The Arctarians were trying to ascertain what was causing this strange bodily and mental degeneration in them. They thought it was something that was affecting the genes of their bodies, but what it was they could not guess. On no other world had they ever degenerated so!
That scene passed rapidly into another much later. Woodin now saw the scene, for by then the ancestor, whose mind he looked through, had developed eyes. And he saw that the degeneration had now gone far, the Arctarians’ multicellular bodies more and more stricken by the diseases of complexity and diversification.
THE LAST OF the thought-cities now were gone. The once mighty Arctarians had become hideous, complex organisms degenerating ever further, some of them creeping and swimming in the waters, others fixed upon the land.
They still had left some of the great original mentality of their ancestors. These monstrously degenerated creatures of land and sea, living in what Woodin’s mind recognized as the late Paleozoic age, still made frantic and futile attempts to halt the terrible progress of their degradation.
Woodin’s mind flashed into a scene later still, in the Mesozoic. Now the spreading degeneration had made of the descendants of the colonists a still more horrible group of races. Great webbed and scaled and taloned creatures they were now, reptiles living in land and water.
Even these incredibly changed creatures possessed a faint remnant of their ancestors’ mental power. They made vain attempts to communicate with Arctarians far on other worlds of distant suns, to apprise them of their plight. But their minds were now too weak.
There followed a scene in the Cenozoic. The reptiles had become mammals; the downward progress of the Arctarians had gone further. Now only the merest shreds of the original mentality remained in these degraded descendants. And now this pitiful posterity had produced a species even more foolish and lacking in mental power than any before, ground-apes that roamed the cold plain in chattering, quarreling packs. The last shreds of Arctarian inheritance, the ancient instincts toward dignity and cleanliness and forbearance, had faded out of these creatures.
And then a last picture filled Woodin’s brain. It was the world of the present day, the world he had seen through his own eyes. But now he saw and understood it as he never had before, a world in which degeneration had gone to the utmost limit.
The apes had become even weaker bipedal creatures, who had lost almost every atom of inheritance of the old Arctarian mind. These creatures had lost, too, many of the senses which had been retained even by the apes before them. And these creatures, these humans, were now degenerating with increasing rapidity. Where at first they had killed like their animal forebears only for food, they had learned to kill wantonly. And had learned to kill each other in groups, in tribes, in nations and hemispheres. In the madness of their degeneracy they slaughtered each other until earth ran with their blood.
They were more cruel even than the apes who had preceded them, cruel with the utter cruelty of the mad. And in their progressive insanity they came to starve in the midst of plenty, to slay each other in their own cities, to cower beneath the lash of superstitious fears as no creatures had before them.
They were the last terrible descendants, the last degenerated product, of the ancient Arctarian colonists who once had been kings of intellect. Now the other animals were almost gone. These, the last hideous freaks, would soon wind up the terrible story entirely by annihilating each other in their madness.
WOODIN CAME SUDDENLY to consciousness. He was standing in the starlight in the center of the riverside clearing. And around him still were poised the ten amorphous Arctarians, a silent ring.
Dazed, reeling from that tremendous and awful vision that had passed through his mind with incredible vividness, he turned slowly from one to the other of the Arctarians. Their thoughts impinged on his brain, strong, somber, shaken by terrible horror and loathing.
The sick thought of the Arctarian leader beat into Woodin’s mind.
“So that is what became of our Arctarian colonists who came to this world! They degenerated, changed into lower and lower forms of life, until these pitiful insane things, who now swarm on this world, are their last descendants.
“This world is a world of deadly horror! A world that somehow damages the genes of our race’s bodies and changes them bodily and mentally, making them degenerate further each generation. Before us we see the awful result.”
The shaken thought of another Arctarian asked, “But what can we do now?”
“There is nothing we can do,” uttered their leader solemnly. “This degeneration, this awful change, has gone too far for us ever to reverse it now.
“Our intelligent brothers became on this poisoned world things of horror, and we cannot now turn back the clock and restore them from the degraded things their descendants are.”
Woodin found his voice and cried out thinly, shrilly.
“It isn’t true!” he cried. “It’s all a lie, what I saw! We humans aren’t the product of downward devolution, we’re the product of ages of upward evolution! We must be, I tell you! Why, we wouldn’t want to live, I wouldn’t want to live, if that other tale was true. It can’t be true!”
The thought of the Arctarian leader, directed at the other amorphous shapes, reached his raving mind. It was tinged with pity, yet strong with a superhuman loathing.
“Come, my brothers,” the Arctarian was saying to his fellows. “There is nothing we can do here on this soul-sickening world.”
“Let us go, before we too are poisoned and changed. And we will send warning to Arctar that this world is poisoned, a world of degeneration, so that never again may any of our race come here and go down the awful road that those others went down.
“Come! We return to our own sun.”
The Arctarian leader’s humped shape flattened, assumed a disk-like form, then rose smoothly upward into the air. The others too changed and followed, in a group, and a stupefied Woodin stared up at them, glistening dots lifting rapidly into the starlight.
He staggered forward a few steps, shaking his fist insanely up at the shining, receding dots.
“Come back, damn you!” he screamed. “Come back and tell me it’s a lie!
“It must be a lie—it must—”
There was no sign of the vanished Arctarians now in the starlit sky. The darkness was brooding and intense around Woodin.
He screamed up again into the night, but only a whispering echo answered. Wild-eyed, staggering, soul-smitten, his gaze fell on the pistol in Ross’s hand. He seized it with a hoarse cry.
The stillness of the forest was broken suddenly by a sharp crack that reverberated a moment and then died rapidly away. Then all was silent again save for the chuckling whisper of the river hurrying on.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Nine Billion Names of God
A sense of the cosmic underlies much of Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction and manifests in a variety of forms: the computer-accelerated working out of prophecy in “The Nine Billion Names of God,” the sentient telecommunications network given the spark of life in “Dial F for Frankenstein,” and the mysterious extraterrestrial overseers guiding human destiny in the novelization of his screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke’s best-known story, 2001, and its sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three, represent the culmination of ideas on man’s place in the universe introduced in his 1951 story “The Sentinel” and elaborated more fully in Childhood’s End, his elegiac novel on humankind’s maturation as a species and ascent to a greater purpose in the universal scheme. Clarke grounds the cosmic mystery of these stories in hard science. Degreed in physics and mathematics, Clarke was contributor to numerous scientific journals and first proposed the idea for the geosynchronous orbiting communications satellite in 1945. Some of his best-known work centers around the solution of a scientific problem or enigma. A Fall of Moondust tells of efforts to rescue a ship trapped under unusual conditions on the lunar surface. The Fountains of Paradise concerns the engineering problems encountered when building an earth elevator to supply orbiting space stations. His Hugo and Nebula Award–winning book, A Rendezvous with Rama, extrapolates his solid scientific inquiry into provocative new territory, telling of the human discovery of an apparently abandoned alien spaceship and human attempts to understand its advanced scientific principles. Clarke’s other novels include Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars, Earthlight, Imperial Earth, and The Deep Range, a futuristic exploration of undersea life in terms similar to his speculations on space travel. He has written the novels Islands in the Sky and Dolphin Island for young readers, and his short fiction has been collected in Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, Tales from the White Heart, The Wind from the Sun, and others. His numerous books of nonfiction include his award-winning Exploration of Space, and the autobiographical Astounding Days. Clarke was officially knighted in 2000.