METAMORPHOSIS
By MIKE CURRY
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories August 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
His name was Hrlec Brey. He was a big man, and he moved slowly as if hehad all the time in the world.
And he had. He had all the time—years and years behind him, years andyears ahead. And the world was his, its length and breadth, its skiesand seas, the solitude of night, the loneliness of day.
He was eating dinner when the knowledge smashed across his mind:Tonight I am going to die.
He put down his leg of ayala and stared blankly at the plankwall across the room. That he was going to die did not disturb him.That he knew about it did. It was not whimsy that had crossed hismind. He was not given to idle speculation. It was as if a sense ofprecognition had suddenly developed in his intellect. It was a strange,irrevocable certainty.
His gaze fell on the half-eaten leg of ayala, and he shrugged. Acrime to let it go to waste, impending death or not. He picked it up,moved his jaw slowly around the bone. So I'm going to die. TomorrowI'll be free. Then his eyes hardened and his teeth tore savagely at thelast bite of meat. I haven't evolved.
Moving slowly because the pains had been with him all day—he calledthem "pains" because there seemed no better word—he washed off thetable and went out to the front porch of his small farmhouse onOphiuchus VI to sit in the twilight and smoke his pipe. He was a man offifty Earth years, whom age had weathered and work had bent, and thestrongest thing about him was his will. He had willed to remain sane inhis solitary world after the tragedy so many years before, and he hadmade it. Just made it. He did not even talk to himself.
He settled his bones in the log chair and planted his feet comfortablyon the railing. He had willed that he could gaze upon this eveningscene and believe it to be Earth. Often he had succeeded. The samecolors in the twilight, though it lasted seven hours. A sky with aMilky Way, without a moon. Gravity that made him always just a littletired. Forests and mountains and sea, beauty and peace. And Sol, apinpoint two thousand light-years off, with no chance of ever gettingback.
A living hell.
He lit his pipe, filled with a native weed he'd gotten used to. Therewas no savor in a pipeful now, with bitterness eating at him. How couldhe spend his last night? There was only one way. The same as any otherof the thousand nights before.
When he died, the last of his race would disappear from the face ofAsmarad, sixth planet of the sun Ophiuchus. He was of Earth. Oh, Motherof Comforts, Earth, in the New Galactic Age! It was a long way from thebarbarian Old Atomic, almost at the fringe of prehistory. As always,when he remembered his heritage from the distant home that had givenhim birth, his great bowed shoulders straightened and some of the oldfire came back into his eyes.
Though he did not often allow himself to think of the past, histhoughts went back—how many years ago, Earth time?—to the day oftriumph, when Brey's ship had put down a mile away by the shore of asalt sea. A thousand men and women with the purpose of carving outfrom untrodden paths the beginnings of a mighty civilization. To makea little Earth of Asmarad as had been done on a thousand other worldsacross