People of the Darkness

Chapter I Birth of “Darkness”

Out in space, on the lip of the farthest galaxy and between the two star clusters, there came into being a luminiferous globe that radiated for light-years around. A life had been born!

It became aware of light; one of its visions had become activated. First it saw the innumerable suns and nebulae whose radiated energy now fed it. Beyond that it saw a dense, impenetrable darkness.

The darkness intrigued it. It could understand the stars, but the darkness it could not. The babe probed outward several light-years and met only lightlessness. It probed further, and further, but there was no light. Only after its visions could not delve deeper did it give up, but a strange seed had been sown; that there was light on the far edge of the darkness became its innate conviction.

Wonders never seemed to cease parading themselves before this newly-born. It became aware of another personality hovering near, an energy creature thirty million miles across. At its core hung a globe of subtly glowing green light one million miles in diameter.

He explored this being with his vision, and it remained still during his inspection. He felt strange forces plucking at him, forces that filled him to overflowing with peacefulness. At once, he discovered a system of energy waves having marvelous possibilities.

“Who are you?” these waves were able to inquire of that other life.

Softly soothing, he received answer.

“I am your mother.”

“You mean…?”

“You are my son — my creation. I shall call you… Darkness. Lie here and grow, Darkness, and when you are many times larger. I will come again.”

She had vanished, swallowed untraceably by a vast spiral nebula, a cloud of swiftly twisting stardust.

He lay motionless, strange thoughts flowing. Mostly he wondered about the sea of lightlessness lapping the shore of this galaxy in which he had been born. Sometime later he wondered about life — what life was, and its purpose.

“Whenshe comes again, I shall ask her,” he mused. “Darkness, she called me — Darkness!”

His thoughts swung back to the darkness.

For five million years he bathed himself in the rays that permeate space. He grew. He was ten million miles in diameter.

His mother came; he saw her hurtling toward him from a far distance. She stopped close.

“You are much larger, Darkness. You grow faster than the other newly-born.” He detected pride in her transmitted thoughts.

“I have been lying here, thinking,” he said. “I have been wondering, and I have come to guess at many things. There are others, like you and myself.”

“There are thousands of others, I am going to take you to them. Have you tried propellants?”

“I have not tried, but I shall.” There was a silence. “I have discovered the propellants,” said Darkness, puzzled, “but they will not move me.”

She seemed amused. “That is one thing you do not know, Darkness. You are inhabiting the seventeenth band of hyperspace; propellants will not work there. See if you can expand.”

All these were new things, but instinctively he felt himself expand to twice his original size.

“Good. I am going to snap you into the first band — there. Try your propellants.”

He tried them and, to his intense delight, the flaring lights that were the stars fled past. So great was his exhilaration that he worked up a speed that placed him several light-years from his mother.

She drew up beside him. “For one so young, you have speed. I shall be proud of you. I feel, Darkness,” and there was wistfulness in her tone, “that you will be different from the others.”

She searched his memory swirls. “But try not to be too different.”

Puzzled at this, he gazed at her, but she turned away. “Come.”

He followed her down the aisles formed by the stars, as she accommodated her pace to his.

They stopped at the sixth galaxy from the abyss of lightlessness. He discerned thousands of shapes that were his kind moving swiftly past and around him. These, then, were his people.

She pointed them out to him. “You will know them by their vibrations and the varying shades of the colored globes of light at their centers.”

She ran off a great list of names, which he had no trouble in impressing on his memory swirls.

“Radiant, Vibrant, Swift, Milky, Incandescent, Great Power, Sun-eater, Light-year—”

“Come, I am going to present you to Oldster.”

They whirled off to a space seven light-years distant. They stopped, just outside the galaxy. There was a peculiar snap in his consciousness.

“Oldster has isolated himself in the sixth band of hyperspace,” said his mother.

Where before he had seen nothing save inky space, dotted with masses of flaming, tortured matter, he now saw an energy creature whose aura fairly radiated old age. And the immense purple globe which hung at his core lacked a certain vital luster which Darkness had instinctively linked with his own youth and boundless energy.

His mother caught the old being’s attention, and Darkness felt his thought rays contact them.

“Oh, it’s you, Sparkle,” the old being’s kindly thoughts said. “And who is it with you?”

Darkness saw his mother, Sparkle, shoot off streams of crystalline light.

“This is my first son.”

The newly-born felt Oldster’s thought rays going through his memory swirls.

“And you have named him Darkness,” said Oldster slowly. “Because he has wondered about it.” His visions withdrew, half-absently. “He is so young, and yet he is a thinker; already he thinks about life.”

For a long time Oldster bent a penetrating gaze upon him. Abruptly, his vision rays swung away and centered on a tiny, isolated group of stars. There was a heavy, dragging silence.

“Darkness,” Oldster said finally, “your thoughts are useless.” The thoughts now seemed to come from an immeasurable distance, or an infinitely tired mind. “You are young, Darkness. Do not think so much; so much that the happiness of life is destroyed in the overestimation of it. When you wish, you may come to see me. I shall be in the sixth band for many millions of years.”

Abruptly, Oldster vanished. He had snapped both mother and son back in the first band.

She fixed her vision on him. “Darkness, what he says is true — every word. Play for awhile — there are innumerable things to do. And once in great intervals, if you wish, go to see Oldster; but for a long time do not bother him with your questions.”

“I will try,” answered Darkness, in sudden decision.

Chapter II Cosmic Children

Darkness played. He played for many million years.

With playmates of his own age, he roamed through the endless numbers of galaxies that composed the universe. From one end to another he dashed in a reckless obedience to Oldster’s command.

He explored the surfaces of stars, often disrupting them into fragments, sending scalding geysers of belching flame millions of miles into space. He followed his companions into the swirling depths of the green-hued nebulae that hung in intergalactic space. But to disturb these mighty creations of nature was impossible. Majestically they rolled around and around, or coiled into spirals, or at times condensed into matter that formed beautiful hot suns.

