THE SONG of VORHU
. . . for Trumpet and Kettledrum

A Novelet by WALTER M. MILLER, JR.

Fearful Destiny

THE legends of humanity's beginnings are as numerous as the races of man. And all these tales, it seems to us, have the common quality of wistfulness, of the yearning to be fathered and protected and disciplined. But there is nothing wistful about Walter Miller's particular brand of Genesis in "The Song of Vorhu." 
It cuts like a scalpel, it sings with the fierce wild beauty of space and suns and the fearful destiny which awaits man beyond the stars. The idea is not new, but you'll remember this story when you have forgotten many others! 
—The Editor 

When space test-jockey Barry Wilkes returned to an Earth devasted by plague, he found there only one crazed woman with whom to seek a far-flung planet where civilization might bloom again!

DURING the century preceding the plague, men of Earth had been venturing into the black glare of space beyond the orbit of the moon. They skirted the fringes of Sol, and subjugated the planets beneath their feet. But they found no mother to replace the earth, nor any soil to call their own. Because of climatic, gravitic, and atmospheric differences, no man could take an axe, a rifle, and a coonskin cap, and sally forth to make a home on Mars. To colonize, he needed an earthlike planet, and Sol had but one to offer: Earth. 
Beyond the orbit of Pluto, Man paused. He idled his shrieking rockets before the Great Plains of Universe, and stared across the light years of nothingness. He turned back with a Shiver from the gulf of interstellum, which could be penetrated no deeper than the length of a lifetime. A cold equation said plainly that he could never cross it. Space-jockeys, garage mechanics, and arm chair mathematicians scrawled it on paper napkins and scratch pads, then glared at it irritably, as if sheer force of longing could change its icy symbols : V2 = C2 — C2 (E/m0C2 + 1)-2. But the equation had been grudgingly honored for two centuries, and despite the would-be inventors, it stated firmly that no man could ever catch a fleeting ray of light. 
Only a few men looked seriously to the interstellum—the soft-eyed men, the men of pensive faces, the men of silent thoughts. At last they built a ship. But they made no promises. 
But the plague struck while the ship was in space, being tested by Captain Barry Wilkes. The plague entity was an earth-adapted descendant of a Venusian micro-organism which had found a home on Earth, and which had seemed quite harmless, except to poultry, for nearly a hundred years. It suddenly transferred its attentions to Man, as epidemics had sometimes done before, with startling and dismaying results. 
Barry returned without testing the interstellar drive. He came back from beyond Pluto, and landed on the festered earth, on her night-side, because the plague, being a vegetable-entity, was quiescent in the darkness, or at least uncommunicable. Fires smouldered in Earth's cities, and her streets were moaning in death. Staggered and numbed by the devastation, Barry felt nothing but the cold hand of awe. Instinct moved him to search for someone untouched by the plague. He wandered until nearly dawn, protected by a germ-proof space-suit from the ship. 

BEFORE he blasted off again into the red glow of morning, he had found a wretched bit of supercargo. He rocketed toward space, for no man could live for long on Earth, nor on the planets, without supplies from home. 
He guided the small experimental ship toward the border of the interstellar wastes. For only there was it safe to apply the drive. And he must find an earthlike planet for himself, and for his passenger. 
A month beyond Pluto, he touched a switch. The Chancellor began listening to the field-song of the cosmos, the song whose notes were written in the universal tensor-point field which bound the continuum into one. To the Chancellor, as to the men who designed it, the field with its eddies and whirlpools was the only "reality" of the universe. The Chancellor listened to the notes in the vicinity of the ship. 
Barry touched another switch. The Chancellor spoke. Its voice contradicted the field, offered an equal and opposing one. The "reality" which bound the ship to its continuum ceased to exist in one small patch of space. The ship became disassociated, became a universe unto itself, existing as a distinct and complete four-space continuum bitten out of five-space. And the velocity of light was the parameter of five-space, according to the Burnarr-Orige mathematics. Driven by an electrically charged hull, the ship was attracted toward higher values of the fifth coordinate, and higher values of its parameter. 
Outside the cabin, the star-studded void seemed to collapse about him into a luminous ring that encircled the ship. But Barry knew that it was not the same cosmos; it was only a projection of its mass at a higher level—a four-space component of five-space. He started the rockets and set the acceleration at one-point-three gravities. Because of the temporal-transforms, the "home-universe" was aging four hours every time his watch ticked at the higher "W"-level. But an inch of length at his new level was worth 14,400 inches at his old. When he dropped back to the former level, he would be very late, and very far from home. 
He had seen his last of Earth, for the Chancellor's nuclear fuel was limited. He had set his hopes on a blue-white star. Humanity lay diseased and dying, except perhaps for a few alpha-ships that might try to reach the stars by the old methods. Their grandchildren might arrive, but it seemed doubtful. All that remained was Barry and his "wife;" for despite a deep distaste, he could scarcely think of the only available female as anything but his "wife." She would certainly have to be the mother of a new humanity—if there were to be a new humanity. She gurgled nonsense-syllables in her corner of the cabin. 
Barry had always been a crisp, rather cynical test-jockey, with a chilly eye and a slightly mocking smirk. He had clung to his crispness and aloofness, even in the awful horror of his last night on Earth, for the urgency of the situation demanded cool sanity. But now, in the shrunken space of the higher "W" level, he had nothing to do but wait while the jets supplied their steady shove. 
He closed his eyes and pressed his head back against the seat's G-padding. Thus did the, cool and emotionless space-jockey begin to cry. He cried silently, and prayed quietly to anything that might` be listening. Tears preserved sanity, and there was no one to see him, save the White Idiot. And she was scarcely more than a wild animal-thing amid her long tangled tendrils of black hair. 
She had spent most of her mindless life in the subterranean cell of an asylum, and she was a hopeless and congenital idiot. When the city burned, a power failure left her cell in darkness, protecting her from the light-seeking spores of the plague, In darkness, the plague slept like a tropical flower. And she had been the only untouched female he could find on the night of his return from space. There had been no time to look for another. 
Her flesh was white and sagging, unmuscled by the lethargy of long incarceration. Her eyes were pale green vistas of emptiness. He tried not to look at her. But she had to be fed and bathed and clothed. And when she gurgled at him. . . . 
But nothing really mattered except the Prometheus-fire of human germ-plasm, carried starward to be reborn and to flame anew beneath the light of another sun—if such were its luck. Barry had no longing to play the part of a Father Abraham, especially when he considered his Sarah. But Man, in the person of Barry Wilkes, was not quite ready to call it quits. He was too fresh from playing the part of Man the mighty, Man the timeless King, Heir of universe and Messiah of the seed of life. He refused to be winked out in the twinkling of an eye, after being so flushed with his own grandeur. 

