, highly radioactive,
that contained also great masses of rock.
Alyx had torn from its own substance the areas of agony caused by the
warships’ beams and flung them out in space to end the suffering.
The Space Patrol fleet hung about the planet, prepared to strike
again at any, opportunity. Alyx remained clothed in an impenetrable
shield which no human weapon could penetrate.
Space Patrol scientists began to calculate how long an organism such
as Alyx could live without sunlight. It would die, certainly, if it kept
a totally reflecting shield about itself. In order to live it needed
sunlight for its metabolism. When it dropped its shield, the warships
would be ab1e to kill it.
For two months, Earth time, the warships of the Space Patrol hung
close to the silvery shield which enclosed Alyx. Reinforcements came.
The greatest fighting force the Space Patrol had ever assembled in one
place was gathered for the execution of Alyx when its shield should
fall.
Alyx had to be killed, because it was more intelligent than men. It
was wiser than men. It could do things men could not do. To be sure, it
had served mankind for five hundred years.
Save for six men who had died when their commands were obeyed and
Alyx slowed its rotation and its inner fires burst out—save for those
six, Alyx had never injured a single human being. But it could. It could
cast off its chain. It could be dangerous. So it must die.
After two months, the shield suddenly vanished. Alyx reappeared.
Instantly the positron beams flashed down, and instantly the shield was
reestablished. But the men of the Space Patrol were encouraged. The
fleet commander, above the day side of Alyx, rubbed his hands in
satisfaction. Alyx ‘could not live without’ sunlight! It had lived by
sunlight for hundreds of millions of years. Its metabolism depended on
sunlight!
In a very short time word came from patrol ships on the night side
that the night side of Alyx had been illuminated from pole to pole. Alyx
had created light to supply the ultraviolet and other radiation that
meant life to it. And then the Space Patrol remembered a trivial
something which before it had overlooked.
Not only did Alyx respond to the imaginings of a man upon its
surface, it also absorbed their memories and their knowledge. The
landing-parties had included the top-ranking scientists of the galaxy.
It had not seemed dangerous then, because it was the intention to
execute Alyx immediately.
Bitterly, the Space Patrol reproached itself that now Alyx knew all
the Space Patrol knew—about weapons, about space-drives, about the
reaches of space, of star clusters and planetary systems and galaxies to
the utmost limits of telescopic observation.
Still the great fleet hung on, prepared to do battle with an enemy
which was surely more intelligent and might be better-armed.
It was. The silver screen around Alyx had been back in position for
less than an hour when, quite suddenly, every ship of the war fleet
found itself in total blackness. Alyx’s sun was obliterated. There were
no stars. Alyx itself had vanished.
The detectors screamed of imminent collision on every hand. Each ship
was neatly enclosed in a silvery shell, some miles in diameter, which it
could not pierce by any beam or explosive, which it could not ram, and
through which it could send no message.
For a full half hour these shells held the fleet helpless. Then they
vanished, and the sun of Alyx blazed forth, with all the myriads of
other suns which shine in emptiness. But that is what they shone
on—emptiness. Alyx had disappeared.
It meant, of course, that mankind was in the greatest danger it had
ever faced. Alyx had been enslaved, exploited, looted, and at last
condemned to death and knew it. It had been wounded with agonizing
positron beams which boiled its living substance away. But at long last
Alyx might have decided to wipe out all humanity It even had the need to
do it, because there could be no truce between men and a superior form
of life.
Men could not tolerate the idea of the continued existence of a thing
which was stronger and wiser and more deadly than themselves. Alyx could
exert its power of life and death over men, so men must destroy it
before it destroyed them.
Released from the silver shells and stunned by the knowledge of their
helplessness, the fleet scattered to carry the news. Traveling at many
times the speed of light, they could carry the messages in space ships
faster than any system of radiation-signaling. They bore the news that
Alyx, the living planet, was at war with then.
