“They still exist,” Dihn Ruuu told us at last, having learned it from the other robots. “But they have changed. They are no longer as I knew them.”
“Where are they?”
“They receive special care.”
“When will we see them?”
“In time,” said the robot. “At the proper moment.”
We doubted that. We all were sure that the High Ones had died out long ago; and that the robots, unwilling to accept the hard truth of that, had been living a weird pretense, masterless for millions of years. We were wrong. In their own good time the robots allowed us to meet the Mirt Korp Ahm. It was on the ninth day of our visit. A vehicle of a kind we had not used before called for us and took us down a sloping track into the depths of the sphere, a dozen levels beneath the surface, into a cool green world of silence, where floating globes of light drifted ahead of us down intricate webworks of corridors.
Dihn Ruuu said, “The current Mirt Korp Ahm population of Mirt, I have been told, is 4,852. There has been no significant change in that figure in the past hundred thousand years. The last actual death was recorded here 38,551 years ago.”
“And the last birth?” Mirrik asked.
Dihn Ruuu stared at him a long moment and replied, “Approximately four million years ago.” After that their fertility was exhausted.”
I tried to comprehend the nature of a race whose last baby had been born in the epoch of the subhuman man-apes, whose last death had occurred in the time of the cave painters.
A sliding panel rolled back and we peered through a thick crystal wall at a member of the Mirt Korp Ahm. In a cavernous six-sided room that reminded me of the rock vault in which we had found Dihn Ruuu, a cluster of massive machinery converged on a cup-shaped couch of glossy blue metal. Enthroned on the couch sat a being of great size, perhaps twice the size of a human, dome-headed, four-armed, covered with scales, indeed a High One such as we had seen in the projections of the globe.
Life-support mechanisms surrounded and practically engulfed it. A dozen small cubical structures were fastened to its limbs; a complex device was strapped about its chest; wires ran from its skull, its body, its wrists. This entire immense room was a nest of equipment that served to sustain the flicker of life in this creature, to nourish it and keep its organs pumping and drain off the poisons of age.
For this High One was old. Hideously, frighteningly old.
Its body was wrinkled and pouchy; its scales no longer overlapped, but had spread apart to show folds of soft grayish skin, and in places the scales had flaked off altogether; the eyes were dull; the expression was slack.
The High One did not move. It gave no indication that it was aware of us. It might have been a waxen image of itself, except for the faint sign of the rise and fall of its breath. Locked within its cradle of cables and conduits and muscle-stimulators and energizers, the prisoner of its own hunger to survive, it seemed lost in a dream of bygone thousands of centuries. We stared at it as if it were a royal mummy come to life, or the last of the dinosaurs.
Commander Leonidas had brought one of his TP people along from the ship. “Can you read it?” Leonidas asked. “Do you pick anything up?”
TPs are not ordinarily supposed to be able to communicate with nonhuman species. But sometimes an alien race carries a strong residual load of latent TP — maybe not strong enough to let members of that race read each other, but enough so that a good Earth TP can pick up stray scraps of thought. Nothing coherent, just flickering impressions rather than full phrases. The TP with us, a man named Davis, pressed close against the crystal wall, closed his eyes, entered into deep concentration. When he turned away moments later, his face was pale and furrowed in disgust.
“A vegetable,” Davis said softly. “The
mind of a vegetable… but an insane vegetable.”
“Ozymandias,” Mirrik murmured. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
Dihn Ruuu said, “They are all like that. Their bodies will endure until the end of time, perhaps. But their minds… their minds…”
“More dead than alive,” Dr. Schein said. “And yet they live on.”
“It is no favor to them,” muttered Dr. Horkkk. “This death-in-life is an indecency! Their time is over. Let them rest.”
Yes, let them rest, I say.
And so a billion years of greatness comes down to this: empty creatures rotting in crystal cages, while bustling robots thrive and multiply and eagerly serve. Our quest is over. We have found the High Ones, we have intruded on what should have been private, we have peered into the nightmare of the galaxy’s loftiest race in extreme old age.
I wish we had never been allowed to see this.
I pray that Earth in its old age, a million or a billion years from now, will die the quick and clean death that planets as well as people deserve, and that no strangers will come spanning the stars to stare at the dismal, dilapidated, deathless heirs to all our magnificence.
We left this underworld of suspended lives and cheated deaths, and returned to the glowing surface of Mirt, and we thought our tour of wonders was at its end.
We were wrong, for Mirt had one amazement left for us, the one which has so enormously transformed the existence of every being in the galaxy and thrust us into a new and strange and exciting era.
Dihn Ruuu led us to a long vaulted room piled deep with the bewildering devices of the High Ones, and as we passed through it I noticed familiar objects on a shelf.
“Look,” I said. “Commemorative plaques!”
Half a dozen of the bright metal disks were stacked there, identical to those that had been excavated so frequently in the ancient sites of the High Ones. None of the others showed much interest in what I had found; they sped onward to some kind of sculpture made of many thin spokes bent and bunched in curious patterns. But I called Dihn Ruuu over and asked the robot about the plaques. The robot scooped them up, spread them on one huge hand, and said, “They are activators.”
“Activators of what?”
By way of answer he reached into the shelf and tugged forward a circular band of smooth white metal, pierced by three slots.
“The thought amplifier,” Dihn Ruuu said. “Which permits communication between mind and mind.”
“Can you show me how it works?”
“The activators must be inserted in the slots. Then one places the amplifier on the head—”
I snatched the disks and the band from Dihn Ruuu and with trembling fingers shoved the activators into place. Dihn Ruuu made no comment. At the far end of the hall, Dr. Schein turned, looked back at me, and called, “What are you doing, Tom?”
“Nothing,” I said, and lifted the thought amplifier to my head.
I knew the risks were tremendous, but I refused to think about such things. All my life had been only a prologue to this moment, all the years of being incomplete, isolated, cut off. Now I saw a chance to become complete after all.
I brought the thought amplifier down until it encircled my temples.
I felt as though a spike had been hammered through my skull. I reeled; perhaps I fell; I could no longer see. Tongues of fire danced in my brain. My mind fled from my body, roaming the long room at will-Encountering another mind-Contact!
A silent voice said —
— Who’s there? Who’s calling?
— Tom Rice, I replied.
— But you’re not a TP!
— Now I am.
I knew that my mind was touching that of Davis, the Pride of Space’s TP man. I felt closer to this stranger than I had ever been to anyone. Our minds met and could have merged; and I let out such a whoop of excitement at my new power that Davis recoiled, stunned, in pain, and sealed his mind off from me. No matter. I was no longer aware of pain myself. I moved away from Davis’ mind — outward-Out into space.