And he didn’t want anything to happen to the kid.

  “So long, Cone,” Andy said, his voice very quiet. “And—thanks. I won’t forget what you did.”

  Conan Lang leaned on Andy’s arm and moved toward the ship. “I’ll be back, Andy,” he said, trying to keep the weight off his feet. “Hold the fort—I know it’ll be in good hands.”

  Conan Lang shook hands with Julio and then Julio and Andy helped him into the outlift. He had time for a brief wave and a final glimpse of the green field under the fiery sun, and then he was inside the patrol ship. They had somehow rigged up a bunk for him in the cramped quarters, and he collapsed into it gratefully.

  “Home, James,” he whispered, trying not to think about what would happen if they could not save his legs.

  Conan Lang closed his eyes and lay very still, feeling the ship pulse and surge as it carried him out into the dark sea from which he had come.

  IV.

  The doctors saved his legs, but years were to pass before Conan Lang again set foot upon Earth. Space was vast and star cruisers comparatively few. In addition, star ships were fabulously expensive to operate—it was out of the question for a ship on a mission to make the long run from Sirius to Sol for the sake of one man. Conan Lang became the prize patient of the ship medics, and he stayed with the star cruiser as it operated in the Sirius area.

  A star cruiser on operations was never dull, and there were books to read and reports to write. Conan Lang curbed his impatience and made the best of the situation. The local treatments applied by Andy had been effective enough so that the ship medics were able to regenerate his burned tissue, and it was only a question of time before he would be strong again.

  The star cruiser worked efficiently and effectively in support of Administration units in the Sirius area, sliding through the blackness of space like some leviathan of the deep, and Conan Lang rested and made himself as useful as he could. He often went up into the control room and stood watching the visiplate that looked out upon the great emptiness of space. Somewhere, on a far shore of that mighty sea, was a tiny planet called Earth. There, the air was cool and fresh under the pines, and the beauty of the world, once you got away from it and could see it in perspective, was fantastic. There were Rob and Kit, friendship and tears and laughter.

  There was home.

  While his body healed, Conan Lang lived on the star cruiser. There was plenty of time to think. Even for a race with a life span of almost two hundred years, the days and the weeks and the months can seem interminable. He asked himself all the old questions, examined all the old answers. Here he was, on a star ship light-years from home, his body burned, waiting to go back to Sirius Ten to change the life of a planet. What thin shreds of chance, what strange webs of history, had put him there? When you added up the life of Conan Lang, of all the Conan Langs, what did you get? Where was Earth going, that pebble that hurled its puny challenge at the infinite?

  Sometimes, it was all hard to believe.

  It had all started, he supposed, with cybernetics. Of course, cybernetics itself was but the logical outgrowth of a long cultural and technological trend. For centuries, man’s ally, the machine, had helped him physically in his adjustment to his environment. What more natural than that it should one day help him mentally as well? There was really nothing sinister about thinking machines, except to a certain breed of perpetually gloomy poets who were unable to realize that values were never destroyed but were simply molded into new patterns in the evolution of culture. No, thinking machines were fine and comforting—for a while.

  But with the dawn of space travel, man’s comfortable, complacent progress toward a vague somewhere was suddenly knocked into a cocked hat. Man’s horizons exploded to the rims of the universe with the perfection of the star drive—he was no longer living on a world but in an inhabited universe. His bickerings and absurdities and wars were seen as the petty things they were—and man in a few tremendous years emerged at last from adolescence.

  Science gave to men a life span of nearly two hundred active years and gave him the key to forever. But there was a catch, a fearful catch. Man, who had had all he could do to survive the conflicts of local groups of his own species, was suddenly faced with the staggering prospect of living in an inhabited universe. He had known, of course, about the millions and millions of stars, about the infinity of planets, about the distant galaxies that swam like island universes through the dark seas of space. But he had known about them as figures on a page, as photographs, as dots of unwinking light in a telescope. They had been curiosities, a stimulus to the imagination. Now they were vital parts of his life, factors to be reckoned with in the struggle for existence. In the universe were incredible numbers of integers to be equated in the problem of survival—and the mind of man could not even learn them all, much less form intelligent conclusions about future actions.

  And so, inevitably, man turned again to the machine. But this time there was a difference. The machine was the only instrument capable of handling the data—and man in a million years could not even check its most elementary conclusions. Man fed in the facts, the machine reached the conclusions, and man acted upon them—not through choice, but simply because he had no other guide he could trust.

  Men operated the machines—but the machines operated men.

  The science of cybernetics expanded by leaps and bounds. Men made machines to develop new machines. The great mechanical brains grew so complex that only a few men could even pretend to understand them. Looking at them, it was virtually impossible to believe that they had been born in the minds of men.

  The machines did not interfere in the everyday routine of living—man would never submit to that, and in problems which he could understand he was still the best judge of his own happiness. It was in the larger problems, the problems of man’s destiny in the universe in which he found himself, that the great brains were beyond value. For the machines could integrate trends, patterns, and complexes of the known worlds and go on from there to extrapolate into the unknown. The machines could, in very general terms, predict the outcome of any given set of circumstances. They could, in a very real sense, see into the future. They could see where Earth was headed.