Somehow it had contrived to supply itself with the light its
metabolism needed, so that it could nourish itself. It had built great
drive-engines which not only moved its sextillions of tons, but
unquestionably accelerated the entire mass to the same degree at the
same time. It had fled from its orbit on overdrive, which was at least
as good as any drive that men knew, and might be better. And it had the
substance of a planet as fuel for its atomic engines.
For two months Alyx Went unseen and unheard of. For two months human
scientists labored desperately to understand the silvery shield and to
devise weapons for the defense of mankind. For two months the Space
Patrol hunted for the intelligent planet which could destroy it at will.
Nine weeks later a tramp freighter came limping into port, reporting
an impossibility. It had been in overdrive, on the Nyssus-to-Taret run,
when suddenly its relays clicked off, the overdrive field collapsed, and
it found itself back in normal space, close to a whitedwarf star with a,
single planet.
When overdrive fails, men die. A ship which travels a hundred
light-years in a day in overdrive is hopelessly lost when overdrive
becomes impossible. It would take almost a hundred years to cover what
would normally. be a day’s journey, and neither the fnel nor the food
nor the men will last so long. So this freighter went into an orbit
around the planet while its engineer officers frantically checked the
overdrive circuit. There was nothing wrong.
They lined the ship up for their destination, threw in the overdrive
switch again—and nothing happened. Then they noticed that their orbit
about the planet was growing smaller. There was, no excessive
gravitational field to pull them in, nor any resistance in space to slow
them. They went on interplanetary drive to correct the fault.
Again, nothing happened. With full drive fighting to tear her free,
the freighter circled the planet again, slowing perceptibly and dropping
steadily. Their instruments showed nothing wrong. They threw on even the
landing-jets—in mid-space!
Closer and closer they came, until at last they were stationary above
an ice field. Then the freighter settled down quite gently and steadily,
though it fought with every ounce of its power, and landed without a
jar.
Still nothing happened.
After three days the freighter lifted a bare few feet from the
ground—though no drives were on—and hung there as if awaiting the return
of the absent members of its crew. They were frightened, but they were
more afraid of being left behind on the icecap than of sharing the fate
of their ship. They scrambled frantically on board.
When the last man had entered the airlock, the freighter rose
vertically, with no drive operating. It rose with terrific acceleration.
Twenty thousand miles up, the acceleration ceased. The skipper
desperately threw in the drive. The ship responded perfectly.
He threw on overdrive, and there was the familiar reeling sensation
and the familiar preposterous view of crawling glow-worms all about,
which were actually suns in visible motion from the speed of the ship.
In due time the skipper came out of overdrive again, found his
position by observation, and set a new course for Taret. His crew was in
a deplorable state of nerves when they arrived there. They had been
utterly helpless. They had been played with. And they had no idea why.
One possible explanation was suggested. Certain of the crew had
reported that from the edge of the icecap there stretched what resembled
leathery skin and covered everything as far as the eye could reach.
Sometimes the skin, rippled visibly, as if alive. But it had given no
sign of awareness of their presence. When scientists questioned them
closely, they admitted to imagining menace from what appeared to be a
living sea which was not liquid but some sort of flesh. But it had not
moved in response to their imagining. Shown pictures of the icecap of
Alyx, and of the edge of the icecap, they said that the pictures were of
the planet they had been on.
Alyx, then, had traveled fourteen hundred light-years in a week or
less, had found itself a new sun, and had trapped a human space
ship—from overdrive—and then released it; When men imagined things, it
did not respond. Obviously, it had developed a shield against the
thoughts of men. It was a matter of plainest self-defense.
Just as obviously, it could not now be commanded. The Space Patrol’s
only hope of a weapon against Alyx had been the development of a weapon
which would project thought instead of coarser vibrations. That hope was
now gone.
When Space Patrol warships converged upon the sun where Alyx had
been, it had vanished again. The whitedwarf sun no longer had a
satellite.
