People of the Darkness Read online

  One of the young purple lights, Cosmic by name, threw a mass of matter a short distance into space, reached out with a tractor ray and drew it in. He swung it ‘round and ‘round on the tip of that ray, gradually forming ever-decreasing circles. To endow the planet with a velocity that would hurl it unerringly between the two outermost planetary orbits required a delicate sense of compensatory adjustment between the factors of mass, velocity, and solar attraction.

  When Cosmic had got the lump of matter down to an angular velocity that was uniform, Darkness knew an irritation he had never succeeded in suppressing, An intuition, which had unfailingly proved itself accurate, told him that anything but creating an orbit for that planet was likely to ensue.

  “Cosmic.” He contacted the planet-maker’s thought rays. “Cosmic, the velocity you have generated is too great. The whole system will break up.”

  “Oh, Darkness.” Cosmic threw a vision on him. “Come on, join us. You say the speed is wrong? Never — you are! I’ve calculated everything to a fine point.”

  “To the wrong point,” insisted Darkness stubbornly. “Undoubtedly, your estimation of the planet’s mass is the factor which makes your equation incorrect. Lower the velocity. You’ll see.”

  Cosmic continued to swing his lump of matter, but stared curiously at Darkness.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he inquired. “You don’t sound just right. What does it matter if I do calculate wrong, and disturb the system’s equilibrium? We’ll very probably break up the whole thing later, anyway.”

  A flash of passion came over Darkness. “That’s the trouble,” he said fiercely. “It doesn’t matter to any of you. You will always be children. You will always be playing. Careful construction, joyous destruction — that is the creed on which you base your lives. Don’t you feel as if you’d like, sometime, to quit playing, and do something… worthwhile?”

  As if they had discovered a strangely different set of laws governing an alien galaxy, the hundreds of youths, greens and purples, stared at Darkness.

  Cosmic continued swinging the planet he had made through space, but he was plainly puzzled. “What’s wrong with you, Darkness? What else is there to do except to roam the galaxies and make suns? I can’t think of a single living thing that might be called more worthwhile.”

  “What good is playing?” answered Darkness. “What good is making a solar system? If you made one, and then, perhaps, vitalized it with life, that would be worthwhile! Or think, think! About yourself, about life, why it is, and what it means in the scheme of things! Or,” and he trembled a little, “try discovering what lies beyond the veil of lightlessness which surrounds the universe.”

  The hundreds of youths looked at the darkness: Cosmic stared anxiously at him. “Are you crazy? We all know there’s nothing beyond. Everything that is is right here in the universe. That blackness is just empty, and it stretches away from here forever.”

  “Where did you get that information?” Darkness inquired scornfully. “You don’t know that. Nobody does. But I am going to know! I awoke from sleep a short while ago, and I couldn’t bear the thought of play. I wanted to do something substantial. So I am going into the darkness.”

  He turned his gaze hungrily on the deep abyss hemming in the stars. There were thousands of years, even under its lower time standard, in which awe dominated the gathering. In his astonishment at such an unheard-of intention, Cosmic entirely forgot his circling planet. It lessened in velocity, and then tore loose from the tractor ray that had become weak, in a tangent to the circle it had been performing.

  It sped toward that solar system, and entered between the orbits of the outermost planets. Solar gravitation seized it, the lone planet took up an erratic orbit, and then the whole system had settled into complete stability, with seven planets where there had been six.

  “You see,” said Darkness, with a note of unsteady mirth, “if you had used your intended speed, the system would have coalesced. The speed of the planet dropped, and then escaped you. Some blind chance sent it in the right direction. It was purely an accident. Now throw in a second sun, and watch the system break up. That has always amused you.” His aura quivered. “Goodbye, friends.”

  Chapter III

  Oldster

  He was gone from their sight forever. He had snapped into the sixth band. He ranged back to the spot where Oldster should have been. He was not.

