Children of the Void

by William Dexter

  “But some day we shall know these things, and then we shall be able to look back on you and see you with certitude —you, and your predecessors and even those yet to- come of the future Races.

  “That raises a problem in your minds, does it not? You are wondering why we cannot leap ahead into our own future to that period of perfection. The answer is simple. We cannot go forward in time. We can only go back over that which has happened, and observe it. We cannot alter it. Otherwise, we might have changed the course of events in your own history. Perhaps that is why we are not able to bend the Space Time curve more sharply and see our own immediate past.

  “And to save your minds from pondering over another problem, I will try to answer your mental question now. You may wish to know why, if we of the Eighth Race can go back in time, our successors of the Ninth and Tenth Races cannot come back to us. We believe that there will be no successors to the Eighth Race. We believe that we are the ultimate form of Man. And because one Race cannot commune with its own past—the Time-span is too short—we can only look forward to our own illimitable future with hope. We may never commune with our successors.

  “If we could be seen by you now we should be seen, I believe, as immaterial things. In your dimension, we should have no substance. Now are you beginning to realise what we could be like?

  “I have said that we are like you. But there are other races sharing our life now, races of which you can have no conception, races that have not yet—in your time—appeared on any world. We share existence with beings from many worlds, for our own today is a period of communion between spheres of life from all parts of the Galaxy.

  “We share the Galaxy; there are no frontiers. Yet each race and each kind has its own place in our scheme. You of the Third Race, with your primitive communication apparatus, have heard voices from other forms of life inhabiting the Solar System in our time. When your call came, we did not know who sent it. And so you heard the speech—that is the only description of it that you could comprehend—of the water-things of Venus, and of four tribes of the descendants of the incandescent beings of Mercury. When these were answered by those to whom we spoke (for we already commune with those two worlds) we turned to your world. If no reply had come from your world, we should have used the forms of communication to be found on other worlds, further out from the Sun. We should have tried to communicate with the filament life of Jupiter, with the mineral creatures of Saturn, and the silicon men of Uranus.

  “That, then, is how we of the Eighth Race came to speak with you of the Third Race. It was inevitable that your Race and ours would communicate at some time. Now that the time has come, we are proud that we are the individuals to make the first such communication with the Third Race.”

  Axel cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘Tell, please,” he said, “how you know the names of these worlds. Are they called by the same names in your time?”

  The reply came at once. “Remember: we have studied you and your speech for many centuries. If we know your language, so we may be expected to know the words you use. We have, remember communicated with the Second Race, too, and also with many other species in the Solar System of your time, past and present. But you are the Third Race. This is the first communication with you of the Third Race, and it is for one reason alone unique. Before, with the First and Second Races, many ages have gone by before communication with them has been effected. You of the Third Race have hardly had time to found your Race, and yet we are able to speak with you already.

  “Creatures on the other worlds of Sol know us and have known of us for many ages. For long centuries, though, we have had little perfect communion with your world. With individuals—yes; but with the Second Race in the mass, no. Mankind has not wished to think of its own future; there has been a barrier between the Second Race and our own. Had your Second Race (to which you once belonged) given as much thought to this matter as have other kinds in the Solar System, your world might still be a thriving, happy place. But you who are the forefathers of the Third Race know that it is not so. Neither will it be so for many ages to come.”

  Arabin seized upon the statement, and strode to the electrodes to query it.

  “Are you, then, able to guide us as to our own future?” he asked boldly. “You have told us so much; can you not tell us more?”

  The unseen entity paused for a long time. Then—“We may not tell you of the things that lie ahead of you,” said the voice gravely. “That would—or could—alter the course of your future. And that future, which is our past, is fixed and unalterable.

  “We may, though, say to you that your Third Race is written in our chronicles as being the hardiest, the most courageous, and the most productive of all whose history we have studied. We may also tell you that, did you not possess these qualities, and pass them on to your descendants, there would have been no Fourth Race to pass on the sequence of life to us.”

  Later, on considering this dictum, I wondered whether the voice was telling us, in a gentle way, that we should need these noble qualities in order to survive. Our struggles have certainly been hard, and will no doubt be as hard in the future. For our descendants, then, I record this particular forecast by the voice with sympathy. They will, I am sure, pass through even sterner times than lie behind us—so closely behind us— as I write this.

  There is another pronouncement by the voice that I must set down. Before the session of communication ended on this occasion, the voice told us something of the First Race of Man. It spoke little, except for the purposes of comparison, about the Second Race, to which we had once belonged, and which had come to such an untimely end.

  The First Race, we learned, had existed “Before the rocks of your world changed.” We took this to represent an era long, long before even what we know as pre-history.

  From the descriptions the voice gave us—sketchy and imperfect as perforce they had to be—we pictured a race of men that archaeology has never yet suspected. A race which died almost in its infancy, so long ago that the last traces of them had been obliterated from the surface of the Earth long before even the great reptiles came.