Energy to feed on was rampant here, but so densely and widely was it distributed that he and his comrades could not even dream of absorbing more than a trillionth part of it in all their lives.

He learned the mysteries of the forty-seven bands of hyperspace. He learned to snap into them or out again into the first or true band at will. He knew the delights of blackness impenetrable in the fifteenth band, of a queerly illusory multiple existence in the twenty-third, and an equally strange sensation of speeding away from himself in an opposite direction in the thirty-first, and of the forty-seventh, where all space turned into a nightmarish concoction of cubistic suns and galaxies.

Incomprehensible were those forty-seven bands. They were coexistent in space, yet they were separated from each other by a means, which no one had ever discovered. In each band were unmistakable signs that it was the same universe. Darkness only knew that each band was one of forty-seven subtly differing faces, which the universe possessed, and the powers of his mind experienced no difficulty in allowing him to cross the unseen bridges, which spanned the gulfs between them.

And he made no attempts toward finding the solution — he was determined to cease thinking, for the time being at least. He was content to play, and to draw as much pleasure and excitement as he could from every new possibility of amusement.

But the end of all that came, as he had suspected it would. He played, and loved all this, until…

He had come to his fifty-millionth year, still a youth. The purple globe at his core could have swallowed a sun a million miles in diameter, and his whole body could have displaced fifty suns of that size. For a period of a hundred thousand years he lay asleep in the seventh band, where a soft, colorless light pervaded the universe.

He awoke, and was about to transfer himself to the first band and rejoin the children of Radiant, Light-year, Great Power and all those others.

He stopped, almost dumbfounded, for a sudden, overwhelming antipathy for companionship had come over him. He discovered, indeed, that he never wanted to join his friends again. While he had slept, a metamorphosis had come about, and he was as alienated from his playmates as if he had never known them.

What had caused it? Something. Perhaps, long before his years, he had passed into the adult stage of mind. Now he was rebelling against the friendships, which meant nothing more than futile play.

Play! Bouncing huge suns around like rubber balls, and then tearing them up into solar systems; chasing one another up the scale through the forty-seven bands, and back again; darting about in the immense spaces between galaxies, rendering themselves invisible by expanding to ten times normal size.

He did not want to play, and he never wanted to see his friends again. He did not hate them, but he was intolerant of the characteristics, which bade them to disport amongst the stars for eternity.

He was not mature in size, but he felt he had become an adult, while they were still children — tossing suns the length of a galaxy, and then hurling small bits of materialized energy around them to form planets; then just as likely to hurl huger masses to disrupt the planetary systems they so painstakingly made.

He had felt it all along, this superiority. He had manifested it by besting them in every form of play they conceived. They generally bungled everything, more apt to explode a star into small fragments than to whirl it until centrifugal force threw off planets.

I have become an adult in mind, if not in body; I am at the point where I must accumulate wisdom, and perhaps sorrow,he thought whimsically. I will see Oldster, and ask him my questions — the questions I have thus far kept in the background of my thoughts. But, he added thoughtfully, I have a feeling that even his wisdom will fail to enlighten me. Nevertheless, there must be answers. What is life? Why is it? And there must be another universe beyond the darkness that hems this one in.

Darkness reluctantly turned and made a slow trail across that galaxy and into the next, where he discovered those young energy creatures with whom it would be impossible to enjoy himself again.

He drew up, and absently translated his time standard to one corresponding with theirs, a rate of consciousness at which they could observe the six planets whirling around a small, white-hot sun as separate bodies and not mere rings of light.

They were gathered in numbers of some hundreds around this sun; and Darkness hovered on the outskirts of the crowd, watching them moodily.

One of the young purple lights, Cosmic by name, threw a mass of matter a short distance into space, reached out with a tractor ray and drew it in. He swung it ‘round and ‘round on the tip of that ray, gradually forming ever-decreasing circles. To endow the planet with a velocity that would hurl it unerringly between the two outermost planetary orbits required a delicate sense of compensatory adjustment between the factors of mass, velocity, and solar attraction.

When Cosmic had got the lump of matter down to an angular velocity that was uniform, Darkness knew an irritation he had never succeeded in suppressing, An intuition, which had unfailingly proved itself accurate, told him that anything but creating an orbit for that planet was likely to ensue.

“Cosmic.” He contacted the planet-maker’s thought rays. “Cosmic, the velocity you have generated is too great. The whole system will break up.”

“Oh, Darkness.” Cosmic threw a vision on him. “Come on, join us. You say the speed is wrong? Never — you are! I’ve calculated everything to a fine point.”

“To the wrong point,” insisted Darkness stubbornly. “Undoubtedly, your estimation of the planet’s mass is the factor which makes your equation incorrect. Lower the velocity. You’ll see.”

Cosmic continued to swing his lump of matter, but stared curiously at Darkness.

“What’s the matter with you?” he inquired. “You don’t sound just right. What does it matter if I do calculate wrong, and disturb the system’s equilibrium? We’ll very probably break up the whole thing later, anyway.”

A flash of passion came over Darkness. “That’s the trouble,” he said fiercely. “It doesn’t matter to any of you. You will always be children. You will always be playing. Careful construction, joyous destruction — that is the creed on which you base your lives. Don’t you feel as if you’d like, sometime, to quit playing, and do something… worthwhile?”

As if they had discovered a strangely different set of laws governing an alien galaxy, the hundreds of youths, greens and purples, stared at Darkness.

Cosmic continued swinging the planet he had made through space, but he was plainly puzzled. “What’s wrong with you, Darkness? What else is there to do except to roam the galaxies and make suns? I can’t think of a single living thing that might be called more worthwhile.”

“What good is playing?” answered Darkness. “What good is making a solar system? If you made one, and then, perhaps, vitalized it with life, that would be worthwhile! Or think, think! About yourself, about life, why it is, and what it means in the scheme of things! Or,” and he trembled a little, “try discovering what lies beyond the veil of lightlessness which surrounds the universe.”

The hundreds of youths looked at the darkness: Cosmic stared anxiously at him. “Are you crazy? We all know there’s nothing beyond. Everything that is is right here in the universe. That blackness is just empty, and it stretches away from here forever.”