  Probably in some other band,thought Darkness, and went through all the others, excepting the fifteenth, where resided a complete lack of light. With a feeling akin to awe, since Oldster was apparently in none of them, he went into the fifteenth and called out.

  There was a period of silence. Then Oldster answered, in his thoughts a cadence of infinite weariness.

  “Yes, my son; who calls me?”

  “It is I, Darkness, whom Sparkle presented to you nearly fifty million years ago.” Hesitating, an unexplainable feeling as of sadness unquenchable came to him.

  “I looked for you in the sixth,” he went on in a rush of words, but did not expect to find you here, isolated, with no light to see by.”

  “I am tired of seeing, my son. I have lived too long. I have tired of thinking and of seeing. I am sad.”

  Darkness hung motionless, hardly daring to interrupt the strange thought of this incredible ancient. He ventured timidly, “It is just that I am tired of playing, Oldster, tired of doing nothing. I should like to accomplish something of some use. Therefore, I have come to you, to ask you three questions, the answers to which I must know.”

  Oldster stirred restlessly, “Ask your questions.”

  “I am curious about life.” Oldster’s visitor hesitated nervously, and then went on, “It has a purpose, I know, and I want to know that purpose. That is my first question.”

  “But why, Darkness? What makes you think life has a purpose, an ultimate purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” came the answer, and for the first time Darkness was startled with the knowledge that he really didn’t! “But there must be some purpose!” he cried.

  “How can you say ‘must’? Oh, Darkness, you have clothed life in garments far too rich for its ordinary character! You have given it the sacred aspect of meaning! There is no meaning to it. Once upon a time the spark of life fired a blob of common energy with consciousness of its existence. From that, by some obscure-evolutionary process, we came. That is all. We are born. We live, and grow, and then we die! After that, there is nothing! Nothing!”

  Something in Darkness shuddered violently, and then rebelliously. But his thoughts were quiet and tense. “I won’t believe that! You are telling me that life is only meant for death, then. Why… why, if that were so, why should there be life? No, Oldster! I feel that there must be something which justifies my existence.”

  Was it pity that came flowing along with Oldster’s thoughts? “You will never believe me. I knew it. All my ancient wisdom could not change you, and perhaps it is just as well. Yet you may spend a lifetime in learning what I have told you.”

  His thoughts withdrew, absently, and then returned. “Your other questions, Darkness.”

  For a long time Darkness did not answer. He was of half a mind to leave Oldster and leave it to his own experiences to solve his other problems. His resentment was hotter than a dwarf sun, for a moment. But it cooled and though he was beginning to doubt the wisdom to which Oldster laid claim, he continued with his questioning.

  “What is the use of the globe of purple light which forever remains at my center, and even returns, no matter how far I hurl it from me?”

  Such a wave of mingled agitation and sadness passed from the old being that Darkness shuddered. Oldster turned on him with extraordinary fierceness. “Do not learn that secret! I will not tell you! What might I not have spared myself had I not sought and found the answer to that riddle! I was a thinker, Darkness, like you! Darkness, if you value… Come, Darkness,” he went on in a singularly broken manner, “Your remaining question.” His thought
rays switched back and forth with an uncommon sign of utter chaos of mind.

  Then they centered on Darkness again. “I know your other query, Darkness. I know; I knew when first Sparkle brought you to me, eons ago.

  “What is beyond the darkness? That has occupied your mind since your creation. What lies on the fringe of the lightless section by which this universe is bounded?

  “I do not know, Darkness. Nor does anyone know.”

  “But you must believe there is something beyond,” cried Darkness.

  “Darkness, in the dim past of our race, beings of your caliber have tried — five of them I remember in my time, billions of years ago. But they never came back. They left the universe, hurling themselves into that awful void, and they never came back.”

  “How do you know they didn’t reach that foreign universe?” asked Darkness breathlessly.

