Out of a future too dimly discerned
to be comprehensible one was chosen.
Why—no one knew or could know.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Comet March 41.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Slowly, wearily, the yellow sun went down the sky. From the east thenight came on, as dark and as deep as the night that has no ending.
The last rays of the sun washed down over the planet, over the lowrounded hills and the trees that grew on them, through the shallowvalleys where the grass grew rank and luxurious. The last songs ofthe birds came undisturbed through the dusk. A deer snorted. Fromsomewhere came the bark of another animal, a bark that ended in a howl,long-drawn and mournful.
Dawn world or dusk world?
The night flowed into the valleys, filled them with a mystic darkness.The darkness crept to the tops of the low hills. Slowly it crept arounda huge ball that rested on top of the nearer hill. The ball, perhapsfifty feet in diameter, lifted a foot from the ground. It quivered,lifted two feet, then slowly settled back to earth.
The darkness came in around it, touched it, hid it from sight.
Lee Garth twisted in his chair. Wearily he laid the pencil down.The equations wouldn't work right. They kept trying to run off intoimpossible combinations. There was an erratic but persistent gadfly ofthought buzzing in his mind, a vague shadowy movement in his brain.Like a ghost from shadow-land it twisted through his brain, twistingthrough the dark convolutions where his memory lay testing the opensynapses, seeking a place where a short circuit would result in action.
Fretfully, Lee Garth picked up the pencil. But there was a thinking inhis mind, a formless thinking that was somehow purposeful. He sensedthe import of that purpose. Tiny chills ran over his body, tiny riversof icy cold. His fingers trembled. The pencil moved over the page.Garth was first puzzled, then perturbed, then lost in a vast unease.
Here and there upon this earth are fields where men, looking backward,see how the stream of history shifted.
There is a field in Greece.
Xerxes gave his orders to his captains. He waited while his host wasled forth. Footmen, archers, men with slings. The cavalry would notbe of value, for the barbarians, up there, were in a narrow mountainpass. It did not matter. The light-armed troops were more than capableof dispelling these wild tribesmen. By noon, or the middle of theafternoon, the way would be clear to the peninsula beyond. Thusreasoned Xerxes.
When the night came the barbarians were still holding. Tomorrow, Xerxesthought, his troops would be victorious.
Tomorrow came and fresh troops went forth. And eventually the newscame back to where Xerxes waited that his army had been routed and wasfleeing in disorder.
It was fate, Xerxes perhaps decided. Fate was a chancy thing. No mancould know for certain what the morrow would bring. Tomorrow was a darkreality and the paths to the future were uncertain and tortuous.
But if Xerxes had ravaged the peninsula of Greece in 480 B.C. in allprobability Plato would not have been born in 427, and he would nothave had as his pupil a youth named Aristotle, and the thinking ofthe scientists of twenty-five coming centuries would have lacked theguidance of these two men. Into the dark reality of the future thehuman race would have followed other paths and the man-world of 1940would not have come into being.
There is a pass in Greece called Thermopylae.
Lee G