  And Earth was headed for disaster.

  The machines were infallible. They dealt not with short-term probabilities, but with long-range certainties. And they stated flatly that, given the equation of the known universe, Earth would be destroyed in a matter of centuries. There was only one thing to do—man must change the equation.

  It was difficult for man, so recently Earthbound, to really think and act in terms of an inhabited universe. But the machines showed conclusively that in as yet inaccessible galaxies life had evolved that was physically and mentally hostile to that of Earth. A collision of the two life-forms would come about within a thousand years, and a life-and-death struggle was inevitable. The facts were all too plain—Earth would lose and the human race would be exterminated.

  Unless the equation could be changed.

  It was a question of preparing the galaxy for combat. The struggle would be a long one, and factors of reserves, replacements, different cultural approaches to common problems, planets in varying stages of development, would be important. It was like a cosmic chess game, with worlds aligning themselves on a monstrous board. In battles of galactic dimensions, the outcome would be determined by centuries of preparation before contact was even made; it was not a romantic question of heroic spaceships and iron-jawed men of action, but rather one of the cultural, psychological, technological, and individual patterns which each side could bring to bear—patterns which were the outgrowths of millennia of slow evolution and development.

  Earth was ready, or would be by the time contact came. But the rest of the galaxy—or at any rate as much of it as they had managed to explore—was not, and would not be. The human race was found somewhere on most of the star systems within the galaxy, but not one of them was as far advanced as were the men from Earth. That was why Earth had never been contacted from space—indeed, it was the only possible explanation, at least in retrospect. And the other galaxies, with their totally alien and forever non-understandable principles, were not interested in undeveloped cultures.

  The problem thus became one of accelerating the cultural evolution of Earth’s sister planets by means of diffusion, in order to build them up into an effective totality to combat the coming challenge. And it had to be done in such a manner that the natives of the planets were completely unaware that they were not the masters of their own destiny, since such a concept produced cultural stagnation and introduced corrupting elements into the planetary configurations. It had often been argued that Earth herself was in such a position, being controlled by the machines, but such was not the case—their choice had been a rational one, and they could abandon the machines at any time at their own risk.

  Or so, at any rate, argued the thinkers of Earth.

  The long months lengthened into years, and, inactive though he was, Conan Lang spent his time well. It was good to have a chance to relax and think things through; it was good for the soul to stop midway in life and take stock. Almost, it was possible to make sense out of things, and the frantic rush to nowhere lost some of its shrieking senselessness.

  Conan Lang smiled without humor. That was all very well for him, but what about the natives whose lives they were uprooting? Of course, they were human beings, too, and stood to lose as much as anyone in the long run—but they did not understand the problem, could not understand it. The plain truth was that they were being used—used for their own benefit as well as that of others, but used nonetheless.

  It was true that primitive life was no bed of roses—it was not as if, Conan Lang assured himself, the men from Earth were slithering, serpentlike, into an idyllic Garden of Eden. All they were doing was to accelerate the normal rate of change for a given planet. But this caused far-reaching changes in the culture as it existed—it threw some people to the dogs and elevated others to commanding positions. This was perhaps no more than was done by life itself, and possibly with better reason, but you couldn’t tell yourself that when you had to face the eyes of a man who had gone from ruler to slave because of what you had done.

  The real difficulty was that you couldn’t see the threat. It was there all right—a menace beside which all the conflicts of the human race were as nothing. But it had always been difficult for men to work before the last possible moment, to prepare rather than just sit back and hope for the best. That man was working now as he had never worked before, in the face of an unseen threat from out of the stars, even to save his own existence, was a monument to his hard-won maturity. It would have been so easy, so pleasant, just to take it easy and enjoy a safe and comfortable life—and beyond question it would have meant the end of the human race.

  Of one thing, Conan Lang was sure—whenever man stopped trying, stopped working and dreaming and reaching for impossible heights, whenever he settled back in complacency, on that day he shrank to atrophied insignificance.

  Sirius Ten had been a relatively easy project because of the planet-wide nature of its culture. Sirius Ten had only one huge land mass, and one great sea. The natives all shared basically the same life pattern, built around the cultivation of dry ricefruit, and the teams of the Applied Process Corps were faced with only one major problem rather than hundreds of them as was more often the case. It was true that certain peoples who lived on the shores of the sea, together with one island group, had a variant culture based on fishing, but these were insignificant numerically and could for practical purposes be ignored.

  The dry ricefruit was grown by a cutting and burning method, under which a field gave a good yield only once before the land was exhausted and the people had to move on. Under these conditions, individual ownership of land never developed, and there were no inequalities of wealth to speak of. The joint families worked different fields every year, and since there was no market for a surplus there was no effort made to cultivate more land than was really needed.