GLANCING at his "wife," Barry thought that Man-the-second could very well prove to be Man-the-mindless, unless the gods of genetics came to his aid. But Barry hoped. And hope was a white narcissus amid the black clods of despair. For Man had arisen once before from mindlessness, from the mud of beastflesh—and not by his own bootstraps. He had done his best to rid himself of brains—by stoning his saints, burning his geniuses at the stake, and crucifying his wisest men. Somehow, Nature had tugged him upward in spite of himself, in seeming defiance of her own laws. Maybe it would happen again. 
He sat before the viewing scope, watching the blue-white star gain brilliance in the center of the screen. It was a higher-level component of a similar star in the home-continuum, but it was the gem of hope in the black velvet void. Somewhere upon the outskirts of its gravitational field, the Chancellor would spew him forth into the less distorted universe of his birth. Then his "High-C Tunnel" to the stars would have writhed and spun away like a broken thread in the magnetic winds of the star-lanced cosmos. 
The star's call seemed a whispered love-song, murmuring of planets, of life, of warm sun-glow on verdant jungles. But the song was only a thought in the mind of the wanderer. Its lyrics could be lies, and its tune could become a dirge. Behind him, however, the wandering tendrils of the plague were creeping through the decaying garbage of Man's one-time world. There was nothing to do but hope. 
The Chancellor winked a light, telling him to prepare for deceleration. Barry spun the plummeting ship by means of its gyros, and aimed its jets at the sun. The Chancellor began its descent through "W," and Barry watched the universe unfold about him. 
The shifting direction of the pseudo-gravity awakened the White Idiot. She began whimpering. He gave her a cool glance, which she returned with the bulging blue-green eyes. 
Suddenly she screamed. The scream pleased her: she grinned widely and did it again. Then she began a chant. "Hungy hungy hungy hungy. . . ." 
He tossed her a handful of puttylike space-rations. She fumbled with them awkwardly, but there was no time to feed her by hand. The ship was shuddering like a frightened animal in the changing geometry. 
He flicked a switch, and the ion-gun began squirting away the charge on the hull. The Chancellor was decelerating its "W" plunge. The luminous ring had spread out to become the familiar scattering of galaxies, stars and star-clusters. 
Soon the parameter was equal to "C," and Barry was back in the home continuum, rushing toward the blue-white inferno with enough velocity to shift the fraunhofer lines toward violet. He spurted the jets and held a weighty deceleration, curving off-course slightly so that the ship would eventually move into an orbital path. 

THE SOLAR system lay somewhere on the opposite fringe of the galaxy. His "tunnel" had withered and diffused. And a glance at the remaining fuel told him that the Chancellor wasn't going to dig any new ones for him. From now on, he'd be on the plodding alpha-drive. The Red Sea was closed, and he stood before the throne of another star—for better or worse. He infused a name into the new sun, thereby giving it substance in the lingua ultima of Barry Wilkes. 
He called it Old Man Odds—and it looked like Man's last chance. Odds was the new home, if he had a livable planet. 
The cosmos was a fairly roomy palace, but it was rather thinly scattered with monarchs. The germ of life was scarcer than ways to destroy it. Man's space-gnats had never found him another home. He'd built himself shacks on the planets of Sol, but he'd never released the umbilical cord that tied him to Mother Earth's industry. The cord fed him water, air, germ-suits, food, or heat, depending on the shack. 
Old Man Odds would have to show a cozy, watery planet with edible life forms. And if Man were to remain Man, and not evolve into something else, the new berth would have to be pretty much like the old one. Otherwise, the sons of men might develop side-staring eyes or taste-buds between their toes—to adapt to some weird local conditions. 
Barry refused even to consider the disturbing question of the White Idiot's fertility. 
When, at last, the ship had lost its furious velocity, he turned into an orbit and began the search for planets. He moved the scanner away from Mister Odds and swept it across the heavens. 
A dull speck crept across the scope. A planet, but too far from the sun. Unquestionably a cold and lifeless world. For life was a function of sunlight. 
Mister Odds was larger than Sol, and his "life-belt" would be further from his fierce heat. Barry took some brightness readings, and calculated the distance at which Man might exist without either freezing or roasting. The belt lay between sixteen and thirty light-minutes from the sun. Hopefully he swept the area with the scanner. 
Two planets lumbered through the region, massive bodies, several times the size of Earth. They suggested belly-sagging gravity. They suggested the future shape of man—stubby legs, basin-shaped pelvis, short thick torso. They suggested a brief life-span for Barry and the White Idiot. 
Just sunward from the life-belt lay a ring of planetoids, like the asteroids of Sol, but larger. Some appeared to be as large as Earth. But the intense radiation that fell upon them would make even the poles a tropic hell of heat. 
He left the ship in the drifting orbit and began charting the entire sun-system. After a week, he had a rough map of the planetal paths. And he had something else. 
He had a lurking suspicion that Barry Wilkes was not the only intelligent being in the realm of Mister Odds. . . . 

