For my part, in the course of a few minutes — although it seemed like hours — I learnt that the Nagani had reached our world as the last possible stage in their search for a home that could support their form of life.
It is difficult, but I will try to translate the thoughts I received. Sometimes I saw events happening before me as I closed my eyes, sometimes I heard a sonorous voice in my mind, sometimes I actually felt sensations — sensations of heat, cold, tension, hope, dismay — and sometimes I simply knew, without knowing how I knew.
For what seemed like a long, long period of time, I was back on Vulcan, though it was a Vulcan I had never seen before. This was Hafna, and not the world named after the old Roman god that we had known. It was an alien world, and yet I seemed familiar with it, thanks to the mind of the Nagani exercising the tele-mentor for me.
I saw bleak, gloomy landscapes in the semi-darkness of a dying world, the sun a mere tiny spot low over the rocky horizon. The sturdy pyramidical buildings were inhabited, I knew, and I found myself inside one of them. Around me were Nagani — a family of them, I knew. And over the family hung a dreadful fear of something in another part of the building. The fear became crystallised as I saw, in another room, one of the obscene creatures we now knew as Vulcanids. But I knew in my mind that they were Hafnarigi, for "Vulcan" and its distinguishing proper name had no place here.
With the Nagani I worked through what seemed long years, building, excavating, providing the underground world in which we ourselves had later lived.
And although the Hafnarigi had closed their minds to the Nagani, I was aware of the incredible depths of their knowledge. From time to time, new awareness came into my mind, as though the intelligences of the Hafnarigi had planted it there for their own purpose. Thus, with the Nagani, I learnt that we must find a means of leaving the fated planet Hafna to search the Solar System for a more kindly world — but a more kindly world for the Hafnarigi.
As ages seemed to pass, I went with the Nagani in their Disc ships, from world to world. I died a thousand times as catastrophe struck again and again and the experimental Discs were either destroyed in space or shot off in an irrecoverable orbit into the farthest depths of the universe.
I shared the triumphs and the terrors of the little people, and joined in their sorrow when at last the men and women of Ama-Viri fell captive to the Hafnarigi. And, most wonderful of all, I saw dimly the past of the Virian world, and realised that its peoples were of the same stock as are Terrestrial humanity.
I experienced the consuming devotion to craftsmanship of all kinds that is the one guiding feature of Nagani life — the one feature that saved them as a race and consoled them while they remained under the Hafnarigi spell.
Sometimes I seemed to be a Virian slave of the Hafnarigi, sometimes a Nagani, either enslaved or freed, for I went through the oddly unemotional period of freedom that the Hafnarigi at last gave to the Nagani once the Virians were subjugated to their will.
And I understood, or seemed to understand for a fleeting second, the reason why the powerful little Nagani had not exterminated the Hafnarigi ages ago. In their minds was an odd sense of pity that the great uncouth, barely mobile monsters should be condemned to the life they led.
Then there flared up in me a sudden resolution to be quit of the Hafnarigi, to leave them on their dying planet. With this came the knowledge that no other planet would receive me, for I was utterly alien to all other forms of life in the Solar System. There was a deep flow of patient reasoning running through all these thoughts and sensations, and I knew that the Nagani must await their time for departure. I also knew that such a time would inevitably come in the course of the ages.
As time went on, there were sudden leaps, it seemed, from one age to another. Progress and knowledge would advance, and then there would be an age of darkness when life appeared to stand still or even retrogress. But slowly, slowly, I came nearer to a present time that I seemed to have always lived in, and I found myself with the Nagani at their Lunar base. With them, I kept long observation on their system of warning devices tuned in to Earth. Suddenly, there was alarm and fear.
Somewhere on Earth a gigantic cataclysm had taken place. Then the reactions died down, and the Nagani regained some of their confidence. But in a short time, a quick chain of reactions on their instruments showed that the cataclysm had struck again and again on Earth.
I construed this as the series of atomic explosions that took place after 1945. Axel, however, saw it in quite a different light, as he told me afterwards. He was convinced that the reactions referred to the steadily increasing decay of human intellect.
However that may be — and I am positive that my supposition was the right one — I continued to share in the experiences of the Nagani until they became terrified by the new aggressive spirit shown by the Hafnarigi. The mass mind in which I shared realised that the time must come soon when the two races must separate.
Then came another disaster on Earth — this time there was no doubt as to its nature. It was the premature explosion of Professor Vogel's thorium bomb. The stereo-link pictures showed me that the planet Earth — I had been thinking of it as Fahan — had rid itself of the tiny parasites I recognised as mankind.
The pictures became confused, as the recipients each injected something of his or her own thoughts into the apparatus. Lucille was quietly weeping, and she gently dropped the hand in which she had held the receiver of the tele-mentor.
