That Jan could add to that knowledge by what he was now doing seemed hard to believe. “Tell us what you see,” Rashaverak had said. “The picture that reaches your eyes will be duplicated by our cameras. But the message that enters your brain may be very different, and it could tell us a great deal.” Well, he would do his best.
“Still nothing to report,” he began. “A few minute, ago I saw the trail of your ship disappear in the sky. ’The Moon is just past full, and almost half its familiar side has now turned away from Earth — but I suppose you already know that.”
Jan paused, feeling slightly foolish. There was something incongruous, even faintly absurd, about what he was doing.
Here was the climax of all history, yet he might have been a radio-commentator at a race-track or a boxing-ring. Then he shrugged his shoulders and put the thought aside. At all moments of greatness, he suspected, bathos had never been very far away — and certainly he alone could sense its presence here.
“There have been three slight ’quakes in the last hour,” he continued. “Their control of Earth’s spin must be marvellous, but not quite perfect…. You know, Karellen, I’m going to find it very hard to say anything your instruments haven’t already told you. It might have helped if you’d given me some idea of what to expect, and warned me how long I may have to wait. If nothing happens, I’ll report again in six hours, as we arranged.
“Hello! They must have been waiting for you to leave. Something’s starting to happen. The stars are becoming dimmer. It’s as if a great cloud is coming up, very swiftly, over all the sky. But it isn’t really a cloud. It seems to have some sort of structure — I can glimpse a hazy network of lines and bands that keep changing their positions. It’s almost as if the stars are tangled in a ghostly spider’s web.
“The whole network is beginning to glow — to pulse with light, exactly as if it were alive. And I suppose it is: or is it something as much beyond life as that is above the inorganic world?
“The glow seems to be shifting to one part of the sky — wait a minute while I move round to the other window.
“Yes — I might have guessed. There’s a great burning column, like a tree of fire, reaching above the western horizon. It’s a long way off, right round the world. I know where it springs from: they’re on their way at last, to become part of the Overmind. Their probation is ended: they’re leaving the last remnants of matter behind.
“As that fire spreads upwards from the Earth, I can see the network becoming firmer and less misty. In places, it seems almost solid — yet the stars are still shining faintly through it.