THE EVIDENCE came from his radar equipment. Stray blips occasionally appeared on the screen. Not transient interference, but orderly pulses. They always disappeared before he could get a fix on their origin. 
He saw no evidence of space travel. The pulses evidently came from a planet. He tried all the radio bands. At first, no results. Then, a strange signal in the ultra-high-frequency range. . . . 
DONG . . . DONG . . . dong . . . dong. . . . 
A series of bell-tones impressed upon a carrier wave. They became higher in pitch, and higher, until they passed the upper audible threshhold and into the super-sonic region. 
He sat transfixed, listening, waiting. After a moment the series repeated itself. 
DONG . . . DONG . . . dong . . . dong. . . . 
Chilled, he forced himself to move. He set up the direction-finding equipment. It was ready when the chimes began again. He watched the bright green pointer move jerkily around the scope until it intersected a planet's bright speck. There it wavered—and stopped. It was the outer planet of the life-belt. 
He drifted aimlessly for a time, wondering about the bells. They were too monotonous, too repetitious, for communication signals. But they were too orderly to be an accidental phenomenon. They spelled intelligence. 
Human intelligence? 
He studied the planet, and grimly choked down his foolish sprouts of hope for beings remotely human. Life was always specialized to fit a set of conditions. Man was fitted to Earth or Earth-like planets. While the lumbering monster on the screen was a double-gravitied hulk. Its day—he guessed it at twelve hours. Its rapid rate of precession insured a glacial age every few years, if it had water for the glaciers. 
Nevertheless, he moved cautiously toward it. If it had life, he was the alien, the monster out of space. How would the life-forms react? 
How would earthlings have reacted to a wandering being from the interstellum, a being who was searching for a home, a being who would accept neither subservience nor equality, but demanded mastery as the divine privilege of his race? Earthlings would have disarmed such a being, if possible, and confined him to a zoo. 
Barry shivered as he drew near the planet. He was weaponless, except for a machine-pistol, and the ship's ion-gun which was potent only in the vacuum of space. 
The planet had a blue-tinged atmosphere. As he moved closer, he saw streaks of clouds. He set the warning equipment against the possible approach of space-vessels, then swung the ship into an orbit for further study of the world. 
There were oceans, sharply outlined by dark land masses. He listened again to the bell-signals. They were not from a localized source, but seemed, rather, to come from several points on the surface. He recorded a series of them. 
Then he tuned the ship's transmitter to the carrier frequency. With anxious misgivings, he fed the recorder's output into the transmitter's modulator. It seemed the only way to contact the source without exposing himself to the grave danger of a landing upon the unknown. He listened tensely as the bell-tones went back down to the planet. 
DONG . . . DONG . . . dong . . . dong. . . . 
When it was done, he cut off the carrier. His receiver was roaring an unearthly din. Sheer havoc followed his transmission. A jumble of bells from all over the planet. They came furiously, high notes, low notes, dissonant chords, booming and tinkling and fading away. 
What had he done! He cursed himself for a fool, a child, poking a pair of scissors into a light socket. 
Gradually, order was restored. Slowly, the pulses rearranged themselves. After several minutes . . . dong . . . Bong... . 
And, something else as well. 

AT FIRST, he seemed to hear a faint buzzing sound throughout the ship, like the dry hisses of a startled rattlesnake. But the microphonic pickup showed only the whine of the jets and the ringing of the bells. 
The buzzing was internal, a ringing in his ears, a self-sound, like the effect of too much quinine, or an accompaniment of dizziness. An emotion seemed to pervade the buzz. Anger! 
But not his anger. He felt only the cold, gnawing teeth of fear along his spine, as he stared down at the hazy world. His mind seemed to writhe, as if something or someone were pecking at the thoughts that lay buried beneath the level of consciousness. He felt invaded, not alone. 
He glanced around the control room suspiciously. The White Idiot was shrieking gibberish. Did she also feel it? He pressed his hands over his face. Memories, nonsensical, unwanted memories, danced willy-nilly through his head. 
Suddenly, he was released from the thought-pecking. He sat breathing heavily. He shut off the radio to kill the monotonous bells. Well? 
No pulse from the warning system. No signs of space-craft. No airships among the clouds. No visible activity on the surface. Nothing. 
Had he imagined it? He scoffed at himself, goaded his mind back to calmness. The buzzing? The feeling of intrusion? Fear, superstitious fear, man standing before the strange, man looking at the, unfamiliar. There was no other possible explanation. 
He blasted the forward rockets, decelerated, and went into free-fall until he touched the first thin layer of atmosphere. Then he unfolded the ship's wings and leveled off slightly, still losing altitude. 
An air-sample showed a breathable mixture of gases. The gravity was ponderous, but endurable. The planet's habitability would depend upon its life-forms, their edibleness, their intelligence level, and their affective attitude toward visitors from the sky. With a slight chill of anxiety, he realized that he might even at the moment be helplessly in the power of whatever lived on the surface. 
But the surface seemed homogenous, for the most part. It was a dull gray-green, laced with yellowish veins that looked like designs on a dusty maple leaf. There were no forests or mountains, only gentle hills and valleys in the gray-green blanket. And the calm sea. 
He descended over the sea. Its surface was glassy, clear, bright green. Shadow-shapes moved beneath it, darting aimlessly here and there. Marine life, possibly edible. He circled several times, then flew toward a distant shore. The land-mass—it would pass the final sentence. 
Green cliffs loomed up before him. They were overhung with massive roots or tentacles growing down into the sea. But he saw no trees upon the land. The roots grew out of the cliff itself. 
Then he was past the shore, flying over the barren, billowing ground. It seemed to move in slow land-tides, as if it were an extensive floating island. But it was smooth, rockless, unbroken. 
Where was life? 
He circled for a landing near the sea . . . the sea, where the tentacles grew, and the shadows lurked, where edible things might be found along the beaches; where man might grow . . . and wax strong again? 
He fired the landing rockets and settled slowly. The ground cushioned inward elastically when the ship rested upon it. He strapped the White Idiot securely in place. He ran a final check on the air, the temperature, and the gravity. 
Then he strapped the pistol belt about his waist, stepped through the pressure lock, and opened the outer hatch. It was only a four-foot drop, but he lowered himself carefully because of the double gravity. The ground was rubbery beneath his feet. He looked around. 
His ship was near a ridge, one of the yellowish veins he had seen from above. . . . 