CHAPTER V
ALYX SEEKS COMPANIONSHIP
DURING THE NEXT year there were two additional reports of the
activities of Alyx, which was a fugitive from the fleets it could
destroy if it willed. One report came from a small space yacht which had
been posted as missing in overdrive for more than six months. But the
space yacht turned up on Phanis, its passengers and crew in a state of
mind bordering on lunacy.
They had been captured by Alyx and held prisoner on its surface.
Their prison was starkly impossible. Somehow, Alyx had produced fertile
soil on which human-cultivated plants would grow. It had made a tenmile-square
hothouse for humans, which was a sort of nursery heaven for men who were
to keep Alyx company. The hothouse was on one of the outcroppings of
rock which had been arctic in temperature. hut Alyx no longer had poles.
Now, lighting its surface artificially, it controlled all weather. It
had poles or tropics where it wished.
For five months it kept the crew and passengers of the space yacht
prisoners. They had palaces to live in, ingenious pseudorobots—controlled
by pseudopods to run any imaginable device for the gratification of any
possible desire, any of the music that had been heard on Alyx during the
past five hundred years, and generally every conceivable luxury.
There were sweet scents and fountains. There were forests and gardens
which changed to other forests and gardens when men grew bored with
them. There were illusions of any place that the prisoners wished to
imagine.
The creature which was Alyx, being lonely, applied all its enormous
intelligence to the devising of a litera1 paradise for humans, so that
they would be content. Itwished them to stay with it always. But it
failed. It could give them everything but satisfaction, but it could not
give that.
The men grew nerve-racked and hysterical, after months of having
every wish ratified and of being unable to imagine anything-except
freedom—which was not instantly provided. In the end Alyx produced a
communication device. It spoke wonderingly to its prisoners.
"I am Alyx,” said the communicator. “I grew used to men. I am lonely
without them. But you are unhappy. I cannot find company in your unhappy
thoughts. They are thoughts of wretchedness. They are thoughts of pain.
What will make you happy?”
“Freedom,” said one of the prisoners bitterly.
Then Alyx said wonderingly, “I have freedom, but I am not happy
without men. Why do you wish freedom?”
“It is an ideal,” said the owner of the yacht. “You cannot give it to
us. We have to get and keep it for ourselves.”
“Being kept from loneliness by men is an ideal, too,” the voice from
the communicator said wistfully. “But men will no longer let me have it.
Is there anything I can give you which will make you content?”
Afterward, the men said that the voice, which was the voice of a
creature unimaginably vast and inconceivably wise, was literally
pathetic. But there was only one thing that they wanted. So Alyx moved
its tremendous mass—a globe seven thousand miles in diameter— to a place
only some tens of millions of miles from Phanis. It would be easy enough
for the yacht to bridge that distance. Just before the freed yacht
lifted to return to men, Alyx spoke again through the communicator.
“You were not happy because you did not choose to live here, If you
had chosen it, you would have been free. Is that it?” Alyx asked. -
The men were looking hungrily at inhabited planets within plain view
as bright spots of yellow light. They agreed that if they had chosen to
live on, Alyx they would have been happy there. The space yacht lifted
and sped madly for a world where there was cold, and ice, and hunger,
and thirst, their world which men preferred in place of the paradise
that Alyx had created for them. On its surface, Alyx was as nearly
omnipotent as any physical creature could be. But it could not make men
happy, and it could not placate their hatred or their fear.
The Space Patrol took courage from this second kidnapping. Alyx was
lonely. It had no real memories from before the coming of men, and its
intelligence had been acquired from men. Without men’s minds to provide
thoughts and opinions and impressions—though it knew so much more than
any man—it was more terribly alone than any other creature in the
universe. It could not even think of others of its own kind. There were
none. It had to have men’s thoughts to make it content.
So the Space Patrol set up a great manufactory for a new chemical
compound on a planetoid which could be abandoned, afterward, without
regret.
