Part 2

Eagerly Llud took the sheaf of photographs made with the telescope. But they told him nothing; only the continental outlines were clear, and those were as they had been nine hundred years ago.... He looked up inquiringly at Zost Relyul.

"There are some strange features," said the astronomer carefully. "First of all--there are no lights on the night side. And on the daylight face, our highest magnification should already reveal traces of cities, canals, and the like--but it does not.

"The prevailing color of the land masses, you see, is the normal green vegetation. But the diffraction spectrum is queer. It indicates reflecting surfaces less than one-tenth millimeter wide--so the vegetation there can't be trees or grass, but must be more like a fine moss or even a coarse mold."

"Is that all?" demanded Llud.

"Isn't it enough?" said Zost Relyul blankly. "Well--we tried photography by invisible light, of course. The infra-red shows nothing and likewise the ultraviolet up to the point where the atmosphere is opaque to it."

The captain sighed wearily. "Good work," he said. "Keep it up; perhaps you can answer some of these riddles before--"

"_We know who you are_," interrupted a harshly crackling voice with a strange accent, "_and pleading will do you no good._"

* * * * *

Knof Llud whirled to the radio apparatus, his weariness dropping from him once more. He snapped, "But who are you?" and the words blended absurdly with the same words in his own voice on the still repeating tape.

He snapped off the record; as he did so the speaker, still crackling with space static, said, "It may interest you to know that you are the last. The two other interstellar expeditions that went out have already returned and been destroyed, as you will soon be--the sooner, if you continue toward Earth."

Knof Llud's mind was clicking again. The voice--which must be coming from Earth, relayed by one of the midget ships--was not very smart; it had already involuntarily told him a couple of things--that it was not as sure of itself as it sounded he deduced from the fact it had deigned to speak at all, and from its last remark he gathered that the _Quest III's_ ponderous and unswerving progress toward Earth had somehow frightened it. So it was trying to frighten them.

He shoved those facts back for future use. Just now he had to know something, so vitally that he asked it as a bald question, "_Are you human?_"

The voice chuckled sourly. "We are human," it answered, "but you are not."

The captain was momentarily silent, groping for an adequate reply. Behind him somebody made a choked noise, the only sound in the stunned hush, and the ship jarred slightly as a thunderbolt slammed vengefully into its field.

"Suppose we settle this argument about humanity," said Knof Llud woodenly. He named a vision frequency.

"Very well." The tone was like a shrug. The voice went on in its language that was quite intelligible, but alien-sounding with the changes that nine hundred years had wrought. "Perhaps, if you realize your position, you will follow the intelligent example of the _Quest I's_ commander."

Knof Llud stiffened. The _Quest I_, launched toward Arcturus and the star cloud called Berenice's Hair, had been after the _Quest III_ the most hopeful of the expeditions--and its captain had been a good friend of Llud's, nine hundred years ago.... He growled, "What happened to him?"

"He fought off our interceptors, which are around you now, for some time," said the voice lightly. "When he saw that it was hopeless, he preferred suicide to defeat, and took his ship into the Sun." A short pause. "The vision connection is ready."

Knof Llud switched on the screen at the named wavelength, and a picture formed there. The face and figure that appeared were ugly, but undeniably a man's. His features and his light-brown skin showed the same racial characteristics possessed by those aboard the _Quest III_, but he had an elusive look of deformity. Most obviously, his head seemed too big for his body, and his eyes in turn too big for his head.

He grinned nastily at Knof Llud. "Have you any other last wishes?"

"Yes," said Llud with icy control. "You haven't answered one question. Why do you want to kill us? You can see we're as human as you are."

The big-headed man eyed him with a speculative look in his great eyes, behind which the captain glimpsed the flickering raw fire of a poisonous hatred.

"It is enough for you to know that you must die."

* * * * *

Llud frowned darkly--then an incredible light burst in his brain. He stared at the pictured figure with quite new and indescribable sensations. "You," he said slowly, "are not on Earth, as I was assuming; if you were, there'd be a time lag of quite a few minutes in this conversation. You must be on one of those miniature ships out there--which aren't big enough to hold a man!"

He saw the uncanny hate flare closer to the surface this time.

"You are clever," said the big-headed man spitefully. "Very well, then--in your screen you see some of the differences between me, who am human, and you, who are not any more. The main difference, which you do not see, is that I am three point sixty-two millimeters high, and you are more like two meters."

Knof Llud was speechless. The man who had just said he was an eighth of an inch tall grinned unpleasantly again at his amazement. "Yes," he said. "I am one of the New Humanity, which has replaced your kind on the Earth. You are the last of the old, subhuman race of giants, which will very shortly be extinct."

"It's impossible," whispered Llud. But he had to remember that he had been on the verge of deducing the thing himself.

The little man folded his arms and gazed at him with mocking superiority. "You have the mentality of nine hundred years ago. Your age would have called size reduction impossible, even though they already had most of the biophysical and genetic knowledge needed. They suffered from increasing overpopulation, but they were blind to the obvious answer--so Earth went through the wasteful folly of launching the interstellar ships. We are descended from dull-witted giants like you."

Cautiously, out of sight of the screen, Llud extended a hand and found a pad of memo blanks and a pencil. Without taking his eyes off the magnified, bragging image, he began to write. He thought he had the answer now to this murderous welcome.

"_We_ have found the solution of the problem of growth," the image was saying. "For seven hundred years now, each generation has been smaller than the one before, so that there is constantly more room on the planet, relatively speaking; and the process still goes on. There are six hundred trillion of us on Earth now. In another two generations there will be a quadrillion human beings only two millimeters tall--and no overcrowding.

