The phoenix, the bird that periodically immolates itself upon a flaming pyre to rise newborn and live again for an-other millennium, and again and forever, is only metaphorically a myth. It exists and there is only one of it.
You are the phoenix.
Nothing will ever destroy you, now that-during many high civilizations-your seed has been scattered on the planets of a thousand suns, in a hundred galaxies, there ever to repeat the pattern. The pattern that started a hundred and eighty thousand years ago-I think.
I cannot be sure of that, for I have seen that the twenty to thirty thousand years that elapse between the fall of one civilization and the rise of the next destroy all traces. In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain, and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very continents change-and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years before is under miles of earth or miles of water.
So I cannot be sure. Perhaps the first blow-up that I knew was not the first; civilizations may have risen and fallen before my time. If so, it merely strengthens the case I put before you to say that mankind may have survived more than the hundred and eighty thousand years I know of, may have lived through more than the six blow-ups that have happened since what I think to have been the first discovery of the phoenix’s pyre.
But-except that we scattered our seed to the stars so well that even the dying of the sun or its becoming a nova would not destroy us-the past does not matter. Lur, Candra, Thragan, Kah, Mu, Atlantis-those are the six I have known, and they are gone as thoroughly as this one will be twenty thousand years or so hence, but the human race, here or in other galaxies, will survive and will live forever.
It will help your peace of mind, here in this year of your current era, to blow that-for your minds are disturbed. Perhaps, I do know, it will help your thoughts to know that the coming atomic war, the one that will probably happen in your generation, will not be a blow-up war; it will come too soon for that, before you have developed the really destructive weapons man has had so often before. It will set you back, yes. There will be darkish ages for a century or a few centuries. Then, with the memory of what you will call World War III as a warning, man will think-as he has always thought after a mild atomic war-that he has conquered his own insanity.
For a while-if the pattern holds-he will hold it in check. He will reach the stars again, to find himself already there. Why, you’ll be back on Mars within five hundred years, and I’ll go there too, to see again the canals I once helped to dig. I’ve not been there for eighty thousand years and I’d like to see what time has done to it and to those of us who were cut off there the last time mankind lost the space drive. Of course they’ve followed the pattern too, but the rate is not necessarily constant. We may find them at any stage in the cycle except the top. If they were at the top of the cycle, we wouldn’t have to go to them-they’d come to us. Thinking, of course, as they think by now, that they are Martians.
I wonder how high, this time, you will get. Not quite as high, I hope, as Thragan. I hope that never again is rediscovered the weapon Thragan used against her colony on Skora, which was then the fifth planet until the Thragans blew it into asteroids. Of course that weapon would be developed only long after intergalactic travel again becomes commonplace. If I see it coming I’ll get out of the Galaxy, but I’d hate to have to do that. I like Earth and I’d like to spend the rest of my mortal lifetime on it if it lasts that long.
Possibly it won’t, but the human race will last. Everywhere and forever, for it will never be sane and only insanity is divine. Only the mad destroy themselves and all they have wrought.
And only the phoenix lives forever.
Not Yet the End
THERE WAS a greenish, hellish tinge to the light within the metal cube. It was a light that made the dead-white skin of the creature seated at the controls seem faintly green.
A single, faceted eye, front center in the head, watched the seven dials unwinkingly. Since they had left Xandor that eye had never once wavered from the dials. Sleep was unknown to the race to which Kar-388Y belonged. Mercy, too, was unknown. A single glance at the sharp, cruel features below the faceted eye would have proved that.
The pointers on the fourth and seventh dials came to a stop. That meant the cube itself had stopped in space relative to its immediate objective. Kar reached forward with his upper right arm and threw the stabilizer switch. Then he rose and stretched his cramped muscles.
Kar turned to face his companion in the cube, a being like himself. ‘We are here,” he said. “The first stop, Star Z-5689. It has nine planets, but only the third is habitable. Let us hope we find creatures here who will make suitable slaves for Xandor.”
Lal-i6B, who had sat in rigid mobility during the journey, rose and stretched also. “Let us hope so, yes. Then we can return to Xandor and be honored while the fleet comes to get them. But let’s not hope too strongly. To meet with success at the first place we stop would be a miracle. We’ll probably have to look a thousand places.”
Kar shrugged. “Then we’ll look a thousand places. With the Lounacs dying off, we must have slaves else our mines must close and our race will die.”
He sat down at the controls again and threw a switch that activated a visiplate that would show what was beneath them. He said, “We are above the night side of the third planet. There is a cloud layer below us. I’ll use the manuals from here.”
He began to press buttons. A few minutes later he said, “Look, Lal, at the visiplate. Regularly spaced lights—a city! The planet is inhabited.”
Lal had taken his place at the other switchboard, the fighting controls. Now he too was examining dials. “There is nothing for us to fear. There is not even the vestige of a force field around the city. The scientific knowledge of the race is crude. We can wipe the city out with one blast if we are attacked.”
“Good,” Kar said. “But let me remind you that destruction is not our purpose—yet. We want specimens. If they prove satisfactory and the fleet comes and takes as many thousand slaves as we need, then will be time to destroy not a city but the whole planet. So that their civilization will never progress to the point where they’ll be able to launch reprisal raids.”
Lal adjusted a knob. “All right. I’ll put on the megrafield and we’ll be invisible to them unless they see far into the ultraviolet, and, from the spectrum of their sun, I doubt that they do.”
As the cube descended the light within it changed from green to violet and beyond. It came to a gentle rest. Kar manipulated the mechanism that operated the airlock.
He stepped outside, Lal just behind him. “Look,” Kar said, two bipeds. Two arms, two eyes—not dissimilar to the Lounacs, although smaller. Well, here are our specimens.”
He raised his lower left arm, whose three-fingered hand held a thin rod wound with wire. He pointed it first at one of the creatures, then at the other. Nothing visible emanated from the end of the rod, but they both froze instantly into statuelike figures.
“They’re not large, Kar,” Lal said. “I’ll carry one back, you carry the other. We can study them better inside the cube, after were back in space.”
Kar looked about him in the dim light. “All right, two is enough, and one seems to be male and the other female. Let’s get going.”
A minute later the cube was ascending and as soon as they were well out of the atmosphere, Kar threw the stabilizer switch and joined Lal, who had been starting a study of the specimens during the brief ascent.