"You understand?" he asked the Engineer.

"I understand," the Engineer replied. "It means that we must wait for the masters that we worked for… that it will be long before they come to us."

"You waited three billion years," Gary reminded him. "Wait a few million more for us. It won't take us long. There's a lot of good in the human race, but we aren't ready yet."

"I think you're crazy," said Kingsley, bitterly.

"Can't you see," asked Caroline, "what the human race right now would do to this city?"

"But magnetic power," wailed Kingsley, "and all those other things. Think of how they would help us. We need power and tools and all the knowledge we can get."

"You may take certain information with you," said the Engineer. "Whatever you think is wise. We will watch you and talk with you throughout the years, and it may be there will be times that you will wish our help."

Gary rose from the table. His hand fell on the Engineer's broad metal shoulder.

"And in the meantime there is work for you," he said. "A city to rebuild. The development of power stations to use the fifth-dimensional energy. Learning how to control and use that energy. Using it to control the universe. The day will come, unless we do something about it, that our universe will run down, will die the heat death. But with the eternal power of the inter-space, we can shape and control the universe, mold it to our needs."

It seemed that the metal man drew himself even more erect.

"It will be done," he said.

"We must work, not for Man alone, but for the entire universe," said Gary.

"That is right," said the Engineer.

Kingsley heaved himself to his feet.

"We should be leaving for Pluto," he said. "Our work here is done."

He stepped up to the Engineer. "Before we go," he said, "I would like to shake your hand."

"I do not understand," said the Engineer.

"It is a mark of respect," Caroline explained. "Assurance that we are friends. A sort of way to seal a pact."

"That is fine," said the Engineer. He thrust out his hand. And then his thoughts broke. For the first time since they had met him, in this same room, there was emotion in his voice.

"We are so glad," he said. "We can talk to you and not feel so alone. Perhaps some day I can come and visit you."

"Be sure to do that," bellowed Herb. "I'll show you all the sights."

"Are you coming, Gary?" asked Caroline, but Gary didn't answer.

Some day Man would come home… home to this wondrous city of white stone, to marvel at its breathtaking height, at its vastness of design, at its far-flung symbol of achievement reared against an alien sky. Home to a planet where every power and every luxury and every achievement would be his. Home to a place that had grown out of a dream… the great dream of a greater people who had died, but in dying had passed along the heritage of their life to a new-spawned solar system. And more than that, had left another heritage in the hands and brains of good stewards who, in time, would give it up, in fulfillment of their charge.

But this city and this proud achievement were not for him, nor for Caroline, nor Kingsley, nor Herb, nor Tommy. Nor for the many generations that would come after them. Not so long as Man carried the old dead weight of primal savagery and hate, not so long as he was mean and vicious and petty, could he set foot here.

Before he reached this city, Man would travel long trails of bitter dust, would know the sheer triumphs of the star-flung road. Galaxies would write new alphabets across the sky, and the print of many happenings would be etched upon the tape of time. New things would come and hold their sway and die, Great leaders would stand up and have their day and shuffle off into oblivion and silence. Creeds would rise and flourish and be sifting dust between the worlds. The night watch of stars would see great deeds, applaud great happenings, witness great defeat, weep over bitter sorrows.

"Just think," said Caroline. "We are going home."

"Yes," said Gary. "At last, we're going home."

Drop dead

Original copyright year: unknown, re-published 1962

THE CRITTERS were unbelievable. They looked like something from the maudlin pen of a well-alcoholed cartoonist.

One herd of them clustered in a semicircle in front of the ship, not jittery or belligerent — just looking at us. And that was strange. Ordinarily, when a spaceship sets down on a virgin planet, it takes a week at least for any life that might have seen or heard it to creep out of hiding and sneak a look around.

The critters were almost cow-size, but nohow as graceful as a cow. Their bodies were pushed together as if every blessed one of them had run full-tilt into a wall. And they were just as lumpy as you'd expect from a collision like that. Their hides were splashed with large squares of pastel color — the kind of color one never finds on any self-respecting animal: violet, pink, orange, chartreuse, to name only a few. The overall effect was of a checkerboard done by an old lady who made crazy quilts.

And that, by far, was not the worst of it.

From their heads and other parts of their anatomy sprouted a weird sort of vegetation, so that it appeared each animal was hiding, somewhat ineffectively, behind a skimpy thicket. To compound the situation and make it completely insane, fruits and vegetables — or what appeared to be fruits and vegetables — grew from the vegetation.

So we stood there, the critters looking at us and us looking back at them, and finally one of them walked forward until it was no more than six feet from us. It stood there for a moment, gazing at us soulfully, then dropped dead at our feet.

The rest of the herd turned around and trotted awkwardly away, for all the world as if they had done what they had come to do and now could go about their business.

Julian Oliver, our botanist, put up a hand and rubbed his balding head with an absentminded motion.

"Another what is it coming up!" he moaned. "Why couldn't it, for once, be something plain and simple?"

"It never is," I told him. "Remember that bush out on Hamal V that spent half its life as a kind of glorified tomato and the other half as grade A poison ivy?"

"I remember it," Oliver said sadly.

Max Weber, our biologist, walked over to the critter, reached out a cautious foot and prodded it.

"Trouble is," he said, "that Hamal tomato was Julian's baby and this one here is mine."

"I wouldn't say entirely yours," Oliver retorted. "What do you call that underbrush growing out of it?"

I came in fast to head off an argument. I had listened to those two quarreling for the past twelve years, across several hundred light-years and on a couple dozen planets. I couldn't stop it here, I knew, but at least I could postpone it until they had something vital to quarrel about.

"Cut it out," I said. "It's only a couple of hours till nightfall and we have to get the camp set up."

"But this critter," Weber said. "We can't just leave it here."

"Why not? There are millions more of them. This one will stay right here and even if it doesn't —»

"But it dropped dead!"

"So it was old and feeble."

"It wasn't. It was right in the prime of life."

"We can talk about it later," said Alfred Kemper, our bacteriologist. "I'm as interested as you two, but what Bob says is right. We have to get the camp set up."

"Another thing," I added, looking hard at all of them. "No matter how innocent this place may look, we observe planet rules. No eating anything. No drinking any water. No wandering off alone. No carelessness of any kind."

"There's nothing here," said Weber. "Just the herds of critters. Just the endless plains. No trees, no hills, no nothing."