RELEASED ENTROPY	Part One

Beginning a two-part novel of power — the victory of
mankind — then retreat ——

by JACK WILLIAMSON

HELLO, universe!”
	The newscaster’s brisk voice, carried out on the hyperchron beam, crackled simultaneously from ten billion receivers on ten million inhabited planets.
	“I speak to you from the Hall of Worlds, on Melchonor, capital planet of the G. U. I. R. (Galactic Union of Interstellar Republics). For the Galactic Council is assembling to-morrow, in the first session of this new year, 104,293 C. S. (Conquest of Space). And a battle of giants is in promise!”
	The crisp words were emphasized by the animated play of the announcer’s features, across the fluorescent screens of ten billion hyperchronoscopes.
	“The first item on the calendar is the famous Gyroc Experiment. This proposed research, which has been hotly debated in scientific and legislative circles for many years, is coming up for final action.
	“Seru Gyroc himself—discoverer of the Omega Effect and the Gyroc Tensors, the basis of the proposed experiment—is going to speak in defense of his tremendous plan to prevent the universe from running down.
	“Seru Gyroc is already acknowledged the greatest living scientist of the galaxy, with nearly two hundred years of brilliant achievement to his credit. Among the latest of his triumphs is a modification of the old triterium-water longevity treatment, which is expected to add another full two centuries to the useful span of human life.
	“We salute you, Seru, a giant of science!”
	The newscaster bowed, on billions of screens.
	“But if he wins again, universe, it won’t be an easy victory! For opposed to him is another giant! The famous space cruiser Silver Bird is now plunging toward Melchonor. Aboard, racing to reach the Hall of Worlds in time for to-morrow’s debate, is Ron Goneen, captain general of the Galactic Patrol, and late commander of the Andromeda Expedition——
	“We salute you, Captain Goneen, a giant of exploration!
	“A battle of giants indeed, universe! Of giants who once were friends! For Ron Goneen, in the Galactic Academy, jot his first scientific training under Seru Gyroc. Now he is returning to join battle with his old professor.
	“Ron Goneen holds that the Omega Experiment, if performed, will result in immediate, universal cataclysm. He is making this desperate race, in his faithful old ship—so he believes—to save the galaxy!”
	The clean-featured face of the newscaster, in the billions of glowing screens, looked briefly down as he caught his breath and scanned his notes.
	“Now, universe!” he cried. “Our next surprise!
	“We bring you a dramatic incident from the Andromeda Expedition, enacted in our own studios under the supervision of a group of the surviving officers.
	“In the three years since its return, the history of the expedition has been told many times. All humanity knows how Captain Goneen planned the Silver Bird—the greatest and the swiftest space vessel ever designed! How his intrepid courage found support and volunteers for the undated voyage to the Andromeda Galaxy! How the great new vessel left the yards of the Galactic Patrol, here on Melchonor, over one hundred years ago! How it reached that distant island universe after a perilous voyage of more than thirty years!
	“A thousand volumes have been written of Ron Goneen’s adventures during forty years of exploration among the planets of Andromeda. His discoveries there have already created a dozen new sciences. His life was in danger ten thousand times!

	“BUT NOW we depict for you the last stirring episode of that forty years, before the Silver Bird returned.”
	The animated face vanished from the screens. In its stead appeared the tapered, silvery hull of a mile-long kappafield space cruiser, driving across a black sky whose brilliant stars were ranged in strange configurations.
	“There you see the Silver Bird,” the brisk voice resumed its narrative, “plunging ahead on the final tour of exploration, into the Gamma Quadrant of the new galaxy. There Captain Goneen encountered a new high type of intelligent life——”
	Suddenly, on the myriad screens, the space about the long ship was aswarm with flying objects. They were intricate nine-pointed crystals, each many yards in diameter. Their polished planes shone with white, mirrorlike radiance. Every point carried a clinging globe of colored luminescence that spun and changed as the crystal moved.
	“These beings were gigantic crystals of eternal metal. Their intelligence life, Captain Goneen believed, was a function of intermolecular electrostatic tensions; vital energy probably being derived from controlled radioactive disintegration.
	“Able to cross interstellar space without the aid of machinery, they had spread over ten thousand planets in a great globular star cluster. Once—so Captain Goneen believed from the colossal ruins he saw—their civilization had been high; but their culture had long since fallen into a vicious decadence.”
	The screens showed the Silver Bird landing upon the surface of a planet, still attended by that glittering, crystalline host. On a high, age-carved plateau, against a greenish sky, loomed a weird, colossal city of crimson cones that were shattered and truncated with immemorial time.
	“The metal Andromedans displayed great cleverness in their efforts to establish communication. This was soon accomplished through a radio hook-up, the crystals being sensitive to ultra-short waves and able to generate them.
	“But here you see Ron Goneen himself, in conversation with a leader of the Andromedans!”
	A broad-shouldered, powerful man, darkly tanned by many suns, the space captain stood on the barren ground beside his ship. Oxygen apparatus was slung about his shoulders, but his big, rugged head was bare, red hair tangled. He was speaking into a microphone. And before him, floating in a many-colored, luminous mist that clung most densely about its points, mirroring in its facets the greenish sky, was a monstrous nine-pointed star.
	“At first the Andromedans pretended friendship,” the staccato voice hastened on. “They brought amazing gifts, revealed the secrets of their half-lost science, and urged Captain Goneen to come with an expedition to the underground city of their rulers.”

