rlaji did not perhaps carry a
message for the Earthmen too: that decadence was the price of peace,
death the inevitable end of contentment. The Hirlaji had stilled
themselves, back in the grey past ... had taken their measure of quiet
and contentment for thousands of years, the searching drives of their
race dying within them. And this was their end.

THERE IS NO PURPOSE.

Rynason shook himself, and felt the cold wind cut through his clothing;
it reawakened him. Stooping, he gathered up several of the
disintegrators and brought them with him to the head of the massive
stairs up which the attackers must come. He crouched beside those
stairs, watching for movement below. But he couldn't see anything.

Something about the Hirlaji still bothered him; kneeling in the
gathering darkness he finally isolated it in his mind. It was their
hopelessness, the numbness that had crept over them through the
centuries. No purpose? But they had lived in peace for thousands of
years. No, their death was not merely one of decadence ... it was
suffocation.

They had not chosen peace; it had been thrust upon them. The Hirlaji had
been at the height of their power, their growth still gathering momentum
... and they had to stifle it. The end in view didn't really matter: it
had not been what they would have chosen. And, having had peace forced
upon them before they had been ready for it, they had been unable to
enjoy it; and the stifling of scientific curiosity that had been
necessary to complete the suppression of the war-instinct had left the
Hirlaji with nothing.

But it had all been so unnecessary, Rynason thought. The ancient
Outsiders brain, computing from insufficient evidence probably gathered
during a brief touchdown on Earth, had undoubtedly been able to give
only a tentative appraisal of the situation. But the proto-Hirlaji
language was not constructed to accommodate if's and maybe's, and the
judgments of the brain were taken as law by the Hirlaji.

Now the Earthmen for whom this race had deadened itself into
near-extinction would complete the job ... because the Hirlaji had
learned their mistake far too late.

Rynason shook his head; there was a sickness in his stomach, a gnawing
anger at the ways of history. It was capricious, cruel, senseless. It
played jokes spanning millennia.

Suddenly there were sounds on the stairs below him. Rynason's head
jerked up and he saw five of the Earthmen climbing the stairs, moving as
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