This entity, Medury by symbol, was not even vaguely man-like; in fact, he—the third person singular pronoun, masculine, is used very loosely indeed; but since it is somewhat better than either “it” or “she” it will have to do—was not even vaguely corporeal or substantial.
Man’s earliest ancestor, it is believed, came into being through the interaction of energy and matter in the waters of the infant seas of Earth. The first Cahuitans, however, originated in the unimaginably violent, raw, crude energy-flare of an atomic explosion.
This explosion did not take place on Tellus, nor in any time known to Tellurian history. The place of occurrence was a planet in the spiral arm of the galaxy across the tremendous gulf of empty space which we now call Rift Two Hundred Forty; the time, as has been said, was in the unthinkably remote past.
Cahuitans are not, strictly speaking, immortal; but as far as mankind is concerned, and except for exceedingly peculiar violences, they might as well be.
Medury brooded. His problem was old; it had probably been considered, academically, by every Cahuitan then alive. But only academically, and no Cahuitan had ever solved it, for the philosophy of the race had always been (and still is) the simple one of least action—no Cahuitan ever did any job until it became necessary; but, conversely, once any job was done it was done as nearly as possible for all time to come.
Medury was the first Cahuitan to be compelled, by one of the basic urges of life, to deal with the problem as a concrete, not an abstract, thing. The problem was, therefore, his. His alone.
His world, the only planet of its sun, was old, old. The last atoms of its fissionables had been fissioned; the last atoms of its fusibles had been fused; no more fires could be kindled.
The Cahuitans in general did not care. For the adolescents, the time of need for a source of high-level quanta had not yet come. For those already fulfilled[A] it had passed. While entirely gaseous, the planet would stay comfortably warm for a long time. Its energies, with the outpourings of its parent sun, would feed billions of people instead of the mere hundreds of thousands comprising its present population. Jobs[A], businesses[A], commerce[A], and industry[A] went on as usual, unaffected.
But Medury was affected: basically, fundamentally affected. The time had come when he should progress into completion, and without a new fire the Change was impossible.
For a time which to a human race would have been fantastically long Medury brooded, considering every aspect of the problem; then stirred himself to action. Converting a tiny portion of his non-material being into three filaments of energy, he constructed a working platform by attaching the ends of these three filaments to the cores of three widely-separated suns. Thus assured of orientation, he launched into space a probing needle of pure force; a needle which, propagated in and through the sub-ether, covered parsecs of distances in microseconds of time. And thus for days, years, what might have been centuries and millennia as we of Tellus know time he searched; and finally, he found.