“Where did you get that information?” Darkness inquired scornfully. “You don’t know that. Nobody does. But I am going to know! I awoke from sleep a short while ago, and I couldn’t bear the thought of play. I wanted to do something substantial. So I am going into the darkness.”

He turned his gaze hungrily on the deep abyss hemming in the stars. There were thousands of years, even under its lower time standard, in which awe dominated the gathering. In his astonishment at such an unheard-of intention, Cosmic entirely forgot his circling planet. It lessened in velocity, and then tore loose from the tractor ray that had become weak, in a tangent to the circle it had been performing.

It sped toward that solar system, and entered between the orbits of the outermost planets. Solar gravitation seized it, the lone planet took up an erratic orbit, and then the whole system had settled into complete stability, with seven planets where there had been six.

“You see,” said Darkness, with a note of unsteady mirth, “if you had used your intended speed, the system would have coalesced. The speed of the planet dropped, and then escaped you. Some blind chance sent it in the right direction. It was purely an accident. Now throw in a second sun, and watch the system break up. That has always amused you.” His aura quivered. “Goodbye, friends.”

Chapter III Oldster

He was gone from their sight forever. He had snapped into the sixth band. He ranged back to the spot where Oldster should have been. He was not.

Probably in some other band,thought Darkness, and went through all the others, excepting the fifteenth, where resided a complete lack of light. With a feeling akin to awe, since Oldster was apparently in none of them, he went into the fifteenth and called out.

There was a period of silence. Then Oldster answered, in his thoughts a cadence of infinite weariness.

“Yes, my son; who calls me?”

“It is I, Darkness, whom Sparkle presented to you nearly fifty million years ago.” Hesitating, an unexplainable feeling as of sadness unquenchable came to him.

“I looked for you in the sixth,” he went on in a rush of words, but did not expect to find you here, isolated, with no light to see by.”

“I am tired of seeing, my son. I have lived too long. I have tired of thinking and of seeing. I am sad.”

Darkness hung motionless, hardly daring to interrupt the strange thought of this incredible ancient. He ventured timidly, “It is just that I am tired of playing, Oldster, tired of doing nothing. I should like to accomplish something of some use. Therefore, I have come to you, to ask you three questions, the answers to which I must know.”

Oldster stirred restlessly, “Ask your questions.”

“I am curious about life.” Oldster’s visitor hesitated nervously, and then went on, “It has a purpose, I know, and I want to know that purpose. That is my first question.”

“But why, Darkness? What makes you think life has a purpose, an ultimate purpose?”

“I don’t know,” came the answer, and for the first time Darkness was startled with the knowledge that he really didn’t! “But there must be some purpose!” he cried.

“How can you say ‘must’? Oh, Darkness, you have clothed life in garments far too rich for its ordinary character! You have given it the sacred aspect of meaning! There is no meaning to it. Once upon a time the spark of life fired a blob of common energy with consciousness of its existence. From that, by some obscure-evolutionary process, we came. That is all. We are born. We live, and grow, and then we die! After that, there is nothing! Nothing!”

Something in Darkness shuddered violently, and then rebelliously. But his thoughts were quiet and tense. “I won’t believe that! You are telling me that life is only meant for death, then. Why… why, if that were so, why should there be life? No, Oldster! I feel that there must be something which justifies my existence.”

Was it pity that came flowing along with Oldster’s thoughts? “You will never believe me. I knew it. All my ancient wisdom could not change you, and perhaps it is just as well. Yet you may spend a lifetime in learning what I have told you.”

His thoughts withdrew, absently, and then returned. “Your other questions, Darkness.”

For a long time Darkness did not answer. He was of half a mind to leave Oldster and leave it to his own experiences to solve his other problems. His resentment was hotter than a dwarf sun, for a moment. But it cooled and though he was beginning to doubt the wisdom to which Oldster laid claim, he continued with his questioning.

“What is the use of the globe of purple light which forever remains at my center, and even returns, no matter how far I hurl it from me?”

Such a wave of mingled agitation and sadness passed from the old being that Darkness shuddered. Oldster turned on him with extraordinary fierceness. “Do not learn that secret! I will not tell you! What might I not have spared myself had I not sought and found the answer to that riddle! I was a thinker, Darkness, like you! Darkness, if you value… Come, Darkness,” he went on in a singularly broken manner, “Your remaining question.” His thought rays switched back and forth with an uncommon sign of utter chaos of mind.

Then they centered on Darkness again. “I know your other query, Darkness. I know; I knew when first Sparkle brought you to me, eons ago.

“What is beyond the darkness? That has occupied your mind since your creation. What lies on the fringe of the lightless section by which this universe is bounded?

“I do not know, Darkness. Nor does anyone know.”

“But you must believe there is something beyond,” cried Darkness.

“Darkness, in the dim past of our race, beings of your caliber have tried — five of them I remember in my time, billions of years ago. But they never came back. They left the universe, hurling themselves into that awful void, and they never came back.”

“How do you know they didn’t reach that foreign universe?” asked Darkness breathlessly.

“Because they didn’t come back,” answered Oldster, simply. “If they could have gotten across, at least one or two of them would have returned. They never reached that universe. Why? All the energy they were able to accumulate for that staggering voyage was exhausted. And they dissipated — died — in the energyless emptiness of the darkness.”

“There must be a way to cross!” said Darkness violently. “There must be a way to gather energy for the crossing! Oldster, you are destroying my life-dream! I have wanted to cross. I want to find the edge of the darkness. I want to find life there — perhaps then I will find the meaning of all life!”

“Find the—” began Oldster pityingly, then stopped, realizing the futility of completing the sentence.

“It is a pity you are not like the others, Darkness. Perhaps they understand that it is as purposeful to lie sleeping in the seventh band as to discover the riddle of the darkness. They are truly happy, you are not. Always, my son, you overestimate the worth of life.”

“Am I wrong in doing so?”