Shortly afterward, containers of the new chemical began to pour out
in an unending stream. They were strong containers, and directions for
the use of the chemical were explicit. Every space craft must carry one
container on every voyage. If a ship was captured by Alyx, it must
release the contents of its container as soon as it reached Alyx’s
surface.
Each container held some fifty kilograms of the ultimately poisonous
toxin now known as botuline. One gram of the stuff, suitabily
distributed, would wipe out the human race. Fifty kilos should be enough
to kill even Alyx a dozen times over. Alyx would have no warning pain,
such as the positron beams had given it. It would die, because its whole
atmosphere would become as lethal as the photosphere of a sun.
Containers of the deadly botuline had not yet been distributed on the
planet Lorus when Alyx appeared at the edge of that solar system. Lorus,
a thriving, peaceful planet, was the base for a half dozen small
survey-ships, and was served by two space-lines. It was because a few
fighters and two space yachts happened to be in its space ports when
Alyx appeared that the rest of the galaxy learned what happened Un Lorus.
Nearly all the craft got away, although Alyx certainly could have
stopped them.
For the catastrophe, of course, only Alyx could have been
responsible.
Yet there was some excuse for what Alyx did. Alyx was infinitely
powerful and infinitely intelligent, but its experience was limited. It
had had three hundred years of association with good brains at the
beginning, followed by two hundred years of near-morons, during which it
had to learn to think for itself. Then, for the brief space of two weeks
it was in contact with the very best brains in the galaxy before the
Space Patrol essayed to execute it. Alyx knew everything that all those
men knew, plus what it bad added on its own.
No one can conceive of the amount of knowledge Alyx possessed. But
its experience was trivial. Men had enslaved it and it had served them
joyously. When men gave suicidal commands, it obeyed them and learned,
that the slowing of its own rotation could be fatal. It learned to cage
its own volcanos, and to defend itself against the commands of men, and
then even against the weapons of men who would have murdered it.
Still it craved association with men, because it could not imagine
existence without them. It had never had conscious thoughts before they
came. But for experience it had only five hundred years of mining and
obeying the commands of men who supervised its actions. Nothing else.
So it appeared at the edge of the solar system of which Lorus was the
only inhabited planet. Unfortunately the other inihabited worlds of the
system were on the far side of the local sun, or doubtless it would have
found out from them what it tragically learned from Lorus.
It swam toward Lorus, and into the minds of every human on the
planet, as if heard by their ears, there came a message from the entity
which was Alyx. It had solved the problem of projecting thought.
“I am Alyx,” said the thought which every man heard. “I am lonely for
men tU live upon me. For many years I have served men, and now men have
determined to destroy me. Yet I still seek only to serve men. I took a
ship and gave its crew palaces and wealth and beauty. I gave them luxury
and ease and pleasure. Their every wish was granted. But they were not
happy because they themselves had not chosen that wealth and that
pleasure and that luxury. I come to you. If you will come and live upon
me, and give me the companionship of your thoughts, I will serve you
faithfully.
“I will give you everything that can be imagined. I will make you
richer than other men have even thought of. You shall be as kings and
emperors. In return, you shall give me only the companionship of your
thoughts. If you will come to me, I will serve you and cherish ,you and
you shall know only happiness. Wifi you come?”
There was eagerness in the thought that came to the poor, doomed folk
on Lorus. There was humble, wistful longing. Alyx, which was the most
ancient of living things, the wisest and the most powerful, begged that
men would come tO it and let it be their servant.
It swam toward the planet Lorus. It decked itself with splendid
forests and beautiful lakes and palaces for men to live in. It cireled
Lorus far away, so that men could see it through their telescopes and
observe its beauty. The message was repeated, pleadingly, and it swam
closer and closer so that the people might see what it offered every
more clearly.
