"I remember--" Bernard answered, choking a little, "--I remember the day before it happened. There was a report on my desk about some tribe of Indians high in the Andes. The report said that the parents had been persuaded to send their children to the school in the foothills, that even among the adults illiteracy and ignorance were being eliminated. It was the last of the ignorant tribes. "I looked up at the sign over my desk and read the motto, 'There is nothing unknowable. There are only things not yet known,' and I thought, 'Yes, we're getting near our goal. We've conquered ignorance and superstition and illiteracy. And as time goes on we'll know more and more things. The area of the unknown will constantly diminish. Knowledge is like an expanding circle of light that eats into the darkness.' Then the darkness came. And you didn't know." * * * * * "We know what happened well enough," Rossiter corrected. He sounded older than his fifty-two years. "I was at the observatory that night. I remember thinking that it was almost time for me to go to the dormitory to sleep. It was summer; Sirius and the sun would both soon be up. Sirius rose, blazing in the darkness, and after him Leo, in the southeast. It should have been invisible in the sunlight. I couldn't believe what I saw. And still the sun didn't come up. "We know what happened in a way. We don't know how or why. The sun, our sun, never rose. The sun just disappeared." "How softly everyone's speaking," Bernard said irrelevantly. "It's the sky and the darkness. I could hardly hear you." He got to his feet. "Where are you going, Tom?" Rossiter asked. "I want to look at the bodies. The people we blasted, I mean." "That's morbid. Don't go, Tom. Stay here." "But I want to go. I'll be back." He moved away through the dimly visible outlines of men and women seated on the ground. He came back after a while and sat down by his friend in silence. "I think I know why they attacked us," he said after a pause. "Why?" "I think we interrupted some magical or religious rite. They were at a very low level of material culture, of course. The points on the spears were stone, and they were wearing garments of what looked like some sort of tree bark. Not woven cloth. But the young men were wearing rattles of some sort of shell around their ankles, and the old man was holding a little drum in his hands. "You see, they had a good cranial capacity. As soon as human beings can think at all, they start trying to impose their will on the universe. I think they met here by the shore to perform some sort of magic. The woman and the baby watched, the old man played his drum, the two young men sang and danced. Perhaps this bit of the coast was sacred to them. Perhaps, when we set our ship down here, we profaned a sacred place." "The woman and the baby bother me," Rossiter said thoughtfully. "It seems a dreadful thing to me to kill a woman. Ever since Kate died...."