“And now it’s an emotional pain. . . a permanent, fixed, immutable disease that will kill me, sooner or later. But don’t worry, I won’t kill myself. I’m over that. And I won’t do anything to damage you, either.”
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS?
He shrugged. “Let’s see what the world looks like out there.” Holman focused the outside viewscreens. “Things look different,” he said, puzzled. “The sky isn’t black anymore; it’s sort of grayish—like the first touch of dawn. . .”
COURSE INSTRUCTIONS?
He took a deep breath. “Let’s try to find some planet where the people are too young to have heard of mankind, and too innocent to worry about death.”
A PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION. THE SCANNERS CAN ONLY DETECT SUCH SOCIETIES AT EXTREMELY CLOSE RANGE.
“Okay. We’ve got nothing but time.”
The ship doubled back to the nearest galaxy and began a searching pattern. Holman stared at the sky, fascinated. Something strange was happening.
The viewscreens showed him the outside world, and automatically corrected the wavelength shifts caused by the ship’s immense velocity. It was as though Holman were watching a speeded-up tape of cosmological evolution. Galaxies seemed to be edging into his field of view, mammoth islands of stars, sometimes coming close enough to collide. He watched the nebulous arms of a giant spiral slice silently through the open latticework of a great ovoid galaxy. He saw two spirals inter-penetrate, their loose gas heating to an intense blue that finally disappeared into ultraviolet. And all the while, the once-black sky was getting brighter and brighter.
“Found anything yet?” he absently asked the computer, still staring at the outside view.
You will find no one.
Holman’s whole body went rigid. No mistaking it: the Others.
No race, anywhere, will shelter you.
We will see to that.
You are alone, and you will be alone until death releases you to join your fellow men.
Their voices inside his head rang with cold fury. An implacable hatred, cosmic and eternal.
“But why me? I’m only one man. What harm can I do now?”
You are a human.
You are accursed. A race of murderers.
Your punishment is extinction.
“But I’m not an Immortal. I never even saw an Immortal. I didn’t know about the Flower People, I just took orders.”
Total extinction.
For all of mankind.
All.
“Judge and jury, all at once. And executioners too. All right. . . try and get me! If you’re so powerful, and it means so much to you that you have to wipe out the last single man in the universe—come and get me! Just try.”
You have no right to resist.
Your race is evil. All must pay with death.
You cannot escape us.
“I don’t care what we’ve done. Understand? I don’t care! Wrong, right, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t do anything. I won’t accept your verdict for something I didn’t do.”
It makes no difference.
You can flee to the ends of the universe to no avail.
You have forced us to leave our time-continuum. We can never return to our homeworlds again. We have nothing to do but pursue you. Sooner or later your machinery will fail. You cannot flee us forever.
Their thoughts broke off. But Holman could still feel them, still sense them following.
“Can’t flee forever,” Holman repeated to himself. “Well, I can damn well try.”
He looked at the outside viewscreens again, and suddenly the word forever took on its real meaning.
The galaxies were clustering in now, falling in together as though sliding down some titanic, invisible slope. The universe had stopped expanding eons ago, Holman now realized. Now it was contracting, pulling together again. It was all ending!
He laughed. Coming to an end. Mankind and the Others, together, coming to the ultimate and complete end of everything.
“How much longer?” he asked the computer, “How long do we have?”
The computer’s lights flashed once, twice, then went dark. The viewscreen was dead.
Holman stared at the machine. He looked around the compartment. One by one the outside viewscreens were flickering, becoming static-streaked, weak, and then winking off.
