
only in mathematics. Earth and Earth's colonies were divided each against all by suspicion, and in mutual
fear were rapidly training and arming for war.
And at this point the very readiness for violence that had sometimes so nearly destroyed you, proved to
be the means of life's survival. To us, the Carmpan watchers, the withdrawn seers and touchers of minds,
it appeared that you had carried the crushing weight of war through all your history knowing that it would
at last be needed, that this hour would strike when nothing less awful would serve.
When the hour struck and our enemy came without warning, you were ready with swarming
battle-fleets. You were dispersed and dug in on scores of planets, and heavily armed. Because you were,
some of you and some of us are now alive.
Not all our Carmpan psychology, our logic and vision and subtlety, would have availed us anything. The
skills of peace and tolerance were useless, for our enemy was not alive.
What is thought, that mechanism seems to bring it forth?
MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT
FINDING HIMSELF ALONE AND UNOCCUPIED, FELIPE NOGARA chose to spend a free
moment in looking at the thing that had brought him out here beyond the last fringe of the galaxy. From
the luxury of his quarters he stepped up into his private observation bubble. There, in a raised dome of
invisible glass, he seemed to be standing outside the hull of his flagship Nirvana.
Under that hull, "below" the Nirvana's artificial gravity, there slanted the bright disk of the galaxy,
including in one of its arms all the star systems the Earth-descended man had yet explored. But in
whatever direction Nogara looked, bright spots and points of light were plentiful. They were other
galaxies, marching away at their recessional velocities of tens of thousands of miles per second, marching
on out to the optical horizon of the universe.
Nogara had not come here to look at galaxies, however; he had come to look at something new, at a
phenomenon never before seen by men at such close range.
It was made visible to him by the apparent pinching-together of the galaxies beyond it, and by the clouds
and streamers of dust cascading into it. The star that formed the center of the phenomenon was itself held
beyond human sight by the strength of its own gravity. Its mass, perhaps a billion times that of Sol, so
bent spacetime around itself that not a photon of light could escape it with a visible wavelength.
The dusty debris of deep space tumbled and churned, falling into the grip of the hypermass. The falling
dust built up static charges until lightning turned it into luminescent thunderclouds, and the flicker of the
vast lightning shifted into the red before it vanished, near the bottom of the gravitational hill. Probably not
even a neutrino could escape this sun. And no ship would dare approach much closer than Nirvana now
rode.
Nogara had come out here to judge for himself if the recently discovered phenomenon might soon
present any danger to inhabited planets; ordinary suns would go down like chips of wood into a
whirlpool if the hypermass found them in its path. But it seemed that another thousand years would pass
before any planets had to be evacuated; and before then the hypermass might have gorged itself on dust
until its core imploded, whereupon most of its substance could be expected to re-enter the universe in a
most spectacular but less dangerous form.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html