Part 3

In the air was a voice. It came from the sphere. It went directly to the minds of the listeners, whispered as a thought current in their brains, whispered as a ghost moving among the nerve endings. The voice said:

"Thus the human race reached its goal. There were not many of us left, a few hundred only. We had reached the point where mental activity alone interested us.... Then our last genius invented what we can only describe to you as a perfect brain. It was a substance that would absorb and retain mental impulses. It would absorb and retain our mental impulses. In effect, then, it would become us.

"That substance is housed in the heart of this sphere.

"We built the sphere, set forces in it that made it, to the best of our knowledge, all powerful. We armed it with incredible weapons. We built into it the apparatus to warp space--an adaptation of the drive we once used on our space ships. Then, on the brain substance housed in the heart of this sphere, we impressed the individual consciousness of each living person, and the knowledge that each person had in his own mind, which included all the knowledge that the human race has gained in more than two million years. We blended into one mind the minds of the two hundred humans who remained alive. Housed in a substance that was eternal, sheltered in a sphere that could not be destroyed, it became an almost perfect mind. We thought it was perfect. We discarded our bodies, as outworn tools. Physically, the human race died. Mentally, it would live forever.

"One thing we had never done--flown to the stars. We had reached the planets and had almost forgotten them. But the stars in the sky we had not reached. It was the last great voyage of discovery.

"We set out for the stars. And we reached them!"

The twinkling points of light that Jan Lippershey had shown to be suns lost in the immensity of space!

The voice died into silence, seemed to rest, then whispered again.

"And near Antares a meteor swarm struck us. Inconceivable powers were housed within this sphere. We tried to escape but the swarm was moving almost as fast as light. We tried to blast the meteors into nothingness, and we succeeded in this. But we could not succeed forever. Eventually even the powers of this sphere were near exhaustion. Thousands of pea-size meteors struck us. The force of those collisions cracked the sphere itself. In time we limped back to earth, limped back to a place where we could lie up and lick our wounds.

"We discovered that the wounds would not heal, that the damage was irreparable. Energy was leaking from the sphere, a little by a little. Somehow we had erred in its construction.

"Somehow we had gone down the wrong road, had taken the wrong turning.

"We could not anticipate that this would happen, we could not see what would happen tomorrow. But we knew that our race, and your race, was dying here, that you, back in the mists of time, were moving down a road with death as your destiny.

"The drive that carries a race is not lightly ended.

"But the human race ended in us, in our error.

"It was our mistake. It was our task to correct it, if we could.

"We tried.

"We could not go back through time, but we could force our thoughts back to certain cyclic periods. We could reach only a few periods, most of them too early or too late to meet our needs. Eventually we found a time that was right and a mind that could understand. To that mind we gave instructions, to Lee Garth...."

The voice paused, sought for energy, slowly gathered it, then went on.

"That is why you were brought here--to repopulate a world, to take up where we left off, to correct an error made two million years after your time.

"We have taken the living from the remote past and used them to bridge the chasm of death. Yours to carry on."

There was silence. Men moved awkwardly, staring at each other, at that sphere, at Lee Garth. The girls, somehow, seemed to understand.

It was Scoop Martin who came out of the crowd, stood apologetically before Lee Garth.

"Mr. Garth, sir, is that right, what we heard?"

Scoop's wolfish face was a mask of fear, doubt, and hesitation.

Garth swallowed. He nodded.

"But--" the reporter gestured toward the globe. "How can men be in that?"

Garth answered slowly. "A lot can be learned in two million years. It is not impossible. You, the you that really exists, your mind, your consciousness, is a movement of thought within a suitable medium. Evolution provided a chemical medium, a mass of tissue, your brain. That is all you really are, the movement of current within your brain cells.... The men who came two million years after us found a better medium than the brain. Upon that better medium, they impressed their thinking."

Garth hesitated, and when he spoke, it was not to Martin, but to someone else.

"Is that not right?"

There was a rustle in the air. A voice whispered.

"In essence, that is correct. It was not so simple as that, but you have the underlying thought. In the year that we have yet to live, we will teach you the process. Perhaps you may discover our error. Perhaps you will want to use other methods. We cannot advise on that point. The only thing that matters is that the race must go on to whatever is its ultimate destiny."

Sighing with the pulse of failing energy, the whisper ceased.

The group stirred again, moving restlessly.

"I'm sorry," Garth spoke, "that I did not ask your permission to bring you here. But I had no choice. If I had asked for volunteers to repopulate the world of two million years from our time, you would have concluded I was crazy. So I had to bring you here without consulting you."

They didn't seem to hear him. They stirred uneasily. All malice was gone out of them. Only unease and trembling wonder were left.

Martin twisted. He spoke.

"We have to rebuild--to repopulate--a world. That's why we're here?"

Garth swallowed, fighting the lump in his throat. He nodded.

"It seems hard to understand, sir," Martin said. "But what can I do to help?"

The lump in Garth's throat rose so high he could not swallow it.

A bulky figure in uniform came out of the crowd. "What can I do, Mr. Garth, to help?"

There was a confused babble of voice. "What can we do, Mr. Garth, to help?"

In that babble he heard only one voice, that of the girl at his side, asking what she might do.

"You might remember," he answered, "that--that my name is Lee."

And when, during the shadow night that followed, the descendents of the dogs the race had left behind them howled on the hills for their lost masters, now there came an answer. Men whistled to them. Slowly, hesitantly, fearfully, but gaining confidence as the whistles of men roused half lost memories, the dogs came down from the hills to their new masters.

Here and there, upon this earth, are fields.