  They had been giants, those men of the First Race, giants in stature and giants in achievement. But their achievements had lain along the paths of romance and pleasure rather than those of progress and strife. They had been the first flicker of humanity’s torch, and, like a flame, they had been suddenly extinguished.

  They had dwelt, said the voice, where seas now washed, but in their day, those places had been mountain tops and green valleys.

  They had been different, though. They had lacked a sense that we later men take for granted. The First Men had been sightless. But still they had sought and created beauty, a strange blind beauty, akin to nothing we could imagine. They had held a curious belief. One day, their prophets had said, they, or their descendants, would see the world around them. And while they had failed to comprehend what sight and seeing could be, they had held firm to the faith that men of the future would be equipped with an added faculty, a faculty to be prized above all others.

  It was deeply affecting to hear the voice speak of these gentle, blind giants, afflicted, had they but known it, but probably happier far more than any of their successors. We thought profoundly about this, and the thought prompted the wonder of what could come next for man.

  Would the Fourth and succeeding Races be accorded even more faculties? With senses that to our limited thinking were as incomprehensible as talk of seeing must have been to those of the First Race?

  And yet we had the answer before us plainly enough. There must be additional gifts in store for Man, for the Eighth Race were able to commune across countless ages with us poor remnants of humanity living now. What other unsuspected and unknowable gifts did they possess?

  The voice was reluctant to talk on these matters, and when we raised the question it answered that the time for further speech was drawing to an end. And without a word as to when we might expect fu
rther communications, the voice left us again.

  Once more we sat in deepest silence for a while, as we pondered over what we had heard this time. Then we talked far into the night, when once we had overcome our awe at the disclosures revealed to us.

  It was while we were still talking—less than eight hours after the voice had left us—that it returned.

  The time had come round again, in that strangely elastic Time-curve, for it to speak. And this time it stayed with us for only a matter of minutes—another instance of the unpredictable and incalculable scale of time standing between ourselves and the far-distant future.

  Now, in the course of a few minutes, we were told of strange things connected with our own time.

  Since last is spoke, the voice said, the thought had arisen that we might still discredit the truth of what had been told us. There was a solemn dignity about the voice—a new voice, incidentally, that we had not heard so far—when it suggested that our imperfect understanding might prompt us to disbelief. Accordingly, we were to be advised of something which we could prove to be true.

  Varang-Varang, the voice announced, would soon be our. near neighbour in space.

  More than that we were unable to learn, although, of course, the message was hardly so terse as I have represented it to be. It described Varang-Varang not only by name, but as “The world of the bat-men.”

  This news we found almost impossible to credit. We had plotted the runaway planet on our scanning screens for many weeks now, and had seen it curve away from us at an oblique angle to the ecliptic. There had been daily checks on its position, and each had registered Varang-Varang as leaving us by many thousands of miles each day.

  In that very fact we should have seen the fallacy of our reckoning. Instead of congratulating ourselves on being rid of the cosmic wanderer, we ought to have realised that a speed of only thousands of miles a day was nothing, compared with the speed of our own world in its journey round the Sun.

  So when we were warned of its return, we started to revise our calculations, and we saw at once the weakness of our earlier reasoning. Varang-Varang was, in fact, slowing down.

  The Virians, who seemed to have a peculiar genius for mathematical calculation, had nevertheless been as blind as we were, but now they set to work furiously. The result was that within three days (during which time the voices did not return) they showed us, by an elaborate three-dimensional model, that there could be truth in what the voice had told us.

  The sudden decrease of speed could—and probably would —change the course of Varang-Varang yet again. The radius of its wide curve through space could now be shortened, so that instead of the hyperbola it had been leading into, it could take a parabolic course. And that would bring it back into the Solar System.

  It was five more weeks—and still the voices had not returned —before we were sure. Then we saw Varang-Varang, as portrayed on our televisor screens, turn off its course by the veriest hairsbreadth. After that, each day showed it growing, growing, growing in size on our screens. Six days later we were sure: Varang-Varang was approaching us again.

  Then the voice returned to us—twice. Each time, we thought we detected a note of tension in it. But each time, it seemed to be offering us vague encouragement and comfort. We badly needed encouragement, too, for the prospect of the approach of this hurtling, derelict globe, even though millions of miles from us, was one of dire horror.

  Especially when we at last saw that Varang-Varang, while coming daily nearer, no longer followed a curved course but was directed straight at us.

  XXI

  If it were true that, as the voice had told us, we were to be the first of a new Race of men, then I suppose we ought to have expected gigantic changes. But while we knew that the old Race had perished on Earth, we still felt ourselves to be members of it. So it was rather as the survivors of the Second Race than as the fathers of the Third Race that we reacted to this new threat. We were terrified.