The pattern changed swiftly and often. At one moment I was surrounded by hurrying small figures in the partially sunken air-locked buildings on the Moon's remote surface; at another I was on Hafna, working in the vast dark breeding grounds of the Hafharigi. Then for a fleeting second I was staring into a stereo-link cavity at a group of Terrestrials, and as the three-dimensional picture flashed off, I recognised Arabin, Ludlam and Karim.
I heard in my mind the silent telepathic orders of the Hafnarigi to my kind: orders not instilled automatically as was the case of the Virians, but passed to me urgently. I knew that as one of the Nagani I did not have to obey them, but the habit of generations led us to comply. The orders shrilled more and more loudly as the urgency of the moment approached, and I was caught up in a great hastening campaign directed at leaving the planet.
Suddenly the orders of the Hafnarigi were pushed into the background of my mind as another pattern of thought overlaid them. The time of freedom had come — the time for leaving the monsters of Hafna, the time our race had awaited for thousands of patient years, was at hand. We would leave the planet Hafna, but the Hafnarigi would stay, entombed in a dead world.
And entombed they were, for I now knew that the Nagani, in building that underground world, had so built it that it could be hermetically sealed by a series of simple operations.
Over a period of I do not know how long, I watched the Nagani remove every one of their race to their Lunar base. I shared in their hopes that the world Fahan — our own Earth — would support them, and I shared in their fears that the rightful owners — ourselves — might defend the planet against the alien race.
In the great black Disc in which we now sat — I was sure it was the same — I cruised with the Nagani over Fahan, scanning continents that were dead, wondering at the life that remained in the oceans, fervently hoping for a foothold for my race. I even saw our own work going ahead bravely in the tiny circle of activity that was London.
Then the Nagani, I was shown, saw the emergence of the foul Hafnarigi from the Disc in which they had stowed away. From what seemed immeasureable distance, for the images before me now shimmered as a telescopic image shimmers in hot weather, I watched the battle between ourselves and the Vulcanids. And I learnt with considerable horror that the great creatures had spread themselves far more widely than we had supposed. I saw them not in scores, but in hundreds, slowly creeping their way across England.
I learnt how they had cunningly fooled us by drawing our attention to one small colony of themselves,
while other branches of their family multiplied unseen in other districts.
The pictures finished.
We sat back in what seemed darkness, so bright and lasting had been the impressions conveyed into our minds by the tele-mentor. And we were left with one last great mind-filling thought — the question: Was the world to be owned by the Vulcanids, or by humanity and the Nagani?
The story had been put to us factually, with no emotional overtones. Now, we knew, it was left to us to decide.
If the tele-mentor had conveyed a true image, we were doomed without the help of the Nagani, for, we knew, they alone held the secret of annihilating the Hafnarigi.
My chain of thought was disturbed by Leo. His voice came as something of a shock, after the purely internal mental images that had occupied us for what seemed so long.
"I want to ask a lot of questions," he whispered, and his voice sounded strangely cracked. "We must know more than this."
Adda Manganna whispered something to Krill Hvensor, who motioned to Arabin to replace his tele-mentor receiver. "We must ask our questions singly," he said.
"First: where did the Vulcanids originate?" asked Leo, when we had all replaced our receivers.
Again came the confusing patterns of thoughts, until each of us had come into the circuit, as it were.
Slowly there formed a vague shining blur in our minds, which crystallised into pinpoints of light that circled slowly before us. Axel murmured in recognition, and his thought was instantly conveyed to us.
We were looking at the constellation Orion.
The grouping of the stars suddenly widened, and the pinpoints of light became infinitely brighter, as the mind of the directing Nagani took us swirling towards the constellation. In a few seconds it lost its shape completely and we were through it — or we had approached so closely as to throw it out of perspective. On and on we seemed to spin, until a great whirling mass floated before us.
Again, as we came nearer to it, the diffused light of the nebula separated and hardened into individual specks, which in turn, grew and blazed in our minds.
Then our thoughts centred upon one bright star round which circled a score or more of planets. We gazed at this for some minutes, and then realised that the Nagani knowledge went no further than this.
"From a satellite planet of some star in the nebula in Orion," murmured Axel. "We should be no wiser if we saw it more closely."
Leo breathed a sigh that sounded like relief. "It's curious," he said, "but I feel comforted to know that they were not from our own System."
"Another question," said Leo. "What... what happened to the humans we knew on Hafna?"
There was a pause, and then we had the impression of a curtain falling, followed by — nothing. This impression I find that I cannot translate into words. But somehow we experienced a feeling of inevitability, and a freeing of troubles — an impression of merging into the whole unguessable scheme of the Universe. There were no regrets, there was no anguish. One moment there was consciousness, and the next — nothing.
Lucille dropped her receiver. "I would ask something," she said. Leo nodded to her, and she replaced her receiver.
