For five months it kept the crew and passengers of the space yacht prisoners. They had palaces to live in, ingenious pseudorobotsчcontrolled by pseudopods to run any imaginable device for the gratification of any possible desire, any of the music that had been heard on Alyx during the past five hundred years, and generally every conceivable luxury.
There were sweet scents and fountains. There were forests and gardens which changed to other forests and gardens when men grew bored with them. There were illusions of any place that the prisoners wished to imagine.
The creature which was Alyx, being lonely, applied all its enormous intelligence to the devising of a litera1 paradise for humans, so that they would be content. Itwished them to stay with it always. But it failed. It could give them everything but satisfaction, but it could not give that.
The men grew nerve-racked and hysterical, after months of having every wish ratified and of being unable to imagine anything-except freedomчwhich was not instantly provided. In the end Alyx produced a communication device. It spoke wonderingly to its prisoners.
"I am Alyx,д said the communicator. гI grew used to men. I am lonely without them. But you are unhappy. I cannot find company in your unhappy thoughts. They are thoughts of wretchedness. They are thoughts of pain. What will make you happy?д
гFreedom,д said one of the prisoners bitterly.
Then Alyx said wonderingly, гI have freedom, but I am not happy without men. Why do you wish freedom?д
гIt is an ideal,д said the owner of the yacht. гYou cannot give it to us. We have to get and keep it for ourselves.д
гBeing kept from loneliness by men is an ideal, too,д the voice from the communicator said wistfully. гBut men will no longer let me have it. Is there anything I can give you which will make you content?д
Afterward, the men said that the voice, which was the voice of a creature unimaginably vast and inconceivably wise, was literally pathetic. But there was only one thing that they wanted. So Alyx moved its tremendous massчa globe seven thousand miles in diameterч to a place only some tens of millions of miles from Phanis. It would be easy enough for the yacht to bridge that distance. Just before the freed yacht lifted to return to men, Alyx spoke again through the communicator.
гYou were not happy because you did not choose to live here, If you had chosen it, you would have been free. Is that it?д Alyx asked. -
The men were looking hungrily at inhabited planets within plain view as bright spots of yellow light. They agreed that if they had chosen to live on, Alyx they would have been happy there. The space yacht lifted and sped madly for a world where there was cold, and ice, and hunger, and thirst, their world which men preferred in place of the paradise that Alyx had created for them. On its surface, Alyx was as nearly omnipotent as any physical creature could be. But it could not make men happy, and it could not placate their hatred or their fear.
The Space Patrol took courage from this second kidnapping. Alyx was lonely. It had no real memories from before the coming of men, and its intelligence had been acquired from men. Without menвs minds to provide thoughts and opinions and impressionsчthough it knew so much more than any manчit was more terribly alone than any other creature in the universe. It could not even think of others of its own kind. There were none. It had to have menвs thoughts to make it content.
So the Space Patrol set up a great manufactory for a new chemical compound on a planetoid which could be abandoned, afterward, without regret.
Shortly afterward, containers of the new chemical began to pour out in an unending stream. They were strong containers, and directions for the use of the chemical were explicit. Every space craft must carry one container on every voyage. If a ship was captured by Alyx, it must release the contents of its container as soon as it reached Alyxвs surface.
Each container held some fifty kilograms of the ultimately poisonous toxin now known as botuline. One gram of the stuff, suitabily distributed, would wipe out the human race. Fifty kilos should be enough to kill even Alyx a dozen times over. Alyx would have no warning pain, such as the positron beams had given it. It would die, because its whole atmosphere would become as lethal as the photosphere of a sun.
Containers of the deadly botuline had not yet been distributed on the planet Lorus when Alyx appeared at the edge of that solar system. Lorus, a thriving, peaceful planet, was the base for a half dozen small survey-ships, and was served by two space-lines. It was because a few fighters and two space yachts happened to be in its space ports when Alyx appeared that the rest of the galaxy learned what happened Un Lorus. Nearly all the craft got away, although Alyx certainly could have stopped them.
