To venture into that terrible alien emptiness themselves was unthinkable. But the urge to explore it by other means grew strong. The means they presently selected was a lowly form of energy life, at home both in the space and on the planets of the Pit. The ingenuity of the Builders produced in it the impulse to combine with its kind into increasingly large, more coherent and more purposeful groups; and the final result of their manipulations was the goyal, a superbeing which thought and acted as an individual, while its essential structure was still that of a gigantic swarm of the minor uncomplicated prototypes of energy life with which the Builders had begun. The goyal was intended to be their galactic explorer, an intelligent, superbly adaptable servant, capable of existing and sustaining itself as readily in space as on the worlds it encountered.
In its way, the goyal was an ultimate achievement of the Builders’ skills. But it was to become also the monument to an irredeemable act of stupidity. They had endowed it with great and varied powers and with keen, specialized intelligence, but not with gratitude. When it discovered it was stronger than its creators and swifter than their ships, it turned on the Builders and made war on them, exterminating them on planet after planet until, within not much more than a century, it became sole master of the Pit.
For a long time, it remained unchallenged there. It shifted about the great dust cloud at will, guided by the Builders’ locator system, feeding on the life of the dim worlds. During that period, it had no concept of intelligence other than its own and that of the Builders. Then a signal which had not come into use since the last of the Builders vanished alerted the locator system. A ship again had appeared within its range.
The goyal flashed through the cloud on the locator impulses like a great spider darting along the strands of its web. At the point of disturbance, it found an alien ship groping slowly and blindly through the gloom. Without hesitation, it flowed aboard and swept through the ship, destroying all life inside.
It had been given an understanding of instruments, and it studied the ship in detail, then studied the dead beings. They were not Builders though they showed some resemblance to them. Their ship was not designed to respond to the locator system; it had come probing into the Pit from the surrounding void.
Other ships presently followed it, singly and in groups. They came cautiously, scanning the smothering haze for peril, minds and instruments alert behind a variety of protective devices which seemed adequate until the moment the goyal struck. The enveloping protective screens simply were too light to hamper it seriously; and once it was through the screens, the alien crew was at its mercy. But the persistence these beings showed in intruding on its domain was disturbing to it. It let some of them live for a time on the ships it captured while it watched and studied them, manipulated them, experimented with them. Gradually, it formed a picture of an enemy race in the void which must be destroyed as it had destroyed the Builders if its supremacy was to be maintained.
It did not intend to venture into the void alone. It had planted sections of its body on a number of the worlds of the Pit. The sections were as yet immature. They could not move about in space as the parent body did, possessed barely enough communal mind to know how to nourish themselves from the planetary life about them. But they were growing and developing. In time the goyal would have others of its kind to support it. Until then, it planned to hold the Pit against the blind intruders from the void without letting the enemy race become aware of its existence.
Then the unforeseeable happened. An entire section of the locator system suddenly went dead, leaving the remainder functioning erratically. For the first time in its long existence, the goyal was made aware of the extent of its dependence on the work of the Builders. After a long difficult search, it discovered the source of the trouble. A key locator near the edge of the dust cloud had disappeared. Its loss threatened to make the entire system unusable.
There was no way of replacing it. The goyal’s mind was not that of a Builder. It had learned readily to use instruments, but it could not construct them. Now it realized its mistake in exterminating the only civilized race in the Pit. It should have kept the Builders in subservience to itself so that their skills would always be at its disposal. It could no longer be certain even of detecting the intruding aliens when they came again and preventing them from discovering the secrets of the cloud. Suddenly, the end of its reign seemed near.
Unable to develop a solution to the problem, the goyal settled into a kind of apathy, drifted with dimming energies aimlessly about the Pit . . . until, unmistakably, the lost locator called it! Alert at once, the goyal sped to other units of the system, found they had recorded and pinpointed the distant blast. It had come from beyond the cloud, out of the void! Raging, the goyal set off in the indicated direction. It had no doubt of what had happened—one of the alien ships had discovered the locator and carried it away. But now it could be and would be recovered.
Extended into a needle of attenuated energy over a million miles in length, the goyal flashed out into the starlit void, its sensor units straining. There was a sun dead ahead; the stolen instrument must be within that system. The goyal discovered a spaceship of the aliens moving in the same direction, closed with it and drew itself on board. For a time, its presence unsuspected, it remained there, forming its plans. It could use the ship’s energies to build up its reserves, but while the ship continued toward Mezmiali, it made no move.
Presently it noted a course shift which would take the ship past the Mezmiali system but close enough to it to make the transfer to any of the sun’s four planets an almost effortless step. The goyal remained quiet. Not long afterwards, its sensors recorded a second blast from the lost locator. Now it knew not only to which planet it should go but, within a few hundred miles, at what point of that planet the instrument was to be found.
Purple fire lashed out from the ship’s bulkheads to engulf every human being on board simultaneously. Within moments, the crew was absorbed. The goyal drank energy from the drive generators to the point of surfeit, left the ship and vanished in the direction of Mezmiali. Within the system, it again closed in on a ship and rode down with it to the planet.
It had reached its destination undetected and at the peak of power, its reserves intact. But this was unknown enemy territory, and it remained cautious. For hours, its sensors had known precisely where the locator was to be found. The goyal waited until the humans had disembarked from the ship, until the engines were quiet and it could detect no significant activity in the area immediately about it. Then it flowed out of the ship and into the ground. The two humans who saw it emerge were absorbed before they could make a report.
There was no reason to hesitate longer. Moving through the dense solid matter of the planet was a tedious process by the goyal’s standards; but, in fact, only a short time passed before it reached the University League’s isolated Depot.
There it was brought to a very abrupt stop.
It had flowed up to the energy barrier surrounding the old fortress site and partly into it. Hostile forces crashed through it instantly with hideous, destructive power. A quarter of its units died in that moment. The remaining units whipped back out of the boiling fury of the field, reassembled painfully underground near the Depot. The body was reduced and its energy depleted, but it had suffered no lasting damage.
The communal mind remained badly shocked for minutes; then it, too, began to function again. There was not the slightest possibility of breaking through that terrible barrier! In all its experience, the goyal had never encountered anything similar to it. The defensive ship screens it had driven through in its secretive murders in the Pit had been fragile webs by comparison, and the Builders’ stoutest planetary energy shields had been hardly more effective. It began searching cautiously along the perimeter of the barrier. Presently it discovered the entrance lock.
It was closed, but the goyal knew about locks and their uses. The missing locator was so close that the sensors’ reports on it were blurred, but it was somewhere within this monstrously guarded structure. The goyal decided it needed only to wait. In time, the lock would open and it would enter. It would destroy the humans inside, and be back on its way to the Pit with the locator before the alien world realized that anything was amiss. . . .