"But," the little man snarled venomously, "we have no room for you giants!"

Knof Llud sighed. The sagging lines of his face were calculated to reassure the other and his superiors on Earth, to whom the sight-sound conversation was undoubtedly being relayed. Llud said tiredly, "But you don't have any reason for destroying us. Why not let us land on one of the worthless outer planets, and make an attempt to live there? Or, if you will give us a little atomic fuel, we will leave the Solar System again and trouble you no more. In exchange we have a great deal of knowledge, data on the stars of the Taurus Cluster and beyond, to offer...."

* * * * *

As he spoke, he was beckoning Gwar Den to him, handing the navigator the brief order he had scrawled on the pad.

The little man laughed shortly. "As if we could trust you--or wanted your worthless knowledge of stars! No, we will not bargain with giants."

The captain said slowly, for there was still time to be gained in order that the gamble he had decided on might have its chance, "You're very sure that you _can_ smash us. Remember, we control gravitic forces, a science you have evidently lost."

He saw the look of sneering triumph waver a little; then the image snapped, "We destroyed the others. Your screen, whatever it is, is not impenetrable; we have power to break through it."

That was true, of course. The drive-field would collapse when the fuel ran out, desperately soon now.

Llud started to speak again; then he felt the nearly imperceptible lurch that meant the _Quest III_ had applied a terrific acceleration at an angle to its line of flight. Gwar Den had done a quick job.

The impacts of enemy fire ceased; the ship's abrupt swerve had temporarily shaken off its rocket-driven tormentors.

Almost simultaneously the image on the screen looked startled. The man turned as if listening to some one else. "So you've begun a frantic attempt to dodge. It won't help you--" His jaw dropped and he listened again; this time he was a little longer overcoming his surprise. Knof Llud knew what the second message had been as surely as if he had been there--that the _Quest III_, far from doubling back, was still heading for Earth, from a slightly different angle, and was even accelerating. The side thrust had already ceased. That expenditure of fuel reduced the chances, but it had to be risked.

The little man faced Knof Llud again and smiled savagely. "Whatever you're trying, we're ready for you!"

"No doubt," thought the captain with some satisfaction. He sat up straighter and gazed at the little man. His discouraged air was gone and the look in his eyes was the distillate of cold, searing scorn. He said, biting off the words with deliberate emphasis, to that one and the others who would be listening, "You pitiful pigmies."

The face in the screen grew darker with rage; it opened its mouth and closed it with a snap.

"You pitiful pigmies," repeated Knof Llud. "You're pigmies not only in physical size, but in everything else. You've thrown away everything that made being human worthwhile, all for the sake of your one pigmy ambition--to multiply your crawling little lives and become more and more at the same time that you become less and less. You've shrunk into vermin. In the end you'll probably shrink away to nothing, and good riddance."

With sudden change of pace he shot out a question: "What's the longest wave length of visible light?"

"2100 angstroms," the answer was mechanical. Then, "You--"

The captain smiled a smile of weary disdain. "I thought so. Six hundred trillion of you, eh? Crawling around down there in the dark, because you see in the far ultraviolet--and the atmosphere stops those frequencies. You can't see the stars! For thousands of years men watched the stars and wanted them and were kept trying by sight of them--but you can't see the stars any more."

The face stared at him with great eyes full of unspeakable hate, and spat a word which had not been in the language when the _Quest III_ was launched. The screen went suddenly blank.

* * * * *

Knof Llud turned away, and his eyes fell on another vision screen. Earth was clear in it, dead ahead, a disk so near that land and sea were distinguishable with the naked eye, and coming rapidly nearer. The sight cost him a moment's nostalgic pain; then he thought of the little men, swarming ant-like over every square foot of habitable land.... Vermin he had called them; vermin they were.

He found himself, for no sensible reason, counting seconds. He had got to seventeen when the screen that showed Earth dissolved into a featureless and blinding glare.

At the same instant a force too tremendous for the senses to register smote the _Quest III_. The interior of the ship, everything and everyone in it seemed to stretch and distort like rubber as the gravitic field was strained beyond its elastic limit. The lights went out as the drive units claimed the last erg of available energy and shrieked their overloaded protest through the crushing and twisted darkness.

But then the lights went on again and the ship was hurtling free in space. Its people picked themselves up dazedly and tried to understand why they were still alive.

"Gee, Dad," young Knof said admiringly as he dabbed at a blackening eye, "what did you do?"

"_I_ didn't do much," said the captain. "The fireworks were from our little friends. I just took your advice about getting the other fellow mad, and it worked. They just shut their eyes and swung with everything they had."

The boy gazed at the vision screen where the Sun was already a star again. He whistled. "They had plenty."

"I thought the heavy artillery must be ready on Earth in case we kept going that way. It was--enough of it to knock us right out of the System at close to the speed of light. Just how close I don't know yet ... ah." He took a couple of sheets of figures from the hands of Gwar Den, and devoured them rapidly. He nodded with satisfaction to the anxious faces around. "We must have been hit simultaneously by fire from all over one hemisphere--and the forces' resultant, which is now our course, came out as I had hoped.... Our velocity is close enough; the journey will take about fourteen years, ship's time, but most of us can expect to live that long--"

"Where are we going?" demanded Knof Jr., unable to contain his curiosity.

Captain Knof Llud smiled down at his son with a touch of wistfulness. The memory of Earth, dwindling into infinite smallness behind, still hurt him; but young Knof would never know that hurt. And, after fourteen years, the captain would be about ready to leave his dream in younger hands.... He laid an arm about the boy's shoulders and pointed silently to the forward vision screen, to a faint blurred light dead in its center.

"Omega Centauri," he said, and there was a new confidence in his voice.