Virginia's hand tightened on his own in farewell and he could feel the pulse of her wrist racing hard and fast. But she stood very straight as she looked into the blaster and they heard the final command to their robot-executioners:
"Dorend thendar!"
Thirty-three one.
Tal-Karanth looked again at the timepiece on the wall. Thirty-three one. At the end of eleven more small fractions of time, the Terrans would no longer exist.
What was life? What was the purpose behind it all? In fifty thousand years the Tharnarians were no nearer the answer than their ancestors had been. Why should there be life at all? Why not the suns and planets, created by chance, and devoid of life? And why even the suns and planets, the millions of galaxies racing outward across the illimitable expanse of space and time? Why the universe and why the life it contained? Why not just—nothing?
The barbarians had set out to find the answer within a hundred years after the building of their first interstellar ship. And Tharnar's interstellar ships had not been outside the system for fifty thousand years; no Tharnarian had been as far as Vendal for fifteen thousand years.
Why had the Tharnarians lost their curiosity; the curiosity and desire to learn that had created the past glory of Tharnar?
He thought again of what he had discovered that night; of one of the reasons why the Terrans had named their ship The Cat. It was not because a cat was a dangerous animal, as he and the others had thought. It was because the mission of The Cat would be to explore in unknown territory, because of an old Terran proverb: Curiosity killed a cat. He did not yet understand the second reason behind the name, but the first reason showed that the Terrans were not without a sense of humor. How long had it been since he had heard a Tharnarian laugh at himself, at his own failings or possibility of failure? Never.
Yet—wasn't that pride? What was wrong with the high-headed pride that admitted no inferiority, no failure? Wasn't fifty thousand years of civilization something of which to be extremely proud?