	THE silvery crystals were shown bearing to the ship shining jewels, unfamiliar implements of metal, and fantastic works of art. Then, with a lonely little band in the trim green of the Galactic Patrol, Ron Goneen was seen marching away from the ship.
	“It was all a treacherous plot against the explorers!” barked the newscaster. “For a simultaneous attack was made on the cruiser and the party lost beneath the surface!”
	Thousands of the crystals, flying flatwise, dived slantingly at the unwarned Silver Bird. Jets of colored flame spurted from their points—arrowed annihilating rays that consumed scores of the luckless crew, who were caught outside the vessel. The survivors took off hastily, in the great vessel, in an effort to defend themselves.
	Deep in the planet, then, the screens showed the attack upon the other party. The Andromedans shone in the darkness—stars of mirrors, floating in cloudlets of many-colored flame! Multihued rays, lancing from their points, ruthlessly cut down the ill-armed, helpless men as they stumbled toward the shelter of boulders and crevices.
	“The few survivors,” the announcer went on, “were carefully taken alive, and carried by the Andromedans into a tremendous, rock-hewn temple, many miles beneath the surface, which was the center of their degenerate worship.”
	The screens showed an immense dim place, with colored stars floating amid vast columns that towered into boundless darkness. Ron Goneen and a few other men, haggard and bloodstained, were kneeling in chains before a stupendous altarlike structure. Before them, set on the apex of a black cone, was a small orb of brilliant white, shimmering like some wondrous pearl.
	“Proving that they had lapsed into superstitious barbarism,” the newscaster rushed on, “the Andromedans chained their captives as an offering before their most holy object—a singular small round stone, which shone with a steady pale glow.
	“However, they underestimated Captain Goneen!”
	Slowly, the swarming crystals departed, leaving the temple dark and empty. Only the pale reflection of the jewel showed the mighty arm of Ron Goneen, as it wrenched a massive block from the altar, shattered the fetters of his companions and himself. Then the announcer continued:
	“Their escape was discovered immediately,” the announcer hurried on. “But Ron Goneen led the few left with him out of the temple, into a labyrinth of narrowing caverns, where the crystals were able to follow only by blasting obstacles out of the way.
	“Time is lacking to detail their hardships and escapes. Flight and hiding from the pursuing crystals! Incredible privation! Desperate struggle for food and water. Respiratory difficulties from an irritating atmosphere!
	“Lost for many days in the dark caverns, they made torches from a seepage of crude petroleum. Ron Goneen ingeniously contrived a compass and a barometer to guide them—from a fragment of iron ore and the hollow shell of a dead organism! When, at last, they reached the open air, he used sheets of mica to make a heliograph with which to signal the Silver Bird!”
	The screens, again, showed the great cruiser landing beside a narrow, dark rift in the planet. Swarms of the bright crystals, wheeling high in the greenish sky, were now puzzlingly fearful of attack. The refugees, naked, weary, bruised, staggered triumphantly aboard.
	And the space captain proudly held, in his great, scarred palm, a small white stone.
	“The Jewel of Dawn!” cried the newscaster. “That is what Captain Goneen called the holy stone, because its pale radiance had helped guide his men through the caverns. For he had taken it from the sacred place of their captors!
	“It is said that he carries it still, in a pouch under his tunic, as a memento of that most desperate adventure. Upon the expedition’s return, all the other specimens and data accumulated were given to the Galactic Museum. But, although curious savants clamored for it, Captain Goneen refused to give up the stone from Andromeda!”
	A great sphere, shimmering like an illuminated pearl, vanished from ten billion hyperchronoscope screens. The newscaster’s face appeared again.
	“That, universe,” his voice crackled, “is the history of the Jewel of Dawn. To-morrow we will take you to the Hall of Worlds, where Seru Gyroc is to speak for his proposed experiment, and Captain Goneen—if his racing ship arrives in time!—against it.
	“What will be the outcome, universe? Will the Galactic Council listen to the foremost scientist of humanity, with his promises of incredible wonders to be done with the Omega Ray? Or will they give heed to this intrepid space commander and his warning of galactic doom?
	“Till to-morrow, universe!”
	And the ten billion screens went briefly dark.

II.
	“MY OPPONENTS have said that this thing is dangerous. I grant them that unguessed perils may lurk in the unknown realms of nature which we propose to explore, but I submit that the prize justifies the risk. Man did not conquer the galaxy through fear of new discovery!”
	When the white-robed speaker gravely paused, silence hung for a long instant in the vast, green-columned Hall of Worlds. Then a tremendous sea of applause rolled upward from the representatives of many interstellar dominions.
	Seru Gyroc was a slight, straight man, with brilliant dark eyes and very black hair. With thin hands folded in his severely simple robe, he stood with bowed head upon the speaker’s dais until silence was restored.
	Quietly then, yet with a dignity supported by his supreme achievements, he resumed, “Besides that possible danger inherent in any attempt to master the very creative force of nature, the Omega Experiment will involve vast expense and will require the best efforts of our most brilliant minds—perhaps for several centuries!
	“My opponents argue that it is sheer folly to undertake a project so costly in both materials and brains, so fraught with unknown peril, and—from their point of view—so needless.
	“Yet, to me”—the white-robed scientist paused; his dark eyes lifted solemnly above the green colonnades, to the vast blue dome above, pricked with golden stars—“it is worth all that cost and risk to win the goal we seek—to save the universe!”
	Once more wild applause rolled against the columns; and, before the thousands had resumed their seats, a powerful figure came striding through the portals: a tall man in the green of the Galactic Patrol, with stern objection written on his rugged face.
	Seru Gyroc looked down with a brief smile of recognition.
	“Entering is my greatest opponent, a man who was once my most brilliant student. It is strange”—and his thin face was almost sardonic—“that the fearless captain general of the Galactic Patrol should be afraid of a mere laboratory experiment! But it seems that he is. And you shall hear his reasons—and you shall judge.”

	RON GONEEN found a seat and sat listening, with a grim expression on his dark, weather-beaten visage.
	“I respect the opinion of Captain Goneen,” Seru Gyroc continued. “It was at his request, transmitted over the hyperchron beam from intergalactic space, that I ceased my preliminary experiments with the Omega Effect, thirty years ago.
	“I have waited patiently for the formal approval and support of the council, because the matter is very grave.
	“It is true, as Captain Goneen pointed out in his request to me, that the fate from which I seek to save our universe is very remote. Yet I venture to say that every one of you has felt the painful pressure of it! For it is supremely tragic to any thinking being to know that all his cosmos must ultimately die, even if his own life is not immediately affected.
	“Our universe is running down. Eventually it must stop—die! My opponents can point out that the energy of disintegrating matter still feeds the suns, whose radiation still warms the planets with the rays that sustain all life. But they cannot deny that every phase of that vital process, being subject to the second law of thermodynamics, must at last cease to be.
	“In the end, they must admit, all matter—even to the last barren fragment of the last sunless planet—must dissolve into free energy. And that energy, ‘decaying’ into the feeblest dark vibrations, of longest wave length, must at last be uniformly distributed through an infinitely expanded space.
	“Picture that ultimate end of the universe! A void of utter darkness, of cold almost absolute, in all of which there is no possible change, no motion, no life, no thought! Even time itself must cease to be—for time is mathematically determinable only by the direction of entropy increase.
	“Doesn’t that vision of utter and illimitable death fill you with abiding horror—even if the reality does not touch your own lives?
	“Can mankind ever be truly triumphant, living in a doomed universe?” Seru Gyroc swept his listeners with keen, dark eyes, in which burned a pressing challenge. “I feel that we cannot!
	“I feel that the conquest of entropy is the supreme task of the human race, worth any cost, any risk short of sure disaster!”
	When he paused, an awed and breathless silence filled the columned hall. His solemn eyes lifted slowly to the star-flung dome, and an uncertain patter of applause swept the floor. He waited. It swelled slowly to a tremendous ocean of sound, beating against the green colonnades.
	Only Ron Goneen kept his seat, with the same grim expression behind the red beard on his unshaven face.
	At last, when Seru Gyroc held up his arms for silence, the uproar subsided reluctantly.
	Only one doubtful question rang from the floor: “Can it be done?”