THUP! A muffled throb—from beneath the surface. The ridge had pulsed . . . like an artery. 
THUP! Another throb. It came faintly from the distance, like an echo, but an octave higher in pitch. 
Was the very earth alive? A huge vegetable mass covering a continent—or floating on a subterranean sea? He knelt to examine it. The surface was tough, leathery, and gleaming dully in the sunlight. He scored it with a knife-blade, and found it tough, like waxed leather. He drove the blade in to the hilt, but found no moisture. 
He arose, and fired a burst of bullets into the substance. Neat, round holes. Then, as he stared, the lead slugs oozed back out of the layer. A thick green paste followed them. It coagulated in small puddles. 
For an instant, he felt the rattler's hiss again. It passed quickly, however. The periodic thups continued. 
He stooped to touch the dried fluid, but it had hardened to a glassy consistency. 
The ground was alive ! 
It was also obviously inedible. 
If the planet were to serve the race of man, food must be found. Man, not yet weaned from Earth, must find somewhere a breast to sustain him. 

HE WALKED away from the ship toward the ocean which murmured faintly from half-a-mile in the distance. The earth was an unbroken expanse of green leather and yellow ridges. He climbed a ridge and stopped in surprise. Below, lay a white spot in the green. It was moving, bulging, swelling upward. It became a pale, translucent dome, growing slowly but visibly. He drew his weapon, and lay cautiously down upon the throbbing ridge to watch it. 
It became a flesh-colored hemisphere. A dark spot appeared upon the crest. A sudden constriction clutched at his throat. With a shudder, he realized that the hemisphere was becoming. . . . 
A breast! 
Trembling, he shrank back out of sight, pushed himself off the ridge, and fled toward the ship. The ponderous gravity tugged at his knees. He staggered as he ran. It was as if his feet were shod in leaden moon-boots. 
The planet was mocking him. It picked his mind—a breast to sustain. . . . 
"Hey! Hey, there!" 
Had someone called? 
Quaking in the icy wind of fear, he plunged on. 
"Hey, Barry! Barry Wilkes! Wait!" 
He froze, gun in hand, and looked around slowly. A man! Barry saw his head and shoulders just beyond the next ridge. It was a low ridge, and the man leaned on it with folded arms, as if it were a board fence. He smiled a neighborly smile. There was something familiar about him. 
"Wh-who are you?" Barry called. 
The man shrugged. "Mother sent me. Mother drank your thoughts. Then she made me, so we could talk. Come on over." 
Barry stood his ground for a moment. "Mother" had made the thing, unquestionably—and Barry was the blueprint. It had his voice, his thin hard face, even his crew cut. 
Caught by a terrible fascination, he advanced upon it slowly, gun in hand. It smiled and lit a cigaret, his own brand. "Mother's" imitative powers were remarkable—or perhaps, her hypnotic powers. 
He moved to a point on the ridge some twenty feet away. The being had been between him and the ship. Now he had a clear escapeway. 
"Don't get around behind me," the creature called. "I can't turn very well." 
Straddling the ridge, Barry stared at the man. It was imbedded to—the waist in the gray-green earth. It was only half a man, the half necessary for sucking in air and breathing it out as words. She had made him for talking—but why had she given him arms, very muscular arms? 
Barry eased himself down on the ship-side of the ridge. 
"Oh, all right," the creature said good-naturedly. "I'll turn around. You're certainly suspicious." 
As if stuck in quicksand, it dragged itself slowly about to face him. Barry kept the pistol trained on its face. 
"You are suspicious, aren't you?" 
"Listen, I don't know what you want," Barry growled, "but I'm perfectly willing to leave. Just stop picking in my mind." 
It nodded. "Certainly. Mother has already assimilated your memory." 
Barry eased his way toward the next ridge, glancing around to make certain that no more of the beings were springing up. 
"There's, no reason to be afraid," the creature said. "Stop and think. It's obvious that Mother didn't send me to get information from you. Nor to molest you. I have no legs." 
Barry hesitated. Perhaps it would be better to face it and see what the thing wanted. 
"Stay out of my mind," he warned. 
It chuckled. "Mother drinks your thoughts only when you feel this." 
Barry felt the buzz for a brief instant. Again, it seemed to connote anger, anger as strong as when he had retransmitted the bell-notes. 
"There," the thing said with an acid twinkle. "I've told you. And now you can shoot her if she does it again." 
Barry watched it warily for any threatening movement. The being's torso pulsed and twitched with each of the subterranean thups. 
"What are those vibrations?" 
"They are Mother's—" The thing paused to grope for a word. "Mother's hearts. They communicate with each other, so that each may beat at the proper time." 
It was undoubtedly telling the truth, Barry thought. The revelation explained the havoc resulting from his retransmission of the bell-tones. Many hearts, beating out of proper sequence. 
The being drew a last puff on the cigaret and flipped it aside. Then it rubbed its hands. 
"Well, Barry, suppose we get down to business. Mother, of course, knows why you're here and what you want. I've come to make you what we think's a reasonable offer." 