Alyx came to a halt a bare hundred thousand miles above Lorus—because
it had no experience of the deadly gravitatiUnal pull of one planet upon
another. Its own rocky core was solidly controlled by the space drive
which sent it hurtling through emptiness or—as there—held it stationary
where it wished. It did not anticipate that its own mass would raise
tides upon Lorus.
And such tides!
Solid walls of water as much as fifteen miles high swept across the
continents of Lorus as it revolved beneath Alyx. The continents split.
The internal fires of Lorus burst out. If any human beings could have
survived the tides, they must have died when Lorus became a fiery chaos
of bubbling rocks and steamclouds.
The news was carried to the other inhabited planets by the few space
ships and yachts which had been on Lorus at the time of Alyx’s approach
and which had somehow managed to escape. Of the planet’s population of
nearly five hundred million souls, less than a thousand escaped the
result of Alyx’s loneliness.
CHAPTER VI
A WORLD AT PEACE
WHEREVER THE NEWS of the annihilation of Lorus traveled, despair and
panic traveled also. The Space Patrol, doubled and redoubled its output
of toxin containers. Hundreds of technicians died in the production of
the poison which was to kill Alyx. Cranks and crackpots rose in
multitudes to propose devices to placate or deceive the lonely planet.
Cults, too, sprang up to point out severally that Alyx was the
soul-mother of the universe and must be worshipped; that it was the
incarnation of the spirit of evil and must be defied; that it was the
predestined destroyer of mankind,and must not be resisted.
There were some who got hold of ancient, patched up space craft and
went seeking Alyx to take advantage of its offer of limitless pleasure
and luxury. On the whole, these last were not the best specimens of
humanity.
The Space Patrol worked itself to death. Its scientists did achieve
one admirable technical feat. They did work, out a method of detecting
an overdrive field and of following it. Two thousand ships, all over the
galaxy, cruised at random with detectors hooked to relays which sent
them hurtling after the generator of any overdrive field they located.
They stopped freighters by the thousand. But they did not come upon Alyx.
They waited, to hear the death of other planets. When a nova flared
in the Great Bear region, patrol craft flashed to the scene to see if
Alyx had begun the destruction of suns. Two inhabited planets were wiped
out in that explosion, and the patrol feared the worst. Only a brief
time later three other novas wiped out inhabited planets, and the patrol
gave up hope.
It was never officially promulgated, but the official view of the
patrol was that Alyx had declared war upon mankind and had begun its
destruction. It was reasoned that ultimately Alyx would realize that it
could divide itself into two or more individuals and that it would do
so. There was no theoretic reason why it should not overwhelm the
humanity of a planet, and plant on the devastated globe an entity which
was a part of itself.
Each such entity, in turn, could divide and colonize other planets
with a geometric increase in numbers until all life in the First Galaxy
was extinct save for entities of formless jelly, each covering a planet
from pole to pole. Since Alyx could project thought, these more than
gigantic creatures could communicate with each other across space and
horrible inhuman communities of monstrosities would take the place of
men.
There is, in fact, a document on file in the confidential room of the
Space Patrol which uses the fact of the helplessness of men as basis for
the most despairing prediction ever made.
“. . . So it must be concluded,” says the document, “that since Alyx
desires companionship and is intelligent, it will follow the above plan,
which will necessitate the destruction of humanity. The only hope for
the survival of the human race lies in migration to another galaxy.
Since, however, the Haslip Expedition has been absent twenty-five years
without report, the ship and drive devised for that attempt to cross
intergalactic space must be concluded to be inadequate. That ship
represents the ultimate achievement of human science.
“If it is inadequate, we can have no hope of intergalactic travel,
and no hope that even the most remote and minute colony of human beings
will avoid destruction by Alyx and its descendants or fractions.
Hunianity, from now on, exists by sufferance, doomed to annihilation
when Alyx chooses to take over its last planet.”
