Listen to it, old one.”
“All right, Emerak,” the elder being said, “you’ve proved your point. I never claimed to be infallible.”
“These are pretty strange thought-impressions coming up, Skrid. Listen to them, they have no minds down there,” said Ullowa. “They don’t think.”
“That’s fine,” exulted Skrid. “We can teach them the ways of civilization and raise them to our level. It shouldn’t be hard, when time is ours.”
“Yes,” Ullowa agreed, “they’re so mindless that they’ll be putty in our hands. Skrid’s Colony, we’ll call the planet. I can just see the way the Council will go for this. A new colony, discovered by the noted adventurer Skrid and two fearless companions—”
“Skrid’s Colony, I like the sound of that,” said Skrid. “Look, there’s a drifting colony of them now, falling to earth. Let’s join them and make contact; here’s our chance to begin.”
They entered the colony and drifted slowly to the ground among the others. Skrid selected a place where a heap of them lay massed together, and made a skilled landing, touching all six of his delicately constructed limbs to the ground and sinking almost thankfully into a position of repose. Ullowa and Emerak followed and landed nearby.
“I can’t detect any minds among them,” complained Emerak, frantically searching through the beings near him. “They look just like us—that is, as close a resemblance as is possible for one of us to have to another. But they don’t think.”
Skrid sent a prying beam of thought into the heap on which he was lying. He entered first one, then another, of the inhabitants.
“Very strange,” he reported. “I think they’ve just been born; many of them have vague memories of the liquid state, and some can recall as far back as the vapor state. I think we’ve stumbled over something important, thanks to Emerak.”
“This is wonderful!” Ullowa said. “Here’s our opportunity to study newborn entities firsthand.”
“It’s a relief to find some people younger than myself,” Emerak said sardonically. “I’m so used to being the baby of the group that it feels peculiar to have all these infants around.”
“It’s quite glorious,” Ullowa said, as he propelled himself over the ground to where Skrid was examining one of the beings. “It hasn’t been for a million ten-years that a newborn has appeared on our world, and here we are with billions of them all around.”
“Two million ten-years, Ullowa,” Skrid corrected. “Emerak here is of the last generation. And no need for any more, either, not while the mature entities live forever, barring accidents. But this is a big chance for us—we can make a careful study of these newborn ones, and perhaps set up a rudimentary culture here, and report to the Council once these babies have learned to govern themselves. We can start completely from scratch on the Third Planet. This discovery will rank with Kodranik’s vapor theory!”
“I’m glad you allowed me to come,” said Emerak. “It isn’t often that a youngster like me gets a chance to—” Emerak’s voice tailed off in a cry of amazement and pain.
“Emerak?” questioned Skrid. There was no reply.
“Where did the youngster go? What happened?” Ullowa said.
“Some fool stunt, I suppose. That little speech of his was too good to be true, Ullowa.”
“No, I can’t seem to locate him anywhere. Can you? Uh, Skrid! Help me! I’m—I’m—Skrid, it’s killing me!”
The sense of pain that burst from Ullowa was very real, and it left Skrid trembling. “Ullowa! Ullowa!”
Skrid felt fear for the first time in more eons than he could remember, and the unfamiliar fright-sensation disturbed his sensitively balanced mind. “Emerak! Ullowa! Why don’t you answer?”
Is this the end, Skrid thought, the end of everything? Are we going to perish here after so many years of life? To die alone and unattended, on a dismal planet billions of miles from home? Death was a concept too alien for him to accept.
He called again, his impulses stronger this time. “Emerak! Ullowa! Where are you?”
In panic, he shot beams of thought all around, but the only radiations he picked up were the mindless ones of the newly born.
“Ullowa!”
There was no answer, and Skrid began to feel his fragile body disintegrating. The limbs he had been so proud of—so complex and finely traced—began to blur and twist. He sent out one more frantic cry, feeling the weight of his great age, and sensing the dying thoughts of the newly born around him. Then he melted and trickled away over the heap, while the newborn snowflakes of the Third World watched uncomprehending, even as their own doom was upon them. The sun was beginning to climb over the horizon, and its deadly warmth beat down.
EN ROUTE TO EARTH
This is another early story—I wrote it In March of 1957—but a whole world of professional experience separates “The Silent Colony” from “En Route to Earth.” The first story was the work of an eager, hopeful amateur, just setting out on a risky writing career, who had sold only one previous story, to the Scottish magazine Nebula. But by the time I had written “En Route to Earth”, less than four years later, I was an established writer with some two hundred published stories behind me and editors asking me for new stories almost every day.
One of those editors was Robert. W. Lowndes, who had given me my first sale to an American s-f magazine in 1954 when he bought “The Silent Colony.” By 1957 Lowndes and I had become good friends, with shared interests not only in science fiction but in classical music and much else. He frequently used my work in his three s-f titles (Future, Science Fiction Stories, and Science Fiction Quarterly), as well as in his detective-story magazine and even, occasionally, in one of his sports-fiction pulps or his western-story magazine.
Lowndes edited so many magazines that he had their covers printed in batches, four titles at a time, and usually asked some writer to do a story based on a cover illustration that had already been painted, rather than doing it, as was more common, the other way around. In those years I was one of the writers he frequently called upon for such tasks. One day in March of 1957 he showed me a new painting by the prolific Ed Emshwiller that was going to be the cover for the August 1957 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly. It showed the stewardess of a space-liner being beckoned by one of the passengers—but the stewardess had blue skin, the passenger had three heads, and various other alien beings could be seen in the background.
“Easy,” I said. “This is going to be fun.” And I went home and wrote “En Route to Earth,” which Lowndes published a few months later.
BEFORE THE FLIGHT, THE CHIEF stewardess stopped off in the women’s lounge to have a few words with Milissa, who was making her first extrasolar hop as stewardess of the warpliner King Magnus.
Milissa was in uniform when the chief stewardess appeared. The low cut, clinging plastic
