“But he left a precious legacy,” Bratcheslavsky said He twisted around on his cushions and picked up a pile of shiny thick white cards, which he held out to Sheklov. Distracted, the younger man took them and turned them over.
They were a set of the pictures from the far-distant reaches of space, which he had so crudely copied for Danty to examine, and which he had so brilliantly and rapidly understood although scores, hundreds of experts had struggled vainly with them for years.
He said, “The ship has gone, hasn’t it?”
“You mean arrived,” Bratcheslavsky said with a sour l~
“Yes . ”
Automatically, Sheklov was shuffling the pictures into the reverse of the standard order, meantime visualising himself, a few minutes from now, consciously imitating what Danty had done with those rough sketches in a roadside restaurant.
Born at the wrong end of time . . .
Oh, what could be wrong with this sick species, mankind, that it had taken Danty with his special, his im. probable talent to see the plain and obvious truth? De. formed by fear and suspicion, everybody’s mind but his had read threats into these pictureat (He re-heard himself asking Tunpin, the morning of his arrival in the States, what might happen if New York were wiped off the map by a total-conversion reactions)
But the sign of the alien ship was reversed. What lay under his hand was the story of the evolution of mannot a threat that he would be driven back to the caves, but a promise that he would travel to the starsl He turned the pictures up one by one, like tarot cards: the caveman with his atone axe; the discovery of fire; that baffling plain disc, which now he realized was symbolic of the invention of the wheel, not the Earth wrapped in smoke and fallout; the release of nuclear power; the rocket, the
first crude spaceship; the view of Earth as the astronauts and cosmonauts saw it when they made their earliest voyages; the far-distant view of the sun from the orbit of Pluto; the contact made with the unthinkable, incredible, inconceivable ship from the far side of the fourdimensional curve of the cosmos. where matter was antimatter and time’s arrow faced the other way . . . and last of all that wonderful sight that some man might one day contemplate: the whole galaxy, turning like a whirlpool of stars.
Might?
Would. That was the most astonishing thing of all. It might, take centuries to work out the philosophical implications of the last conclusion to be drawn from this inverted exponential curve of achievement, but for the time being at least, he, Vassily Sheklov, was content to accept it with the force of a poetic or religious truth.
We’re going to make it.
Because this alien species could not have learned what -as the pictures proved-they knew about mankind from this meeting: the naked form of a primitive man, above all, waving a flint axe. It followed that they, in their past, had already grown familiar with human beings, in what was still the latter’s future. This encounter, the first for man, was for the aliens the last.
No use. It turned his brain topsy-turvy to try to think about it. Leave it to the genius speculators, leave it to the philosophers and cosmogonists and metaphysicians. Right now, the problem was to try to convey some of his sense of certainty to people that Bratcheslavsky had dismissed as “merely efficient.” How wonderful to know that the human race was not after all going to be destroyed because aliens triggered its own horrible armoury of murder-and how terrifying to know that it rested on his shoulders to convince the world . . .
For a brief instant he felt he knew exactly why Danty had chosen to destroy himself. And then there was a knock at the door, and someone was standing there, and the someone was saying, “The First Secretary and the Chinese Ambassador are waiting to receive you, so if you will come with me…”