III.
	“IT CAN be done,” said the white-robed scientist gravely. “Entropy can be mastered.”
	His dark eyes caught the stern, forbidding look on the face of Ron Goneen, below. He paused as if disconcerted, then caught his breath and abruptly resumed: “The first law of thermodynamics is our assurance that the dissipated energy of a run-down universe still exists. For, although energy may be expressed in many forms, from the complex atoms in the core of a young sun to the feeble, dark radiation of a dead universe, its sum total is always the same.
	“It is the second so-called law of thermodynamics which informs us that any universe will run down. Yet that law has long been recognized to be merely statistical, not absolute. It is merely a statement of probability.
	“Consequently, its circumvention has been the most tantalizing dream of human science. Inventors since the dawn of knowledge, vaguely sensing the hidden truth, have labored vainly to perfect machines of perpetual motion.
	“There is a tradition, moreover, that a theoretical solution was imagined by an investigator whose name is now lost, at the very beginning of the Era of Science, before the race had ever left the mother planet.
	"Considering the problem of a gas in a partitioned chamber, this early genius* conceived the idea of an entity he called a demon, who should be able to operate an ultramicroscopic door in the partition, in such a manner as to allow only the swifter-moving molecules to pass through in one direction, and only the slower-moving ones to enter the other end of the chamber.
————
	* This “early genius,” of course, was Clerk Maxwell.
	A technical definition of entropy (Swann): “The change of entropy from one state of a system to another is the integral of dH/T from the first state to the second, the integral being taken along a reversible path, with dH representing the element of heat added at the temperature T.”
	A statistical interpretation of that definition is that every energy change in a system tends to proceed in the direction of maximum probability. That is, in the case of the confined gas, it follows from the conditions of probability that the molecules will tend to reach an average state of equally distributed energy in all parts of the system.
	When a piece of red-hot iron is plunged into a bucket of cold water, it is not “impossible”— according to the classical laws of molecular dynamics alone—that the molecules of iron should continue to absorb energy from the molecules of water, until the water is frozen and the iron fused. That remarkable occurrence would involve, however, a decrease of the entropy of the system. Statistically, it is very improbable, because the energy present can be distributed among the molecules in an immensely greater number of ways when the water and the iron have both reached the same average temperature. And any blacksmith can testify that, actually, it seldom happens!
	Crudely conceived, then, entropy is the measure of chaos, confusion, dissipation, of spent and useless energy. As clocks run down and rain falls and coal burns and the sun shines and your car is braked to a stop and your eye reads this page, the entropy of the universe is being increased. All energy runs down a hall, up which, without the aid of something like Maxwell’s demon, it can never return.
————
	“Thus this entity, so extraordinary of sense and agility, would be able, without doing any physical work, to accumulate fast molecules on one side of the partition, and slow ones on the other. In other words—since molecular motion is an expression of heat, of energy—the demon begins with a uniform or most probable distribution of energy, and he accumulates it, against the thermodynamic gradient, in one end of the chamber.
	“This remarkable being, that is, reduces the entropy of this system of gaseous molecules. Without doing any work, he collects heat in a part of the system, and cools the rest. He reverses the normal flow of energy, to increase the organization of his system, and to make its energy once more available for useful thermodynamic interchange.
	“How this unknown investigator pictured his demon,” continued the white-robed speaker, “it is now impossible to say, for any other meaning of the word is lost.
	“And for a hundred thousand years this elemental problem has baffled all science. The present very highly organized—and hence, statistically, extremely improbable—state of our universe has been tantalizing proof of the existence, somewhere, at some time, of this demon. It is evident that there must have been a winding up of the universe, a building, a creative process, in which the amount of its entropy was reduced. Yet the search for it always failed.
	“The first clue, I think, is to be found in the tensors I evolved less than a hundred years ago. They constitute a complete mathematical description of that demon. They apply, I am convinced, to a real phenomenon possible in the material world, which I have termed the Omega Effect.
	“New forces are involved, which I have termed, again using that ultimate symbol from an ancient alphabet, the Omega Radiation. I have not yet dared to release them. That waits for your approval. And their nature, therefore, or the system of laws they will follow, is yet unknown.
	“Only this much is certain: the Omega Effect will alter the conditions of real probability, in whatever part of the universe in which it occurs, in such a manner that the second law of thermodynamics will no longer apply. What was formerly a state of maximum probability will become one of minimum probability, and thermodynamic processes will be altered in conformity to the new statistical situation.
	“But that is enough to show the technical possibility of the experiment.”

	SERU GYROC paused again. His burning eyes scanned the thousands of his listeners, beneath the golden-starred dome. Ringing eagerly now, his low voice resumed: “And think what success would mean! Freedom from the old limitation of entropy: that energy must always be lost, wasted! Our fuel and power problems solved forever!
	“A man could draw heat from a mass of ice to cook his dinner! He could collect energy from the air to run his planes and vehicles—the very same energy that they had dissipated through friction—and travel forever without any cost in fuel!
	“Our children—if your courage allows me to perform this experiment—can gather dark waste radiation from the void, and condense it into matter again. They can build themselves new worlds and new shining suns—forever!”
	Once again the white-robed scientist waited while tremendous applause reverberated against the green columns.
	“That is my plea,” he finished quietly. “This thing can be done. I grant that it will be costly; I grant some element of danger. But I am eager for your permission and your aid to do it. It is a grave matter; consider it well. Please listen now to my opponents. Then—the decision is yours!”
	He went slowly to his seat.
	And Ron Goneen, recognized by the presiding officer, stalked grimly forward. The mighty, red-bearded explorer of space stood for a moment silent on the dais.
	“I am sorry that I must oppose this plan of my friend and teacher,” his deep voice rolled against the dome. “I am sorry to oppose any brave effort to increase the greatness of man. Perhaps it seems strange that I do. But I have been long away from the sheltered planets of the galaxy, and I have felt the blind, terrific might of the cosmic forces with which Seru proposes to tamper.”
	Soberly, his deep-set, narrowed blue eyes scanned the multitude.
	“I am proud of mankind,” he said. “For a hundred thousand years the human race has marched steadily upward. We have conquered all the galaxy. From a ‘minor phenomenon of planetary decay,’ as one ancient cynic put it, man has become the dominating intelligence of an entire galactic system. He has won a freedom, a power, a longevity, a perfected happiness, that would amaze his less fortunate progenitors.”
	His great scarred hands knotted earnestly at his sides.
	“Are we then to risk all this advance—everything that our race has ever accomplished since the first terrestrial beast rubbed two pieces of wood together and discovered fire? Are we to gamble all that upon one turn of an unknown wheel?
	“And for what?”
	The deep voice was husky with desperate urgency.
	“To prepare against a doom that will not be imminent for a million million years? Isn’t that sheer folly?”
	His rugged, stern face looked to the white-robed scientist in his seat, and back to the thousands. “Or to gain needless, fantastic powers? What is the need to cook on stoves of ice, or to collect the waste energy of friction, when we have reservoirs of atomic power to last a billion years?”
	His voice rumbled deeper. “What is the need to build new worlds, when Andromeda and a million million other island universes lie waiting for the explorer and the pioneer? Is there no room for triumphant adventure, without tampering with the very foundations of the universe?”
	His solemn face lifted to the vault of stars. “Since the dawn of terrestrial history, man has struggled through superstition and religion and science to solve this ultimate problem: the riddle of creation. He has never done so—and it is well that he has not!
	“For our own lives are among the phenomena of increasing entropy! Let us not seek to overrun the balance of the universe, and set time itself to flowing backward—lest we perish with our success!”
	Ron Goneen stepped a little backward; his voice sank lower.
	“That is all I have to say. It should be enough. Think well before you act. For the future of humanity—the very life of the universe—is in your hands.”
	He sat down abruptly, grim-faced as ever.