  The Oripesh natives of Sirius Ten had a well-developed cult of ancestor worship, thinking of their dead as always watching over them and guiding their steps. Since whatever the ancestors did automatically had the sanction of tradition behind it, it was through them that the Corps had decided to work—it being simply a question of palming off Corps agents as ancestors come back from their dwelling place in the mountains to help their people. With careful preparations and experienced men, this had not proved overly difficult—but there were always miscalculations, accidents. Men were not like chemicals, and they did not always react as they were supposed to react. There was always an individual variable to be considered. That was why if a Corps agent lived long enough to retire you knew both that he knew his stuff and that he had had more than his share of plain old-fashioned luck.

  Sirius Ten had to be shifted from Stage Four to Stage Five. This was a staggering change in economics, social structure, and technology—one that had taken men on Earth many centuries to accomplish. The men of the Applied Process Corps had to do it in a matter of a few years. And so they set out, armed with a variety of ricefruit that grew well in marshy land and a sound knowledge of irrigation.

  With such a lever they could move a world.

  It was three years to the day when Conan Lang returned to Sirius Ten. The patrol ship came in on her anti-gravs, and he waited eagerly for the outlift shaft to open. His heart was pounding in his chest and his lips were dry—it was almost like coming home again.

  He swung his newly strong body into the outlift and came out of it in the green field he had planted so long ago. He took a deep breath of the familiar humid air and grinned broadly at the hot, burning sun over his head. It was good to be back-back at a place like so many other places he had known, places that were as close to a home as any he could ever have without Kit. The breeze whispered softly through the green ricefruit, and he waved at Julio, who came running across the field to meet him. These were, he knew, his kind of people—and he had missed Andy all these years.

  “Hey there, Julio!” he laughed, shaking Medina’s hand. “How goes it?”

  “Pretty good, Conan,” Julio said quietly. “Pretty good.”

  “The kid—how’s the kid?”

  “Andy is dead,” said Julio Medina.

  Conan Lang stood stock-still while an iron fist smacked into his stomach with cold, monotonous precision. Andy dead. It could not be, could not be. There had been no word, nothing. He clenched his fists. It couldn’t be true.

  But it was. He knew that with ice-cold certainty.

  “It just happened the other day, Conan,” Julio said. “He was a fine boy.”

  Conan Lang couldn’t speak. The whole planet, his mind tortured him. The whole stinking planet isn’t worth Andy’s life.

  “It was an accident,” Julio said, his voice carefully matter-of-fact. “Warfare has sprung up between the rival villages like we figured. Andy was out after information and he got between them—he was hit by mistake with a spear. He never had a chance, but he managed to walk away and get back here before he died. The Oripesh don’t suspect that he wasn’t a god and could die just like anyone else. He saved the rest of us by coming back here—that’s something.”

  “Yeah,” Conan Lang said bitterly, “that’s something.”

  “I buried him here in the field,” Julio Medina went on. “I thought he’d like that. He…said good-bye to you, Conan.”

  It had been a long time since Conan Lang had had tears in his eyes. He turned without a word and walked away, across the green field and into the hut where he could be alone.

  V.

  From that time on, by unspoken mutual consent, the two men never again mentioned the kid’s name. They gave him the best possible write-up in their reports, and that was all that they could ever do for Andy Irvin.

  “I think we’ve about done it here, Conan,” Julio told him. “I’d like to have you make your own check and see if you come up with the same stuff I did. There’s a lull in the raiding right now—the natives are worried because that spear hit an ancestor by mistake, and they’re pretty well occupied with rituals designed to make us feel better about the whole thing. You shouldn’t have any trouble, and that about ought to wind things up.”

  Conan Lang nodded. “It’ll be good to get home again, eh, Julio?”

  “Yes, you know that—and for you it should be for keeps.”

  Conan Lang raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s no secret that you’re due to be kicked upstairs,” Julio said. “I rather think this is your last field job.”

  “Well, it’s a nice theory anyhow.”

  “You remember all us old men out here in the stars, the slave labor of the Process Corps. Bring us all home, Conan, and we’ll sit around in the shade and drink cold wine and fish and tell Res to each other.”

  “Consider it done,” said Conan Lang. “And I’ll give you all some more medals.”

  “I’ve got medals.”

  “Can’t have too many medals, Julio. They’re good for what ails you.”

  “They’re not good for what ails me” said Julio Medina.

  Conan Lang smiled and fired up his pipe. The kid, his mind whispered. The kid liked that pipe. He thrust the thought from his mind. A man had to take death in his stride out here, he told himself. Even when it was a kid who reminded you of yourself a million years ago—

  A million years ago.

  “I’ll start in tomorrow,” Conan Lang said, puffing on his pipe. “Do you know Ren, Julio?”

  “The chief s son? Yes.”

  “How did he come out?”

  “Not well, Conan. He lost his woman, Loe, to one of the men we made wealthy; he has not been the same since.”

  “We’re great people, Julio.”

  “Yes.”

  Conan Lang was silent then, and the two men stood together in the warm evening air, watching the great double sun float slowly down below the horizon as the long black shadows came marching up from the far edge of the world.