He could feel the drowsiness settling upon him. The ship was accelerating to lightspeed, and the cyrogenic sleep was coming. But he didn’t want to fall into slumber with those thoughts of blood and terror and loss before him.
With a conscious effort, Holman focused his thoughts on the only other available subject: the outside world, the universe of galaxies. An infinitely black sky studded with islands of stars. Glowing shapes of light, spiral, ovoid, elliptical. Little smears of warmth in the hollow unending darkness; dabs of red and blue standing against the engulfing night.
One of them, he knew, was the Milky Way. Man’s original home. From this distance it looked the same. Unchanged by little annoyances like the annihilation of an intelligent race of star-roamers.
He drowsed.
The ship bore onward, preceded by an invisible net of force, thousands of kilometers in radius, that scooped in the rare atoms of hydrogen drifting between the galaxies and fed them into the ship’s wounded, aching generators.
Something… a thought. Holman stirred in the couch. A consciousness—vague, distant, alien—brushed his mind.
He opened his eyes and looked at the computer view-screen. Blank.
«Who is it?» he asked.
A thought skittered away from him. He got the impression of other minds: simple, open, almost childish. Innocent and curious.
It’s a ship.
Where in it… oh, yes. I can sense it now. A beautiful ship.
Holman squinted with concentration.
It’s very far away. I can barely reach it.
And inside of the ship…
It’s a man. A human!
He’s afraid.
He makes me feel afraid!
Holman called out, «Where are you?»
He’s trying to speak.
Don’t answer!
But…
He makes me afraid. Don’t answer him. We’ve heard about humans!
Holman asked, «Help me.»
Don’t answer him and he’ll go away. He’s already so far off that I can barely hear him.
But he asks for help.
Yes, because he knows what is following him. Don’t answer. Don’t answer!
Their thoughts slid away from his mind. Holman automatically focused the outside viewscreens, but here in the emptiness between galaxies he could find neither ship nor planet anywhere in sight. He listened again, so hard that his head started to ache. But no more voices. He was alone again, alone in the metal womb of the ship.
He knows what is following him. Their words echoed in his brain. Are the Others following me? Have they picked up my trail? They must have. They must be right behind me.
He could feel the cold perspiration start to trickle over him.
«But they can’t catch me as long as I keep moving,» he muttered. «Right?»
CORRECT, said the computer, flashing lights at him. AT A RELATIVISTIC VELOCITY, WITHIN LESS THAN ONE PERCENT OF LIGHTSPEED, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THIS SHIP TO BE OVERTAKEN.
«Nothing can catch me as long as I keep running.» But his mind conjured up a thought of the Immortals. Nothing could kill them… except the Others.
Despite himself, Holman dropped into deepsleep. His body temperature plummeted to near-zero. His heartbeat nearly stopped. And as the ship streaked at almost lightspeed, a hardly visible blur to anyone looking for it, the outside world continued to live at its own pace. Stars coalesced from gas clouds, matured, and died in explosions that fed new clouds for newer stars. Planets formed and grew mantles of air. Life took root and multiplied, evolved, built a myriad of civilizations in just as many different forms, decayed and died away.
All while Holman slept.
The computer woke him gently with a series of soft chimes.
APPROACHING THE SOLAR SYSTEM AND PLANET EARTH, AS INDICATED BY YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS COURSE INSTRUCTIONS.
Planet Earth, man’s original home world. Holman nodded. Yes, this was where he had wanted to go. He had never seen the Earth, never been on this side of the Milky Way galaxy. Now he would visit the teeming nucleus of man’s doomed civilization. He would bring the news of the awful defeat, and be on the site of mankind’s birth when the inexorable tide of extinction washed over the Earth.
He noticed, as he adjusted the outside viewscreens, that the pain had gone.
«The generators have repaired themselves,» he said.
WHILE YOU SLEPT. POWER GENERATION SYSTEM NOW OPERATING NORMALLY.
Holman smiled. But the smile faded as the ship swooped closer to the solar system. He turned from the outside viewscreens to the computer once again. «Are the ‘scopes working all right?»
The computer hummed briefly, then replied. SUBSYSTEMS CHECK SATISFACTORY, COMPONENT CHECK SATISFACTORY, INTEGRATED EQUIPMENT CHECK POSITIVE. VIEWING EQUIPMENT FUNCTIONING NORMALLY.
Holman looked again. The sun was rushing up to meet his gaze, but something was wrong about it. He knew deep within him, even without having ever seen the sun this close before, that something was wrong. The sun was whitish and somehow stunted looking, not the full yellow orb he had seen in film-tapes. And the Earth…
The ship took up a parking orbit around a planet scoured clean of life: a blackened ball of rock, airless, waterless. Hovering over the empty, charred ground, Holman stared at the devastation with tears in his eyes. Nothing was left. Not a brick, not a blade of grass, not a drop of water.
«The Others,» he whispered. «They got here first.»
NEGATIVE, the computer replied. CHECK OF STELLAR POSITIONS FROM EARTH REFERENCE SHOWS THAT SEVERAL BILLION YEARS HAVE ELAPSED SINCE THE FINAL BATTLE.
«Seven billion…»
LOGIC CIRCUITS INDICATE THE SUN HAS GONE THROUGH A NOVA PHASE. A COMPLETELY NATURAL PHENOMENON UNRELATED TO ENEMY ACTION.
Holman pounded a fist on the unflinching armrest of his couch, «Why did I come here? I wasn’t born on Earth. I never saw Earth before…»
YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS INDICATES A SUBJECTIVE IMPULSE STIRRED BY…
«To hell with my subconscious!» He stared out at the dead world again. «All those people… the cities, all the millions of years of evolution, of life. Even the oceans are gone. I never saw an ocean. Did you know that? I’ve traveled over half the universe and never saw an ocean.»
OCEANS ARE A COMPARATIVELY RARE PHENOMENON EXISTING ON ONLY ONE OUT OF APPROXIMATELY THREE THOUSAND PLANETS.
The ship drifted outward from Earth, past a blackened Mars, a shrunken Jupiter, a ringless Saturn.
«Where do I go now?» Holman asked.
The computer stayed silent.
Holman sat blankly while the ship swung out past the orbit of Pluto and into the comet belt at the outermost reaches of the sun’s domain.
He was suddenly aware of someone watching him.
No cause for fear. I am not of the Others.
It was an utterly calm, placid voice speaking in his mind: almost gentle, except that it was completely devoid of emotion.
«Who are you?»
An observer. Nothing more.
«What are you doing out here? Where are you, I can’t see anything…»
I have been waiting for any stray survivor of the Final Battle to return to mankind’s first home. You are the only one to come this way, in all this time.
«Waiting? Why?»
Holman sensed a bemused shrug, and a giant spreading of vast wings.
I am an observer. I have watched mankind since the beginning. Several of my race even attempted to make contact with you from time to time. But the results were always the same—about as useful as your attempts to communicate with insects. We are too different from each other. We have evolved on different planes. There was no basis for understanding between us.