	THE presiding officer again recognized Seru Gyroc, who resumed the dais to say: “Yes, the life of the universe is indeed in your hands! For, if your decision is against the experiment, I shall destroy my notes.
	“And let me say that it was but a singular chance of reasoning that led me to discover the Gyroc Tensors. They are an anomaly in this universe of increasing entropy. No phenomenon guides the mind to them. It is safe to say, on grounds of mathematical probability, that my tensors will not be discovered again in this universe.”
	His voice was suddenly loud and clear.
	“The supreme privilege is yours! To vote for eternal life, for the power of creation itself, for the ultimate victory of mankind—or for retreat, failure, and inevitable, everlasting, changeless death!”
	The presiding officer again looked inquiring at Ron Goneen. But the weather-beaten space captain sat rigid and impassive in his chair, with mighty arms folded and narrowed steel-blue eyes staring bleakly ahead, as if at some awesome vision.
	Seeing that the president was about to call for the vote, Seru Gyroc rose hastily to make a final plea: “Personally, I believe that the danger of the Omega Experiment has been very much exaggerated. I would not willingly endanger other lives than my own, even in the cause of science.
	“And let me assure you that if the council approves the experiment, it will be performed with every precaution for safety. All my fellow workers will be carefully protected. And the actual research will be done at some point far outside the galaxy.”
	The presiding officer looked again, a little anxiously, at the space captain. But Ron Goneen still sat mute, staring—as if he already perceived the horror of the disaster of which he had spoken warning.
	Somewhat reluctantly, the president called for the vote. Each member pressed a button on his desk. Tabulated automatically, the result was instantly flashed on a huge screen at the end of the chamber.
	“The Galactic Council,” the sonorous and somewhat regretful voice of the official reverberated against the green columns, “has declared its approval of the plan!”
	As his voice echoed and died away, a hushed restraint filled the Hall of Worlds, as if the thousands felt a stricken apprehension at what they had done.
	Ron Goneen rose quietly in the silence, made his way to Seru Gyroc. He bowed, took the hand of his old master. “You have won,” he said. “It is to be. I hope my fears prove to have been without foundation. And let me be the first to volunteer my aid—for, come success or disaster, this will be the greatest adventure of man’s history.”
	Seru Gyroc was trembling, with tears of emotion in his eyes.
	“Thank you, Ron,” he gasped. “I am glad to have you with me again, and your aid will be priceless. And I hope”—his voice was very grave—“I hope man never regrets this day!”
	Suddenly, then, a wild and tremendous wave of cheers broke through the silent Hall of Worlds.

IV.
	THAT SAME DAY, the enthusiastic Galactic Council passed the necessary measures to authorize and finance the Gyroc Research Expedition, “Dispatched for the purpose of discovering a method for the controlled decrease of entropy.”
	And Ron Goneen offered the use of the veteran Silver Bird. Stained with the corrosion of many atmospheres, battered with the accidents of two million light years of space, scarred from the attack of the Andromedans, it was still the most powerful existing ship.
	In the busy yards of the Galactic Patrol, beneath the red-and-blue binary sun of Melchonor, it was completely refitted, and provisioned with supplies to last the expedition, if need be, for half the fifteen centuries of a normal lifetime.
	Vastly elaborate machine shops and laboratories were set up aboard, equipped with many pieces of apparatus designed by Seru Gyroc that were completely new to science.
	Ten years had passed when the preparations were complete, and the twelve hundred selected members of the expedition gathered on the dock beside the Silver Bird.
	Before any came aboard, Seru Gyroc appeared in the entrance valve, looking frail and thin in his severe white robe, yet animated with indomitable purpose.
	“One word, before we depart,” he said. “You are mostly young men and women. You represent the galaxy’s best. You were selected from millions who volunteered. You have much to lose: youth, vigor, genius! Are you prepared for great sacrifice?
	“I must tell you that our destination is the tiny, sunless planet of Pyralonne, discovered by the Andromeda expedition. It lies two hundred thousand light years from the limits of the galaxy. We have selected it to minimize the danger of the experiment.
	“You must all realize that our research may be fatal to some or all of you. Even otherwise, you must be prepared to spend several centuries upon dark, frozen Pyralonne, toiling in a grim exile of science. There will be no later opportunity to return. Let any who wish now withdraw. The rest will please come aboard.”
	The twelve hundred pressed eagerly forward, cheering. Ron Goneen strode forward silently from among them. His tanned, rugged face very grim. He strode up the gangway, clasped the thin hand of Seru Gyroc, and entered the vessel without a word. The chosen hundreds followed, marching out of the purple twilight.
	The long hull was sealed at last. Ron Goneen, standing beneath the transparent dome of his bridge, gave the order to rise. Gigantic atomic generators fed power to the kappafield coils, and the Silver Bird was off!
	The red sun and then the blue rose again, as the globe of Melchonor fell behind. They dwindled to tiny disks—to a ruby point and one of sapphire. The two points merged into one, and that was lost in the silver clouds of the galaxy.

	YET, swift as was the Silver Bird, plunging through millions of miles in a second, drawn into a tiny subspace of her own by the field warp of the kappa coils, seven years had passed before she approached her destination.
	Little larger than the ancient Moon of the mother planet, Pyralonne had been flung by some unguessed early cataclysm from the gravitational embrace of its own parent sun.
	Adrift among the stars, it had acquired, through millions of years, by the rule of equipartition of energy, the terrific velocity appropriate to its own tiny mass. Until at last, a freakish “runaway” world, it had burst free to go plunging forever into the dark gulf beyond its mother universe.
	Overtaking it, the Silver Bird slanted down across cragged, barren ranges that had not changed in a million million years, to land upon a plain. Once that bleak plateau may have known the brief flash of life. But since before the birth of Earth it had been sunless, changeless, the silent abode of frigid and eternal night.
	Armored against the complete vacuum and cold nearly absolute, men emerged beneath a sky utterly black, sunless, starless. In one quarter was the vague, silvery spindle of the galaxy—visible with light that had left it two thousand centuries before. Opposite was the dim tiny spiral of the Andromeda Galaxy, four times more distant.
	Undismayed, however, the explorers set to work at once.
	With stone quarried from that bleak plain, using tools and materials from the ship, they at once began erection of the laboratory: a great solitary tower, crowned with an immense flat dome.
	The ship itself, connected with the tower through a long tunnel, served as auxiliary workshop and living quarters for most of the expedition.

	FOUR MORE YEARS had passed before the actual research could be begun, with Ron Goneen in command of personnel and Seru Gyroc in charge of the laboratory.
	Already many members of the party, oppressed by the weight of cold and darkness, and recalling Ron Goneen’s dire predictions, were beginning to regret their early courage.
	For, as the slender scientist had foreseen, the conquest of the Omega Effect proved a long and arduous task. As the years grew into decades, Seru Gyroc himself sometimes admitted discouragement.
	Even on Pyralonne, however, existence was not absolutely cheerless. Sometimes, under favorable conditions, the hyperchron beam brought news from home; and the great ship provided facilities for rest and recreation.
	The expedition included a few hardy and daring women. Among the most brilliant and the most beautiful of them was tall, regal Karanora Quane, who had been for many years Seru Gyroc’s assistant in his biological research.
	The members of the expedition spared little time for love, and few cared to bring forth children who would know only this grim world. But Seru Gyroc and his lovely assistant were married before the first century had passed, and a daughter was presently born to them.
	The child was named Lethara. Many were grateful for her golden-haired presence among them, for the difficulties of the research had begun to seem insuperable. The smiles, the laughter and the songs of Lethara enlivened many weary decades.
	Discontent grew bitter, as the second century slipped away, until a company of mutineers attempted to seize the Silver Bird. They blocked the tunnel leading to the laboratory tower, and welded the bulkhead doors upon those aboard who refused to join them.
	Ron Goneen, however, was on the bridge. He held it, single-handed, for twenty hours, until Lethara, now a grown and beautiful woman, came in a space suit from the tower to tell the mutineers that her father had made a hopeful new discovery. She joined Ron Goneen, and together they induced the rebels to surrender.