  “Because they didn’t come back,” answered Oldster, simply. “If they could have gotten across, at least one or two of them would have returned. They never reached that universe. Why? All the energy they were able to accumulate for that staggering voyage was exhausted. And they dissipated — died — in the energyless emptiness of the darkness.”

  “There must be a way to cross!” said Darkness violently. “There must be a way to gather energy for the crossing! Oldster, you are destroying my life-dream! I have wanted to cross. I want to find the edge of the darkness. I want to find life there — perhaps then I will find the meaning of all life!”

  “Find the—” began Oldster pityingly, then stopped, realizing the futility of completing the sentence.

  “It is a pity you are not like the others, Darkness. Perhaps they understand that it is as purposeful to lie sleeping in the seventh band as to discover the riddle of the darkness. They are truly happy, you are not. Always, my son, you overestimate the worth of life.”

  “Am I wrong in doing so?”

  “No. Think as you will, and think that life is high. There is no harm. Dream your dream of great life, and dream your dream of another universe. There is joy even in the sadness of unattainment.”

  Again that long silence, and again the smoldering flame of resentment in Darkness’ mind. This time there was no quenching of that flame. It burned fiercely.

  “I will not dream!” said Darkness furiously. “When first my visions became activated, they rested on the darkness, and my newborn thought swirls wondered about the darkness, and knew that something lay beyond it!

  “And whether or not I die in that void, I am going into it!”

  Abruptly, irately, he snapped from the fifteenth band into the first, but before he had time to use his propellants he saw Oldster, a giant body of intense, swirling energies of pure light, materialize before him.

  “Darkness, stop!” and Oldster’s thoughts were unsteady. “Darkness,” he went on, as the younger energy creature stared — spellbound, “I had vowed to myself never to leave the band of lightlessness. I have come from it, a moment, for… you!

  “You will die. You will dissipate in the void! You will never cross it, if it can be crossed, with the limited energy your body contains!”

  He seized Darkness’ thought swirls in tight bands of energy.

  “Darkness, there is knowledge that I possess. Receive it!”

  With newborn wonder, Darkness erased consciousness. The mighty accumulated knowledge of Oldster sped into him in a swift-flow, a great tide of space lore no other being had ever possessed.

  The inflow ceased, and as from an immeasurably distant space came Oldster’s parting words:

  “Darkness, farewell! Use your knowledge, use it to further your dream. Use it to cross the darkness.”

  Again fully conscious, Darkness knew that Oldster had gone again into the fifteenth band of utter lightlessness, in his vain attempt at peace.

  He hung tensely motionless in the first band, exploring the knowledge that now was his. At the portent of one particular portion of it, he trembled.

  In wildest exhilaration, he thrust out his propellants, dashing at full speed to his mother.

  He hung before her.

  “Mother, I am going into the darkness!”

  There was a silence, pregnant with her sorrow. “Yes, I know. It was destined when first you were born. For that I named you Darkness.” A restless quiver of sparks left her, her gaze sad and loving. She said, “Farewell, Darkness, my son.”

  She wrenched herself from true space, and he was alone. The thought stabbed him. He was alone — alone as Oldster.

  Struggling against the vast depression that overwhelmed him, he slowly started on his way to the very furthest edge of the universe, for there lay the Great Energy.

  Absently he drifted across the galaxies, the brilliant denizens of the cosmos, lying quiescent on their eternal black beds. He drew a small sun into him, and converted it into energy for the long flight.

  And suddenly, far off he saw his innumerable former companions. A cold mirth seized him. Playing! The folly of children, the aimlessness of stars!

  He sped away from them; and slowly increased his velocity, the thousands of galaxies flashing away behind. His speed mounted a frightful acceleration carrying him toward his goal.

  Chapter IV

  Beyond Light

  It took him seven million years to cross the universe, going at the tremendous velocity he had attained. And he was in a galaxy whose far-flung suns hung out into the darkness, who were themselves traveling into the darkness at the comparatively slow pace of several thousand miles a second.

