It was considered that not less than six years’ journeying in super-overdrive would be required to cross the gulf between the island universes. The ship was fueled for twenty years at full power, and it would grow its food in hydroponic tank, purify its air by the growing vegetation, and nine-tenth of its mass was fuel. It had gone into the very special overdrive which Alyx had worked out—and ignored thereafter—twenty five years before. Of all the creations of men, it seemed least likely to have any possible connection with the planet-entity which was Alyx.
But it was the Haslip Expedition which made the last report on Alyx. There is still dispute about some essential parts of the story. On the one hand, Alyx had no need to leave the First Galaxy. With three hundred million inhabitable planets, of which not more than ten thousand were colonized and of which certainly less than a quarter million had been even partially surveyed, Alyx could have escaped detection for centuries if it chose.
It could have defended itself if discovered. There was no reason for it to take to intergalactic space. That it did so seems to rule out accident. But it is equally inconceivable that any possible device could intentionally have found the Haslip Expedition in that unthinkable gulf between galaxies.
But it happened. Two years journeying out from the First Galaxy, when the younger children had already forgotten what it was like to see a sun and had lost all memories of ever being out-of-doors beneath a planet’s sky, the expedition’s fuel store began to deteriorate.
Perhaps a single molecule of the vast quantity of fuel was altered by a cosmic ray. It is known that the almost infinitely complex molecules of overdrive fuel are capable of alteration by neutron bombardment, so the cosmic-ray alteration is possible. In any case, the fuel began to change. As if a contagious allotropic modification were spreading, the fuel progressively became useless*.
* Pure metallic tin, at low temperatures, sometimes changes spontaneously to a gray, amorphous powder, the change beginning at one spot and spreading to the rest of the material. M.L.
Two years out from the First Galaxy, the expedition found itself already underfueled. By heroic efforts, the contaminated fuel was expelled from the tanks. But there was not enough sound fuel left to continue to the Second Galaxy, or to return to the First. If all drive were cut off and the expedition’s ship simply drifted on, it might reach the Second Galaxy in three centuries with fuel left for exploration and landings.
Neither the original crew nor their children nor their grandchildren could hope to reach such a journey’s end. But their many-times-great-grandchildren might. So the Haslip Expedition conserved what fuel was left and the ship drifted on in utter emptiness, and the adults of the crew settled down to endure the imprisonment which would last for generations.
They did not need to worry about food or air. The ship was self-sustaining on that score. They even had artificial gravity. But the ship must drift for three centuries before the drive was turned on again.
Actually, it did drift for twenty-three years after the catastrophe. A few of the older members of the crew died; the greater part had no memory at all of anything but the ship.
Then Alyx came. Its approach was heralded by a clamorous ringing of all the alarm bells on the ship. It winked into being out of overdrive a bare half million miles away. It glowed blindingly with the lights it had created to nourish its surface. It swam closer and the crew of the expedition’s ship set to work fumblingly—because it had been many years since the drive had been used—and tried vainly to estimate the meaning of the phenomenon.
Then they felt acceleration toward Alyx. It was not a gravitational pull, but a drawing of the ship itself.
The ship landed on Alyx, and there was the sensation of reeling, of the collapse of all the cosmos. Then the unchanging galaxies began to stir, very slowly—not at all like the crawling glow-worms that suns seem within a galaxy—and the older members of the crew knew that this entire planet had gone into overdrive.
When they emerged from the ship there were forests, lakes, palaces—such beauty as the younger members of the crew had no memory of. Music filled the air and sweet scents, and—in short, Alyx provided the crew of the Haslip Expedition with a very admirable paradise for human beings. And it went on toward the Second Galaxy. .
Instead of the three hundred years they had anticipated, or even the four years that would have remained with the very special overdrive with which the expedition’s ship was equipped, Alyx came out of overdrive in three months, at the edge of the Second Galaxy.
In the interval, its conimunicators had been at work. It explained, naively, everything that had happened to it among men. It explained its needs. It found words—invented words—for explanation of the discoveries the Space Patrol had wanted but could not wait to secure.
Jon Haslip the twenty-second found that he possessed such revelatious of science as unaided human beings would not attain to for thousands of years yet to come. He knew that Alyx could never return to the First Galaxy because it was stronger and wiser than men. But he understood Alyx. It seemed to be an inheritance in his family.
Alyx still could not live without men nor could it live among men. It had brought the Haslip Expedition to the Second Galaxy, and of its own accord it made a new ship modeled upon the one it had drawn to itself, but remarkably better. It offered that ship for exploration of the Second Galaxy. It offered others. It desired only to serve men.
This new ship, made by Alyx, for the Haslip Expedition, returned to Dassos a year later with its reports. In the ship of Alyx’s making, the journey between galaxies took only five months—less than the time needed for the ancient first space journey from Earth to Venus.*
* Earth, of course, is familiar as the first home of humanity. It is the third planet of Sol. Venus is the second planet of Sol, and the first journey from a planet to another was that from Earth to Venus. —M.L.
Only a part of the augmented crew of the first ship came back to Dassos with reports for the Space Patrol. Another part stayed behind in the Second Galaxy, working from a base equipped with machines that Alyx had made for the service of men. The Space Patrol was very much annoyed with Jon Haslip the twenty-second. He had not destroyed Alyx. It had informed him truthfully of the fact that it was a danger to men, and he had not destroyed it. Instead, he had made a bargain with it. Those of the younger folk who preferred to remain on Alyx did so. They had palaces and gardens and every imaginable luxury. They also had sciences that overreached those of other men, and Alyx itself for an instructor.
Alyx carried those young folks on toward infinity. In time to come, undoubtedly, some of the descendants of those now living on Alyx would wish to leave it.
They would form a human colony somewhere else. Perhaps some of them would one day rejoin the parent race, bringing back new miracles that they or possibly Alyx had created in its rejoicing at the companionship of the human beings who lived upon it.
This was the report of Jon Haslip the twenty-second. He also had reports of new planets fit for human habitation, of star-systems as vast as those of the First Galaxy, and an unlimited vista of expansion for humanity. But the Space Patrol was very much annoyed. He had not destroyed Alyx.