“No. Think as you will, and think that life is high. There is no harm. Dream your dream of great life, and dream your dream of another universe. There is joy even in the sadness of unattainment.”

Again that long silence, and again the smoldering flame of resentment in Darkness’ mind. This time there was no quenching of that flame. It burned fiercely.

“I will not dream!” said Darkness furiously. “When first my visions became activated, they rested on the darkness, and my newborn thought swirls wondered about the darkness, and knew that something lay beyond it!

“And whether or not I die in that void, I am going into it!”

Abruptly, irately, he snapped from the fifteenth band into the first, but before he had time to use his propellants he saw Oldster, a giant body of intense, swirling energies of pure light, materialize before him.

“Darkness, stop!” and Oldster’s thoughts were unsteady. “Darkness,” he went on, as the younger energy creature stared — spellbound, “I had vowed to myself never to leave the band of lightlessness. I have come from it, a moment, for… you!

“You will die. You will dissipate in the void! You will never cross it, if it can be crossed, with the limited energy your body contains!”

He seized Darkness’ thought swirls in tight bands of energy.

“Darkness, there is knowledge that I possess. Receive it!”

With newborn wonder, Darkness erased consciousness. The mighty accumulated knowledge of Oldster sped into him in a swift-flow, a great tide of space lore no other being had ever possessed.

The inflow ceased, and as from an immeasurably distant space came Oldster’s parting words:

“Darkness, farewell! Use your knowledge, use it to further your dream. Use it to cross the darkness.”

Again fully conscious, Darkness knew that Oldster had gone again into the fifteenth band of utter lightlessness, in his vain attempt at peace.

He hung tensely motionless in the first band, exploring the knowledge that now was his. At the portent of one particular portion of it, he trembled.

In wildest exhilaration, he thrust out his propellants, dashing at full speed to his mother.

He hung before her.

“Mother, I am going into the darkness!”

There was a silence, pregnant with her sorrow. “Yes, I know. It was destined when first you were born. For that I named you Darkness.” A restless quiver of sparks left her, her gaze sad and loving. She said, “Farewell, Darkness, my son.”

She wrenched herself from true space, and he was alone. The thought stabbed him. He was alone — alone as Oldster.

Struggling against the vast depression that overwhelmed him, he slowly started on his way to the very furthest edge of the universe, for there lay the Great Energy.

Absently he drifted across the galaxies, the brilliant denizens of the cosmos, lying quiescent on their eternal black beds. He drew a small sun into him, and converted it into energy for the long flight.

And suddenly, far off he saw his innumerable former companions. A cold mirth seized him. Playing! The folly of children, the aimlessness of stars!

He sped away from them; and slowly increased his velocity, the thousands of galaxies flashing away behind. His speed mounted a frightful acceleration carrying him toward his goal.

Chapter IV Beyond Light

It took him seven million years to cross the universe, going at the tremendous velocity he had attained. And he was in a galaxy whose far-flung suns hung out into the darkness, who were themselves traveling into the darkness at the comparatively slow pace of several thousand miles a second.

Instantaneously, his vision rested on an immense star, a star so immense that he felt himself unconsciously expand in an effort to rival it. So titanic was its mass that it drew all light rays save the short ultraviolet back into it.

It was hot, an inconceivable mass of matter a billion miles across. Like an evil, sentient monster of the skies it hung, dominating the tiny suns of this galaxy that were perhaps its children, to Darkness flooding the heavens with ultraviolet light from its great expanse of writhing, coiling, belching surface; and mingled with that light was a radiation of energy so virulent that it ate its way painfully into his very brain.

Still another radiation impinged on him, an energy which, were he to possess its source, would activate his propellants to such an extent that his velocity would pale any to which his race had attained in all its long history, hurling him into the darkness at such an unthinkable rate that the universe would be gone in the infinitesimal part of a second!

But how hopeless seemed the task of rending it from that giant of the universe. The source of that energy, he knew with certain knowledge, was matter, matter so incomparably dense — its electrons crowding each other till they touched — that even that furiously molten star could not destroy it!

He spurred back several million miles, and stared at it. Suddenly he knew fear, a cold fear. He felt that the sun was animate, that it knew he was waiting there, that it was prepared to resist his pitiable onslaughts. And as if in support of his fears, he felt rays of such intense repelling power, such alive, painful malignancy that he almost threw away his mad intentions of splitting it.

“I have eaten suns before,” he told himself, with the air of one arguing against himself. “I can at least split that one open, and extract the morsel that lies in its interior.”

He drew into him as many of the surrounding suns as he was able, converting them into pure energy. He ceased at last, for no longer could his body, a giant complexity of swarming intense fields sixty million miles across, assimilate more.

Then, with all the acceleration he could muster, he dashed headlong at the celestial monster.

It grew and expanded, filling all the skies until he could no longer see anything but it. He drew near its surface. Rays of fearful potency smote him until he convulsed in the whiplash agony of it. At frightful velocity, he contacted the heaving surface, and… made a tiny dent some millions of miles in depth.

He strove to push forward, but streams of energy repelled him, energy that flung him away from the star in acceleration.

He stopped his backward flight, fighting his torment, and threw himself upon the star again. It repulsed him with an uncanny likeness to a living thing. Again and again he went through the agonizing process, to be as often thrust back.

He could not account for those repelling rays, which seemed to operate in direct contrariness to the star’s obviously great gravitational field; nor did he try to account for them. There were mysteries in space which even Oldster had never been able to solve.

But there was a new awe in him. He hung in space, spent and quivering.

“It is almost alive,” he thought, and then adopted new tactics. Rushing at the giant, he skimmed over and through its surface in titanic spirals, until he had swept it entirely free of raging, incandescent gases. Before the star could replenish its surface, he spiraled it again, clinging to it until he could no longer resist the repelling forces, of the burning rays which impinged upon him.

The star now lay in the heavens diminished by a tenth of its former bulk. Darkness, hardly able to keep himself together, retired a distance from it and discarded excess energy.

He went back to the star.

Churning seas of pure light flickered fitfully across. Now and then there were belchings of matter bursting within itself.

