Tonight the Stars Revolt!Fox, Gardner F. (Gardner Francis)
Science
Tonight the Stars Revolt!
Fox, Gardner F. (Gardner Francis)
Adventure stories; Science fiction; Space pirates -- Fiction
A nebulae that was uncounted light-years away came rushing toward them.
It was a spinning silver wheel at a distance, but it broke into great
blotches of black space to dissolve into just another star system
without form or noticeable nebulosity.
They swooped over a reddish planet and dropped through its atmosphere.
They studied great buildings of stone and metal that towered high into
the clouds. Tiny fliers and great air-freighters dotted the skies. The
old man said, "This people used their science wisely. They built a
civilization that gives every man all he wants which is, in effect, all
he can understand."
They left the red planet, swept light-years away and down through heavy
mists to a greenish globe whirling majestically in the light of its
distant sun. Beneath them lush, tropical jungles lifted fronds and
branches to the steaming mists. Somewhere in that massed carpet of
vegetation an animal screamed in its dying agonies. Through a break in
the trees Angus saw a naked man squat and hairy and with a stone-bladed
spear in his hand, fleeing before the bounding fury of a gigantic
tiger. The great cat was making its last leap, spreading its talons
into the man's shivering flesh, as the mists crept up and hid them.
"A young world," Stasor said softly, "with all its life ahead of it in
which to find its destiny."
They went out into space and found a planet where giant insects ruled,
where a lumbering thing in the shape of a man, but mindless, was used
for heavy labor. Another planet showed lizards dwelling in strangely
wrought mansions. A third showed mind-beings that looked like crimson
jellyfish hanging in midair by some means of mental suspension.
"All these," explained Stasor with a wave of his palm, "are freaks.
Life throughout the whole universe, across all of its uncountable
light-years, follows mainly a pattern like our own. Creatures that
we call man, with two arms, two legs, two eyes, a nose and mouth,
breathing atmosphere into lungs, have been the ruling race because of
circumstances like gravity and atmosphere, over which they themselves
have no control.
"One more example, then we're done...."
They fled across star galaxies, through sprawling universe where
binaries and dwarf stars and red giants alternated against the black
void like a spangled curtain. They went through the Megellanic Cluster
and the Andromeda nebula. They came swooping down so swiftly that the
stars blurred a little, even at their incredible distances, toward
another galaxy.
Stasor found a little star. It was surrounded by nine planets. He chose
the third planet outward from the star, and dropped his observational
platform through the heaviside and ionosphere.
Angus craned forward. He liked this world. It reminded him vaguely of
Karr, with its green grasses and rolling oceans.
"Its inhabitants call it the Earth. A peaceful place. Look over
there--you can see the city clearer now."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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