ions--a dreadful price to pay
for a questionable gain. Too great a price, I think." His eyes opened,
and he raised a thin hand to check the younger man's protest. "I know--I
know--in this we do not see as one. Yet perhaps some day you will learn
even as I have that to rest is better than to engage in an endless
struggle. Suns and planets die. Why should races seek to escape the
inevitable?" Tordos Gar turned slowly away and gazed fixedly into the
night sky.

Taj Lamor checked an impatient retort and sighed resignedly. It was this
attitude that had made his task so difficult. Decadence. A race on an
ages-long decline from vast heights of philosophical and scientific
learning. Their last external enemy had been defeated millennia in the
past; and through easy forgetfulness and lack of strife, ambition had
died. Adventure had become a meaningless word.

Strangely, during the last century a few men had felt the stirrings of
long-buried emotion, of ambition, of a craving for adventure. These were
throwbacks to those ancestors of the race whose science had built their
world. These men, a comparative handful, had been drawn to each other by
the unnatural ferment within them; and Taj Lamor had become their
leader. They had begun a mighty struggle against the inertia of ages of
slow decay, had begun a search for the lost secrets of a
hundred-million-year-old science.

Taj Lamor raised his eyes to the horizon. Through the leaping curve of
the crystal clear roof of their world glowed a blazing spot of yellow
fire. A star--the brightest object in a sky whose sun had lost its
light. A point of radiance that held the last hopes of an incredibly
ancient race.

The quiet voice of Tordos Gar came through the semidarkness of the
room, a pensive, dreamlike quality in its tones.

"You, Taj Lamor, and those young men who have joined you in this futile
expedition do not think deeply enough. Your vision is too narrow. You
lack perspective. In your youth you cannot think on a cosmic scale." He
paused as though in thought, and when he continued, it seemed almost as
though he were speaking to himself.

"In the far, dim past fifteen planets circled about a small, red sun.
They were dead worlds--or rather, worlds that had not yet lived. Perhaps
a million years passed before there moved about on three of them the
beginnings of life. Then a hundred million years passed, and those
first, crawling protoplasmic masses had become animals, and pla