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“Through millions of years!
“And what saves him, through all these ages? Nothing but the solitary situation of his sun; it is the loneliness of the Life-giver—the loneliness of his sun in space—that permits man and his world to endure.
“But at last the sun suffers it no longer; once more, it must speak to another star; and at last—for always sometime it must be so, even in the loneliness of the sky—another sun approaches; and before fresh material is sucked out to start another set of worlds, the spheres already old are drawn away and cast out into space. Such is the circle of life—and death—of worlds, to which all must, in the end, submit. Sometime one of those cast-off worlds may find another sun,
as this has done.”
The Frenchman bowed to Philbin. “You were, monsieur, in the year of this planet the sixteenth thousand, five hundred and eighty-fourth, Ecliptic. I return you to it.”
“It was a remarkable year,” said the little linquist, thrillingly, “if for no other reason, because of the production of the tremendous pessimistic poem ‘Talon.’
“I translate the original title—Talon, a claw. The Talon of Time was meant. The people here understood the awful circle of the life, and death, of worlds as M. Duquesne has just sketched it. The poet of ‘Talon’ was the Omar Khayyám of their days of facing their fate. So in a poem of marvelous power he pictures man pursued by Time—a great tantalizing, merciless bird of prey which waits for him through the ages while he rises from a clod without soul to feel and brain to know, until he can appreciate and apperceive the awful irony of his fate; then the bird reaches out its great talon and tears him to pieces.
“I despair adequately to render in our words the ironic tragedy of this poem; but Fitzgerald, translating our Omar, has rendered two lines like two of these:
‘And lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The nothing it set out from. Oh, make haste!’
“Like Omar, the poet preached pleasure; and he laughed at the ghastly futility of those who defied and fought the fated drift of their world into eternal darkness and cold.
“Clearly he presented the prevailing mood of the period; but clearly, also, there was another mood. The spiritual and intellectual heirs of Lagon Itol had proceeded with his plans for these cities.
“There was yet no complete agreement among the scientists that this world must be torn away from its sun. Its orbit was on the edge of the critical area of disturbance. Every one agreed that the five outer planets would surely be torn away; they agreed that the next planet inferior—that is, nearer its sun than this one—probably would not be torn away.
“The name of that planet was Ocron; and by the way, these people knew that it was inhabited.
“They agreed that this world on which we now stand would be severely altered in its orbit; yet they considered there was a chance it would not be torn away.
“Yet that chance did not appeal to many. By the year 16,675 Ecliptic—which is the last year for which I can find a census—the total population was under twelve million, and many of them very old. The number of children under ten years is given separately; they were less than a hundred and fifty thousand. At the rate they were allowing themselves to die, probably there were barely ten millions of people of all ages when the disturbing star—which they called Borak—came its closest and cast them off into space.
“The best of the energies of the dwindling millions had been put, for two generations, into these five cities which were planned, located and created and equipped for the final defiance of extinction. They abandoned all older habitations and adopted these.”
“But where did they go, in the end?”
A dozen demanded it, together.
“Of that mystery, we have not yet,” Philbin confessed, “a trace. They had reduced themselves, we know, from a billion in number at the time of Lagon Itol—two hundred years before—to about ten millions. Barely one per cent of them, therefore, were spared up to the time of the catastrophe to attempt the tremendous task of further survival.
“Throughout at least the last five thousand years of their history, cremation of the dead was universal among them. We will find no cemeteries or entombments, except perhaps a very few archaic barrows from a very early age. The people throughout their civilized period disposed of their dead in a systematic, orderly and decent way.
“Now, did the last ten million also die, and as they went, were they also cremated by their survivors, so that we will find, at the end, only the bones of some small group who, enduring to the last, had disposed of those immediately before them? Or somehow, did some of them—escape?”
The great chamber of the Council was tensely silent, close-crowded as it was.
It was Tony, presiding, and having the advantage of having heard most of these facts before, who first found voice:
“Returning to our present problem,” he recalled them to that which had gathered them together, “it is clear that we can find no other cities of the shielded type, and equipped to combat the cold, except the five we know; for no others ever were built. We know also that there is no other generating station providing light and heat and power, except that close to Gorfulu; for no other ever was planned or built.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE PIONEERS PLAN REPRISALS
JACK TAYLOR’S post, when on watch, was the northern gate.
“The Porte de Gorfulu,” Duquesne had dubbed it, recalling the fashion in Paris of naming the gate after the city to which, and from which, its road ran.
There was not at this gate, or at any of the seven others, any actual guard station. What Philbin had read had made certain, if it had been doubtful before, that the builders of these cities had acted in complete coöperation and unison; they had been banded together in their desperate attempt to defy their fate of dark and cold.
