«I think you are wise,» said Jeserac. Then, for the last time, the echo of an ancient fear rose up to plague him. «But suppose,» he added, «the ship makes contact with something we do not wish to meet…» His voice faded away as he recognized the source of his anxiety and he gave a wry, selfdeprecatory smile that banished the last ghost of the Invaders.

«You forget,» said Alvin, taking him more seriously than he expected, «that we will soon have Vanamonde to help us. We don’t know what powers he possesses, but everyone in Lys seems to think they are potentially unlimited. Isn’t that so, Hilvar?»

Hilvar did not reply at once. It was true that Vanamonde was the other great enigma, the question mark that would always lie across the future of humanity while it remained on Earth. Already, it seemed certain, Vanamonde’s evolution toward self-consciousness had been accelerated by his contact with the philosophers of Lys. They had great hopes of future co-operation with the childlike supermind, believing that they could foreshorten the aeons which his natural development would require.

«I am not sure,» confessed Hilvar. «Somehow, I don’t think that we should expect too much from Vanamonde. We can help him now, but we will be only a brief incident in his total life span. I don’t think that his ultimate destiny has anything to do with ours.»

Alvin looked at him in surprise.

«Why do you feel that?» he asked.

«I can’t explain it,» said Hilvar. «It’s just an intuition.» He could have added more, but he kept his silence. Thesematters were not capable of communication, and though Alvin would not laugh at his dream, he did not care to discuss it even with his friend.

It was more than a dream, he was sure of that, and it would haunt him forever. Somehow it had leaked into his mind, during that indescribable and unsharable contact he had had with Vanamonde. Did Vanamonde himself know what his lonely destiny must be?

One day the energies of the Black Sun would fail and it would release its prisoner. And then, at the end of the Universe, as time itself was faltering to a stop, Vanamonde and the Mad Mind must meet each other among the corpses of the stars.

That conflict might ring down the curtain on Creation itself. Yet it was a conflict that had nothing to do with Man, and whose outcome he would never know…

«Look!» said Alvin suddenly. «This is what I wanted to show you. Do you understand what it means?»

The ship was now above the Pole, and the planet beneath them was a perfect hemisphere. Looking down upon the belt of twilight, Jeserac and Hilvar could see at one instant both sunrise and sunset on opposite sides of the world. The symbolism was so perfect, and so striking, that they were to remember this moment all their lives.

In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening toward an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.