Darkness began again. He charged, head on. He contacted, bored millions of miles, and was thrown back with mounting velocity. Hurtling back into space, Darkness finally knew that all these tactics would in the last analysis prove useless. His glance roving, it came to rest on a dense, redly glowing sun. For a moment it meant nothing, and then he knew — knew that here at last lay the solution.

He plucked that dying star from its place, and swinging it in huge circles on the tip of a tractor ray, flung it with the utmost of his savage force at the gargantuan star.

Fiercely, he watched the smaller sun approach its parent. Closer, closer, and then — they collided! A titanic explosion ripped space, sending out wave after wave of cosmic rays, causing an inferno of venomous, raging flames that extended far into the skies, licking it in a fury of utter abandon. The mighty sun split wide open, exhibiting a violet-hot, gaping maw more than a billion miles wide.

Darkness activated his propellants and dropped into the awful cavity, until he was far beneath its rim and had approached the center of the star where lay that mass of matter which was the source of the Great Energy. To his sight it was invisible, save as a blank area of nothingness, since light rays of no wavelength whatsoever could leave it.

Darkness wrapped himself around the sphere, and at the same time the two halves of the giant star fell together, imprisoning him at its core.

This possibility he had not overlooked. With concentrated knots of force, he ate away the merest portion of the surface of the sphere, and absorbed it in him. He was amazed at the metamorphosis. He became aware of a vigor so infinite that he felt nothing could withstand him.

Slowly, he began to expand. He was inexorable. The star could not stop him; it gave. It cracked, great gaping cracks which parted with displays of blinding light and pure heat. He continued to grow, pushing outward.

With the sphere of Great Energy, which was no more than ten million miles across, in his grasp, he continued inflation. A terrific blast of malignant energy ripped at him; cracks millions of miles in length appeared, cosmic displays of pure energy flared. After that, the gargantua gave way before Darkness so readily that he had split it up into separate parts before he ever knew it.

He then became aware that he was in the center of thousands of large and small pieces of the star that were shooting away from him in all directions, forming new suns that would chart individual orbits for themselves.

He had conquered. He hung motionless, grasping the sphere of Great Energy at his center, along with the mystic globe of purple light.

He swung his vision on the darkness, and looked at it in fascination for a long time. Then, without a last look at the universe of his birth, he activated his propellants with the nameless Great Energy and plunged into that dark well.

All light, save that he created, vanished. He was hemmed in on all sides by the vastness of empty space. Exaltation, coupled with an awareness of the infinite power in his grasp, took hold of his thoughts and made them soar. His acceleration was minimum rather than maximum, yet in a brief space of his time standard he traversed uncountable billions of light-years.

Darkness ahead, and darkness behind, and darkness all around — that had been his dream. It had been his dream all through his life, even during those formless years in which he had played, in obedience to Oldster’s admonishment. Always there had been the thought: what lies at the other end of the darkness? Now he was in the darkness, and a joy such as he had never known claimed him. He was on the way! Would he find another universe, a universe which had bred the same kind of life as he had known? He could not think otherwise.

His acceleration was incredible! Yet he knew that he was using a minimum of power. He began to step it up, swiftly increasing even the vast velocity which he had attained. Where lay that other universe? He could not know, and he had chosen no single direction in which to leave his own universe. There had been no choice of direction. Any line stretching into the vault of the darkness might have ended in that alien universe…

Not until a million years had elapsed did his emotions subside. Then there were other thoughts. He began to feel a dreadful fright, a fright that grew on him as he left his universe farther behind. He was hurtling into the darkness that none before him had crossed, and few had dared to try crossing, at a velocity which he finally realized he could attain, but not comprehend. Mind could not think it, thoughts could not say it!

And — he was alone!Alone! An icy hand clutched at him. He had never known the true meaning of that word. There were none of his friends near, nor his mother, nor great-brained Oldster — there was no living thing within innumerable light-centuries.He was the only life in the void!

Thus, for almost exactly ninety million years he wondered and thought, first about life, then the edge of the darkness, and lastly the mysterious energy field eternally at his core. He found the answer to two, and perhaps, in the end, the other.

Ever, each infinitesimal second that elapsed, his visions were probing hundreds of light-years ahead, seeking the first sign of that universe he believed in; but no, all was darkness so dense it seemed to possess mass.

The monotony became agony. A colossal loneliness began to tear at him. He wanted to do anything, even play, or slice huge stars up into planets. But there was only one escape from the phantasmal horror of the unending ebony path. Now and then he seized the globe of light with a tractor ray and hurled into the curtain of darkness behind him at terrific velocity.

It sped away under the momentum imparted to it until sight of it was lost. But always, though millions of years might elapse, it returned, attached to him by invisible strings of energy. It was part of him, it defied penetration of its secret, and it would never leave him, until, perhaps, of itself it revealed its true purpose.

Infinite numbers of light-years, so infinite that if written, a sheet as broad as the universe would have been required, reeled behind.

Eighty million years passed. Darkness had not been as old as that when he had gone into the void for which he had been named. Fear that he had been wrong took a stronger foothold in his thoughts. But now he knew that he would never go back.

Long before the eighty-nine-millionth year came, he had exhausted all sources of amusement. Sometimes he expanded or contracted to incredible sizes. Sometimes he automatically went through the motions of traversing the forty-seven bands. He felt the click in his consciousness which told him that if there had been hyperspace in the darkness, he would have been transported into it. But how could there be different kinds of darkness? He strongly doubted the existence of hyperspace here, for only matter could occasion the dimensional disturbances which obtained in his universe.

But with the eighty-nine-millionth year came the end of his pilgrimage. It came abruptly. For one tiny space of time, his visions contacted a stream of light, light that was left as the outward trail of a celestial body. Darkness’ body, fifty million miles in girth, involuntarily contracted to half its size. Energy streamed together and formed molten blobs of flaring matter that sped from him in the chaotic emotions of the moment.

A wave of shuddering thankfulness shook him, and his thoughts rioted sobbingly in his memory swirls.