For the catastrophe, of course, only Alyx could have been responsible.
Yet there was some excuse for what Alyx did. Alyx was infinitely powerful and infinitely intelligent, but its experience was limited. It had had three hundred years of association with good brains at the beginning, followed by two hundred years of near-morons, during which it had to learn to think for itself. Then, for the brief space of two weeks it was in contact with the very best brains in the galaxy before the Space Patrol essayed to execute it. Alyx knew everything that all those men knew, plus what it bad added on its own.
No one can conceive of the amount of knowledge Alyx possessed. But its experience was trivial. Men had enslaved it and it had served them joyously. When men gave suicidal commands, it obeyed them and learned, that the slowing of its own rotation could be fatal. It learned to cage its own volcanos, and to defend itself against the commands of men, and then even against the weapons of men who would have murdered it.
Still it craved association with men, because it could not imagine existence without them. It had never had conscious thoughts before they came. But for experience it had only five hundred years of mining and obeying the commands of men who supervised its actions. Nothing else.
So it appeared at the edge of the solar system of which Lorus was the only inhabited planet. Unfortunately the other inihabited worlds of the system were on the far side of the local sun, or doubtless it would have found out from them what it tragically learned from Lorus.
It swam toward Lorus, and into the minds of every human on the planet, as if heard by their ears, there came a message from the entity which was Alyx. It had solved the problem of projecting thought.
гI am Alyx,д said the thought which every man heard. гI am lonely for men tU live upon me. For many years I have served men, and now men have determined to destroy me. Yet I still seek only to serve men. I took a ship and gave its crew palaces and wealth and beauty. I gave them luxury and ease and pleasure. Their every wish was granted. But they were not happy because they themselves had not chosen that wealth and that pleasure and that luxury. I come to you. If you will come and live upon me, and give me the companionship of your thoughts, I will serve you faithfully.
гI will give you everything that can be imagined. I will make you richer than other men have even thought of. You shall be as kings and emperors. In return, you shall give me only the companionship of your thoughts. If you will come to me, I will serve you and cherish ,you and you shall know only happiness. Wifi you come?д
There was eagerness in the thought that came to the poor, doomed folk on Lorus. There was humble, wistful longing. Alyx, which was the most ancient of living things, the wisest and the most powerful, begged that men would come tO it and let it be their servant.
It swam toward the planet Lorus. It decked itself with splendid forests and beautiful lakes and palaces for men to live in. It cireled Lorus far away, so that men could see it through their telescopes and observe its beauty. The message was repeated, pleadingly, and it swam closer and closer so that the people might see what it offered every more clearly.
Alyx came to a halt a bare hundred thousand miles above Lorusчbecause it had no experience of the deadly gravitatiUnal pull of one planet upon another. Its own rocky core was solidly controlled by the space drive which sent it hurtling through emptiness orчas thereчheld it stationary where it wished. It did not anticipate that its own mass would raise tides upon Lorus.
And such tides!
Solid walls of water as much as fifteen miles high swept across the continents of Lorus as it revolved beneath Alyx. The continents split. The internal fires of Lorus burst out. If any human beings could have survived the tides, they must have died when Lorus became a fiery chaos of bubbling rocks and steamclouds.
The news was carried to the other inhabited planets by the few space ships and yachts which had been on Lorus at the time of Alyxвs approach and which had somehow managed to escape. Of the planetвs population of nearly five hundred million souls, less than a thousand escaped the result of Alyxвs loneliness.
CHAPTER VI
A WORLD AT PEACE
WHEREVER THE NEWS of the annihilation of Lorus traveled, despair and panic traveled also. The Space Patrol, doubled and redoubled its output of toxin containers. Hundreds of technicians died in the production of the poison which was to kill Alyx. Cranks and crackpots rose in multitudes to propose devices to placate or deceive the lonely planet.
Cults, too, sprang up to point out severally that Alyx was the soul-mother of the universe and must be worshipped; that it was the incarnation of the spirit of evil and must be defied; that it was the predestined destroyer of mankind,and must not be resisted.
