Was this a dream, a nightmare? This heat, this sand, that vague feeling of horror he felt when he looked towards that red thing?
A dream? No, one didn’t go to sleep and dream in the midst of a battle in space.
Death? No, never. If there were immortality, it wouldn’t be a senseless thing like this, a thing of blue heat and blue sand and a red horror.
Then he heard the voice.
Inside his head he heard it, not with his ears. It came from nowhere or everywhere.
“Through spaces and dimensions wandering,” rang the words in his mind, “ and in this space and this time, I find two peoples about to exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never fulfil its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And I say this must not happen. ”
“Who … what are you?” Carson didn’t say it aloud, but the question formed itself in his brain.
“ You would not understand completely. I am— ” There was a pause as though the voice sought—in Carson’s brain—for a word that wasn’t there, a word he didn’t know. “ I am the end of evolution of a race so old the time cannot be expressed in words that have meaning to your mind. A race fused into a single entity, eternal.
“ An entity such as your primitive race might become ” — again the groping for a word—“ time from now. So might the race you call, in your mind, the Outsiders. So I intervene in the battle to come, the battle between fleets so evenly matched that destruction of both races will result. One must survive. One must progress and evolve. ”
“One?” thought Carson. “Mine or—”