“Oldster, Oldster, if only your great brain could know this—”

Uncontrollably inflating and deflating, he tore onward, shearing vast quantities of energy from the tight matter at his core, converting it into propellant power that drove him at a velocity that was more than unthinkable, toward the universe from whence had come that light-giving body.

Chapter V The Colored Globes

In the ninety-millionth year a dim spot of light rushed at him, and, as he hurtled onward, the spot of light grew, and expanded, and broke up into tinier lights, tinier lights that in turn broke up into their components — until the darkness was blotted out, giving way to the dazzling, beautiful radiance of an egg-shaped universe.

He was out of the darkness; he had discovered its edge. Instinctively, he lessened his velocity to a fraction of its former self, and then, as if some mightier will than his had overcome him, he lost consciousness and sped unknowingly, at steady speed, through the outlying fringe of the outer galaxy, through it, through its brothers, until, unconscious, he was in the midst of that alien galactic system.

When he regained consciousness, at first he made a rigid tour of inspection, flying about from star to star, tearing them wantonly apart, as if each and every atom belonged solely to him. The galaxies, the suns, the very elements of construction, all were the same as he knew them. All nature, he decided, was probably alike, in this universe, or in that one.

But was there life?

An abrupt wave of restlessness, of unease, passed over him. He felt unhappy and unsated. He looked about on the stars, great giants, dwarfs fiercely burning, other hulks of matter cooled to black, forbidding cinders, intergalactic nebulae wreathing unpurposefully about, assuming weird and beautiful formations over periods of thousands of years. He, Darkness, had come to them, he had crossed the great gap of nothing, but they were unaffected by this unbelievable feat and went swinging on their courses, knowing nothing of him. He felt small, without meaning. Such thoughts seemed the very apostasy of sense, but there they were; he could not shake them off. It was with a growing feeling of disillusionment that he drifted through the countless galaxies and nebulae that unrolled before him, in search of life.

And his quest was rewarded. From afar, the beating flow of the life energy came. He drove toward its source, thirty or forty light-years, and hung in its presence.

The being was a green-light, that one of the two classes in which Darkness had divided the life he knew. He himself was a purple-light, containing at his core a globe of pure light, the purpose of which had been one of the major problems of his existence.

The green-light, when she saw him, came to a stop. They stared at each other.

Finally she spoke, and there was wonder and doubt in her thoughts.

“Who are you? You seem… alien.”

“You will hardly believe me,” Darkness replied, now trembling with a sensation which, inexplicably, could not be defined by the fact that he was conversing with a being of another universe. “But I am alien. I do not belong to this universe.”

“But that seems quite impossible. Perhaps you are from another space, beyond the forty-seventh. But that is more impossible!” She eyed him with growing puzzlement and awe.

“I am from no other space,” said Darkness somberly. “I am from another universe beyond the darkness.”

“From beyond the darkness?” she said faintly, and then she involuntarily contracted. Abruptly she turned her visions on the darkness. For a long, long time she stared at it, and then she returned her vision rays to Darkness.

“So you have crossed the darkness,” she whispered. “They used to tell me that that was the most impossible thing it was possible to dream of– to cross that terrible section of lightlessness. No one could cross, they said, because there was nothing on the other side. But I never believed, purple-light, I never believed them. And there have been times when I have desperately wanted to traverse it myself. But there were tales of beings who had gone into it, and never returned. And you have crossed it!”

A shower of crystalline sparks fled from her. So evident was the sudden hero worship carried on her thought waves that Darkness felt a wild rise in spirits. And suddenly he was able to define the never-before experienced emotions which had enwrapped him when first this green-light spoke.

“Green-light, I have journeyed a distance the length of which I cannot think to you, seeking the riddle of the darkness. But perhaps there was something else I was seeking, something to fill a vacant part of me. I know now what it was; A mate, green-light, a thinker. And you are that thinker, that friend with whom I can journey, voyaging from universe to universe, finding the secrets of all that is. Look! The Great Energy which alone made it possible for me to cross the darkness has been barely tapped!”

Imperceptibly she drew away. There was an unexplainable wariness that seemed half sorrow in her thoughts.

“You are a thinker,” he exclaimed. “Will you come with me?”

She stared at him, and he felt she possessed a natural wisdom he could never hope to accumulate. There was a strange shrinkage of his spirits. What was that she was saying?

“Darkness,” she said gently, “you would do well to turn and leave me, a green-light, forever. You are a purple-light, I a green. Green-light and purple-light — is that all you have thought about the two types of life? Then you must know that beyond the difference in color, there is another: the greens have a knowledge not vouchsafed the purples, until it is… too late. For your own sake, then, I ask you to leave me forever.”

He looked at her puzzled. Then, slowly, “That is an impossible request, now that I have found you. You are what I need,” he insisted.

“But don’t you understand?” she cried. “I know something you have not even guessed at! Darkness — leave me!”

He became bewildered. What was she driving at? What was it she knew that he could not know? For a moment he hesitated. Far down in him a voice was bidding him to do as she asked, and quickly. But another voice, that of a growing emotion he could not name, bid him stay; for she was the complement of himself, the half of him that would make him complete. And the second voice was stronger.

“I am not going,” he said firmly, and the force of his thoughts left no doubt as to the unshakable quality of his decision.

She spoke faintly, as if some outside will had overcome her. “No, Darkness, now you are not going; it is too late! Learn the secret of the purple globe!”

Abruptly, she wrenched herself into a hyperspace, and all his doubts and fears were erased as she disappeared, He followed her delightedly up the scale, catching sight of her in one band just as she vanished into the next.

And so they came to the forty-seventh, where all matter, its largest and smallest components, assumed the shapes of unchangeable cubes; even he and the green-light appeared as cubes, gigantic cubes millions of miles in extent, a geometric figure they could never hope to distort.

Darkness watched her expectantly. Perhaps she would now start a game of chopping chunks off these cubed suns and swing them around as planets. Well, he would be willing to do that for a while, in her curious mood of playfulness, but after that they must settle down to discovering possible galactic systems beyond this one.