MAN, standing on the open palm of an alien being, and speaking to a mirror image of himself—he could scarcely afford hysteria at such a time. He stood stiffly, waiting. 
"Go on." 
"Very well. You're looking for a place to live and to reproduce your kind. Mother knows your needs and knows that this is the only suitable world in this system. You don't have much choice. But this planet can be your home." 
"What's the price?" 
"A service you will perform. Mother has grown too large for this world. But she can't leave the planet. You can carry her seed to other worlds." 
"Why can't you do it?" 
"I'm not detachable." 
Barry paused thoughtfully. The offer was unacceptable, at least until he learned more about the being, its traits, the extent of its power. One thing was certain: it knew his traits, the traits of his race, the savagery and the sublimity, the tribal self-centrism, the Messianic claim to first rights to the throne of universe. It knew—yet offered to share its planet. It felt secure before the last remnants of Man. Why? 
Barry stiffened his shoulders and swallowed the dry sponge of fear that swelled in his throat. If the thing was telling the truth, it wouldn't destroy him before it tried to get what it wanted. He tucked the pistol back in his belt and advanced toward the half-man. He sat on the ridge, for the gravity was weakening him quickly. 
"My race needs shelter and food," he snapped. "There's nothing here." He waved toward the empty landscape. 
The thing smiled confidentially, craftily. "There is Mother," it said, and patted the gray-green ground. 
A proturberance appeared where his hand had touched it. The sprout writhed slowly upward, like a cobra slithering out of a Hindu's basket. It sprouted and spread and branched out into a leafless bush. Two white buds squeezed themselves out at the ends of twigs. They unfolded into blossoms, turned their faces toward each other, then moved lazily together in a light kiss. They withered, and the petals rolled back to expose tiny green knobs. 
As Barry watched, the knobs swelled and ripened into a pair of pink fruit with light brown speckles. 
"Try one." 
"No, thanks." Again he felt that the thing was mocking him, teasing him by psychodrama—the legend of Bereshith, Genesis, the first temptation of Man. Its whims were grotesque. 
The half-man shrugged and touched the bush. The fruit shrank. The branches folded. The earth sucked it slowly down, drawing it back from whence it came. 
"You see, at least, that food can be provided," the creature said with a slight leer. 
Barry slid from the ridge and snorted at it contemptuously. He drew the pistol again. 
"You can give," he growled. "But you can also take away."
"You have no choice. There's no other planet." 
Barry backed away from it, cursing softly. "My race makes no deals. You know my mind, you know our history. We serve no one." 
The creature laughed contemptuously. "Except emperors, tyrants, even marble statues." 
Barry turned away and staggered toward the ship under the load of his own weight. He heard several sharp clicks behind him. He whirled quickly. 
The thing was holding an exact replica of his own machine-pistol. It jerked frantically at the trigger. Barry crouched reflexively. Then he straightened with an angry laugh. 
"I forgot to tell you," he snapped. "I never learned how to make explosives." He fired a burst into the being's chest. 
The air-sac spewed green fluid. The half-man dropped the useless weapon and clawed at the ground. The "mother" began giving birth to something that looked like the head of a spear. Barry shot a burst in the creature's face, destroying the eye-mechanisms. 
Then he bolted for the ship. 

A HOST of protuberances appeared ahead of him. They sprouted, and grew slowly into a tangle. He dodged and zigzagged. A green hand caught at his ankle. He jerked free and drove onward against the heaviness. 
A web of tough green tentacles had belted the ship securely to the ground. He blasted at them. They wriggled, but stayed in place. A few had grown through the air-lock and had opened the inner hatch. If they had harmed the White Idiot. . . . 
"I'll kill you!" he shrieked at the endless expanse of the world-creature. 
He tugged at the tentacles in the hatchway and crawled among them into the ship. They curled toward him, but their motion was blind and fumbling. He eluded their snares and pulled himself toward the control room. 
Someone was in the ship! 
A nude woman stood by the radio equipment. She was stripping away panels and jabbing a heavy wrench into the tube-housings. 
"Stop!" 
She glanced around, smiling. She was a composite—the body impossibly perfect, fashioned out of the dream-fabric of a lonely space-jockey, a thousand lightyears from home. The face was a blend—a bit of the first love, and a bit of . . . his mother. 
He raised the gun toward the green beauty. 
"Would you shoot your mother, Barry?" 
The rich voice—it was the voice that had soothed him in childhood. Her face—it changed, slowly: It was his mother's. But the body remained. . . . 
He laughed hysterically and shot a burst of bullet holes up its spine. She sagged, gasping, against the radio. "Barry, Barry darling. . . ." 
Her calm face! She was unharmed. Pure dramatics, meant to unhinge his mind! 
Her soft bare arm reached into the hollow of the set and tugged at something. Then he saw the cord—like one of the tentacles. It was attached to her abdomen, and it ran across the floor and out of the ship through the air-lock. 
He aimed carefully, and shot it in two. She dropped. He dragged her to the hatchway and tossed her among the green feelers. They blindly mistook the body for his own. They curled about it, snakelike, dragged it from the ship, and began to absorb it. 
He slammed the hatch, bolted it, and hurried to the controls. The White Idiot was whimpering softly and trying to reach part of a brown-speckled fruit that lay near her on the deck. He kicked it away from her, then sat in the control-seat.