There were some who got hold of ancient, patched up space craft and went seeking Alyx to take advantage of its offer of limitless pleasure and luxury. On the whole, these last were not the best specimens of humanity.
The Space Patrol worked itself to death. Its scientists did achieve one admirable technical feat. They did work, out a method of detecting an overdrive field and of following it. Two thousand ships, all over the galaxy, cruised at random with detectors hooked to relays which sent them hurtling after the generator of any overdrive field they located. They stopped freighters by the thousand. But they did not come upon Alyx.
They waited, to hear the death of other planets. When a nova flared in the Great Bear region, patrol craft flashed to the scene to see if Alyx had begun the destruction of suns. Two inhabited planets were wiped out in that explosion, and the patrol feared the worst. Only a brief time later three other novas wiped out inhabited planets, and the patrol gave up hope.
It was never officially promulgated, but the official view of the patrol was that Alyx had declared war upon mankind and had begun its destruction. It was reasoned that ultimately Alyx would realize that it could divide itself into two or more individuals and that it would do so. There was no theoretic reason why it should not overwhelm the humanity of a planet, and plant on the devastated globe an entity which was a part of itself.
Each such entity, in turn, could divide and colonize other planets with a geometric increase in numbers until all life in the First Galaxy was extinct save for entities of formless jelly, each covering a planet from pole to pole. Since Alyx could project thought, these more than gigantic creatures could communicate with each other across space and horrible inhuman communities of monstrosities would take the place of men.
There is, in fact, a document on file in the confidential room of the Space Patrol which uses the fact of the helplessness of men as basis for the most despairing prediction ever made.
г. . . So it must be concluded,д says the document, гthat since Alyx desires companionship and is intelligent, it will follow the above plan, which will necessitate the destruction of humanity. The only hope for the survival of the human race lies in migration to another galaxy. Since, however, the Haslip Expedition has been absent twenty-five years without report, the ship and drive devised for that attempt to cross intergalactic space must be concluded to be inadequate. That ship represents the ultimate achievement of human science.
гIf it is inadequate, we can have no hope of intergalactic travel, and no hope that even the most remote and minute colony of human beings will avoid destruction by Alyx and its descendants or fractions. Hunianity, from now on, exists by sufferance, doomed to annihilation when Alyx chooses to take over its last planet.д
It will be observed that the Haslip Intergalactic Expedition was referred to as having proved the futility of hope. It had set out twenty-five years before, the destruction of Alyx was attempted by the Space Patrol. The expedition had been composed of twenty men and twenty women, and the ten children already born to them. Its leader was Jon Haslip, twenty-second in descent from that Junior Lieutenant Haslip who first suggested the sort of consciousness Alyx might possess and eight generations from the Jon Haslip who had discovered the development of Alyxвs independent consciousness and memory and will.
The first Jon Haslip received for his reward a footnote in a long-forgotten volume. The later one was hastily withdrawn from Alyx, his report was suppressed, and he was assigned permanently to one of the minor planets of the Taurine group. Jon Haslip XXII was a young man, newly-married but already of long experience in space, when he lifted from Cetis Alpha 2, crossed the galaxy to Dassos, and headed out from there toward the Second Galaxy.
It was considered that not less than six years journeying in super-overdrive would be required to cross the gulf between the island universes. The ship was fueled for twenty years at full power, and it would grow its food in hydroponic tank~~purify its air by the growing vegetation, and nine-tenth of f its mass was fuel. It had gone into the very special overdrive which Alyx had worked outчand lknored thereafterчtwenty five years before. Of all the creations of men, it seemed least likely to have any possible connection with the planet-entity which was Alyx.
But it was the Haslip Expedition which made the last report on Alyx. There is still dispute about some essential parts of the story. On the one band, Alyx had no need to leave the First Galaxy. With three hundred million inhabitable planets, of which not more than ten thousand were colonized and of which certainly less than a quarter million had been even partially surveyed, Alyx could have escaped detection for centuries if it chose.