As he looked at her she vanished. “Hmm, probably gone down the scale,” thought Darkness, and he dropped through the lower bands. He found her in none.

“Darkness… try the… forty-eighth…” Her thought came faintly.

“The forty-eighth!” he cried in astonishment. At the same time, there was a seething of his memory swirls as if the knowledge of his life were being arranged to fit some new fact, a strange alchemy of the mind by which he came to know that there was a forty-eighth.

Now he knew, as he had always known, that there was a forty-eighth. He snapped himself into it.

Energy became rampant in a ceaseless shifting about him. A strange energy, reminding him of nothing so much as the beating flow of an energy creature approaching him from a near distance. His vision sought out the green-light.

She was facing him somberly, yet with a queerly detached arrogance. His mind was suddenly choked with the freezing sensation that he was face to face with horror.

“I have never been here before,” he whispered faintly. He thought he detected pity in her, but it was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was under the influence of an outside will that could not know pity.

Yet she said, “I am sadder than ever before. But too late. You are my mate, and this is the band of… life!”

Abruptly while he stared, she receded, and he could not follow, save with his visions. Presently, as if a hypnotist had clamped his mind, she herself disappeared, all that he saw of her being the green globe of light she carried. He saw nothing else, knew nothing else. It became his whole universe, his whole life. A peacefulness, complete and uncorroded by vain striving, settled on him like stardust.

The green globe of light dimmed and became smaller, until it was less than a pinpoint, surrounded by an infinity of colorless energy.

Then, so abruptly it was in the nature of a shock, he came from his torpor and was conscious. Far off he still saw the green globe of light, but it was growing in size, approaching — approaching a purple globe of light that in turn raced toward it at high velocity.

“It is my own light,” he thought, startled. “I must have unwittingly hurled it forth when she settled that hypnotic influence over me. No matter. It will come back.”

But would it come back? The green globe of light was expanding in apparent size, approaching the purple globe which, in turn, dwindled toward it at increasing speed.

“At that rate,” he thought in panic, “they will collide. Then how will my light come back to me?”

He watched intently, a poignantly cold feeling clutching at him. Closer… closer. He quivered. Green globe and purple globe had crashed.

They met in a blinding crescendo of light that brightened space for light-years around. A huge mistiness of light formed into a sphere, in the center of which hung a brilliant ball. The misty light slowly subsided until it had been absorbed into the brighter light, that remained as motionless as Darkness himself. Then it commenced pulsating with a strange, rhythmic regularity.

Something about that pulsing stirred ancient memories, something that said, “You, too, were once no more than that pulsing ball.”

Thoughts immense in scope, to him, tumbled in his mind.

“That globe is life,” he thought starkly. “The green-light and I have created life. That was her meaning, when she said this was the band of life. Its activating energy flows rampant here.

“That is the secret of the purple globe; with the green globe it creates life. And I had never known the forty-eighth band until she made it known to me!

“The purpose of life — to create life.” The thought of that took fire in his brain. For one brief, intoxicating moment he thought that he had solved the last and most baffling of his mighty problems.

As with all other moments of exaltation he had known, disillusionment followed swiftly after. To what end was that? The process continued on and on, and what came of it? Was creation of life the only use of life? A meaningless circle! He recalled Oldster’s words of the past, and horror claimed him.

“Life, my life,” he whispered dully. “A dead sun and life — one of equal importance with the other. That is unbelievable!” he burst out.

He was aware of the green-light hovering near; yes, she possessed a central light, while his was gone!

She looked at him sorrowfully. “Darkness, if only you had listened to me!”

Blankly, he returned her gaze. “Why is it that you have a light, while I have none?”

“A provision of whatever it was that created us endows the green-lights with the ability to replace their lights three times. Each merging of a purple and green-light may result in the creation of one or several newly-born. Thus the number born overbalances the number of deaths. When my fourth light has gone, as it will some day, I know, I too will die.”

“You mean, I will… die?”

“Soon.”

Darkness shuddered, caught halfway between an emotion of blind anger and mental agony. “There is death everywhere,” he whispered, “and everything is futile!”

“Perhaps,” she said softly, her grief carrying poignantly to him. “Darkness, do not be sad. Darkness, death does indeed come to all, but that does not say that life is of no significance.

“Far past in the gone ages of our race, we were pitiful, tiny blobs of energy which crept along at less than light speed. An energy creature of that time knew nothing of any but the first and forty-eighth band of hyperspace. The rest he could not conceive of as being existent. He was ignorant, possessing elementary means of absorbing energy for life. For countless billions of years he never knew there was an edge to the universe. He could not conceive an edge.

“He was weak, but he gained in strength. Slowly, he evolved, and intelligence entered his mind.

“Always, he discovered things he had been formerly unable to conceive in his mind, and even now there are things that lay beyond the mind; one of them is the end of all space. And the greatest is, why life exists. Both are something we cannot conceive, but in time evolution of mental powers will allow us to conceive them, even as we conceived the existence of hyperspace and those other things. Dimly, so dimly, even now I can see some reason, but it slips the mind. But Darkness! All of matter is destined to break down to an unchanging state of maximum entropy; it is life, and life alone, that builds in an upward direction. So… faith!”

She was gone. She had sown what comfort she could. Her words shot Darkness full of the wild fire of hope. That was the answer! Vague and promissory it was, but no one could arrive nearer to the solution than that. For a moment he was suffused with the blissful thought that the last of his problems was disposed of.

Then, in one awful space of time, the green-light’s philosophy was gone from his memory as if it had never been uttered. He felt the pangs of an unassailable weariness, as if life energies were seeping away.

Haggardly, he put into effect one driving thought. With lagging power, he shot from the fatal band of life… and death… down the scale. Something unnamable, perhaps some natal memory, made him pause for the merest second in the seventeenth band. Afar off, he saw the green-light and her newly-born. They had left the highest band and come to the band where propellants became useless. So it had been at his own birth.

