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It is three thousand light-years to the Vatican. Once I be-
lieved that space could have no power over faith. Just as
I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God's
handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith
is sorely troubled.
I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin wall above
the Mark VI computer, and for the first time in my life I
wonder if it is no more than an empty symbol.
I have told no one yet, but the truth cannot be con-
cealed. The data are there for anyone to read, recorded on
the countless miles of magnetic tape and the thousands of
photographs we are carrying back to Earth. Other scientists
can interpret them as easily as I canmore easily, in all
probability. I am not one who would condone that tamper-
ing with the truth which often gave my order a bad name
in the olden days.
The crew is already sufficiently depressed, I wonder how
they will take this ultimate irony. Few of them have any
religious faith, yet they will not relish using this final
weapon in their campaign against methat private, good-
natured but fundamentally serious war which lasted all
the way from Earth. It amused them to have a Jesuit as
chief astrophysicist. Dr. Chandler, for instance, could never
get over it (why are medical men such notorious atheists?).
Sometimes he would meet me on the observation deck,
where the lights are always low, so that the stars shine with
undiminished glory. He would come up to me in the gloom
and stand staring out of the great oval port, while the
heavens crawled slowly round us as the ship turned end
over end with the residual spin we had never bothered to
correct.
"Well, Father," he would say at last. "It goes on forever
and forever, and perhaps Something made it. But how you
can believe that Something has a special interest in us and
our miserable little worldthat just beats me." Then the
argument would start, while the stars and nebulae would
swing around us in silent, endless arcs beyond the flawlessly
clear plastic of the observation port.
It was, I think, the apparent incongruity of my position
which, yes, amused the crew. In vain I would point to my
three papers in the Astrophysical Journal, my five in the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. I
would remind them that our order has long been famous
for its scientific works. We may be few now, but ever since
the eighteenth century we have made contributions to as-
tronomy and geophysics out of all proportion to our num-
bers.
Will my report on the Phoenix Nebula end our thousand
years of history? It will end, I fear, much more than that.
I do not know who gave the nebula its name, which
seems to me a very bad one. If it contains a prophecy, it
is one which cannot be verified for several thousand mil-
lion years. Even the word "nebula" is misleading; this is
a far smaller object than those stupendous clouds of mist
the stuff of unborn starswhich are scattered throughout
the length of the Milky Way, On the cosmic scale, indeed,
the Phoenix Nebula is a tiny thinga tenuous shell of gas
surrounding a single star,
Or what is left of a star . . .
The Rubens engraving of Loyola seems to mock me as
it hangs there above the spectrophotometer tracings. What
would you, Father, have made of this knowledge that has
come into my keeping, so far from the little world that was
all the universe you knew? Would your faith have risen
to the challenge, as mine has failed to do?
You gaze into the distance. Father, but I have traveled a
distance beyond any that you could have imagined when
you founded our order a thousand years ago. No other sur-
vey ship has been so far from Earth: we are at the very
frontiers of the explored universe. We set out to reach the
Phoenix Nebula, we succeeded, and we are homeward
bound with our burden of knowledge. I wish I could lift
that burden from my shoulders, but I call to you in vain
across the centuries and the light-years that lie between us.
On the book you are holding the words are plain to read.
"AD MAIOREM DEI GLORiAM," the message runs, but it is a
message I can no longer believe. Would you still believe it
if you could see what we have found?
We knew, of course, what the Phoenix Nebula was.
Every year, in our galaxy alone, more than a hundred stars
explode, blazing for a few hours or days with thousands of
times their normal brilliance before they sink back into
death and obscurity. Such are the ordinary novaethe com-
monplace disasters of the universe. I have rocorded the
spectrograms and light curves of dozens, since I started
working at the lunar observatory.
But three or four times in every thousand years occurs
something beside which even a nova pales into total insig-
nificance.
When a star becomes a supernova, it may for a little while
outshine all the massed suns of the galaxy. The Chinese
astronomers watched this happen in A.D. 101)4, not knowing
what it was they saw. Five centuries later, in 1572, a super-
nova blazed in Cassiopeia so brilliantly that it was visible
in the daylight sky. There have been three more in the
thousand years that have passed since then.
Our mission was to visit the remnants of such a catas-
trophe, to reconstruct the events that led up to it, and, if
possible, to learn its cause. We came slowly in through the
concentric shells of gas that had been blasted out six thou-
sand years before, yet were expanding still. They were im-
mensely hot, radiating still with a fierce violet light, but
far too tenuous to do us any damage. When the star had
exploded, its outer layers had been driven upward with
such speed that they had escaped completely from its
gravitational field. Now they formed a hollow shell large
enough to engulf a thousand solar systems, and at its center
burned the tiny, fantastic object which the star had now
becomea white dwarf, smaller than the Earth, yet weigh-
ing a million times as much.
The glowing gas shells were all around us, banishing the
normal night of interstellar space. We were flying into the
center of a cosmic bomb that had detonated millennia ago
and whose incandescent fragments were still hurtling apart.
The immense scale of the explosion, and the fact that the
debris already covered a volume of space many billions of
miles across, robbed the scene of any visible movement. It
would take decades before the unaided eye could detect
any motion in these tortured wisps and eddies of gas, yet
the sense of turbulent expansion was overwhelming.