"The animals," she whispered. "Where are they from? Are there more?"
We saw ourselves in one of the giant black Discs again, spinning idly over a patch of Terrestrial countryside in twilight. It was either dusk or dawn — we could not tell. Below us we saw animals grazing, and, through the mind of the Nagani, we suddenly felt a great kinship with the living creatures below us. They did not stand to us in the relation, say, that a household pet stands to a human family.
They were more to us than that. They were creatures isolated from their masters through lack of any common point of understanding. Yet we knew that we could understand them, and they us. We felt something of the spirit of a schoolboy who steals an apple from a tree, a combination of mischief and of the knowledge that what we were taking would be of more immediate use to us than to the owner.
We saw the amazed creatures swept up into our craft; we saw them housed in strange new quarters at the Lunar base. We knew that they were not there as, in days gone by, animals had been kept in zoological collections, but more as participants of a way of life we could not understand. More than pets, more than objects of curiosity, but how much more, our inability to fathom the recesses of the Nagani mind kept from us.
That last factor also resulted in only a blurred picture being received when I asked how and where the Nagani would live if they shared our world with us. There was a bold upsurge of hope in our spirits —
for we were thinking with the Nagani mind — and then a feeling of fulfilment, of gigantic industry, of incomparable craftsmanship bestowed on articles of incredible beauty. But concrete images — no. We did, however, agree later, that we had each had an impression of work.
I could continue for many pages with the attempt to describe our reactions to the images we saw and experienced. But it would only be a poor attempt at best, for we were left with impressions rather than knowledge. As we pooled our experiences later, we found that we were of a common mind to accept the Nagani.
The hours of conference with the rest of our colony, too, I will omit. There were some who distrusted the Nagani, but they had not yet gone through our experiences of revelation. A few were openly rebellious, but the final count of hands showed that the overwhelming majority were for admitting the strange little creatures to our world.
But first, we agreed, only one hundred would come. They would live alongside us, and if, after a month, they had become accepted, others should follow until the whole of their race — or what remained of it — should participate in a common life with us.
The Nagani themselves accepted these terms, although they could easily and swiftly have taken the whole of our world for themselves. They planned to set up their colonies in some of the great industrial cities, which they would adapt for their needs.
The whole history of the Nagani migration to Earth is now known to every child, of course, and there is little point in my describing the vast movement.
I must, however, give some consideration to an incident that distressed us greatly. In time to come, its repercussions may have incalculable effect upon the people of Earth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Some ten or twelve days after our first understanding with the Nagani envoys, Thomas Ludlam began to recover somewhat from the shocking wound inflicted upon him by the renegade Virian. Axel had treated him with every care, but had been unable to apply the anti-biotic treatments that had flourished towards the end of my time on Earth. He had been unable to make satisfactory cultures of penicillin or of any of its associated moulds and derivatives, and had preferred to treat Thomas by older and slower methods.
The old man's wonderful constitution helped to bring him to the point of convalescence much more quickly than we had hoped, but he was still unable to move the upper part of his body, and lay in a plaster cast. The least movement caused him agony as his breathing was accelerated, and he took this immobility very hardly.
Within a fortnight of his wound, he expressed a mild desire to see his own village again, and Leo and I reproached ourselves bitterly for having failed to give him a glimpse of his ancient home before this, and at once set about arranging his transport to Oxted, where he had spent his boyhood. Thomas had been almost a year back on Earth, and had been sojourning not more than thirty miles from his village, and we had never even told him that he was so near his home. Truth to tell, we had forgotten that he was a Surrey man, and Thomas himself had patiently and unselfishly bided the time when he could, in his own words, ask for a few days' leave.
We drove out, an ambulance to the farm, and tore the roof off the vehicle so that Thomas, in his bed, could look round at the country we passed through. He lay there, his bed canted so that he could see without moving, and whispered to me, sitting beside him, of the joy he would have in going home again after so many, many years.
David Cohen, who was now our driver and conductor on all journeys of importance, had drawn me aside and warned me to prepare Thomas for the Oxted he would find. "He'll never know it," David whispered. "Since 1945 they've made it into one of them satellite towns."
We were, indeed, through the town before he recognised it. He gave a feeble gesture and pointed at an old building. "I went to school there," he whispered with difficulty. I thought he was rambling, for the building he pointed at now housed a bank, and the front had been done over in what looked like sham Tudor beams.
However, having got his bearings, Thomas had us turn off down a narrow lane running downhill, with "Brook Street" oni the sign at the top. We trundled slowly down the hill, now lined on each side by twentieth century houses with sadly over-grown gardens, and as we turned a bend at the bottom, Thomas gave a husky moan. There, flush with the lane, stood an old thatched cottage to our right.
David pulled up and got out, motioning to me that he would have a look round the cottage first.
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