“We explored a number of them,” Ken Star said.
“We found records on Lodestone—narratives written by desperate men who had explored others. Some of them are visibly artifacts.
A few still have the shape of ships—queer, enormous ships—even after tune we can’t calculate.”
“But—ships?” A stubborn unbelief shook my voice.
“They’re miles long!”
His gaunt head nodded at the blank screen.
“So is that thing.”
“What—” I had to get my breath. “What happened to them?”
“Tune.”
In the vibrant silence of the drum, his precise old voice echoed like a gong of doom.
“Time and catastrophe.
I think their last voyage was begun before our own space and time were born.”
“You know where they came from?”
About to speak, he stopped to watch that blank screen again.
Old Habibula dropped an empty caviar can, which made a shocking clatter.
Glancing at Lilith, I found her staring into the mocking ruby eyes of that small skull.
Her face was bloodless and desperate. I caught her hand, covering the poison ring.
She turned slowly to watch Ken Star, her cold hand limp in mine.
“I think we know,” he said at last.
“I believe I told you long ago about my theory that our own space-time universe has grown from the space and mass ejected from an exploding galaxy in that mother universe?
Well, I think the fleet carried refugees from that galaxy.
“A tremendous, tragic saga!
Its heroes, I imagine, were creatures a little like ourselves.
We found doorways, anyhow, not much too large for men, and dust of phosphorous and calcium where one of them must have died.
Their biochemistry is lost beyond reconstruction, but those ships prove a high technology.
“Only old galaxies explode.
Their race must have been ancient and powerful.
They have left the traces of an awesome struggle to survive.
They must have fled first to the fringes of their galaxy, ahead of the explosion.
“There, with the whole galaxy behind them exploding like a hundred million supernovas, they built their fleet.
Apparently the expansion of their old universe had left their galaxy isolated, with no other near enough to reach. Anyhow, they took the dangerous path that the galactic explosion had revealed. They attempted interspatial flight.”
He paused again to watch that black circle of greenish darkness, with its dim fringe of shifted stars.
“That one surviving ship is manned with robots,” he said.
“Its survival is ironic, because it was built to take the greatest danger. The refugees built it to open a way from space to space, for their escape.
When the way was open, it was to come through first, to survey the new space and secure a bridgehead for their invasion.”
Lilith’s cold hand clenched hard on mine.
“I’m not sure what all went wrong,” Ken Star said.
“We found no records we could read—none except those old machines.
But I believe part of the fleet was trapped in that galactic explosion.
Nothing less could have fused and battered those magnificent ships into the things we took for natural asteroids.
“I think more of them were mauled when they came into the new universe too soon—while its expanding mass was still as deadly as the exploding galaxy.
Perhaps there were other fatal excursions—we can only speculate.
But the deadliest surprise of all must have been the anomaly of time.”
“And that’s a fearful thing!” gasped old Habibula.
“But for Lil’s precious serum I’d be frozen and dead a thousand years ago in that foreign universe!”
Shivering, he drained his wine.
“The crippled fleet must have been left to wait while the robots came through to prepare for their invasion,” Ken Star said.
“At the different rates of time, a million years—or a hundred million—may have passed for the fleet before the robots could send the signal for it to follow.
“By that time, the invading race was dead—”
“So we’ve just machines to fight?” I whispered.