“As we learned the secrets of the universe, we also learned how to project our minds to distant galaxies. We visited your earth when the seas were first cooling. We taught the plantlike creatures of Mars to build their civilisations under water. We helped the creatures of your planet Pluto to escape to a planet of the binary star Sirius when their own world lost its atmosphere. Our greatest achievement was to help in the evacuation of more than a thousand planets in the Crab Nebula before it exploded and turned into a supernova.
“You earth creatures can have no conception of the tremendous dramas of interstellar space. Your scale is too small. But the Nioth-Korghai have watched the births and deaths of galaxies. We have seen island universes created out of nothing. You must understand that these universes are living creatures. They possess their own kind of cosmic life, on a level that cannot be grasped by biological organisms. The religion of the Nioth-Korghai teaches that the universe itself is a gigantic brain, in which the worlds we know are mere individual cells.
“Fifty thousand years ago, your earth was approaching the end of a great Ice Age, and the men who lived on it were little better than apes — you call them Neanderthals. The Nioth-Korghai decided that conditions were propitious for a great experiment — the attempt to produce a more intelligent form of life. This was during the lifetime of Kuben-Droth, one of our greatest biological engineers –”
Fallada interrupted: “I thought you had no science?” The creature fell silent. For more than half a minute, they were afraid it had decided to end its story. Then it began again.
“We had no technology in your earthly sense. We did not need it — the sea supplied all our simple needs. But science springs from the soul and the will. Our problem was to persuade your Stone Age men to develop intelligence. No creature can be made to evolve against its will. We had to implant a will-to-intelligence in these creatures, and this could be done only by inhabiting their brains and making them dream. You cannot imagine the difficulties involved. For these early men could be made to experience intense pleasure, but they forgot about it a few seconds later. It was like trying to teach algebra to monkeys. Kuben-Droth devoted more than half his lifetime to the task, but he died before we finally achieved success. It took seven hundred years to produce a man and woman whose children became the first of the new species of true men. We called them Esdram and Solayeh. They survive in your mythology as Adam and Eve.
“Now for seven hundred years, we had lived in the brains and bodies of human beings. And in some ways this was a dangerous thing to do. Their vital energies sustained us. We enjoyed the intoxication of their sensuality, although at first it disgusted us. Your world was dangerous and violent, but it was also very beautiful.
“Yet we were scientists, and we had enough self-control to know that it was time for us to leave the human race to itself. We left your earth in groups of a hundred, to return to our own star system –”
Fallada said: “Excuse me interrupting you again, but surely Rigel is hundreds of light-years away from earth. How long did this journey take you?”
Again there was a lengthy silence, as if the creature had to prepare its answer. Then it said: “You forget that the energies of the universe exist on many levels. On the physical level, energy cannot attain a speed greater than that of light. On our level, it can move a thousand times that speed. The journey took us less than a year.
“Our group was the last to leave. We deliberately stayed on as long as we could. Then we completed the transformation to the correct level of cosmic energy — you might call it the fifth dimension — and began our journey.
“It was on this return journey that we met with the accident. The chances against it were millions to one; it should have been impossible. When we had covered more than half the distance, we passed within a few hundred miles of a collapsing star — a black hole. These are some of the rarest objects in the universe, and none of us had ever encountered one before. They end by falling out of your universe into a nondimensional hyperspace. We decided to explore — which was a mistake. Some of us were sucked into the whirlpool. Others realised what was happening and warned the rest of us to stay away before they were also sucked in. But it was too late to escape. The force was too powerful. All that we could do was to delay our destruction. We did this by moving into orbit around the black hole. And we continued to circle around, drawn inexorably by its gravity. Some lost strength and hope and allowed themselves to be drawn in. And the rest of us continued to struggle, determined to maintain existence until the last possible moment.
“And then, after more than a thousand years, the black hole disappeared. It fell out of your space, and we were free. Yet we were now so exhausted that we lacked the strength to transform ourselves to the correct level of energy. We were free, but we were stranded in space, four hundred light-years from our own stellar system.
“It was then we began to dream of our happy days on your earth, of the flow of energy from living bodies. We began to travel slowly back towards our own system, searching for other inhabited planets like the earth. There are millions of these in the universe, and if we had been less exhausted, we could have found one without difficulty. As it was, we searched for more than a year before we found one. This was inhabited by a primitive race of animals, not unlike dinosaurs, but far bigger. Their coarse energy disgusted us, but we needed it to live. We absorbed it until we were drunk, killing the creatures by the hundred. After that, we felt less desperate; but the energy transformation was still impossible. Their lower form of energy made it even more difficult. So we moved on, looking for a planet with some higher form of life.
“It is true that we had become destroyers of life. But we had no alternative. We were like soldiers lost in the desert; we had to take whatever we could find. And we found many inhabited planetary systems. In some cases, we found creatures with the kind of life energy we needed, but they always resisted us. We had to take what we wanted by force, destroying those who were too weak to resist. On one planet of the Alnair system, we found bodies resembling those we bad left behind at home, and took them over. We were gradually becoming reconciled to the state of homeless wanderers. And now we had bodies, the longing to return home was beginning to disappear. Besides, we realized that we were apparently immortal. At first, we assumed that this was some strange consequence of our ordeal in the black hole. We decided to try the experiment of living off natural foods, to see what happened. The result was that we aged at the normal rate. So it was now clear that if we wanted to stay alive, we had no choice. We had to continue to drain the vital energies of other creatures. We learned to do this without actually destroying them — in the way that human beings have learned to milk cows. This was not only more humane, but it also prevented us from destroying our own food supply. There were some among us who found even this alternative disgusting, and who preferred to allow themselves to die of old age. But the rest of us became reconciled to our new status — as vampires or mind parasites. After all, this seems to be a law of nature; all living creatures eat other living creatures.
“On a planet of the Alpha Centauri system we began to build a spacecraft. It was vast, because we wanted it to remind us of our home — the great underwater caves of our own world. More than twenty thousand years ago, we revisited your solar system. We were hoping to find beings from our own world — for we knew they intended to return here periodically to observe your progress. We were disappointed, but we stayed here nevertheless. Human beings were still hunters living in caves; we taught them the arts of agriculture, and how to build villages in the middle of lakes. And when there was no more we could do, we returned to the Alpha Centauri system and continued our explorations. . .”
Carlsen stood up quietly and moved to the door. The other two were so absorbed that neither of them noticed as he unlocked it and quietly closed it behind him.