THINGS were happening outside. He glanced through the imperviglass shield. The ground was caving in beneath the rocket. The space-craft was sinking into an ever-deepening pit. He tried to start the jets. The ignition blinked, and there was a brief blurp from the reactors. But no fire from the tubes. A relay clicked and the ignition went dead. 
The tubes—they were choked off. By the tentacles, of course ! They had grown inside and formed a tight cork. To continue trying to start the jets would soon build up a critical mass in the reactors and expand him suddenly into an atomic mushroom. 
And the world-creature with him, perhaps. . . . But that was not the way. 
The ship had sunk until the gray-green substance half-covered the imperviglass shield. He could feel the pulsing heartbeats through the insulated hull. They were being devoured alive. 
The heartbeats. . . . 
He moved quickly to the radio equipment and inspected it. The woman-thing had shattered several tubes. He replaced them from the stock of parts, and tried the set. The tubes came alive in a dim glow. She had not harmed any other circuits. 
The bell-tone recording was still in place. He fed its signal into the transmitter. 
DONG . . . DONG . . . dong . . . dong. . . . 
The tiny space-craft shuddered. Suddenly the ground heaved like a storm-tossed sea. The violent heaving threw him to the deck. He crawled to the controls. 
The tentacles were loose from the hull. They slashed about-wildly in the air, whipping against the view-shield with savage cracks. He hit the jets. This time they spurted. It was a rough, erratic take-off. He climbed quickly out of the planet's atmosphere. 
Numb with trembling anger, he set an orbital course about the world-creature's home. The transmitter still poured out the resounding bell-tones, the electromagnetic nerve-signals, the echoes of the heartbeats. After two hours of it, he listened for the thing's response. 
Silence. Empty silence. 
"Mother" had had a heart attack. 
He moved spaceward again, and set his sights on the inner planet of the life-belt. But it proved unnecessary to approach any closer than the outer fringes of its atmosphere. The air was choked with ammonia vapor.
He moved on, wandering aimlessly. The monster was right. There were no other suitable worlds in the system. He and the White Idiot were marooned on a barren island in an endless sea. Between Mister Odds and the next star lay fifty light-years of emptiness. His rocket-fuel was too low for the search. 
Should he have accepted bondage in the land of the world-creature—indentured himself in slavery to the gray-green Pharaoh? 
The White Idiot kept howling for the remains of the brown-speckled fruit. Evidently one taste had been enough to start a craving, a terrible gnawing hunger for the food the woman-thing had given her. Man would have been enslaved indeed. 
Would it have been better than death? 
Who could answer him? Who could judge the decision he had made? It was for Man, the yet-unborn, to judge—for Man, the forever-dead, to judge. But the judge was silent. And the question remained. 
Was Barry a traitor to the race? 
The voice of his thoughts sat in the judgment seat. Thoughts, thoughts from childhood, thoughts from manhood, voices and memories, words, words, words. Alice in Wonderland. Soliloquy from Hamlet. The Psalms of David. . . . 
What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him? Or the Son of Man  that Thou visitest him? 
Barry went unwavering into the interplanetary void. Hot moisture clouded his eyes. 
Slavery? 
If Man could not occupy the throne, if Man could not wear the crown, then it was better for him to die. The End. 
No more spires, rising toward the blue of heaven. No babies wailing in their cribs. No war-drums to throb in the steaming jungles. No ships to clog the spaceways, nor priests offering bloody sacrifices to tribal gods. Dead. Dead was the inscrutable, unbelievable creature called Man. His savagery had shocked the very Earth that bore him. But his gentle dignity made dumb brutes lick his hand in homage. 
Barry looked spaceward. 
A cold, slow, sleepy death in the interstellum. A wandering ship, rocket heat gone, drifting forever. Until some nine-legged archeologist from Arcturus perhaps, cracked it open to look at the remains. 
Barry looked toward Mister Odds. 
A beautiful, gleaming inferno of hell. A seething explosion that never ceased. A sudden plunge into the blinding light, then—to wander as scattered neutrons in the vast furnace. 

GRADUALLY he killed the tangential component of his velocity. The ship stood still in the star's silent glare. Man knelt before the behemoth and surrendered with a shudder. But it was the behemoth of universe, not an alien intelligence. 
The ship drifted, slowly creeping sunward, then moving faster, beckoned by the siren voice of the gravity-song. 
He looked at the White Idiot in pity. Her bloodless lips moved ceaselessly, silently, meaninglessly. He went to kneel beside her.
"Dadda dadda dadda. . . ." 
He did something he had never done before. He took her pallid, pathetic face between his hands and kissed her lightly. Then he backed away in horror. Her skin was flecked with dark spots, greenish black. 
The plague! 
In the dark night of space, it had lain dormant. Now, in the light of the new sun, it blossomed forth, to thrive in the ultraviolet bath. 
He shivered slightly. In perhaps a day, her body would swell, then burst, to spew forth a cloud of the plague spores. The spores were the unconquerable contagion. 
Angrily he spun the ship starward and set the rockets thundering. It leaped ahead like a thrown javelin. He grinned into the blinding light. 
"Good morning, Mister Odds!" 
The heat became unbearable as he approached the planetoid belt. He started the refrigerating mechanism. It worked for a time, then developed a vapor-lock. The heat increased. 
A dark mass loomed up on the screen. He lashed out instinctively at the braking rockets. He veered sharply. The gravity of a small planetoid tugged at the ship as he plunged past it. He sat breathing heavily for a moment, then picked a careful path among the scattered bodies. 
Careful ... lest he die the wrong way. He smiled sardonically. Man—strange mating of beast and angel. A snarling gorilla still wanted to live. A weary spirit wanted to quit. 
The White Idiot was wailing softly. She had entered the painful stage of the disease. Soon she began screaming and clawing at herself. Barry knew. He had seen the plague on Venus. The thin green tendrils were lacing through her flesh, feeding here, feeding there, then wandering experimentally along a nerve to gnaw at the substance of the brain. Green piano-wires, sewing themselves between her joints, digging in, running along the marrow of her bone. 
A bullet would be easier. 
Thoughts ... the voice of his thoughts . . . and the judgement. . . . 
Thou hast made Man but little lower than the Angels. Thou hast subjected all things under his feet. 
All things—except the life of Man itself. She had drunk Earth's chalice. And though the chalice was shattered, the wine was not yet wasted all away. 
He put the gun back in his holster and tried to close his mind to her shrieks. 
What right had he to seek the white-death, in the heart of Mister Odds? He hovered in doubt. 
A larger planetoid was lumbering along its orbit toward him. He swung in ahead of it, then began decelerating. Slowly it overtook him, and its gravity tugged lightly. He let it drag him back. He watched it drift larger on the screen. He waited. 