  There was no panic. That may have been because we were numbed by the accumulation of terrible experiences through which we had passed in our own lifetimes, and because we had no surplus emotion left in us. We were frightened as children who cannot understand are frightened.

  But the Virians had more courage. Day by day they watched the nearer approach of Varang-Varang on the scanners, and day by day they reported calmly on what they had learned. After a month the planet showed on the screens as large as the moon, and then there was little increase in its apparent size for more than a week. Then came another noticeable degree of increase in size and speed, almost as though the pace at which the planet was travelling had become erratic, and as though it were braking and accelerating by turn.

  We slowly shook off our terrified lethargy and began to ask ourselves whether, after all, we were to be crushed. Of reasoning we seemed to have none, otherwise we might have applied the logic that, if this pronouncement of the Eighth Race’s spokesman were to be fulfilled, then we should live to see fulfilment of the prediction that the Third Race would live long.

  Anyway, as we became less terrified, we shared the watch on the screens, measuring hour by hour the tiny apparent increases in apparent size of Varang-Varang. We noted that acceleration now seemed to have given place to a retarding influence, and at times we required micrometrically adjusted instruments to detect any motion on the part of Varang-Varang.

  Then, as the runaway planet slowed into something like a regular Solar orbit, we began to experience the vast changes that are now regarded as normal. First came the apparent error in the Virian chronometric device coupled to the screens. For some reason the infallible mechanism appeared to be running slow by the Sun, and repeated checks by Solar sighting failed to reveal the source of the discrepancy. But when night fell, a dual check by lunar and astronomical sighting showed us that there was no error.

  The day had become shorter by eleven minutes.

  And there, swinging slowly behind the Moon, and dwarfing our ancient satellite into insignificance, hung the monster globe of Varang-Varang.

  The Virians called upon the Nagani to help in their calculations of further possible phenomena, and received the reply that the little people were already well ahead with studying this startling development. Calmly—but then, the Nagani never acted otherwise than calmly—they were working with some great computer of their own devising. From their findings, they told us, they hoped to present us with information that would tell us whether our world would survive.

  The question of survival now occupied us intensely, for by daybreak we could see that the rotational period of our Earth was noticeably shorter.

  Forty-eight hours later came a reprieve, conveyed to us by the Nagani technicians from the computer. They had assessed the results of Varang-Varang’s approach, and predicted that it would be caught within the Earth’s field of gravitation. We caught our breath in horror at the thought, picturing the enormous mass being drawn into collision with our own world.

  But—there was a saving clause.

  If the Nagani calculations were correct, the planet would reach the lower arc of its curve when the Moon was in inferior conjunction. In other words, when Varang-Varang was nearest to Earth, and could feasibly be dragged inward by Terrestrial gravity, the Moon would be in the way—between ourselves and the runaway globe. This would mean, the Nagani were sure, that the Moon would become the pivot of a gigantic whirling bi-planetary system, with Earth and Varang-Varang on opposing sides.

  Their calculations were far too complex to be conveyed to us by their talking machine (which did not hold words enough in its memory-bank to describe the situation), and so we were once more introduced to their tele-mentor equipment.

  This time, though, every adult in our community was permitted to “see” the results of the Nagani thought-processes. We sat around a number of their tele-mentor devices, with the translucent receiving tubes pressed to that spot on our foreheads that marks the site of the vestigial pineal eye. And this time, so clear
was the intention and purpose of the Nagani controllers of the equipment, we each saw identically similar pictures.

  They showed us the monstrous Catherine-wheel formation of Earth and Varang-Varang swinging round the common pivot provided by the Moon, and at the same time turning in its wider sweep round the Sun. They showed us, too, in anticipation of the event, the astonishing sight of a change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis. We saw the North Polar regions presented more directly to the Sun, while the Antarctic was turned forever out of sunlight. Varang-Varang, too, suffered a sharp tilt, far more severe than the Earth’s comparatively slight libration. And on that bleak planet we saw, through the “eye” of the tele-mentor, Gargantuan tremors shake the rocky surface, rending and tearing away its landmarks to form new mountains and new valleys.

  Varang-Varang would now, surely, be a world of the dead, for nothing could possibly live in those terrifying landslides and —yes—those appalling volcanic infernoes. Maybe in billions of years to come the mad world of Varang-Varang will have cooled down and calmed its surface, and life may arise there again.

  If Earth were to suffer no more than we had been shown on the tele-mentor process, then there was still hope for us all, human, Nagani, Virian, and animal. But not, alas, for the bat-men. For they were truly bat-men. They had no females with them.

  One thing the tele-mentor could not show us was the possible effect on our daily lives. How long, we wanted to ask, would our day become? How many days in a year? How would the seasons run? What would become of the course of Nature?