Gradually the queer speech of the world-assassin painted the portrait of his race, his mission, and his egocentric soul.
CHAPTER VII
So long ago that there were no words for the incredible period of time that lay between then and now, the planet Chwosst, fourteenth from the sun Tsloahn in the star system Lluagor, had become overcrowded to the point of danger. The dominant race of Chwosst were the two-toed one-eyed green men who called themselves Graken, which signified The Mighty, or All-Consuming. The other races of life on the planet were insignificant, small rodent-like beasts used for food by the Graken, who were wholly carnivorous.
They conquered the principles of space travel and sent out fleets of ships—these early craft were bullet-shaped, much as the designers of the first potential rockets of Earth had shaped their creations—and within a hundred-year space they had perfected these so that travel was negligibly dangerous. In their own system they had discovered one other planet capable of supporting their kind. This had given them a long breathing space, during which they hammered at the locked gates of the sub-space corridors. The Graken bred fast, though, too fast, and their two planets filled up before they had solved interdimensional travel.
There followed a long spell of civil war, revolutions that cut their numbers down fantastically and at last came near to exterminating the Graken entirely. While they were repopulating their double homelands, they made a peace among themselves that was never again broken. To assure it, they invented the headgear which broadcast their thoughts, and in a generation or two they had become a kind of ant horde, billions of individuals conditioned to a kind of community thought, a way of life in which every idea of every individual was passed on to those near him, shared and refined amongst so many thousands that a giant race-mind at last made its appearance, and no single Graken ever felt that he had conceived anything, but that they had done it.
This conjoint cerebration did not reach through space from planet to planet, and so the single-mindedness of the Graken was kept on its track by constant emissaries from one half of the race to the other.
Now a new terror arose for them: the rodents on which they had fed, a breed of beast even more amazingly fertile than the Graken themselves, were decimated by a plague; and nourishment became so scarce that extinction was threatened. Of course there were no rich and poor among the Graken, no money and no privilege, any more than there would be among a queenless ant tribe. So as one grew hungry, they all did. They might have fed half their people and let the other half starve, but that was not the Graken way.
Now, at this most crucial time of their history, the secret of sub-space was finally discovered, and the relatively simple manner of intratime interstellar journeying ascertained.
Patrols were sent out in the old-style bullet-craft, but due to a lack of manual maneuverability in entering and leaving the galaxies now opened to them, the casualties were nine ships out of each ten sent out from Chwosst. Even so, another habitable planet was found within a matter of a few Earth-months, and food (composed of the "inferior races" found thereon) brought back to the hungry system of Lluagor.