Tower of Glass Read Online Free PDF Page B

life is spawned. Things happen fast on such a world. Another million years and there’s complex multi-celled life. A million more to mammal- equivalents. A million more to a galactic-level civilization. Change, fierce, unending change.”
    “I want to believe you,” Krug said darkly. “I want. But I can’t.”
    ‘‘Radiation-eaters,” Vargas went on. “Clever, adaptable, accepting the necessity, even the desirability, of constant violent genetic change. Their star expands: very well, they adapt to the increase in radiation, they find a way to protect themselves. Now they live inside a planetary nebula, with a fluorescent sky around them. Somehow they detect the existence of the rest of the galaxy. They send messages to us. Yes? Yes?”
    Krug, in anguish, pushed his hands through the air at Vargas, palms outward. “I want to believe!”
    “Then believe. I believe.”
    “It’s only a theory. A wild theory.”
    “It accounts for the data we have,” said Vargas. “Do you know the Italian proverb: Se non è vero, è ben trovato? ‘Even if it isn’t true, it’s well invented.’ The hypothesis will do until we have a better one. It answers the facts better than the theory of a natural cause for a complex repetitive signal coming to us in several media.”
    Turning away, Krug stabbed at the activator as though he no longer could bear the image on the dome, as though he felt the furious radiation of that alien sun raising deadly blisters on his own skin. In his long dreams he had seen something entirely different. He had imagined a planet of a yellow sun, somewhere, eighty, ninety light-years away, a gentle sun much like the one under which he had been born. He had dreamed of a world of lakes and rivers and grassy fields, of sweet air tinged perhaps with ozone, of purple-leaved trees and glossy green insects, of elegant slender beings with sloping shoulders and many-fingered hands, quietly talking as they moved through the groves and vales of their paradise, probing the mysteries of the cosmos, speculating on the existence of other civilizations, at last sending their message to the universe. He had seen them opening their arms to the first visitors from Earth, saying, Welcome, brothers, welcome, we knew you had to be there. All of that was destroyed now. In the eye of his mind Krug saw a hellish blue sun spitting demonic fires into the void, saw a blackened and sizzling planet on which scaly armored monstrosities slithered in pools of quicksilver under a sullen sky of white flame, saw a band of horrors gathering around a nightmarish machine to send an incomprehensible message across the gulf of space. And these are our brothers? It is all spoiled, Krug thought bitterly.
    “How can we go to them?” he asked. “How can we embrace them? Vargas, I have a ship almost ready, a ship for the stars, a ship to carry a sleeping man for centuries. How can I send it to such a place?”
    “Your reaction surprises me. Such distress I did not expect.”
    “Such a star I did not expect.”
    “Would you have been happier if I told you that the signals were after all mere natural pulses?”
    “No. No.”
    “Then rejoice in these our strange brothers, and forget the strangeness, and think only of the brotherhood.”
    Vargas’ words sank in. Krug found strength. The astronomer was right. However strange those beings might be, however bizarre their world—always assuming the truth of Vargas’ hypothesis—they were civilized, scientific, outward-looking. Our brothers. If space folded upon itself tomorrow, and Earth and its sun and all its neighbor worlds were engulfed and thrust into oblivion, intelligence would not perish from the universe, for they were there.
    “Yes,” Krug said. “I rejoice in them. When my tower is done I send them my hellos.”
    Two and a half centuries had passed since man first had broken free of his native planet. In one great dynamic sweep the spaceward drive had carried human explorers from Luna