IT WAS nearly as large as Earth; but its face was misted by clouds. It would be hot, boiling hot. It had a small moon at half a million miles. The moon's pale face was sharply outlined against the blackness; like Luna, it had no atmosphere. 
Barry guided the ship .toward the planet's northern pole, where the temperature might be endurable in a spacesuit. The pole was inclined away from the star, and it would be a long winter's night on the surface. 
When he reached the atmosphere, he chuckled bitterly. The air was breathable, and the gravity was nine-tenths that of earth. The planet's day appeared to be about twenty-two hours. In a billion years, when the sun had cooled slightly, the place might be inhabitable. 
He dropped beneath the cloud blanket into the night of the polar region. But the night was amber with the glow of volcanic fires. He landed on a barren stretch of igneous rock, and checked the temperature at 130° F. A steam-bath, but not much worse than the interior of the ship. 
He gathered the White Idiot in his arms, opened the hatch, and climbed out onto the rocky face of the planet. The glowing clouds were lighted from beneath. The air was full of fumes from lava blow-holes that spewed yellow streamers of smoke toward the sky. A hot drizzle was falling about the ship. Puddles of steaming water lay rippleless in the cloud-glow. 
Barren, young, desolate, the planet lay lifeless beneath the blue-white sun. There was no soil to support plant life. Without plant life there could be no animal life. And the equatorial temperatures would be boiling. 
He laid the White Idiot gently in a shallow, steaming pool—for the igneous ground was razor-sharp. The hot water would soothe her tortured flesh. She jerked spasmodically and panted in short screams. Her bulging eyes sought him out, pleading. His hand twitched toward the butt of the pistol. . . . 
But the voice . . . the voice of judgment . . . behold the thing the Lord God made to have dominion. . . . 
Bereshith!—so it was in the beginning. 
Bullets—they would not be the end. 
Haunted, he turned away from her. Choking, he ran toward the ship. If he stayed, he would surely. . . . 
The screams stopped. He paused, turned slowly, as Lot's wife. She was craning her neck, looking down at herself. He approached her again. And saw it. 
A thin green tendril had grown from the flesh beneath her clothing. It groped toward her face, like a climbing vine seeking sunlight. She watched it hypnotically. It swayed like a curious cobra. 
Then it found her throat. 
"Uh . . . uh . . . uh. . . ." 
He staggered blindly, lifted the pistol —and squeezed. He fired until the clip was empty. The body jerked and rolled under the impacts. The pool became bright red. 
He dropped the gun and stumbled back to the ship. He slammed the hatch. He must not look back. 
But the pool loomed up through the imperviglass. 
… from the mud of Earth, and into his nostrils the breath of life ... 
Ripples wandered across the shallow water. The body rose and fell, caressed by the warm pond. Lullaby. Goodnight. 
Suddenly the White Idiot opened. The wiry tendrils burst forth, like a sackful of loose threads, after the manner of the plague. They shook themselves, a flurrying dust-mop, scattering a cloud of faintly visible spores into the humid air. Then they wilted slowly downward, collapsed, lifeless into the pool. The dust spread, settled, dulled the surface of the water. 
He tried to stop babbling aloud. God, why couldn't he stop! The cries in his throat—they were no longer his own. No control! He clenched his jaws. The sound became a nasal whine. He held his breath. Blackness loomed. The breath came out a shriek. 
He talked. He knew he talked. But what was he saying? A senseless chatter. Where was sanity? But he could still think. He had to get away. Away from the new planet baptized in blood before birth. He blasted the rockets, roared upward, outward, spaceward. 

DON'T look at me, Mister Odds." He closed the view-shield, cutting off the sight of empty cosmos. He set a clumsy course around the planet. But the moon-gravity dragged him out of the orbital path. 
So, he landed on the satellite, at the pole, where Mister Odds was sliced in half by the sharp rim of the moon-disk. He sat waiting ... for nothing, his eyes irresistibly drawn toward the planet upon the opposite horizon. On his left —the white eye of God. On his right—the pallid corpse of Abel. 
"It was mercy." Another five minutes and she would have been dead. Mercy was a prerogative of Cosmos. 
"A moment of insanity." The Cosmos had no throne for mad monarchs. 
"A crime, a final act of unworthiness." So be it, then. 
What was the flavor of the speckled fruit? And the flavor of life upon the planet of the world-creature? The world-creature, who fashioned an exquisitely lovely woman for him—from the blueprint of his dreams. The massive planet could have been a garden in paradise. A paradise now unquestionably lost. He was glad. 
Forget, and die. 
If only it could happen again—the upward march of Man—from the protoplasm left up on the planet. Something would happen, surely. Mister Odds would grow old and kindly. The mists over the White Idiot's grave would part—and fall as rain. Lakes, then seas. 
The seed was planted—yeast cells, bacteria of fermentation, disease germs, vegetable spores, and the body of the Idiot to nourish them. Most would die. The hardy might survive. The spores had chlorophyll to convert. sunlight and raw minerals into food, food for animal cells. . . 
Bereshith. . . . In the Beginning. 
But Man? 
One of the gray locksmiths, one who had sought after the grail, the key of life, had said that wherever there was a sun and an earthlike planet, there Man would come. . . Man, or something very manlike. For he said that Man was an inevitable end-product of the life-forces, the logical conclusion to a search for adaptability.
No one had ever found another earth-like planet. It was a safe thing for the locksmith to say. 