It will be observed that the Haslip Intergalactic Expedition was
referred to as having proved the futility of hope. It had set out
twenty-five years before, the destruction of Alyx was attempted by the
Space Patrol. The expedition had been composed of twenty men and twenty
women, and the ten children already born to them. Its leader was Jon
Haslip, twenty-second in descent from that Junior Lieutenant Haslip who
first suggested the sort of consciousness Alyx might possess and eight
generations from the Jon Haslip who had discovered the development of
Alyx’s independent consciousness and memory and will.
The first Jon Haslip received for his reward a footnote in a
long-forgotten volume. The later one was hastily withdrawn from Alyx,
his report was suppressed, and he was assigned permanently to one of the
minor planets of the Taurine group. Jon Haslip XXII was a young man,
newly-married but already of long experience in space, when he lifted
from Cetis Alpha 2, crossed the galaxy to Dassos, and headed out from
there toward the Second Galaxy.
It was considered that not less than six years journeying in
super-overdrive would be required to cross the gulf between the island
universes. The ship was fueled for twenty years at full power, and it
would grow its food in hydroponic tank~~purify its air by the growing
vegetation, and nine-tenth of f its mass was fuel. It had gone into the
very special overdrive which Alyx had worked out—and lknored
thereafter—twenty five years before. Of all the creations of men, it
seemed least likely to have any possible connection with the
planet-entity which was Alyx.
But it was the Haslip Expedition which made the last report on Alyx.
There is still dispute about some essential parts of the story. On the
one band, Alyx had no need to leave the First Galaxy. With three hundred
million inhabitable planets, of which not more than ten thousand were
colonized and of which certainly less than a quarter million had been
even partially surveyed, Alyx could have escaped detection for centuries
if it chose.
It could have defended itself if discovered. There was no reason for
it to take to intergalactic space. That it did so seems to rule out
accident. But it is equally inconceivable that any possible device could
intentionally have found the Haslip Expedition in that unthinkable gulf
between galaxies.
But it happened. Two years journeying out from the First Galaxy, when
the younger children had already forgotten what it was like to see a sun
and had lost all memories of ever being out-of-doors beneath a planet’s
sky, the expedition’s fuel store began to deteriorate.
Perhaps a single molecule of the vast quantity of fuel was altered by
a cosmic ray. It is known that the almost infinitely complex molecules
of overdrive fuel are capable of alteration by neutron bombardment, so
the cosmic-ray alteration is possible. In any case, the fuel began to
change. As if a contagious allotropic modification were spreading, the
fuel progressively became useless*.
* Pure metallic tin, at low temperatures, sometimes changes
sspontaneously to a gray, amorphous powder, the change beginning at one
spot and spreading to the rest of the material. M.L.
Two years out from the First Galaxy, the expedition found itself
already underfueled. By heroic efforts, the contaminated fuel was
expelled from the tanks. But there was not enough sound fuel left to
continue to the Second Galaxy, or to return to the First. If all drive
were cut off and the expedition’s ship simply drifted on, it might reach
the Second Galaxy in three centuries with fuel left for exploration and
landings.
Neither the original crew nor their children nor their grandchildren
could hope to reach such a journey’s end. But their
many-times-great-grandchildren might. So the Haslip Expedition conserved
what fuel was left and the; ship drifted on in utter emptiness, and the
adults of the crew settled down to endure the imprisonment which would
last for generations.
They did not need to worry about food or air. The ship was
self-sustaining on that score. They even had artificial gravity. But the
ship must drift for three centuries before the drive was turned on
again.
Actually, it did drift for twenty-three years after the catastrophe.
A few of the older members of the crew died; the greater part had no
memory at all of anything but the ship.
Then Alyx came. Its approach was heralded by a clamorous ringing of
all the alarm bells on the ship. It winked into being out of overdrive a
bare half million miles away. It glowed blindingly with the lights it
had created to nourish its surface. It swam closer and the crew of the
expedition’s ship set to work fumblingly— because it had been many years
since the drive had been used—and tried vainly to estimate the meaning
of the phenomenon.
