Childhood’s End

by Clarke Arthur

For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.

At the end of one path were the Overlords. They had preserved their individually, their independent egos; they possessed self-awareness and the pronoun “I” had a meaning in their language. They had emotions, some at least of which were shared by humanity. But they were trapped, Jan realized now, in a cul-de-sac from which they could never escape. Their minds were ten — perhaps a hundred — times as powerful as men’s. It made no difference in the final reckoning. They were equally helpless, equally overwhelmed by the unimaginable complexity of a galaxy of a hundred thousand million suns, and a cosmos of a hundred thousand million galaxies.

And at the end of the other path? There lay the Overmind, whatever it might be, bearing the same relation to man as man bore to amoeba. Potentially infinite, beyond mortality, how long had it been absorbing race after race as it spread across the stars? Did it too have desires, did it have goals it sensed dimly yet might never attain? Now it had drawn into its being all that the human race had ever achieved. This was not tragedy, but fulfillment. The billions of transient sparks of consciousness that had made up humanity would flicker no more like fireflies against the night. But they had not lived utterly in vain.

The last act, Jan knew, had still to come. It might occur tomorrow, or it might be centuries hence. Even the Overlords could not be certain.

He understood their purpose now, what they had done with Man and why they still lingered upon Earth. Towards them he felt a great humility, as well as admiration for the inflexible patience that had kept them waiting here so long. He never learned the full story of the strange symbiosis between the Overmind and its servants. According to Rasha- verak, there had never been a time in his races history when the Overmind was not there, though it had made no use of them until they had achieved a scientific civilization and could range through space to do its bidding.

“But why does it need you?” queried Jan. “With all its tremendous powers, surely it could do anything it pleased.”

“No,” said Rashaverak, “it has limits. In the past, we know, it has attempted to act directly upon the minds of other races, and to influence their cultural development. It’s always failed, perhaps because the gulf is too great. We are the interpreters — the guardians. Or, to use one of your own metaphors, we till the field until the crop is ripe. The Overmind collects the harvest — and we move on to another task. This is the fifth race whose apotheosis we have watched. Each time we learn a little more.”

“And do you not resent being used as a tool by the Overmind?”

“The arrangement has some advantages: besides, no one of intelligence resents the inevitable.”

That proposition, Jan reflected wryly, had never been fully accepted by mankind. There were things beyond logic that the Overlords had never understood.