	MORE YEARS PASSED, however, and the second century had turned before the supreme day of the actual experiment. The tower had been carefully insulated against the Omega Radiation, and the apparatus was set up under the dome. Ron Goneen and Seru Gyroc alone remained with it, sending all the rest aboard the ship.
	Karanora Quane and her lovely daughter were the last to leave the tower.
	And tears glistened suddenly in the steel-blue eyes of Ron Goneen, speaking to Lethara—in the eyes of Captain General Goneen, who had stalked a thousand planets and two galaxies, with never a second glance at any woman!
	Lethara clung to his bronzed form suddenly, her violet eyes dark and big.
	“There is danger, Ron?” she cried. “So much danger?”
	“So I said, two hundred years ago,” said Ron Goneen. “And so I still believe.”
	“Then why—why do you go on?” she demanded. “When there is so much to live for in the world that is! I wish so much to see the things I have never seen—sunshine and blue skies and green things growing, everything back there!”
	“I wish, Lethara,” Ron Goneen said softly, “that I could show you all the worlds that I have seen. Lethara——”
	Softly, she whispered, “What is it, Ron?”
	“Lethara,” he said again, “if I am alive after this experiment is done, I shall have something to tell you. But now you must go!”
	Her eyes were suddenly wide and deep with dread. She clung to the great arms that pushed her away.
	“Alive—— Oh, Ron!” she gasped. “Do you mean——”
	Her father took her arm, drew her toward her queenly mother.
	“Don’t be alarmed, my dear,” he urged her. “We have taken every precaution. The only risk is the unforeseen——”
	The girl’s frightened eyes looked away from him, back to the rugged, bronzed face of Ron Goneen, grim again with his forebodings.
	“Smile, Ron!” she begged him. “And promise you will live—to tell me that!”
	The rugged, weather-beaten features of the space captain creased into a slow, stiff smile, even while sudden unwanted tears shone in his deep-set eyes. His voice came, at the second effort, a deep hoarse croaking, “I promise—Lethara that——”
	And she was gone.
	Having locked and sealed the tunnel door, Seru Gyroc turned to cry exultantly, “Now we conquer entropy!”

V.
	ALONE in the tower, the two men climbed back to the floor beneath the dome, where the apparatus had been erected. In the center of the room was a small metal pier. Bearing upon it, arranged in an ominous-looking circle, were the gigantic barrels of the seven ray projectors whose interfering frequencies were expected to generate the Omega Radiation.
	With thin fingers trembling a little, Seru Gyroc set a glass beaker of water on the pier. From a glass rod across its top he suspended a little globe of silver, so that it hung in the water.
	One by one, he began to focus the great barrels upon the tiny argent button——
	Ron Goneen had gone to one of the little armored ports. He shaded his eyes from the light within, looked out across the frigid, dark plateau. In the distance, beneath the slanted, silvery disk of the galaxy, he could see the red-and-green beacons at the landing field, and the flying lights of the Silver Bird.
	The latter rose, as he watched, like colored stars in the black sky, diminished, then vanished at last above a bleak mountain range. The ship was gone, with Lethara—— He closed the insulating shutters.
	“We’ll give them two hours,” he told Seru Gyroc. “I ordered them to stand off ten billion miles, in case of any—accident——”
	He stood bleak-faced, watching, as Seru Gyroc finished his last fussy adjustments, and stepped back at last to look with a nervous impatience at the tiny silver bead suspended in the water.
	“It’s ready.” Gyroc sighed. “The heterodyning beams should set up the Omega Effect in the silver ball. The normal conditions of energy probabilities should be reversed. The silver should absorb heat and freeze the water to ice.
	“I’m going to close the key!”
	“Wait,” said Ron Goneen. “The two hours——”
	The little man looked at him sharply.
	“You aren’t still afraid, Ron—of so small a thing?”
	“It’s big enough,” the space captain said solemnly, “to threaten the equilibrium of the universe! I had meant to say nothing more, Seru; but, saying good-by to Lethara, I suddenly saw all the glory of life. It is far too wonderful to put into jeopardy——”

	HIS GREAT HAND caught the shoulder of the scientist.
	“Seru, I beg you,” he said urgently, “for the sake of our old friendship, for the love of Karanora, for the youth and happiness of your daughter—give up this thing! Even now!
	“We are risking so much—so needlessly! Let us simply destroy the apparatus, and report that the experiment failed!”
	“No!” The hard power of Seru Gyroc’s voice was suddenly like the vibration of a great dynamo. “We shall not turn back. If you are afraid, captain, you should have gone with your ship.”
	“It is not for myself,” said Ron Goneen, “but for the others, for the universe, for Lethara! I beg you——”
	The dark eyes of the scientist flashed to a chronometer. “The two hours have gone, Ron,” he said quietly. “We begin! Stand by the safety controls, if you like———”
	The tall space captain stepped suddenly forward, his great hands grasped abruptly for the other’s shoulder.
	“I am sorry to do this, Seru,” his deep voice began, “after you have worked so long. But I am going to stop you! The risk is too great——”
	With a surprising agility, however, the black-haired little scientist stepped swiftly back. A thin hand flashed into his white mantle, came out with the deadly little pointed rod of a positron gun.
	“No, you won’t stop me, Ron!” His dark eyes were flaming, his narrow face wild with a fanatic elation. “Mankind must perish, in the end, or rule the tide of entropy. And to-day—by myself—is the issue decided!”
	“Stop!” gasped Ron Goneen. “You are mad——”
	“Stand back!” the cold voice rasped. “Or I shall report that you perished in the experiment——”
	“Go ahead,” boomed Ron Goneen. “That would be your smallest crime. For you are about to murder mankind—about to wreck the very universe!”
	His narrowed eyes fell to the tiny, bright needle in Seru Gyroc’s unwavering hand. He knew that its beam of pure positive electric flame could sear and destroy a human body in an instant. For some distracting ruse——
	His long, tanned body suddenly tense, he peered at a tiny port above Seru’s head. “A ship!” he cried. “It must be the Silver Bird, returned—and it is ramming the tower! I knew they would find a way! Look out!”
	The bleak eyes flickered briefly aside, as he leaped. But they came back to him, cold and dark as the sky of Pyralonne, flaming with a mad determination, merciless.
	At that moment, for the merest terrible instant—and the thing was to become a fantastic enigma, to haunt all his latter life with its mad dilemma—he thought that the ramming ship was no ruse. A cold, silvery projectile indeed was smashing into the tower!
	But golden fire, jetting from the cruel, steady needle, struck him with an avalanche of agony. That brief insane impression was burned away. In a last frantic effort to reach Seru, he lurched forward against the merciless flame, crumpled——