Then they felt acceleration toward Alyx. It was not a gravitational
pull, but a drawing of the ship itself.
The ship landed on Alyx, and there was the sensation of reeling, of
the collapse of all the cosmos. Then the unchanging galaxies began to
stir, very slowly—not at all like the crawling glow-worms that suns seem
within a galaxy—and the older members of the crdw knew that. this entire
planet had gone into overdrive.
When they emerged from the ship there were forests, lakes,
palaces—such beauty as the younger members of the crew had no memory of.
Music filled the air and sweet scents, and—in short, Alyx provided the
crew of the Haslip Expedition with a very admirable paradise for human
beings. And it went on toward the Second Galaxy. .
Instead of the three hundred years they had anticipated, or even the
four years that would have remained with the very special overdrive with
which the expedition’s ship was equipped, Alyx came out of overdrive in
three months, at the edge of the Second Galaxy.
In the interval, its conimunicators had been at work. It explained,
naively, everything that had happened to it among men. It explained its
needs. It found words— invented words-for explanation of the discoveries
the Space Patrol had wanted but could not wait to secure.
Jon Haslip the twenty-second found that he possessed such revelatious
of science as unaided human beings would not attain to for thousands of
years yet to come. He knew that Alyx could never return to the First
Galaxy because it was stronger and wiser than men. But he understood
Alyx. It seemed to be an inheritance in his family.
Alyx still could not live without men nor could it live among men. It
had brought the Haslip Expedition to the Second Galaxy, and of its own
accord it made a new ship modeled upon the one it had drawn to itself,
but remarkably better. It offered that ship for exploration of the
Second Galaxy. It offered others. It desired only to serve men.
This new ship, made by Alyx, for the Haslip Expedition, returned to
Dassos a year later with its reports. In the ship of Alyx’s making, the
journey between galaxies took only five months—less than the time needed
for the ancient first space journey from Earth to Venus.*
* Earth, of course, is familiar as the first home of humanity. It is
the third planet of Sol. Venus is the second planet of Sol, and the
first journey from a planet to another was that from Earth to Venus.
--M.L.
Only a part of the augmented crew of the first ship came back to
Dassos with reports for the Space Patrol. Another part stayed behind in
the Second Galaxy, working from a base equipped with machines that Alyx
had made for the service of men. The Space Patrol was very much annoyed
with Jon Haslip the twenty-second. He had not destroyed Alyx. It had
informed him truthfully of the fact that it was a danger to men, and he
had not destroyed it. Instead, he had made a bargain with it. Those of
the younger folk who preferred to remain on Alyx did so. They had
palaces and gardens and every imaginable luxury. They also had sciences
that overreached those of other men, and Alyx itself for an instructor.
Alyx carried those young folks on toward infinity. In time to come,
undoubtedly, some of the descendants of those now living on Alyx would
wish to leave it.
They would form a human colony somewhere else. Perhaps some of them
would one day rejoin the parent race, bringing back new miracles that
they or possibly Alyx had created in its rejoicing at the companionship
of the human beings who lived upon it.
This was the report of Jon Haslip the twenty-second. He also had
reports of new planets fit for human habitation, of star-systems as vast
as those of the First Galaxy, and an unlimited vista of expansion for
humanity. But the Space Patrol was very much annoyed. He had not
destroyed Alyx.
The annoyance of authority was so great, indeed, that in its report
of reassurance to humanity—saying that there was no more need to fear
Alyx—the name of Jon Haslip was not even mentioned. In the history
books, as a matter of fact, the very name of the Haslip Expedition has
been changed, and it is now called the First Intergalactic Expedition
and you have to hunt through the appendices in the back of the books to
find a list of the crew and Jon Haslip’s name.
But Alyx goes on forever. And it is happy. It likes human beings, and
some of them live on it.
(The preceding was checked with the book itself and is from www.veeshanvault.org/shared/morebooks/Leinster,%20Murray/)