To the Planner on his great golden chair the news came and quenched his chucjding good humor. His huge soft face turned pale with fear.
To a man named Boysie Gann, locked in the dungeons of the Machine, no word came—but he knew. For he heard a guard whisper to another, "The Starchild!"
To a girl with haunted dark eyes, telling whispering sonic beads before a console of the Machine, the word came in a language that Man had not invented, and few men could understand. Her name was Delta Four, and she did not fear. She did not care at all. . . .
And that was how it began for them, and the wave of darkness raced on into infinite space.
Twelve minutes from the Sun it swept Mars, halting the dedication of an enormous new project to extract oxygen and water from the dead crust of the planet. The Deputy Planner of Mars, a poorly planned individual who had seen the Writ of Liberation with his own eyes, snatched a gun from his honor guard and shot himself.
During the following quarter hour that shadow bathed the asteroids, terrified a few, left others unconcerned. For either they did not know, being buried in the mining shafts that hollowed out the precious cores of the tiny planets, or they were so dazed and uncaring with the eternal hardship of their toil that nothing could frighten them again.
The racing wave of light overtook the scattered outposts of the Plan on the Moons of Jupiter. It darkened Saturn's rings, swallowed the satellites of Uranus and Neptune. It fell upon the Spacewall Command complex on distant Pluto, where only those whose eyes fell upon the Sun by chance noticed it—but they were afraid.
It drowned the Spacewall itself—more web than wall, a net of far-scattered stations whose laser beams and patrol craft kept watch on the little-known infinities beyond, alert to guard the Plan of Man against vagrants from the Reefs, or such enemies as the Starchild.
A wave of unexpected terror, it sent the crews of a thousand slow-wheeling spaceforts shouting to their emergency stations. It awakened sirens and horns on ten thousand lonely patrol ships. It set the laser beams winking with a million signals of confused alarm.
A day or so beyond Pluto it washed the frontiers of the solar system, the snowball protoplanets of solid methane and ammonia that the distant gravitational arms of the Sun had never gathered into actual worlds.
And then at last, days beyond that last fearful outpost of the Plan, it began to bathe the Reefs of Space.
Out on the Reefs, those living asteroids grown through unending ages by the minute fusorian organisms, feeding on the thin seas of interstellar hydrogen, the wave of shadow no longer meant terror. It was only another event in a life that was filled with danger and surprise.
On one lonely worldlet a prospector stopped to peer in annoyance at where the Sun had been. He fumbled in his pack for a luminous crystal of fusorian diamond, and bent over his drill again.
On another Reef a lay preacher in the Church of the Star glanced at his watch, then at the sky. He was not afraid when he saw that Sol was gone from its accustomed position. He had been expecting it.
He left his work to face the blue blaze of Deneb, knelt, whispered a few words of supplication and thanksgiving. Calmly then he bent back to the unfinished space boot on his last, for he was by trade a cobbler.
The shadow washed over a grave, but no one saw it. No one could have, for no one was there. Not even the cadaver; the grave was empty.
The shadow rested lightly on a city of stern, hard-faced refugees from the Plan of Man—on a great cluster of reeflets where a mighty space armada was being fashioned from fusorian steel—on a girl named Quarla Snow, who stood watching it flicker out with tears bright in her eyes.
On another living rock, a herdsman stood guarding a calving member of his herd from a flight of marauding pyropods. Lying behind a sheltering ledge of organic iron, one eye on his parturient spaceling while he searched out the armored killers with frugal flashes from his laser gun, he failed to notice that the Sun had gone out.
That was how it began, for every man, woman and child alive.
And thirty-nine minutes later the Sun began again its mighty outpouring of heat and light, but the wave of brilliance that followed the dark looked down on a changed solar system.
The Sun's atomic engines ran again. Hydrogen fused into helium through the carbon cycle. Filtered energy flowed toward the solar surface. Radiation poured into space.
Three minutes from the Sun, the wave of radiation crashed against that insulated dome on Mercury. It was recorded by the clucking camera, analyzed by the thousand automatic instruments. Sobbing with joy— or fear!—the blinded astronomers flashed the word to Earth: The Sun lives again!
But its light reached Earth before their message. That first rebirth of light brushed a high mountain on Earth, where the Planner sat on his golden chair, the gray metal falcon that perched on his shoulder darting a red-eyed glare about the room, whirring its steel wings. The Planner was staring at a sheet of creamy parchment that bore the heading:
WRIT OF LIBERATION
It had been delivered to him by the hand of one of his own guards, who had found it at his door. It said:
The Starchild requires the release of all of his followers who are held in the service of the Plan of Man by security collars.
The Starchild requires that all of his followers who have been consigned to the Body Bank for salvage shall be restored to their original state, and then that they too shall be released.
The Starchild finally requires that the barrier called the Spacewall shall be dismantled, and that free passage between the worlds of the Plan and the Reefs of Space shall be permitted.
The Starchild is aware that the Plan of Man considers itself invulnerable, and thus he has arranged a warning demonstration. At the moment of the vernal equinox on Earth the Sun will be extinguished. Twelve near stars will blink.
If the Planner fails to meet the Starchild's requirements after this demonstration, further measures will be taken. These will result in the destruction of the Plan of Man.
"Unplanned nonsense," groaned the Planner. "Impudence! Treason!" A tall Technicolonel said uneasily, "Sir. We must take measures—" "Measures," grumbled the Planner while his steel falcon clashed its pinions. "What does the Machine say?"
A girl in a hooded gown said, "No data, sir." Her voice was like distant music, her expression serene.
"No data! Find me some data! Find who this Starchild is! Tell me how he did this thing—and how I can stop him from doing it again!" The Technicolonel coughed. "Sir, for some years we have had reports of a Church of the Star. A new religion, apparently springing from the Reefs—"
"Always the Reefs! They should have been destroyed twenty years ago!"
"Yes, sir. But they were not. And the pioneers—that is, sir, the tramps and vagabonds on the Reefs—they invented new superstitions. They worship, I believe, the star Deneb. Alpha Cygni—the star at the top of the Northern Cross. They have imagined a paradise on the planets that they imagine to orbit around it. They wish to migrate there, or some of them do—though at maximum drive for conventional spacecraft," he continued earnestly, "they might average some one per cent of the speed of light, in which case Deneb, at four hundred light-years distance, would not be reached for forty thousand—"
"Get to the point!" cried the Planner fretfully. "What about the Starchild?"
"Well, sir, we had heard rumors of such a person in our investigations of this cult. Some time ago we decided to send a ... uh ... a special investigator to secure intelligence concerning him and it. The investigator's name was Boysie Gann, sir, and—"
"Bring him to me! Is he here on Earth?"
"Yes, sir. But . . . well, sir, he did not return as we expected. In fact"—the Colonel's face was a picture puzzle of confusion—"I must confess, sir, that we don't properly know how he did return, as—"