BARRY wrote. He wrote to quench the oral flow of words, the babble of threatening insanity. He wrote a sketchy history of Earth, of her kings and prophets, of her warriors and her locksmiths—and of her last space-jockey and his mad flight to the stars. He wrote of the White Idiot, and of the faint hope of the cells and spores. When he ran out of paper, he scratched words on the metal walls with the point of a knife. 
Then he ran out of words, and out of food. 
He donned a space-suit and walked out into the faint gravity of the moon. He walked until he was several miles from the ship. But he was still in the ship's shadow. 
The surface was rough, pocked with blow-holes where bubbles of hot vapor had spewed forth from the once-molten body. He glanced down one of the light-less cavities. An icy maw of death, mysteriously deep. 
Where the sun struck the moon's face, the surface was warm. But in the black shadows, there was no heat. 
How deep was the narrow hole? 
He stepped into it. Gravity wafted him slowly into pitch blackness. When he had fallen twenty feet, he realized vaguely that it was deep enough to prevent escape. He dragged his feet and arms against the narrowing walls to prevent a killing crash. But the satellite's gravity was only a gentle breeze. 
How deep? 
It seemed an endless tunnel into a cold hell. He shone his flash downward. Far below . . . a gleam of white. A puddle of liquid helium perhaps. 
He checked his wrist instruments. The temperature was low and meaningless. But there was a slight vapor-pressure. The white puddle was unquestionably liquid gas. 
He began deflating his space-suit, to make death quick. He clutched at the shaft's walls, pulling himself to a stop in a narrow place. Then he took off the suit. 
A shock of cold. Bursting eardrums in the low pressure. Then he was falling. He sank into a dull half-faint as he approached the bottom. Blackness was merciful. 
A sharp sear of pain lanced through him, and persisted like the constant burning of an electric shock. It died suddenly, to be replaced by a shrieking ache that pulsed through every bone and nerve. He jerked, twisted and found that he could move. 
He opened his eyes. He was lying on a metal pallet. A helix of gleaming metal spiralled about him, like the coil of an induction heater. He breathed painfully, and tried to stop. But something was forcing him to breathe, pulling his ribs out and in. 
Daylight filtered through a mental fog. The dying whine of a generator howled in his throbbing ears. Then a voice . . . a human voice . . . incomprehensible words. 

THEY SLID him gently out of the coil. Consciousness faced again. Awareness was a light bulb, loose in its socket, flickering on and off erratically. Once, when he opened his eyes, the room was dark except for yellow moonlight coming through the window. 
White-garbed figures moved about him. Needles pricked his arm. He was bathed in rays, covered with blankets of frosty powder. Sometimes he saw faces through the mist that screened his senses. Long thin faces with large clear eyes. Human faces, or at least humanoid. A handsome people. 
They tried to speak in sign language. But he babbled in weak whispers. From his mutterings, and from bits of writings found upon an airless, weatherless moon, their linguists pieced together a knowledge of his tongue. They talked. 
They told him that he had planted the first seed. 
Once he mumbled that it was the murdered seed of Abel, and they bowed gravely in sympathy. 
The sons of the White Idiot struggled valiantly to save the corpse that they had plucked from a deep-freeze on their planet's moon. But the flicker of life waxed and waned in weak tides. 
They said they had made a mistake. They had taken him out too soon. Perhaps if they had waited and studied for another century. . . . 
Dead a billion years, he came alive to die again. 
Sometimes, during rational moments, he questioned his awakeners, one of them in particular. A girl, with large, rust-brown eyes, and a wide soft mouth, and a close-cropped brush of bright black hair. She told him stories of the Planet. 
Sometimes he could see her warm, expressive face, and could understand her words, spoken in the soft hiss of English newly learned. 
"There was an ancient legend among our people, Barry Wilkes. It told of the god, Vorhu, and his consort, Ndriga, who fell from his arms in heaven and plunged down through the Northern Lights. Vorhu came to bury her. But the pale blue Alononu blossoms had grown from her body and spread across the planet." 
She patted his arm and smiled faintly. "Our people once identified Vorhu with the moon. They piled his altars high with the night-flowering Alononus." 
But Barry's mind was dulled by the eons. Her stories came to tire him. Once he wondered vaguely if she had been made by the world-creature. 
They told him he was dying, for it was their custom to greet death gravely and politely. 
They gave him the last sacrament of their people, a rite reserved for the high space-warriors of their nation. And they moved him to the window where he could see the white vapor-trails that streaked the sky in martial formation, as if honoring the passing of a kind. 
But his vision grew dim. 
The girl brought a basket of blue Alononu blossoms and scattered them over his pallet. Then she chanted the Death Song. And it told of the soul's final merging in the spirit of the race of Man. Bereshith. 

Next Issue's Science Fiction Headliners 

ABERCROMBIE STATION by JACK VANCE 
THE REGAL RIGELIAN by KENDELL FOSTER CROSSEN 
SURVIVAL by JOHN WYNDHAM