"Perhaps," suggested the Engineer, "we should go now. The others are waiting for us. They have come so far, many of them from greater distances than you.”
"How many are there?" asked Gary.
"Only a few," said the Engineer, "so very few. Life is so seldom found throughout the universe. The universe does not care for life. I sometimes think life is merely a strange disease that should not be here at all, that it is some accidental arrangement of matter that has no right to be. The universe is so hostile to it that it would seem almost to be abnormal.
There are so few places where it can take root and live.”
"But throughout those billions of galaxies there must be many races,”
declared Kingsley.
"There may be many we do not know about," said the Engineer, "but very few that we can contact. It is so very hard to get in touch with them. And some of them would be useless to us, races that had developed along entirely different lines to achieve a different culture. Races that live without the application of any of the practical sciences. Races that are sunken in the welter of philosophy and thought. Races that have submerged themselves in aesthetics and are untrained in science. The only ones we could reach were those scientifically-minded races that could catch our message and could reply to us… and after that could build the apparatus that would bring them here.”
"Hell," said Herb, "it takes all kinds of people to make a universe.”
The Engineer led them through an air lock which opened from the room into a mighty corridor… a corridor that stretched away for inconceivable distances, a vast place that held a brooding sense of empty space.
The suits functioned perfectly. Gravity and pressure were normal and the suits themselves were far more comfortable than the spacesuits used back in the solar system.