VI.
	RON GONEEN was swimming through a void of terrible darkness. Far ahead of him, somewhere, were flickering gleams that seemed to mean warmth, life itself. Swimming, walking, flying, crawling, he struggled aways toward them. But they fled away, like mirages. A cold cloud of darkness followed after him, implacable in its alien sentience. At last, however, pursuing one gleam of mocking flame, he came up to it. He thrust his stiff arms about it, tried to warm himself. But the flame turned black before him. And somehow it drained the warmth from his body, so that he was fearfully cold.
	Still, he somehow knew, the black flame was hot. But its heat was selfish, useless. It radiated no warm rays, but seared him instead with bitter cold and then danced away like a malicious, mocking being.
	He groped toward another. But the pursuing darkness was becoming thicker; it began to press upon him like some heavy, viscid liquid. The numbing ache probed deeper into his bones. He was freezing. The flame was there before him, but it gave no warmth.
	The big space captain woke, then. He was lying, shivering, on the floor of the laboratory. His left shoulder was blistered. The cloth of his green tunic was still smoldering around the edges of a small hole, where the positron ray had struck.
	But what was this cold in his bones?
	A shadow passed over his face. He opened his eyes, sat up with a painful effort. Then he saw Seru Gyroc—and he shuddered to a cold shock of bewildered dread, as painful as the ray!
	This was no longer the confident, black-haired, still-vigorous experimenter. It was an old, old man!
	For Seru Gyroc was stooped and shrunken. His pale hands trembled weakly. His white face was a lax, shriveled mask, deep-lined with some unutterable horror. His dark eyes, strangely hollowed and sunken and glazed, were the eyes of one who has looked into a forbidden, searing hell. And his long hair, so dark before, was now completely white.
	His quivering hands tried vainly to help the injured man to stand.
	“I’m sorry, Ron—so terribly sorry!” His gasping voice was thin, quavering, cracked. It was the voice of an old, a fearful, a shattered man. “I have been utterly, criminally wrong! Please—oh, please try to forgive me! I shot you down in utter madness!” And the dreadfully aged man dropped on his knees, sobbing.

	THE SPACE CAPTAIN got stiffly and slowly to his feet, drew the haggard scientist up beside him. He looked fearfully at his own huge, scarred hands, saw with relief that they looked as young and powerful as ever.
	“No, you escaped the main force of it,” that broken quaver assured him. “You were lying behind the shields, and I think the positron shock partially immunized you.”
	“What happened?”
	Bewilderedly, Ron’s blue eyes swept the broken, twisted apparatus about the shattered metal pier. There was no trace of the silver bead or the beaker of water in which it had been suspended.
	Still sobbing, the experimenter so strangely shattered and old was peering mutely, blankly, at his broken apparatus.
	“The experiment!” urged Ron Goneen. “Did you try it?”
	“I did,” said that aged voice. “I finally got the projectors synchronized to generate the Omega Radiation in the silver ball. I stood here, watching———”
	“And what happened?”
	“At first,” gasped the old man, “I thought it was successful. The ball turned black, as radiation and reflection ceased. The thermometer showed that the temperature of the water was falling, as its heat was absorbed.”
	His tangled white head shook sadly.
	“Yes, for a moment I thought I had won the power of that old investigator’s demon. I could make heat flow from the cold water into the hot globe, and refuse to let it return! But then——” His voice stopped, with a shudder of his emaciated frame.
	“Then?”
	“Then I felt it!” whispered Seru Gyroc. “The black globe became suddenly a cold and deadly eye. I felt the chill of it all through me—a horrible cold something, the deadly enemy of life itself!
	“I was suddenly stricken, numb, all but helpless. Sweat of horror was on my face, and I felt suddenly that it would freeze—that that horrible globe was sucking the heat out of everything in the room. And then, Ron——”

	THE THIN MAN flung himself against the space captain’s shoulder, sobbing bitterly.
	“Then I did it! I don’t know why. I didn’t know what I was doing. The globe had begun to shrink. Normally, it should have become larger, expanded with heat. But it was contracting—the utter reversal of nature!
	“And still it was like an eye—a dead-black, hypnotic eye! There was life in it. Not the human sort of life, nor the sort we have found on any planet—but an alien, hostile other life.
	“And that other life commanded me!
	“I was trying to reach the switch. The thing that I did seemed as vague as a dream. I hardly knew that I had done it. The water in the beaker was now frozen to ice. Thick, white frost was crusting over the glass. The room was misty with particles of congealing ice. My fingers were so numb that I could hardly feel the key.
	“But at last, with a frightful effort—still fighting the terrible pressure of that eye—I shut off the projectors. There was an explosion, a flash of blinding flame. The apparatus was smashed, as you see it. I was knocked senseless.”
	“An explosion, I see,” said Ron Goneen. “But how?”
	“The silver must have reached a temperature of many thousands of degrees,” explained Seru. “It had drawn heat out of the water, out of all the room—out of our bodies, even. That concentrated energy was suddenly released, as the thermodynamic interchange resumed the direction of increasing entropy——”
	Eagerly, then Ron Goneen seized his arm, shook him. “So it’s all over?” Ron cried. “Finished? And no harm done, except the smashed equipment, and——” The voice stuck in his throat, as he looked at the bleached and shriveled form of the little scientist.
	“I know that I am changed,” whispered Seru. “I saw my reflection on the instruments.”
	“But you stopped it?” Ron Goneen went. “And the Silver Bird will be coming back! And we can take Lethara back, to see all the worlds at home——”
	His voice choked again, at the increasing horror that glazed the sunken eyes of Seru Gyroc.
	“What’s the matter?” he gasped. “Didn’t it—stop?”
	The dreadful hollow eyes of the shattered man flickered toward a port. And Ron Goneen saw with a start of horror that the inner, insulating shutter had been slid aside, leaving only the transparent window.
	The old man shook his strangely white head.
	“That is what I did,” he mumbled. “I opened the shutter—because that other life commanded it! I hardly remember doing it. Honestly, Ron—I was helpless, hypnotized! That strange, dead-black, freezing eye——”
	Quivering to a cold shock, Ron Goneen opened his mouth and tried in vain to speak. His nerveless hand closed weakly on Seru’s thin shoulder.
	“No, Ron, it didn’t stop,” the old man quavered at last. “At first I didn’t understand. But I think I see it now. When I broke the circuit, the accumulated Omega force poured out through that open shutter. It must have gone out in a spherical wave—its velocity almost infinite!”
	Ron Goneen swallowed, wet his dry lips. “Then what—what will happen?”
	Seru’s dreadful eyes went back to the port. “Look outside!” he gasped.

VII.
	WALKING UNSTEADILY to the unshuttered port, the big space captain peered apprehensively out—upon a thing madder than his dream of horror.
	The stark, immemorial mountains of Pyralonne were no longer utterly black. An eldritch, bluish radiation flickered about every jagged summit. And across the lifeless, frozen plains swept fantastic shapes like the phantoms of his dream—like the wraiths of black flame that had seared him with their cold.
	He shuddered; their dread cold pierced him, even in the insulated tower.
	“Do you see them?” the hollow, sepulchral voice of Seru Gyroc, behind him, was demanding. “The creatures of destruction, born already! The hordes of doom—cold spawn of the Omega Radiation!
	“Can you feel their eyes of darkness, staring through your body—like the eye that commanded me? Can you feel their fingers reaching to destroy us? Fingers of cold flame!”
	“Yes,” Ron Goneen whispered hoarsely. “Yes, I feel them. But what are they?”
	“They are life—the new life!” spoke the hollow voice behind him. “With your warning, I should have foreseen—had I not been blind with egotism!
	“For our kind of life is a phenomenon of entropy increase. These beings are an alien part of the opposite process. We have set energy to flowing up the hall—and they were born to ride the current! They suck up radiation, simple atoms, all forms of energy. They exist through integration: the building of complex atoms.
	“They are vampires! They take; they give nothing. They are actually vortices of intense heat. But they only absorb; they radiate nothing, so that they seem black and cold to us. They drink up the precious force of life itself——”
	“Look!” cut in the deep voice of Ron Goneen. “There’s a ship—a strange, battered ship!”
	His horror-widened eyes followed it, dropping out of the black sky athwart the weirdly blue-crowned crags of Pyralonne. Its hull was rusty, corroded, scarred as if by ten thousand meteoric collisions.
	And it brought a disturbing memory.
	“Queer!” he muttered. “But I thought—in the last instant before you shot—I thought there was a real ship ramming the tower!”
	“And you fooled me!” the old man admitted. “For just an instant of helpless panic.” And, bitterly, he added, “I wish something had struck us, to stop my madness——”
	“But—there!” Ron Goneen’s narrowed eyes were still upon the ancient space cruiser approaching. “It’s out of control!” he gasped. “Falling——”