We had checked our primary drive hours before and
were drifting slowly toward the fierce little star ahead.
Once it had been a sun like our own, but it had squandered
in a few hours the energy that should have kept it shining
for a million years. Now it was a shrunken miser, hoarding
its resources as if trying to make amends for its prodigal
youth.
No one seriously expected to find planets. If there had
been any before the explosion, they would have been boiled
into puffs of vapor and their substance lost in the greater
wreckage of the star itself. But we made the automatic
search, as always when approaching an unknown sun, and
presently we found a single small world circling the star at
an immense distance. It must have been the Pluto of this
vanished solar system, orbiting on the frontiers of the night.
Too far from the central sun ever to have known life, its
remoteness had saved it from the fate of all its lost com-
panions.
The passing fires had seared its rocks and burned away
the mantle of frozen gas that must have covered it in the
days before the disaster. We landed, and we found the
Vault.
Its builders had made sure that we should. The mono-
lithic marker that stood above the entrance was now a
fused stump, but even the first long-range photographs told
us that here was the work of intelligence. A little later we
detected the continent-wide pattern of radioactivity that
had been buried in the rock. Even if the pylon above the
Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an
immovable and all but eternal beacon calling to the stars.
Our ship fell toward this gigantic bull's-eye like an arrow
into its target.
The pylon must have been a mile high when it was built,
but now it looked like a candle that had melted down into
a puddle of wax. It took us a week to drill through the
fused rock, since we did not have the proper tools for a
task like this. We were astronomers, not archaeologists, but
we could improvise. Our original program was forgotten:
this lonely monument, reared at such labor at the greatest
possible distance from the doomed sun, could have only
one meaning, A civilization which knew it was about to
die had made its last bid for immortality.
It will take us generations to examine all the treasures
that were placed in the Vault. They had plenty of time to
prepare, for their sun must have given its first warnings
many years before the final detonation. Everything that
they wished to preserve, all the fruits of their genius, they
brought here to this distant world in the days before the
end, hoping that some other race would Snd them and that
they would not be utterly forgotten.
If only they had a little more time! They could travel
freely enough between the planets of their own sun, but
they had not yet learned to cross the interstellar gulfs, and
the nearest solar system was a hundred light-years away.
Even if they had not been so disturbingly human as their
sculpture shows, we could not have helped admiring them
and grieving for their fate. They left thousands of visual
records and the machines for projecting them, together
with elaborate pictorial instructions from which it will not
be difficult to learn their written language. We have exam-
ined many of these records, and brought to life for the first
time in six thousand years the warmth and beauty of a civil-
ization which in many ways must have been superior to our
own. Perhaps they only showed us the best, and one can
hardly blame them. But their worlds were very lovely, and
their cities were built with a grace that matches anything
of ours. We have watched them at work and play, and lis-
tened to their musical speech sounding across the centuries.
One scene is still before my eyesa group of children on a
beach of strange blue sand, playing in the waves as chil-
dren play on Earth.
And sinking into the sea, still warm and friendly and life-
giving, is the sun that will soon turn traitor and obliterate
all this innocent happiness.
Perhaps if we had not been so far from home and so vul-
nerable to loneliness, we should not have been so deeply
moved. Many of us had seen the ruins of ancient civiliza-
tions on other worlds, but they had never affected us so
profoundly.
This tragedy was unique. It was one thing for a race to
fail and die, as nations and cultures have done on Earth.
But to be destroyed so completely in the full flower of its
achievement, leaving no survivorshow could that be rec-
onciled with the mercy of God?
My colleagues have asked me that, and I have given what
answers I can. Perhaps you could have done better, Father
Loyola, but I have found nothing in the Exercitia spMtua-
lia that helps me here. They were not an evil people: I do
not know what gods they worshiped, if indeed they wor-
shiped any. But I have looked back at them across the cen-
turies, and have watched while the loveliness they used
their last strength to preserve was brought forth again into
the light of their shrunken sun.
I know the answers that my colleagues will give when
they get back to Earth. They will say that the universe has
no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode
every year in our galaxy, at this very moment some race
is dying in the depths of space. Whether that race has
done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference
in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.
Yet, of course, what we have seen proves nothing of the
sort. Anyone who argues thus is being swayed by emo-
tion, not logic. God has no need to justify His actions to
man. He who built the universe can destroy it when He
chooses. It is arroganceit is perilously near blasphemy
for us to say what He may or may not do.
This I could have accepted, hard though it is to look upon
whole worlds and peoples thrown into the furnace. But
there comes a point when even the deepest faith must fal-
ter, and now, as I look at my calculations, I know I have
reached that point at last.
We could not tell, before we reached the nebula, how
long ago the explosion took place. Now, from the astronom-
ical evidence and the record in the rocks of that one sur-
viving planet, I have been able to date it very exactly. I
know in what year the light of this colossal conflagration
reached Earth. I know how brilliantly the supernova whose
corpse now dwindles behind our speeding ship once shone
in terrestrial skies. I know how it must have blazed low in
the East before sunrise, like a beacon in that Oriental dawn.
There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery
is solved at last. Yet0 God, there were so many stars you
could have used.
What was the need to give these people to the fire, that
the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?






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