He paused no more and dropped to the true band, pursuing a slow course across the star beds of this universe, until he at last emerged on its ragged shore. He went on into the darkness, until hundred hundreds of light-years separated him from the universe his people had never known existed.

Chapter VI Dissipation

He stopped and looked back at the lens of misty radiance. “I have not even discovered the edge of the darkness,” he thought. “It stretches out and around. That galactic system and my own are just pinpoints of light, sticking up, vast distances apart, through an unlimited ebony cloth. They are so small in the darkness they barely have the one dimension of existence!”

He went on his way, slowly, wearily, as if the power to activate his propellants were diminishing. There came a time, in his slow, desperate striving after the great velocity he had known in crossing the lightless section, when that universe, that pinpoint sticking up, became as a pinpoint to his sight.

He stopped, took one longing look at it, and accelerated until it was lost to view.

“I am alone again,” he thought vaguely. “I am more alone than Oldster ever was. How did he escape death from the green-lights? Perhaps he discovered their terrible secret, and fled before they could wreak their havoc on him. He was a lover of wisdom, and he did not want to die. Now he is living, and he is alone, marooning himself in the lightness band, striving not to think. He could make himself die, but he is afraid to, even though he is so tired of life, and of thinking his endless thoughts.

“I will die. But no…! Ah, yes, I will.”

He grew bewildered. He thought, or tried to think, of what came after death. Why, there would be nothing!

He would not be there, and without him nothing else could exist!

“I would not be there, and therefore there would be nothing,” he thought starkly. “Oh, that is inconceivable. Death! Why, forever after I died, I would be… dead!”

He strove to alleviate the awfulness of the eternal unconsciousness. “I was nothing once, that is true; why cannot that time come again? But it is unthinkable. I feel as if I am the center of everything, the cause, the focal point, and even the foundation.”

For some time this thought gave him a kind of gloating satisfaction. Death was indeed not so bad, when one could thus drag to oblivion the very things which had sponsored his life. But at length, reason supplanted dreams. He sighed. “And that is vanity!”

Again he felt the ineffably horrible sensation of an incapacity to activate his propellants the full measure, and an inability to keep himself down to normal size. His memory swirls were pulsating and striving, sometimes, to obliterate themselves.

Everything seemed meaningless. His very drop into the darkness, at slow acceleration, was without purpose.

“I could not reach either universe now,” he commented to himself, “because I am dying. Poor mother! Poor Oldster! They will not even know I crossed. That seems the greatest sorrow — to do a great thing, and not be able to tell of it. Why did they not tell me of the central lights? With Oldster, it was fear that I should come to the same deathless end as he. With mother — she obeyed an instinct as deeply rooted as space. There must be perpetuation of life.

“Why? Was the green-light right? Is there some tangible purpose to life which we are unable to perceive? But where is my gain, if I have to die to bring to ultimate fruition that purpose? I suppose Oldster knew the truth. Life just is, had an accidental birth, and exists haphazardly, like a star, or an electron.

“But, knowing these things, why do I not immediately give way to the expanding forces within me? Ah, I do not know!”

Convulsively he applied his mind to the continuance of life within his insistently expanding body. For awhile he gloried in the small increase of his fading vigor.

“Making solar systems!” his mind took up the thread of a lost thought. “Happy sons of Radiant, Incandescent, Great Power, and all the others!”

He concentrated on the sudden thought that struck him. He was dying, of that he was well aware, but he was dying without doing anything. What had he actually done, in this life of his?

“But what can I do? I am alone,” he thought vaguely. Then, “I could make a planet, and I could put the life germ on it. Oldster taught me that.”

Suddenly he was afraid he would die before he created this planet. He set his mind to it, and began to strip from the sphere of tight matter vast quantities of energy, then condensed it to form matter more attenuated. With lagging power, he formed mass after mass of matter, ranging all through the ninety-eight elements that he knew.

Fifty-thousand years saw the planet’s first stage of completion. It had become a tiny sphere some fifteen-thousand miles in diameter. With a heat ray he then boiled it, and with another ray cooled its crust at the same time forming oceans and continents on its surface. Both water and land, he knew, were necessary to life which was bound by nature of its construction to the surface of a planet.

Then came the final, completing touch. No other being had ever deliberately done what Darkness did then. Carefully, he created an infinitesimal splash of life-perpetuating protoplasm; he dropped it aimlessly into a tiny wrinkle of the planet’s surface.

He looked at the finished work, the most perfect planet he or his playmates had ever created, with satisfaction, notwithstanding the dull pain of weariness that throbbed through the complex energy fields of his body.

Then he took the planet up in a tractor ray, and swung it around and around, as he now so vividly recalled doing in his childhood. He gave it a swift angular velocity, and then shot it off at a tangent, in a direction along the line of which he was reasonably sure lay his own universe. He watched it with dulling visions. It receded into the darkness that would surround it for ages, and then it was a pinpoint, and then nothing.

“It is gone,” he said, somehow wretchedly lonely because of that, “but it will reach the universe; perhaps for millions of years it will traverse the galaxies unmolested. Then a sun will reach out and claim it. There will be life upon it, life that will grow until it is intelligent, and will say it has a soul, and purpose in existing.”

Nor did the ironic humor of the ultimate swift and speedy death of even that type of life, once it had begun existence, escape him. Perhaps for one or ten million years it would flourish, and then even it would be gone — once upon a time nothing and then nothing again.

He felt a sensation that brought blankness nearer, a sensation of expansion, but now he made no further attempts to prolong a life which was, in effect, already dead. There was a heave within him, as if some subconscious force were deliberately attempting to tear him apart.

He told himself that he was no longer afraid. I am simply going into another darkness — but it will be a much longer journey than the other.

Like a protecting cloak, he drew in his vision rays about him, away from the ebony emptiness. He drifted, expanding through the vast, inter-universal space.

The last expansion came, the expansion that dissipated his memory swirls. A vast, compact sphere of living drew itself out until Darkness was only free energy distributed over light-years of space.

And death, in that last moment, seemed suddenly to be a far greater and more astounding occurrence than birth had ever seemed.