	THE VESSEL sagged drunkenly. It veered unexpectedly toward the tower, so that Ron Goneen caught his breath for fear that singular feeling should prove to have been a premonition. But its mighty prow crashed against the weirdly gleaming plateau, two miles away. It rolled half over, very deliberately, and lay still.
	Ron Goneen’s breath went out in a long gasp of pain. “That—that’s the Silver Bird!” he breathed hoarsely. “But look at it—battered as if it had been drifting ten thousand years. And it left here, three hours ago, shining like new!”
	Behind him, the hollow voice croaked, “I have done this, also! For time has gone mad, along with entropy—because the one is the child of the other.”
	Still watching from the port, Ron Goneen’s rugged face was grim and drawn with horror. For a valve of the fallen ship had opened. His eye caught the motion of tiny figures.
	Could one of them be—his heart leaped with hope and fear—Lethara?
	He groped for a pair of binoculars hanging beside the port, lifted them. The harsh landscape seemed to leap at him: naked, black rocks, every jagged point limned with pale-blue fire.
	It was as if some electrical energy were being drawn out of the planet, he briefly thought, and sucked away into space.
	He found the running figures. They were only a score in number—of the great ship’s twelve hundred. Their leaping bodies were bulky in the space armor, heads visible in egg-shaped, transparent helmets. Every face was haggard, drawn, horror-twisted.
	They were fleeing across that weirdly shining desert. And behind them, pursuing, came the shapes he had seen—the phantoms of black, freezing flame.
	He saw one straggler fall behind. The spinning phantoms overtook him—or her, for Ron had failed to see. The figure stiffened, fell. Blue flame played briefly over it. It left the rocks, lifted into a whirling column of darkness. It was gone—consumed——
	“The other life devours them,” said the hollow voice of Seru Gyroc. “It absorbs their heat, consumes their lives, integrates their atoms——”
	Ron Goneen was suddenly rigid with hope and horror. For his staring eyes had found one familiar face, and then another—familiar still, although terrible with agonized dread.
	“Lethara!” he gasped. “I see Lethara and her mother!”
	The taller form of Karanora seemed weak, stumbling. The girl was aiding her. They were falling to the rear of the fugitive group.
	Ron Goneen dropped the binoculars, ran toward the stair.
	The lean, quivering fingers of Seru Gyroc clutched his tunic. “Wait!” the old voice quavered. “What are you doing?”
	“I’m going to help them,” gasped Ron Goneen. “Let me go. Lethara needs me!”
	The thin fingers closed hard on his arm. “You can’t live outside,” warned Seru. “Your body heat will draw the other life——”
	“I must,” said Ron Goneen. “For Lethara——”
	He broke free, stumbled down the steps toward the air lock. Swiftly, he flung himself into a suit of insulated pressure armor, slipped the transparent helmet over his head, let himself out of the valve into an explosive puff of freezing air.

	THE dark, rocky waste stretched before him, every ragged point still shining with eerie and ominous blue. Far in the distance he saw the little group, each frantic figure outlined in a terrible aura.
	He came shuddering against a strange wall of cold. Despite the insulation of the suit, he felt as if chilling fingers had reached through to probe his body.
	This was the same piercing cold he felt in the dream.
	Fighting it, he ran toward the distant group. They still fled before the black phantoms. One and another, as he watched, stiffened and fell—and the things swept down upon them, lifted and consumed their bodies.
	Not half the original score were left when he plunged into a depression that was a vale of shining horror, a cup of cold, blue dread.
	Panting, breathless, sweat-drenched and yet shivering, he mounted the burning slope beyond. Cold fear smote him. Only three of the fugitives were left. And one of them, as he looked, grew stiff and fell.
	For a moment it lay still, the core of a blue shimmer. Then a tentacle of spinning blackness touched it: it whirled upward like a leaf in the wind: it was gone.
	Ron Goneen stumbled onward, toward the two.
	They saw him. One of them beckoned in wild appeal for aid. The other made a frantic gesture as if to warn him to go back.
	Then he could see their faces, through the blue glow surrounding their helmets. They were Karanora and Lethara. The girl was still aiding her mother. It was she who had beckoned him back.
	The mother suddenly stiffened, as the others had done, and fell. With another frantic, warning gesture at Ron Goneen, the girl bent over her, tried in vain to lift her.
	Staggering, his body stiff and leaden with penetrating cold, Ron Goneen came up to them. The once lovely form of Karanora Quane lay stiff upon the shining rocks. Her face was already blue and lifeless, a frozen mask of horror unutterable.
	Anxiously, the younger woman touched the arm of his suit. “Oh, Ron!” she cried. “My mother! Help my mother!” Her own face was pinched and white with cold, her violet eyes wide and strange with uncomprehending dread.
	“It’s too late,” Ron Goneen gasped into the tiny microphone before his half-frozen lips. “Karanora is dead—and there’s just the barest chance for us! Come——”
	But she tried with her feeble strength to push him away. “Then go back,” she begged. “Save yourself, Ron! I’m too weak to go any farther—too cold!”
	He held her unwilling arm, pulled her toward the tower at a stumbling run.

	BUT his stiff body ran like an ill-oiled machine. Every step took an age of effort. He ached with fatigue, with the queer, numbing pain of this penetrating cold. The blue flame was denser about him.
	He fastened his dimming eyes upon the black tower. Squat and immense, it seemed an infinite distance across the shining waste.
	“Go on, Ron,” the girl was sobbing. “Leave me. It was brave of you to come. But it was no use. Death is in me, already. The black, freezing flames—— They sucked out something. Leave me, Ron. Just remember that—I loved you!”
	Her hand went rigid in the insulated glove. She fell.
	Ron Goneen bent, picked her up in his great, numb arms and ran on. All his body was dead now. It seemed that it was not he who moved, but some lifeless machine—that he merely watched.
	The machine stumbled and fell. It picked itself up, lifted the girl, staggered on.
	Behind came whirling black pillars of darkness; vampires hungry for the little heat left in the machine, for the atoms that formed it.
	Again the machine toppled forward. This time it could not rise. It pushed stiffly forward on hands and knees, dragging the stiffened body of the girl.
	The black base of the tower was near, the square entrance of the air lock outlined with glowing blue. Warmth! And a haven from the destroying phantoms!
	Struggling grimly for mastery of the dead machine, Ron Goneen felt suddenly the tiny pressure of a little round object, under his tunic—the singular bubble of light that he called the Jewel of Dawn: the luminescent holy stone of the Andromedans, that he had taken for a torch, had carried since as a badge of triumph. No, carrying the jewel, he couldn’t give up!
	The leaden limbs moved stiffly. The machine inched forward, dragging the girl. And at last they were inside the black, square chamber. Darkness came again, as his fingers closed over the control wheel.

