The Timeless Ones

It was a peaceful world, a green world, where bright blossoms swayed beneath two golden suns. Why did the visitors from Earth sit in their rocket-ship--terrified?

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"There will be a great many changes, Ned," Cynthia Jackson said. She stared out the viewport at the little green world which the contact rocket Star Mist was swiftly approaching on warp-drive.

Her husband co-pilot nodded, remembering Clifton and Helen Sweeney, and the Sweeney youngsters. Remembering with a smile Tommy Sweeney's kite-flying antics, his freckles and mischievous eyes--a tow-headed kid of ten with an Irish sense of humor, sturdily planted in a field of alien corn five thousand light years from Earth.

Sowing and reaping and bringing in the sheaves, in the blue light of a great double sun, his dreams as vibrant with promise as the interstellar warp-drive which, a century ago, had brought the first prospect ship from Earth to the stars.

He'd be a man grown now, as sturdy as his dad. You could almost take that for granted. And his sister would be a willowy girl with clear blue eyes, and she'd come out of a white plastic cottage with the buoyancy of twenty summers in her carriage and smile.

They'd be farmers still. You couldn't change the Sweeneys in a million years, couldn't wean them away from the good earth.

It was funny, but he couldn't even visualize the Sweeneys without thinking of a little sleepy town, the kind of town he'd left himself as a kid to strike out across the great curve of the universe. Dry dust of Kansas and the Dakotas that would still be blowing after a thousand years!

"They've had time to build a town, Ned!" Cynthia said. "A really fine town with broad streets and modern, dust-proof buildings!"

Ned Jackson awoke from his reverie with a wry start. He nodded again, remembering the many other colonists and the equipment which had been shipped to the little green world across the years. Plastic materials to build houses and schools and roadways, educational materials to build eager young minds.

Every ten years a contact rocket went out from Earth by interstellar warp-drive to make a routine check. The trip was a long one--eight months--but the Central Colonization Bureau had to make sure that anarchy did not take the place of law on worlds where teeming jungles encouraged the free exercise of man's best qualities--and his worst.

From end to end of the Galaxy, on large planets and small, progress had to be measured in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number. There could be no other yardstick, for when man ceased to be a social animal his star-conquering genius shriveled to the vanishing point.

"The friends we made here were very special, Ned," Cynthia said. "I guess people who dare greatly have to be a bit keener than the stay-at-homes, a bit more eager and alive. But the Sweeneys had such a tremendous zest for living--"

"I know," Ned said.

"They were wonderful--generous and kind. It will be good to see them again. Good to--" Cynthia laughed. "I don't know why, but I was about to say: 'Good to be home.'"

Ned thought he knew why.

They'd made their first flight for the Bureau exactly ten years before. It had been a combined "official business" and honeymoon flight, and almost the whole of it had been spent on the little green world.

Did not the queen bee and her consort, flying high above the hive on a night of perfumed darkness, remember best what was bliss to recall, the shifting lights and shadows and honey-scented murmurings of their nuptial trance?

Would not the brightest, furthest star be "home" to the star-beguiled?