  Instantaneously, his vision rested on an immense star, a star so immense that he felt himself unconsciously expand in an effort to rival it. So titanic was its mass that it drew all light rays save the short ultraviolet back into it.

  It was hot, an inconceivable mass of matter a billion miles across. Like an evil, sentient monster of the skies it hung, dominating the tiny suns of this galaxy that were perhaps its children, to Darkness flooding the heavens with ultraviolet light from its great expanse of writhing, coiling, belching surface; and mingled with that light was a radiation of energy so virulent that it ate its way painfully into his very brain.

  Still another radiation impinged on him, an energy which, were he to possess its source, would activate his propellants to such an extent that his velocity would pale any to which his race had attained in all its long history, hurling him into the darkness at such an unthinkable rate that the universe would be gone in the infinitesimal part of a second!

  But how hopeless seemed the task of rending it from that giant of the universe. The source of that energy, he knew with certain knowledge, was matter, matter so incomparably dense — its electrons crowding each other till they touched — that even that furiously molten star could not destroy it!

  He spurred back several million miles, and stared at it. Suddenly he knew fear, a cold fear. He felt that the sun was animate, that it knew he was waiting there, that it was prepared to resist his pitiable onslaughts. And as if in support of his fears, he felt rays of such intense repelling power, such alive, painful malignancy that he almost threw away his mad intentions of splitting it.

  “I have eaten suns before,” he told himself, with the air of one arguing against himself. “I can at least split that one open, and extract the morsel that lies in its interior.”

  He drew into him as many of the surrounding suns as he was able, converting them into pure energy. He ceased at last, for no longer could his body, a giant complexity of swarming intense fields sixty million miles across, assimilate more.

  Then, with all the acceleration he could muster, he dashed headlong at the celestial monster.

  It grew and expanded, filling all the skies until he could no longer see anything but it. He drew near its surface. Rays of fearful potency smote him until he convulsed in the whiplash agony of it. At frightful velocity, he contacted the heaving surface, and… made a tiny dent some millions of miles in depth.

  He strove to push forward, but streams of
energy repelled him, energy that flung him away from the star in acceleration.

  He stopped his backward flight, fighting his torment, and threw himself upon the star again. It repulsed him with an uncanny likeness to a living thing. Again and again he went through the agonizing process, to be as often thrust back.

  He could not account for those repelling rays, which seemed to operate in direct contrariness to the star’s obviously great gravitational field; nor did he try to account for them. There were mysteries in space which even Oldster had never been able to solve.

  But there was a new awe in him. He hung in space, spent and quivering.

  “It is almost alive,” he thought, and then adopted new tactics. Rushing at the giant, he skimmed over and through its surface in titanic spirals, until he had swept it entirely free of raging, incandescent gases. Before the star could replenish its surface, he spiraled it again, clinging to it until he could no longer resist the repelling forces, of the burning rays which impinged upon him.

  The star now lay in the heavens diminished by a tenth of its former bulk. Darkness, hardly able to keep himself together, retired a distance from it and discarded excess energy.

  He went back to the star.

  Churning seas of pure light flickered fitfully across. Now and then there were belchings of matter bursting within itself.

  Darkness began again. He charged, head on. He contacted, bored millions of miles, and was thrown back with mounting velocity. Hurtling back into space, Darkness finally knew that all these tactics would in the last analysis prove useless. His glance roving, it came to rest on a dense, redly glowing sun. For a moment it meant nothing, and then he knew — knew that here at last lay the solution.

  He plucked that dying star from its place, and swinging it in huge circles on the tip of a tractor ray, flung it with the utmost of his savage force at the gargantuan star.

  Fiercely, he watched the smaller sun approach its parent. Closer, closer, and then — they collided! A titanic explosion ripped space, sending out wave after wave of cosmic rays, causing an inferno of venomous, raging flames that extended far into the skies, licking it in a fury of utter abandon. The mighty sun split wide open, exhibiting a violet-hot, gaping maw more than a billion miles wide.