World without Stars Read Free Page B

gas, which became star clusters. Giant stars in those clusterssoon went supernova, enriching the interstellar medium. Some second and third generation suns got born.
    “But then the clusters broke up. Gravitational effect of the galaxies, you see. The dispersal of matter became too great for
     star formation to go on. The bright ones burned themselves out. But the red dwarfs are still around. A type M, far instance,
     stays fifty billion years on the main sequence.”
    “Please,” Rorn said, irritated. “Valland and I do know elementary astrophysics.” To the gunner: “Don’t you?”
    “But I begin to see what it means,” Valland said low. Excitement coursed over his face. He clenched his pipe in one fist.
     “Stars so far apart that you can’t find one from another without a big telescope. Metal poor, because the supernova enrichment
     stopped early. And old—old.”
    “Right,” I said. “Planets, too. Almost without iron or copper or uranium, anything that made it so easy for us to become industrialized.
     But the lighter elements exist. So does life. So does intelligence.
    “I don’t know how those Yonderfoik we’re going to visit went beyond the Stone Age. That’s one of the things we have to find
     out. I can guess. They could experiment with electrostatics, with voltaic piles, with ceramics. Finally they could get to
     the point of electrodynamics—oh, let’s say by using ceramic tubes filled with electrolytic solution for conductors. And so,
     finally, they’d extract light metals like aluminum and magnesium from ores. But they may have needed millions of years of
     civilization to get that far, and beyond.”
    “What’d they learn along the way?” Valland wondered. “Yeah, I see why we’ve got to go there.”
    “Even after they developed the space jump, they steered clear of the galaxies,” I said. “They can’t take the radiation. Where
     they live, there are no natural radioactives worth mentioning, except perhaps a few things like K-40. Their sun doesn’t spit
     out many charged particles. There’s no galacticmagnetic field to accelerate cosmic rays. No supernovae either.”
    “Why, maybe they have natural immortality,” Valland suggested.
    “Mmm, I doubt that,” I said. “True, we’re saddled with more radiation. But ordinary quantum processes will mutate cells too.
     Or viruses, or chemicals, or Q factor, or—or whatever else they may have on Yonder.”
    “Have they developed an antithanatic, then?” Rorn asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “If not, that’s one valuable thing we have to offer. I hope.”
    I saw in the brief twist of Valland’s mouth that he understood me. Spacemen don’t talk about it much, but there are races,
     as intelligent and as able to suffer as we ourselves, for whom nobody has figured out an aging preventive. The job is hard
     enough in most cases: develop a synthetic virus which, rather than attacking normal cells, destroys any that do
not
quite conform to the host’s genetic code. When the biochemistry is too different from what we know— Mostly, we leave such
     planets alone.
    I said in haste: “But let’s keep to facts. The Yonderfolk did at last venture to the galactic rim, with heavy radiation screening.
     It so happened that the first world they came on which was in contact with our civilization was Zara. Our own company had
     a factor there.”
    We didn’t yet know how many suns they visited first. Our one galaxy holds more than a hundred billion, most of which have
     attendants. I doubt if we’ll ever see them all. There could be any number of civilizations as great as ours, that close to
     home, unbeknownst to us. And yet we go hopping off to Andromeda!
    (I made that remark to Hugh Valland, later in the voyage. “Sure,” he said. “Always happens that way. The Spanish were settlin’
     the Philippines before they knew the coastal outline of America. People were on the moon before they’d got tothe bottom of the Mindanao