VIII.
	WHEN Ron Goneen awoke—or came slowly back to a drugged half wakeness—he lay in the dark cubical space of the air lock. And Lethara was still inert beside him, very quiet in her bulky armor.
	The inner valve had been opened, however. The air about them was not bitterly cold. And their transparent helmets had been removed so that they could breathe it.
	Wondering how long he had lain unconscious, the space captain sat up painfully. His big body was still cold and stiff, and a leaden depression filled his mind. He shook his shaggy head, tried to rouse Lethara.
	The girl would not completely wake, however, although she stirred uneasily and called his name in a low, half-eager, half-anguished tone.
	He got awkwardly out of his own space armor, removed hers, and carried her in his arms up to the living quarters on the second floor of the tower. Still she slept, as he laid her in a bunk. Her oval face looked thin and pale.
	He returned to pull the covers up about her shoulders, touched her pale-golden hair, and then hurried away to find her father, his bewildered mind full of this dread enigma.
	Seru Gyroc was wearily pacing the wrecked laboratory above, running shivering fingers through his strangely bleached hair. His shriveled, haggard face, his glazed and sunken eyes, made a living mask of horror and despair. He started nervously.
	“Ron, this is you?”
	“It is!” The deep voice tried to sound cheerful. “I carried in Lethara. She is sleeping. I think she’s all right. But Karanora——” Ron spoke gently. “I couldn’t help her.”
	The white head shook wearily.
	“It makes no difference, about anybody,” whispered Seru. “Doesn’t matter—dead or alive——”
	“But it does matter!” boomed Ron Goneen. “We’ll keep alive—somehow. We’ve got to keep her alive. The ship is wrecked, of course. But there’s a life tube here in the tower. We’ll manage to get back to the galaxy. We can do it—somehow!”
	A ghastly, stricken figure, Seru Gyroc came unsteadily to stand in front of him and peer into his face with terrible hollow eyes.
	“Don’t you realize, Ron? When I opened that shutter and stopped the apparatus, I turned something out—something that hasn’t stopped.”
	Ron Goneen gripped Gyroc’s thin shoulder with huge, anxious fingers. “There’s no way to stop it?”
	“None. The Omega Ray went out faster than light! Faster than time—because it destroyed the meaning of time!” The white head shook. “There is nothing we can do, although the insulation of the tower will probably preserve our lives for a while—a little while.”
	Ron Goneen searched his terrible face.
	“How far will it go?”
	“To the bounds of the universe—growing ever stronger! Because, like the force of cosmical repulsion, its effect varies directly with distance.”
	Ron Goneen dropped his big hand and staggered back. “Then all,” he whispered, “all the galaxy—all humanity is——”
	Great tears shone in the hollow eyes of Seru Gyroc. “All humanity,” his dry voice rasped, “all our cities, all our planets——” His silver head bowed. “What happened to the Silver Bird and those aboard has happened everywhere——”
	“Has happened?” gasped the space captain.
	The stricken scientist nodded. “Sooner, probably, in the most distant galaxies than in our own,” he whispered. “Probably”—he swallowed with an effort, and went on in a dry, leaden tone—“there is not a human being left alive, save us in this tower!”
	Trembling, his thin hand pointed at an unshuttered port.
	“Look!” he quavered. “Look at the sky! You can see—already——”

	RON GONEEN swayed to the tiny port, put his face to its heavy lens. Against the darkness above a ragged wall of blue-crowned summits, he could see the galaxy, a long spindle of silver spanning many degrees.
	But it had changed! It was changing, incredibly, as he looked! The spinning rotation of its spiral arms was visible. In a second he saw the normal motion of a thousand centuries! And it was reversed, turning backward!
	“What is it?” he gasped breathlessly. “What is happening?”
	That terrible voice behind him croaked again, “Look at Andromeda! Look at the rest! Our galaxy, being nearest, was the last to change——”
	Ron Goneen staggered across the wrecked laboratory, pushed aside the shutter from another port. He saw that the Andromeda Galaxy was also visible in its motion, and turning backward.
	And it was shrunken!
	The spiral arms were drawing in. And its silvery glow had darkened to an eerie, bluish hue, like the luminescence that covered the frozen rocks of this stark world.
	“Beyond!” quavered Seru Gyroc. “The rest!”
	He thrust a pair of powerful binoculars into Ron’s stiff hands. Peering through them into the dark chasm of the empty sky, the space captain saw myriads of spinning, bluish motes, all rushing toward him, all shrinking and growing dark as they came.
	“What is it, Seru?” he demanded again. “I knew that there was some danger—but I can hardly understand why——”
	“Space itself is contracting,” echoed that doomed voice. “All stellar and galactic motions have been reversed. The nebulæ are contracting in the direction of their original condensations. Their radiation is being drawn back, absorbed, reintegrated into heavy atoms.”
	“But how can we see it?” Ron Goneen demanded. “This light by which we see them was emanated a million or a hundred million years before the experiment was begun!”
	The scientist shook his haggard white head.
	“Time and the words ‘before’ and ‘after’ no longer have a meaning—except for events that take place in this insulated tower. For time is only our consciousness of the continual increase of entropy, a measure of the running down of the universe. And entropy—except in here—is nowhere increasing.”
	Ron Goneen stared out again. The blue glow, he thought, was fading from the rocks; the blue, spinning motes of doomed galaxies were fainter in the sky.
	“It will soon be dark,” Ron whispered hoarsely. “Everything—gone——” He closed the shutter upon the mind-staggering doom without. Swaying heavily, like a man dead drunk, he stared at Seru Gyroc. His hoarse voice asked faintly, “And what will be—the end?”

	THE stricken scientist had resumed his weary, aimless pacing. His thin, quavering reply came in disjointed fragments, “We set the current of entropy to flowing backward. No stopping it——” The universe is winding up again. All matter will be condensed again into a single superatom. Even this in the tower, after the insulation fails. Our bodies——
	“No energy is ever created, ever destroyed. But we have undone all the work of time. Perhaps, eventually, the balance will be turned again—although not, I think, without the intervention of intelligence. The other life may do it——
	“And the superatom will disintegrate again—disperse its matter through a space once more expanding, in galaxies, suns, planets. The river of entropy will flow down the hill again——”
	Ron Goneen lurched forward protestingly.
	“So man many be born again!” he muttered bitterly. “If the word ‘again’ has any meaning when time has been destroyed! He may again conquer the galaxy, and again attempt to master entropy, and again destroy himself and——”
	His narrowed blue eyes, savage and brooding, stared at Seru Gyroc. “Tell me, my old teacher!” he demanded hoarsely. “Is that cycle of birth and struggle and doom, of winding up and running down, of eternal, senseless repetition—is that less horrible than the single, inevitable death that might not have come for a billion billion years?”
	The thin man stopped his restless pacing, bowed his bleached head. “It is more horrible,” he whispered. “It is infinitely more horrible. You were right, Ron, from the beginning. And I was a fool, an insane egomaniac. Your words were the truth. I have murdered mankind!”
	His stricken voice sank, “I have murdered the universe!”
TO BE CONCLUDED.