Chapter XVIII: The Great Riddle

The homecoming! The return of our war-racked forces to the city, with half its suburbs burned, and a thousand of its people killed by Talon’s bombardment! I shall not describe the cheers, the laughter, the sobbing. Victory in war can seem to be so little better than defeat! All the paeans of triumph cannot heal the maimed, or bring back the dead.

I was king no longer, for our prince now was ruler, with Sonya for his queen. I was glad to be released. There is a very false, a pseudo-glory, in ruling a nation.

But Altho would not have me wholly resign. My promised reforms, my earthly ideas of government, were needed here. And so they called me premier, and thrived upon a crude but humane version of what we on earth would call a civilized government: a veneration of the aged, a new idea of infant welfare, a monogamy of marriage with the surplus women doing their rational work in art and industry.

Of Talon’s thousands, fully half of them escaped back into the mountains. They are there now. They will always be a menace. But there is not a race of humans in all the universe unmenaced by something. The very essence of human existence is struggle. We do not think of Talon’s brutes now as the Nameless Horror, and we are always prepared.

It was shortly after my marriage to Alice, that one evening I came upon Jim and Dolores in each other’s arms.

“Well!” I said. “What’s this?”

He kissed her again. “I loved her right from the beginning,” he declared.

Which was not exactly true, but I knew he thought so.

I had never seen little Dolores so radiant. “And I always loved him, Len. You know that.”

I did indeed. And she had never wavered in that love, from the days when he had seized the little blind child and whirled her in the air.

Our return to earth? We never made it. With Dr. Weatherby’s death, the grave held the vital knowledge we needed for such a journey. Nor did we desire it. Our lives were cast here.

Often now, from earth, thought-waves reach me, tiny earth, rolling on with a speeding time so much faster than ours of this outer realm! Centuries have passed on earth. Of what use for me to return—a primitive, savage being of their past ages?

Civilizations have risen, held their peak, and declined. Great cities have come and gone. Ice has been again where once I saw the jungles of the tropics. And the ice has melted again through countless ages.

The new humans of earth often communicate with me. Their thoughts are amazed at what I have to tell them. It is all amazing to me, the great riddle of the universe. And I think sometimes of that ancient earth-astronomer, groping with the riddle, writing in his ancient book:

Man, the little god of this earth, tied down to the small star
which infinite Nature gave him for an abode, storms forth into
immeasurable stellar space with his thoughts.

From that little earth I stormed forth in body, beyond the stars!

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Numerous mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed, only these were perhaps not completely obvious:

pg 21: illuminued -> illumined
pg 44: rehemence -> vehemence
pg 94: enscrouded -> enshrouded
pg 38: incrusted -> encrusted

pg 152: _The rafts were heading slowly for the north tip of the in the other channel._ An unknown word has clearly been omitted by the printer.

Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.